“Sean Frost's office,” a female voice said.
What? “Uh, it's Min Lee from Marketing, reception was going to put me through to Finance but looks like they made a mistake,” I said. “Could you do it instead?”
“I could,” she said, “but they had a team-building day today, and the few staff that were here ran the bank files and then went home about 30 minutes ago. No one's going to answer.”
Shit. “There's no one there? No one?”
“I don't think so. You'll have to wait until Monday.” There was a pause. “Is it urgent?”
“Yes. It really is. I'm on some seriously tight deadlines. Are you absolutely, positively sure there's no one?”
She exhaled. “I'll speak to Sean,” she said. “There might be someone down there. Or, if you come down to 35, I have access to the accounting system and maybe I can find what you're after.”
I couldn't get down the stairs fast enough. If there was anyone left in the department, I didn't want to miss them.
When I got to thirty-five, though— I’d very expertly taken the long way to avoid going past Henry's office—it was actually Sean who was waiting for me. He was leaning casually against his door frame just in front of his personal assistant. Unlike Diane's assistant, her desk wasn't covered in mountains of paperwork and she even had her mobile out.
What was the co-CEO of Frost International doing waiting to help me with some menial enquiry? It didn't make any sense, but I smiled at him anyway, and he smiled back. “Min,” he greeted me. “I understand there's some crisis?”
I stood in front of him. “I'm so sorry about this,” I said and he held his hand up and shook his head as a reply, as if to say 'Don't worry about it'. “I just have deadlines,” I explained. “Tight deadlines. I emailed Finance this morning for some figures from last year, but apparently there's no one there?”
He nodded. “Yes, bad timing to need anything from them. They played minigolf all day and now they're probably getting drunk. Maybe I can help you instead?”
You can help me by telling me why everyone hates you when you're so nice, I thought, remembering everyone's dire warnings about him. I glanced back at his assistant. She seemed relaxed. That meant something, didn't it?
“Um,” I said, realising he'd actually required a response from me. There were some specific figures I needed, but I couldn't ask him just for those because it might give the project away. I went long, instead. “I'm looking for last year's full sales figures. The full data ones, not the ones in the annual report.”
He looked surprised. “All of them?”
Behind him, his Personal Assistant who had been packing things into her handbag stopped and made a face. “It's okay, Sean, I can start doing it for her.”
He waved his hand dismissively at her. “No, no, that's fine, Frances, you go and enjoy your weekend. I think Sales management has all that data on USBs that they give out with induction packs,” he said, running a hand absently over his five o'clock shadow. “Actually, yes, now that I think about it I'm pretty sure I've seen Omar with a drawer full of them. Come on, I'll take you down there.” He gestured at me to follow him. I did, but I wondered if Diane or Jason would be concerned that he was helping me. I hoped no one from Marketing would see.
As Frances walked with us to the lift, I surreptitiously cast a glance upward to one of the clocks on the wall. 5:04 pm. Sean let his assistant go home on time?
I couldn't leave it. “Something special happening tonight?” I asked her pleasantly as we all stepped into the lift.
She shook her head, a bit confused about why I'd asked. “Uh, no? Not unless you consider a new episode of my favourite show 'something special'.” She smiled and took out her phone to check her messages.
Sean chuckled as he selected the fourth floor—Sales—guessing what I was surprised about. “Work-life balance,” he said, and he and Frances shared a professional smile. “My employees work a little differently to Diane's. How late are you likely to be here tonight?”
I thought about what I needed to do. “Probably seven? It would be later, but I have something on tonight.”
“And you're still here?” He laughed pleasantly. “Suddenly I understand why you and Henry work so well together.” At the mention of Henry I winced, but I tried not to let him see. “Can you do me a favour, Min? He and I butt heads constantly over the fact he never takes his holidays. I think he's decided I'm micromanaging his annual leave, but, really, I'm just trying to get him to take a break once in a while. Could you get him out of here for a week or two? Put him on a beach somewhere and take his phone off him?” Sean put his hands in his pockets. “It's not that I don't appreciate his dedication, but, you know...” He smiled at me.
Henry hates you, Sean, I thought, but I smiled back. “Well, he's going to South Korea next weekend.”
“And I'm sure he'll find four days with his extended family and his soon-to-be in-laws very restful,” he pointed out with a grin. Soon-to-be in-laws? I think I nearly gaped at him. He noticed and smoothly changed the subject. I was grateful. “Speaking of extending families, Belinda's due any day now,” he said, patting his breast pocket where I could see the outline of a mobile. “Just waiting for the call.”
“You must be so excited,” I said politely. “Boy or girl?”
The lift stopped on level 31. Sean dissolved into a charmed smile at the question as the doors opened and several people got into the lift. “A girl again,” he said, and then started to tell me about his other children.
While he was talking, I glanced across at the people who'd joined us. They were all bunched together talking and laughing about something, but when one of the guys got a little bit too loud, another hushed him and shot a worried glance towards Sean. There was a woman with them, but there were men in the way so I couldn't see much of her. What I could see were ballet flats, tights and what looked like a very nice dress suit. She had her hair up, too, in a loose bun with little curls poking out of it. It was red like Gemma's, actually, and I think I'd seen some pictures on her Facebook where she had her hair like...
I realised what I was thinking. Oh, fuck. Fuck! That hair isn't red like Gemma's, it is Gemma's. That's Gemma. I panicked. I did not want her to see me at work and looking like this. With every fibre of my being I didn't want her to even know that I had a 'this'.
She obviously hadn't seen me on her way in, but the whole lift was made of mirrors and at some point she was going to catch sight of me. I looked up at the panel above the door; we were only at floor 29, and there were three other floors on call on the way down to four, as well. I couldn't turn around to face the wall because the wall was a mirror, and I couldn't even get out early because I'd have to push through that group of people with her to press the button. Most importantly, the co-CEO was escorting me somewhere, and you don't just bail on the co-CEO. I was trapped in here in this fucking dress and heels and makeup, pretending to be the model woman, and hoping desperately that she was too distracted to look over towards me.
I looked up at the display panel showing which floors we were passing: 28... 27...
“What would you like? A boy or a girl?” Sean asked me conversationally. “If you could choose.”
I stared at him, confused. What? Had he really asked that question?
His eyebrows went up when he saw my expression, and he laughed warmly. “I asked you if you wanted a boy or girl when you have children, but perhaps it's a bit early to be asking that question. Especially while you're flavour of the month in Marketing.”
I winced when he said 'Marketing'. Gemma knew that's where Sarah and I worked. She hadn't heard him, though. “How's your project going, by the way? I imagine by the urgency, you're pitching soon?”
I couldn't tell him about that, even if all he wanted was a simple yes or no, and I was so distracted by desperately trying to keep someone standing between me and Gemma that I didn't have enough brain power to say anything but, “Uh...”
26...25...
&n
bsp; Just as I was saying that, the lift stopped on the 23rd floor, and three of the men with Gemma waved goodbye to her and walked out. When they were gone, she turned and leant against the wall opposite me and took out her phone.
I was standing opposite her in the lift, she was literally two metres from me.
Don't look up, I mentally willed her. Don't look up!
The doors felt like they took eternity to close, and the lift seemed to be going much more slowly than usual. 19...18... 17...
“I'm sorry, I shouldn't put you in that position,” Sean said to me when I didn't answer. I could hardly even remember what we were talking about. “I'm just so used to asking Jason about his projects and his pitches and all the things he does in marketing that it's just a habit to talk to marketers like that...”
God, please stop saying that word, I thought, glancing between him and the display panel. Let's just talk about kids again, I don't care.
I must have looked pretty stressed out, because Sean asked, “Are you feeling alright, Min? You look a bit pale suddenly.”
When he said my name, I felt it like a tonne of bricks and immediately looked at Gemma to see if she'd heard it.
She had.
She looked up momentarily, glancing at us. I pushed back against the wall of the lift, holding my breath. I hoped Sarah was right about how different I looked. She must have been right, because Gemma didn't recognise me at first, but I think my height made her double-take.
When she did look back at me she frowned, I think second-guessing herself. Her eyes swept over me, and when she got to my face, recognition dawned on hers. Her jaw dropped.
She gave me a really obvious, really astonished once-over, but it was her tone of voice that really betrayed her shock to everyone else in the lift, including Sean Frost. “Min...?”
EIGHTEEN
Gemma's obvious shock only lasted for a few seconds. Then her eyes darted between Sean and I and she straightened, stammering, “I-I'm sorry, I didn't recognise—” She stopped herself before she finished that sentence, though, looking away and blushing deeply. I remembered that blush, but this wasn't how I'd imagined causing it.
I wanted to apologise to her, but I couldn't. I couldn’t say anything. Everyone was staring at us—Sean Frost was staring at us—and I couldn’t think of anything I could say to her that wouldn’t be a dead giveaway, either as to how we knew each other or why she hadn’t recognised me. So neither of us said anything, we just both tried desperately not to look at each other while everyone was looking at us.
You could have heard a pin drop over the hydraulics. I could even hear my own heartbeat.
Obviously trying to break the tension, Gemma unlocked her phone to go back to whatever she’d been doing, and in the process fumbled with it and it slipped out of her hands. It clattered across the floor of the lift, under the feet of a couple of the other people in there, and everyone bent down to try and help her retrieve it. She nearly knocked heads with someone in the process and when she stood up again, examining a scratch on the corner of her phone, she was an even deeper red and just looked so humiliated. I could hardly bear to watch it. It was like my own personal horror show.
This is my fault, I thought, feeling the knife twisting in my gut. That she feels that way is all my fault. If I’d just told her that I have to look like this at work, it would be nothing. Why didn’t I just tell her?
Even as I asked myself that question, I could see my reflection frowning back at me from one of the panels. I knew why: because I hated that I had to look like this. I felt like a footballer in a tutu. I felt wrong, and exposed, and fuck, I had to be wearing a white blouse today, didn’t I? So she could definitely see the shape of my breasts? What a shocking reality check it must be for her. It would be one thing for her to kind of know that I had breasts I was hiding away somewhere, and another to see me dolled up like the public face of Chanel. I cringed. I bet she didn’t think I was hot now.
Sean's eyebrows had been up in his hairline as he watched the exchange, but he quickly relaxed. “Old friends?” he asked amicably.
We both looked at him, and then each other, and then I was blushing, too. I sure as fuck wasn't going to answer, and after a few seconds it became clear Gemma wasn't going to either. One of us had to or it was going to sound pretty suspicious, so I managed, “Friend of a friend.”
“Ah,” Sean said, looking between us. He seemed to accept that, but, boy, was he watching me closely. Very, very closely. Then, just as easily as he had before, he expertly smoothed things over. “This is an enormous company,” he began, “I actually went to university with one of the Ops managers up in Queensland. We'd hired him and I'd even signed off on it and hadn't noticed at all until I visited the site and there he was, with his own big office. Hilarious.” Remembering, he winced. “Except that he thought I'd been deliberately ignoring him. Less hilarious. Solved by a night out at the local, though.” He laughed.
A night at the local, I thought, glancing at Gemma again. She was looking at her feet and her lips were pressed in a tight line. Please don’t regret kissing me, I thought as I looked at those lips. I couldn’t handle being someone’s drunken ‘whoops’. Sean was telling some other light-hearted story about someone else he'd bumped into unexpectedly, but I couldn't focus on anything he was saying. I could only focus on the fact there was a girl I'd kissed—that still sounded so weird to me—standing two metres from me and obviously wishing she was a hundred million miles away.
Sean had to take a step towards me before I realised we'd reached the fourth floor and the doors had slid open. I couldn't even look at Gemma as I stepped out.
Sean stopped abruptly just outside the lifts and took out his phone for some reason, so I just stared at the ground between us. How the fuck was I going to go to Sarah's thing tonight, now? There was no way I could be in the same room with her after that, even if I should really apologise.
As soon as the doors on the lift were closed, Sean tucked his phone in his pocket and turned back to me. “Min,” he said. I looked across at him, confused. “I hope I’m not speaking out of turn here. Are you alright? You look shaken.”
I put my hands to my cheeks, glancing around us to make sure there was no one listening. “Oh, do I?” I asked, feigning surprise. “No, no… I’m fine.”
He gave me a look as if to say, ‘you don’t need to play brave with me’. “Something happened in there, and I don’t know what it was, perhaps you two had a falling out? If so, Frost provides our employees with excellent dispute resolution services. Counselling, mediation, you name it. Would you like me to give you some more information about that?”
They can’t be that state of the art if you and Diane are still at each other’s throats, I thought. I shook my head. “It’s fine, really, it’s just a misunderstanding.”
He directed me a very concerned frown for a good five or ten seconds while he considered something. “Even so,” he said. “Look. How about you just go back upstairs and put your energy into those deadlines you mentioned earlier? I’ll go and grab one of those USBs from Sales and bring it up to you.”
My stomach dropped. That last thing I wanted was for the co-CEO to think I needed extra assistance and special treatment, especially on top of that nightmare lift ride. “No, no, Sean, that’s absolutely fine, I don’t need you to waste your time, it’s just been a really intense project and once it’s over, I’ll—”
“—Be assigned to another one, if I know my sister as well as I do,” he said, chuckling. “I do actually have a personal interest in the profitability of my own company, believe it or not, and Marketing plays an important role in that. If I can do a few things here and there to help, it's definitely not a waste of my time.” He put a hand on my arm. “Go on, off you go.” When that didn't work and I didn't look convinced, he smiled. “It's fine, Min, really. You’re actually doing me a favour. I enjoy helping out.” He gave my arm one last reassuring pat, and then turned and walked down the corridor towards the Sale
s offices.
I watched him disappear around a corner, waiting for his body language to change, or waiting him to throw me an angry glance or shake his head… but he didn’t do anything of the sort. He was striding like he was on his way to do something important, and not play assistant to a Marketing Lead. It was so confusing. Henry had fed me a series of vague stories about what a horrible person he was, so I felt like it didn't make sense. But maybe it did, maybe they really just didn't get along. His assistant just seemed so happy. That meant something, didn't it?
I turned back towards the lift, pressing the button and half-expecting the doors to slide open and reveal Gemma. Just to avoid any chance of that, I seriously considered taking the stairs. It was a good thing she wasn’t in there when I stepped into the lift again, because I wasn’t that fit and I didn’t really relish the idea of doing 32 floors in stilettos. I would have, though, and a hundred fucking times over, to avoid a repeat of what happened before.
I closed my eyes as the lift went up. God, how the fuck was I going to survive Sarah’s movie thing tonight? With Bree and Sarah going, I really didn’t like my chances of figuring out some way to get out of it. Bree might let me overrule her, but then I’d have to deal with those sad puppy dog eyes all night. And Sarah would never let up on me about bailing if I did.
If there were a lot of people, maybe Gemma and I could just… manage to not cross paths. Then I wouldn’t have to explain to her why I looked like this at work. Fuck, though, I really should apologise to her for putting her in that position. She didn’t deserve to be humiliated just because I had issues going on with my gender that I didn’t want anyone to know about.
As I stepped off the lift and walked through Marketing, something occurred to me. If there were a lot of people at Sarah’s place… well, Sarah didn’t seem like the type to go blabbing about stuff to people, so she probably didn’t tell them too much about me. That was a problem because they were going to want to know what my deal was; guys didn’t just go around being called ‘she’ by their friends, and girls didn’t look and act exactly like men unless there was something going on…
Under My Skin Page 39
