My Office Rival Swore I'd Beg First, and I Took the Bet novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Archive
Odette announces a ninety-day contest for the Product seat and a shared war room, and that night Roz and Drake are stuck in the basement archive, where her hand on his tie turns into a kiss.
On the first day of fall, Odette Hargrove put a gold pen on the table.
Then she told the whole fourth floor that one of us would be her next Vice President of Product.
She said it in the middle of the Monday meeting, between the tent fabric order and the parking garage memo.
"One seat," Odette said. "Ninety days, more or less. On Friday, December eighteenth, at the Summit, I will name it."
Everyone looked at me.
Then everyone looked at Drake Hollister, who sat across the table with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his hands folded.
He did not look at me at all, which is how I knew he had been looking at me before.
"Roz runs Tents," Odette said. "Drake runs Packs."
"You'll build the Ridgeline Kit together. One system, a tent and a pack that belong to each other."
"Together," I said.
"In room 4B. Glass walls, long table, a fridge. Kip has agreed to clear it."
Kip Danforth, our VP of Sales, smiled with every one of his teeth.
"Delighted," he said, in the voice of a man holding a hot coal in each hand.
Drake said, "Understood."
He had been saying that word to me for two years, in exactly that tone, and I had won every Trail Review we ever had.
All fourteen.
I kept a list in my desk drawer, and I never once felt like I had beaten him.
That night at eight I went down to the basement archive.
He had said in the afternoon that his Cairn packs outsold my Switchback tents in year one.
Drake does not lie, which is the most annoying thing about him.
The archive is a long, cold room with metal shelves and a smell of old paper.
Its door has a latch that has stuck since the Obama administration.
I found the Ridgeline One sales report on the third shelf.
I was reading it in the aisle, with my cardigan pulled over my knuckles, when the door clicked behind me.
"Hello, Szymanski," Drake said.
He stood in the doorway in his navy three-piece suit, with the tie still on and a file box under one arm.
"I was here first," I said.
"You were. I'd like the same report."
"Get it yourself."
"It's in your hand."
I held the report over my head.
He is six foot two and I am five foot ten, so it did not go as I'd planned.
"Fine," he said. "Read it aloud. I'll wait."
Behind him the heavy door swung shut with a thump that was a little too final.
I tried the handle.
It turned and the door did not open.
I tried it again, harder.
"The latch," Drake said. "It sticks."
"I know it sticks."
"Then you should not have come in."
"I was holding a box."
We looked at each other in the cold light of a single bulb.
He took out his phone and held it up to the ceiling.
"No bars," he said.
"Of course there aren't. It's a basement made of paper."
"Facilities leaves at six. Odette's already gone."
"We could break the glass in the door."
"It's a steel door with no glass."
"We could yell."
"Roz."
He never says my first name at work.
It stopped me dead, in the middle of the aisle, with the report half crushed in my fist.
"You've been wanting to win this since the second you walked in," he said. "Why?"
"Because you think you've already won it."
"I don't."
"You stand there like it," I said. "In your vest. With your hands folded. Like a man waiting for a bus he knows is coming."
His jaw did something small and tight.
"You're furious at the way I stand."
"I'm furious at the way you lose."
I don't know why I said it.
I'd been thinking it for two years, and it came out of me in that cold little room.
He went very still.
"Say that again."
"You lose like you don't care. Fourteen times."
"You say, 'Congratulations, Szymanski,' and you shake my hand and go back to your desk."
"Then I have to go to the ladies' room and be angry at a stall."
"That's not what you're angry about."
"Then what am I angry about?"
He took one step.
I took one step.
I grabbed his tie, because I had to put my hands somewhere, and I yanked it, and his face came down level with mine.
His hand closed around my wrist.
His thumb lay across the pulse, and I knew he could feel it hammering.
"You're shaking," he said, low.
"With rage."
"Is that what that is."
He did not let go and I did not let go.
His mouth was an inch from mine.
Then I kissed him, or he kissed me, and I will argue about it until the day I die.
It was hard and furious and it tasted like coffee.
He backed me into the metal shelf and the whole thing rang like a bell.
A box of old receipts fell off the top and hit the floor.
I bit his lower lip hard enough to taste something coppery.
He laughed into my mouth.
It was a low, rough sound I had never heard in two years of meetings.
"I've wanted to do that since the Denver trade show," he said against my ear.
"Which one?"
"The one where you threw a carabiner at me."
"It was a cheap carabiner," I said. "It slipped."
"It hit me in the head."
"It slipped on purpose."
He kissed me again, and behind us the old latch clicked, and the heavy door began, slowly, to swing open.
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