I Slept with My Boss and Ran Away

The report comes back a third time.

There's a sticky note on the cover page, two words in Damian Blackwood's handwriting.small, precise, and deeply unreasonable: Again. Faster.

'Faster,' I think. 'The man wants me to research, compile, cross-reference, and format a forty-page market analysis faster than I did it the first two times he returned it.' The first revision had a table header in twelve-point font where it should have been eleven. The second: the executive summary ran three sentences beyond its implied limit.

This time I read the note twice before I understand it. A decimal point. Page fourteen, third column. 7.2% where it should read 7.02%.

I fix it. I reprint it. I carry it into his office and place it precisely on his desk and walk back out without making eye contact, and he takes it and sets it aside with the efficiency of someone filing a piece of furniture, and I resume my seat at the outer desk and continue existing.

That is, functionally, the entire nature of my relationship with Damian Blackwood.

My name is Isabella Rossi. I'm twenty-seven, I have an MBA from a school that cost more than I'm currently earning, and I have been his executive assistant for fourteen months. In those months, I have managed his schedule, screened his calls, prepared his briefings, coordinated international travel for a man who crosses time zones like other people cross rooms, and handled approximately five hundred discrete tasks ranging from the professionally demanding to the quietly absurd.

I have learned the following things about him: he does not say good morning; he takes his coffee at exactly seventy-two degrees Celsius and will return it otherwise; he reads at triple the speed of any normal person; and he possesses a quality of presence that makes every other person in a room orbit slightly toward him without meaning to. He does not explain his decisions. He does not, as far as I can determine, experience doubt.

He also does not register that I exist except as a mechanism for delivering information he has already decided he needs.

I find this, on balance, easier than the alternative would be.

At four-fifty, his line buzzes.

"Clear tomorrow evening."

I open his calendar. "You have the Meridian gala, Mr. Blackwood."

A pause. The kind that means he is aware of this and was telling, not asking. "Clear the hour after. And you'll be attending."

"Of course."

The line goes dead.

I write gala . attending on my notepad and draw a small box around it. That's how I mark things I'm not looking forward to.

The Meridian Hotel's ballroom exists in a register I don't have natural access to.

I've been to two of these events now.Blackwood Holdings' annual exercise in celebrating itself.and each time the feeling is the same: four hundred people in clothes that cost more than my rent, speaking to each other in the shorthand of people who have never had to think about the cost of things, and me in the nicest thing I own, holding a clutch that I bought secondhand from a woman on the internet, performing the expression of someone who belongs here.

The performance is adequate. Nobody has looked at me twice.

Damian moves through the room the way water moves through terrain.along the path of least resistance, which happens to be whatever path he chooses. Every conversation he stops at, every hand he shakes, every nod he gives carries the weight of a man who has decided what his time is worth and is permanently, silently invoicing everyone else for theirs. They know it. They lean slightly forward. They use shorter sentences.

I trail at the correct distance. I hold his schedule and his preferred sparkling water and stay out of the way.

At half past nine, he stops.

The man across from him is taller than Damian.silver-haired, wearing a smile that hasn't reached his eyes in so long the path has closed over. Vincent Blackwood. The uncle. I know the name from the organizational brief I've maintained for the past fourteen months: Board Observer, formerly Chief Operations Officer, current position: complication.

In person he is something the brief didn't quite prepare me for.

"Damian." His voice is warm the way a small, enclosed room is warm. "You look tired this evening."

"I look exactly as I did this morning." Damian's expression doesn't change. It never does. He has a face that is making decisions at all times, and one of those decisions, always, is not to give anything away.

"The Carolinas initiative," Vincent says. "Some of the board have questions I haven't been able to answer satisfactorily on your behalf."

"I've addressed the board's questions."

"Some of them. The ones with sufficient patience." Vincent swirls his champagne with the leisure of someone who believes time costs him nothing. "The others remain curious."

What crosses Damian's expression then is not anger.anger is too warm for it. It's the cold of something that has had a long time to settle and harden, like water that's been ice so long it's forgotten it was ever anything else. He holds his uncle's gaze for precisely four seconds. I count, because I've learned that the duration of Damian Blackwood's silences is not accidental.

Vincent breaks first. Just barely.

"Enjoy your evening," he says pleasantly, and moves away with his champagne, and the room exhales around them.

Damian doesn't move for one second.

Then: "Ms. Rossi. Sparkling water."

I go.

At the bar alcove near the quieter end of the ballroom, I'm waiting for his order when the man in the white jacket appears at my elbow.

Late thirties, clean-shaven, the polished presentation of a high-end catering company. His smile is practiced and warm and completely symmetrical.

"Compliments of Mr. Blackwood," he says, extending a champagne flute toward me. "For his assistant.he wanted to thank you personally for the work you've put in this week."

I look at the flute.

Fourteen months. Damian Blackwood has not once acknowledged that I have a week, much less expressed any opinion about the quality of my contribution to it. The sentence the man has just said does not correspond to anything in my experience of how the world operates.

But the man is still smiling, and the flute is extended, and I've been performing ease in this room for two hours, and Vincent Blackwood's smile is still sitting wrong somewhere behind my eyes, and my defenses are fractionally, fatally lower than they should be.

"Thank you," I say.

I drink it.

The sparkling water I'd ordered sits on the bar, uncollected.

By ten-fifteen, the room has started moving at a speed slightly different from my own.

It's subtle at first. A warmth spreading from my chest outward that doesn't match one glass of champagne. A heaviness in my legs that deepens by the minute, as if my body is quietly making arrangements I haven't approved. My vision swims.once, briefly, corrected.and in that one moment of wrongness, everything clicks into terrible clarity.

'Something is wrong.'

'Something was in the drink.'

The thought arrives with the flat certainty of a fact that's already true regardless of whether I accept it.

I cannot tell Damian. He's forty feet away, deep in a conversation I can't interrupt without cause, and more than that: there are things that matter more than illness, and being competent in front of this man is one of them, and whatever is happening in my body is happening fast and I need to be somewhere that isn't this ballroom.

I find the doors. The corridor beyond is cream and quiet and too long.

VIP floor. The numbers above the elevator mean something but I'm having trouble holding them still. I need a chair. I need a flat surface. I need the world to stop moving at this slight, wrong angle.

There's a door to my left. I try the handle and it turns, and the room beyond is dark and still and that stillness is the only thing I want right now.

I go in.

The door closes behind me with a soft, heavy finality, and takes everything I knew with it.