Undersold

by B. B. Hamel

  I understood why Shane craved privacy. I understood why he was so obsessed and reclusive, why he stayed away from personal relationships. It was hard to be in the spotlight, but it was harder when you dragged someone else into it. I had done exactly that, I had dragged him into the spotlight again, and I was breaking inside because of it. I could handle the whispers, but I couldn’t handle the whispers about him. Everything we had gone through together up to this point clicked, and I understood why he’d want to go on a dating app and pretend to be someone else. At this moment, the only thing I wanted was to be invisible, but when you’re a person like Shane Green, or a part of his life, then you can never be invisible again. It’s like a permanent spotlight at all times. I had only been in this spotlight for less than an hour now, and already it was exhausting.

  I moved down the hallways back toward Shane’s office. Janice was sitting at her desk, and she smiled up at me as I approached. I had forgotten all about what she had seen, and suddenly I turned bright red as the memory came back.

  “Hi Amy,” she said.

  “Hi Janice. He told me to come see him when I got in.”

  “Yep, go on in, he’s expecting you.”

  “Thanks.” I was grateful that she didn’t tell people about what she saw, and I wished I could thank her for that, too.

  She smiled and nodded, then went back to her work. Of everyone involved, she had the right to ask questions after what she had seen, maybe even the right to act uncomfortable. Instead, she was professional and kind. I found myself liking her even more, and my awkwardness melted away as I pushed open Shane’s office door.

  I was surprised at what I found. Inside, sitting at the table I usually worked from, were Royal Brown and Shane, talking amiably. I didn’t expect to see Royal in here, and I stopped near the doorway, unsure why we would need a lawyer. Was Shane going to sue me because I had broken his privacy? I was suddenly afraid. I couldn’t imagine Shane would do that, but I did promise to follow his rules. Maybe this was because I had violated our agreement.

  When the door clicked shut behind me, they both noticed my presence and stopping talking. Royal stood, a big smile breaking out across his face.

  “Well hello there Miss Woodall, don’t be shy, come on in.” He gestured for me to join them.

  I had to force my legs to move. I glanced at Shane, and he gave me an apologetic look. I wished Royal wasn’t there so that I could ask him what was happening.

  “Hello, Mr. Brown,” I said as I walked over to join them.

  I shook hands with him. “Call me Royal, please. Make this awkward situation a little easier, I say.”

  He gestured for me to take a seat. After we sat, he leaned forward on his elbows.

  “Well Amy, first of all, don’t be alarmed. I can tell you’re confused.”

  I nodded, but couldn’t bring myself to answer.

  “Let me explain to you why I’m here. Since Shane is your boss, there are some ethical and legal issues regarding how exactly your relationship can be treated. Because that damn blog posted that picture of you guys, you have to sign some crap forms saying your relationship won’t interfere with your work, Shane here won’t show you preferential treatment, and other such garbage. Pretty standard legal and HR document, but it’s necessary if you guys are going to continue seeing each other.”

  Royal gestured toward a small stack of papers sitting in the center of the table.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. I still felt confused and uncertain. Why was he talking about our relationship?

  Royal looked at Shane. “I guess you didn’t tell her about this.”

  Shane shook his head. “Sorry, Amy. I should have told you. Royal thinks it’s in our best interest to file some paperwork with HR, basically proclaiming our relationship, and saying the company has no liability for any of it. And you won’t be able to sue the company for any reason from here on out.”

  It slowly dawned on me what was happening. Shane wasn’t breaking up with me, and he wasn’t suing me. He was making our relationship public. I didn’t know what to say.

  “It’s all pretty standard stuff, Amy,” Royal said.

  “So, you’re not....suing me? Or breaking up with me?” I said quietly, looking at Shane.

  He looked confused, then laughed. “No, not at all. I’m not suing you. I want this to happen between us, and the only way for it to continue is to sign these documents. I’m taking us public, more or less. At least as far as the company is concerned.”

  I could tell Royal felt a little uncomfortable, but the fear inside me broke. I felt relief wash across me in waves. Shane reached his hand out and I took it, feeling silly. Of course he wasn’t going to sue me. More than that, he wanted to be together still, even if it meant making our relationship public.

  “Well, what do you say?” Shane asked, looking into my eyes.

  “This is the most romantic contractual gesture I’ve ever seen,” I said quietly.

  Shane and Royal both laughed, and it broke the tension at the table.

  “That’s the spirit Amy, it’s a love contract. Very romantic, and all that. Very modern. I’ll get a copy framed for you two,” Royal said.

  “Let’s go over these so you understand what it is you’re signing,” Shane said.

  We walked through the contract. It was pretty simple. It defined our relationship was extra-professional romantic, and waived my right to sue the company. It wasn’t exactly making our relationship public, but it was at least making it official within Adstringo. I signed the forms immediately, not caring about lawsuits or liability. All I wanted was Shane.

  When the contracts were signed, we all stood and shook hands.

  “Great doing business with you as always, Amy,” Royal said. Shane walked with him to the door and they spoke quietly as I stayed behind at the table. Once Royal was gone, Shane came back to me, wrapped his arms around me, and we kissed. I felt his stubble and the fatigue in every ounce of his muscles, and I guessed he hadn’t slept well the night before.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine. I’m just relieved. I was terrified coming in this morning.”

  “You looked pretty deer in the headlights when you first walked in.” He laughed.

  “I thought you were going to sue me.”

  “I don’t think fucking me all week is grounds for a lawsuit.”

  I laughed. “Maybe not, but letting that asshole take our picture maybe is.”

  He moved away from me and looked serious. “Listen to me. I knew that was only a matter of time.”

  “I know, but I was stupid about it. Didn’t realize what was happening. I’m so sorry, Shane.” I could feel the guilt and doubt start to build again.

  He shook his head. “That wasn’t your fault. If we’re blaming anyone, of course it was mine. And I’d understand if you don’t want to be a part of this world. From now on, there are going to be paparazzi around much more often, and we’ll have to be extra careful.”

  “What do you mean, extra careful?”

  He sighed and looked away. I could still feel the touch linger like a ghost on my skin. He moved over to the windows and looked out over the city.

  “I know we just declared our relationship for the company, but I’m still not ready to give up on my privacy.”

  “I understand that.” I took a few steps closer.

  He shook his head. “I’m not sure it’s fair. But this is something that I need.”

  I came up behind him and wrapped my arms around him. He sighed and dipped his head.

  “This is what I want. I don’t care what we have to do. I only care about you,” I whispered into his strong back.

  He turned and wrapped his arms around me.

  “I don’t deserve someone like you, Amy. Anyone else would have run away by now.”

  I couldn’t believe he was saying that. Beautiful, rich billionaire Shane Green doesn’t deserve normal, boring Amy? I breathed his smell and thought about our bodies
wrapped together, sweating and moving, our skin fused in points of agonizing pleasure. I couldn’t let him go, no matter what.

  “Don’t say that. We both know I’m the plain one. Look, I’m in this. We’ll work out whatever we need to do,” I said.

  He kissed my lips. His mouth opened and his tongue ran against mine. He turned, and pushed me up against the glass. The contrast between the cold and smooth behind me and his strong warmth in front was disorienting at first. He kissed me hard, then moved his lips to my ear.

  “Don’t ever call yourself plain again, Amy Woodall. You’re far from plain. That’s an order.”

  His body pressed against mine, and I felt his need. I wanted to give him whatever he wanted, for as long as he wanted it.

  22.

  The details of our relationship didn’t change much. We still saw each other most days at work, but I didn’t linger as long as I used to in his office. People whispered, and some even asked questions, but after a week or two another new scandal broke, and the office gossip shifted away. Everyone more or less dropped it, though people still whispered, and Linda still asked way-too-personal questions from time to time.

  What changed was how we were able to meet. We always were at his house, and he never sent the car directly to my apartment. In order to keep the paparazzi away from my place, he had the car drop me off and pick me up at different spots within a block or so of my building. He always insisted on being in the car to make sure I was safe. It felt very spy-like, and it was fun at first, but quickly got frustrating. Since the paparazzi never knew where to wait, they had a hard time following me. That worked pretty well, and I never had to deal with the cameras hanging around outside my place. Shane said I was lucky, but I didn’t feel lucky when I had to hoof it three blocks in the cold to catch my ride.

  Coming in and out of his house was a different story. Even when we left from the back, there were still cameras everywhere. He had private parking in the alley behind his house, but the paparazzi would sometimes try to look over the fence. For the most part, that system kept us out of the blogs, but we were never able to go anywhere public together. That suited me just fine; we spent our nights in bed, and ate whatever Shane felt like cooking. I wished I could help in the kitchen, but my skills were limited to Ramen Noodles and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He liked the joke that I should write a college student cookbook, and fill it with two-ingredient dishes made from cheap stuff. I may not have been any good in the kitchen, but I worked to make up for it in other places.

  The biggest benefit of our relationship going public was being able to talk to Darcy about it. Almost every day I gushed about the details of everything, from Shane’s huge collection of antiques, to his amazing physique, to the small presents he kept buying for me. After a few days I could tell she was bored of it, and I understood why. Our relationship was pretty boring from the outside. We never went anywhere, and we never did anything but spend time together. He had a huge collection of movies, and had built a small home theater in the basement level of his townhouse. We spent hours down there going through all the classics, Citizen Kane to Gone with the Wind. Darcy was an amazing friend to listen to the same stories over and over, and I tried not to talk her ear off too much. I couldn’t help it though; the days flew by, and the nights did too, and all I could think about was Shane.

  During this time, I went to see my Dad as much as possible. Time with Shane dominated most days, but at least once a week I used Shane’s driver to take me out to the suburbs. He insisted that I used the driver instead of the train, and it was hard to argue with his stern, perfect face. It didn’t mesh well with my innate sense of self-security, taking an expensive car instead of public transportation, but I always gave in. My dad was doing pretty well, or at least that’s what his caregiver Jasmine said. I was worried for a long time that I wouldn’t be able to afford Jasmine anymore, but after I sold the app and started working for Adstringo, I was able to increase her hours. She took care of Dad full time, and that was a huge relief for everyone. Dad looked thin, and I couldn’t tell if that was because I hadn’t seen him as often as I wanted to, or if he really was losing weight. When I asked Jasmine, she told me that he was as comfortable as he could be, and he was eating like usual. I suspected Jasmine was downplaying his condition, but I didn’t want to argue and potentially upset him. Instead, we sat in front of his television every time I visited. Dad would lay sprawled out in a hospital bed, and we watched whatever sports he felt like watching. I mentioned Shane, but I didn’t go into details.

  We fell into an easy rhythm like that, and weeks went by. I visited my father, I worked all day, and I spent each night with Shane. Little by little, I moved more and more of my stuff into Shane’s house, and his room was starting to look almost as messy as my old apartment. I felt guilty about that, and tried to clean up after myself more. It was hard, though, when all he wanted to do was take my clothes off and throw them on the floor. As soon as whatever I was wearing hit the ground and his strong hands took my body, straightening up was all but forgotten.

  One afternoon, the comfortable, idyllic motion of our lives changed forever. It was a normal Wednesday afternoon; I had spent the night before at Shane’s and we dodged the paparazzi that morning in order to get to work together. My stomach still did flips every time we got into the car to ride to work. I still had trouble believing my good luck.

  Shane and I had a lunch meeting to go over some details about the app. We were having trouble programming the rating system for individual tutors, and found that single low-ratings were filtering out big chunks of our teachers. We were worried that a single bad review could remove a perfectly good tutor from rotations. I worked hard on it all morning, and about fifteen minutes before our meeting I had one of those lucky “Aha!” moments. The solution to our problem more or less presented itself to me, and I was beyond excited. I gathered up my things and walked quickly over to Shane’s office. I was excited to share my breakthrough with him, and it hadn’t occurred to me that he may be busy.

  The whispers and looks continued, but much less than the first week or two after the blog post. I couldn’t blame them; it was a huge piece of gossip. I hated it though, and found that most people avoided me for some reason. Linda went out of her way to be kind, along with a few other people involved in my project, but for the most part my coworkers pretended like I didn’t exist. Nobody was outright mean or rude, but there was a palpable shift in the way the office responded to me. Though my relationship with Shane was gone from the office rumor mill, the cold shoulders and awkwardness from most people stuck around. I felt like that was the biggest downside to everything.

  I made my way toward Shane’s office, and noticed Janice wasn’t at her desk. Shane’s office door was cracked open, which usually meant that he was alone in there, so I pushed the door open and looked inside.

  I stopped dead at what I saw. Janice was sitting on Shane’s desk, her legs crossed toward him. Shane was sitting in his chair, leaned back, and he was looking up at her with a big smile on his face. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Shane laughed, and Janice reached down to put her hand on his shoulder. She continued to talk quietly at him, and their bodies shifted toward each other slightly. Then, Shane reached his hand up and placed it on top of Janice’s hand, still on his shoulder. They were making eye contact, and there was a short moment of intense silence, palpable across the room.

  I didn’t make a sound, and neither of them noticed me in the doorway. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This wasn’t their normal interaction, or at least it wasn’t what I normally saw between them. It was intimate, a kind of intimacy I had never seen Shane share with anyone but me. I felt jealous almost immediately, but more than that, I felt confused. Janice was tall and beautiful, smart and kind. In a lot of ways, she was everything I wanted to be. Her self-assurance and easy manner made people feel at ease almost immediately around her, and I had seen her take control of a room simply by entering it and sp
eaking.

  Basically, she was the kind of person I always imagined Shane would fall in love with. Not some quiet, dorky computer nerd from the crappy suburbs, but beautiful, brilliant Janice. I had no clue why she was Shane’s personal assistant, and I always wondered why she wasn’t some high-powered executive at another company. Now it was starting to make sense to me. They clearly had a relationship, and it was one he never told me about. The fact that he never mentioned it made it seem all the more sinister.

  I felt my stomach sink and the stone of self-doubt in my chest harden. I took a step back out of his office as they laughed together at something else I couldn’t hear.

  I remembered the conversation I had with Linda my first week in the office. She had said there was a rumor about Janice and Shane. Was this the secret he had been hiding from me? Did he have some sort of relationship with Janice he wasn’t telling me about? I couldn’t imagine he was the kind of man who would lie about dating multiple women, but then again, he did pretend to be someone he wasn’t when we first met. He talked so much about trust, and yet there he was, flirting with his assistant.

  I couldn’t stay. It felt wrong to break in and speak during what was clearly a private moment, so I turned and left. I walked fast, my mind racing. I didn’t exactly know what my plan was, but I knew I needed to keep moving. Was that rumor Linda told me true? Why would he keep an ex-girlfriend around as his assistant? Back at my desk, I could feel myself close to hyperventilating. I felt dizzy and out of control. What were they doing now? How long had this been going on?

  I pushed back from my computer and gathered my things. I walked out toward the elevators, got on, and left the office. I couldn’t think straight, and didn’t want to. Let Shane and Janice have their moment. I was sick and tired of him lying to me, or at least of him not telling me the whole truth. Hadn’t I more than earned his trust by now? I’d done nothing but follow his rules and try to live up to his standards of privacy. I thought I was doing a good job, but what if he needed something more?