Yeah, I’m supposed to be working, I know. Don’t get all Mr. Henningford on my ass. If you’d just had Apollo—Mr. Kane—feeling you up like he’d just been doing to me, you wouldn’t be working either. Just sayin’.

I’m pacing in circles around my desk, like this lion I once saw stuck in an enclosure at the zoo. He just walked the same path over and over again, wearing it down to dirt, ignoring the rest of his enclosure as he went. At the time, I felt sorry for him.

Right now, I feel too…I don’t know what I feel. But something. Something very mixed up and twisted and worried and horny as fuck and—

“Ashley, are you okay?”

Oh thank god, Natalie is coming to my rescue.

“Yes! No! Yes? I don’t know.”

She’s staring at me like I’ve lost my mind. Which, to be fair, I kinda feel like I have.

“What’s going on?” she asks slowly, as if talking to a small child, or a deranged adult.

Okay, I deserved that. I mean, I don’t like it, but I deserve it.

“Apollo—” I hiss a little too loudly and everyone in a ten-foot radius turns to hear, no doubt because he’s, like, the only topic of conversation this morning. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up doing a ten-page spread on him in the magazine this month, if only because no reporter is going to want to focus on anything else.

Natalie tilts her head and stares at me for a moment, and then nods knowingly. “We need to have a little chat,” she says, grabbing my arm and dragging me toward the smaller conference room on the main floor. A handful of men are streaming out—the hoity-toity upper management guys who rarely deign to mix with us lowly reporters—so we stand off to the side until they all leave, and then dart into the darkened room and close the door.

“What is going on between you and Mr. Kane?” Natalie demands, propping her hip against the boardroom table, crossing her arms and glaring at me. “Have you been holding out? Do you know him? Is he as good in bed as he is hot?”

“Natalie!” I hiss indignantly. “I have not slept with Apo—Mr. Kane.”

I can feel my fucking ears turning red, a sure sign that I’m lying, and Natalie, being Best Friend Extraordinaire that she is, definitely doesn’t overlook this fact.

“Wanna try that again?” she asks, cocking one eyebrow expectantly.

“Well, I haven’t,” I insist, crossing my arms stubbornly across my chest. But I can’t just stand there; I have too much energy in me to just stand and talk to her. I start pacing the room, the image of the trapped lion in the zoo crossing my mind, but I shove it away.

“I stole his cab this morning—”

“You what?”

“I didn’t know it was him!” I say plaintively. “I was late and I stole his cab and—”

“What was Apollo Kane doing riding in a fucking cab?” Natalie explodes, cutting me off.

I stop.

I stare at Natalie, confusion writ large all over my face.

“I have no idea,” I say slowly. “That’s weird.”

“Yeah, that’s like fucking weird,” Natalie says sarcastically. “The man could afford to be flown to work every morning in a private helicopter. He’s not exactly the kind of guy to slum it in a yellow cab.”

“Well, that part doesn’t matter,” I say, waving my hand in the air dismissively, although I’ll be honest, my brain is going a hundred miles an hour. I really have no explanation for why I was fighting Mr. Apollo Kane, the richest man in New York City—the richest man on the East Coast—for a fucking cab. I file it away under Shit I’ll Never Know And It’ll Drive Me Crazy Until The Day I Die file, along with Why The Hell Is Kanye West Popular and Who Thought Crimped Hair Was Sexy.

1982, I’m looking at you.

“Well, so anyway, I jump in his cab and I might have waved out the window at him and sort of made fun of him and…” I can feel myself withering under Natalie’s glare. “He didn’t exactly have a name tag on!” I say defensively, my cheeks a brilliant red. Perfect, now they can match my brilliant red ears.

“So I felt bad and I went to his office after the big announcement and I told him I was sorry and I knocked over his vase, well, a vase, and broke it and then he carried me in his arms—”

“He what?”

“Will you let me finish? I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet!”

Natalie’s eyes open wide and I can almost see her thoughts as they flash through her mind, and I can tell they're getting dirtier by the second.

“His cock…Natalie, I didn’t see it, but holy fuck, it’s huge, like 12 inches huge,” I breathe, finally getting to the important part. “He was telling me that he was going to tie me up and spank me and he was pulling off his tie—”

Natalie squeaks like a dog toy, making me feel better about my sudden impersonation of the annoying aisle of the Petco store, but I plow forward, wanting to get this off my chest.

“But his secretary, Mrs. Sanders, remember her? Real cranky old biddy?” At Natalie’s nod, I continue, “She beeped in over the intercom and said that he had to go to a meeting to talk to board members about which departments to cut. Whole departments! Natalie, we may not have—”

“It’s probably here that I should cut you off,” a voice says from the speaker on the phone.

The phone in the middle of the room, on the table.

The phone with the red blinking light on it, indicating that it’s live and broadcasting and fucking picking up everything I’m saying, oh god, oh god, oh god.

“I would hate for you to say something that you might regret later,” a voice says drolly.

Not a voice.

Apollo Kane’s voice.

Natalie’s staring at me, and me at her, and I can’t breathe and I’m hyperventilating and as Natalie dives for the phone to turn it off, I’m running and I can hear my skirt tearing, my strides are so long but I don’t care, I fucking don’t care, I have to hide, I have to go into the bathroom and hide and never, ever come out and they’re going to find me, dead, just a pile of bones and cute clothes and say sadly, “There lies Ashley the Associate Editor who literally died of embarrassment,” and my ghost’s cheeks are going to turn red when it hears those words.

As I sit on top of the toilet, snuffling pathetically, my arms wrapped around my knees, I have to wonder what I’d ever done to deserve this. If they ever invent a time machine, the first thing I’m doing is going back to this morning. I’m going to fucking hold the damn door open to the taxi cab and wish Apollo Kane a good day while he’s climbing into it. Because then I wouldn’t have had to apologize to him and he wouldn’t have promised to spank me and I wouldn’t have…

I wouldn’t have heard the plans to fire my fellow co-workers. To fire me.

I drop my head to my knees and stare dully down, eyes unseeing.

No, even a time machine couldn’t help me now. Me and my friends and even my co-workers that I’d secretly give decaf coffee to, just to fuck with their heads…we’re all fucked.

And I don’t have the slightest clue of what to do about it.