Superior - Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Race

My mind whirled as it adjusted to the changing landscape. Several members of the executive group asked Jane more questions about her strategy. The girl responded to each with thoughtful answers that were always well-supported by data. She seemed to be prepared for everything, knowing every relevant number and fact off the top of her head without once referring to her notes.

My heart sank further with every clear, concise, well-considered answer she gave. Jane was for real. I needed to start taking her seriously. Deadly seriously. Her easy command of both data and creative ideas seemed formidable. How had she memorized so much in such a short amount of time? It was odd to see someone so young command the room with manifest brilliance. But she did it with aplomb. The sight of such a distractingly pretty girl navigating questions ranging from metric minutiae to high-level strategic concepts was dizzying. She was more than simply smart, she was in complete command of the subject matter. Even from this, a single meeting, I could tell that her intellect had to be nearly as breathtaking as her immense, gravity defying décolletage. The girl’s mind was downright intimidating.

As I walked out of the meeting, feeling sick, I knew that I had just had my first encounter with the most formidable adversary of my entire career. I was going to have to pull out everything I had in my arsenal this time. It was time to go all out, not pull any punches.

Thankfully, focusing on revenge caused a bit of my usual swagger to return. Never had I truly brought the entirety of my willpower and resolve to bear on an opponent. I hadn’t needed to. Part of me was eager to see what I was truly capable of when I really pushed myself. This was a chance to rise to the occasion, to pull the absolute best from myself. It was a challenge I relished.

At the conclusion of the meeting, Carl, the CFO, had asked both Jane and I to submit market strategy outlines for the implementation of Jane’s approach by the close of business on Monday. It was Friday, and I worked until almost 10:00 PM before finally calling it a night. I’d been determined to regain my edge over this sexy prodigy, calling everyone on my team to get them scurrying over the weekend for data and insights that I knew I would need to best Jane.

As I left, I noticed a light on in the office across the building. As I oriented on it, I quickly realized which office it was. Jane’s.

I smirked. Let her work late into the night. It wouldn’t matter. I was going to be working the entire weekend, polishing a market strategy plan that there was no way Jane could match after just two days on the job. She hadn’t even been assigned a team yet! I, on the other hand, had all six of my people digging into loan origination analytics to adapt our models to be more female-centric. The depth of my analysis was going to be light-years ahead of whatever trash Jane cooked up. Deep dives into our company’s business model wasn’t something she could go out on Google and cobble together. This was real work. It couldn’t be replicated by an outsider like her. It was the perfect way to expose her lack of experience at Currentech re-establish myself as the dominant player in the executive group.

The next morning, I woke up early, pulling into the office parking lot before 7:00 AM. There was still one other car in the parking lot, frosty from spending the night there. I chuckled. It probably belonged to someone that had gone to happy hour, had a bit too much to drink, and taken an Uber home.

As I walked into the office, I took the corridor toward Jane’s office, deciding to have a little snoop through her things to see if they would offer any clues as to the strategy she was planning to submit. While I didn’t expect that hers could possibly match mine, it didn’t hurt to use every advantage I could. I’d underestimated her before and needed to ensure that I didn’t do so again.

As I approached her office, however, I saw movement through the glass wall. Jane was in there! I paused, stunned. So she had stayed later than me last night and still beaten me into work this morning. At 6:50 in the morning? On Saturday?

Her eyes met mine as I stood before her office window, gaping at her in surprise. She looked as incredible as ever, hair perfectly coiffed, face fresh and youthful, luscious body doing all sorts of interesting things to her conservative blouse and business suit.

Wait! She had been wearing the same thing yesterday, hadn’t she? That suit? That ivory top? It was the same.

Had she ever even left the office?

Shaking back her shimmering mane of ginger hair, Jane’s eyes once again found mine, seeming amused by my reaction. I suddenly realized that my mouth had fallen open and quickly clapped it shut.

With a flourish of her slender wrist, she reached her right hand over her keyboard and struck a key. The act seemed to satisfy her, and as soon as she had done it, she gathered her bag and coat to meet me at her office door.

“Coming in early to work on your strategy doc?” she asked, her viridian eyes twinkling.

I nodded, still wrapping my mind around the fact that she was already here, puzzling over the incongruity of her presence here. I thought back to the parking lot. Had that been her car? The one with the frost? It had to be, I supposed. It was the only other car in the lot!

Had she really spent the night? The more I thought about the combination of clothing and car, the more likely it seemed. Yet as I looked into her luminous eyes, I couldn’t find a trace of tiredness in them. Had she slept in her office? At least enough to look fresh this morning? But why would she do that? It couldn’t have been comfortable. I knew that if I had done that, I would be looking disheveled and exhausted. The woman didn’t even have a sofa in her office, just an office chair. Maybe she had slept on the floor?

I shook my head. No way. It just didn’t make any sense!

Was she doing this just to play mind games with me or something? If so, it was working. I didn’t understand what she was doing at all, my mind fruitlessly turning over the possibilities over and over to uncover her purpose in doing this.

“John?” Her first-ever use of my name startled me from my whirling thoughts, returning my mental focus to the breathtaking beauty before me.

“What? Oh!. I, um… yeah. I guess so,” came my halting response.

Her chin dropped in the slightest of nods, as if she had expected my response. Her gaze dropped to the floor, and she crouched before me to retrieve something from the ground. As she rose, she handed me a half-spilled cup of coffee. In my dumbfounded state, I hadn’t even realized that I’d dropped it! Her manicured fingertips brushed mine in the exchange, the brief contact sending a thrill through my tense body.

“Good luck,” she said before slipping on her trenchcoat and sweeping past me, her curvaceous chest brushing my outer arm, leaving it tingling from the brief, light contact. Had a breast that large really been that firm? It didn’t seem possible. But far more concerning was the electrifying effect her two fleeting touches seemed to have on my body. God, the girl was desirable. I had never reacted like this to anyone before.

I whirled as she strode away, surprise washing over my features as I watched her approach the elevators. “Are you leaving?” The words simply slipped out of me, unbidden.

She paused, throwing her long hair back as she turned to give me a questioning glance. “Of course. Why would I stay when I’m finished?”

With that, she turned to face forward once again, continuing toward the elevators. When she entered the small compartment, turning to face me once again, her eyes flashed with something resembling amusement, though the rest of her beautiful face wore as icy an expression as ever.

When the stainless steel doors shut before her, I continued to stare at the two stainless-steel panels in disbelief. She was done?

I thought about that. Even if she had worked all night, which I doubted, there was no way her plan could be any good. Not without the help of a team. Certainly not without spending the rest of the weekend polishing and refining.

I laughed. Suddenly. Aloud. If she thought she could spend one night at the office and create a plan that would outstrip something that I had a team of six working on for the entire weekend, she had another thing coming.

Suddenly delighted, I swept into my office, tossing my briefcase on the credenza. I plopped into the black leather chair before my computer, logging in to find a lone email in my inbox this morning. It was from Jane.

I opened it, my stomach doing a flip as I saw that she had sent it directly to Carl, the CFO. She really had sent her plan already. And she had copied me on the email! I gazed at the attachment in shock, unable to believe that she had been so stupid as to have squandered the opportunity to use the weekend to improve it. Not to mention the fact that she had actually given me the advantage of being able to see the entire thing before I wrote my own! I would be able to ensure that mine addressed everything she had written. I couldn’t believe my luck! This girl had really made a major tactical error here. Maybe I had actually begun to overestimate her after her presentation in the executive meeting. Maybe she had just been lucky. Or had already known her marketing approach before coming on board with the company.

As I thought more about it, I realized that had probably been what had happened. She had probably put a ton of time into the whole loans-geared-toward-women concept before ever coming to work for Currentech. Maybe it was her senior project at school or something.

Spending so little time on her followup assignment, however, was a huge mistake on her part. Everyone would soon see that she was all looks and no brains. Or at least no work ethic. She would quickly be dismissed as a one-hit wonder. I mean, even for simply appearance’s sake alone, she should have waited to send the document until Sunday night or Monday. Sending it first thing on Saturday morning would telegraph to the CFO how little time she had put into it.

Delighted by my competition’s cascade of mistakes, I opened the attachment. The document was presented in much the same style as that which she’d suggested in the meeting, with clean, feminine cover art that merged cool professionalism with artistic panache.

I scrolled down, my eyes quickly scanning the page. As I finished the executive summary, my stomach clenched. By the time I pored over the brilliantly presented data, charts, and graphs, my heart rate had risen high enough that I could feel the veins throbbing in my temple. I kept going, my eyes roaming brilliant idea after brilliant idea, each supported by a wealth of empirical data. The document hadn’t been hastily thrown together at all. Or lacking in content. In fact, her social media targeting plan alone was as large and detailed as what I’d been planning for my entire document.

When I finished, I rose to my feet, slamming my chair into the back wall of my office. I ran my fingers through my hair as I attempted to come up with an approach for dealing with this girl’s latest landmine in the path of my career. I tried in vain to cajole a plan from my frustrated brain.

I could work all weekend and even with the help of my entire team and not create anything close to as good as she had.

Jesus! Had she really done this in one night? She couldn’t have. She must have prepared all of this before she’d even come to work here, anticipating the project before ever receiving it. I wasn’t sure how she had been so prescient, but it was the only way she could have managed it. No one could have done this in a single night. Hell, no lone person could have done it in a week!

Stewing, I began to pace, considering my predicament again. I would still have to complete the assignment. It was a direct mandate from Carl. Maybe I could piggyback on her work, using her research and ideas as a springboard to something even better? The thought held a certain appeal, though I would have to find some additional data to add to what she’d done, so that it didn’t come across as blatant plagiarism. The problem was that she had been so utterly thorough in her analysis, so solid in her conclusions, that I could think of nothing she had missed.

I felt rage boil my blood. By sending this so early and copying me on the email, Jane had ensured that any attempt I made to use her data or similar ideas would simply look as if I were attempting to pawn her work off as my own. And if I went a different direction, it would look as if I were doing so simply to counter her rather than for the good of the company. I was also certain that I couldn’t counter her ideas as effectively as she’d promoted them. Every one of her thoughts had been robust, and she had even written of alternative paths, addressing each in turn, masterfully illustrating their deficiencies in favor of her own conclusions.

Worst of all, was that she was right on every single point! How was I supposed to effectively counter proposals that I completely agreed with?! Especially when they had been presented with arguments so cogent and airtight that even I had been completely convinced of the effectiveness of her approach.

Damn her.

Sending her proposal so soon and giving the whole thing to me had been exactly the right play, I suddenly realized. She had tied my hands completely even while demonstrating utter superiority. It hadn’t been a mistake at all to send out the document so quickly, as I’d initially thought. Quite the contrary. Her actions had been a masterstroke of competitive strategy.

Suddenly, I felt as if he were playing against a grandmaster in chess, my moves countered in devastating fashion before I ever even made them.

I fell into my chair with a soft thump, my body suddenly lethargic, completely devoid of the energy and enthusiasm I’d possessed mere hours before. I had entered the office hopeful. Cocky even. Now that seemed as if that had been weeks ago. Cradling my head in my hands, I attempted to find a way out of this trap of hers.

I came up empty.

I spent the rest of the weekend developing a competing proposal, but despite my best efforts to maintain my willpower, drive, and work ethic, there was a halfheartedness in the attempt. I knew that hers would be the proposal adopted by the company the entire time I worked on mine. It was quite the mindfuck.

Still, I completed my assignment, doing my best to rail against her precise, well-reasoned arguments with whatever data I could get my team to cough up. I felt like an overmatched player in a tennis tournament, returning blisteringly hard serves with fumbling, weak shots that I knew would be slammed into the opposite corner for winners every time. I knew I would lose.

And lose I did. No one even mentioned my proposal in the next executive meeting, every word of the excited discussion centering around the brilliance of Jane’s plan. I said nothing for the entire meeting—-a weekly meeting that I had grown accustomed to dominating with my own plans and ideas.

By the end of the meeting, staring glumly at this teen girl’s breathtaking profile, I raged inside. Bitterness twisting my organs as I watched her dazzle my boss and peers a second time, I resolved to beat the bitch, no matter what it took.