Page 50 of A Ticking Time Boss

“A bit,” she admits. Another rustle and yes, she has to be lying down. I stretch out on the hotel bed and imagine her doing the same on hers.

“Want to talk me through your thought process?” I ask, sounding like I’m asking about the weather, and not if she’ll let me ask her out. “No worries if not.”

“Okay,” she says. “Well… you and I are friends. Weird ones, maybe, and definitely new, but friends. I like that, and we might lose it.”

I close my eyes. She sounds like she’s made a pros and cons list, and the idea of Audrey sitting down and attacking this like a story she wants to write makes me smile. “We might, yes. But we might have more fun.”

“Right. Well, that’s another issue. Fun. At some point we’d stop having it, and you’d still be my boss.”

“I’d never interfere in your career. I should have made that clearer, spitfire. Would never happen. You could do anything to me and I wouldn’t.”

“I believe you,” she says, yet there’s a but in her voice. Of course there is. Because it’s her livelihood and her dream, and what am I put up against that? There are too many cases of men who abuse their power over women in the workforce.

“You can say no,” I say, “or you can say yes, and there will be no repercussions.”

“I know. Carter, I don’t… I know. But the idea is still scary. What if someone at work found out?”

I’d researched it. It’s not an HR violation, isn’t mentioned anywhere in the company’s policies. But telling her that feels like admitting to how much I’d thought about this, so I don’t.

“All good thoughts. Great ones, even. You keep thinking them. But I want you to remember that I won’t be in charge of the Globe forever.” I reach down and rest my hand on the belt of my slacks. “You can consider it for a long time.”

“Hopefully I won’t need a long time,” she says.

The silence stretches out between us. It’s not heavy. I hear her breathing faintly on the other line and wonder what it would feel like to have her resting on my chest instead.

Audrey speaks again. “Carter. Would it be like it was last week?”

“You and me, you mean? Yes. I think so.”

“We had fun.”

“We always have fun.”

This time, I can hear the smile in her voice. “You make me laugh so much. It’s ridiculous, actually.”

“And you accuse me of being charming,” I say.

“You are that, too. Nothing like how I expected a CEO to be, and especially not when I saw all the changes you brought.”

The mass layoffs. They’re still uncomfortable to think about, even if they’d been necessary. Upending so many lives. “I live to surprise,” I say.

“Well, you surprise me,” she replies. “Regularly.”

Maybe her words give me the inspiration, or it’s still the lingering image of Audrey out for dinner with her date, her cheeks flushed with life and eyes glittering as she laughed at his fucking jokes. But I ask the question anyway.

“Did you want him to kiss you tonight?”

“No,” comes the soft answer. “I didn’t.”

“We never spoke about that.”

“About what?”

“Intimacy,” I say. “Where it fits into the equation for you, in relationships and dating. With your nerves.”

The silence between us feels heady this time. I could take back my words. But I don’t, letting them hang there, my stress like prickles beneath my skin.

I hear a soft click on the other end and I know, without knowing how I know, that Audrey has turned off her bedroom light. Cast her room into darkness. “It’s complicated,” she says. “I do want someone to be intimate with. Just not him. None of the men I’ve been on dates with, really.”

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