Page 25 of My Sexy Boss
After devouring the cake, Sheila leaned back and folded her hands on her stomach. “That was awesome. When are you going to ask Cierra out for dinner?”
“Never. I’ve decided to stop acting like a fucking teenager and more like the CEO of Velocity. I have too much on my plate with the business, and I can’t get involved with someone at work. That would be a real mess, and I’m not talking about my grandfather here. It wouldn’t work out. I’d blow it, and then it’d be awkward as fuck in the workplace.”
“That’s right, once you break it off with a girl, it’s ‘out of sight, out of mind.’” She winked at me and took out her wallet.
“Put that away. Dinner’s on me.” I whipped out my credit card and handed it to the waiter over her protests. “You can get it the next time.”
Slipping her wallet back into her purse, she said, “You always say that but there’s never a next time.”
“When you’re with me, leave your money at home. I don’t let women pay. Call me old-fashioned, a chauvinist, a caveman, or whatever, but that’s the way I roll. You know this.”
“Have you been called all of those things by different women?”
“That and much worse. Some of the names I deserved. I know I can be an asshole and a bastard, but I only get that way when I’m pushed. When I go out with a chick, I tell her that I’m looking for a good time, no commitment. Some of them are cool with that, and when it ends, it’s likeciao. No drama at all. But there’re a lot of women who say ‘no problem’ and tell me they want the same thing, and then when I’m ready to move on, I get the fucking soap opera. That’s when the nonstop calls start, the texts, bumping into me ‘accidentally’ at restaurants, coffee shops, and the accusations are the final straw. I’m accused of leading them on, lying to them, cheating on them, and a ton of other bullshit. And I was honest with all of them right from the start. It makes me want to join a monastery.”
She laughed. “I can’t see you donning a robe and hoeing a garden. Do you even know what a weed looks like?”
Picturing myself in a brown robe, hoe in hand, sandals on my feet, I burst out laughing. “No idea. I wouldn’t know which was the weed or the plant. I guess the monastery isn’t such a good alternative.”
“I’d say no. Women are complicated. We tell a guy we don’t want anything but a good time, but then when that’s all he wants, we feel slighted, used, and fucking mad. It seems men can compartmentalize things better than a lot of women. We need to feel cherished and loved, and when we’re having a great time with a guy, a part of us hopes he’ll see that his life is better with us in it. I guess it’s the Cinderella happily-ever-after ending we all want for our lives. Or at least a lot of us want it. Sometimes we don’t even know it until it happens.”
I paused for a minute, letting what she said sink in. “This is too complicated. I’ll take a botany class and join the monastery.” We both laughed as we rose to our feet and left La Luna.
On the way home, Cierra kept spinning through my mind. I thought about everything Sheila had said, and then I decided that my focus had to be on Velocity. We had an internal problem, a big launch coming up, plus several potential clients I was trying to get on board with the company; the last thing I needed was a complicated mess with a woman at work. If things went wrong between Cierra and me, it could blow up in my face in a seriously ugly way. I needed to find someone to get my mind off her. This was probably just sexual tension, and the most effective way to get rid of that would be to just cut to the chase and find someone else to work it out on.
And maybe it was time I did settle down.
I went into my condo and stared out at the twinkling lights reflecting in the bay. Running my fingers through my hair, I leaned against the glass window and stared into the night. I wasn’t oblivious to the fact that my reputation for going through women probably didn’t reflect too well on the company. It’d gotten to the point where, when you looked up my name online, those sleazy articles were the first things to come up. It made me look flaky, and for the wrong client, that could be off-putting. My grandfather had built his public image as a family man so carefully, married to my grandmother for decades and focusing most of his spare time on raising my mother, my aunt, and then me when I came along. Me taking over the company from him marked a sincere shift in the public image of the firm, from old-fashioned and family-oriented to modern and family-free. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I’d need to be careful with the way it was read by the rest of the business world.
Pushing away from the window, I kicked off my shoes, sat on the couch, and put my feet on the coffee table for a few minutes. Then, with a clenched jaw, I took out my phone.If there’s anyone specifically invested in getting me a new woman, it’s Grandma.I tapped her number in slowly, drumming my fingers on the couch as I waited for her to pick up. My eyes flicked back and forth around the room, knowing that if I gave her this opening, there was no chance she was going to back down. But that was probably for the best. I needed someone to take control of that aspect of my life to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid with Cierra. I needed to keep working with her for the foreseeable future, so no matter how tempting one quick fuck would be, it would be the wrong choice.
“Hello?” my grandmother answered.
“Hi. How are you?” I pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingers.
“Good. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m doing fine. So, you know how you’re always talking about those women you want to set me up with?”
“I do,” she replied, her voice mostly cool and casual, but I could hear the excitement brimming at the back of it.
“Well, I’m in.” I tossed my hand in the air. “Go for it.”
“Really?” I could hear her shuffling papers at the other end of the line, as though she had a file that she’d been hanging on to for years, waiting for this call.
“Yeah, really. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Okay. Let’s see here….”
A small smile broke out on my face. It might not have been conventional, but letting my grandmother set me up on a date was probably about as good an idea to keep my mind off Cierra as anything else I’d come up with so far. And hey, who knew who she had in that long-awaited file of hers?
