Page 43 of Exposed
Nothing matters butus.
This is about us, too. Not just him, not just me, but the both of us as a single entity, and that fact in itself is drunk-making.
He takes my hand, threads his fingers through mine. Leads me out of the conference room. It’s night, but what time I don’t know. The lights are dimmed low so the TVs provide most of the light in the office space. Pretty much everyone is still present, although all of them except three people are asleep on couches and curled up in beanbags. The three left awake glance at us as we exit the conference room hand in hand, and all three keep their expressions carefully blank and return a bit too studiously to the documents they’re poring over.
I lean closer to Logan. “I think they heard us,” I whisper.
He chuckles and squeezes my hand. “Actually, honey, I think they heardyou.”
I blush furiously. “I’m sorry, Logan. I tried to be quiet.”
“No worries,” he says as we exit the building and he leads me down Forty-fifth to his vehicle. “They’ll be adults about it or they’ll find another job.”
“I don’t want to cost anyone their jobs,” I say. “It’s my fault I was loud.”
“It’s my company, my conference room. And also, I’m pretty sure I heard Beth and Isaac in there yesterday. Either that, or they were watching porn together instead of working.”
“You let your employees have sex and watch porn while working?”
“Hell no.” His truck, a big silver box on wheels I’ve been in once before, is parallel parked half a block away. It’s a Mercedes-Benz G63 AMG, I note. I wonder how much it cost; a lot, is my guess. “The computers and other devices provided by the company are for work use only, and I carefully monitor that. Porn is how you get wicked viruses, for one thing, and I don’t mean of the STD variety. As for sex, as long as they’re discreet and it doesn’t affect their working relationship, I don’t give a flying fuck what they do, or where they do it.”
“You’re a good boss,” I say, buckling in.
“I try. Basically, I remember how shit ran in the army, and I try to be exactly the opposite.” He laughs, although I don’t quite get the joke. “That’s only partially true. I learned lots of valuable skills in the army, including how to run a tight-knit group of people. You give them a small number of hard-and-fast rules that cannot be broken, and leave everything else up to them. In the atmosphere I’ve created up there, I can use a small space and a relatively small group of employees to get a ridiculously massive amount of work done. I pay them a fuckload of money, keep the mood loose and relaxed, let them work on their own time and at their own pace, sitting, standing, lying down, buzzed, whatever, as long as the quality of their work remains consistent.”
“Must be nice for them.”
“I hope so,” he says, checking oncoming traffic and pulling out into the street. “That’s the point. I want them towantto come to work. I require long, crazy hours, which usually entails sleeping at the office during sixty-hour marathon sessions like this one, but I pay triple overtime and huge bonuses at the end of projects like this. What you saw is my entire company, the core of it. I’ve got a couple other subsidiary offices in the city, and some others in L.A. and London, but those are all totally self-sufficient and don’t require any input from me. Those kids upthere, they’re my business. All the subsidiaries, all the offshoots and spin-off branches, they run it all.”
“They must work nonstop.” I don’t even try to follow the series of turns Logan takes to get home. I just enjoy the fact that as soon as he finishes a turn, his hand takes mine again and threads our fingers together.
His hand feels natural in mine, and that makes my heart hammer.
“They do. Sixty hours a week is standard fare, eighty or more common. And when we have a huge project like this acquisition, we basically live at the office until it’s done, but then we take a few days off. Or rather, I give them a few days off.”
“You don’t take days off?”
He shrugs. “Not really. I’m not really a workaholic, but I like what I do, so I do it a lot. I stay home Sundays, for the most part.”
“What do you do for fun?”
He eyes me. “Work out, Krav Maga, run, watch movies.”
“You don’t have a girlfriend?”
A shrug, eyes returning to the road. “No. I did, for a while, but it wasn’t really serious. When she made it clear she needed to either get serious or move on, we broke up. It was amicable, and I was honest. I wasn’t going to string her along or lie about not wanting anything super serious.”
“Why didn’t you want anything serious?” I ask.
We’re on his street, which I recognize. It’s a long, quiet, tree-lined avenue of walk-up town houses, lovely, expensive, and serene, an insular little world away from the bustle of midtown Manhattan.
He sighs. “I just didn’t. She was a great girl, sweet, smart, beautiful, easy to hang out with. But it just wasn’t there with her, for me, long-term speaking. I don’t know. I don’t really have any emotional hangups, you know? I’m just not going to tie myselfdown long-term unless I’m really sure about it. It’s not fair to me, or to her, or the idea of an ‘us.’ A long-term relationship is only as valuable as the effort both people are willing to put in. You both have to be totally invested or it doesn’t work. I was in a relationship for a while, right after I got out of the hospital, and I was all in, right? Like, gone for the girl. She was fuckingitfor me, but I was needy, I guess. Too needy for her. She wasn’t feeling it. So after like, a year and a half, she broke up with me via the super awesome tactic of sleeping with my business-partner-slash-house-flipping-mentor, and then telling me about it. I was still pretty fucked up about how I got injured, you know, the guilt and confusion and everything. I’m not gonna toss out PTSD, because it’s not that. I know guys who have that, and it’s not pretty. I was normal fucked up. Real-deal clinical PTSD is ugly fucked up.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m okay. You never completely get away from the bad dreams and occasional flashbacks, but you gotta expect that, seeing and doing the kind of shit we did over there.” He pulls the big SUV into a parking spot outside his door, exits, and circles around to open my door for me. “When I said I don’t have any emotional hangups, that was a little bit of a lie. I do, sort of, because of how Leanne ended things. I don’t trust easily. But that wasn’t the reason why I didn’t want anything long-term with Billie. I trusted her all right, I just didn’t feel strongly enough to move in together or propose, I guess, and that’s exactly what she wanted. I was cool with just dating, having fun, spending the night together here and there.”
He unlocks the front door of his house, disables his alarm, and closes the door behind us. At this point his dog, Cocoa, a massive chocolate lab, is going crazy, barking fit to burst.