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"Um… " I stared at the blood-red glass of wine before me, and then, needing something to settle my freaking jumping heart, I picked it up and started drinking. I had only intended it to be a sip, but then I soon found that I couldn’t stop. Not until he reached out, immensely amused in a way I had never seen him before, and halted the glass. He set it down and gave me a soft look.
“You'd really rather drink yourself to death than say yes?”
"I need to know exactly what you're asking me."
“I’m asking us to date officially. Not just sleep together, but just see where this goes. This way when I ask you to come places with me personally, it'll be clear that you're going as my girlfriend and not as my secretary."
I stared at him in shock; however, this wasn't something I could so easily accept for several reasons.
“I, uh… I don't know if I can say yes,” I replied. “I mean, I want to trust you with all my heart, but I don't know if this will look good on you.”
“How so?”
I stared at him, then thought of the bet with the girls and understood that I had to come clean for his sake and mine.
“I don’t know how you’re going to react after I tell you this, so please forgive me in advance, but I think I have to say it.”
“Go ahead,” he replied, and I nodded.
“Some of the reason why I applied to your firm so suddenly is because… well, the secretaries that you worked with before were all sort of from the same agency. From there, we were assigned to companies all over the city, and, well, there was… the last three secretaries were quite upset that they had gotten dismissed.”
He watched me, his eyes narrowly cautious in that way that he usually reserved for clients when he suspected they were trying to screw him over, but of course, he was going to eventually lunge. First, I needed to speed up so that I wouldn’t be the next roadkill after the board members at Haansbro.
“I, uh… there was a sort of bet that I had to get employed by you and not fired.”
He took a pause as though he couldn’t quite comprehend what I was saying.
“What?” he asked.
“It’s… small, well, relatively. It's about a thousand dollars, and I didn’t even know you before this, and my boss was being an asshole, you saw right, and I just… the salary was amazing, and I just thought I’d give it a shot. And then I was called in so early.”
He cocked his head as he watched me, and I couldn’t help but shut my eyes because this sounded, I was sure, just as bad as it looked. My throat began to close up because I couldn’t imagine that this would in any way be good for our budding intimacy, but I had to be honest with him. I had to make him understand.
“Why were you the one dared to do this?” he asked. “Run out of other secretaries in the circle?”
This sounded condescending, but I knew it was his style; he was just being direct and wanting to get to the crux of what bothered him the most about this.
“I’ve never gotten fired before,” I replied.
He blinked and drew his neck back, and I nodded.
“No matter what, I’ve always been able to stick with it because I have to take care of my mom, and I just never had the luxury of being fired from jobs. So, I used to be a complete suck-up to my boss, as you saw, whereas most people couldn’t, and in justice, I sort of developed a nickname for being insufferable. Hence why the dare was proposed to me.”
And just like that, for the first time that night, a smile, wide and bright, came to his face. He leaned against the chair, then, completely amused, and I released a deep sigh of relief.
“You are known for being insufferable?” he asked, and I nodded.
“Well, in a way, so were the other girls, but you ruined it. So, they were sure you would find a problem with me as well, and… “
“And what?” he asked.
“There was mention of using it to launch a sort of class-action suit against you because then it would be clearly obvious that you had a problem with women.”
At this, the smile completely dissipated from his face.
“That’s fucking ridiculous. They were fired because they made severe mistakes.”
“Well, they all insisted that they didn’t make the mistakes, and yet they couldn’t explain why the errors had been made, so there was also the suspicion that perhaps the mistakes were being engineered to make them look bad and thus provide the reason for their dismissal?”
