Page 6 of Get It In Writing
Chapter Four - Rebecca
A week’s gone by, and I still haven’t been able to get rid of that note Mr. Harper left for me. It’s so silly, I admit to myself, and if anyone were to see it, I’d be completely mortified.
Still, I’m able to go about my tasks and responsibilities without getting distracted by the glances Mr. Harper gives me through the glass wall of his office. I’m able to keep doing my work, even though every time he comes over to my desk with a post-it or a piece of paper, my heart starts speeding up and I feel like I’m about to faint.
But the notes are always innocuous. Requests for me or Joanna to calendar a meeting or a lunch downtown. A list of things he wants on his sandwich for lunch.
It’s never anything dirty, even though I fantasize that he’s going to call me a bad girl who needs to be punished.
I look at the note on my way home from work when I’m on the subway. I think about it when I’m brushing my teeth in the morning.
Remember when I said I should have flushed it like the mobsters to do drugs in the movies? Well, now this note is kind of like my drug.
It’s not exactly that I’ve become obsessed with it or anything, but every time I read it I get a little jolt of electricity through my spine, and I wonder what would have happened if I’d given him one of the two answers he was looking for.
And of course, I wonder if he does this with all the women in the office.
It’s a random Monday morning, and when I get to work, Joanna is out. I fire up my computer and read the email from the Personnel Manager in HR telling me I’ll be manning the reception desk alone today.
No biggie. We don’t get much walk-in traffic. Mr. Harper is very particular about who he lets into the office and when. If we have a visitor coming in for a meeting, we have to alert the front desk downstairs, and if anyone tries to get up without being announced by me or one of the other admins, there is a strict policy that they’re not allowed up without our confirmation.
And that very rarely happens. One time, we had a contractor try to get up to try to cold-sell some building materials to Mr. Harper for a project that’d been written up in one of the real estate magazines.
That really pissed Mr. Harper off. He wasn’t even supposed to ever find out about it, but I accidentally spilled the beans when I mentioned it to Joanna while he was walking by our desk. All I was saying was that it’s sort of impressive that the guy thought he could just show up unannounced to try to sell something.
Mr. Harper wasn’t amused. Oops. I tried to save face by explaining that we, of course, turned the guy away, and that we scheduled him for a meeting later in the week with the construction consultant Mr. Harper has on retainer, but still, he didn’t like it.
Joanna explained that it was because it showed a lack of control on our part.
It really didn’t seem like a big deal to me at the time. Stuff’s going to happen that you can’t control, right? You can only control your own actions. Sometimes things are going to happen that you won’t be able to see coming.
So when I get into the office and learn that Joanna isn’t in, it’s fine.
I hang my coat up in the closet and grab myself a hot cup of coffee, and poke my head into Mr. Harper’s office to see if he needs anything.
“Do I need anything?” he asks, looking up from his drafting desk in the corner of the room. “No, I don’t need anything. I can tell you something that I’dlike, but there’s nothing Ineed.”
He’s standing up, leaning over the desk, and he’s got one of his feet up on a low metal bar beneath it. I feel like a creep checking out his butt in his dark grey pants, and before I turn to get the hell out of there, he catches me.
“Anythingyouneed, Rebecca?” he asks, tossing his pencil down on the desk and turning to face me, hands on his hips.
“Nope!” I don’t know if my face has turned white as a ghost or red as a beet, but something’s definitely happening to my cheeks.
And I come up with the perfect excuse for why I was standing there staring.
“Just looking at your tattoos,” I say. I clasp my hands together in front of me to keep from smacking myself on the forehead for the stupid excuse, but he seems to buy it. “Admiring them,” I add.
“You like a guy with ink?” he asks, sitting down on one of the chairs set up in front of the desk.
“Well, not usually,” I respond.
“So that’s what the problem was?” he says. “I’m not your type physically?”
“No, that’s not it!” Now I know that my face must be red, because I feel hot all over and I want to get the hell out of this office.
And I keep telling myself not to look at his arms, because the truth is that I find tattoos incredibly sexy. I can’t explain it. And I want to know where else he’s inked.
“So Iamyour type physically?” he asks.
