Chapter Seven- First Day

Garrick Vaughn was waiting for me at the front desk at 8am sharp, arms crossed and an emotionless expression.

 

“Good morning.” He didn’t offer his hand. “Garrick. Chief of staff. I run this floor when Mr. Ravenscroft isn’t standing directly on top of it, which means you answer to me on anything that isn’t strictly his.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“There’s nothing okay about it yet.” He started walking, and I fell into step beside him because it seemed safer than standing still. “You’ll learn where everything you need is, how the phones route, who gets put through and who gets declined. You’ll learn that anything you see on his desk, in his email, in his calendar, stays exactly where you saw it. No messaging friends about which celebrity’s lawyer called and whatnot. No mentioning who was in his office and for how long. Do you understand?”

 

“I understand discretion. I signed the same NDA everyone else did.”

 

He stopped walking long enough to look at me properly, assessing me like he was trying to figure me out. “Mr. Ravenscroft doesn’t usually sit in on interviews himself. He didn’t do so for the last three people who held your desk.” He paused. “Care to tell me how you landed that?”

 

My heart rate surged, but I kept my face still. “I applied, he interviewed me and I got the job.”

 

“Sure.” He didn’t believe me. I could see it in the way his jaw worked, in the way his eyes shifted once toward Raiden’s closed office door and back to me, like he was recalculating something. But he didn’t push it. “Rule one,” he continued, “whatever you think this job is, it is not as simple. Rule two, everyone who’s underestimated him has regretted it. You’re not an exception.”

 

He walked me through the rest of the rules and necessities without easing at all. The filing system, the calendar software, the list of names that got immediate access to Mr. Ravenscroft and the much longer list that didn’t. By the time he handed me off to my desk outside Raiden’s office, I understood two things clearly; Garrick didn’t trust me, and Garrick wasn’t wrong not to.

 

I told myself that it didn’t matter. I wasn’t here to be trusted; I was here to get paid.

 

Raiden’s door stayed shut most of the morning. When it finally opened, he walked past my desk without breaking stride, a folder tucked under one arm, phone already at his ear, and said only, “Vaughn has my nine o’clock rerouted to the Chen call,” not looking directly at me as he spoke.

 

“Yes, sir. I’ll……..” he was gone before I had a chance to respond.

 

That was the only exchange we'd had all day. There was no sign of the man I had thrown myself at  less than a week ago, who had given me one of the best nights of my life. Just a CEO moving through his own building with forty other things demanding his attention, none of which happened to be me.

 

It went on like that for the rest of the day. He dictated a memo without once looking up from his notes and asked me to confirm a dinner reservation, all while speaking to me in a flat tone he would probably use to order coffee. When Garrick brought him a stack of contracts to sign, Raiden barely acknowledged that I was still in the room and close enough to hear every word of a conversation about board seats I had no business hearing.

 

By four o’clock I had started to wonder if I had built the whole thing up in my head. Maybe it really had been nothing but a bad decision  to him and I was just a stranger he happened to hire out of some passing curiosity that had already burned off by the time I signed my paperwork. Maybe the man in that hotel room had been a different version of him entirely, one that may never get to meet again.

 

I caught myself checking every time he passed my desk, for some sign that he remembered. A pause, a glance, literally anything.

 

There was nothing. Just his voice giving instructions, his footsteps moving toward his office, his door closing without a backward glance and his documents rustling as he went through folders.

 

I sat there afterward staring at my monitor, at an inbox full of meetings I was yet to schedule with names I didn’t recognize yet, and made myself think about the number that mattered; the one on the job offer. The one that would cover Elena’s surgery if I stacked enough weeks of it together and didn’t spend a cent on anything else.

 

That was why I was here. Not because of a hotel room or a look I might have imagined or a man who apparently forgot me somewhere between the elevator and his desk. I was here for the money. Nothing else.

 

I repeated it to myself on the walk to the train, on the ride home, lying awake afterward staring at the ceiling of the apartment I could hardly afford; nothing else, nothing else, nothing else, and I nearly believed it.