Rebuilding Harry Ch 02

A year later, Veronica walked into the office, as Jack was interviewing candidates to replace his recently-departed secretary, Susan, who had decided to give up her job to spend more time with the husband and children. He was happy for her, although he felt a twinge of jealousy that stuck with him for a while, as Susan's husband's recent promotion had meant they no longer needed the second income. With each candidate that came into his office that day, the feeling of guilt at having let his career stagnate the way it had deepened. As he was getting to the bottom of the list, after having found a few suitable candidates to choose from so that the mundane business of work could return as usual, the beauty walked in.

It was almost a miracle of nature the way she moved. She had thin features but very pronounced curves, and yet she was both businesslike and graceful as she strutted in on her high heels. Her face was heart-shaped, with slightly pouty lips, and her wavy hair fell about her head in almost comical glamour. Her blouse was done up to the top button, but the dark shadow of her bra gave her an added sexuality that might not have been matched were she showing more skin. And yet, as she walked, the heft of her breasts was unmistakable as each step gave them the tiniest jiggle. Her skirt was also modest and brazen at the same time, going down to her knees but promising a glimpse of something scandalous should she sit and cross her legs just so. She had glasses on with a slightly thick rim, and Harry's first impression was that she must have been putting on airs to seem smarter than she was, and yet her eyes, which did have a lucious smokiness to them, betrayed also a sharp mind. She didn't blink, staring much the way movie stars do when they're trying to look intense, and her mouth carried the slightest sultry grin. And, when her left hand went up to remove the glasses, Harry noticed an engagement ring. It made him smile inside, wondering if perhaps she treated her own man the way Trish had treated him, or if she was a devoted fiancé. In a way, it made him feel relieved -- if she were single there might be some tension, but there was a comfort in knowing she was taken, like balance being restored to the universe.

"Hello!" she said charmingly as she took his hand and shook it, after having tucked her glasses away.

"Hi yourself," Harry said. "You must be Veronica?"

"Smart man," she said, with the hint of teasing in her voice. Harry was impressed by the way her eyes locked on his. There was a confidence that he found reassuring -- many of the other applicants had been deferential and cowed, or their confidence was something almost manufactured. Veronica, on the other hand, seemed interested in engaging him. If her manner was like this at work, it would make for a great co-worker. She'd probably make a better impression for him to future clients.

"Please, won't you sit?" he asked, motioning for the chair as he went to the desk to grab her resumé from the pile. The pile itself was a standard job interview technique that the office forced down his throat -- part of the criteria was to see how an applicant would react to knowing that there was competition, and to have that fact hovering in the interview. They liked poise. Harry personally thought it was overrated, but he had to admit it had a telling effect upon many of the applicants, and showed which ones responded to stress worse than others. Veronica glanced at the pile, and then looked like she was holding back a big grin, but managed to keep the amusement only in her eyes.

"Thanks so much," she said. As Harry began to look through the resume, she suddenly became even more impressive. She was going through law school at the moment, but had completed a double major already in anthropology and political science, graduating with honours in both disciplines. She'd worked as an assistant to the vice president of a competing firm, and it sort of surprised him that she'd be willing to take a pay cut for a less prestigious position, so that was the first thing he asked about.

"Well, I guess, to begin with, this looks really good," he said, waving the resume. "Makes me wonder why you're going slumming. Is that what you're doing?"

"Maybe," she said, cocking an eyebrow, and then she laughed. "No, no, I don't see it that way. School's just very demanding, and while I love to work in offices I just couldn't handle the crazy hours at my last place. And, to be honest, the role wasn't fulfilling."

"Well," Harry said, "you do understand that there's always the possibility that I might choose to take on an extra project here or there."

She gave him an appraising look, and it was sobering. In an instant, she'd seen from his age and position that he hadn't been all that upwardly mobile, and her eyes said,

Who are you kidding?

But then she had a look of reevaluation, and asked, "Is there some interesting work starting to pour in?"

He grinned. "Smart girl," he said.

"Girl?!" her mouth dropped, her pouty lips emoting shock, before she pursed them playfully. "I might be a student, but I've been around the block a few times."

"Oh really?" he asked. "How are you with a computer?"

Immediately she leaned forward across his desk and reached out to turn the resume over to the next page. Even as his eyes drifted down to the bosom that almost brushed the desk even though her torso was well above it, he could sense that her eyes weren't leaving his. He coughed and quickly glanced at the portion she was pointing to, entitled "info-tech skills". She had all the right acronyms, databases and the software packages that they were using, as well as a dozen others.

"You want to see my portfolio?" she asked, her eyes boring into him as she kept her pose above his desk.

"That's okay, we usually do testing for that if we need it," he said, looking down.

She laughed, and sat back, straightening her outfit. "Harold, there's nothing about me that's faked."

He looked up at her eyes again, and it was amazing for him. This woman was so fun. There was a playfullness in everything she did, even in the way she said his name. With Trish, "Harold" sounded like a chore for her to say. With Veronica, it was entertainment.

"That may be the case," Harry said, chuckling self-consciously at this sudden feeling, "but we'd have to do the tests anyway. We do need to be certain about what's under the polish."

She shrugged. "I suppose that's fair, although I'd just love it if we could dispense with that part of the process."

"Why's that?" he asked, eyebrows raised.

"I hate to show off," she said. "Sometimes I've found that you can get further by letting others think they've got the better of you, skills-wise."

"Oh yeah," he said, "which is why you mention the double-major right at the top of the resume for people to see." He threw a thumb at the wall beside his desk, where his own undergrad and MBA were hanging, and he added, "By the time you leave law school you'll have more degrees than me. Yeah, I'm really sure I've got the step on you right about now."

She looked down and to the side with a wry grin, as though she was annoyed at having been sloppy.

"Hey, it's cool," Harry chucked. "I need a good co-worker. And trust me, if it were a guy with these sorts of credentials I'd hire him in a second too."

"So I have the job?" she said excitedly, her eyes lighting up.

"Not so fast," Harry laughed. "We still have the testing to conduct. And that'll be with someone who's a little less susceptible to your charm, if I know Mrs. Kowalski at all."

"Oh, come now," she said, standing up. With a slick motion she removed her glasses from her breast pocket and replaced them, and then took a step forward. "Nobody's immune to charm." She slinked towards him and then sat on the corner of his desk, leaning forward an putting a hand on his knee. "Couldn't we just... forget about the test?"

He couldn't wipe the dumb grin off his face. This thing was so surreal it was practically goofy. He gestured with a head tilt towards her ring finger. "Wouldn't that be a little inappropriate?"

"He's a shmuck," she said quickly, unphased. "He's going nowhere in life, and he doesn't feed my imagination. I mean, I don't know you, but this vibe I'm getting right now... I think we could be good for each other."

With that, Harry let out a guffaw and grabbed her hand and removed it from his knee. "You're funny. You still have to do the tests."

She laughed too, before going back to her seat. "That's fine. Do you have any other questions for me?"

"Yeah," Harry said. "Assuming all goes well, when's the earliest you can start?"

"Straight away," she said.

Harry frowned for a second, and then glanced at the flip calendar on his desk. "Isn't it exam time?"

"There's always something," she shrugged, and then grinned.

"Well, cool," he said, and then stood up to shake her hand. She took it, and gave a courteous and professional handshake. "Thanks very much," he said, before adding dryly, "It was an absolute pleasure."

"Oh, good!" she said, and before he took his hand back, she said, "By the way, you ought to know that I wasn't the only one getting interviewed here."

Harry laughed, before letting go of her grip to replace her resumé in the second pile. "Really? How did I do?"

"Better than you think," she said. "I get the feeling you're the modest type. That's unnecessary for certain people."

"Well, thank you," he said. "Good luck on those tests, hey? I think you'd be fun to work with."

"Thanks!" she said sweetly, before turning to walk for the door. Right when she reached it, she turned back briefly. "By the way, the ring's a fake."

"Huh?" he said, looking up.

"Yeah," she said, licking her lips. "It's a good way to keep the creeps away." With that, she gave a wink that stirred Harry inside, and then sauntered off to the main office for her testing. For more than just a passing moment, he watched her body, which seemed paradoxically both slim and voluptuous, before ringing the main office to send in the next candidate.

Veronica performed magnificently on all the aptitude tests, which was a relief for Harry because he hated the idea of either not hiring her or trying to find an excuse for having chosen a subpar candidate. He almost felt a little guilty at how detached he was with every successive applicant, but none of them had anything on her. A quick reference check showed that she did indeed have all the work experience that she'd claimed, and between that and her skills, it was no contest. It was such a pay decrease, though, that he almost felt like she was going to be doing him a favour by taking the job, but when he phoned and asked her if she wanted the job, she giggled excitedly and said she'd love to.

That night, when he got home, he lay down in the bed next to Trish, and fell asleep immediately, a dumb grin on his face.

From the moment Veronica started at work, it was as though a jolt of electricity had been induced into everything surrounding Harry at the office. He suddenly felt compelled to finish reports quickly, and enjoyed having her deliver paperwork for him so much that he strove to produce as much as he could. He started booking more meetings, reviewing figures more, and took on any extra project he could, even though he never asked Veronica to stay past her normal quitting hours. He liked having visitors, because he knew that the first impression they would have of him would be swayed by her -- her confidence, her charm, and the fact that, at the end of the day, she answered to him. He enjoyed making decisions outside of the office now and asking her advice on them, even though he read from her eyes early on that they both knew it was pointless because she was going to encourage him to go with his instinct anyway.

Veronica herself was a machine. By the end of the first week she had reorganized every file at her desk and in his office. By the end of the second week all the online information was cleaned up and archived, so thoroughly that the office's network administrator had to come by to make sure that nothing irresponsible was being done. She'd put in a half-dozen requisitions for things that Harry had meant to get around to but never did, placed plants all over that seemed to be on some sort of miracle food, and even had his calendar synchronized with two new Blackberries -- one for her and one for him -- so that at any given instance he might know about a new meeting she'd just booked for him. Of course, he had no idea how to work the damned thing, so she fixed it up that an updated schedule would pop up on the computer screen whenever he needed to know something, and the Blackberry just took messages from her when he was away from the desk.

The coffee she made was excellent, and the memos that she was sending on his behalf made him sound like a Rhodes scholar. When the latest email virus came around and every machine in the office was brought down, it took her only a half-hour to restore the data from the archives she'd made, and while chaos reigned in the rest of the company, with everything cancelled for the remainder of the day, Veronica and Harry had a quiet beer in his office and talked about a new guy she was seeing and her progress at law school.

Her demeanor towards him was nothing but professional, and it was invigorating. Before, he and the others in the company had grown so accustomed to each other that what had once been a pleasantly informal environment had turned into a drab and unexciting routine of hellos and mindless smalltalk. But Veronica would have none of that. She constantly referred to him as "sir" or "Mr. Stevens", completely straightfaced when others were around (although with the hint of a smile when they weren't), and it wasn't long before others were referring to him as Mr. Stevens too. In fact, most of the secretaries were keeping a close watch on her and had set about duplicating many of her improvements to Harry's work area in their own corners.

He found that even with the added work, things were running so efficiently that he could hit the company gym for a half-hour at lunch, and after a week of soreness suddenly he had even more energy than before. Veronica never joined him, although there were a couple of times when she was showing up when he was leaving, and he was glad they didn't work out together. She wore tight sweaters and very short shorts, and the thought of her getting into and out of them in the locker room drove him to distraction when he should have been more focused on work.

Life at home with Trish was the same as ever. She started spending a little more time around the house since that day with Jack, taking up photography as a hobby. He bought her a digital camera for her birthday, the kind that can hold thousands of pictures in the memory card and even record video, and she'd been using it frequently, on things in the house or in the garden. At first, it was an interesting change, but before long it wasn't as though things were any different. Even though she was in the house, she wasn't there, really.

Still, while there were many times during the last year since he learned of her infidelity that he wanted to spend as little time at home out of dread, suddenly he was looking forward to every new work day. Once he even caught himself leaving before Trish could give her ritualistic morning "Goodbye", and it made him smirk. He had been preoccupied that morning with the fact that the day marked Veronica's first three months of employ under him, and he was wondering about coming up with some sort of thank-you for her.

As it happened, he'd decided upon flowers, some daisies, and was carrying them into the office when Veronica greeted him with a slightly forlorn look.

"Bad news," she said, instead of the usual "Good morning, Mr. Stevens."

"What's up, Veronica?" he said, suddenly nervous. Things had been going so smoothly he hadn't even thought about a contingency plan in case something was to change.

"The company's being audited," she said. "Surprise inspection."

"Huh?" he asked. "We've already squared all our numbers with accounting. We're clean."

"I know, I know," she said. "But they had a power surge or something and all their computers are wiped out. The audit's on everything for the last two years - something about a really bad oversight - and so we have to re-submit everything for that time period. Reg phoned me at home and asked me to come in early to talk to him about it."

"

Reginald

phoned you?" Harry asked, raising an eyebrow. Reginald was the vice-president, and while it seemed that there was increased traffic around his desk in general since Veronica's arrival, Reginald

had

been stopping by a little more often than before, usually with report requests or whatnot. Harry hadn't thought on it before, but suddenly something seemed amiss.

"Yes,

that's

a whole other headache," she said. "I'm just in the process of putting the data together in a spreadsheet, and when that's done Reg has asked me to start working with the other secretaries to get their work in order as well."

"Reg asked you that?" Harry said, suddenly a little annoyed. She was technically a company employee and could be snatched up by anybody higher up than Harry on the food chain, but it still felt underhanded.

"Yeah..." she said. "I was toying with the idea of giving an excuse why I couldn't, but I thought I'd run it by you first."

"Right..." he said.

"Nice flowers," she said. "Who's birthday is it? I didn't have anything in your calendar."

"Oh," he said, flustered. "They're for you. Three months of good work."

"Thanks!" she said, brightening a little. "Let me put them in water." With a luscious smile and eyes that glistened a little behind her glasses, she got up, took the flowers, and began to walk towards the staff room. He watched her go, and suddenly he had this feeling that everything that had been going well was at risk of slipping away from him. He could tell where this was going. She'd been recruited to work as an assistant to the vice president at her last job, and that was going to happen again here. Could he blame Reg? Not really, but he could be pissed about it. He felt a buzz of jealousy in his stomach, and went into his office in the worst mood he'd been in for a long time.

Sitting down at the desk, he saw a checklist that Veronica had prepared for him - things that he'd need to do for his end of the audit. Veronica was big on checklists, and normally every one she threw at him was immaculately laid out, but a quick glance at some of the spelling errors showed that this one had obviously been hurried. He looked at it, and then noticed that his computer was on, the scheduler indicating that all his appointments were cancelled for the day. He looked back at the paper, and saw that at the bottom she wrote "I'll be staying late tonight. -V"

He sighed, and went over to the filing cabinet in the corner of his office and began to remove accounts for the last two years.

"I ordered Chinese," Veronica said as she walked into the office early that evening. Harry looked up from the desk that he'd been sitting at for most of the day, and it seemed like numbers were swirling all around his field of vision.

"Thanks," he said, focusing on her. The office had been closed for the day, and while most of the others were staying late also, she'd forgone her usual dressy wardrobe and was wearing her gym sneakers, black jeans and a loose sweater. She also had on her glasses and her hair up in a bun, which was consistent with how she normally did herself up, but it looked odd with the red pen she'd jammed behind her ear. He smiled.

"What?" she said, catching his grin. "Don't you dare make fun of the way I look, or you'll be getting decaf for the next week."