The Messenger (A Lesbian Romance) (3 page)

So, I did my best. I made an honest effort to start working again, which was no small feat once I realized how little I actually cared if this deal went through or not. After a few minutes, Mitchell walked away from a nervous-looking associate. I assumed he was satisfied. I made a deal with myself that if I could get in just one more filing request for the day, it would be safe to go home.

Despite the wind-whipped feelings in my heart, I got my filing request done. I handed it off to Margaret and hurried back to my office to get ready to go. A small smattering of emails had to be answered, which I was not happy about. As I systematically went through them, Margaret called to me from her desk.
 

“Lucy, we got a problem… “

The tone of her voice was concerning. It was like she thought we’d just sent out a bomb or something.
 

“Can it wait?”, I yelled, still hoping to get to leave soon.
 

She didn’t answer, which was her way of saying no, get your ass out here. I headed out to her desk to find her staring at our filing.
 

“What’s wrong?”

“You push a rush on these, but you’re sending it to the wrong firm… “

I quickly did the math. It didn’t look good. Any information that fell into the wrong hands could spell disaster for not only my project, but for everyone else’s projects as well. While the mistake was not life-threatening, our industry thrives on exposing the cracks in one another’s armor. The last thing I wanted to be responsible for was a smattering of industry bloggers raising an alarm on us.

I stood there as though frozen, trying to rewind all my activities of the afternoon. What else could I have fucked up? I thought of all the emails that just went out, and struggled to see straight. In the twisted cinema of my mind, I saw awful mistakes that would make us the target of every bloodthirsty competitor.
 

I didn't even notice it when the messenger came and grabbed the package from Margaret.
 

“Uh, Luce?” Her voice sounded like it had danced across a taut clothesline between two tin cans. I was vaguely aware that I was looking at her. She gestured at the messenger, who was already halfway through the door, then held up her hands in the international gesture of what now, jerk? I quickly emerged from my fog like a diver coming to the surface too fast. My hands flew out from me like I thought I could throw them to get the messenger's attention. It was only then that I saw who the messenger was.
 

Rabbit.
 

If I'd had any breath in me then, it would've been knocked clear out of me. As it was, all I could do was squeak.
 

“Hey!” I sounded like an aggravated mouse.
 

Rabbit slowed down and looked over her shoulder, as though she wasn't sure she'd actually heard something. I gulped some air and tried to sound like a normal person.

“Wait! We need those back.” She turned to face me, but stood still.
 

“What?”, she asked, incredulous.
 

“We need them back”, I sputtered. “They’re wrong.”

Rabbit's perfectly groomed eyebrows knitted together. She took a few steps backward and pushed the elevator button.
 

“Lady, once I log in a package, it's as good as delivered.” She held the thick envelope up for emphasis and dropped into her huge bag. I could hear the elevator making its way up. There would be no time.
 

“Please.” I'm pretty sure I whimpered.
 

Although my memory of this moment is clouded by all the things that have transpired between then and now, I swear that I saw Rabbit's eyes soften. She seemed to think for a minute. The elevator dinged. I thought for a second that she would walk away. With a gaze that told me she was already regretting it, she walked toward me and squeezed the two-way radio clipped to the strap of her bag.
 

“Saul, this is Rabbit. I'm in the towers up on Grand with a hot potato. The suit's changed her mind. Requesting a void, over.”

Suit? It shouldn't have, but Rabbit calling me a suit stung me in a place I didn't know existed. She looked me right in the eye as she waited for a response. I couldn't read her. This girl was as mysterious as a shadow. After a moment, her radio crackled to life and confirmed the cancellation of the pick-up. With a smirk reminiscent of the one she gave the girl on the concrete bench, which careened my stomach into somersaults, she reached into her bag and presented me with the envelope. I took it and thanked her, fighting the temptation to touch her hand. Suddenly I became aware that I was blushing. Rabbit, for her part, looked intrigued. She raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah. Well. You have a good day or whatever”, she muttered. She turned and sauntered out, all her sense of urgency gone now that her mission had been cancelled. I wondered what she would do that all that energy. Margaret cleared her throat, as though she knew that she had just witnessed something. This woman missed nothing. She pursed her lips and sat down. I couldn't tell how much she was reading into it, and it would be a while until I found out. Standing behind me in the doorway to my office like some kind of office monster, was Mitchell.

Chapter Five

Mitchell held his hands clasped to his belly, like a soccer player defending against a penalty shot. All his earlier posturing of docility and concern had been just an act. He smirked at me for an uncomfortable moment before stepping aside and letting me back into my own office. He closed the door behind himself. This wasn’t going to be good.
 

“I’m not spying on you or anything”, he said, as he pulled out a chair and sat. “But, I happened to be walking across the floor when I overheard your mishap with the file.”
 

Although I tried to hold it back, I felt a long sigh escape me. Mitchell was the last person I’d wanted to witness my embarrassing little moment. There’d be no way I could spin this, so I took my seat and waited for him to get on with it, feeling suddenly like the office wasn’t my own territory anymore.

He looked at me expectantly.
 

“Well? Anything you’d like to say?”

I felt like I’d been caught stealing or something; the sense of panic and failure that flashed through my mind was eerily reminiscent of the long-past days when my only job at this firm was to deliver the mail. I just shook my head.
 

“Murphy, we can’t have sensitive information falling into the wrong hands, you know that.”

His condescending tone snapped me back to reality. I remembered that I wasn’t a lowly mail girl, and hadn’t been for many years. His attempt at bullying me wouldn’t go very far.
 

“Really. I thought that we’d built this empire by distributing potentially career-ending information to anyone who bothered to ask.”
 

“Sarcasm. Wonderful.”

Admittedly, he was right. I was just in no state of mind to behave appropriately. Rabbit’s gaze had bore a hole into me, and I hadn’t fully recovered.

“Alright, alright. It was just a mistake. Never happened before, never will again. And, we caught it. Just in time, but we caught it.”

He nodded slowly, as though that wouldn’t be good enough.

“See, that’s not all I’m concerned about. I’m a big picture guy, Lucy, you know that. When I see a mistake like this, I can’t help but wonder about all the mistakes that had to happen before all that.”

Shit. It was like he’d picked up my thoughts via transmitter.
 

“To put it another way, I’m thinking we need to pull the project.”
 

“Really. Is this coming from the board?”

At the mention of the board, he seemed to stiffen. My spider senses began to tingle.
 

“No, not the board. In fact, no one knows about this little blunder. Yet.”

“
Yet
?” It sounded like a threat.
 

“Yes, yet. I came to check on you of my own volition, as a friend. It was just… serendipitous that I happened to be in the right place at the right time to keep this from reaching the board.”

He smiled then. It was like being grinned at by a reptile. Mitchell and I had worked side by side for the better part of twenty years, and I’d never seen him like this. As though waiting for the right moment to strike, he held his gaze for a long, uncomfortable beat before continuing.
 

“And as your friend, I’d like to offer to keep this between us, if you’ll do something for me.”

So there it was. I was almost afraid to ask, but there was a glaring problem in his attempted proposal.

“How would the board have found out?”

He winced and looked down at his hands.
 

“That’s the sticky part about all this, Luce. I might feel obligated to tell them, out of interest for the company.”

“Are you blackmailing me?” My skin began to crawl.
 

“Such a dirty word. I am most definitely not blackmailing you. I’m just offering you something you need, in exchange for something that I want.”

“Fine. What is it?”

“There’s a meeting tomorrow that I want you to take. It’s in the evening, at the bar in the Regency hotel. It’s the Viperion Group. You’re going to tell them that we can’t deliver the acquisition.”
 

“Wait… isn’t that
your
project?”

It was a rhetorical question, of course. When he’d started working with this hot, new media company, he crowed about it for weeks. He had so many plans to take this company to the top, and made grandiose predictions that he was going to make them bigger than Apple. I vividly recalled how he strode through the hallways giving unsolicited updates on his work with them. It suddenly occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken the chance to brag.
 

He sighed and fidgeted. Although I felt no better about where this conversation was going, it was somehow comforting to see a glimmer of his usual awkward self.
 

“Technically, yes. But, when you think about it, we should be taking responsibility for each other’s projects, right?”

He couldn’t even look me in the eye at that point. Instead, he pretended to be captivated with one of his fingernails. It was suddenly clear why he was demanding this of me. It flashed behind him in a neon sign that only I could see.

“Oh, Mitchell. You’re scared of them.”

He must have been expecting me to say that, because I could see the muscles of his jaw work as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. It looked painful. I wondered how long he’d been waiting for me to mess something up in order to have something to hold over my head, knowing full well that proving myself over and over was the only thing the drove me. That was one of the best and worst things about working so well with someone: they know what keeps you up at night.
 

“My reasons aren’t really any of your business. Bottom line, you take this meeting, or I start carefully implying to the board that maybe their go-to shark is starting to lose her touch.”

He stood, and looked at me for a moment before heading for the door. I thought I saw some semblance of regret on his face, but it was probably more like relief that someone was going to do his dirty work for him.

As he took hold of the lever on my door, he turned.
 

“I’m not going to make this offer again. I suggest you take it.”
 

I swear he must’ve had a boner as he walked out. Knowing that bastard, it was probably the first erection he’d had in years.

Chapter Six

With the door closed behind Mitchell, and since Margaret knew better than to come in, my office was as quiet as a tomb. Despite the lazy brilliance of a late summer afternoon, it was dark there, as I’d never bothered to open the blinds that day. It hadn’t occurred to me to do so, and between being shot through the heart with some kind of barbed arrow by Rabbit, and being blackmailed for some petty concern by Mitchell, getting up to let in the light was simply more than I could bear, even though it was the only thing I really wanted then.
 

Even the simplest thing felt like such a trial. It took me the better part of an hour to get my things together and get moving. There was still plenty of work to do, but now I knew better. I couldn’t take the risk of making yet another mistake, thereby adding chum to the water for Mitchell. Where I was normally so meticulous in packing up my bag and shutting things down for the evening, I simply dumped everything into a backpack I kept on hand, and turned off my computer. I gave Margaret a perfunctory nod as I walked past her desk to the elevator lobby. She raised an eyebrow that was at once sympathetic and suspicious.
Her kids must not get away with anything
, I thought, as I waited for the elevator.
 

As I rode the elevator down, its smooth, noiseless descent kicked me into autopilot, for which I was endlessly grateful. Getting in the car and driving home would take no more thought than breathing. The familiar sights and freeway exits passed by in a blur. Before I knew it, I was home. However, it wasn’t long before the trouble started up again, and my thoughts turned once more to this nagging problem that sat upon my mind like a wet blanket.
 

I walked throughout my condo as though I was haunting it. I’d filled the place up with the best money could buy of everything, but I was alone with nothing but my thoughts. A dreadful place to be. My mind had suddenly become a strange and foreign place.
 

Although I went through the motions of a normal evening, I couldn’t shake my unease. Feeling mentally exhausted but physically restless, I elected for a good hard work out. I started on the treadmill. In no time, my heart was pounding and I'd entered an intense and familiar rhythm. After a few minutes at top speed, I lowered the intensity. Usually, I'd be staring out at the twinkling lights of downtown and letting my mind slowly float back to reality. This time, my mind went somewhere else entirely, to images that were far less real but far more vivid.