“Onboarding?” I shook my head. “Marjorie showed me to my desk and Jeff with IT helped set up my laptop, and that was it.”
“Well, we need to remedy that immediately.” Don picked up his phone and spoke to Marjorie, requesting the form.
Seconds later, Marjorie burst through his office door, handed over a paper, and left. Don plopped it down in front of me and retrieved a pen from his desk. “Please sign this.”
Feeling like I was being railroaded (to use Spade’s term), I read over the form. It stated that if my employment with Emerald City Advertising was ever terminated, I would make no attempts to contact my clients, and banned me from working for a competitor for a period of three years. “What if I don’t sign it?” I asked.
“You’re refusing?” Chad scoffed. “See, Don? She’s completely uncompliant. Everyone has to sign it, for chrissake. You’re not any better than the rest of us, Jessica.”
Don held up his hand again. “This standard non-compete is a requirement of your continued employment here. You should have signed it when you were first hired, but mistakes happen. We’ll take care of it now.”
“So… I’ll lose my job if I refuse to sign?” I asked for clarification.
“Nobody wants that, Jessica, but you cannot work here without a signed non-compete.”
Yet I’d been working there for years without one. Don and Chad were both watching me, and I saw no way out of it, so I scrawled my signature and the date on the form before sliding it in front of Don. He added it to my employee folder and set it aside.
“Now, moving forward, Chad will be approving all your ads before you send them to clients. Any changes he suggests, youwillmake.” Don frowned. “Do you understand?”
Oh, I understood all too well; Don’s depraved little daddy was yanking his chain. Any respect or compassion I had left for my boss snapped. Don dismissed me, and I went back to my desk with smoke coming out of my ears. As soon as my ass landed in the chair, I called Spade.
“Hey, babe,” he answered.
“Hi. I’m sorry to interrupt you while you’re working, but I need help.”
“Don’t worry about it. I can take a break. What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
I gave him a brief rundown on what had happened in Don’s office before adding, “Will you please tell Morse and Tap to leak what they found to Mike Chentam?”
Spade chuckled, sounding every bit as pissed as I felt. “With fuckin’ pleasure. You okay, Jess?”
Surprisingly enough I was. “Just brandishing my imaginary sword and preparing to slice my way through this place.”
“This is your moment, babe. Don’t forget your line.”
Touched that he’d remembered, I grinned. “Silly rabbit, tricks are for kids.” It was cheesy and silly, and it felt damn good to say it.
“That’s my girl.”
***
Spade
I managed to keep my family away from Jessica for the first few weeks after I moved into her apartment. I’d been stopping by their house every couple of days to show my face and check on Uncle Jaime, but I’d been blowing off Sunday family dinners since that was my one day off to spend with Jessica. After the fourth missed dinner, Mom knew something was up. She called during work Wednesday to ream me on my absence and read me the riot act about family time.
“It’s a woman, isn’t it?”
I hadn’t been prepared for the question, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to lie about Jessica. “Yeah, I’ve been seeing someone.”
“And you’re hiding her from us like she’s some kind of whore? Does she even know you have a family?”
That raised my hackles. Jessica and I were still going strong, and she’d been through multiple changes over the past few weeks. After Tap and Morse leaked the information they found to the owner of her company, he cleaned house. Jessica said Mike Chentam showed up with an attorney, two security guards, and the gal from HR. They summoned Chad and were in a closed-door meeting in Don’s office for over an hour.
When they finally reemerged, one security guard accompanied Chad to his printer room office, and a few minutes later, Don and Chad were both escorted off the premises, each carrying a box of personal effects. In the days that followed, Mike brought in a new manager whose first act of business was to promote Jessica to department manager. Jessica took over Chad’s desk—metaphorically speaking, no number of Clorox wipes could have convinced her to sit at his physical desk—and she quickly realized how little of his job he’d actually been doing.
She’d been working long hours trying to play catch up, and I didn’t want to add the drama that was my family onto her already sagging shoulders.
“Madre, Jess is most definitely not a whore. She’s a good girl. Smart, funny, she comes from a stable family and has a great job.”
