Executive's Pet by Jamie Knight

Author:Jamie Knight [Knight, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

Melissa

After having my fill of the shopping therapy that Friday evening, driving home to spend an uneventful weekend by myself — the first uneventful weekend in five years since Dennis and I are usually connecting via video chat and spending some “intimate” time together — I return to work. I return to business as usual that Monday.

It’s now Wednesday, and for three days in a row now, I’ve seen Tommy rush out for lunch, only to come back ten or fifteen minutes later, with various brown or plastic bags full of take-out food. One day it’s from a fried chicken place; another day, it’s from a sushi place, and today it’s from a Vietnamese noodle soup place.

And, like all the other days, it’s a small bag of food. Only really enough for one person. Momentarily, I feel like flagging him down, asking him what he’s in such a hurry for. Why he can’t even give himself a full half-hour to eat, but I think better of it.

He’s not even looking my way, as he had for the last few days, and he looks more disheveled than usual. Frumpier than usual, too, which I don’t get a good feeling about.

Neither does Isabella because she says to me in between bites of her chef salad (we both decided to eat at our desks today) as Tommy disappears back up the elevator, “Poor kid. I know all the bosses around here work their assistants hard, but I’ve heard Ms. Vanacore takes that to a whole other level. A whole other understanding of hard.”

This starts a knot in my stomach.

A knot that travels up to my neck and down my spine.

“What you mean?” I almost don’t want to know, but it’s better than catching Dennis’s eyes in the portrait I still have on my desk of him.

Even though we’ve been “broken up” since before this last weekend, and I haven’t bothered to bring it up to Isabella, I can’t bring myself to do anything with this photo, his picture. It feels too final, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of final. Not yet.

I can feel that my life is changing in slow increments and I even know that it’s for the best, but I hesitate to rush in change, because I suck at adjusting.

“Heard she’s a bit of a slave driver,” she says. “Heard it goes beyond just asking for a lot out of her employees, to some of those requests being beyond what most people consider fair or acceptable.”

She meets my eyes over another bite of lettuce, egg, and ham, or turkey.

“Also heard from some folks that this played into her reputation at other law firms.”

This causes my stomach to turn, twist, and tighten even more.

From somewhere in my heart, mind, and soul, I suddenly get the image I saw of Ms. Vanacore last Friday, as I was hurrying from the cafeteria to talk with Dennis. The meanness, possessiveness she had about her. The dismissiveness she had toward me, and the way I can only imagine she was with Tommy when she saw him in there, eating lunch.

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