Undersold(45)

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 speaking.

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.