by Anne Connor
“Dad thinks I need a change of pace, and I agree. After that last stint in rehab...I’d rather not talk about it.”
“You sure you’re okay to be involved in a club opening?”
I’m aware that she went to rehab, but I don’t know if it’s really serious. Lexi has a way of making her life into a mess, and then just wanting to check out and take a break for a while, and the best way for her to do that is to have her dad pay for a stint in rehab. I find it really insulting to people with actual problems who want help, but then again, I try to not judge. It’s just hard when it’s the woman who’s put you through the ringer so many times.
“Yeah, it’s fine. Dad is just paranoid. He thinks I need to take a break from all the partying and shit, so I have this gig in PR at this non-profit. It’s actually affiliated with the department of health here in New York. We do a lot of good work, Ryan, which you’d know if you ever actually called me.”
“Guilt won’t work on me, Lexi. But I’ll do it. Tentatively. Out of the goodness of my heart. After my attorney’s had a chance to go over the contract.”
“I’ll have the attorneys for the club send it over.”
7
Sara
The office is truly impressive. All of the walls are glass, with steel supports and black and white photos of New York hanging from wire affixed to the high, clear walls. Kayla brings me into a conference room adjacent to her office. The other side of the conference room shares a wall with Ryan’s office, where he’s on the phone, looking sexy as all hell, clearly on an important call.
I wonder what it’s like to be him. For this all to be permanent. Real life. Because as of right now, as an intern, everything is all very temporary for me.
“Okay.” Kayla hits the lights and connects her laptop to a cord in the middle of the conference room table. There’s a stack of books off to one side. They look like library books, all tattered and worn, old, with the covers and spines becoming unglued from the pages inside. “Ryan’s been kicking this idea around for a while, and he’s wanted to try and assign it to a few other interns, but to be perfectly honest, none of them has had your aptitude.”
“Oh! That’s so nice! I mean, it’s not nice about the other interns. I mean that’s nice of you to say about me.”
“It’s the absolute truth. Most of the interns here think this is an opportunity to goof off. I think this they forget this is an actual place of business.”
“I won’t forget. The work you guys do here is amazing.” I try not to pile it on too much, but I completely mean it. I know I kind of blew the interview, even though it was totally inadvertent, and I still feel like I have to prove that I want to be here. “I’ve become somewhat of a fangirl since I heard about you guys. I think I’ve listened to about ten or eleven episodes since I interviewed here a week ago.”
“Then you’ve shown greater initiative in the past week, before you ever started officially working here, than most of the interns have in their whole tenure with the company.”
“I don’t mean any disrespect, but why do you think it is that a lot of the interns have been…”
“Disappointing? Subpar? Fucking awful?” Kayla smiles as she sits down across from me at the conference table.
“Well...yeah,” I respond meekly.
“Ryan is the best at what he does. Hands down. And I have a lot of love and respect for the man. But he has a major blind spot when it comes to women. I’m not saying all of the interns have be all that bad.” She clicks a few things on the laptop and a few spreadsheets come up. “Just most of them.”
“Ohhh...gotcha.”
“Ryan hand-picks everyone who works here. And he has his reasons. The group of interns we have currently is excellent. Including you. Which is why he was so eager to have you tackle this project, given your education and background.”
“I’m very eager to start!”
“You are doing this internship for college credit in addition to the stipend, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“That’s a first. In fact, a lot of the interns who come through our doors aren’t really formally students anymore. But it is genuinely an internship because education is our first priority,” Kayla explains.
“That’s part of what I like about you guys so much.”
Between the call-in show and everything else that Ryan does, isn’t true, and the more I’ve learned over the past week, the more I realize that Dirty After Dark actually is a really good fit for me. In addition to doing all sorts of promotions and advertising for different brands - which is how he became filthy rich - he also is a huge proponent of sex education reform. He even appeared in front of Congress about two years ago to lobby for more comprehensive sex education. He’s an advocate for LGBT rights, and he’s a huge player in the charity community both here in LA and in New York.
“Sara, you can stop trying to prove yourself. You have the position. You are very impressive. And I’m thrilled that Ryan’s selected someone who seems to know their ass from their elbow.”
I wasn’t sure if I would feel comfortable in a work environment where people are so very free with their language, but I am. It doesn’t feel awkward. I’m still a little concerned about how I’ll feel if and when Ryan starts asking me all kind of personal questions again, but when I think back to the interview, I realize that I actually sort of loved it in spite of myself, in spite of everything I assumed about myself.
“That’s me,” I respond. “I’m a girl who knows her ass from her elbow. I might not know the difference between a vibrator and a dildo, but I’m a quick learner.”
Kayla shakes her head and laughs. I love how she does her makeup. It’s in a retro pinup style, totally opposite from me. I usually just wear a little bit of lipgloss and mascara and I’m good to go. I wonder whether Ryan would prefer a more made-up look for me.
“So, let’s review what you’ll actually be doing in this internship. In addition to helping out with the day to day production of the show, we would like you to devote a lot of your time to creating segments devoted to how sex education has evolved over the past half decade or so. Ryan’s doing this series of specialized pieces, and this is one that he’s had on the back burner. It was only when you came along that he found a person up for the assignment.” She pulls up a spreadsheet on her computer and the projector on the table throws its image against a white screen against the wall. “This is a list of sources I’ve found. You can use this as a starting off point. You can use as many of these as you like, or none of them, or all of them. We want you to make this your own project.”
“Wow,” I say, peering at the spreadsheet on the screen. “Textbook from the 60s? Ladies magazines from the 80s? This is going to be fun!”
“Good. I’m glad. One of the other projects we did was how to take the best sexy selfies and somehow an intern came unprepared for that episode. So you have a lot to work with here.”
I glance over a few more of the titles that Kayla’s designated for me. There’s several outdated biology and anatomy textbooks. It’s almost like this project has been tailor-made for me.
“Thank you so much, Kayla!”
“I’ll let you get working.” Kayla disconnects her computer and flips the lights on, leaving behind a printout of the spreadsheet with all the titles of the books. “You can feel free to hang out in here, or bring your work to your desk. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”
She smiles and leaves me to it. I start to peruse the list of publications, and there’s even more great stuff here than I thought. I grab the books over on the other side of the table and put them in front of me, and start dividing Kayla’s reading list by time period, and then further by type: medical, biology or health textbook; popular reading materials like women’s and men’s health and beauty magazines; and then things that seem to be public advisories and service announcements.
There’s a lot to work with, and by the time I look up to check the time on my phone, it’s almost lun
ch time. My stomach grumbles a bit and I see Ryan stride confidently over to the conference room.
He raps twice on the door and pokes his head in
“Lunch?” Flashing his signature smile, he shifts into the conference room and sits down at the table across from me, where I have spread out several sheets of paper and the books I’ve started to look at. The project is starting to take shape in my mind, but I haven’t eaten since early this morning.
“Do you take all of your interns out to lunch on their first day?” I ask, putting my pen down.
“As a matter of fact, I do. Only the beautiful ones, though.”
My stomach tumbles inside my core, and I know he’s said this to every girl who comes to his office, but I can’t help it.
“So which is it? Only the beautiful ones, or all of them?”
“All of my interns are beautiful.”
“You say that to all of them, don’t you, sir?”
“I like the way you call me sir,” he says cooly. “And no, I don’t say it to all of them.”
“So how do you decide?”
“I only say it to the ones who are beautiful on the inside, too.”
Swoon-worthy, and he’s saying it to me.
“Okay,” I say, standing up. “You’ve convinced me. And you’re the boss, anyway. Don’t I have to do what you say?”
“Absolutely not.” He holds the door for me as we make our way out of the conference room. “But if you want to, I can have you doing exactly what I want.” His whisper sends a chill zipping straight down my spine, spearing me between the legs.
I clear my throat and straighten my back up as we go over to my cubicle. A few of the other employees at Dirty After Dark are at their own cubicles doing research on their computers, or eating salad in between talking with their colleagues.
“What’s good to eat around here?” I grab my rain coat, even though it’s a beautiful day outside today.
“You tell me,” he says, “you young people know all the hip and happening spots around town.”
“Hardly,” I reply. Walking through the reception area toward the elevators, I feel his presence around me. He really is larger than life, with a voice to match - a face made for billboards, and a voice made for the sweet, sweet sounds coming out of your speakers.
“I thought you were a native of the city.” He leans back against the walls by the elevators, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his tight jeans. He is sexy on ads at bus stops, but so much hotter in person. Two dimensions don’t do him justice - he’s an all-around full package when it comes to looks.
Chiseled jaw with a peppering of a facial hair, as though he doesn’t want a full beard, but can’t be bothered to shave. Deep and stormy eyes that scream mystery, grey and swimming and piercing with their intensity. I imagine he looks at everyone like this, but the way he’s leaning against that wall is making me want to beg him to throw me against it and put my hands over my head.
Teach me a thing or two about getting dirty.
“I am from here,” I say, nodding and hitching my purse squarely onto my shoulder. “But I’m not much of an adventurous eater. I mostly have pre-made salads from the grocery store when I’m not eating in the dining hall.”
“Ah, yes,” he says as our elevator dings. “The dining hall. Forgive me, I almost forgot you’re still a student. We have interns of all ages come through our doors. You don’t seem like you’re in college. You’re so driven, and you have so much purpose. Most people your age don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”
The doors open and we step inside, that breathtaking view of the city greeting us. This is a gorgeous view, and having it be the backdrop for Ryan is just perfect.
“I kind of had to get it all figured out,” I say as the elevator zips us down to the first floor. I don’t want to admit that I’m patching together an income on a combination of grants, loans, scholarships and this internship, so I decide to leave that part out. “Just really want to get good grades, is all. What about you? You’re from New York, right?”
“Yep, New York, born and bred.” We step outside into the warm California afternoon sunshine. “It’s nothing like here. I like it better out here. People are more laid back.”
“In Los Angeles?” I smirk and follow Ryan as he starts down the palm tree-studded sidewalk. “You don’t find people in LA to be, I don’t know, a little bit obsessed with themselves? Self-involved?”
“Oh, yeah, definitely,” he says, reaching over his shoulder to scratch an itch. Gosh, the way his muscles work under his shirt...his arms are ripped, pure tanned muscle, smooth and firm. My stomach churns into a knot when I see him shoot a quick glance over to me as he looks over to check if there are any cars coming. We cross the street and I steady myself, following him to a ramp leading to an underground parking lot. “The people in New York are obsessed with themselves in a different way. Here, everyone focuses on buying a certain look, you know? Back east, everyone wants to buy prestige. It’s just a different kind of one-upmanship.”
“So what made you decide to come out to California? Was it something you heard in a song that beckoned you?”
“Not exactly.”
The parking lot is full of expensive cars, foreign and domestic, some that I recognize and others that I’ve never even seen in advertisements. Ryan fishes his keys out of his pocket and clicks the fob, setting his car off with a beep.
I see him walk over to the driver’s side of a gorgeous, sharp, solid black car that I recognize as a Lamborghini. I don’t know how much something like this costs, but I know it must be a fortune.
Suddenly concerned that I might have dirt on my shoes, I look down and cautiously glance at my feet, careful to not let him see. I don’t want him to think I’ve stepped in anything.
“So you never told me where you wanted to go for lunch.” Ryan comes around to the passenger’s side of the vehicle and opens the door for me before jogging back around to his side, around the front of the car. He looks born to do this, opening the door for a girl getting into his car, except the girl should have black stilettos on the end of her thin, smooth and perfectly long legs.
“I don’t know,” I say with a shrug, trying to keep it cool. I pretend I know where are the hip restaurants are, what they’re called, as though by wishful thinking I’ll be able to come up with a place that will impress the boss. Oh, yes, what about that new place that has the oysters and champagne? What was it called again? I can’t remember, I’m so silly. “Subway?”
“I could do Subway,” he says, backing out of the parking space. “But I had that for lunch yesterday. Why don’t I take you someplace a little bit more festive to celebrate your first day at the office? Do you like Mediterranean?”
My stomach grumbles a bit and I press my hand over it to disguise the sound. If we were in my car, I would have turned up the radio a little to drown it out.
“That sounds awesome!” I say. “I love Mediterranean.”
“Okay. Good.” Ryan sneaks a glance over at me and squints his eyes against the sun. The temperature inside the car is perfect, and it smells nice and new, like musky leather and whatever manly cologne Ryan as on. When he scrunches up his face against the bright sky, he looks even cuter than he did a few moments ago. He smiles and adjusts his visor, sliding his other hand along the steering wheel. “You’re going to like it. And like it or not, I still have more questions for you.”
I look out the window at the scenery. There’s some traffic, but I don’t mind being stuck here with Ryan. “Questions for me? I thought you were the one who answers the questions, not the one who asks them.”
“Good point,” he chuckles. “So you ask, and I’ll answer.”
There’s so much that I don’t know about him, of course. I read up on him after meeting him, but I’m not sure what to ask. I don’t know if I should ask him one of his dirty, personal questions, like the ones he asked me on my interview, so I go with something a little bit more light. It’s not lik
e I’d have the gumption to ask him a dirty question anyway.
“Okay. I’ve got one. Chocolate or vanilla ice cream?”
“Classic question. I thought you were going to ask if I wear boxers or briefs, but this one is better.” He taps his fingers on the steering wheel, beating a rhythm into my stomach that sends warmth lower and makes me shift in my seat. I train my eyes forward to avoid getting too far in over my head around him. “Vanilla. It’s great on it’s own, plus it’s so versatile. You can do anything with it. It goes with anything. You want sprinkles, you can do sprinkles. You want hot fudge, go ahead and put that on there too.”
“You can do that with chocolate, sir,” I say. The way the words come out of my mouth sounds a little bit strange, even to me. My voice is a little bit deeper, a little darker, smoothed out around the edges when I say it, especially when the word sir forms on my lips and comes out with a tempting little lilt at the end. It seems that I’m learning how to get dirty already.
Ryan laughs again. “You’re right, but I like vanilla because of its simplicity.”
“I understand,” I say.
The car slows down and rolls to a stop, and Ryan cuts the engine, leaning over me slightly to glimpse the restaurant we’ve stopped in front of. His proximity to me makes the air between us feel electric.
“This is us.” He slips the key from the ignition and we get out of the car. There’s outdoor seating at the restaurant, and I catch a few young women in oversized sunglasses peering at Ryan over their salad and martini lunches.
The outside seating area is flanked by a topiary wall of manicured bushes around its exterior, with low canopies of palm tree branches and strings of twinkling Christmas lights dotted throughout. There’s a man outside in a sharp black suit as though he’s waiting just for us, and Ryan hands him the keys to his car, clapping him on the back.
We step past the awning and through the doors into the restaurant, where we’re greeted by a gorgeous, glamorous young hostess. Behind her to the left is a full bar with the rich and beautiful of LA bumping elbows and smiling.
