Chapter 2: Chapter 2
Anita Rhodes knew immediately who the man in the expensive suit in the corner of the cafeteria was. Everybody at Marshall Capital knew exactly who Kenneth Marshall was. Not only was he the name and the face of the company, but he liked to walk around the place. Anita had friends in other companies that had never once seen one of their directors or owners in ten years or more. Some of them even worked in places smaller than Marshall Capital.
She felt she was extraordinarily lucky to work in a place where the founder of the company mingled so freely with his workers.
Still, it was odd to see him down in the cafeteria sitting alone, and with body language that did not welcome anybody to take one of the other seats at his small table. Usually when he went down to the cafeteria, it was at lunch time, and he'd mingle freely, often picking a table to join. She'd never seen him downstairs for breakfast before, or dining solo.
Of course, she was very rarely down in the cafeteria for breakfast, either. She simply couldn't afford it, even though her Marshall Capital ID gave her a nice discount on a meal. Usually, she packed some fruit and yogurt for breakfast, and something quick and cheap for lunch. But that morning her alarm hadn't gone off. The frayed power cord hadn't charged her phone and it had died overnight. So she hadn't had time to make a quick dash through the market for a thirty-cent orange and a cup of off-brand yogurt. Plus, she had a meeting with Kenneth Marshall himself at ten. She knew she couldn't skip breakfast. She was going to be part of the team demonstrating some work she was really excited about. She simply couldn't afford to be distracted by hunger, or worse yet, have her stomach growling, while she and the team were trying to impress Marshall.
The fact was that the new scoring algorithms her team had developed and coded were actually pretty daring, and Anita knew that Marshall liked daring. After all, he'd built his company by staking his fortune on bold investments in big ideas. She knew, just by reading between the lines in interviews he'd given that he was sure the company was playing it way too safe. What her team was offering was a better, and more liberal, scoring system to decide which proposals the company should invest in. Anita didn't think they'd really get any buy-in from Marshall, though, if they sold it as a slightly better, slightly safer program than the one that existed already.
With that in mind, Anita took advantage of Marshall's springboard directive - everybody on the professional staff was required to put at least 5% of their time into finding new and innovative ways to expand on their work. Her job was to find ways to convert subjective observations of a proposal into numbers that the algorithms could use. She did that, but then she went into the archives of all of the projects that the existing scoring scheme had rejected over the past three years. As the team was refining their code, Anita scored those rejected proposals and ran them through the new scheme.
What she saw astounded her. The new scoring system and algorithms were flexible in how much risk they were willing to tolerate for different rates of return. Anita realized that she could play around with the criteria and give the system some really big balls. She found a combination of acceptance criteria that would have accepted 13% of the proposals the existing system had rejected. About half of those proposals had been picked up by Marshall's competitors. When she looked at how those investments had panned out, she saw that some of the investments failed, but most had turned out to be profitable. Two billion dollars in three years profitable. And those competitors were nowhere near as good at shepherding start-ups to profitability as Marshall Capital was. When Anita factored in the accepted wisdom in the industry that Marshall brought in 8% more profit on investments than their competitors did, she came up with a magic number that she had already shared with the team and with her boss, a magic number that she was dying to tell Kenneth Marshall.
Two billion, one hundred and seventy-five million, three hundred and nineteen thousand, four hundred and twelve dollars. If her team's scoring algorithm had been in place over the previous three years, the net gain by investing in proposals that the existing scheme had rejected would have been $2,175,319,412.
By 9:45, Anita was bouncing in her seat. Her slides were in the deck. She had seven of them on her improved method of actually putting the proposal into numbers, and then three on the analysis she'd done which led up to her magic number. At 9:46, Anita's boss, Sharon Woolever, walked up to her desk.
"I need you to hop over to Ardingham and take some notes."
"What?" Anita asked. The Ardingham proposal was just about wrapped up. It had already been scored and accepted, and now was in the final negotiations before the contracts were signed and the first check was written. Her team's involvement with Ardingham had ended at least seven weeks earlier.
"There's a meeting going on over there. They need minutes taken, and I'm sending you."
Anita couldn't believe what she was hearing. They needed her to take minutes for a meeting that had nothing at all to do with her job?
"But, Marshall's going to be here in a little over ten minutes," Anita protested. "We've got our presentation all ready to roll, including my parts. We're all rehearsed and have all the duties divvied up already."
"Peter will handle your parts," Woolever said. "Now, the meeting at Ardingham starts at 10:30, and you don't have a car. So I imagine you need to get to the bus stop right now if you're going to make it?"
"Peter's bright, but if Marshall has any questions on my comparison analysis-"
"Go."
Anita could tell by the tone of the Woolever's voice that arguing would get her precisely nowhere. She'd just been sent off on some pointless task to cut her out of the meeting with Marshall, probably so her boss or somebody else on the team could get credit for her contributions. She wondered if Woolever herself was going to drop the magic number.
"Alright," Anita said, grabbing her coat. "Do you need a copy of the minutes?"
"Of course not," Woolever said. "Our part's been done for quite a while now."
Anita knew that just laying out the truth of what was going on, out loud and in plain English, to her boss would be an extremely career limiting move, so she bit the comment back and walked out of the building.
By the time she got across town to Ardingham's offices, she had her professional face and demeanor back on. She approached the receptionists' desk and told them about the appointment.
"I'm sorry, we don't see you on the list of attendees for today's meeting, Anita."
"I know. I was a last-minute addition, I think to substitute for somebody else. I had to rush over." She was pleased to see that the receptionist still remembered her.
"Nobody is missing. Looks like everybody that was in on the last several meetings is along, including Mr. Levine, who has been handling the minutes."
Anita felt a surge of temper threaten to burst out of her, but she realized she was dealing with somebody just doing their job, and uninvolved with Woolever's games. "Thank you," she said, politely. "I apologize for the mix-up on our end."
"No problem at all. Sorry you had to come all the way over on such a rotten day."
Anita nodded as she buttoned her coat back up and put her hat back on. She fumed while waiting in the rain and wind for the bus to bring her back to work. It was one thing for Woolever to undercut her the way she had, but to send her out into a bitter autumn rainstorm to do it was beyond acceptable. If it weren't for the fact that unemployment in the city was insanely high, and that there were very precious few jobs out there that would actually use her skills, Anita knew that she would have just taken the bus home and just never gone back to Marshall.
In so many ways, Marshall Capital was a great company to work for, but Woolever was one of the most unpleasant people Anita had ever dealt with in her life. The woman was an insufferable terror to Anita and to the one other woman on the team, but she was the picture of grace and professionalism whenever one of the men on the team was present. Woolever had been a great boss for Anita's first year, but then showed her true colors. The first hint that things were amiss was when Anita got her first performance review. Her ratings were all good - above average across the board, nice commentary with the usual number of places for improvement - but no raise. What Woolever said, but never put on paper, was that she felt Anita still needed more time as a probationary employee so was not yet eligible to move into her full pay grade. When Anita simply accepted that without argument, it seemed it opened the door for Woolever, and every day there was some fresh insult, and every so often, some pointed hint that Woolever had a lot of pull around HR. Four years in the job, and Anita's performance still looked great on paper, but her pay was only half of what it really should have been. There were many times when she did consider just walking off the job, grabbing whatever work she could get to keep the bills paid until she got back into a good analyst job. But with the university in town, there were always more bright young kids with degrees than jobs available for them. That included waiting tables, tending bar, and other jobs like that. It more of a reality than a joke in town that you needed a Masters to flip burgers and a Doctorate to serve coffee.
And with each month that Anita put up with her job at Marshall, her savings slid away and her debt built up to where she could no longer afford to just up and move somewhere else. She'd show up in a new town beyond broke, and the thought of trying to land a solid professional job while homeless sounded utterly foolish.
Moving back home was an idea that she never once contemplated. Anita's mother on her best day was worse than Woolever on her worst. It took her a while, but Anita realized that part of why her relationship with Woolever was so messed up was that she had naturally started trying to appease her, the same way she'd learned to appease her mother. She'd probably been doing it long before she noticed how cruel her boss was. In fact, Woolever had probably noticed that in Anita as early as the job interview - the mannerisms and gestures, the body language of somebody who was used to tolerating abuse.
When Anita got back to the office, she just went to her desk and started working. Peter came by, positively glowing at how well the meeting with Marshall had gone. He thanked her for all the work she'd done on the project, and the great notes she'd left for her slides in the presentation. When he said that Anita wondered if some part of her had predicted that she'd be excluded from the meeting, if she'd made sure she left good notes so her coworkers could still look good without her. Anita had done enough things like that to protect her siblings growing up, always making sure that no matter what was going on with her, her siblings were taken care of.
"He sounded interested in the proposal, but I don't know if we quite sold him on it," Peter said.
"Really? The magic number didn't sell it?"
"Boss cut it at the last minute. She said our idea will sell itself on its own merits without resorting to theatrics."
Anita frowned.
"I know. It was a pretty impressive number, and I gotta say, I checked your math and it works out. But you know Sharon. She likes to play things really cool and chill," Peter said. "We all made sure to mention you in the meeting, though. Make sure Marshall heard your name."
Anita barely heard Peter's last sentence. She was stuck on the fact that Woolever had cut the magic number from the presentation entirely. Did she actually not want the project to get Marshall's blessing? Did Woolever really hate her so much that she'd erase one of her major accomplishments from the project proposal entirely? Or was she playing the long game, playing it 'really good and chill' in front of Marshall now, only to wait until the new system actually approved to make the big reveal and take credit for the analysis?
With those dark thoughts swirling in her head, Anita just couldn't stand being at her desk any longer. She dropped a quick email to her boss that she'd caught a chill running to Ardingham and back, and was going to take a half-day of sick time.
The one nice thing about taking the bus at mid-day was that it was mostly empty. She was able to grab the seat right under the heat vent. Halfway home, she was warm enough to take her hat off. The blast of warm air coming down from above reminded her more than a little bit of Robert. He was an old lover of hers, the guy she'd been with about the time she'd graduated college. They'd been together for almost a year, when they both got job offers in different cities that were too good to pass up. Last she'd heard from him, he was well and comfortably established in a law firm in Houston. In hindsight, she should have passed up the offer at Marshall Capital and followed him.
"Oh, Robert," she whispered while she watched the city roll by outside of the bus windows. She'd had her share of men in her life, but Robert had stood out. He'd picked up a book once. Bondage for Beginners, and had talked her into letting him restrain her. It took a bit, but she finally warmed to the idea.
She was beyond pleasantly surprised at how thrilled she was when he came home one day with a pair of leather cuffs. He set them on the end table next to his arm chair, and told her to take her clothes off right in the middle of the living room. Anita remembered her first response being, "What?" She'd expected to go straight to the bedroom with the restraints. Instead, he lowered himself into his arm chair, sprawling insolently, and said, "Strip."
There was something about that combination then, his posture in the chair, the restraints sitting on the end table, that single word, spoken with such confidence. Robert had always been a good lover, a little bit cocky, but skilled enough with his cock to merit it. But to hear him say, "Strip," in a tone of voice that brooked no disobedience or hesitation. She felt herself grow instantly weak in the knees and wet between her legs. In a sudden burst of inspiration, she went to the corner of the room and turned on the floor lamp, to make the room even brighter than it had been with just the overhead light. Then she walked to the exact center of the room, turned her back to him (Robert was quite the ass man, after all), and peeled herself out of her clothes.
"Knees," he'd said next.
She'd knelt down, and turned to look over her shoulder at him.
"Eyes front!" he'd said.
She'd heard him get out of his chair, heard the clink of the cuffs' metal hardware. First one wrist then the other were wrapped up in the leather strips, and she'd found herself so aroused that she'd thought just the slightest puff of air over her clit would push her over into orgasm.
"Hey!"
"Huh?" Anita said, shaken out of her memory by the bus driver's voice.
"Your stop."
Anita stepped off the bus and practically ran into her building and up the stairs. Her hands trembled as she fumbled with her keys to unlock the door. As soon as she got inside, she started shedding clothing as she made her way to the bedroom and threw herself down on the mattress.
Normally, Anita needed to lay on her back and use a vibrator to orgasm solo, but with the hot memories of her first time letting Robert dominate her fresh in her mind, she stayed face-down on the bed, and opened her legs. She grabbed a big handful of her hair and yanked at it, while she roughly fingered herself. When she finally masturbated herself to exhaustion, she burrowed under the covers and fell deeply asleep.
-End of book 1.
Gifts
-- Gift
received Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone