The Billionaire's Assistant

Chapter 14

After an unsuccessful attempt to discreetly wake the dubiously conscious Emma, Kat was off to work, waking, getting ready, and leaving earlier than everyone but Jack. Jack wasn't secretive exactly, but the group knew how much he valued the time he spent alone. It seemed to recharge him, his stoicism was unwavering, but after a day on his own it was as if it was less of a concentrated effort for him, as if he could more easily relax into its velvety silences and glances laden with meaning.

At dinner the previous night they'd come to the conclusion that Kat needed to first determine what kind of information she'd have the opportunity to uncover before determining how to best use it. The group was at a bit of a loss. Tillibenton was a huge polluter, yes, but what knowledge could the group gain that would stop them? Conner and Brent had been for blackmail, arguing that the only thing that people like Jove care about is their reputation, but Andy had been firm.

"Everything we do, we put Kat at risk. She's the one taking chances here, and she's the main one in danger if anything goes wrong. If Kat tries to blackmail him, what's to say he wouldn't just have her killed?"

Everyone looked away from Kat awkwardly as if she'd been the one to remind them her life was on the line and she flushed, nerves and fear intermingling to color her countenance.

"We need to be smart about this," Andy went on. "We need to be strategic. Everything that we do needs to happen in a way that gives Kat full plausible deniability, like she was never involved. No felonies. Nobody gets hurt."

"Well, that's not how they operate," Emma had chimed in, her bright voice concealing the edge Kat knew lay just beneath the surface. "We have morals, they don't. We wouldn't hurt anyone, they would. What can we actually find out that could take them down the way you're talking about, Andy you have to be realistic."

Andy was shaking her head before Emma finished her sentence, already denying the words she knew were to come.

"We have to protect Kat," she said simply, shooting Kat a look she couldn't read. "And this is how we do that. We'll find out what's on her work computer and we'll go from there." She'd stood brusquely at that point, clearing her not quite finished plate. "We have an opportunity here and we have to go about this the right way."

Andy had screwed her eyes shut for a moment as if in pain. "We do this the right way," she finally said quietly. She'd turned and left then, washing her dishes then collecting clothes for her river trip.

Kat knew how anxious Andy had been about this situation, an anxiety well hidden but not camouflaged completely. She'd felt closer to her in a sense, more connected to her inner emotional state. Andy had always been intense, but over the last few weeks that intensity was heighted to a degree Kat had never seen. Her emotions, both positive and negative, were spurting forth much more readily and aggressively as the idea of making a real difference became a reality.

It was hard to swallow, Kat could understand that. She'd been with the group for such a comparatively short time but even she felt shell shocked and in disbelief at the huge and world changing advancement in their progress, even she had the urge to pinch herself as if she was dreaming.

She paused on the sidewalk, her ears flushing red. The dream. The dream she'd had about jove. She mumbled a distracted apology to the man walking behind her who'd bumped her shoulder when she stopped short and began again, head down as if the people around her were aware of her less than appropriate recollections. Her ears flushed deeper as she recalled the details of the dream, the way Jove's muscular, sculpted body had looked in the dark, the way she'd wanted him so desperately, how she'd kissed him, how she screamed his name.

She shook her head as if to rid it of the thought by force, her face beginning to flush anyway. She couldn't understand why she'd had that dream, why seeing Jove or talking to him affected her the way it had. She'd never been particularly boy crazy, and when her childhood friends were selecting their favorite members of popular boy bands or pasting pictures of their proclaimed future husbands on their bedroom walls, she was at the lake watching the birds, fish, and bugs go about the fascinations of their daily activities.

The times she was there with her mother in the summer they'd occasionally rent one of the tourist-trap paddle boats, overpriced, but the only way to access the closed off section of the lake. They would rent the boat for the day, paddle out, swim in the center of the lake, blissfully alone, then take the boat to the inaccessible opposite shore, far less developed than the public beachfront and much shaggier, much more wild. Well into her teens she and her mother would explore like two children, trekking through the brush, pointing out oddities to one another, and soaking up the sun, the outsideness of it all, as completely as they could.

That was a word they'd always used to describe that inarticulable yet indelible feeling that they knew overtook them both when they were in their true element. In a sense it was as simple as being outside but it simultaneously wasn't, it was much deeper, much more complex. It was an ancient feeling translated into a modern tongue. Outsideness is the air, but it's the feeling of it as wind rushing past your skin, the freshness of it as it fills your lungs, the pull and the push and the stillness and the thickness of it. It was air in all the ways it could be but more than that, all the ways you could be with it. Every way the air could change you and every form it could become, that was outsideness. That was a fraction of it. It was the earth too, in its many forms, its ever changing and unrecognizable forms, its cyclical softening and hardening and its growth and its grime and its deep, deep blackness that brings forth the new. It's the new as well, the bright greenness so small, rigid as tiny soldiers, serving their duty bravely as they rise into the unknown. It's the old, the steady, the solid, still changing but on levels so imperceptible they can no longer be distinguished, the trees as old as man and the hills and valleys carved from lost waters. It was the sun.

Outsideness was impossible to explain, Kat had tried, even with Andy. The core concept was simple, basic even, and people assumed that understanding that meant they understood her, but even as Andy had nodded and recounted her own experiences with being swept up by the beauty of nature, Kat knew she didn't understand.

Outsideness isn't understandable, she'd decided. It's not something I can explain. She was settled in that, had no conscious desire for anyone to understand her when she tried to explain herself, but at the back of her mind she could never forget her mother's face when she'd first said the word. Her mother had known. She'd known right away, even with the young Kat's tendency to butcher pronunciations. She knew what outsideness meant, she understood Kat, and more than that she knew how powerful it was, how much sway it held over her daughter.