Dear CEO, I'm not a man

Chapter 3

I barely made it back to my desk before Ben appeared out of nowhere.

"Elena, are you okay?" he whispered, frantically looking me over for injuries.

"Dude, get off me!" I hissed, shoving his hands away.

His eyes widened.

"Remember," he whispered back, "you're a man."

Right.

I straightened immediately, cleared my throat, and tried my best to look like I hadn't almost died in the CEO's office.

Ben glanced at the cardboard box in my hands.

"So... are you fired?"

Before I could answer, a loud scrape echoed across the office.

I looked up.

Every single person had somehow abandoned their desk and was pretending not to stare at me.

Apparently, I was today's entertainment.

"You all sold me out," I muttered. "Happy now?"

A chorus of awkward coughs and guilty smiles answered me.

Someone even whispered, "Sorry."

Then, as if rehearsed, everyone hurried back to work.

Cowards.

Ben pulled out his phone.

"Should I call Zara? This deserves a celebration. You survived."

"I didn't just survive."

He looked up.

"I'm going on a business trip with Mr. Vale."

"...Yeah, sure, you’re quitting..."

His face froze.

"...Wait."

Another pause.

"...WHAT?!"

Half the office looked over again.

I grabbed his arm and yanked him closer.

"Keep your voice down!"

"Dude!" he whispered loudly. "You're quitting, right?"

"Why would I quit?"

His jaw nearly hit the floor.

"Because you're going to get yourself killed! Or worse... accidentally kill him when he finds out you're actually a woman!"

I sighed.

"The salary is three times what I was supposed to earn."

Ben's expression softened.

"If I keep getting paid like this..." I said quietly, "...I can clear my family's debt in a year and a half."

Silence.

"You really don't value your life, do you?"

"I value finally being able to sleep without debt collectors knocking on our door."

He looked away.

I just hope Victor rots in hell for making me live a life like this.

"I'll leave once the debt is paid," I promised. "I just need to survive until then."

His shoulders dropped.

"...Fine."

I smiled.

He didn't agree because he liked the idea.

He was agreeing because he'd known me since we were six years old.

Once I made up my mind...

There was no changing it.

"So," he asked, "what now?"

I let out a long sigh.

"I have to learn Mr. Vale's schedule, organize tomorrow's itinerary, confirm the hotel reservation, prepare his travel documents, find out which car we're taking, memorize his preferences..."

"Okay, okay!" Ben laughed, raising both hands. "I get it. You're basically adopting an overgrown billionaire."

I couldn't help laughing.

"Pretty much."

“I still think it's best to quit and save yourself the stress”

“Yeah like quitting and waiting for my dad's debt collectors to strangle me when I am sleeping or wait for them to sell me off since that wicked man decided it was okay to borrow that amount of money and die without us knowing” I half screamed at Ben.

"But I still think you're insane."

"I've been told."

“Let me know when you're done, I will call Zara” he said and walked out feeling guilty.

It was at that moment I realised how quiet the office was. They may have heard our conversations but who cares, I was already the sacrificial lamb

By the time I finally got home, my legs were ready to file for resignation.

The moment I walked into my apartment, I kicked off my shoes, dropped my bag onto the floor, and collapsed face-first onto my bed.

I hadn't realized how much I'd miss my mattress.

One day.

I'd only worked there for one day.

And somehow I'd spent the entire afternoon chasing Ken around the company, memorizing Mr. Vale's schedule, arranging tomorrow's meetings, confirming the hotel, and trying to understand the impossible standards of a man who seemed allergic to human interaction.

I was beginning to suspect I'd signed a slavery contract instead of an employment contract.

Rolling onto my back, I stared at the ceiling. I have never been this stressed from work in my life, not even when I found out Victor was cheating and drowned myself in deadlines just to avoid feeling anything. Even that version of me, running on three hours of sleep and spite, wasn't this depleted.

It's been six months. Victor doesn't own any part of my heart anymore, that much I'm certain of. But the memories are of stubborn tenants who never got the eviction notice, they still show up uninvited, quiet and persistent, at the worst possible hours.

Maybe what I need isn't therapy. Maybe I just need something, someone, sinful enough to burn the last of him out of my bloodstream.

Which is, apparently, why my brain keeps wandering back to Mr. Vale.

I have never in my life stood in front of a man that beautiful. That unfairly, almost offensively handsome. I want to steal his face and frame it, hang it right across from my bed so it's the first thing I see every morning before my eyes even finish adjusting to the light.

Just imagining him above me,that expression, that stillness right before he moves, is enough to make the heat pool low in my belly, my thighs pressing together on instinct. I want his voice wrecked and low against my ear as I scream his name into the dark. I want to hear him lose that composure, hear it crack apart because of me. My hand is inside my trousers before I've fully decided to let it go there, and when my fingers find my c**t, the image in my head sharpens, his collarbone, the tendon in his neck, the exact way his jaw would tighten if he watched me fall apart underneath him. A moan slips loose before I can catch it, soft and involuntary.

Elena. Get it together. Are you actually about to touch yourself over a man who might, quite literally, be the devil's own son?

"We are not developing a crush on Corporate Satan."

My phone rings, dragging me back into my body with the subtlety of a bucket of cold water.

"Elena, I'm already on my way with Ben, he tried to tell me what happened, but that man narrates like he's reading a grocery list, so now you're giving me the real version. We're having a sleepover, not negotiating." Zara hangs up before I can get a single word in, per usual.

So much for my imaginary Greek god. Looks like one fantasy is getting swapped for an incoming hurricane, time to shove the evidence of my thirst under the bed and brace myself for chaos.

Twenty minutes later, my apartment door swung open without a knock, because apparently privacy was a concept Zara had never respected in her life.

"Where is she," Zara announced to the room, dragging a duffel bag the size of a small child behind her. "Where is the woman who got herself a billionaire boss in one afternoon."

"I didn't get him," I said, sitting up. "I got assigned to him. Like a punishment. Like community service."

"Uh huh." She dropped the bag, kicked off her shoes, and flopped onto my bed like she paid rent there. "Ben said he called you a pumpkin."

"A feminine-looking pumpkin," Ben corrected, walking in behind her with a plastic bag of snacks and the exhausted energy of a man who had already relived this story twice. "Very specific insult. I respect craftsmanship."

"I hate both of you."

"You love us," Zara said, already ripping open a bag of chips. "We're the only people dumb enough to still be here after you disguised yourself as a man to survive corporate warfare."

She wasn't wrong. That was the annoying part.

I told her everything, the screaming through the hallway, Ken's aggressive height commentary, the almost-blown cover when my real name nearly slipped out, the eight-inch male heels comment that I was still recovering from emotionally. Zara laughed so hard at the pumpkin line she nearly choked on a chip, which felt like a fair punishment from the universe.

"Okay but," she said, wiping her eyes, "be honest. Ben said the CEO is hot. Like unfairly hot. Is that true or is Ben just easily impressed."

"I am not easily impressed," Ben said, offended. "I have standards."

"You cried at a phone commercial last Tuesday."

"That was a beautiful reunion, Zara. A grandmother and her grandson. Reunited by 5G. I'm not made of stone.”

I ignored both of them and reached for a chip, mostly so I'd have something to do with my hands that wasn't confirming or denying anything.

"He's fine," I said. "Objectively. In the way a loaded gun is fine to look at."

Zara's eyebrows shot up so fast I regretted every word.

"Elena."

"What."

"You have a face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have a very specific face right now, and I have known that face since the ninth grade, and the last time you made that face it was about a guy who turned out to be the human equivalent of expired milk."

"This is not that."

"This is exactly that."

"I am currently disguised as a man, Zara. Undercover. For someone who wants his secretaries delivered like takeout and would fire me on sight if he found out what's actually under this blazer. There is nothing here to develop a face about."

"Sure," she said, popping another chip into her mouth, entirely unconvinced. "Nothing. That's why you went quiet for two full seconds just now."

Ben, ever the useless mediator, chose that exact moment to change the subject in the least subtle way a human being has ever attempted.

"So what time do you leave tomorrow?"

"3:50 a.m." I groaned and dropped my head back onto the pillow. "At his house. Which I have never seen. Which I found out about via a text from a number saved as 'Mark' that I don't remember giving my number to."

"That's not concerning at all," Zara said.

"Also I'm not allowed to wear perfume, ask questions, speak unless spoken to, or, and I quote, breathe too close to him."

Both of them stared at me.

"Is he a man or a smoke detector," Ben asked.

"At this point I genuinely don't know."

We stayed up longer than we should have, the three of us piled across my bed the way we used to be as teenagers, before debt and Victor and fake identities became things I had to keep straight in my head. Zara fell asleep first, mid-sentence, which was very on brand. Ben lasted another twenty minutes before he started snoring into my pillow like he owned it.

I lay there in the dark long after they'd both gone under, staring at the ceiling, running through everything I still hadn't done. Travel documents, check. Itinerary, check. Hotel confirmation, check. A working explanation for how a man named Eli Carter had somehow appeared out of nowhere with zero employment history, no LinkedIn, and a face that occasionally forgot to look male under fluorescent lighting.

That last one, I did not have an answer for.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand, and for one horrible second I thought it was 3:50 already.

It wasn't. It was 1:47 a.m.

Unknown number.

Ken, presumably, with another cheerful list of things I wasn't allowed to do near my new employer.

I unlocked the screen, already bracing myself.

Change of plans. Mr. Vale wants you at the house tonight instead. A car is already outside your building.

I sat straight up so fast the room spun.

Tonight.

As of now.

As in this exact moment, while I was lying in bed with two sleeping friends and absolutely no idea what I had just agreed to.

I looked toward the window.

There, parked directly beneath the streetlight outside my apartment, sat a black car I did not recognize.

Engine running.

Waiting.