Chapter 3
3
OPHELIA
M y eyes roll to the back of my head and I thank the gods above that the voice on the other side of my phone call can’t see my face. Can someone please explain to me how people who make far more money than I do can be so clueless sometimes? How did you manage to become the CEO of a multi-million dollar marketing firm and not know how to convert a Word document to a PDF? Sometimes I swear I’m the only competent person who works at this company. Well, me and Dale.
“Yes, sir, I’ll make sure to do that for you. Yep, mhmm, I know exactly what the client is asking for. Don’t worry about it, you just go enjoy the Bahamas. Alright, have a good day now.” As I hang up the phone and silently scream into my hands, my second favorite human walks into my office.
“Mr. Jenkins?” Dale asks, knowing good and well that there’s really only one person who I can be irritated as all hell by but still treat with the utmost respect. Anyone else I would have ripped their heads off for being so completely inept. But Mr. Jenkins is my boss and honestly a good guy—albeit a little confused by today’s technology.
He’d hired me four years ago after I Googled ‘marketing firms, Charleston South Carolina’ with nothing but a backpack and two years of personal savings to my name. When I tracked down his office, I walked right in without an appointment, lied to his secretary about being family, and asked him for a job. I’ll never forget the way the skin around his eyes wrinkled as he studied me from the opposite side of an old, wooden desk, wondering who the hell I thought I was to walk in and demand a job. After thirty minutes of questions that resembled more of an interrogation than an interview, I was hired. Four years and a whole hell of a lot of work later, I’m standing at the helm of said company as his second in command. I make more money than I need in a year and work every day doing what I love. Marketing isn’t for everyone but I love my job more than most things.
“Yes.” I let out a tired sigh. It’s only three in the afternoon on a Monday but I feel like it should be well past my bedtime. “I love him but he’s exhausting sometimes.”
“He tries,” Dale says, taking a seat in one of the chairs in my office and pushing his lips out like a duck as he thinks about our boss. Dale came on board to be my assistant three years ago and there are some weeks I see him more than I see my best friend, Bailey, who I live with. Well, used to live with. She lives with her husband now and has for the last few months. It’s weird not having her around the condo anymore and heading home feels a little more lonely than it used to.
“Hey, how was the wedding?” he asks, our weird telepathy that’s developed over the last three years of working together connecting and giving my internal monologue away.
“Ugh, it was so beautiful. Bailey was the classic blushing bride and I was the standard blubbering maid of honor. I could watch that girl get married every day and never get tired of it.”
She and I had been friends for years ever since I met her at a charity function she had organized. She was in the event planning and hospitality space and with my background in marketing and brand management, we naturally crossed paths. After she went through a life altering night, she moved in with me and we lived together for two years before she met the man she would fall in love with. Her ‘soldier’ as she likes to call him. Bailey and Hank are the quintessential perfect couple. He dotes on her as if she’s a princess and she loves him so much that she’d never shut up about him if you let her. I wasn’t surprised when he told me he wanted to marry her after only knowing her for nine months and asked me to help him with the proposal.
“Sounds like fun. Did you have a good time? Meet anyone?” He wiggles his eyebrows at me and gives me a smirk. He knows my normal weekend behavior well enough so I’m not offended by his insinuation in the slightest. People are often appalled when I tell them my body count. Not that many people ask but when they do, they clutch their pearls and stare at me like I’m a modern day whore. I much prefer to be considered a modern day Samantha Jones, thank you very much.
Strong. Independent. Unashamed.
I love men.
But I love using them for my own satisfaction more.
And because I’m not shy about that fact, I’m often pegged as a slut or a homewrecker.
Neither of which are true.
If a man can go out and have a good time and be celebrated as a ‘player,’ why can’t the same be true for women? And I never hookup with a guy who is in a relationship. Ever. I have a finely tuned radar for that kind of thing and never buy into the whole ‘we’re taking a break’ bullshit. Sure, I enjoy the company of single men on the weekends, but I never sleep with more than one man in the same weekend and never beg for a man to take me home with him. If he isn’t interested, I will happily take myself home and enjoy my own company. The sex toy industry isn’t worth billions of dollars by accident.
“It was so fun. The venue was perfect and the food was amazing. I’m still dreaming about the cake,” I start, leaning back in my chair and kicking my heels up on my desk. The pair of black leather Jimmy Choos point high as they rest on the tabletop. Dale looks at me, still pressing his lips out, and waits for me to continue.
“What?” I tease, knowing good and well what he’s hoping I’ll say.
“Come on, O, spill. I know you. Who’s the guy?” he spits out playfully.
“Who says there was a guy?” I retort, lifting an eyebrow at him.
“Miss ma’am, do not do this to me. I haven’t seen a dick in months and it’s starting to affect me on a deeply personal level. Spill the beans and let me live vicariously through you.” The way he flicks his hand at me makes me chuckle in my seat. Dale loves men just as much as I do which is part of the reason we get along so well. I don’t have a shot in hell at taking him home with me, so there’s no way work can get awkward. Instead, I just tell him about my weekend flings and he gobbles it up like free candy.
I chew on my lip for half a second before giving him what he wants. “You have to promise not to laugh.”
“Why would I laugh? When have I ever laughed at you?” He dips his chin and looks at me over his kelley green rectangle frames. The light shining in from the window in my office reflects off his bald head. He’s right, he’s never laughed at me once. And I’ve shared a lot with him over the last three years.
“I slept with a groomsman.” I feel my lips pull back into an uncomfortable line. He simply stares at me and blinks a few times when I don’t continue.
“That’s it?” He almost sounds disappointed. “Why would I laugh at that?”
“I don’t know, because it’s a cliché?” I shrug my shoulders and can’t figure out why I have this dull sense of embarrassment around the man I went home with on Saturday. My night was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. There’s confidence and then there’s a downright knowing of just how good you are. And Malcolm knew exactly how good he was. I feel my cheeks flush at the thought of his name but I quickly push the feelings out of my mind and my heart.
“So what? They’ve made probably a hundred movies about the maid of honor shacking up with a groomsman, or worse, the best man. They normally hookup once, decide to be friends with benefits, and then end up getting married themselves by the end of the movie. Oh my gosh!” Dale gasps and brings both of his hands in front of his mouth, his eyes becoming two round circles. “Did you just become a horribly cheesy romcom?”
I sit up in my chair as my head falls back from laughing so hard. One thing I love most about Dale? His sense for the dramatics. “Not in your fucking life. I’m never getting married and I never sleep with the same guy twice. It’s my rule. One and done.” I don’t explain the reason for the rule but after asking, and being shot down multiple times before, he knows not to try and get me to explain my severe aversion to all things marriage and commitment.
“Ugh, you and your little rules.” He rolls his eyes at me. “So, how was it? Give me all the gory details.” He crosses one leg over the other and leans over his knee, ready to take in every scrap of story I give him.
“Well, he has tattoos… everywhere .” I emphasize the last word for impact because Malcolm has more tattoos than my eyes could take in for the time I got to see him naked. In his dress shirt, I could see some of them etched into his hands and peeking out from the collar of his button-down, but I didn’t expect every inch with the exception of a few places to be inked.
“ Everywhere , everywhere?” Dale’s eyes grow wider than before as he hints at the question he dare not ask.
“Everywhere except his face and the family jewels.” I snap my lips together in a satisfied smirk remembering how he was literally covered from head to toe in dark images and intricate tableaus with the exception of his face and a small area around his groin. A man would never.
“Damn. Was it good?”
The images of him pushing me against a wall behind the venue during the family toasts rage in my mind. The way we snuck off like two kids in the dark and started to feel each other up as if nothing else mattered. How, when we got back to his apartment, he lifted me up around him as if I weighed nothing and carried me to the bedroom. As a woman who proudly wears a size sixteen dress, I still can’t get over how effortless he made it seem. And then the sex—my mind can’t even go there without getting warm all over.
“Darling, let me tell you about how good it w—” I start but then stop. Dale never comes into my office in the middle of the afternoon unless something is wrong. The fact that he came in while I was on the phone makes it all the more suspicious. “Wait a minute, why did you come in here?”
“What do you mean?” His voice shrinks and gets noticeably smaller and the way he sinks into his chair tells me everything I needed to know.
“You never come in here when I’m on the phone.” I squint my eyes at him and lean over my desk on my elbows. He squeezes his lips together and clasps his hands together in his lap.
“Are you sure you don’t wanna talk about your sexy tattooed hookup instead?” he tries, lifting his chin to one side and shrugging his shoulders.
“Dale. What happened?” I ask sternly.
“The designers submitted a marketing campaign to a brand without final approval and it has the wrong copy on it and now the client is upset.” He shrinks into himself and winces, ready to brace for impact.
“Goddammit, Dale. You need to lead with these things.” I sigh angrily, not so much at him but at the universe in general.
“Well I’m sorry my plan on buttering you up before letting you know the bad news didn’t work. Next time I’ll do a little dance and try harder,” he shouts back. This is our thing. He will tell me something has gone wrong, I will get frustrated and make a comment which he then throws right back at me, and then we fix the issue at hand.
It works for us.
I set my feet on the floor and pull myself back into my desk, grabbing the phone to connect with our lead graphic designer, ready to have their ass. “Send me the contact for the brand, now. ”
“Are you sure you don’t wanna talk about your sex life first?” he tries, standing from the chair like a student being dismissed from the principal’s office.
“No sex talk for you today. Next time, lead with the bad shit so we can fix it first and then we can talk about my sex life,” I huff, waiting for the line to be picked up.
“Fine,” he grumbles, walking out of my office like a dog with its tail between its legs.
As he goes, and the line rings, my brain shoots back to my night with Malcolm and the strange tingly feeling I got in my stomach when Dale asked about him returns. I try to think about what the feeling is or where it comes from when a voice cuts through on the other end of the phone. “Hello?”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing pulling a stunt like that?” I bark into the phone.