Chapter 13
B y the time we make it to the event meeting, I’m ready to kill him and it’s not even lunchtime on day one.
I have no idea what I’m going to do. He sat through his first two meetings looking bored, his mind anywhere other than on the things he’s supposed to be focused on and if he wasn’t visibly checked out half the time, the other half the time he was rude and dismissive as he worked on his phone.
I’m the one with ADHD and yet he was the poster child for it this morning.
I nudged him half a dozen times under his desk and gave him the motherly don’t be an ass look, but he ignored me too. I can’t tell if he’s just so miserable by the idea of running the foundation that he’s not even going to try or if he just truly, deeply doesn’t give a shit.
“You need to pay attention in this meeting,” I tell him as we walk toward the conference room at the other end of the floor.
“I’m trying,” he lies. “This stuff isn’t my thing and I have a patient in the hospital who I operated on last week who isn’t doing so well and another case that came in this morning that my residents are having trouble with. I’m needed there. Not here.”
I pause, snagging his arm and pulling him to a stop, staring up at his eyes clouded with concern. “Do you need to go?” I ask, feeling bad for thinking he was just being an ass.
He sighs, running a hand through his hair and messing it all up. It was so perfectly coiffed when he came in and now it’s a tussled, sexy disaster. “No. I took this week off, and another doctor is handling it, but I don’t like it. It doesn’t sit well with me.”
“Because that’s what you do.”
He nods as if I’m finally starting to get it. “That’s what I do. Not this. The whole reason my mother hired you is so that you can learn this stuff and eventually do it for me.”
“You’re still the CEO. My position is to help you do that. I can sit in on meetings. I can take notes. I can discuss my thoughts and guide you with my suggestions. But ultimately, the final decisions on things are yours.”
“Which is why you’re going to work those three mornings a week from the hospital.”
My heart instantly starts to pound as a cold sweat breaks out across my forehead and the back of my neck. “About that.” I shift, staring down at my feet. “I don’t like hospitals.” More like hate them to the marrow of my bones.
“Nobody likes hospitals. Not the people who work there and least of all the people who are forced to be there and in this case the patients are children.”
His fingers latch on to my chin, dragging my gaze up to his.
Oh-so-green eyes burrow into mine, making me feel stripped down.
Bare. Yet there’s something else too and I can only wonder if he feels it every single time he touches me the way I do.
That damn current of energy. A step in and now he’s so close, my nose taking a happy bath in his cologne.
His thumb does a small drag along my jaw, clipping the corner of my lips, causing my breath to catch. And just like that, his eyes darken, his body temperature noticeably rising. He does it again, his eyes tracking down to follow the motion, locking on my lips for a beat before returning to mine.
But those eyes… I can’t tell what this look is. Anger? Frustration? Hunger?
A nearby sound has him blinking as if coming back to the room, his hand instantly dropping to his side. A step back and then, “I can’t be in two places at once. That’s your job. I’ll arrange for you to be in a non-patient part of the hospital.”
It’s a command, not a request. A cold rush of air settles back on my shoulders, all the heat he engulfed me in moments ago ices over. “Like where, the janitor’s closet?”
He gruffly exhales. “There’s an administrative wing where my office is. I’ll arrange for some space for you there.”
I want to argue this more than I want to kick him in the nuts and after the morning I’ve had with him that’s seriously saying something about how much I dislike this idea. “How about a negotiation?”
“The negotiation is you do it or you quit since you enjoy reminding me, I temporarily can’t fire you.”
“I’m not quitting. The satisfaction I get from ruining your day with my mere presence is too rewarding.”
“Then it seems you’re at the hospital with me three mornings a week, Echidna.”
He doesn’t give me the chance to argue further as he brushes past me for the conference room.
Damn him .
Without a choice, I plaster on a smile and pretend like everything is fine. That I’m not freaking out over having to spend time in a hospital, and that I didn’t just have a moment with my boss where he not so professionally touched my lips.
Because in all likelihood, he didn’t, right?
He’s a mean, intolerant, arrogant, condescending jerk who outwardly would rather put Icy Hot on his dick than touch me.
I probably had a crumb from breakfast on my face that he was cleaning off.
Anything that I perceived as something else between us, is just that.
Perceived. A point proven as Mean Jenny walks by, throwing me a sneer to end all sneers before entering the same conference room I’m supposed to be in and reminding me precisely what type of women Kaplan Fritz is attracted to.
Not me.
Not that I care.
I wasn’t lying when I told him ruining his day is the highlight of mine.
Because I hate him. Gorgeous, ghosting bastard dropped me like third-period French.
He was something to me and I thought I was something to him.
For three years he was the only person who I felt knew me without actually knowing me.
A friend unlike any I had.
He wasn’t part of my daily life. I didn’t tell him about what high school was like or what was going on with my mother and her marriages.
Or that I was moving states again and starting a new school in my junior year of high school.
Instead, I told him things about myself I’d never told anyone.
Things about Forest and what his death did to me.
I asked him philosophical and existential questions and he did that with me too. We shared thoughts and secrets.
Kaplan knew my inner soul and treated it with care and respect while extending that same piece of himself to me. It was purely platonic and innocent and maybe that’s what made it so perfect. I trusted him. I relied on the knowledge that someone truly cared.
Now as I enter the conference room and dutifully take the seat as far away from him as possible, I’m starting to question if maybe that was all the conjuring of a lost, lonely child’s mind.
He is not the man I thought he was.
So it’s time I let go of any residual notion of that. I’ll do my job here. I’ll get myself acclimated to life in Boston. And if in a few months or a year I find it more impossible to work for him than I already do, I’ll quit and find something else that nurtures my soul.
While I get my laptop set up, Kaplan calls the meeting to order, asking Roberta, the head events planner, to start with an update.
“Sure,” she says, cuing up her PowerPoint to the SMART Board before twisting in her chair to face Kaplan.
“Alright, so as you can see on this slide, this spring we have three main charity events that we’re going to be sponsoring.
The first is an organization that helps under-resourced children, towns, and school programs by providing funding and equipment for sports, and resources for other extracurricular activities.
The second is a reading and math program that targets city public schools in low-income communities and provides supplemental materials and educators for both gifted students, as well as children who require extra help but aren’t afforded that through their daily curriculum and school budgets.
And the third one provides college prep assistance and guidance for lower-income families.
This includes everything from standardized test preparation, assistance with college applications, and financial aid help. ”
She clicks a button on her laptop and then the slide changes.
I scan over the fundraising goal from each charity and the cost to run each event and frown.
I hadn’t seen any of these figures at the last budget meeting because they weren’t available.
That meeting was to figure out how much we planned to spend on the events themselves.
“I’m sorry,” I interrupt, still staring at the board as I swivel back and forth in my chair. “Can I ask a couple of questions about this?”
“Sure,” Roberta replies with a warm smile. Her Kelly-green blouse accentuates her gorgeous dark skin and I need to find out where she shops.
“So, I realize I’m brand-new here, but do you invite the same guest list to each event or are they fresh with each new charity?”
“Well, if you’d done your research and your job, you’d already know the answer to that,” Jenny snaps. “There is a forty-two percent overlap between all three events.”
“Right,” I state, completely ignoring her tone. I use my pen to point toward the screen. “And each of these charities is all academically based or at least related to underprivileged children and school systems.”
“So?” Another snap by Jenny, this one even harsher than the first.
“So,” I mock. “Maybe if you did your research and your job, Jenny, you’d realize that these numbers aren’t impressive at all. Aren’t you the one handling the booking and scheduling for these events? You set the dates for these, right?”
“Yes. I don’t see the problem.”
“How on earth do you think it makes smart financial sense to have them each one week apart if there is that much overlap in guest lists? If I were invited to all three of these events or even two of these events, I’d likely accept one and decline the others because who wants to deal with that nonsense three weeks in a row?
” I turn back to Roberta, completely dismissing Jenny.
“Have you considered hosting one large gala instead of three smaller events?”