Fighting Mr Knight

Bonnie You can tell a lot about a man by his nostrils. Pay attention and they’re full of clues. If his nostrils flare and his lips part, he’s picturing you naked. The nostrils of the guy in the sharp blue suit at the top of the boardroom are fat with anger. Max, my boss. He checks his watch as the team piles in, taking the seats around me. Technically, they’re on time, but they’re on Big Ben’s clock rather than Max’s, which is five minutes slower. Twenty of us—architects, interior designers, planners—make up Bradshaw Brown, one of London’s smaller architecture firms. As far as design firms go, we’re not sexy. We don’t design shiny pointy things in the London skyline shaped like shards of glass or walkie-talkies and if I listed ten of our projects to the public, eyes would glaze over. Restoration of old abandoned heritage buildings, that’s our bag. The two sales guys take seats at the front. The Antichrist to us creatives. Their strategy is to pimp us out for deadlines that we can’t meet, then they ignore our calls because they’re too busy on the phone, selling us to new clients. Max hooks up his laptop, and the boardroom screen comes to life. But this morning, it’s not displaying the Bradshaw Brown team agenda. Twenty jaws drop to the floor as we stare at an attractive blonde posing seductively on sand while rocking a red bikini and Santa hat. Then slowly, like dominoes, nineteen slack jaws swivel to stare at me. Well, s**t. My body stiffens in defence, and I shoot them back death glares. I force my horrified eyes back to the screen. The photo is in a message from a Danielle. To summarise our boss’s emailed response in big print: Danielle in a Mrs. Claus outfit makes his d**k hard. It’s not even Christmas. Danielle smiles playfully at us with wide eyes as she lives her best life on a beach somewhere. Max is too busy checking something on his laptop to notice that he’s broadcasting his digital m**********n bank to the design team. His inability to pick up on the tension in the room is astounding. “Uh, Max,” Nisha, Bradshaw Brown’s contracts manager and my close friend, says sharply beside me. “That’s not the agenda you have on-screen.” Confused, Max pivots and then flinches as if Danielle jumped out and slapped him in the face. “s**t!” Choking painfully on his own saliva, he frantically yanks the cable from his laptop. We watch gobsmacked. Awkward sniggers sprinkle the room. Max levies us a glare as if it’s our fault. “Moving on.” Nisha c***s a brow at me in a ‘you okay?’ as Max recovers, plugs his computer back in and replaces sexy Mrs. Claus with the meeting agenda. I plaster a bright smile on my face. Mortified is the understatement of the century. So Max is dating again. Max, the man I spent the past four years with. I was a fresh architecture graduate wet behind the ears when he was a qualified architect at Bradshaw Brown. He took me under his wing and became my mentor. Then he became my boyfriend, my fiancé and eventually my boss. Then my ex-fiancé. But still my boss. Not an ideal sequence of events. My gaze trails up his body as he strokes his tie in agitation. I know every inch of this man, every freckle, birthmark and vein on his d**k. How he sneezes after s*x. I could write his medical records from memory. Does Danielle know his d**k veins too? He wasn’t supposed to start dating again. He was supposed to become a fat monk. “Status updates,” Max orders, turning his attention to the project managers sitting at the back, confidence fully restored. “Darren, the Mayfair project. Where are we with it?” I can barely hear Max over the sound of my heartbeat in my ears, like a drum smashing against my brain. Who the f**k is Danielle? Darren shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “All going well, boss. We’re preparing the preliminary cost estimates. I’ll perform a requirement drill-down with the team to ensure we’re singing from the same hymn sheet.” He nods curtly in my direction. “Then we’ll finalise figures, dot the i’s, cross the t’s and present back.” Huh? I have no idea what the f**k Darren’s saying. Scraping all his fingernails down the whiteboard would have achieved the same result. “I’ve planned a workshop with Bonnie today,” Darren adds. Calling it a workshop is a stretch. Ten minutes ago, Darren popped a fifteen-minute meeting in my diary. A meeting to say he’s in a meeting. “Bonnie,” Max says sharply, rapping his knuckles on the desk like a headmaster. “Treat it as urgent. Do you need me to help prioritise workload?” I stare back at Max in disbelief. Is he really going to get on my grill after that little exposé? “Bonnie and I can take this offline,” Darren cuts in before Max can detect that this full-blown workshop is a chat on the way to get coffee and some of the walnut cake they have in the cafeteria. Darren takes everything offline, which means nothing will happen. He’ll give the same update phrased slightly differently next week. He’d be a great politician. Next up is Layla, the other project manager. Layla prefers to keep everything online, which means she’ll monopolise the meeting talking about her project in irrelevant detail. Everyone drifts to faraway places while Max reins in Layla. Eighty percent of people are thinking about s*x during meetings, and many of the scenarios involve other people in the room. It’s the same with conferences, weddings and funerals. That’s my theory. I often wondered what co-workers thought of Max and me. I suspect it’s less fifty shades of office romance and more old married couple who schedule s*x. I guess that was the red flag. With Max, there was no steamy elevator s*x or sneaky boardroom leg rubbing under the table. No uncontrollable bouts of horniness or unexpected semis. Not once did we have to rush out to the stairway to claw off each other’s clothes. On the clock, we talked shop. Off the clock, we talked about . . . quite a bit of shop. Our s*x life at home was decent enough, though. After years together, I never expected to be swinging from chandeliers, letting loud guttural moans rip through me in an Oscar-worthy performance. But what we did have was stability. Max was simply, always there. A constitutional force in my life not to be questioned. Nisha breathes angrily beside me as Layla rambles about a Notting Hill church conversion into luxury flats. “That’s enough, Layla,” Max cuts in sharply. “If there are no escalations, let’s move on.” “Can we talk about the Lexington project?” Nisha asks. Everyone’s spine straightens. The Lexington East London project has been the buzz of the office for weeks.