Going Up! Read Free Page B

fundraiser?”
    Zach nodded. “Do you have a favorite department store?”
    Leah’s smile was blissful. “Oh yay! Shopping on the firm’s expense account—I love this job!”
    Leah’s Christmas dress really had been worth buying—he wanted to see her happy.
    “Well good,” he said soberly. “We want to keep you here.”
    Suddenly her eyes narrowed. “No, seriously, why aren’t you taking her to this thing?”
    Zach’s face heated. “Honestly, Leah, the only person I see in the mornings is a male substitute teacher who likes to play dress up. My father would not approve.”
    “Wait a minute….”
    Zach increased his pace to his office, the better to throw himself in and slam the door, but he heard Leah’s feet clacking behind him with absolutely no dignity at all in her platform spikes, and she was in the doorway to his office as he turned around to shut the door.
    “I’ve been asking the wrong question!” she burst out as soon as the door closed. “I should have been asking who is he !”
    Zach swallowed. “My father would not approve,” he said again, his throat dry.
    “You mean your running-for-a-Republican-office father who doesn’t approve of you being a union lawyer!”
    “He approves of the second word,” Zach said, and Leah rolled her eyes.
    “Look, Mr. Driscoll—”
    “You know, you can call me Zach,” he said. He didn’t have any real friends. He had coworkers and cocktail-party friends and his father’s political friends—but not one person in his entire life had ever actually asked him who he’d want to really take to a party.
    Leah looked surprised—and justifiably so. She’d been working there for three years. She’d called him “Mr. Driscoll” when they’d walked arm in arm to his father’s fundraiser.
    But then, sexual harassment had never been further off the table before.
    “Okay,” she said simply. “Zach. You don’t even know? What’s the worst your father could do?”
    Zach swallowed. He didn’t know. “I had this train set when I was a kid,” he said, thinking. “It was great. One of those wooden ones—I must have gotten a new train and new tracks for every birthday and every Christmas for like, five years. And then, I turned… I don’t know. Ten? And I woke up Christmas morning and I thought I was going to get another train—there’d been an engine I wanted and me and the nanny had rewired the train for it, and—anyway, I woke up and ran to the nursery where the Christmas tree was, with the train around the bottom, right?”
    It was the longest, most personal thing he’d ever said to anyone, and he was talking to his secretary. She nodded, barely, because her mouth was open and she probably couldn’t say anything until she thought to close it.
    “And the train was gone. Dad decided I was too old for it, so the train was gone, and I had a laptop with learning software under the tree.”
    Leah closed her mouth with a snap. “That’s the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” she said, appalled.
    Zach shrugged. “I’ve heard sadder,” he said frankly, thinking of the nurse who’d gotten fired because she’d gained weight. “The point isn’t the sad.”
    “Oh the hell it isn’t— ”
    “The point is that I don’t know what he’ll do,” Zach said evenly, because that was the point. “He has an idea of what the world should be like, and I don’t know what he’ll do to make that work.”
    Leah swallowed. “What can he do?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
    Zach shrugged. “You, uhm, ever wonder why we get a nice office building doing union law when the rest of the building is all corporate law and high-priced media attorneys?”
    “Oh.”
    “And, you know, my own apartment is sort of awesome.”
    “And all your employees get discounts,” she said numbly, and Zach nodded, thinking about six people in an apartment, struggling with rent.
    “Yes, yes you do.”
    “Oh,” she said again.
    “Oh,” he repeated