CHAPTER THREE
962 Words
Maya
I threw up twice before I even got home, which I chose to blame on the champagne and not, as Ginny insisted the second I
called her, on the fact that I had just walked out of a stranger's penthouse in yesterday's dress.
"Say that again," Ginny said. "Slowly. I need to make sure I heard you right."
"I woke up in his bed. I don't remember anything after the second round of drinks. And then it turns out he already knew my
name because apparently I work for him."
"You work for him." A long pause. "Maya. Which him."
"Garrison Holdings, Ginny. He's Garrison Holdings."
The silence on the other end went on so long I thought the call had dropped.
"I'm coming over," she finally said. "Do not eat anything. Do not shower yet. I need the full timeline before you wash away
the evidence."
She showed up at my door twenty minutes later with a bag of bagels and an expression that told me she'd spent the entire
cab ride trying not to laugh, and was losing.
"It's not funny," I said, letting her in.
"It's a little funny."
"Ginny."
"Okay. It's extremely not funny, and also the single most insane thing that has ever happened to either of us, and I need you
to understand I am holding both of those truths at the same time." She dropped the bagels on my counter and turned to face me
properly, and whatever amusement had been on her face dissolved into something gentler. "Are you okay?"
I sat down on the arm of my secondhand couch because my legs didn't feel entirely reliable. "I don't know. I don't remember
anything, Ginny. Not really. I remember dancing with him. I remember him being funny, which I was not expecting, and then it
just stops. Like someone cut the film."
"You didn't feel sick before that? Dizzy, weird taste, anything?"
"No. I think I just had too much to drink and made a series of increasingly bad decisions with a man who apparently owns
the building I'm supposed to walk into on Monday."
Ginny sat down across from me, all the teasing gone out of her now. "Okay. First things first. Did he do anything you didn't
want?"
"No. I don't think so. He was, weirdly, kind of a gentleman about it this morning. Told me to take my time, offered me coffee,
which I did not stay long enough to accept." I dropped my head into my hands. "It's not that, Ginny. It's that I have no idea what
happened, and Monday I have to sit in an orientation session in a building he owns, and I don't know if he's going to walk past
my desk like nothing happened or fire me on principle for being an embarrassment."
"He's not going to fire you for something you both did."
"You don't know that."
"I know men like that don't get to where he is without knowing exactly how bad it would look for him if this ever got out. He
has more to lose than you do." Ginny reached over and squeezed my hand, grounding in the way only she'd ever been able to
manage. "You got that job because you're good, Maya. Better than good. Whatever happened Friday night doesn't erase three
months of interviews and a resume that made them fight over you. You earned that seat. Don't let one blackout convince you
otherwise."
I wanted to believe her. I mostly did, in the parts of my brain that were still capable of rational thought, which felt like a
shrinking percentage as the weekend went on.
I called my mother Saturday and told her nothing, because there was nothing productive it would do except worry her, and
she had enough to worry about already. She asked how the celebrating went and I told her it was fun, which wasn't exactly a
lie, just an incomplete truth, the kind I'd been getting uncomfortably good at telling since my father died and someone had to
start managing what got said out loud and what got carried quietly instead.
"You sound tired," she said.
"Long night."
"Good tired?"
I thought about gray eyes across a room, about a low laugh against my ear on the dance floor, about waking up somewhere I
didn't recognize with my heart in my throat.
"I don't know yet," I said, which was the truest thing I'd said all weekend.
By Sunday night I had rewritten my mental script for Monday morning approximately forty times. Walk in like nothing
happened. Address it directly if he brings it up. Quit before it becomes a problem, which Ginny vetoed within four seconds of
me suggesting it, reminding me in no uncertain terms that I had worked too hard to hand this job back over a mistake that was,
by her count, at least fifty percent his fault for not mentioning his own name.
"He let you leave without telling you who he was," she said. "That's on him."
"He gave me my badge back."
"That's not the same as an introduction, and you know it."
She wasn't wrong. Somewhere underneath the panic, I was starting to notice a smaller, sharper feeling I didn't like nearly as
much, an irritation at a man who'd had every opportunity to tell me exactly who I'd spent the night with and had chosen,
instead, to watch me figure it out on my own, like it amused him.
I fell asleep Sunday night still turning that thought over, and woke up Monday morning with my alarm blaring and a single,
unhelpful certainty settling into my stomach.
Whatever waited for me at Garrison Holdings, it wasn't going to be a normal first day.
- Writer
