Page 54 of Vixen's Guide to Christmas
I laugh and squeeze her tighter. “I didn’t like how he was looking at you.”
“And how was he looking at me?”
I know this is payback from earlier when I made her repeat when I called her mine. “Like you were available. That he wanted you.”
“But I was.”
I shake my head. “Technically, yes. But that didn’t mean I liked it.”
She lifts up on her toes to give me a small kiss. “You know I never would’ve done anything with him, right?”
“I do now.”
“I don’t….or should I say…didn’t cross that line in the business world. And that definitely included clients.”
“Again, I know that now,” I say. “But then? All I saw was him getting something I wasn’t. It also didn’t help that I just learned who you were, so I was still processing that. Actually, can we just forget how I acted that first night and chalk it up to a brief episode of douche-y rage?”
“We can,” she says as she turns back around so we’re both looking at the snow. “That is, if you can forgive me for my chronic stubbornness.”
I lean down to press a gentle kiss behind her ear. “Am I forgiving Kat or Katherine?”
There’s a shift in the air that has nothing to do with the snowfall or the wind. I pull her in tighter, wanting her to know that whatever she wants to say, I’m here for her.
“I used to work for a firm like you do. I was one of those young, excited, do whatever you ask them to do junior executives. Work sixteen-hour days. Weekends. Anything to get ahead.”
“Oh, the days,” I say. “Where you’d take any scrap of work they’d give you, and you treated it like it was the most important thing in the world.”
“Exactly. But from the beginning, one of mid-level publicists took a liking to me. He said I had good ideas and invited me to beon his team for a huge product rollout. I was the only junior to be asked to come on board. I was so excited.”
I pull her in tighter to me, having a feeling where this is going. Still, it’s her story, and I’m going let her tell it, no matter how long she needs.
“He used a lot of my ideas during that time, but I didn’t think anything of it. It was a collaborative effort. I was part of the team. The team got the win. I assumed that’s how things went.”
“Normally they do,” I say. “But I’m guessing there’s more?”
She nods, and I feel her hands gripping tighter onto my forearms. “After that project he asked me out. The only policy about dating in the workplace was that senior executives couldn’t date subordinates. But since he wasn’t in a senior leadership role yet, we were good.”
Yup. I know where this is going. And I already want to kill this guy.
“It started good, just like any other relationship. Fun dates. Knowing looks across the office. Before I knew it, I had a key to his place and had all but moved out of the apartment I had with Logan.”
“And knowing our business, that meant you were bringing work home with you.”
“Exactly. And since we worked together, the conversations we had felt more collaborative than anything. He’d ask me what I’d do in a certain situation, or what ideas I had for a hypothetical product campaign. I answered honestly, because that’s who I am, and didn’t think anything of it. They weren’t groundbreaking ideas, in my opinion. Because if they were, he, or someone above him, should’ve thought of that, you know?”
“Oh I do,” I say. “I also know that just because you’re higher on the food chain doesn’t mean you’re the smartest person in the room.”
“I know that now,” she says. “But then I thought I was just brainstorming ideas. Sure, he’d use a few of them, but I really didn’t think anything of it. And when I’d ask him if he did use it, he’d pass it off. Make it seem like it wasn’t that big of a deal. And after a while, I figured it wasn’t.”
“I’m guessing this hit a boiling point?”
“It did,” she says, taking a deep breath before continuing. “He had the chance to pitch for a multi-million-dollar campaign. He couldn’t fuck it up. A promotion was on the line, and I knew the stress was getting to him. So every night we’d go back to his place and work on it. We thought of everything: How he was going to use his advertising dollars. Strategy. Media rollout. Press tours.”
“When you say ‘we’ I’m guessing that meant you.”
I feel her shrug against me. “I thought I was helping. It wasn’t until much later that I truly realized I put together his entire presentation for him.”
I’ve seen this happen; people taking credit for another’s work is more prevalent in firms than I care to admit. But someone you care about doing it to you? That has to fucking sting.
