Chapter 16 Marcus

I bolted upright, sending Sammy darting off my chest and out of my bedroom, her claws scraping on the hardwood floor as she skittered off into the dark recesses of my apartment. I fumbled for my phone and my glasses at the same time and ended up knocking over my water cup in the process.

" Motherfucker ," I hissed, not realizing I had answered the call.

"Marcus?" I heard Alex say.

"Sorry. I just knocked over my…whatever. Who gives a shit. Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," he responded.

I paused and looked at the time on my phone. It was three in the morning. Three. In the fucking morning. I was standing in my dark bedroom in my underwear. Water dripped off my nightstand and had drenched my Kindle. It was slowly puddling on my bedroom floor, spreading over the hardwood. My cat was staring at me around the corner of my door, her eyes as big as quarters as she watched me. Frank was sitting at attention on his side of the bed, ready to strike even though he was all bark and no bite.

And this douchebag had the audacity to say, " Yeah, I'm fine. "

"So, can I go back to bed?" You complete sociopath .

Alex paused before he said, "Sure, I was just bored. Thought you might be up."

"It's a Wednesday, Alex," I reminded him. "I'm supposed to wake up in two hours. I'm going to be at the office in four hours. Why would I be up?"

"You're right," he stated, as if he were reluctantly accepting that I knew my own schedule.

I let out a low exhale and walked over to my bedroom door. I scooped up Sammy and brought her back over to my bed, where I took a seat. "What's wrong, Alex?"

"Nothing's wrong."

I brought my hand up and rubbed it over my eyes. "Not true." I yawned. "I know what you're like when you're upset. What's wrong?"

"I shouldn't have called."

"Yes, you should have." I released another yawn. "Sorry. What's wrong?"

He was silent on the other end. I could picture him, standing out in the chilly night on his balcony. Knowing him, he was drinking wine from a coffee mug he had balanced on the railing. On two occasions, he had accidentally knocked the mug off, sending it careening a few dozen floors down. That still never stopped him from doing it again.

"Do you think the due diligence is going okay?" he finally asked.

Confusion slammed into me. "You called me at three in the morning to talk about due diligence?" I replied. "Hell, I thought something bad was happening."

"You always do."

"You're right," I confirmed. "And you never do, so it's throwing me off that you're calling about this."

"Just wanted to check in."

I sighed and fell back on my bedspread. "Look, I've got it. I always do."

"You mean that?"

"Of course."

Alex was quiet again, which could be unsettling from a guy like him, who almost never shut up. Normally, I would have pressed it, but my eyelids just kept dipping lower and lower.

"You're the best," he said. "Marcus fucking Fitz."

"Yep." I yawned again. "Marcus fucking Fitz. That's me."

I must have fallen asleep without saying goodbye, because when I woke up a couple of hours later, my legs were dangling off the bed and my phone was sitting by my ear.

***

I dragged myself into the office a few hours later, clutching my Yeti coffee mug in one hand and my phone in the other. My contact lenses were dry in my eyes and my chest heaved as yet another yawn escaped me. Cassie, of course, was already waiting in the fishbowl. She was wearing another perfectly tailored, perfectly coordinated, corporate-approved outfit today. But her ivory, chiffon blouse was just transparent enough to offer me a hint of the outline of her bra underneath. Want surged through me, potent and sharp. Suddenly, I felt wide awake.

"Morning," I said as I entered the conference room.

Cassie glanced up and did a double take. "You look horrible," she informed me as her eyes looked me up and down.

"Well, I'm tired." I put down my coffee and fell into my chair so hard that it rolled a few inches to the side. "What's your excuse?"

She didn't respond. Instead, she raised her middle finger for a moment—just long enough for me to catch the gesture.

"Rude."

"Are you going to tell on me again?" she challenged lightly before she smiled at me.

Fuck, she was so pretty.

This time, I didn't respond. I took a long drink of coffee before I let out a contented sigh. Then I pulled out my laptop to start the long, daily process of working through my emails.

"Did you get a chance to look at those ledgers I flagged?" Cassie asked after a moment.

"Yep. Still don't know what to make of them, but I looked."

"Good," she said. "Well, regardless, we have to let the auditors start going through the finances. It sounds like I can give them the go-ahead."

"Sure," I agreed. "I'll spend some time on them again later this week. For now, I have to deal with some PR stuff."

I noticed Cassie perked up when I said "PR." She lifted her chin and peered at me over the top of her laptop.

"It means public relations," I clarified needlessly, just to piss her off.

She snapped down the top of her screen, removing any obstructions from her view of me. "What for?"

"Why are you so interested in this?"

"Because it's salacious," she insisted, intrigue detectible in her tone. "And nothing about you is salacious."

"Nothing?" I took another drink of my coffee. "Didn't I make you come in a nightclub bathroom five days ago?"

Immediately, Cassie looked to her right where a few developers were working. She inhaled sharply as she scanned the room for any indication someone heard me.

"They can't hear," I informed her. "The room is sound managed. All they hear is muffled sounds."

"So they won't hear me when I tell you that if your definition of salacious is hooking up in a nightclub, you're just a sweet summer child."

Those words did something to me. I breathed in deeply, practically drinking in the way she observed me with interest. "Now, this is intriguing," I commented. "I've been wondering about this for days, actually."

"What?"

"You said I can go from sweet to cocky at the flip of a switch, but you have a similar Jekyll and Hyde vibe, if you ask me. Chiffon by day and nipple piercings by night."

"Don't be silly," she responded airily, but her eyes slowly hooded with desire. "I wear the nipple piercings during the day, too."

I held back a smile. Cassie preferred that. She liked it when I was stormy and serious, not when I was grinning at her like a lovesick puppy—even though that was how she made me feel. Unsteady. Confused. Smiling so much that my face hurt.

I kept my tone even. "What kind of salacious things are you getting into then?"

Playfully, she scoffed—but her body betrayed her. Her generous chest heaved with lustful inhales. "As if I would just tell you that."

"Show me then," I ordered, not missing a beat. That sent her lip right back between her teeth, which immediately made me harden under the table.

"Tell me what kind of PR you have to do," she countered.

Our gazes lingered on each other, equal parts defiant and desirous. After a beat, she raised the top of her laptop. "I believe this is called an impasse."

"Clearly."

***

It wasn't until the PDF reader on my laptop crashed that I realized it was after six and most of the office had gone home. The only people that remained were a couple of developers sitting at the flex desks a few feet away and Cassie.

Cassie was typing rapidly, her eyes drifting between her screen and a massive binder next to her. While I was on the verge of keeling over from exhaustion, she was as bright as she was when I walked in this morning. It was fucking incredible, frankly, but not surprising. I mean, she was apparently the valedictorian of the top ranked university in the country.

After leaving Princeton and running my own business, I had learned something important about the upper echelon. These people—the wealthy and powerful who went to these fancy schools—weren't much different from anyone else. Going to an Ivy League school didn't immediately make someone formidable or brilliant. Half of the people I met there were distressingly incompetent. Now, that wasn't to say that everyone there was entitled and vapid. There were plenty of people there who were the first in their family to go to college, or who had studied diligently their entire life to earn a spot. But the bottom line was this: I wasn't always impressed with the privileged and the wealthy. They had to earn my respect before I gave it to them.

Cassie had more than earned my respect though. Her capacity for work trounced mine—and I was a bona fide workaholic. I had been that way since I was eighteen. Yet day after day, she worked me under the table—and she made it look easy. Natural, if anything.

That capacity, coupled with the fact that she had captured every iota of desire in me, meant I was gone for her. She was all-consuming. There was a part of me that needed her to feel at ease. I longed for the sweetness of her body and the feeling of her touch. She was the genesis of my every fantasy. She was the still point of the turning world.

"Come get a drink with me," I said, after staring at her for a full sixty seconds without her noticing.

"Like a date?" she responded, doing that thing where she didn't remove her gaze from her laptop—like she couldn't even be bothered to look at me. I loved it when she did that. It was so damn flippant.

Emphatically, I shook my head. "No, not like a date. I have zero interest in dating you."

"Well, that makes two of us."

"I'd rather double the length of this due diligence period than date you."

"And I would rather sit through corporate finance class a second time than date you." She was quick to respond, like she'd had that one ready for a while.

"I would rather have my bag searched and get wanded down by the TSA during Thanksgiving weekend at JFK than date you."

"And I would rather work for TSA than date you. So, five minutes and then we'll go?"

"Sounds good," I said.

***

There was a shitty, overpriced rooftop gastropub right around the corner from the office. It was the kind where all the décor looked like rusted leftovers from a shipyard, even though the place was only a couple years old and there were no industrial ships for miles. Most of the beers were at least fifteen dollars, and all the food should have been fried—and yet none of it was.

When we got to the roof on the twelfth floor, Cassie took one look at the menu (which was naturally a single sheet of paper affixed to an entire clipboard) and shook her head. "Hell no," she declared.

"Why not?"

"Let me guess," she said, glancing at me. "The owner knows your name and you'll definitely be able to finagle us a free spinach artichoke dip."

"I mean, probably an edamame hummus, but I make no promises," I deadpanned.

When Cassie smiled, I wondered if she really thought I was funny or if she was just smiling because that was what everyone did when I told a joke. "You know what? Fine. Show me what Marcus Fitz is like on a date."

"Nope," I reminded her as I guided her towards the bar area. "This isn't a date. You'd never be so lucky."

She lifted an eyebrow. "Well, if it's not a date, I'm buying the first round."

"Like hell you are," I said. "I have a standing tab here."

"A standing tab ?" she confirmed. "Wow, that's embarrassing."

"Not as embarrassing as you pretending you ever had any intention of paying." I tapped my hand on the wood surface of one of the free cocktail tables. "Hold down the fort."

When I got to the bar a few yards away, I nodded at the bartender, who recognized me. Cassie was right. It was downright embarrassing that I had spent a small fortune on saisons and these vegan pot stickers I thought tasted like the bottom of an eggroll, but Alex loved them. Within a couple of seconds, I had a beer for each of us and I knew a waiter was going to show up out of nowhere with food I didn't order.

When I got back to the table where I left Cassie, she was typing away on her phone as usual and grinning.

"Here you go," I said as I placed the beer in front of her. Then I sat opposite her and waited for her to acknowledge my presence. When she finally looked at me, I was hit with this wave of recollection. I remembered the way that she looked at me right after she finished coming. It was that same look of satisfaction and mild surprise.

"This is a saison ?" she asked as she tilted her head to the side to study the beer I bought her. "That's my favorite."

"Mine too."

We clinked glasses and we each took a long sip. For a beat, I savored the fruity notes in the beer and the gentle tinge of the alcohol hitting me. I loved drinking—and in the healthiest way possible. I loved the way my arms started to feel lighter and the way the warmth kindled deep in my stomach. More importantly, I loved the way it killed my nerves around her. There was definitely something exciting about being around Cassie and feeling like the whole world was more electrifying and erratic, but I also so badly wished I could just be as suave as she was.

The alcohol helped.

"Good?" I asked.

"Amazing," she confirmed. There was a small line of foam right on her lower lip. Boldly, I reached forward, pressed my thumb against it, and brought it over to my own mouth. When I sucked on the pad of my thumb, Cassie raised an eyebrow.

I didn't acknowledge it, mostly because I knew she wanted me to. Instead, I nodded my chin at her phone. "Who are you always texting?"

She shook her head. "Nobody. And I'm not even trying to be coy. I'm really not texting anyone."

"Oh," I said, frowning lightly. "I just assumed—"

"I'm on Reddit. I like to read posts about horror films, and sometimes I leave comments."

This revelation shook me more than any of the countless things I had learned about Cassie in the last few weeks.

Reddit was a website, largely a discussion community, with a reputation for being overrun by guys sitting alone in their homes and trolling each other. That couldn't have been further from the truth. Reddit was a treasure trove of knowledge. Back when Alex and I were trying to figure out how to run a business, we spent a lot of time reading posts on the "Startups" subreddit (a place on the site where people just talked about startup companies).

Nowadays, I read Reddit most nights before I went to bed—even if I lied in interviews and said I read nonfiction business books, like Lilac said I had to.

"No shit," I finally commented. "I do the exact same thing."

She looked taken aback. "You watch horror films or talk about them on Reddit?"

"Both," I admitted. "On the ‘Horror' subreddit, right?"

Cassie nodded. Briefly, we stared at each other in silence, realizing that we had stumbled upon another similarity we both kept under lock and key.

"Should we tell each other our usernames?"

"Hell no," was her response.

I smiled. That was the right answer. It was the cardinal rule of Reddit to never tell anyone you knew in real life about your username.

"Favorite film?"

She took a drink of her beer as she thought about it. "Going to have to go with Silence of the Lambs ," she decided. "What about you?"

"Same," I admitted.

Cassie went so far as to roll her eyes. "You've got to be shitting me. This is another ploy to sleep with me, right?"

"Cassie, look at me," I said to her, feigning seriousness. "Do I looked like a man who tries to seduce women using the Silence of the Lambs ?"

As soon as the words left my mouth, I could practically see the gears in her brain working on overdrive as she concocted a snappy response. The funny thing was, I didn't even stop her. I was excited to see what she would come up with—and she didn't disappoint.

"You look like a man who seduces women using the Silence of the Lambs because it's too much work for him to watch The Notebo ok."

"That's surprisingly accurate."

"I do my best." She tossed her hair over her shoulder and that small gesture hit me with a wave of desire to reach out and yank her hair around my wrist while I kissed her soft neck. "And you should call me Cass, by the way."

"Cass?"

"Yeah. I haven't gone by Cassie since college, and Cassandra is just the name I use at work."

I smirked. "Does this mean we're best friends now?"

"It means you made me come in a nightclub bathroom, so it's probably best if you use my name. Even my barista calls me Cass."

"I'll take it."

She surveyed me before she said, "So what the hell is going on with you and Alex?"

I paused, wondering how she could possibly know that he called me at three in the morning. She was good at her job—a regular Sherlock Holmes, frankly—but nobody was that good.

"You lied to him yesterday," she continued. As she spoke, she reached over and picked up the glass tealight holder on the table and rotated it, spilling the wax into the votive. "When he walked into the conference room, you lied to him and said we were renaming files instead of looking at those ledgers."

"Oh," I replied. "You noticed." As soon as I said that I felt like an idiot because of course she noticed.

Luckily, she didn't draw attention to my comment. Instead she shook her head. "Look, if you don't want to talk about it, it's okay."

"No, I can talk about it." I cleared my throat and then took a long drink from my beer. "I should talk about it. I think it's worth sharing with you, both from a due diligence perspective and also because I intend to spend a lot of time with you from here on out, and you should know about me and Alex."

"You intend to spend a lot of time with me?" she questioned, intrigue in her tone. "That's presumptuous."

"Are we not having drinks together as we speak?"

Cass raised a shoulder. "Fair enough. Tell me about Alex."

I took a moment to collect the right words, wondering how to share this with someone who wasn't Dr. Jensen for the first time. After a beat, I fixed my expression and said, "Cass, I'm so close to being free from this whole…" I trailed off. "I'm just so damn close ."

She was studying me, eyes on mine. I had noticed that about her; she liked to look at my eyes. She once said they were beautiful, and I hadn't stopped thinking about that comment ever since.

"I think you're telling the truth," she mused. "But I'm having trouble accepting that."

"Accepting what?"

"That you could possibly have any ill-will towards Libra or Alex," she finished. "Do you have any idea how much money you've made off that app?"

"Are you really asking me my net worth?"

"I already Googled it," she answered before she raised her glass to me. "Due diligence."

I finished my beer, chugging more of it faster than I needed to. "So, when you Googled me, did that Vanity Fair article come up?"

Cass pursed her lips like she was holding back a laugh, which was a drastically different reaction than most people had when I spoke to them about this infamous scrap of journalese.

"I take it you think it's funny," I noted, nodding my chin at her. "What was your favorite part? The part where they insinuated we spent part of our Series A funding on blow, or the part where I'm allegedly quoted as saying, ‘Peter Thiel can suck my dick'?"

"Honestly, I was thinking about the part where you allegedly caught two employees having sex in the stairwell and you just high-fived one of them and went about your business."

"That part was true," I admitted, which made Cass's eyes widen.

"Really?"

I nodded. "Yeah, the one I high-fived is Cooper, who's now our Chief Technology Officer." I shrugged. "I just thought it was a badass place to sleep with someone."

"Can't argue with that."

"Anyway," I said, shaking my head. I tapped my fingers on my empty glass, forcing some of the residual foam bubbles to pop. "There was a massive blowback when that article was published—blowback from every direction. A few of our funders threatened to cut their investments, and I even had random customers emailing me and calling the office and making death threats. One guy even Tweeted at me and Alex and said we were the worst thing to happen to the tech world since the dot-com bubble burst."

"That's kind of funny."

"Agreed. But at the time it was terrifying because we thought we had just tanked the company. So, we hired this PR firm, Lilac, to try to help us rehabilitate our images. That ended up being a great decision overall, because we got our act together and IPOed and went public three years later."

"I remembered that," she said. "Bloomberg Business called you and Alex ‘the comeback kids.'"

I nearly cringed at the memory. "Yeah, that was embarrassing…But anyway, the strategy Lilac came up with was to present me as the reliable one and to let Alex be the eccentric genius. And that kind of made sense, I'll admit. From day one, Alex was the one with the coding skills and the idea, but he needed someone to get it off the ground. That was me. The one with the business sense to turn a couple of kids into millionaires. So, we just dug into that idea."

"So, they packaged you up into a paragon of virtue and business savvy and Alex got to keep being…Alex."

"Exactly. So, while he was doing coke with trust fund babies on yachts in the Mediterranean, I had to arrange for a bunch of influencers to run into me at an animal shelter and post pictures saying how nice I was to them. And when Alex was having threesomes with runway models, I had to go to events with grad students from Columbia who I had literally never met before, but shit like that apparently landed well."

Always needing to keep my hands busy, I continued to tap my fingertip against my empty beer glass as I thought back on the countless other measures I had to take to get Libra back in a good light. If I hadn't signed an NDA, I could have written a New York Times bestselling tell-all that would have rocked a lot of people's worlds—and made me a hell of a lot more money.

"Well, so what?" she asked, frowning as she spoke. "The company is doing fantastic. Nobody cares what you do anymore. You're not a kid anymore. You're twenty-eight now."

"I signed a contract that says I have to follow a specific set of rules for the duration of the contract. Otherwise, I lose a considerable amount of my shares." I inhaled and exhaled quickly thereafter, knowing no number of six-second resets could ever make me fully comfortable with my reality. "I probably don't need to tell you this, but most of my wealth is in stock, not liquid assets. So, if I mess up, I'll lose a lot."

Cass was still frowning with her lips parted the tiniest bit. "There's a contract ?" she clarified.

I nodded, even though that gesture was far too casual for what we were discussing. "It wasn't just a PR overhaul, it was a deal with the devil. Our board of directors demanded it."

"Holy shit," she murmured, her gaze ticking side to side as she let this revelation sink in. "What's in the contract?"

"A lot of dos and don'ts. The dos change a lot. I basically have to do whatever Lilac tells me to, whenever they tell me to. The don'ts are pretty stable. No smoking in public. No drinking in excess in public. Anyone I date has to be pre-approved by Lilac. No drugs of any kind, ever. No picking up women for one-night stands—that kind of thing. I'm giving a brief overview, but it's, like, seven pages of stuff."

"You can't be serious." Her expression was nothing short of horrified as she watched me. She shook her head. "Marcus…really?"

"I don't think I could make this shit up," I admitted. "So, that's that. That's my life. I'm a tightly managed, money-making robot and Alex is free as a bird."

"So let me get this straight: He has no dos and don'ts?"

"They're lenient. Like, he's allowed to binge drink in public whenever he wants. They say it builds off his persona as the hottest guy in the tech industry."

"Debatable," Cass murmured, which made me want to reach over the table, grab her into my arms, and take her mouth so hard that she would moan loudly enough to drown out the insufferable top forty music blasting over the speakers.

"And you resent Alex for having all the freedoms that you don't," she concluded, quick to make the connection as usual. "He gets to eat his cake and have it too."

I nodded, unable to say anything else about that. If I started talking about all the resentment I held towards Alex, we would be at this table all night.

"When is the contract up?"

"When I'm thirty, or when I quit working at Libra. Whichever comes first."

"Ah," she said knowingly. "No wonder you're so keen to sell."

"Of course I am. I am constantly pretending to be somebody else. Cass, that messes with my head in ways I can't even put into words."

Cass was quiet. I looked up at her and she was watching me. When she picked up her beer and took a drink, she kept her gaze on me. Instantly, that became one of the hottest things I had ever seen a woman do.

"You understand it though, don't you," I stated. I wasn't asking; I was observing.

She raised a shoulder. "I do what I have to."

"When did that all start?" I inquired. "When did you start going to dive bars and piercing your…Back in college you were—"

"Perfect," she filled in, even before I attempted to. "Or I pretended to be."

"When did that change?"

She brought her beer to her lips and she finished it. "Right after college, I had some stuff happen in my personal life that made me think about who people wanted me to be versus who I wanted to be. I ultimately decided that nothing— nothing was worth giving up my sense of self."

"But you still know how to be Cassie Pierson," I replied. "The chiffon and the money. It wasn't until I saw you at Shelf Atlas that I even realized you were any different than you were back in college."

"I know," she noted, grimacing as she spoke. "Like I said, I do what I have to do. I know what my job and coworkers expect from me, and I know I have to keep working if I want to survive."

To survive.

"The dive bars and nightclubs and the drunk bathroom hookups—that's the real you?"

"It's part of it," she said with a nod. "But there are other things. The horror movies. Traveling. I read like any normal person. I just like to do things that make me feel good. So, drinking, dancing, fucking—I'll do them as long as they feel good to me."

God, she fascinated me. She was complexity personified. All I wanted to do was explore her—to go back to college and get the bachelor's degree I never finished with a major in Cass Pierson.

"What we did on Friday was…that was the first night in six years that I've broken any of the rules. Drinking in excess. Chugging. Smoking. Weed. Hooking up in public, and with someone who wasn't pre-approved." I steeled myself before I admitted, "Cass, I can't stop thinking about it."

"You weren't worried about getting caught?" When she spoke, her eyes lowered to my lips.

I recognized that look; I fucking loved that look.

"I was," I admitted. "I knew it was stupid. But…"

"What?"

"I wanted you," I said. To my relief, my voice didn't waver. "I saw you in that bar and I thought I would stop breathing if I couldn't have you. You just looked so…forbidden."

She smiled when I said that. It was subtle, like I was tickling some element of her pride.

"As stupid as it was, it felt so good to break the rules, Cass. So fucking good . I might even say it made it more fun for me, knowing I was doing the opposite of what people have been telling me to do for years."

Cass's eyes traveled over my mouth as I spoke. Her gaze ticked up to meet my eyes. "I know exactly what you mean."

I wanted her so badly that my heart was racing. I wanted to hear her voice in my ear, husky and desirous while she came. I needed to watch her come apart at the seams, wet and tearing at her clothing to let me see more of her. Fuck it all—the deal, this friendship—fuck it. We were made to do this. Resisting it was like trying to make water flow in the opposite direction. It was borderline impossible.

We were an inevitability.

"Do you want to get out of here?" I asked.

"Absolutely," she responded, before I could even finish speaking.