Nights with My CEO novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Napkin
Jacqueline drops her ring in the toast bucket, leaves, and writes thirty nights on a bar napkin for a stranger.
Merrill Dunwoody raised his glass and said Colby Sargent's name, and the whole thirty-fourth floor clapped.
I stood by the window with a plastic cup of seltzer and clapped with them.
It was closing night.
Dunwoody Capital had been sold to a firm called Callender at noon, and every one of us had been told to wear something nice.
"The Calder Rail thesis," Merrill said, "is the best piece of research this house has produced in thirty years."
"It is also the reason a bigger firm bought us."
"So I am proud to announce that, as of Monday, Colby is our Head of Research."
Colby smiled at the room.
He had worked next to me for three years.
He had been my fiance for two.
The Calder model was forty-one pages, and I wrote every one of them.
I walked two freezing Saturdays through the Calder rail yards with a stopwatch and a clipboard to count how fast their trains turned around.
Colby had brought me coffee on the second Saturday and held the clipboard.
He had never once looked at what was written on it.
Now he was lifting his glass to my work.
The room turned to look at him, so nobody saw my face.
That was the first thing I was grateful for.
Ten minutes later he found me in the stairwell between thirty-four and thirty-three.
"Jackie," he said, and put his hand on my arm like we were friends. "We need to talk before Monday."
"You're doing great," I said. "Keep going."
"I'm trying to be kind here."
His voice went soft and sorry, the voice he used on clients.
"We're not going to work as a couple. You know that. Merrill agrees it would look bad if my fiancee reported to me."
"So the engagement is over?"
"It's the mature thing."
"And my job?"
"HR will call Monday. It's about fit." He squeezed my arm. "It's nothing personal."
I looked at his hand.
I looked at the ring on mine, which he had picked out himself, a small blue stone he said matched my eyes, though my eyes are green.
"You said fit," I said.
"Jackie."
"Nobody else here fits either, then."
I walked past him and pushed open the door to the party.
It was loud, and then it was not, because I was walking straight at the champagne bucket in the middle of the room.
The bucket sat on a table next to Merrill's podium.
It was full of ice and open bottles, and a hundred and forty people were holding glasses.
I pulled the ring off my finger.
I dropped it into the ice with a small wet click.
"Congratulations," I said.
Merrill's smile stopped halfway.
Colby came through the door behind me, red from the neck up.
"Colby," I said, loud enough for the back row. "One question, since you wrote the Calder thesis."
"Jacqueline, not here."
"Footnote fourteen. What turn time do you assume for the Calder yards?"
Somebody near the bar laughed, because it was a funny thing to ask at a party.
Colby laughed too, a bright, easy sound.
"We're not doing a quiz," he said.
"It's one number."
"It's a party."
"Eleven hours," I said. "That's the number. The street says nineteen. I stood in the snow for it."
His face did not move at all, and that told me everything.
He did not know.
He had copied forty-one pages and never read a footnote.
"Excuse me," I said to the room, and I took my coat from the rack and left.
Pine Street was cold and wet, and I kept walking until a hotel doorman opened a brass door for me without being asked.
The Ansonia Court had a bar in the back with low lamps and nobody in it.
I sat at the end and ordered a seltzer with lime.
I did not want a drink.
I wanted to be someone people could not see through for one hour.
My hands were shaking, so I pressed them flat on the bar.
I was not going to cry in a hotel.
Two stools down a man put a cup of tea on the bar and said to the bartender, "Hot water again, when you can."
He was tall even sitting down.
His suit was charcoal, and he wore it as if the collar bothered him.
His hair was black and cut short, gone silver at the temples, and his nose had been broken once and set a little crooked.
He looked tired in a way sleep would not fix.
He looked at the pen in my hand and then at the napkin I had pulled toward me without noticing.
"Bad night?" he said.
"The worst Friday of my life."
"I just buried my father last month," he said. "And then my girlfriend of four years told me I had never once been in the room with her."
He said it flat.
"Mine told me I don't fit," I said, "and then he took my job."
He turned on his stool.
"What would help?"
It was an honest question, and I had no honest answer.
So I wrote one.
I wrote it in blue pen on a bar napkin, fast, before I could be reasonable.
"One. First names only. Two. No work, and no talking about work. Three. Nobody pays anybody for anything. Four. Thirty nights. Five. Either of us can end it by saying so, any night, and nothing is owed."
I turned the napkin around and slid it down the bar.
He read it twice.
His mouth moved in something that was nearly a smile.
"This is a contract," he said.
"It's a recovery plan," I said. "I'm Jacqueline. You don't have to be anyone."
"Reed."
He picked up my pen.
He did not ask if I was sure.
He looked straight at me, and he wanted it, and it showed.
He signed under my name, in a square, careful hand.
"Thirty nights," I said. "Starting tonight."
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