Page 2 of Jesse

It was lipstick that brought us together. We were all wearing the same shade of pink. Bright Berry Beach.

I mean, yeah. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but basically… that’s really how it started.

Last week we made Ms. Entrepreneur magazine’s Richest Women in the World list for the seventh year in a row.

We have almost a hundred and twenty cosmetic lines now. We own this whole building and use every single inch of space on the top twenty floors. We employ ten thousand people globally and more than two thousand here at corporate.

We are the definition of success.

And yet… we’re still going through with this plan tonight.

There’s a part of me that’s super-excited about that.

The name of the douchebag man who used us for sex back when we were young and dumb is Jesse Boston.

Oh, yeah. You’ve heard of him. Youngest of the Boston Brothers. Infamous for their money, and their power, and their bad-boy reputations.

Jesse Boston was our inspiration. Just like we inspire this room filled with recruits to be their best and rise to the top, he did that for us.

We vowed one thing that night in the bar during spring break. We made a pact that we would never fall for a handsome face with a big wallet ever again. Instead, we would make our own future. Our own money. We would write the happy end to our own fairytale.

And we did.

So… why are we bothering with Jesse Boston tonight?

Well, we are women, after all. And we were scorned. Quite simply put, we want revenge.

He should not be allowed to treat women like that. He should pay for what he did to us. And he needs to learn his lesson.

We are the perfect women to teach that lesson.

The room erupts into a standing ovation. The accolades are for each other just as much as they are for us and our team. And then they are split up into smaller teams and the process of assimilation into our corporate community proceeds without us.

We leave the stage, Hannah leading the way. “I have to get back to the lab. I’m cooking up a new scent for the Glow line.”

“Go, go, go,” Mila says.

“I have to jump too,” Natalie says. “I have four new department managers who need a lot of handholding.”

“Get them settled,” Mila calls. She turns to me. Even though I’m the CFO—finance is my specialty—Mila is the boss of things. She likes to lead and the rest of us really don’t, so we appreciate her take-charge attitude. “You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” I say.

“Good. See you at seven. Don’t be late.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I say, just as she rushes though the crowd to head back upstairs.

How to describe me?

Well… I’m basically the girl next door. The nice one. The sweet one. I don’t have Natalie’s firm handshake, or Mila’s venomous tongue, or Hannah’s brilliant mind for molecules.

I’m just the numbers girl.

The single, not-dating one.

The one who never quite got over her night with Jesse Boston when she was eighteen.

The one who relentlessly follows his tabloid exploits.