Chapter3
By the time Bradley called her into his office to talk about what she needed to help him with that day, Jessica had--more or less--gotten her composure back. She hadn’t thought much about what her new boss would look like; part of her recovery had focused on avoiding one of the biggest triggers she’d had for what the counselors had called her “obsessive-compulsive behaviors”: the urge to have sex with whoever was the best-looking person in the room, as a way of validating herself.
While there were so many layers to why she had tended to do that that Jessica wasn’t sure she’d ever get to the bottom of it, she knew that being teased relentlessly during her “awkward” teen years had contributed. Somehow, if she could get gorgeous men to fuck her, it meant that Sally Jeffords, Natalia Giacometti, and Jenn Fitzgerald were all wrong, that she wasn’t the ugly bitch of the graduating class.
He’s your boss, he’s a billionaire tech bro, and he probably has some kind of trophy wife or girlfriend anyway, Jessica had told herself again and again as she’d continued setting up her workstation, waiting for Bradley to buzz her. But the shock of seeing him for the first time hadn’t quite gone away,
Jessica had expected for her boss to be like so many of the other “tech bros” who seemed to be making billions on innovations in the past decade: unexceptional to look at, probably less than rigorous in hygiene and dress, with the homogenous, bland features of a Yale frat brother or a member of the lacrosse team on the outside. She’d expected floppy, nondescript hair or a tight fade, jeans and a tee shirt, those “normal” indicators.
Instead, the man who’d come into the inner sanctum had been gorgeous enough to grace the cover of GQ, and Jessica had noticed, too, that he’d been dressed appropriately for it. While he wasn’t in a suit, Bradley had been in designer shoes, dark-wash high-end jeans, and a button-down shirt. His dishwater blond hair was combed back off of his face and to one side, cut neatly, and his face was clean-shaven.
Then, too, there was the body in the clothes: Bradley Holt wasn’t the lanky beanpole that so many young tech billionaires seemed to be, and he wasn’t the slightly paunchy young man who might eventually run to fat if his time high on the hog lasted long enough. He was lean, broad-chested, muscular enough that Jessica’s mind had immediately pictured--for an instant--him picking her up and bending her over the desk to take her from behind. He wasn’t burly, but instead the fitted clothes showed off a kind of wiry strength. Probably goes to the gym three or four times a week, splits his time equally between cardio and strength training, works with a trainer--the whole deal, Jessica had thought, even as the introduction had moved forward.
As she opened the door to Holt’s office--she had to think of him by his last name, she reminded herself; she couldn’t give herself the freedom to think of him by the first name yet, not with her mind still in such a ferment. Jessica took a deep breath, remembering one of the exercises from her early recovery. Cravings were just cravings. They would pass if you gave them enough time. They always passed.
She stepped into the office and was once more--briefly--thrown. It was obvious that Bradley had put a lot of thought into his inner sanctum: it was comfortable without looking too much like a home office, with a seating area of a couch and a couple of comfortable chairs, a coffee table, and off to the side a little service station with a coffee set, an electric kettle, a fridge and a little sink for clean-up purposes. There were enough mugs, tumblers, wine glasses, and water glasses for a party of up to about five or six people to have something to drink, and bottles of a few high-end liquors, along with a few expensive red wines, were visible as well.
At the opposite end of the almost palatial space, Holt sat at a large, efficient-looking desk, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over downtown Portland behind him. Off to his right, there was a door onto a little terrace, obscured by the interior wall. The walls of the office themselves were painted a deep teal, focused and calming all at once. The floor was polished oak, with cream-colored rugs around high-traffic areas.
In front of Holt’s desk sat three chairs--comfortable looking enough. if straight backed, a compromise between the goal of not encouraging the sitter to linger and not making them fidget. Jessica chose the one in the center and stepped up to it. Holt rose to acknowledge her as she came in, and they both sat down at the same instant. There is an entire semester’s worth of psychology at play here, Jessica thought as she settled into the comfortable chair.
“So, there’s a lot that I’m going to have going on today,” Holt told her, getting straight to business. “I’m afraid you’re going to have your first day in the deep end of the pool.” Jessica smiled.
“That actually is a good thing,” she said, taking out her phone and flipping open the notepad she’d brought with her. Jake’s final parting gift had been a posted list of all of Holt’s preferred vendors for various things, taped to the desk next to the computer where she couldn’t possibly miss it.
It had included numbers, who specifically to speak to, email addresses, and “code words” --whether it was an emergency purchase, a last-minute item, a reservation that would need particular attention, and so on. “I’d rather get the full scope early on than be lulled into a false sense of how easy the job will be.”
“Exactly the kind of attitude I like to see,” Holt said, smiling slightly. He sat back in his chair, pulled something up on his computer, and glanced at the screen. “So, the biggest things on the agenda for today are a meeting with some investors I’m courting at three, and a phone call with the people from the immigration group at four-thirty. I also need you to arrange a dinner for me with the CEO of Langley Enterprises for later in the week, and check with my tailor on the suit I’m supposed to have ready for the charity event on the sixth.” Jessica nodded, scribbling quick notes for herself on the notepad.
It was not outside of her experience, any of the individual things; it was obvious to her right away that Holt was as dedicated to his charities and causes as he was to his business itself, and that he spread himself as broadly as he could: immigration, women’s health, children’s causes, and the homeless were all issues that he had some form of connection with.
“I’m also supposed to be hearing from the Portland Community Alliance in the next day or so,” Holt said, interrupting the flow of personal and professional tasks that needed scheduling or management. “I think they’re looking for donors to contribute to building a new community center for kids--see if that’s what they’re seeking, and find out how much they need. If it’s more than a million to get to their goal, use Jake’s list to figure out who else we can rope in.”
Jessica smiled slightly to herself. One of the lists that Jake had given her had been of Holt’s peers in the industry, people he was on good terms with. She hadn’t really known what specific purpose it was put to, but at least one of them was now clear: her new boss sometimes, apparently, exerted his cred with his peers to get them to join him in charitable giving.
“Okay,” Jessica said as Holt finished. She had at least eight hours’ worth of work on the notepad, though Jake’s shortcuts would at least save her the trouble of figuring out how to make some of the things Holt wanted happen.
“Oh! I almost forgot,” Holt said. “Block out lunch for both of us--I like to have lunch with my assistants at least twice a week, to check in and make sure everything’s going smoothly in general. Your first day here seems like a good time for that.” He smiled again, and Jessica felt the little flutter in between her throat and her stomach, the tightening feeling somewhere between her hips.
“Will do,” she said, returning the smile.
“Pick whatever place you want to go in Portland to eat--and make sure you block out the full hour, plus fifteen minutes before. We’ll do a progress report and then go get something to eat.” Jessica nodded, her smile broadening. Either he is a really good actor, or he’s genuinely a good guy, she thought. Jake seemed pretty happy working for him--maybe he’s just a decent boss. She rose from the seat and excused herself from the office, and Holt turned back to his work with a passing comment that if she needed his follow-up or preferences on anything, she could buzz him any time.
Jessica left the office and went straight to her desk, exhaling a breath she hadn’t even been entirely aware that she’d been holding. Her first meeting--real meeting--with her new boss, and it had gone better than expected. Somehow, the entire time she’d been preparing for her new life on the opposite end of the country from her old one, Jessica had held the suspicion in the back of her mind that it was all fake, that it would just evaporate through her fingers, disappear as if it had never even truly existed.
She’d meet Holt, and he would gruffly and angrily inform her that he hadn’t meant to hire her, or once she’d sat down with him, he would give her a list of demands so far beyond the pale that it wouldn’t even remotely be possible to satisfy them, or as soon as she’d sat down, he would tell her that the only reason he’d actually hired her was to be his personal fuck-toy.
The last notion had been wrapped in a mixture of desire and utter horror in Jessica’s mind. The part of her brain that still reveled in its addiction had craved the excuse of something like that: she had to fuck her gorgeous boss, or she would get fired. But the stronger, saner part of her had dreaded the possibility at the same time: that she would have to not only give up her freedom, but also backslide in her recovery.
That she would be prey, locked in not only by the need she had for the job, but also by her spiking cravings. Jessica looked at the list of things she needed to accomplish for the day and mentally went through what would have to be done--or at least, have some progress to show--by the time she met with her new boss.
She opened up the calendar application on her computer and selected the day, and started filling in the obligations that weren’t already on it. Jessica reasoned that she would schedule her lunch with Holt around his other obligations for the day; therefore, she would need to know what times were actually open first.
Once she found the right opening, she scheduled it and keyed in a notification for Holt as well as a reminder for herself, to be sent to her phone twenty minutes before she needed to be ready to give Holt her progress report.
Jessica dove into her tasks, letting go of her fear and anxiety in the demand for complete focus. She had never--even at the height of her addiction--been a bad employee. Part of what had made it difficult for her to acknowledge that she had a problem had been the fact that it had never affected her work--until, of course, it had.
But the way that it had affected her work had been peripheral; she’d ended up having sex with her boss’s nineteen-year-old son, and he’d blackmailed her for months with the pictures she hadn’t known he’d taken. She’d ended up quitting the job finally when he wanted to pimp her out to friends of his, to make it impossible for him to hold that threat over her head anymore.
As she worked, the fact that so much of what she had to do on her first day could be done more or less automatically started to give Jessica’s mind room to roam. She was typing up a press release as the thoughts started to intrude: the mental image of Holt picking her up and pinning her face-down on her desk, pulling her pants down and her panties with them, taking her from behind right there.
Jessica tried to push the thought out of her mind, but fast on its heels was another: the idea of Holt leading her over to the little sitting area in his office and demanding that she strip down for him, telling her that he had only hired her because he’d heard she was nympho trash and she’d better thank him appropriately for giving her a chance to make such a good salary.
“No,” Jessica murmured softly to herself. “He’s a decent guy. He’s made it clear that he hired me because I’m good at my job.” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes and repeated one of the mantras she’d learned in recovery. You can’t think your way into right action, but you can act your way into right thinking. It was something out of alcoholism recovery, Jessica knew--something by one of the originators of AA--but it was apt. And it helped. The thoughts would go away as long as she focused on actually doing the right thing.
She opened her eyes and reminded herself that she only had another hour and a half to get things properly done; she could do it, and she would do it. Jessica shifted in her seat and looked at the list on her notepad. She’d already done a lot--but she wanted to knock her first day out of the water, and the next thing that needed doing was a phone call.
That would make it impossible for her to think about what Holt’s body had to look like under his crisp, clean, tailored clothes. God, his cock must be...no. Stop. Jessica took a quick, deep breath and picked up her phone. Make the phone call. Jessica found the number on the reference sheet and began dialing it, checking the time again. An hour and a half to go.