Maliciously Obedient

“You’re going with Diane Powell, sir.” Joanie was new, having replaced his former assistant, Gloria, who had been more grandmotherly than his own grandmother, but who had finally decided that coddling and nurturing her own seventeen grandchildren was her life’s work. Gloria had worked for his dad and she rose up the ranks with Mike. Truth be told, he was ready for a change, and Joanie was green but smart. Tech savvy. Enough training and she'd do fine.



Joanie wouldn’t stop calling him “sir”. At twenty, she was fresh out of secretarial school but came well connected, with great references and, because she was so new and eager, she was cheap. Mike needed cheap if he was going to make the cut with the quarterly profit numbers.



“You can stop calling me ‘sir’,” he insisted.



“Oh. Um, OK, Michael.”



“It’s Mike.”



“OK, Mike. You’re going with Diane Powell. Dom is already lined up. He will pick you up at seven, he will pick Miss Powell up at 7:30 and deliver both of you to the Elysium at eight.” The sound of keys on a keyboard, rapid-fire and efficient, dotted her words.



“Thank you,” he said. “So, how are the mergers and acquisitions documents?” he asked, launching a tight formation of clipped statements that were essentially a shorthand between the two of them that she had picked up amazingly quickly. Where Gloria had seemed to be telepathic, knowing what he was going to say before the sentences even came out, Joanie still struggled. She would be there soon, and at that point he would give her a big, fat raise.



Right now, though, he was living on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, metaphorically speaking, when it came to the corporation. He had restricted his own jet use. They didn’t actually own their own private jet – he just rented one. Other cutbacks had been necessary to get him to this point. He was starting to question those now that he was in the trenches. The impact of what looked good on paper but didn't work in the real world hit him as he worked on the lower floors of his building. None of it was major, though. Employees could suffer scratchier toilet paper or lower quality pencils.



But he was starting to have a conscience. A corporate conscience – the two words contradictory – about how he had handled bonus structures and promotions, his failure to fill empty positions and the blended workload on a number of people who had taken over for empty spots without compensation. The amount of complaining that took place around the water cooler, literally, was a revelation. It was also jarring because it made him wonder, back in his salad days, was he a complainer? Did he talk about the things he didn’t like and bitch about his financial problems the way that all of these people seemed to?



In his world now, if he had a conversation with someone it was either pleasant small talk designed to kill time at a non-business event or business – or heavy breathing and moans in bed. Conversation had fallen into those three basic camps and, aside from the occasional phone call with his mom (which didn’t fall into any of those categories, thank God), he couldn’t fathom standing around and talking for twenty to thirty minutes about nothing but things he didn’t like about his life. If he didn’t like something, he changed it.



It really was that simple.



As Matt Jones, he had made the mistake on day two of saying exactly that. The cold, perplexed stares aimed at him in the coffee room forced him to add, with a jocularity he didn’t feel, “Then again, that’s easier said than done.”



Folks had loosened up.



His disconnect made him question whether it was him or them. Numbers weren’t in his favor. There were so many more of them, who seemed so helpless in their own lives, so powerless, so willing to concede that what they didn’t like was a reality they couldn’t change and so the only empowerment they possessed was to complain about it. A language of its own, with linguistic twists and turns that were so foreign to him and yet, these people seemed to be native speakers.



Not Lydia. He’d noticed that she would gripe here and there and then retreat, off to work. Something inside her was self-feeding, and his respect for that almost – almost – matched his attraction for her.



Almost.



“So, Gloria, is my – uhh. Sorry, Joanie.”



“It’s okay, sir, you can call me Gloria. I understand. You worked with her for years.”



“I didn’t work with her for that long, Joanie. I worked with her for four years. She was my father’s secretary before that.”



“Oh...oh. Umm, OK. That’s fine,” Joanie said, the pitch of her voice changing. It made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, gooseflesh spreading over his shoulders and upper arms. That was a turn on a dime. Why had sweet Joanie just – oh. Now he got it. “Not that you’re a secretary by any stretch, Joanie. You have far more widespread administrative skills than – and I would never...” He fumbled. “You’re an executive assistant and so was Gloria. She evolved with the job and so will you.”



He heard a whoosh of a held in breath. “Thank you, sir. Uh...Mike. Thank you, Mike.”



“You’re welcome, Joanie. Is my tux ready?” On to safer territory.



“Yes.”



“Is there anything else that I need to know about this charity event?”



“Yes.”



“And what is that?”



“Your friend Jeremy called and said that he would be attending.”



“Jeremy?”



“Yes, Jeremy.”



“Jeremy is attending?”



“Yes, Sir. Yes, Mike. Yes.”



“Is he taking a date?”



“He didn’t say.” Finding an assistant who could really meet whatever business, personal, professional needs he had – of course, keeping it within ethical and decency bounds – was something that his father had always warned him would be harder than he ever imagined. He thought of Lydia and her feeling of underutilization and underappreciation and it led his mind to Dave.



“Joanie, could you pull the HR file for a guy named David Crawford? He’s my director of communications. I’d like to check out everything that might be in his personnel file. Just have it delivered to my office, or, uh...”



“If it doesn’t violate confidentiality, I can scan it for you and send it to you as a PDF and you can read it on your smart phone. I added the PDF reader app for you.”



“Yes, I noticed that earlier looking at a different PDF. Thank you.” And that’s why Joanie was something more than a secretary; she took the initiative. Gloria had been fabulous about taking care of whatever was put in front of her and taking care of him emotionally, especially ushering him through his father's death. Yet Joanie had promise and initiative and so did Lydia. He wanted to make sure he didn’t crush either.



“I will get that to you, Sir...Mike. Is that something you need before the charity ball?”



“Nope.”



“Okay. Anything else?”



“No. Go home, Joanie.”



“I will, uh – Mike.” Click.



Why would Jeremy go to an autism fundraiser ball? It’s not that Jeremy wasn’t involved in philanthropic institutions – they both had been since they made their money, but Jeremy wasn’t the type. This would be a room filled with over-Botoxed women and portly men who made more money than God but had no one to spend it with. To spend it on, certainly – but not to spend it with.



He expected this to be a three drink, rubbery steak, polite golf clapping two hours and Diane...she would be arm dressing. Tux candy, just someone he would take because she was “high society” and his face would get in the newspaper and – who knew? Maybe it would bolster Bournham Industries.



Whatever appeal dating women like Diane had held for him had died. Matt Jones had seen to it that – that part of his life held no appeal and Lydia had hammered the nails in that coffin.



Ironically, what he really wanted to do was what Jeremy did. He suddenly had a vision of himself hiking the Appalachian Trail, hanging out on a hammock on a beach in Thailand, going on a three month sailboat cruise through the Fiji Islands and the South Pacific.



Living.



None of that had ever mattered to him, even when Jeremy had begged and pleaded for him to join in the pleasure of roaming, itinerant and free. Tasting the local flavor – literally, when it came to Jeremy – wasn't on his bucket list. At best, he had spent a few summers camping and hiking and having fun, and those now held greater appeal than they had even a week ago. It must just be the stress talking, the craziness of having so few weeks left to meet the target goals for profit expansion, to get his stock orders and to walk away from Bournham Industries as a billionaire. That was the clincher.



In order to win, he had to lose. This would be a battle with the board of directors. If he lost, he retained control of his company. If he won, he sold it in a private sale to...well, he wasn’t sure to whom, but he ceded control. Or the IPO went through and Bournham became public.



Control wasn't his for this event – the next three hours would be spent in blinding, blistering, boring, blustering social pain. He dulled his ears and dulled his eyes and thanked his hairdresser for making him look like Mike again. Michael Bournham would be on the press stage, blinded by flashes and video cameras and more, and he had to pretend to like it.



Fake it to make it became increasingly, outrageously difficult when he could touch something so authentic, so real, in Lydia.



Later, in the quiet of his apartment as he slipped into his tuxedo – which had indeed been freshly pressed and dry cleaned and ready to go – he had expected to feel more in his own skin with his hair and his eyes back. What he found was that he was searching for Matt Jones in the mirror.



Buzz! “Sir, are you there?” It was Dom using the intercom system.



“Yup.”



“Ready to roll, sir?”



“Ready to roll, Dom. Let’s go.” As the elevator descended, he stared at the buffed, stainless steel backs of the doors and thought of his body pressed against hers in that elevator, the scent of arousal inches away, pulling him anywhere but here.



J. K. Rowling must have been at a high society charity ball when she came up with the idea for dementors. A silent scream pounded through Mike’s head as he felt the life force of all goodness, happiness, flow, excitement, and exhilaration being sucked out of every pore. Diane clung to him as if he were her substitute for caloric intake.



She preened, scanned, surveyed, and critically analyzed the room to determine the exact number of people to make eye contact with, where they ranked in the room in terms of power, prestige, and impact, and ignored anyone who didn’t compute.



It made his balls ache. Mind muddled, as the speakers droned on and on, he reminded himself that it was a good cause, an important cause. The research money would help children, would help families, would help society and that these stuffed shirts were the very people whose wallets needed to be cracked open. If nothing else, these over-exfoliated, over-polished, over-entitled, under-conscienced, pompous, hollow beings were the ones who needed most to contribute to humanity. Even if it was just through a checkbook.