Page 7 of The Boardroom: Cassidy
***
The next day the office was quiet, as the excitement of the strange country girl joining the team had died down considerably. I dressed more formally this time, using the money I had brought with me to buy some new office clothes, which included two blazers with sets of dress pants to match, in navy and beige, and a white blouse. When I looked at the receipt, the reality began to sink in deeper: I wasn’t going back to South Dakota anytime soon. What the hell was I doing?
Johnathan smiled at me politely as Sabryna and I walked in. He certainly wasn’t acting antagonistic towards me, but he wasn’t necessarily being extremely welcoming to me either. I figured he probably had bigger things to worry about than who was getting lower-level office chores done for his employees. It was my coworkers who I would probably have to worry about more than my boss.
“See ya soon,” Sabryna said, smiling at me as she went to sit at her desk. I sighed, alone again, and retreated to my office all the way in the back.
The door groaned as I opened it, and I made a similar sound soon after: the desk was piled in what must have been hundreds of pieces of paper, binder-clipped and stapled together, and many of them covered with urgent looking sticky notes in various colors. It looked like an entire week’s worth of work…did they expect me to complete all this in one day? Did I even have the training to do it? I felt myself begin to panic for the first time since I had arrived in Seattle.
I sighed and sat down to look at the first stack, which had a sticky-note placed upon it by a guy called Mark who was apparently from the marketing department. He wanted me to read a bunch of research reports and then synthesize them into a more manageable document for Johnathan. I groaned. This alone would take me all day.
I started reading the first report, highlighter in hand. It was dull work, and I found myself looking at the clock on my phone far too much to be at all healthy. Two hours passed, and my head felt completely numb from the reports, which were filled with strange words and graphs that probably only a statistics professor could decipher. I heard the doorknob turn, jumped out of my stupor, and turned around to see Cassidy, standing there in the doorway like he knewexactlyhow handsome he was, even this early in the day.
“Morning love,” he said with a smirk that made me blush. “How’s the first real day of—what the hell?”
I stared at him blankly. “What?”
“This,” he said, shuffling through the papers on my desk. “Fucking…this?”
“What?”
He practically grabbed the research report I was reading out of my hands, and then looked at the accompanying sticky note from Mark. “Stupid fucking wanker. Of course he did. Of course.”
Cassidy suddenly stormed out and I followed him down the hall timidly. “Cassidy?” I called after him. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
I saw him turn down the hall until he found an office, and then practically kicked the door down. Sitting inside was a red-haired man with glasses, who quickly minimized a tab on his computer that was most definitely Netflix. I backed away down the hallway before the man, who I figured was Mark, saw me.
“What the bloody fuck is this, Mark? You lazy shit. Are you kidding me?” Cassidy yelled. “Are you capable of doing anything yourself?”
“Sorry, Cassidy, I just thought the new girl was here to help with stuff, so I—”
“Small secretarial chores, Mark, not your entire fucking job. This is like a week’s worth of work for you, and not just any work, but work that you’re pretty much the only person in the office that has the training to do. And you were trying to hand it off to her so you could sit in your office and watchStranger Things?Seriously?”
“Look, sorry, I just—”
“Piss off,” Cassidy said, and shut the door. I noticed that a few people had cracked their doors open to listen to the argument, and Cassidy had noticed too.
“There,” Cassidy said. “I don’t think anyone will bother you with any absurd amounts of work for a while, don’t you think?”
I stood there silently, a bit flabbergasted. We walked back to my office in silence, and I couldn’t think of the right words to say.
“Thanks,” I practically mumbled. Cassidy was leaning against the open door of my office, practically hovering over me. “I really appreciate it, that report was uh…messing with my head.”
“I’m not going to let anyone take advantage of you,” Cassidy said. “Never, okay? I’m your friend here.”
I felt myself blush again. “Okay.”
For the first time, I really noticed how strikingly attractive Cassidy was. He wore a tailored gray waistcoat over a white button down with the sleeves rolled up, showing off his muscled forearms. His blue eyes were especially striking—not just because of the color, but because they had a deep intensity to them, like they were permanently set to bedroom. And of course, I had to admit that watching him step up to defend my honor like that was just a tiny bit sexy.
…okay, a lot sexy.
It was then I noticed I was staring.
“Are you alright?” Cassidy asked, and the tones of his British accent were suddenly making my knees weak.
“Oh, yeah,” I said quickly. “And thanks again.”
“Of course,” Cassidy said, and gave me an electric sort of smile that suddenly took me aback. “I’ll see you around, okay?”
