Page 1 of The Flirtation
Chapter 1
Avery
It was3:45 am on a gloomy winter Wednesday and I hadn’t left my office since eight the morning before, but I’d just had some sensational, world-class orgasms, so I was awake and calm and happy and ready for anything. The lighting was still dim inside as I hurried to the ladies room with my overnight bag, the offices of Kaplan & Keene Business and Wealth Management glowing like a romantic midtown restaurant—the kind of restaurant I’d love to go to—with computers and a strong Wi-Fi signal and no annoying people taking pictures of their food. It was quiet, and…no wait…I could hear a vacuum cleaner running inside the ladies room. I was notalone.
“Hey Magda!” I hurled words at the salt and pepper-haired cleaning lady as soon as I flung the door open, hoping to delay her favorite topic of conversation—my shameful lack of a social life. She turned off the vacuum as soon as she saw me. “I didn’t hear you!” I continued yelling even though it had gone quiet. “You’re here early! Is it freezing out? How’s your hip? How was your grandson’s recital? I like your sweater, did you knit it yourself?” I looked her straight in the eyes, no shame, meeting her Slavic maternal gaze, which was somehow warmly sympathetic and coolly judgmental at the sametime.
I had played classical music on my computer and locked my office door in the unlikely event that anyone else was around. If she’d heard me groaning and moaning I’d just die. Most days, Magda was the only person I could talk to from four-thirty to seven in the morning when I was at the office, and the fabric of our finely-woven relationship dynamic would be shredded if she now thought of me as some pervert instead of the nice misguided work-obsessed single woman she’d always known meas.
“Why you spend all night here again,huh?”
“I have an early Skype meeting with London! It’s easier to stay here than trudge back and forth up and downtown in thisweather.”
“You don’t say. I do this everymorning.”
“Right. Well, I couldn’t sleep anyway, so. Better to work than watch Netflix all night bymyself.”
“This is your choices? Work or Netflix? This is new AmericanDream?”
I shrugged and whipped out my toothbrush and toothpaste and proceeded to go to town on my molars while she lay intome.
“You! Beautiful girl with long hair! Smart! With apartment that don’t stink—why you waste life here all day all night when you can enjoy world outside with man and not computer, working, computer, other people’s money numbers, computer, no man, no friends, computer computer work workwork?!”
Phew. She didn’t hear thevibrator.
“If you my daughter I lock you out of office until you come back with good husband.” This from a woman who was a successful pediatrician back in the oldcountry.
I let her continue while I splashed cold water on my face, then applied a quick layer of BB cream, dusting of blush, swipe of mascara and hint of red lip gloss. My Skype meeting was in less than fifteen minutes and I needed to look professionally attractive for the sake of my company. I needed to get my girls into a push-up bra, squeeze myself into a size XS cashmere sweater, and pull my hair into a messy up-do so that I could dazzle my British colleague with my financial acumen, strategic synergistic decision-making skills, and All-American sexy librarian-ness.
Magda went on with her rant while I ducked into a stall and changed out of my pajama top. Any tension I had been feeling in my upper back and shoulders had magically disappeared after the brief but intense session with my Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator (“personal massager” if you believe the product description on certain websites). I call it Mr. Potter—which isn’t gross if you think about how Harry Potter is now an adult. Or maybe it is still gross, so I suppose I should make it clear that I’ve never thought of Harry Potter or Daniel Radcliffe while Magic Wanding (yes it’s a verb). I should also make it clear that this was the first time I’d brought Mr. Potter to work, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep and it had nothing to do with the fact that I hadn’t Skyped with Luke Mason in five days—I was just tired and excited at the same time and I didn’t want to have any nervous energy during our meeting. I mean yes, Luke made a few surprise guest starring appearances in my imagination over the course of those few glorious moments, but so did Jon Hamm and a guy I once saw at the library at Wharton Business School, and I certainly didn’t have any serious feelings for themeither.
I gave Magda a hug before hurrying back to my office, promising to get her a cappuccino as soon as Starbucks opened, and to seriously think about how I was wasting the “best years of nude body life” sitting at my desk. I settled back into the chair in front of my desktop monitor, angling the desk lamp and the Himalayan salt lamp (that my sister Jackie insisted I keep by my computer), so they cast a flattering light upon my face. I signed into Skype and examined the image that Luke would be treated to in a few minutes. From the waist up, I looked pretty good, considering it was Kill Me O’clock. He’d have no idea that I was wearing plaid pajama bottoms and Ugg boots. It was one of the many reasons I considered this the best working relationship Ihad.
Alittle over a year earlier,one of our wealthy author clients had the charming misguided notion to purchase a struggling bookshop chain in the UK. Because none of the older partners or managers at my firm wanted to deal with the five hour time difference on a regular basis if they didn’t have to (because they had things like spouses and offspring to deal with—I mean enjoy spending time with), I was tasked with handling our clients’ transatlantic business. I was the youngest junior manager at the Kaplan & Keene—one of the largest boutique business and wealth management firms in Manhattan—so it was a great opportunity to stand out and make myselfindispensable.
My boss had suggested that we hire a UK-based consultant to help us with our more significant transactions, andthank Jude Law, that consultant was Luke Mason. I was so busy working up a list of initial questions that I hadn’t had time to Google him, so I was completely unprepared for the level of blue-eyed-chiseled-jawline-tailored-suited-handsomeness and eargasm-inducing English accent-ness that I was faced with during our first Skype meeting. With no background information on each other and no clue that our professional relationship would extend beyond this particular consultation, we flirted our professional asses off. It’s not like we were sending naked pics or describing what we’d like to do to each other’s bodies—it was just good old-fashioned, harmless, not-meant-to-go-anywhere flirtation to keep our long days of working for other people fun and just a little bittitillating.
My boss eventually talked our client out of the bookshop acquisition, unfortunately, but another one of our clients—a champion surfer no less—got a hankering for some transatlantic business not long afterwards. That deal went forward, and soon I had an excuse (I mean legitimate business reasons) to check in with Luke on a regularbasis.
My brain had two modes—work it like a boss, and unconscious—so on the days when my calls with Luke were scheduled for the beginning of his UK work day, I’d just sleep at the office, because it was nearly impossible to go back to sleep at 4:30 and then get up an hour and a half later to get ready and make the trek from my little apartment on the Upper West Side to Midtown. Most of the time we scheduled for nine-thirty New York time, which was two-thirty in the afternoon for him. There had been days when our schedules demanded a ten pm Skype meeting, which was three in the morning for him. We never complained. Regardless of when we’d do it, it was always the most pleasant part of myday.
Less than tenseconds until Luke was due to initiate our Skype video chat. I tried so hard to stop smiling as I waited, but as soon as that delightful sing-song notification started and I accepted—oh yes I accepted—and his handsome face appeared on my screen, he was already grinning into the camera and I just gaveup.
“Hello darling,” hesaid.
“Hello sailor,” said I. It was our thing. Ever since our first week of working and Skyping together, this was how we’d begun every conversation. It was adorable. We just smiled at each other for about five seconds. He was wearing his glasses. We matched! I loved it when he wore his glasses. The blue rims accentuated his blue eyes. I wished I could see the actual shade of blue, but it’s always hard to tell on a videocall.
Here’s what I knew for sure: his voice made me think of warm caramel sauce on creamy vanilla soft serve ice cream. Everything I knew about him made me think of warm caramel sauce on creamy vanilla soft serve ice cream—you know how you just want to twirl it around your tongue and swallow?Oh my God you cannot keep thinking things like that! Focus, focus. We’re talking about a five million pound merger here. Spreadsheets! Profit margins! Cloud-based info techintegration!
We were each prepping for our separate debriefing meetings with the client, Buck “Bucket” Reynolds—a world champion surfer slash businessman who had merged his surfer lifestyle chain of stores with the UK’s most successful surf shop. Our duty was to inform him of the progress of post-mergerintegration.
Insert totally obvious debriefing of Luke and merging with Luke jokeshere.
I am forever grateful to Bucket for his decision to broaden his investment horizons, so that I could stare at Luke Mason’s perfectly-shaped lips on my computer monitor while they formed the words “minor working capital adjustments” and made them sound like a line from a Lord Byronpoem.
Focus!
I cleared my throat. “Lovely to see you.” I had a tendency to adopt a very slight English accent when conversing with him—not a Madonna level accent—every now and then I’d say something with a little English inflection. He seemed to think it was charming. “Long time no see—goodweekend?”
