The Boss (The Boss 1)

“Hey! I was in the neighborhood and thought it might be safe to stop by and ask you to lunch. Safer than it used to be.” Holli slid her hands into the back pockets of her painted-on jeans and rocked on the balls of her feet, her lower lip caught between her teeth. “And then I ran into Deja here.”

Ah and ha. I hid my smile as much as I reasonably could.

“Do you two know each other?” For a city of eight million people, New York could be an incredibly small world.

Deja stood, giggling awkwardly as she looked to Holli for permission or confirmation. I got the feeling there was a conspiracy there. “Holli worked an event at RM a few years back.”

“I was a human sushi platter.” Holli beamed with pride. “It was one of my first modeling jobs. I got to meet Aerosmith.”

I laughed with them, the way you laugh when you’re the third wheel in a conversation. It wasn’t that they were intentionally excluding me from their in-joke; obviously there was a vibe between them. I shrugged and smiled. “How can you forget a naked sushi girl, right?”

“So, do you want to go to lunch? I can cover things here,” Deja offered.

“Great, thanks.” That would give me a chance to grill Holli about her naked sushi times. I would never pass up a chance to hear about rock stars eating sushi off my best friend.

“So,” Deja said, her eyes wide, her smile carefully neutral as she looked from me to Holli. “I’ll see you around some time?”

“Next Friday, right?” Holli made intentionally cheesy finger guns at Deja, who laughed and nodded.

“Definitely. Definitely,” she agreed, backing away in the direction of the office doors.

Holli turned away first, and I followed suit, not looking back to see if Deja was still watching her.

Holli is totally open about her sexuality – which I’m not sure fits into any easy classification. She’s been with both guys and girls, and for a while, in college, she’d had this three-way relationship going with a married couple. For about six months in 2010, she was in an unrequited love affair with the George Washington Bridge. She’s pretty delightful that way. I know that any time I talk to her about sex stuff, she’s going to either have tried it, or at least have an opinion on it.

I didn’t know how open Deja was about herself, though, and I am so not in the market to out people. I kept the conversation safe on the ride down.

“It’s cool that she remembered you,” I commented as the doors closed.

“Yeah, she’s really nice!” Holli hit the lobby button. “I invited her to the party.”

“I gathered that.” I raised an eyebrow. “What happened to ‘no work people’?”

“I figured this one exception would be okay.” Her eyes widened. “Why, did I do something wrong? You didn’t invite him, did you?”

“I don’t think it’s really his scene.” I felt a little bad for being relieved by that. I wanted to keep him as separate from the rest of my life as possible. We weren’t a couple, and it was weird enough working in the same place as the person I was fucking. I’d decided I would draw the line at casual recreation with my friends.

“You start in Beauty tomorrow, right?” Holli asked as we stepped off the elevator and into the lobby. “Why on a Friday?”

“Because I’m driving Mr. Elwood insane.” I preemptively grinned at her. “Not in the way you’re thinking. Deja is there to ‘train’ and she doesn’t really need any training. There isn’t much for me to do in the office but clean. Apparently, he finds my cleaning style ‘obsessive’ and ‘pathological’.”

“You’re going to do so good at this job, Sophie,” Holli said, and the pride in her voice warmed me like a cup of really good hot chocolate.

A frisson of excitement tingled all the way down my arms. “Actual assistant editor job. It’s going to be a huge change.”

Just as we reached the doors, my phone chirped. It was Neil. “Hang on, I have to take this.”

We stepped outside— because unbelievably, the traffic on Broadway in lower Manhattan is quieter than the building’s super echo-y lobby— and I answered the call.

“Yes, Sir?” I assumed he could hear my coy little smirk through the phone. But when he spoke, I could tell it wasn’t time for flirting. He sounded utterly overwhelmed, his words clipped. “I’ve been called away. I’ll be leaving within the hour.”

“Do you need me to come back?” I held up one finger to Holli, Jake’s cryptic remarks floating through my mind. Had something gone wrong with the deal? Was it even possible at this point? I knew absolutely nothing about how the company had changed hands or why.

“No, it’s nothing work related.” The tension in his voice was apparent. “I’m going home to London. My mother has been hospitalized; they think she had a stroke.”