Chapter 9 Rae
RAE
I lose track of time somewhere around midnight.
I fight it as hard as I can, but when the Sandman comes for you, he’s gonna get what he’s after.
Sure enough, my head starts to bob. The files start to blur together.
Names become meaningless strings of letters and numbers stop making sense altogether.
My tired handwriting gets sloppier with every page until I can’t even read my own notes.
Finally, I take mercy on myself and lay my head on my arms. “Just for a second,” I mumble aloud to the empty office. “Just to rest my eyes.”
The room is warm. The desktop is cool under my cheek.
I’ll just rest for a minute.
Just one minute.
Just… one…
Then I’m back in his office. I’m on my knees again, picking up scraps of paper from the floor, but they’re endless. No matter how many I pick up, there’s always more. To make matters worse, my skirt is determined to ride up.
He’s standing over me. I can see his shoes. Black leather, polished to a mirror shine. I reach for a piece of paper near his foot and my blouse gapes open like a mouth parted and begging for a kiss.
“Look at me,” Lukas growls.
I look up. He’s so tall from this angle. Miles of him stretching toward the ceiling.
His hand comes down. Fingers thread through my hair. The touch is gentle at first. Then he tightens his grip until it borders on painful. I arch my back and neck to look him in the eye.
“Good girl,” he says.
He tilts my head back even further. My throat is exposed. I’m breathing hard now.
“Do you know why I chose you?” His voice scrapes through the dark like a match strike.
I shake my head an inch. His grip won’t let me move much more than that.
“Well, you’ll learn soon enough.”
His thumb traces along my jaw. Down to my chin. He presses it against my lower lip.
“Open,” he says.
I open.
He pushes his thumb inside. I taste salt. Mint. Ocean. Smoke.
“Good girl,” he says again.
Those two words do something strange to me. I feel liquid and shameful, hot and cold at the same time. Boneless in his grasp, almost, like I’m putty he can shape and reshape however he pleases.
My eyes flutter closed. His other hand is still in my hair, holding me in place. I’m on my knees in front of him and I don’t want to be anywhere else.
His thumb slides deeper. I suck on it without thinking. He makes a sound in his throat, low and approving.
“That’s it,” he purrs. “Just like that.”
I’m trembling now. My thighs press together. There’s an ache between my legs that’s getting harder and harder to ignore.
He pulls his thumb free. A string of saliva connects my lips to his skin like glistening pearls.
“Now,” he says, and his free hand moves to his belt—
“Wake up, Ms. Everett.”
I jerk awake so fast I nearly fall out of my chair.
The files scatter everywhere. My notes go flying. I’m gasping like a landed fish.
And Lukas Lazarev is standing in front of my desk.
He’s in a charcoal gray suit this evening. Or is it morning now? I can’t tell. My brain isn’t working. My body is still caught in the dream, still throbbing, still wanting.
“You fell asleep,” he observes.
I blink at him. “I— I guess so. Sorry. I was just—”
“Working.”
“Yes.”
He looks at the mess of papers around me, then back at my face. “Get up,” he says. “I’m taking you home.”
The thought of that happening immediately sets my cheeks aflame. “That’s not necessary. I can take the subway.”
“The subway stopped running an hour ago.”
I glance at the clock on my computer. It’s 2:52 A.M. He’s right.
“Okay, well, I can call an Uber.”
“Or you can just get in my car.” He’s walking toward the elevator, certain that I’ll follow. Unfortunately, he’s correct. “Come.”
I gather my things with clumsy fingers. My bag, my coat. I leave the files and my notes in a neat stack on the desk. That’s Future Rae’s problem now.
The elevator ride is silent. Lukas stands on one side; I stand on the other. There’s an entire elevator car between us, but between some combination of how unbelievably big he is and how sleepy and edgy I feel right now, that space does not seem even close to sufficient to protect me.
It’s probably because of that stupid dream. The scene is still fresh in my head. His thumb in my mouth… His hand in my hair… Good girl, he called me…
I clench my thighs together and stare at the floor numbers counting down.
The parking garage is empty except for a gleaming black sedan that can only belong to one man. He strides to it and opens the passenger door for me. I slide in.
The interior smells like him, just as he did in my dream. Leather and sea salt and mint.
He gets in. The engine roars to life and we start to drive.
I have never been more aware of another human being in my entire life.
His hands are enormous on the steering wheel and I can’t stop looking at them.
The scarred knuckles, the blunt fingers, the silver rings catching light from passing street lamps.
Those hands could do anything. Break anything. Hold anything down. Hold anyone down.
I squeeze myself closer to the passenger door.
The city whisks by outside. New York at 3 A.M. is a different animal. Quieter, lonelier. When I dare to glance at him periodically, I see it reflected in those gray eyes.
It’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking.
That doesn’t stop me from trying to imagine, though.
What does a man like Lukas Lazarev see when he looks at a girl like me?
Some helpless kid who can’t handle a late night?
A dumpster fire who fell asleep at her desk like a college freshman during finals week?
A mess? A slacker? A burnout? An easy lay?
Or maybe he doesn’t think about me at all. Could it be that I’m just another task on his list? Pick up the assistant. Drop her off. Move on to whatever dark business fills his nights.
I sneak another look at his profile, hoping for answers. There’s nothing to be found, though. There’s only the rough line of his jaw and the silver of his beard.
He’s not handsome in any conventional way. His features are too brutal for that. Too weathered. Too rough.
But there’s something about him that makes it hard to look away.
It’d be nice if one of us would say something.
I could apologize for falling asleep on the job, I guess, though it seems only fair, considering he dragged me back in to work past midnight.
But some kind of conversation would be good.
Anything to fill this awful, suffocating silence.
Better yet, anything to make me forget that awful, suffocating dream.
“How are you finding the work?”
His voice breaks the silence so suddenly that I flinch.
“The work?” I parrot, eloquent as ever.
“The job. Life on the fiftieth floor.” He glances at me, then back to the road. “How are you finding it?”
I pick at a thread on my coat sleeve. Something about the nighttime and the hazy state of my consciousness makes me far more honest than I would normally be.
“I don’t even know. I have no idea what I’m doing.
I sat at my desk for eight hours yesterday staring at a closed door.
The snake plants are my only friends now.
We’ve bonded over our shared confusion about why we’re there. ”
He chuckles without smiling. “The adjustment period can be disorienting.”
“That’s one word for it,” I say, side-eyeing him suspiciously. “I was thinking more along the lines of ‘Kafkaesque nightmare,’ but sure, let’s go with ‘disorienting.’”
This time, he does smile. It’s small, a nano-smile, but it transforms his face in a way I hadn’t expected.
“You’re funny,” he says, like he’s surprised by that fun little discovery.
“I’m really not,” I assure him. “It’s sleep deprivation talking. In reality, I’m extremely boring.”
“I doubt that.” He shifts lanes smoothly, one hand draped over the steering wheel with ease. “It will get easier, you know. The work. The understanding of it.”
“Will it? Because right now, I feel like I’m assembling IKEA furniture without the instructions. In the dark. While someone yells at me. In Swedish.”
“No one is yelling at you.”
“Yet,” I counter. “No one is yelling at me yet.”
I rub at my tired eyes. This whole ride feels strange and surreal. If I think too hard about it, I think I might have a mental breakdown, so I focus on fidgeting with that loose thread on my cuff again and looking out the window periodically.
“Can I ask a question?” I venture, emboldened by the tiny crack in his glacier exterior.
He nods. “Fire away.”
“What were all those files for? The ones I was summarizing before I, um…” I gesture vaguely. “Before I became one with my desk.”
Lukas rubs at his beard with one silver-ringed hand. “Background.”
“On what?”
His weathered face cracks into a quarter-smile. “As I said, you’ll understand in time.”
“Will I?”
“Yes. If you stay.”
If I stay. Like it’s an open question, a TBD. Like there’s a chance I won’t get that chance.
I peer out the window. We’re crossing the bridge into Brooklyn now.
Lights ripple on the water below. Normally, I can’t get enough of this view.
It’s the one thing about this city I’ve never become jaded about.
Snow is a dirty, pain-in-the-ass sludge, the subway is a petri dish on wheels, and Broadway is an overhyped ripoff—but this view? This never disappoints.
“Can I ask another question?”
Lukas nods again, same as before. “If you’d like.”
“The meeting yesterday,” I say. “All those men.”
“What about it?”
“Who were they?”
“Associates.”
I want to scream. This is the least illuminating conversation of my life.
But there’s one more question I can’t stop thinking about. The scarred man’s voice seeping out in that dark hallway. Just like the last one.
“Final question.” I take a breath. “What happened to your previous assistant?”
He frowns. “What are you talking about? I haven’t had an assistant in nearly two decades.”
I frown right back. “But the men in that meeting,” I protest, “your ‘associates,’ they were talking about me after you left. I heard them.”
He glances at me, just for a second. Then back to the road. “And?”
“They said I wouldn’t last. They said I was just like the last one, that she didn’t last, either.”
That sucks all the air out of the vehicle. Lukas shows no outward sign of it, but I feel it, like the warmth is being stolen away from me. His hands on the wheel seem to ice over, somehow, and his eyes do the same.
“People talk,” Lukas intones at last, his face guarded and cryptic. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
He pulls up to my building. The car stops, but the engine remains on and idling.
Then he turns to look at me. Those gray eyes are unreadable in the dark. “You ask a lot of questions, Ms. Everett.”
“Is that a problem?”
“That remains to be seen.”
I busy myself with assembling my stuff. By the time I’ve gathered my bag and my scattered thoughts, he’s out and rounding the hood of the car. He opens my door and waits there, hand extended, like this is some kind of date.
It’s not a date. Obviously. He’s just being… polite, I guess you’d call it? Is Lukas Lazarev capable of being polite? Or maybe it’s a generational thing. Men of his era open doors for ladies and lay coats over puddles and bring flowers, whether or not they mean it.
The thought of Lukas Lazarev brandishing a bouquet of roses immediately makes me giggle. I clap a hand over my mouth to stifle it.
But when I step out onto the sidewalk, all thoughts of laughing go away. It’s cold as hell outside, and I forgot how thin this coat is.
He walks me to the door. His hand hovers near the small of my back but doesn’t touch.
“Get some sleep,” he advises when we reach the stoop. “Tomorrow will be busy.”
I fumble for my keys. My fingers are clumsy from the cold, and also from— No, just the cold. Definitely not from his proximity.
“Thank you,” I manage to splutter. “For the ride.”
It’s only when I look up that I realize exactly how close we’re standing. I could count every individual fiber in Lukas’s beard from here. His breath fogs in the cold air between us.
His gaze drops to my mouth. Lingers there.
My lips part. I don’t mean for them to; they just do.
And as they do, the dream rushes back. His thumb pressing against my lower lip… Open… Good girl… The taste of salt and mint…
He reaches out. For a second, I think he’s going to touch my face. My heart stops.
But his hand descends. He pries the keys from my uncooperative fingers and unlocks the door himself, then pushes it open to reveal my shabby apartment lobby.
I don’t move. I can’t. My feet are rooted to the concrete. He’s so close. If I leaned up even an inch—
“Goodnight, Ms. Everett.”
Lukas steps away. Then he’s walking back to the car.
I watch him get in, watch the sedan pull away. Then, with a huge yawn, I start the trek upstairs.
I’m halfway to my apartment when it hits me: I never told him where I live.
I never gave him my address.
He just knew.