Undeniably Yours - Jerry Cole Page 0,2

any case, I’ve already found a replacement,” he said.

“Is this because we stopped sleeping together?”

Marcelo pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and shook his head as if he were being forced to talk to the dumbest man on the planet.

“That ended a long time ago,” he said.

“I know, but maybe you’re still upset about it. I remember you took some time off not long after that.”

“It was nearly a year after that, and I took time off because my sister died.” Marcelo showed the first signs of being upset.

“Oh yeah...then you should have more free time. You don’t need to resign to pursue your dreams!”

I realized instantly that I’d said the wrong thing. His face reminded me of the look my mother gave me when she caught me masturbating to a pin-up poster of my favorite boyband member. It was shock and horror, which I was used to by now. But there was something else; something more visceral and painful to see. Disgust. Revulsion.

“My God,” he whispered, turning on his heel and walking back into the room that he used as an office.

It was a closet really.

I mean I literally converted a utility closet into an office space for him. Thinking about it now, I probably should have given him a regular office but I hadn’t thought of it at the time. I just wanted his office to be adjoined to mine and the closet was the most obvious choice. It dawned on me that little slights like that may have built up over the years and finally led to the inevitable. He was leaving and moving on to greener pastures. Just like everybody else.

I threw myself down in my chair behind my desk and closed my eyes against the headache that was threatening to pound its way through my skull. I’d be damned if I let Marcelo just walk away like that. Not him. He wasn’t like everybody else. He was the only person who knew how to make my coffee not taste like boiling turpentine. The problem was, I may have left it too late.

I was repulsive to him already.

Chapter Two

She was a nightmare; my actual nightmare came to life. She was tall. Too tall to be considered elegant, and too skinny to be considered thin, and OLD. Too old to be considered at all, frankly. She had the kind of complexion that made all of her makeup look dusty and grey. It didn’t help that she was one of those women who favored darker colored lipsticks over the traditional pinks and reds. Hers was a deep rum raisin color, a dusty rum raisin.

“This is Helen Moraz,” Marcelo introduced the shrew to me with a big smile on his face. “Mrs. Moraz comes highly recommended, speaks five languages, and is a bit of a coffee connoisseur.”

The screw faced shrew gave a demure smile at the compliment, making her wrinkled old bat face light up like a lava lamp.

“Hello, Mrs. Moraz,” I said obediently, offering her my hand.

She grasped it firmly and I shuddered at the cold, soft flesh clothing her bones. I looked up at Marcelo and gave him the look that meant “please don’t leave me with this person”. I knew he knew what it meant because we’d used it many times before. Usually during business-related dinner parties or obnoxious fundraisers.

As if on cue, his fucking cell phone rang, and he pulled it out of his pocket.

“I’ll leave you two to get acquainted. I need to take this,” he said, stepping out of the room and out of earshot.

“So, Mrs. Moraz, where were you before this?”

“Tempe,” she said as if that explained everything.

“And what did you do there?”

“I was the personal secretary of the Chief Financial Officer,” she said.

“Really? Then why on earth would you want to come here?”

“The CFO died, and I figured it was time for a nice change of pace,” she said as if being my personal assistant was a lovely vacation from her years of REAL work in Tempe.

“Well, the winters here are going to be a major change compared to Arizona weather.”

“I wasn’t in Arizona.”

“But I thought you said you were in Tempe.”

“Yes, Tempe Industries.”

I nearly swallowed my tongue. Tempe Industries was a global player in electronic components manufacturing. If you owned any kind of gadget, there is a good chance that at least some of the components were made in a Tempe factory. They even thought about building a factory here a while back but decided that