Jade Everett stared at herself in the mirror to judge the final results. She looked jaw-droppingly sexy.
She had just finished putting the final touches on her outfit for their company's Christmas 'Festivus' party which took place annually.
This party was an infamous holiday Bacchanalia that was put on by the company that she worked for: Dominus Publishing.
Their downtown Chicago offices were located inside of a finely appointed ten-story building that looked out over the Chicago River on the New East Side.
Jade had been working at Dominus for around six months as a private contractor. The company, which sold itself as a book publisher for the next generation of readers and writers, wanted to modernize the offices a bit and pull the old building into the 21st century, and so they had sought out an up-and-coming urban artist to do some thought-provoking paintings on various walls and murals throughout its aging walls.
Jade just so happened to be in the right place at the right time. The CEO and President of the company (and grandson of the founder) Malcolm Dominus had apparently read an article that had been done on Jade in a local art magazine that he'd randomly decided to browse one morning while sipping his Americano at a neighborhood coffee house. He loved the look of the art that was featured in the piece—particularly her various uses of famous literary works to inspire some of her more off-the-wall and futuristic designs. He was quite pulled in by some. Intrigued and yet, beguiled.
She'd received a call that very next day from one of the publishing company's representatives with an offer she couldn't refuse.
Dominus would agree to pay her one hundred thousand dollars in exchange for her yearlong artist-in-residency at their downtown offices. It was a fair amount of money for her level of experience and the up-and-coming-status she currently had within the industry. Jade was absolutely thrilled at the offer.
Over that time she'd be responsible for working with the publishing house's creative design team on a number of thought-provoking paintings that would span all the way from the ground floor foyer to the top floor conference rooms and executive offices.
It was an incredible opportunity and Jade truly loved the job. She was making more than she'd ever made from her passion and for the most part, as long as each new artwork was completed on time, she could make her own hours too. More than anything, she was finally doing what she wanted to do: to make her livelihood solely out of her own creativity.
During her first few months of work, Jade had mostly kept to herself. Most of the employees were a little older than her (she was 24) and her job was so different than anyone else who worked there, that she found she had little in common with her coworkers the few times she had joined them for afterhours libations and bitching.
Her third month in she had connected with another girl who worked in the marketing department. Danielle was only two years older and the two had very similar interests. They'd go to movies occasionally or out to the clubs when they were up for a little crazier fun. She'd met her in the lunch atrium one day when the two were grabbing something from the snack bar at the same time. It was good to have a friend in the office, though Jade probably wouldn't quite reveal all of her extra curricular activities to Danielle for fear of being judged.
Jade was the kind of girl who kept carefully cultivated secrets.
It was around six months in to the job when Danielle asked Jade if she'd be attending the company's upcoming Crazy Christmas Costume Party. They were sitting inside at the building's bottom floor sandwich shop one cool, December day while sharing a foot-long, chips, and a soda. Jade had no idea what she was talking about, and so Danielle began to animatedly explain the crazy end-of-the-year party where people were required to dress up in extravagant holiday-themed costumes.
Apparently Malcolm Dominus, the owner, had decided some years back to steal part of his second-favorite holiday, Halloween, and combine it with his first, which was Christmas. The 'Festivus' was so raucous that it had quickly become everyone's favorite event of the year. People talked about it like they talked about Christmas itself.
"Yeah it's so crazy, people dress up in the wildest and most creative costumes, they do a first, second, and third place costume contest with these huge rewards like a 'Caribbean Cruise' or 'Dinner for Two at Alinea', and the company brings in entertainers and there are servers walking around with some very expensive tray-passed food and Champagne—I'm tellin' ya, the alcohol alone at this thing makes it worth coming. They do not scrimp on the budget. You should totally come, you would have an amazing time." Danielle reasoned as she loudly crunched into a potato chip.
Jade was somewhat skeptical as she sat across from her friend in her paint-splattered overalls with her dark brown hair pulled up on the side into a convenient bun. She'd always despised company parties. They were awkward and it usually meant drinking with a bunch of older people that would invariably end up telling you lots of details about their life that you didn't actually care that much to hear about. No one cared what your kid did at karate that week, Kevin.
She wasn't convinced she'd be attending.
And then Danielle threw in this tidbit:
"And it's really cool too, Mr. Dominus always goes to the party as Santa Claus and he has started this tradition where for the last few hours of the party, he goes into this big Santa's Workshop set that they prop up and he sits on one of those mall Santa chairs with a couple of velvet-lined benches added to it; and employees are encouraged to go and sit with him and ask for whatever they want for around the office or like, something relating to their job."
"Whoa...wait, he really does that?" Jade's interest in the party had instantly shifted at the mention of this.
"Yeah, last year the marketing team asked for Cubs season tickets that we could use for various in-house sales contests within our department, and he totally went for it," Danielle said excitedly.
"Wow," Jade said again, though her mind was traveling down an entirely different path now.
"Ted Rodriguez from the editorial department got another week's paid vacation a couple of years ago. And I heard this other girl saying that he'd agreed to pay for the last few classes of her NYU postgrad—apparently she's finishing her MA in Children's Literature. He's basically like our real life boss being super charitable while he's dressed like Santa Claus just because he loves Christmas so much and has lots of disposable income. How fucking cool is that?" Danielle finished as she sucked the last drops of soda airily out of the plastic straw.
"That is really cool, actually," Jade agreed, as no less than forty-seven different mice began to sprint on the various metal wheels that turned with industrious thought inside of her conniving brain.
This new tidbit definitely changed everything.
Jade may have felt that a good majority of the people that worked at the publishing company were a bunch of bookish wet blankets, but she had an entirely different opinion of Malcolm Dominus.
She had met him finally two months into her job as she lay upside down and tethered over the outside railing of a grand staircase that emptied into the open-concept floor plan of the literary fiction department. She'd been working on the facial features of a large, shadowy creature of sorts. Blue and black and purple paints completed the impressionist image of the mysterious villain that spanned from the inner balcony one floor up and all the way down the side of the staircase bannister. The painting was monstrous and yet marvelously beautiful at the same time.
The angle made it so that she would lock herself into the side of the wall and then tilt herself upside down in order to see things from her very unique viewpoint while she painted.
She was wearing her trademarked overalls and a thin gray cotton tank top that rode up on her body as she painted. Her flat stomach could be seen from out of the sides of her outfit.
"You know, I've walked by this painting as it's progressed every day now for a week, and I feel like I see something different in it every single time," a deep, caramel voice drifted into Jade's airspace. She took her headphones out to look for who was talking to her. Most employees there usually just left her alone while she worked. She preferred it that way.
She found herself staring at a startlingly sexy, upside-down, black man with a finely trimmed beard, who was gazing admiringly up at her work.
She pulled herself up and lay sideways on the railing of the stairs so she could see him better.
"Oh...well I'll take that as a compliment," Jade said. She'd never seen this man before but she was definitely very happy she was seeing him now.
He looked like Idris Elba's doppelgänger. She'd even had to take a very long second to make sure that it WASN'T Idris Elba. He had thick, muscular legs and a similarly built upper-body that filled his fitted white oxford and similarly tailored blue slacks nicely. His shoes were a sharply polished pair of walnut wingtips. He looked good, she thought. It was rare for Jade to be taken aback by the physical looks of a man. She was usually the one to hold someone's attention in that department.
