His eyes finally met mine, and for a split second, I thought he'd notice me but it was like looking into glass, his dismissal so absolute it felt more insulting than a shout.
As he straightened his jacket, a strange, cold shiver raced down my spine, making my hands tremble against the leather of my bag.
Maybe it was the perfume, or his aura but it was a visceral, unsettling reaction. My mind recognized it immediately, the smell and the sound were enough to bring my conscious mind to place the memory.
A memory I didn't know was not buried, but the gnawing sensation lingered through the air.
Seeing him was like catching the scent of a storm I'd survived years ago. It hit me all a once, it was a mix of a flash of a rainy night, a crowded gala, and perhaps a sharp-edged encounter in a courthouse hallway, too familiar to ignore altogether.
One thing I was sure of was we had met. Or rather, I could call it a collision. It must have been brief seconds, really and defined by an arrogance but it was indeed memorable.
I've never felt so out of place and so uncomfortable around a person before.
He didn't respond to my greeting, it was a low rumble after all I wasn't quite sure I heard myself too. I had a job to do, and I was already seven minutes late.
Tiana hurried through the lobby of Lincoln Willow Legal, her heels clicking a frantic rhythm on the marble. By the time she reached the fourth floor, she could see her boss, Mr. Henderson, hovering near her desk like a storm cloud with a clipboard.
"Nice of you to join us, Tiana," Henderson barked, not even looking up from his watch. "I assume the traffic was personally tailored to delay your arrival?"
"I'm so sorry, Mr. Henderson. There was a situation", more like an epitome of perfection dressed in obsidian matte, but I wasn't about to tell Mr. Henderson that.
"Situations are for people who don't have deadlines," he snapped, finally looking up. His face was a shade of corporate grey. "The Thorne brief is sitting on my desk, incomplete. The client is calling in twenty minutes. Do you think they care about your 'situation'?"
"I'll handle it right away Sir".
Tiana felt the heat rise to her cheeks. The sting of The Man's indifference was now being buried under the weight of professional failure.
The Thorne Brief needed three more sections of cross-referencing, editing and a total overhaul, ahead of the client call that was set for 8:30 AM sharp.
Henderson's look hinted at a "performance review" if the file wasn't perfect.
"Get to your desk. Now," Henderson ordered, his voice dropping to a dangerous low. "And if I see you checking your phone for whatever distraction caused this tardiness, don't bother coming in tomorrow."
Tiana sank into her chair, her heart hammering. She opened her laptop, but for a split second, the glowing screen blurred. She wasn't just thinking about the Thorne brief. She was thinking about how the vulnerability of her job, Henderson's heat felt like two sides of the same coin, it burned with a tension to be the best and show everyone she was worth being in this room at this time.
The morning's humiliation was only the prologue. As Tiana dove into the Thorne brief, her fingers flying across the keys, the universe seemed determined to test her breaking point.
By 9:00 AM, the office felt like a pressure cooker. The air conditioning didn't seem to drive the humidity away, leaving the air thick and stagnant.
To make matters worse, while rushing to the communal printer, Tiana had collided with a junior associate, sending a lukewarm latte cascading down the front of her cream-colored silk blouse.
"Just perfect," she hissed, dabbing at the beige stain with a rough paper towel that only succeeded in shredding and sticking to the fabric.
She spent the rest of the afternoon hiding behind her blazer, despite the rising heat, feeling the sticky residue of sugar on her skin. Every time Henderson walked by, he made a point of sighing loudly or tapping his watch. It was a slow-motion psychological warfare that left her drained.
At 10:00 AM, the "big fish" arrived. Mr. Smith himself led the client; an AI expert and Tech mogul named Marcus Thorne, into the boardroom. Tiana was called in to present the research she had spent all night agonizing over.
As she stood at the head of the mahogany table, the stain on her shirt felt like a neon sign. Thorne didn't look at the data; he looked at her with a clinical, detached boredom that felt eerily familiar.
"Is this the best your firm can offer, Smith?" Thorne asked, his voice a gravelly baritone.
"The formatting on page twelve is inconsistent with the previous projections."
Tiana's heart sank. It was a minor clerical error, a result of her rushing after the morning's debacle at the parking lot. She tried to explain the shift in the market variables, but Thorne simply held up a hand
"I'm not paying for excuses," he said, mirroring Amir's dismissiveness from that morning with haunting accuracy. "I'm paying for perfection. Fix it by tonight, or we'll be taking our business to a firm that values its clients' time."
The dismissal was total. Tiana was ushered out before she could even defend her work. The rest of the day was a blur of frantic corrections and silent tears shed in the supply closet.