Page 16 of Babies for the Big Shot

My brain short-circuits.

He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t smirk. Just looks at me with a level of calm intensity that makes my knees wobble and my ovaries file HR complaints.

I immediately walk into the edge of a desk.

“Shit,” I hiss, gripping my shin and trying not to cry in the middle of someone else’s fancy hallway.

Someone laughs behind me. Someone else offers a polite “You okay?”, which I respond to with a weak thumbs up and the overwhelming urge to disappear into the floor.

I finally reach my desk and collapse into the chair, heart pounding and limbs heavy. My pulse is still racing, and I haven’t even logged into my email yet.

Professional. Calm. Unbothered.

I am none of those things.

Not when Nick Ashford looks at me with that maddening mix of calculation and craving, half challenge, half temptation.

And the worst part?

I think I want to repeat it, too.

I take my seat and grip my new stapler, the last shred of emotional support I have on this godforsaken corporate battlefield.

“Okay, Captain Clippy,” I murmur under my breath, patting it with trembling fingers. “You and me. We’ve got this.”

My desk is cute, if you like glass, cold lighting, and the kind of energy that says someone’s about to be fired. Everyone around me is gorgeous and competent and probably went to Ivy League schools where they majored in Not Making Out With Their CEO.

The girl next to me has color-coded her Google calendar and brought in her own ergonomic keyboard. I still haven’t figured out how to log in, so I bypassed the portal and found a workaround to access the campaign files anyway.

The workload is terrifying.

There are acronyms I don’t understand.

Meetings I didn’t know I was invited to.

Slack channels filled with people saying things like “circle back” and “let’s park this for now” without even blinking.

By halfway through the morning, I’ve rewritten a CTA that made the senior strategist do a double-take, flagged a broken analytics link no one else had noticed, and figured out how to condense a pitch deck without losing its punch.

By 2 p.m., I’ve had three cups of office coffee, two panic attacks, and an existential crisis over whether I actually know what marketing is or if I just lied really well in my interview. Also? My blouse is sticking to my back in a way that feels aggressive.

Nick passes me in the break room once.

He just strolls in, grabs a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge, and nods. As if we’re strangers at a networking event. As if we haven’t done unspeakable things against the mirrored wall of a stalled elevator.

I nearly choke on my string cheese. He doesn’t even blink.

Absolute monster.

By 5:47 p.m., I’ve sent twelve emails, rewritten one social caption fourteen times, the final one slaps, thank you very much,stared down a cursed spreadsheet,anduntangled the logic behind a last-minute client request no one wanted to touch.

Sure, I accidentally replied “same lol” to a message from my new department head. But I also earned a “nice catch” on Slack and got added to a project I wasn’t technically assigned to.

I think I blacked out sometime around three.

But I did it. I made it.

I survived Day One.