Chapter 13 Cass

The ride home from Shelf Atlas was an out of body experience. Or it was at least what I imagined an out of body experience would feel like. I wasn't necessarily "looking" at myself as I sat in the back of an Uber, window open in the middle of the night because I couldn't tell if I was drunk, horny, sated, or even hungry for that matter. I was just a thrumming mix of bewilderment and excitement—as far as I could tell.

After I came, Marcus lowered me down from the sink, fixed my clothes, kissed me so hard I forgot my own name, and called me a car. Then he walked me outside of the club and proceeded to wait with me.

While we waited, he bummed a cigarette off the bouncer and we passed it back and forth. To my surprise, the silence was comfortable. It gave me an opportunity to study him in the blue cast off from the Shelf Atlas sign and the dim light from the streetlamps that dotted the sidewalk where we stood. He was handsome in that moment. Quiet, unassuming—more like the guy I briefly knew back in college. I found it hard to reconcile them: Marcus fucking Fitz, the shy kid who used to study during dinner in the dining hall, and Marcus Fitz, the COO of Libra who just uttered an impressive string of filthy declarations while he fingered me in a nightclub.

He was studying me too, his green eyes lingering on me as he dangled that cigarette between his lips. His gaze traveled over my face and lower, along my body. I wondered what he was thinking about. I wondered if he was remembering the sight of my bare breasts and wet pussy. I wondered if he would remember them tomorrow.

I knew I would. I would remember every second of it.

Once we smoked the cigarette down to the filter, he threw the butt on the sidewalk and gestured for me to come closer. It was a beckon with one hand, casual and commanding. It was entitled and presumptuous. I didn't care. Of course, I obliged. My body was still pulsating from my climax and I just couldn't stop staring at that beautiful mouth of his. When I was close enough he pulled me into his arms, wrapping both of them around me and warming me in his embrace. He smelled like beer, weed, cigarettes, and my lipstick. And when his lips touched mine again, the entire world melted into a blur around me as I surrendered to his kiss. Even though I was nearly delirious with lust, I somehow knew with total clarity that I needed more of him.

Instead, he put me into the car alone and told me he would see me at work on Monday. I could have strangled him for that. But instead I found myself nodding and leaning out of the open car window so he could kiss me one last time.

In the car, I found my head throbbing with confusion as the aftershocks of my orgasm began to fade. I had just fooled around with Marcus—Marcus Fitz. Marcus fucking Fitz. A guy who shamelessly attempted to get me fired. A guy who passive aggressively tried to drive me out of his office. A guy who today pissed me off so much that I went to a nightclub to screw a stranger because I was so pent up with frustration.

I wasn't sure where my self-respect had gone, but I assumed she was on a raging bender with my common sense and impulse control.

When I keyed into the apartment, the living room was empty. I contemplated stopping by Bethany's room to talk to her, but I didn't know what I would say. Hey, remember that guy who was trying to sabotage my career? Yeah, I just spread my legs for him in a nightclub bathroom.

A bathroom .

***

I spent most of the night thinking about Marcus, begging sleep to find me. Sleep had always been my fickle mistress. She didn't make an appearance until the early hours of the morning, when I had already replayed the bathroom encounter three times. When my alarm went off, my head was aching and my body felt impossibly heavy. Saturday was a lost cause.

Sunday was more of the same. I had errands to run and people to see, but still I found myself thinking about Marcus. His lips. His hands. His words. At brunch with some friends from business school, I completely lost track of the conversation because I was so preoccupied with the memory of his fingers pulling on my nipples. I then accidentally ordered myself a third bloody Mary, which was disastrous because I somehow associated the taste of alcohol with Marcus. And in a cruel karmic twist, I went home, collapsed on my bed, and ended up dreaming about that bastard.

By the time Monday rolled around, I wasn't sure how to describe my feelings. This was unchartered territory. I was a one and done kind of girl. That was my thing—and I loved that about myself. That flippancy let me enjoy countless men without regret, shame, guilt, or longing. It was always just sex—no more and no less. So the fact that I was developing a borderline obsession with a guy who I hadn't even slept with was nothing short of a catastrophe.

I needed to put a stop to this. Immediately.

He was there, of course, when I arrived at the office early in the morning. I entered through the front door and turned right, where he was the first thing I saw. The overhead light in the conference room shone down on him, where he was sitting at the table already working away on his laptop. He didn't see me. Or maybe he did and he pretended not to. Both possibilities annoyed the hell out of me.

"Morning," Marcus said when I walked into the conference room. To my chagrin, when I heard the sound of his voice my stomach felt like I was sitting in a car going from zero to sixty in three seconds flat.

"Hi," I responded, as I rolled my chair back and dropped my tote onto it. "How was the rest of your weekend?"

"Pretty good." He typed as he spoke and I noticed he still hadn't looked at me. "What about you?"

I paused. I could tell him the truth: I spent all weekend thinking about his fingers in my pussy and his lips sucking so hard on my breasts that I had no fewer than three hickeys on them. But his tone couldn't have been more blasé. To be honest, I'd had hotter conversations with my dermatologist. So, instead I lied and said, "It was fine."

"That's good."

The silence that followed set in like a fog more deadly than anything I had ever seen in a John Carpenter film. And honestly, a mystical fog would have been a great addition to this moment because then I could choke on it, start coughing, and then we wouldn't have been trapped in this deafening silence.

I busied myself with my laptop and pretended to check email, even though I read my email on my phone while I was waiting for the subway. That charade didn't last long. It only lasted two minutes before I ended up staring at him again. Today, he was wearing a black polo shirt—and he was honestly wearing the hell out of it. It hugged his pectoral muscles, subtle yet sexy—maybe because I knew exactly what it felt like to touch those muscles.

"Something wrong?" he asked. He was staring at me over the top of his laptop. After a few seconds, he raked his hand through his brown hair. "Did I do something?"

Yeah, you used your warlock sex powers and made me obsessed with you, you douchebag.

"No, sorry. I was just thinking about what to write in an email."

"Okay," he said in that condescending, passive aggressive way he always did. "Well, let me know when you have a minute to talk."

There it went again—my stomach driving that zero to sixty Tesla. "About what?"

"According to my calendar, we're supposed to do a preliminary run through of the financials to make sure I uploaded the right documents." He respired as he leaned against the back of his chair. It bobbed twice as it settled with a gentle squeak. "What exactly does that entail?"

It was a miracle I kept the disappointment off my face upon hearing he wanted to talk about due diligence and not what happened on Friday night. I managed to nod. "Good question. I run through a checklist to make sure all the right documents are there, as you said, but I also do some light auditing."

"Light auditing?"

"The team at PricewaterhouseCoopers does the in-depth auditing, but I do some initial work. My background is in financial analysis, so it's just something I do to tighten up the process."

He dipped his head in recognition. "It doesn't sound like you need me to do that," he responded. "Or…"

It took me a beat to realize he was asking if he needed to hang around me today. Once that realization hit, my ears began to heat. I couldn't believe I spent fifteen minutes planning an outfit, ultimately opting for the tightest sheath dress I owned, only for him to tell me he would prefer to keep his distance today. It was borderline humiliating if anything.

But maybe it was for the best. Staring at him now, I could only imagine the problems it would create if we had a repeat of Friday night.

He was a seller. I represented the buyer. This simply couldn't happen.

I raised a shoulder. "Up to you." If he wanted to do something else, he was welcome to it.

He lifted the coffee cup by his laptop up to his lips and he took a drink. For a moment, he stared off to the side in the direction of the brick wall to his left, while he considered my guidance in silence. "Maybe I'll just get you going and then I'll step away if it's not productive for me to be here."

"Sure."

Marcus walked over to the seat adjacent to mine. When he was next to me, the presence of his body lit up carnal memories. That recognition then sparked a momentary identity crisis for me; I really couldn't remember a single occasion when a guy in a polo shirt and loafers had any effect on me. I allowed myself a brief glance in his direction, which was a huge mistake because I noticed he was wearing an Apple Watch. It was unsurprising, based on everything I knew about Marcus, but it was just so… nerdy. And then I devolved into a second (though luckily still brief) identity crisis because I found myself looking at that Apple Watch and thinking it was the most adorable thing I had seen in months.

"Did I do something?" he asked.

I didn't blame him for asking; I had been quiet for about thirty seconds, glancing at him like a teenager who didn't even know how to be in her own skin. I managed to bring myself back to earth, just in time to say, "Can you see my screen?"

"Yep."

"Great. I work best when I start from the earliest numbers and work my way to the present. You hired a Chief Financial Officer five years ago, right?"

"Right. His name is Morgan."

"So, it's safe for me to assume the messiest record keeping is from the earlier years, I'm guessing."

"None of it is messy."

When I looked over my shoulder at Marcus, he was reclining in his chair with his arms folded over his chest. Even that simple, relaxed posture reminded me of Friday night—and immediately had my libido on alert.

"You sure?"

"Of course I am. I was the one tracking the finances." He raised his thumb up to his mouth and pressed it between his lips as he chewed on the nail. "But I welcome your thoughts."

"Do you really?" I asked as I opened the oldest balance sheet in the folder.

"Fuck no."

His response drew a smile from me. It was the first unprofessional thing he had said all morning, and I was actually grateful for it for once.

My eyes ticked from side to side as I ran through the lines on the balance sheet on the screen. Before long, I tilted my head to the side and said, "You know this isn't balanced, right?"

I could practically feel the anger spill out of Marcus and radiate through the conference room. He leaned forward, brushing against my shoulder in the process, and frowned at the screen.

"What are you talking about? Of course it's balanced. The math sums automatically."

"But you're double counting current liabilities. You have wages on one line and salary on another, which doesn't make sense when you had no wages paid out at that time. That means you double counted, and therefore should have ended up with overflow on your assets."

Marcus frowned, eyes latched onto my laptop screen. "No, I think we had wages at that time."

"Wages to who? You and Alex were the only ones on staff."

He pulled his lips to the side. "Shit. Let me take a look," he said as he leaned over to his right to grab his own laptop from the other side of the table. Then he rolled back towards me in his chair and rested his laptop on his thighs.

"The math is right but the accounting is wrong," I explained.

"I understand the problem, but what I don't understand is how I could make an error that was so easy for you to find." He clicked his tongue as he pulled up the document. "Fucking embarrassing…"

"I just know what to look for."

Marcus glanced up at me and let out a sigh through his nostrils, his lips still tucked to the side. That glance held volumes: He knew he was wrong and wasn't unimpressed I sniffed it out like a bloodhound.

After a few minutes of silence, Marcus let out a measured exhale. "I've been through three rounds of funding, countless audits, and a few board reviews and not once has anyone pointed this out."

"It's one year," I reminded him. "I wouldn't fret. We're not going to devalue you over it."

"I kind of want to fire our accountant though."

"Weren't you technically the accountant at the time?"

Marcus froze and dropped his gaze to the side for a moment. He cleared his throat. "We should, uh, move on, yes? More finances?"

I chuckled. "Real smooth."

"Quiet."

"You love it."

"I really do," he responded before freezing. It was almost like he didn't intend to say that out loud, or at least forgot he was trying to play me hot and cold. Guiltily, he looked in my direction and gritted his teeth when he saw me staring at him with a bemused expression on my face. "I misspoke there. I meant to say I hate it—and you—with a burning passion."

"Clearly."

He raised his chin at my screen. "Next year, please."

We continued this for the next three hours: I reviewed balance sheets, Marcus explained some of the nuances of the accounting for me, and occasionally I pointed out minor discrepancies. He was right though. The numbers were largely clean and there was nothing I would flag as a concern in any of the balance sheets.

When I finally closed the last one, I turned and looked over at Marcus, who was leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling. With his head tilted back, his Adam's apple—which I sucked on less than seventy-two hours ago—stuck out.

"How are you doing over there?" I inquired.

He raised his head. "I'm seeing double, Cassie," he replied. "That was so many balance sheets…But we're done, right?"

"Not even close. I need to look through your ledgers now."

"Seriously?" His face lit up with alarm. "You want to go through the ledgers?"

"Did I not just say that?"

Marcus's expression tightened into an even deeper frown. "Yes, but I'm trying to understand this. I thought I was just going to upload the documents and wash my hands of them."

I nodded. "That's fine. You're always welcome to do something else."

"And what are you going to do if I stop?"

"I'm going to be doing my job, which is to review your ledgers and make sure they're complete before I set the accountants on them. Believe it or not, I'm totally capable of doing that without you by my side."

He pushed his hand through his brown hair before he shook his head. "Damn. Your capacity for this shit is incredible."

"Well, I wasn't the valedictorian at Princeton for nothing," I replied as I located and clicked open the most recent ledger.

It took me a few beats to realize Marcus was sitting behind me without saying a word. I glanced back at him and he was staring at me with one eyebrow raised, his lips parted, and his green eyes focused on my face.

"What?" I asked, scanning his expression.

"Say that again."

"What?" I repeated, just to annoy him.

"No, say the thing about Princeton again."

"Oh," I commented. I forced myself to look back at my laptop. "I was the valedictorian."

After a few more seconds, Marcus let out a near-delirious chuckle. "You're kidding me."

"Do you really think I would joke about something so Googleable?"

When he didn't respond, I turned to face him again, only to find he was still staring right at me. "Please don't tell me you're going to make a big deal about something that doesn't even matter anymore."

"Cassie, don't belittle it. That's a huge deal," he insisted, surprising me in the process. When I didn't react to his statement, he actually broke into a smile and said, "That's incredible. You're incredible."

"And yet only one of us is a millionaire."

"Why do you do that?" he commented, frowning again. "Why is it that every time you get a compliment, you chew it up and spit it out?"

"I don't do—"

"We've only been working together for two weeks and I already know this about you," he said. "It's like you're incapable of hearing people say anything nice about you."

"It's just a thing of mine, I guess."

"Why?"

Even though I knew it was stubborn, I shrugged.

"No, don't do that. There's obviously a story here."

I averted my gaze from his face. I briefly toyed with telling him the truth—with telling him about all those times those well-meaning compliments twisted into something noxious. The words got stuck on their way up though, tangling themselves together and distorting themselves until all I could manage to say was, "I just don't like other people telling me what I am and what I'm not. And I need to leave it at that."

Marcus turned my response over a few times. He would drop it; I could tell by the way his eyes came up to meet mine and stayed there. Slowly, he nodded. "Got it."

"Good," I responded, hoping my tone wasn't as acidic as it sounded in my head. I cleared my throat as I faced the laptop again. "I can do the ledgers myself if you're tired of this."

"No, I'll stick around for a little bit longer."

"I'm sure you have other things to do."

"Whatever. I'll work a little late tonight." He slid his chair up next to me so I no longer had to look over my shoulder to see him.

Eventually, his hand traveled to the back of my chair and stayed there. I hated how much relief that small gesture brought me.

We couldn't do this. I couldn't do this.

I just wished he wouldn't make it so hard not to.