She thought she was a champ for managing to hold it together. Then the hot flashes began. That was when Jo finally started to crack. She was thirty-nine—far too young for menopause. When her gynecologist told her no one really knew what caused them, she almost exploded. Her blood pressure skyrocketed. She lost liters of pit sweat every day.
“I can’t live like this anymore,” she said.
“Try exercise,” she was told.
Those two flippant words from a doctor who was staring straight at her vagina when he uttered them were the only advice that ever made a real difference.
Jo was forty the first time she set foot in a gym. She stepped on a treadmill and began to run the rage off. Five miles later, she almost felt human. When she hit ten, she knew something was happening. Her body, which had long held her back, had finally freed her. Over the next three years, she grew stronger than she’d ever thought possible. Jo sensed the power building within her, but she had no idea what she could do with it. Until Lourdes.
Three years to the day after Jo was made manager, the young woman showed up in her office shortly before eleven a.m., her uniform disheveled and her face drained of color. She was new—only three days on the job. Jo had hesitated to hire her. She’d felt terrible about it, but Lourdes was too pretty, with a figure that—even in a uniform—was certain to draw unwanted attention. Jo had gone through the short interview fully expecting to turn her down. Then the young woman had asked if she could work mornings. In the evenings, she went to school.
“What are you studying?” Jo had asked casually.
“Hotel management,” Lourdes said. “Someday, I’d like to have a job like yours.”
Jo hired her on the spot. The limits of her own influence were becoming clear. She’d need an army of women to change things in the industry. “Come in at eight,” she’d said. “You can spend your first two hours of every shift helping me. If that works out, I’ll find the money to employ you in my office full-time.”
Now the same young woman was standing before her, looking like her soul had spilled out. All that were left of the top three buttons of her uniform were a few dangling threads. She clutched the rest of her shirt together in her fist.
“Lourdes.” Jo ran to her and searched for injuries. “What happened?”
Lourdes opened her mouth but couldn’t speak.
“Where’s the rest of your team?”
The young woman shook her head. Somehow, she’d ended up on her own.
“Call 911,” Jo ordered the executive trainee who’d been embedded in her office. “Tell them we’ve had a sexual assault. Have them send an ambulance and the police.”
“What room was she in?” the trainee asked. Handpicked by the C-suite, he considered himself Jo’s superior in everything but title. “Was it a VIP suite?” The corporation had guidelines to follow in such situations, and Jo had tossed them out the window.
“Just do it,” she ordered.
She found Lourdes’s cart on the thirty-ninth floor, outside the hotel’s second-best suite. She used her pass to let herself in. A man in his fifties, naked beneath an open hotel robe, greeted her in the suite’s living room. His limp red penis protruded from a tuft of salt-and-pepper hair.
He looked her up and down. “Where’s the coffee?” he demanded in an international accent that rang of cash.
“I’m not room service,” she informed him. “I’m the hotel manager, and I’ve called the police.”
“Oh really?” He seemed intrigued and amused. “For what?” He closed his robe and tightened its belt, then sat down on the edge of the bed, and crossed his legs.
Jo’s pulse was accelerating, and she could feel the heat beginning to build. She wanted to murder him, and she was worried she would. “You attacked the woman who came to clean your room.”
“The girl’s a hysteric.” He dismissed the charge with an almost dainty wave of his hand. “I didn’t leave a mark on her.”
“You had your penis out when I got here.”
“I wasn’t expecting you!” The man laughed. “Ask your boss,” he added, as if that would clear everything up. “He knows I am a very pious man who would never do such things. And it is not very hospitable of you to burst into my room and accuse me.”
The tenor of his voice changed as he switched from defense to offense. The guest was someone important, Jo remembered. She’d taken the reservation from the CEO’s office herself. She couldn’t recall who he was. Mafioso, dictator, mogul, or Nobel Prize winner. It made no difference. He was a VIP. And the rules were different where VIPs were concerned.
“Your face,” the man said, adopting a tone of concern. “It is very red. I’m afraid that you are not well. Perhaps you realize that you have made a mistake?”
The heat that had begun in Jo’s chest had crept up her neck and laid claim to her head. Beads of sweat formed along her hairline. She desperately wanted to rip off her suit jacket, but she knew doing so would expose the sweat stains spreading under the arms of her silk shirt.
There was a knock at the door. The police, she assumed, before she realized that the NYPD couldn’t have made it to the hotel so quickly. The door opened before she could make a move toward it. Hotel security had arrived, led by the trainee. The relief she felt lasted less than a second.
“Jo, can you come with us for a moment?” the trainee inquired.
Something was up. “Where’s Lourdes?” Jo demanded.
“She’s totally fine,” the trainee cooed. “It was all a big misunderstanding.”
“The police will decide that,” Jo said.
“We don’t need the police. Like I said, it was all a misunderstanding. Lourdes is with HR right now, figuring out her next steps.”
Three men in their forties and fifties would be pressuring a twenty-two-year-old woman to take a payout in exchange for an NDA. “I want to see her first.”
The trainee had the chutzpah to smile at her. “I’ve already spoken with senior management. That won’t be possible.”
She knew then what she should have known all along. He’d been hired to keep an eye on her. “You fucking traitor,” Jo spat.
“Say what you like, but we need to leave this room. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience, sir,” the trainee told the guest.
“Don’t apologize.” The man stood up from the bed and laid an avuncular hand on the young man’s shoulder. “These poor women—they are at the mercy of their hormones. You and I are lucky to be men. I can only imagine what their suffering must be like.”
Jo later told Art that something inside her had ignited—a powder keg that had been filling for a very long time. The force of the explosion propelled her across the room before she knew what was happening. With one hand, she grabbed hold of the VIP’s throat and slammed him into the wall. Her free arm reared back and sent her fist flying toward the man’s face. In the last millisecond, it veered to the left and hit the wall less than an inch from his ear. When her arm finally came to a stop, it was wrist-deep in the drywall. It was clear that the impact would have killed the man in her grip. Miraculously, Jo felt no pain at all.