I Love You, Miss Genius novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Assistant

Juno becomes Dash's assistant for investor week and corrects his deck without looking up.

On Wednesday morning Dash Rhine's office looked like a place where a storm had stopped to eat.

There was a bowl of cereal on the keyboard and a whiteboard covered in arrows.

Three half-drunk coffees sat on the windowsill, each one with a different lid.

I stood in the doorway with a notebook and a calendar I had not asked for.

"Rules," Dash said, without looking up. "One, don't flatter me. Two, don't hover. Three, tell me when I'm wrong."

"Those are all the same rule," I said.

"Which one?"

"Argue with you."

"Huh." He chewed. "That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me all week."

He ate cereal out of a coffee mug with a spoon that did not match.

I set the calendar on the one clear corner of his desk.

"You have eleven meetings today," I said. "Four of them overlap."

"Which four?"

"The ones you scheduled yourself."

He looked at the calendar.

Then he looked at me, narrowly.

"Fix it," he said. "Use any method you want."

I fixed it in nine minutes with a pen and no apologies.

By ten he had stopped treating me like furniture.

He paced when he thought, with one hand in his hair, muttering lines of code under his breath.

Every so often he said, "Juno, am I wrong?"

I said yes about half the time.

When I said yes, he stopped, glared, and said, "Prove it."

Then I proved it, and he said, "Fine," and went on pacing.

At eleven Bettina appeared in the glass door with a folder.

"I need Juno for the board packets," she said.

"Juno's busy," said Dash.

"It's a filing job."

"She's not filing."

"She's a temp, Dash."

"She's the first person in this building who's told me no without a spreadsheet," he said. "I'm keeping her."

Bettina's lips pressed into a thin plum line.

"Of course," she said, and shut the door so quietly it was worse than slamming it.

Dash dropped into his chair.

"She hates it when I do that," he said. "I like it."

"You're not scared of her?"

"Everyone's scared of Bettina. She's good at her job."

"That's not what I asked."

He looked up with those grey eyes.

"No," he said. "I'm scared of the demo."

At four o'clock he stopped pacing in front of the whiteboard and stared at it.

"I can't make it break," he said. "Two trials, same patient, same eligibility window. Which one wins?"

"Whichever asked first."

"That's not a rule. That's manners."

"It's the rule you want," I said. "You just haven't written it down."

"Write it down."

"I'm your assistant."

"You're my second opinion. Write."

I grabbed the nearest pad of sticky notes and a pen.

I wrote one line, small and neat, without thinking.

He took it out of my hand.

"Tie-break by oldest request first," he read. "Huh."

He stuck it to the whiteboard.

Then he stood back, rubbed his jaw, and said it again quietly, to himself.

"Oldest request first."

His shoulders came down an inch.

It was the first time in two days I had seen him stop bracing for something.

"That's good," he said. "That's really good."

"It's one line."

"The good ones usually are."

He ordered dumplings for the whole floor at six.

I carried them in, and everyone ate standing, and for twenty minutes no one was afraid of anyone.

Gus came in early, with his thermos, and winked at me from the door.

Around eight, the floor emptied.

Dash told me to go home, and I started gathering my cardigan.

He was still at the whiteboard.

He peeled the sticky note off, held it in the light, and read it again.

I watched his face and saw it change.

He looked down at the bottom corner of the note, where my pen had trailed off.

I looked too, and my stomach dropped through the floor.

I had written two small marks at the end of the line, the way I always did.

// g

I had done it without noticing.

I had done it on his whiteboard, in his office, in front of him.

I did not breathe.

Dash read it for a very long time.

Then he folded the note once, slowly, and put it in his pocket.

"Go home, Juno," he said.

His voice was perfectly pleasant, and he did not look up.

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