The Billionaire Game(10)
Instead I stood up and held out my wrists like a suspect being collared. “You got me, copper!”
Sarah’s lips thinned. “Please, Kate, try to be professional.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I could feel the eyes of the lobby on me—I probably shouldn’t have pulled that stunt with the fake handcuffs. When was I going to learn how far was too far to push a joke? I followed her, the HR flunkies hanging back a second before swooping in behind me, like security detail at the parade.
#
I sat down in the folding chair in Sarah’s office, which was really a glorified cubicle, since she only ranked about a head higher than me on the corporate totem pole. Peeling inspirational posters peered down at me from the walls, and the fluorescent light over her computer hissed and spat, blinking on and off so rapidly it looked like it might be in Morse code. Sarah sat down at the desk and nervously shuffled some papers, while the HR cronies took up positions flanking her like bodyguards. I waited for her to say something.
And waited.
And waited.
Damn, those pieces of paper were getting really thoroughly shuffled.
“Look,” I said when I couldn’t stand the suspense any longer—I am terrible at movies, don’t ever take me—“What is this about? Is it about that coffee spill on Dan from Accounting? Because first of all, that was an accident, and second of all he was harassing me and he had it coming—”
Sarah cut me off with a wave of her hand, and hemmed before finally beginning to speak.
“As you know, we regularly monitor company internet use—”
“What?” I blurted, too startled to keep from interrupting her. “I didn’t know that!”
Sarah heaved a sigh, and settled back into her chair, seeming more comfortable. Ah, the familiar old ground of having to explain something to me. “It was in your employment contract.”
“Oh. Right.” So sue me, I hadn’t read the employment contract. Yeah, yeah, I knew that wasn’t smart, but give me a break, the thing was as thick as seven Bibles and didn’t have half the human interest. I’d figured I could pick up most of it as I went along, and so far, I’d been right.
“As I was saying, we monitor company internet use, and, well. There’s no easy way to say this.” Sarah took a deep breath like she was about to plunge into a deep and roiling ocean. “Kate,” she said in the kind of portentous tone used by mystical prophets in cheesy movies with bad CGI, “we know.” She took another deep breath. “We know about the porn.”
What?
“Oh good,” I snarked, “I was worried I was going to have to explain the birds and the bees to you, and believe me, that is not a conversation I would be comfortable having with my boss.” Then something about her previous sentence jangled wrong in my brain.
Sarah said primly, and a touch frostily, “I was referring to a specific instance of pornography, or rather several specific instances, namely those that you have been viewing on your computer.”
“What?” I exclaimed indignantly. “I have never watched porn in my life!”
“Oh, no?” Sarah said, fingering one of the pieces of paper in front of her.
“No ma’am,” I said. “Cross my heart and hope to die. I read my porn, like a classy person.”
“Well, I’m afraid the evidence says otherwise,” Sarah said. She slapped several pieces of paper down in front of me. “What do you call this?”
“Uh, I call this ‘research,’” I said. “For my lingerie company? That I run on the side?”
Because that’s what it was. Sarah must have done her internet monitoring when I was working on my plus size line designs, because the pictures in front of me showed larger women of all races and a variety of weight distributions, each modeling sporty, frilly, or sexy underwear. Man, looking at all these brought it back. I could see now where I’d been making my mistake—I’d been trying to use the underwear to convey a look of slimness, when for this range I should have instead been emphasizing the curves. Oh, man, as soon as I got out of this meeting I was going to grab my design notebook and—
Oh right, this meeting. Where I still had to convince my superiors that even if I was wasting company time, I wasn’t doing it to look at porn. And that I definitely wouldn’t ever do it again, at least not in a way where they could catch me.
“I’m sorry, am I supposed to be getting off on this?” I said, trying to laugh it off. “Because there’s nothing sexy about an inaccurately sized shoulder strap.”
“They are scantily clad,” Sarah hissed in the shocked tone of voice most people would reserve for they are having a blood orgy and worshipping the devil while listening to Nickelback CDs.
“Yeah, scantily clad ladies,” I said. “Like, what, am I supposed to be imagining the dudes in these pictures?”
Sarah opened her mouth to say something, checked herself, glanced backwards at the silent HR golems for support, and then tried again. “Devlin Media Corp prides itself on being an open, supportive, and tolerant workplace. We do not discriminate based on race, class, gender, or…other things. Nonetheless, we cannot tolerate use of company time and resources for your own titillation. This has nothing to do with your…proclivities, or preferences, but—”