I want You Deeper

“I Nicholas plopped down in the guest chair in his best friend’s see you met my HR director.”

office, his second cup of coffee grasped in one hand. He might need a few more to get through what was coming up that morning.

“Charlie.” Nicholas let the word hang out there a moment, savoring it a little. Fascinating woman. He’d had a hard time taking his eyes off her, but it wasn’t just those large, blue eyes and perfectly plump lips. It was her poise. Her calm. Just looking at her made him feel at peace, and he’d always thought of himself as a pretty easygoing guy.

“She doesn’t know about you.” Justin sat forward in his chair as he dropped that bomb on Nicholas. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Charlie hardly acted like she knew who he was when she’d let him in. If Justin had briefed her ahead of time, she would have at least understood why he knew her by name.

“So what does she think is happening?” Nicholas had to ask.

“I thought I’d surprise everyone with an expert speaker.” Justin looked out the glass wall behind Nicholas briefly before responding. “They should all be down there by now. Let’s go.”

Nicholas didn’t join Justin in standing, though. “Wait. Does Charlie think she’s running this meeting?”

That seemed to bring Justin to a stop. He looked around, seemingly confused. “Yeah. I guess. I don’t know.”

That was Justin. He was a great guy, but he tended to be a bit on the allwork-and-no-play side of things. Nicholas, on the other hand, had always been all about play. It annoyed Justin that Nicholas had managed to build three successful businesses and was now moving on to his fourth-all by his late twenties.

Some called him a genius. He just called himself very, very lucky.

“That’s not going to go over well,” Nicholas muttered under his breath as he followed Justin toward the elevator. Although they’d shrunk their staff down to this one area, Justin had explained they still were allowed to rent out the big conference room in the lobby whenever they needed it.

“What?” Justin turned to look at Nicholas as he pressed the down button on the elevator. He still looked legit confused.

“Charlie. Your HR director. She’s prepared to lead this big meeting-” “Staff retreat,” Justin interrupted.

Biting back his annoyance at Justin’s focus on semantics, Nicholas trudged forward. “I don’t really want to just come in and take over.”

The elevator doors slid open, and they stepped inside. Justin spoke while staring up at the indicator above them that displayed the floor they were passing. “Don’t worry. I told Charlie I was taking over after she did her part. She’s doing her opening presentation right now.”Nôvel/Dr(a)ma.Org - Content owner.

“So I’m taking over for you, really.” Nicholas breathed a sigh of relief at that. Even though he’d just met her, the thought of upsetting this woman bugged him.

“Yep. Trust me. Charlie and I have done everything we can to boost morale around here since the downsizing. They’re tired of hearing from us. You’ll bring new energy. Besides, come on. You’re a hero to most of the people on the development team, which is pretty much everyone in that conference room.”

“No pressure,” Nicholas commented.

If Justin heard that, he didn’t acknowledge it. His attention was fully focused on his phone. Typical. Nicholas estimated he got five minutes of his best friend’s time, tops.

The doors to the elevator opened, and Justin stepped out, staring down at his phone as he walked. How he avoided walking into walls doing that, Nicholas had no idea. He seemed to have perfected it to an art, though.

As they neared the conference room, Charlie’s voice carried into the hallway. Nicholas’s heart skipped a beat. It slowed his walk for a couple of seconds as he realized it had been years since just the sound of a woman’s voice had done that to him.

Nicholas allowed Justin to go in, standing outside the door, safely out of sight, as Justin had instructed. It was part of the surprise that Nicholas wasn’t all that excited about.

“Thank you, Charlie,” Justin said a few minutes later, after Charlie had finished discussing all the praise they’d gotten recently for their latest software update. It all sounded great, but Nicholas had been in this business long enough to know she was wasting her breath. At this point, it was just important to make it clear they’d continue to receive a paycheck. Sure, the success of the company was a huge factor in that, but they needed something more personal. Something that would excite them individually.

“Many of you have been in this field for years,” Justin said. “You’ve seen the industry grow and change. There’s one person who’s been an innovator in this space. He came up with the framework we use every day, sold off that company, and now he’s the head of the next big video streaming app-”

“Nicholas Shaw!” Nicholas heard someone call out.

“Exactly. You know him?”

A series of murmurs followed, then someone said, “He’s my idol.”

Nicholas looked down at the floor, smiling to himself. He felt like he lived most of his life in a bubble. He went to work every day, surrounded by his team. He met with vendors and investors and spent his weekends at his condo in Lake Tahoe.

But every now and then, something like this happened, reminding him that he’d achieved a tiny, tiny level of fame as a tech entrepreneur. His name was all over the internet in articles about billionaires under thirty and Silicon Valley success stories. He’d even been included in some hot bachelor piece at a local TV station a few weeks earlier, along with a bunch of other guys.

That had been the biggest nuisance of all. He didn’t know anyone who honestly wanted to be on a list like that. It did nothing but get you teased by pretty much everyone you knew.

“Everyone, give a big TravTech welcome to Nicholas Shaw!”

Justin’s announcement was his cue to enter. But he didn’t move right away. As the applause started up, his nerves kicked in. It was his closestguarded secret that he was terrified of public speaking.

Closing his eyes, Nicholas took a deep breath and willed himself to move. “Fake it until you make it.” That had always been his approach to conquering this particular fear. People told him they didn’t have a single clue that he was nervous up there, but inside, he felt like a child, presenting a report to his class without having prepared.

This time, seeing the audience only made it worse. Sure, it was a small group, but that didn’t help. The people gathered there were staring at him like they expected great things from him. That was the very type of pressure he didn’t need.

“Good morning, everyone!”

Did he sound as loud to everyone else as he did to himself? Maybe he should take it down a few notches.

“Good morning.”

It was hard to make out those actual words in the chorus of responses from the audience. They weren’t in sync, first of all, but they also were said in varying levels of enthusiasm. Some stared at him with wide eyes, but many more looked bored.

And then there was Charlie. She sat next to Justin’s girlfriend, Brooke, who was also the marketing person for TravTech. Justin sat way in the back of the room, staring down at his lap. Nicholas would bet good money he was looking at his screen again.

“I built my first piece of software when I was twelve,” Nicholas said, blurting out the words he’d uttered so many times, he had them pretty much committed to memory. Everyone always seemed to want to hear his history. “Do you know what software was like fifteen years ago?”

Nods. Of course, they did. Many of these people were developers, so they’d probably grown up around computers.

“There was no such thing as a smartphone, at least not at first. It wasn’t like today. But many of us saw a way that software development could be made easier. That’s the world I’ve always envisioned. Do-it-yourself, dropand-drag editors, out-of-the-box software, configurable canned solutions… You guys know the drill.”

Nods again. They knew where he was coming from. Everyone wanted to be the innovator who developed the next big thing. They just didn’t want to be the ones who were put out of work by that very thing.

“I realized something, though.” Nicholas stepped around the podium, standing in front of the group. Podiums were too formal, too much like a speech. “The last thing we want to do is make a bunch of professionals obsolete. So I pivoted early on, changing my goal. I wanted to make things easier for you, not the customer.”

No matter which way he directed his gaze, he couldn’t stop staring at Charlie out of the corner of his eye. Was she judging him? Maybe deciding she didn’t find him nearly as attractive as he found her?

“The work you’re doing here is similar.” He paused, waiting for the confused looks, then added, “You build apps that help students learn. But you aren’t going directly to the students for that. Your work gives educators work. See how it’s similar?”

Some nods, although not enthusiastic ones. He was losing them. He’d been brought here to inspire, not bore, them. He needed to step things up here.

He knew what to do.

“I’m going to need some assistance with this next part.” He let his gaze slide slowly across the group as though carefully deliberating which person to choose. When his stare finally landed on Charlie, his eyes widened and he took a deep breath. “Ms. McLaughlin, could you help me out up here?”

Now it was her turn to widen her eyes. She looked legitimately surprised. After a quick glance at Brooke, she stood and came to the front of the room, taking her place next to Nicholas.

Nicholas had done this exercise many times before, but for some reason, this time, he felt nervous about it. Probably because he’d just assigned himself to be Charlie’s partner.

“Now I need you to pick someone from the audience.”

Charlie frowned, a look that pushed her bottom lip out a little. It made her even more beautiful, if that was possible. She looked out at the crowd, then pointed at Justin. “Justin.”

The man whose head had been down the entire time Nicholas had been up here suddenly looked up. His expression made it seem as though he’d just been awoken from a nap. He had no idea what was going on.

Nicholas could hang him out to dry, but his college roommate had definitely saved Nicholas’s butt a few dozen times over the years. The least Nicholas could do was return the favor.

“Join us, Justin. We’re pairing up, so I’m going to need you to pick your partner from the audience.”

If he’d put money on it, he would have bet Justin would pick Brooke. But he should have known his roommate better. Instead, Justin grabbed someone from the back of the room. Nicholas assumed the guy was from the development team, mostly because Justin had told him every single employee aside from Charlie and Brooke was a developer. Everyone else had been let go.

They continued like that, pairing people up and gathering at the front of the room until the chairs were all empty. And then the real fun began.