Page 97 of Snake

Autumn sat back and stared at her fathers while understanding surged through her.

What a fool she’d been. A decade. She’d been playing Chase’s little games for virtually her entire career, thinking she had him handled. And maybe she had, for a while—not until Signal Bend had he done anything she couldn’t ignore.

But she never should have ignored any of it. For a decade, she’d disregarded every chance she might have had to show him the limits of his disrespect and condescension. What would her working life have been if she’d drawn the proper boundary immediately, rather than play little games, letting him think he was getting away with small offenses?

He had been getting away with small offenses. Because she’d ignored them, telling herself she was tougher than a few dumb words. Telling herself it was beneath her to notice them, telling herself she was teaching him that his ‘small offenses’ were beneath her notice.

The real lesson she’d taught him was that she would tolerate almost any kind of talk as long as he kept his hands to himself.

“Oh my god,” she whispered. “Oh my god.”

Both her fathers squeezed her hands at the same time.

“Let’s talk about next steps,” Pops said.

“We want you to quit,” Pom said, “but it’s your decision, and whatever you decide, we got you, Gingersnap. We got you.”

Even through the dense fog of her shocked self-recriminations, Autumn heard that word we.

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~oOo~

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Obviously, she couldn’t quit her job, at least not now or for the next year or so. She had to finish the Signal Bend project, get that fully leased and open. There was no way in Dante’s nine levels of hell she would allow anyone else to claim credit for that work. No one.

However, that dinner with her fathers, and the several hours after dinner, had crystallized some fresh plans and ideas in Autumn’s mind. By the time Pom and Pops left her condo—at the same time, whatever that meant—they had debriefed her entire tenure at MWGP, played out some future scenarios, and eventually gotten around to debriefing the Cox Situation (as Pops had called it with such somber inflection she would now forever hear the capital letters) in a manner more productive than her previous Why was I so stupid/Why doesn’t he want me/I don’t want him anyway moaning.

She had a plan. It was complicated, it was scary, and she wasn’t sure she could pull it off, but if she could, it might solve her whole cluster of current troubles. Or, you know, make them all worse. But if it worked, it could be great.

Thus, on Monday morning, Autumn arrived at the office about an hour before the weekly exec meeting. She wore a sedate grey sheath dress with a boat neck, a summer-weight black wool jacket that skimmed her hips, and her black patent Louboutins. Her hair was pinned up in a French twist.

She’d dressed, as always, to feel powerful and worthy of notice, but today she specifically chose a look that did not accentuate any of her parts Chase enjoyed noticing.

After she put her bag in her office, she crossed the exec suite to Chase’s. It was too early for Lisa to be installed at her desk for the day, but Chase was a habitually early arriver (though he did little actual work beyond delegating tasks to others, he liked the optics of being first in, last out). She’d seen his Benz in the garage, too.

So when she knocked on his slightly ajar office door, she heard exactly what she expected.

“Yeah, come,” he called.

She stepped into his office. He sat at his desk, frowning deeply at the phone in his hand. When he saw Autumn, though, he set the phone down—screen down, like he didn’t want her to see it—and sat bolt upright.

“Autumn, hi. Hi. I didn’t expect to see you.”

He seemed flustered, which was a new experience for her. “I’m here for the weekly.”

He pushed his phone away. Then he reconsidered, opened a drawer in his desk, and brushed the phone into it. “I thought you’d be dialing into the meeting today.”

Autumn considered the empty place on his desk where his phone had been. It was like he was hiding it from her, but she couldn’t think of a single time she’d been particularly interested in what was on his screen, never mind anything actually in his phone. Nor could she recall him ever being cagey about his phone before.

Didn’t matter. She had a purpose, and that mattered. “I wanted to talk to you beforehand, so I came in.”

Blood drained from his face, turning his golden tan (whether expensively fake or expensively natural) to a kind of flat taupe. His voice remained carefully professional. “Okay. Talk about what?”

She crossed the room and sat in a chair before his desk. “We need to talk about what happened in Signal Bend, Chase.”

Among the scenarios she’d prepared for: Chase would be offended and dial the snark to eleven. Chase would refuse outright and fire her on the spot. Chase would pretend to consider it and try to reestablish their little dance where he condescended and she found ways to do it anyway.

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