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“Sounds delicious,” Evie said in a sarcastic voice.
“Totally,” Summer responded.
I was glad they were bonding, of course, but not at my expense.
Still, I now knew Evie liked ice cream. She was clearly not health conscious, but then at her age, was I?
I didn’t want to think of myself at her age, when all I could think about was work and making it in this highly-competitive environment. John and I had just gotten our first app out, a program for high school kids, based on the idea of online dating. But the functionality was limited to only positive responses; they could like, love or find each other funny. The kids, of course, still found a way to exploit it, but at many schools, the app was used the way it was intended to, as a fun way for kids to interact and get to know each other, a safe space to share videos and build confidence and a sense of community. LikeMe became huge and before we knew it, we were no longer working on a fun project for computer science class, but developing a viable platform that could make us millions. Both of us dropped out of college to focus on the project, to the dismay of our parents.
But those were the days when we lived off sugar and caffeine, burning calories faster than we could ingest them. We didn’t worry about our bodies, brain fog or energy levels dropping due to lack of sleep. Our twenty-year-old bodies were designed to be pushed and we pushed them.
My attraction to Evie grew and even though I was aware of it, I thought I had it under control. Until the night I decided to pop into the office and see if she was still there, working away on the mad assignment I’d given her. I had already decided against the project, there was a flood of similar stuff on the market and it wasn’t innovative enough for us. But I wanted to see if Evie would arrive at the same conclusion, and how she’d go about it.
When she was there, sitting alone in the office, her legs pulled up in the office chair, shoes kicked off, it did something to me.
I should have turned around, gone home.
But I didn’t.
And then, in the dark, it was too easy. She was walking ahead of me, I caught the smell of her hair. A clean shampoo smell, no perfume, nothing messing with the wonderful scent of her and desire overcame me. Simple as that.
But it couldn’t happen again.
It wouldn’t.
As far as I was concerned, it had not happened at all.
If she could live with that, good.
If she couldn’t, I would have no problem finding someone else to do her job.
Chapter 5
Evie
I almost didn’t go in to work the next day.
How was I going to face him after what had happened?
I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror, how could I begin to deal with what I had done? Sleeping with my boss? That was not me at all! No matter how many excuses I could come up with (and I could come up with many), I knew I should have known better.
I would’ve quit and gone back home, the only problem was, that would mean quitting and going back home. I didn’t want to go home and I didn’t want to resign from my job. I liked working in the city, being surrounded by the buzz of all that creative energy. Nobody would have thought anything of it back home if I told them it didn’t work out. They would accept it without question, but then what would I do? I would be the baby of the family again, never taken seriously by anyone.
Here, I was someone.
I was the way to get to Tate Sagarro, one of the brilliant brains of the tech industry. People watched me as I came in to work in the morning, eagerly waiting for a second of my time, trying to go up the stairs with me, bribing me with coffee to get five minutes with Tate. I had found my feet over the past few weeks, getting into a groove at work. I didn’t want to give that up because of one mistake.
Because that is what it was.
I was sure he felt the same way. Afterwards, when we had taken the elevator down, we had barely talked or looked at each other. He’d offered to take me home and I’d quickly said something about already having a ride, which we both knew was not true, but he seemed grateful to accept.
I remembered that he was away on his trip, which meant I wouldn’t see him at work, giving me some time to think up a strategy. I went for coffee as soon as I got into the office. As I was stirring extra sugar into my cup, someone tapped me on the shoulder.
It was Haroon.
“So?” he asked, impatiently bouncing on his feet. “Are we a go for this morning?”
“What do you mean? I told you last night, the Kigana meeting is off?”
