Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Madison
" I s he single?"
I was startled at the slight prod by the woman seated before me. She was so gorgeous I couldn’t look away, with bangs that didn’t seem to move and the most perfectly shaped lips I had ever seen.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"He's your boss, right?" she asked, smiling, "I saw you come in with him earlier."
"Um... yeah, yes, he is," I replied as I glanced at the stage once again. He was indeed mesmerizing to watch; the way he spoke, the way he was measured and intentional with it made me so mesmerized by who he was.
Seeing him up here, captivating the entire audience with every word that came out of his mouth, made me understand why I was so head over heels for him. It had been this way from the very moment I had met him, and last night had all but solidified my desire for exactly what I wanted with him.
The woman prodded me once again. "Is he single?" she asked.
I stared into her eyes and replied, "No, he's not. He has a girlfriend. Their relationship is incredibly serious."
"Oh really? How long have they been dating?" she asked. "You're sure about this?"
"Over three years," I replied, even more confidently. "They’ll be getting engaged soon. He's already discussed engagement rings with me. I mean, jewelers."
She gave me a peculiar look, and I didn’t need to interpret it to know that I had just messed up. Not only had I just lied about my boss, but I had basically exposed his secrets and thrown him to the wolves, so of course she would think I was crazy. Who would release that kind of information about their boss? I panicked even further when she leaned over to the woman next to her and whispered into her ear.
I sighed because once again, I had done something that clearly indicated that I was risking my job. There was no other explanation for my behavior and attitude.
I returned my attention to him, but just then Emma sent a message once again.
"Hey, how's it going?" she asked. "Has he said anything about last night yet?"
Needing the distraction, I replied immediately.
"No," I replied. “He's up on stage giving his keynote speech, looking gorgeous as always, while I have just lied to someone behind me and said that he has been in a relationship for three years and now he's about to get married, so basically, she needs to back off.”
"Is that true?" she shrieked.
“Of course not. I've never even seen him with a woman in that sense in the six months I've worked with him. He's obsessed with his work. It's all he ever does.”
"No wonder he’s attracting suitors as he talks on stage," she said.
"Yeah," I agreed. “All eyes are on him while he just looks like he's quite uninterested in being there. It's a little bit funny because he doesn't like crowds at all. I bet he cannot wait to get back to the hotel.”
“I, on the other hand, sure can. Maybe it's best I try to avoid him as much as possible until things calm the hell down between us”.
“I said it before, and I’ll say it again,” she said. “I don't think you should avoid him at all. It's already too late. You guys have gone intimate. Maybe not all the way yet, but it's only a matter of time. So why try to shy away from it? He will never just be your boss anymore; he will also be the man you've been intimate with, who you quite possibly are in love with, although you'll never admit it."
I truly didn’t know what to say. She was right. I guess the sooner I accepted it, the better. It was either things went uphill from here onwards or downhill. It would never be the same.
I watched him for a little while longer and thought about her words from earlier that morning.
She was right. If I could spend six whole months dressing so nerdishly so that he wouldn’t notice me, why then couldn’t I do the same in the opposite direction? Why couldn’t I get him to notice me? I adored him, and he seemed to be attracted to me, or rather, he was immensely attracted to me, at least enough to give in last night, so why was I so scared?
From his last story rampant around the office about how his previous female secretaries came onto him and how he threw them out like trash. He hadn’t thrown me out so far, and I… I wanted the assurance from him about why.
I put on a sly grin then and replied to Emma’s message.
"I know him," I wrote. "I know so much about him that you would find it creepy, truly. More than you need to know. More than even he knows. I used to wonder where all this was headed, and at the end of the day, I just accepted that it was headed nowhere. But after last night... for now, I will admit that I want more. Maybe I'm too scared to say anything about him being the love of my life just yet, but I at least want him to be the man that I have been intimate with and not just my boss. I can at least strive for this. It's not as though we can go back."
I sent the message and then shut my phone off. A few seconds later, however, it lit up with a message.
It was from Emma.
"Where did you go? Why aren’t you responding?" she asked.
I frowned at her question.
"What do you mean by why aren't you responding? I sent you a message."
Just as I sent it, however, I looked down and realized that all the messages I had just sent hadn’t gone to her.
"Shit, I think it didn't send, maybe the network was bad."
I left the chatroom and was about to turn the screen off, however, when I noticed that I'd just recently exchanged messages with Hunter. It was less than a minute ago, and I couldn’t understand why. Had he tried to talk to me? That couldn’t be, he was still on stage, staring directly at me now, I realized.
Something knocked into my heart with a staggering blow as I finally read the first sentence and then the second. I pulled the chatroom open and nearly screamed. Instead, I was so shocked that I jumped to my feet in the middle of a room with more than three hundred people.
Thankfully, I didn’t curse back as I just might have ruined the entire event if I had.
I wasn’t sure though that I hadn’t when in the next moment my chair fell down behind me to the ground, showing the force with which I had stood up from it.
I immediately tried to right it quietly; however, I didn’t carry on speaking until I was seated again, and with my head so lowered down, I wondered if I would ever manage the courage to straighten up enough to look him in the eye once again.
I couldn’t look at him now. All I could do was try to delete the message and truly hope that he hadn’t seen it. I was so terrified that I immediately did this and then had no choice but to wait for my fate because now more than ever, I was sure that it was headed to nowhere but doom.