To be fair, this was exciting, though. Not cleaning, and not the technicalities of this job, but the place. Never would I have imagined coming here. It took me awhile for the realization to sink in, and I hadn’t even seen much of the interior yet, but I was in the Landseer Tower. Previously owned and operated by Thomas Landseer before his death six years ago, and now owned by his son, Asher Landseer, current head of the Landseer empire.
I knew nothing about Asher, save for what I heard before coming. I was to clean his office, and make it immaculate. Why me? No one would give me a good answer to that, except to say that it shouldn’t be an issue. Asher Landseer was in an important meeting and wouldn’t be around, so I had free reign to clean to my heart’s content and make everything perfect. The usual person who cleaned, some elderly woman, had requested the day off so she could go to her granddaughter’s dance recital.#p#分页标题#e#
Nervous already, my anxiety soared when I heard some of the strange things people said about my situation. I passed a couple of men at a soda machine who stared at me, then laughed, saying something along the lines of “I don’t envy her” when they thought I was too far away to hear them. I’d also read, mostly on tabloid covers and entertainment news articles, that Asher was eccentric and reclusive. What did that mean, though? I figured he probably just liked his alone time. It couldn’t be that bad, right? He was married, afterall.
Married, and beautiful beyond words. Not that this should have mattered for much of anything, especially not to me. But whenever I saw his picture, in passing somewhere, my heart jumped a little. A brief quickening of my pulse, an intimate little trill of some private thought singing through my head, and…
Back to work. I reached the office, pulled out the key the manager had given me, and unlocked the door. Stepping inside, I flicked the light switch on and closed the door behind me.
Everything was amazing. He had a desk in the back, like any other office, but behind it was a large, bay-styled window with a reading nook built into the wall. Beside that, cornered off into its own alcove, was a set of floor to ceiling bookcases. A glass wall and door separated the main office section from a private meeting area, and opposite that was a chaise with a small table beside it. The entire office was probably bigger than my apartment, and I used to think I had a pretty nice apartment.
I didn’t have time to admire the place, though. I needed to clean. I searched around for an outlet to plug the vacuum into, then checked for what I should or shouldn’t need to move beforehand. I would need to dust, but I’d do that after I wiped everything down first. God, this job was going to be so boring.
And, everything looked perfect anyways. I tried, I honestly tried, but I couldn’t find anything that looked like it really needed cleaning. Maintaining the atmosphere, I guessed. I couldn’t clean a mess that wasn’t there.
I should have just done that, should have finished cleaning and left, but I was curious. The bookcases called to me, like some siren of the sea from an epic poem. Just what kinds of books did Asher Landseer have? Probably typical business books, sets of legal dictionaries or how-to’s, or unopened and unread classics meant to impress some business associate into thinking he’d read this or that.
He had all those and more. I browsed through his collection of literature, enthralled. The business books weren’t so interesting, but he had a section with newer publications(some from bestselling authors and others from vague unknowns), older classics like Alice in Wonderland and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and everything in between.
My hand crept towards a copy of Dante’s Inferno. Leather bound, with a gold, gilt-stamped title on the cover and spine, and more gilt lining the edges, it looked like a book collector’s dream. I stared at it, rapt, letting my hand caress the cover, feeling the rough leather against my fingertips. The book had a crisp smell with a tinge of masculine warmth, like a man’s freshly worn leather jacket.
There was no possible way Asher Landseer had read this. Absolutely none.
Except when I opened it, it wasn’t stiff. And there were dogears on a few of the pages. I moved to the first, wanting to see what he’d found so interesting, and…
“Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straight forward pathway had been lost,” a calm, confident voice said from behind me.
I panicked, tossed the book back onto the bookshelf, and turned to face the unknown speaker. That would have been it, except I was confronted by Asher Landseer himself. He stared at me with his cool, steel blue eyes. He looked none too happy with me intruding on his private space, browsing through his bookcase. His pristine, pitch black suit without a wrinkle anywhere, his short-cropped hair, barely an inch in length, and his sharp, powerful jaw making him look unlike anything I ever imagined a businessman should look like. I briefly imagined him stepping out of a helicopter in a spy movie, playing the role of a debonaire CIA secret agent.