Free The Plan by Qwen Salsbury Page A

in-room coffee pot, and I consider brewing a practice pot, but I don’t want my whole room to reek of it.
    I bring my cell into the bathroom because I just have a feeling.
    The psychic network needs to recruit me because about three-point-five minutes into my well-deserved bath, he calls.
    “Hello.” I hold still, trying not to slosh water. I have suddenly become conscious about the drawbacks of being in the tub.
    Tub means nude.
    “Why would you take the second quarter P&L with you?”
    “I didn’t, sir. It’s in your case, behind the personnel lists.”
    “If I had it, I wouldn’t be calling you.”
    “Everything is in alpha order in your case. It’s been in there all evening.”
    “I need it.”
    “Fine. I will be there in under ten minutes.”
    “That is an especially long time to walk across the hall. No matter. It is not here.”
    “I will look through my things and call you back, sir.”
    “I will wait.”
    “Oh, surely you have better things to do than listen to me look for papers. I will call you back in a few minutes.”
    “Are you unable to interpret certain social cues, Ms. Baker? It should be obvious to anyone that I am irritated, and yet you persist.”
    Sigh. I look at my bubbles. So long bubbles.
    I learned this on the day I took this position, didn’t I? Do what he wants when he wants it even if it doesn’t make sense.
    “Of course, Mr. Canon,” I acquiesce…
    …and then stand right the fuck up in the bath, water sloshing and splashing and then gurgling loudly when I hold the receiver down near the drain. With a metallic thump, I flip the lever so the water starts to go down.
    I pinch the phone between my ear and shoulder while I dry off. The terry is soft, but it still rustles against me. I might’ve made sure it brushed across the phone a couple of times, too.
    “Ms. Baker, um, I will check here again. I will call back if I find it.”
    “As you wish, sir. I will finish looking here, and then, if need be, come to your room,” I say, and smile what is probably a very wicked smile before adding, “as soon as I get dressed.”
    I throw on the first thing I find and get myself into his room almost immediately.
    The file is there. Slipped down in his case. It actually is hard to see, and I’m a bit panicked as I first begin to look.
    Not sure what he expected me to show up in when I went to his room, but I don’t think it was pajama pants and a tank. He’s still in his slacks and dress shirt. I think he might sleep in them.
    Hell, he may not require sleep. The advances of cyborg technology and all that.

Day of Employment:
376
    4:45 a.m.
* Bedspread : Back on bed.
* Coffee : Set to brew in one hour.
* Clothes : Yoga pants and Mr. Bubbles T-shirt.
* Location : Hotel fitness center.
    I ’M W ONDERING W HAT cosmic missteps I’ve taken to now find myself perpetually awake before God.
    I have committed myself to making personal progress. Hitting the gym early enough to be done and leave it before the sun cracks over the horizon tests my resolve.
    Further, the object of my resolution, the point of it, was to get Canon to notice me. That boost of confidence that puts a spring in one’s step. The positive aura that translates as sex appeal. That is what I was going for.
    It’s all for naught now. Reminding myself that I was merely trying to garner his attention for motivational purposes—that it would be really sick to otherwise hitch my star to such a dysfunctional wagon—is getting harder to reconcile when the alarm goes off.
    How did it come to this? To this point of a desperate, pitiful, embarrassing type of thing you would only admit to yourself and the last amber drops echoing in a bottle of what used to be Jack?
    Memory blocks rearrange and stack as I recall my initial time at the company, time when I was centered and the existence of one Alaric Canon was comfortably part of the vast unknown. Surely I was not so transfixed immediately. Surely not…
    Day of Employment: 1