Page 9 of Saved By the CEO

“I can tell.” The lovely woman I adore so much pours me a cup and hands it to me. “Did you finally bang Josh?”

I add a perfectly reasonable amount of cream and sugar, ignore Annie’s judgmental stare, and take a long sip. “No.”

She starts piling breakfast onto a plate. “You need to put that man out of his misery.”

“He’s fine,” I say, reaching for a piece of bacon. She smacks my hand.

“He’s like a lovesick puppy. Either fuck him or stop stringing him along.”

I frown. “I’m not stringing him along.”

She sits down and starts shoveling food into her mouth. “Sure you’re not,” she says between bites.

“I’m not.”

She rolls her eyes and changes the subject. “While you were out partying like a college freshman and batting your eyelashes, I was here at home doing research into the fucking virus.”

“Research?”

“Yeah. They should hire me. I googled the shit out of it.”

I make my way to the fridge and start pulling out anything that looks edible. Two-day-old spaghetti bolognese for breakfast? You betcha. Stale string cheese while I wait for it to heat up in the microwave? Uh-huh.

“So what did you learn?”

She gestures with her fork in the air. “They have no clue how it spreads. It just pops up randomly in the population. Like, they can’t trace the cases back to each other. So they’re speculating that maybe it lies dormant in the body, and the fertility crisis activated it or something.”

I turn around, string cheese in hand. “So we could have it? Like, right now?”

“If they’re right, then yeah. You could wake up one morning, dying, with your only cure being to get fucked by that greasy guy on the third floor—” I make a face. She continues. “—and there would benothingyou could do to prevent it from happening. Like, how fucked up is that?”

“If the most compatible person for me is Greasy Guy, then maybe I’ll just let the virus end me.”

“Fair.”

I spend the rest of the day rotting in bed. This has truly been the worst hangover of my life, and I can’t even remember drinking that much. I definitely had more than I should have, but I didn’t black out. I got home fine, without needing any help, and even washed off my makeup before going to bed.

Annie pokes her head into my room sometime in the afternoon to let me know she’s heading to spin class. I’m still in bed when she gets back.

On Sunday morning, I get a call from Mr. Bennett. And you know, when you really think about it, why should I be free from work on the weekend? Think of the shareholders!

He wants me to prepare an agenda for a meeting and reorganize all the files on his laptop. He also wants to go over what I plan to say to the press. The Green House project is bleeding money, and the company is considering cutting a few corners. Mr. Bennett does not want the press to run with that angle.

I’m supposed to have answers for him—some way to spin it—but I don’t. I’ve spent the entire weekend rotting in bed and feeling like crap instead of getting on top of it. He’s not impressed.

Now it’s Monday, the day of my second-ever press briefing, and I have a fever. It’s not super high, but it’s still a fever. My entire body aches, I can’t stop shivering, and my head is pounding. But I don’t have time to take a sick day right now,especially not today. So I head to the office and pray it goes away before the press arrives.

“Let’s see,”Mr. Bennett pulls up an article. “‘BenCo Cuts the Green from Green House’—very creative.” He clicks on another. “Oh, what about this one? ‘Green House Confirmed as Financial Nightmare, Near Ruin.’ It’s a little too dramatic for my taste, but I get it. They need the clicks to survive.”

I stare at the hands folded in my lap. He’s going to fire me. I’m sure of it.

The press conference went terribly. I felt dizzy from the fever and couldn’t think straight. As a result, I wasn’t careful with my wording, and the reporters quickly picked up on the project’s financial issues.

“Are you going to explain yourself?”

I force myself to meet his eyes. Disappointment and anger sit plainly on his face.

How am I going to help Mom without any income? She’ll lose the house because I fucked up.