: Part 1 – Chapter 1

I’ve dreamed about the day Beau Banks would notice my pussy.

I’ve had years—a decade, even—of fantasizing about my best friend’s older brother perceiving me as more than an extra appendage of his younger sister, Avery. Years of wondering what it’d be like to have him put me and sex in the same stratosphere, and instead, I have no choice but to settle for this.

His dad—my boss, Neil Banks—asking about the cat filter that’s covering his face during a very important virtual meeting. But instead of just saying cat, he keeps saying pussycat over and over and over, while Beau and a dozen other important people from my new place of employment, Banks & McKenzie Marketing, look on.

And no, as much as I wish I were, I’m not dreaming and I’m not high.

This is happening, live and in color—beet fucking red, specifically.

“I’m a pussycat, Juniper. Do you see I’m a pussycat?” Neil asks, confused why his face isn’t his face.

“I see, Mr. Banks,” I answer, fighting like hell to keep myself from falling into the black hole his son sucks me into whenever he’s around. Right now isn’t the time to focus on Beau’s warm brown eyes or sexy dark hair or the way his expensive gray suit hugs his most perfect shoulders and biceps. It isn’t the time to wonder if his hands would feel just as good on my skin as they look sticking out of the cuffs of the sleeves of his expensive white shirt.

I have a cat-filter emergency to worry about, and as the seconds tick by without my doing something about it, it gets more and more out of control.

Every time Mr. Banks speaks, a cat’s mouth moves on the screen while the Hughes International execs watch on via Zoom. A Zoom I am responsible for setting up.

Just moments ago, my focus went to shit when Beau strode into the conference room and found an empty seat at the massive table, and my gaze is still trying to keep track of his every move. But Neil is getting more and more unhinged as he tries to figure out how to remove the whiskers and fur and pointy cat ears from his face.

“Why do I look like a pussycat, Juniper?” Mr. Banks asks from his fancy leather chair at the head of the table where I stand directly beside him.

Inadvertently putting a funny filter on your boss for an important meeting is bad enough, but his calling the kitten a “pussycat” is making it irrefutably worse. I didn’t know anyone still used the word without being facetious, but I guess that’s what you get for assuming.

Ass, meet me, Juniper Perry, brand-new marketing intern extraordinaire and the next resident of whatever the nearest spot to the earth’s crust is.

“I’m trying to fix it,” I assure Mr. Banks, silently cursing myself when my eyes wander from the screen of the laptop in front of us to Beau for a flash of a second. Clearly, when it comes to him, I have no control. It’s a wonder I’m not actively fantasizing about how his mouth would feel on me right now.

Annnd now I am…

Great, Juniper, just great.

“Why am I a pussycat?” Mr. Banks asks yet again, seeing as I’ve yet to master his daughter—and my best friend—Avery’s computer settings enough to get it turned off.

I swear, I’m going to absolutely throttle her for sticking me with this Zoom responsibility with no warning this morning. She all but shoved her laptop into my hands as we were heading out the door and told me she’d meet me at work.

She’s still not here, by the way.

“Your pussycat is cute, Juniper, but it’s not ideal for this meeting,” Mr. Banks comments, and I can actually feel my face heating up beneath my skin.

“What? No. It’s just a funny filter, Mr. Banks. Avery must have been messing around with it,” I explain in a panic as I hit the escape button. Surely ending this Zoom and having to start over is no longer the worst-case scenario when my boss keeps talking about my pussycat in front of a room full of people.

But nothing happens. The screen is frozen up.

“A filter?” he questions. “Of your pussycat?”

Someone save me.

“It’s not my cat,” I say through a tight throat, my face hotter than the surface of the sun. I don’t dare look up at anyone in the room as my fingers gently tap the touch pad of the laptop in an endeavor to move the still-frozen cursor. “It’s just a funny filter of a random cat.”

Mr. Banks edges in, pounding his meaty Boomer clubs on the keyboard like that’s somehow going to fix it. In reality, even with his grayish-white hair, he’s more of a Gen X-er than a Boomer, but his lack of technological savvy is wildly Boomer behavior.

“Neil? You there?” the CEO of Hughes International, the literal biggest social media holding company on the planet, asks on his end of the screen. I know for a fact that he wasn’t expecting to take this meeting with a cat, and I can’t imagine he’ll have the patience to watch us fumble with it much longer.

“Hold on, Marcus,” Mr. Banks comments from behind me, allowing me back to the keyboard again. “We’re having some issues.” His face is still a cat, and mine is now too. For me, at least, it covers my skin, which is officially the color of a tomato.

“Mr. Banks,” I whisper toward him. My heart is pounding so hard, it might beat itself straight out of my throat. Likely, of course, to be followed by vomit. “Let me see if I—”

“Oh man. Now, I’m all wet,” he mutters, dejected, and proceeds to move his fingers back to the keyboard to tap whatever keys he can reach. “A wet pussycat.”

The filter has changed from “cat” to “cat in bathtub,” and is it just me, or has Mr. Banks said the word pussy no fewer than one hundred times already? It should be illegal to hear your best friend’s father say the word pussy this much, and the fine should be doubled at eight in the morning.

I know he’s technically saying pussycat, but it’s the way he says it. Pussy, far too long pause, cat.

My gaze flicks to Beau again—of course—but he’s not looking at me. He’s actively gesturing toward two of his coworkers to do something, anything that’ll be more productive than sitting here watching his dad and me wrestle with a laptop.

“I think I got the pussycat off,” Mr. Banks says then, clicking the remote to the projector to turn the Zoom off the main screen and then clicking it back on. “Uh-oh. It’s back. Your pussycat is back, Juniper.”

I want to die a slow death as the entire room suddenly comes down with a cold to cover their laughs. Beau’s is the most distinct, but the rest of our coworkers are at an unfair disadvantage—I’ve been studying the man’s every move, sound, and smile since I was a scrawny eleven-year-old girl with braces and he was a studly sixteen-year-old high schooler who spent his summers shirtless and surfing. Take in the fact that I’m now twenty-three, I’ve got a decade-long track record of observing Beau Banks, and I’d swear I know him better than I know myself.

I’m sweating now, pits and tits and everything in between, and things are getting serious. My boss has been a cat for a full three minutes, and I’m starting to wonder if the Zoom app will ever be pussy-free again. The screen, no matter what I press, isn’t budging. “Mr. Banks. Please. Let me shut down the computer and restart.”

Officially out of skills, Mr. Banks turns operations completely over to me.

“Then what?” he asks.

The truth is, I don’t know. If I knew why Avery’s computer was frozen on cat filters, I would have turned them off a long time ago.

“Let’s go old-school and switch to a conference call,” Beau suggests, jumping up from his seat and peering out into the hall to get his assistant Natalie’s attention.

“Marcus, we’re having a system malfunction, so we’re going to reconnect on the conference line,” Mr. Banks says then, his kitty mouth moving ever so cutely for all to see. “Please accept my apology for the delay.”

I scoot all the way into the frame, doing a force quit on the meeting and all the running apps, and when that doesn’t work, I hold down the power button with brute force. My pink silk bra-covered boobs are the only thing on-screen for a flash of a moment as I lean over and they peek out of my white blouse, and then thankfully, blissfully, the laptop shuts down and everything goes black.

I close my eyes to will away an impending cry and restart Avery’s computer. Beau and Natalie are making quick work of setting up the conference call, and before I know it, the meeting is back in progress without the unfortunate addition of pussy.

My first day at work as a fresh-out-of-college intern is set to qualify as a national disaster—seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised if FEMA bursts into the room with aid—and I only have my best friend to thank for it. Starbucks, in her mind, was way more important than this meeting, and when your dad owns the company and you have a conscientious friend like me, you can get away with reprioritizing the official schedule to align with that.

Neil assigned this task to her when we had orientation with him last week and Avery was pretending to be all serious about the new job so she could get an additional allowance for new “work attire.” The thousands she spent at Hermès and Saks have yet to even see the fluorescent light of the office, and because we all know her so well, none of us are even surprised.

From the moment we became friends in kindergarten, Avery has always loved her rich-kid-of-Miami lifestyle. She doesn’t have a dream job because she’d never waste her dreams on labor. She’s got a flighty attitude and a quick wit but, most importantly, a heart the size of Texas—the reason she gets away with the rest of it.

She and her family are the backbone of everything significant in my life, and I love them more than words can express, even when Avery is a royal pain in the ass and Beau is witnessing Neil repeatedly ask me about my pussycat.

“Sorry about that, Marcus,” Mr. Banks apologizes to the Marcus Hughes as soon as Natalie and Beau get the conference call connected. Every relevant social media app you can think of these days is owned by him, and the revenue that landing one of his accounts could bring Banks & McKenzie is overwhelming. Sickening, really, if you’re the one potentially screwing it all up.

Oh God. Three deep breaths through my nose do nothing to ease the rage of my nerves, and I have to put a hand to my stomach to stave off a potential upchuck.

“This is a firm full of thinkers,” Beau chimes in, his voice a charming balm of confident charisma. “You can’t tell me any other firm has had the forethought to break the ice on some serious negotiations with kittens.”

“No,” Marcus responds on a laugh, his voice full of a levity I’m not expecting. “I can’t say that they have. Let’s just hope some of that ingenuity rubs off in our favor.”

“Oh, I can assure you it will,” Neil hedges. “Chris’s flight from New York was delayed this morning, but he should be here shortly, and I’ve got a boardroom full of young creatives, ready to hear about your latest development.”

Almost thirty years ago, Neil Banks and Chris McKenzie founded this Miami-based marketing firm that now has hundreds of employees on its payroll. Brick by brick, they built it into one of the topmost-performing ad agencies in the country. Beau joined on when he graduated college several years ago, worked his way to the top of the totem pole, and now spearheads numerous campaigns as one of the principal ad execs in the company.

The road could have been easy for him, but I know it wasn’t. He’s worked for everything he’s gotten despite the obvious nepotism, and I aspire to do the same. I could’ve worked for my father’s real estate empire—the world-renowned Perry Enterprises—with little to no effort and astronomically high pay, but I’d rather flip burgers at a fast-food joint than do that.

“Midnight is our latest social media app that we’ll be releasing early next year,” Marcus Hughes explains, and I quickly pull my phone out of my pocket and start taking diligent notes. I’ve got a major redemption arc to write for myself if I want to prove I’m anything other than Avery’s ditsy friend who can’t figure out fucking Zoom filters. “Think of it as an app meant for dating and conversation, but you can stay anonymous while you do it.”

“Anonymous?” Neil questions, tilting his head to the side. “You think that’s what people want these days?”

“It reminds me of that reality show, Love is Blind,” Beau chimes in, and I hate how fixated my gaze becomes on his mouth as it moves. The plush lips, the white teeth, the hard jaw—he’s just so perfect.

“That’s a great comparison,” Marcus agrees. “Social media these days is all about showing everything, about allowing viewers into your private life and private spaces. We follow people in their homes and their jobs and to their Brazilian waxes, for shit’s sake. But Midnight is the opposite of that. It’s discreet. It allows users to maintain a sense of privacy and anonymity while still experiencing a depth of conversation that gets to the heart of things.”

“Mm-hm,” Beau hums, pulling my wanton slut of an attention span right back to him. A few strands of his wavy, dark hair edge toward his eyes as he leans into his own laptop to check his prep notes, and his long fingers reach up to swipe them away. I sink my teeth into my bottom lip, willing myself not to stare at his broad shoulders beneath his suit jacket or linger as his biceps flex when he lifts his elbows to the table. “And what interface are we dealing with here? Gusta or Veronix?”

As I add a few more notes into my phone, a text message flashes across the screen. I discreetly open it, but no one is looking at me anyway. Now that I’m not intimately entrenched in causing massive stress, I’ve faded quite nicely into the background. The far corner of the room, to be exact. Honestly, if I could’ve buried myself into the soil of the big potted plant beside me without my new coworkers thinking I’m off my rocker, I would’ve done it.

Avery: Do you want anything from Starbies?

If I could sum up my best friend in one text message, this would be it. She’s considerate and completely out of touch, all at the same time. Asking me if I want a drink now, when she was supposed to be here an hour and a half ago, is like the dentist asking me if I’d like some Novocain when the root canal is over.

Me: You’re just going to Starbucks NOW?

Avery: I had to run back to the condo because I wasn’t liking what my hair was doing today. You know how sometimes it does that annoying frizzy thing with the whoosh and the poof?

Having attended kindergarten, elementary, middle, high school, and college together—and sharing a condo now—I know the whoosh and poof she’s talking about well. So well, in fact, I know it’s not even really a thing, and missing your first day of work because of it is truly unbothered behavior.

In all reality, it’s how I should behave too. My parents are wealthier than the Bankses, and for as little love as they’ve given me over the years, they’ve still managed to drown me in privilege. If it exists, and I want it, I can have it.

Which makes it painfully ironic, of course, that the only thing I’ve ever wanted is the one thing I can’t have—a whole, happy, loving family with parents who didn’t divorce when I was a kid and spend the rest of my life losing their minds.

That’s probably why I clung to the Banks family during my parents’ split. They were everything I didn’t have and had always wanted, and Avery was generous enough to share them with me. I spent nearly every waking moment at their house when I wasn’t at school and, after a couple years, even started staying with them to celebrate all the major holidays.

Neil and Diane are like second parents, and Avery is a sister in every way but genetically.

Beau, though…he spurs a different kind of reaction. His handsome good looks and charming smile and alluring personality make my brain go control-alt-delete.

I can’t even talk about some of the things I’ve fantasized about related to him without risking spontaneous combustion, and I sure as hell can’t talk about them in front of his family. Especially with my best friend. Avery would think I’m completely nuts if I told her the truth about my years-long crush on her only sibling.

To them, to him…he’s my pseudo-older brother.

To me, he’s my wildest fantasy.

Put the two of them together, and I’m at the center of an altogether taboo romance. And now, I’m going to be working with him every day.

What in the hell was I thinking? Yeah. Great question.