Dating My Brother's Best Friend .

I told myself I was ready. I said it out loud in my bathroom mirror at 6:47 this morning while my hair was doing something I had no name for. I said it again on the bus with my sketchbook on my lap and my earphones in and the city moving past the window like it had somewhere important to be. I said it a third time standing on the pavement outside the building because I needed to hear it one more time before I walked through those doors. I was ready. I was absolutely, completely, one hundred percent ready. And then I walked into the lobby of Vale & Associates and the first person I saw was Roman Vale standing at the reception desk in a dark suit looking like he owned the entire building. Which, I then remembered, he did. I stopped walking. A man behind me walked directly into my back and muttered something under his breath and kept moving. I barely felt it. I was too busy staring at the person who had existed at the edges of my life for the past three years like a warning sign I was never quite brave enough to read. Roman Vale. My brother's best friend. Co-founder of the company I had just spent four months applying to work for. He had not seen me yet. I had approximately four seconds to decide what to do with that. Here is what I knew about Roman Vale before this morning. He and my brother Kai built this company together when they were nineteen years old. Two people, a shared office space the size of a large cupboard, and something Kai always described as Roman's terrifying refusal to fail. Three years later Vale & Associates occupied a forty-storey glass tower in the financial district and had more clients than I had ever bothered to count. I knew he was quiet in a way that made people pay attention. I knew that when he walked into a room something in the room changed, like the air rearranged itself slightly to accommodate him. I knew that my brother trusted him more than he trusted most people and Kai did not trust easily. I also knew, because I was twenty years old and not completely oblivious, that Roman Vale was the kind of person you noticed whether you wanted to or not. What I did not know — what nobody had bothered to tell me — was that he would be here. That he would be standing twelve metres away from me on the first morning of the most important internship of my life. That he was not just an employee of the company I was joining. He was the company. His name was on the building. I genuinely could not believe I had not thought about this more carefully. He turned around. I do not know what I expected. That he would not recognise me, maybe. That I could slip to the side and find my way to the intern floor without this becoming a thing. I had my sketchbook pressed to my chest like a shield and my badge in my hand and I had a plan for today and that plan did not include this. Roman Vale looked at me across the lobby of his building and for one long second he did not say anything at all. He had that kind of face. The kind that did not give you much. Dark eyes, jaw set, expression somewhere between neutral and unreadable, like he had decided years ago that the world did not need to know what he was thinking and had stuck to that decision ever since. Then he said, "Lina." Not a question. Just my name, quiet and certain, like he had already done the calculation and arrived at the answer before I had time to pretend I was someone else. "Hi," I said. Brilliant. Four years of arts school, a portfolio I was proud of, a brain that usually worked, and the best I had was hi. He walked towards me and I stayed exactly where I was because my feet had apparently decided to take the morning off. He stopped a comfortable distance away. Professional distance. The kind of distance that reminded you that you were standing in a lobby and not in your brother's kitchen on a Sunday afternoon where Roman occasionally appeared for reasons I had never fully analysed. "You're the new intern," he said. "I am," I said. "I didn't know you'd be— I mean, I knew it was your company. Obviously. I just didn't think about whether you'd actually be—" "Here?" "Present," I said. "I didn't think about whether you'd be present." Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile. Roman Vale did not do anything as straightforward as smile at 8am on a Monday. But something moved at the corner of his mouth and then it was gone. "I work here," he said. "Yes," I said. "I can see that." A beat of silence. "I'm your supervisor," he said. I stared at him. "Your direct supervisor," he said, in case the first time had not been sufficient. "Your work reports to me. Evaluations, project assignments, end of term review. All of it." I kept staring. "Is that a problem?" he said. "No," I said immediately, because it was not a problem, it was absolutely fine, everything was completely fine and I was totally ready. "Not at all. That's completely fine." He looked at me for a moment in the way that Roman Vale looked at things — like he was reading something that had not been written yet. "Good," he said. "Orientation starts in twenty minutes. Third floor." And then he turned and walked to the elevator and pressed the button and waited for it without looking back at me once. I stood in the lobby holding my sketchbook and my badge and the ruins of my very prepared morning and watched the elevator doors close behind him. Then I looked around to make sure no one had witnessed that. Three people at reception were very focused on their computers. Zara appeared at my elbow from absolutely nowhere. "So," she said, her voice bright and entirely too loud for 8am. "That was Roman Vale." "Yes," I said. "Your brother's best friend." "Yes." "Who is now your boss." "My direct supervisor," I said. "Apparently." Zara looked at the elevator. She looked at me. She looked at the elevator again. "Lina," she said. "Don't." "I'm just—" "I know what you're going to say and I need you to not say it." She pressed her lips together. She lasted approximately four seconds. "He is extremely—" "Zara." "I was going to say tall," she said innocently. "I was going to say he is extremely tall." I looked at her. She looked back at me with the expression of someone who absolutely was not going to say tall. "Come on," I said. "We're going to be late." Orientation was on the third floor in a room with too many chairs and not enough coffee and a woman named Patricia who had clearly given this exact presentation so many times she could do it backwards. There were twelve of us in total. Twelve interns spread across different departments, all dressed in our best professional outfits, all pretending we were not nervous. I sat next to Zara and drew small things in the margins of my notebook while Patricia talked about company values and communication channels and the importance of meeting deadlines. I was listening. I am always listening even when it looks like I am not. That is a thing people assume incorrectly about people who draw during meetings. What I was also doing was thinking about the lobby. About Roman in that suit saying I'm your direct supervisor like it was the most straightforward information in the world. About the way he had looked at me with those dark, steady eyes and not seemed particularly surprised or particularly bothered or particularly anything. I was bothered enough for both of us, which was annoying. I had met Roman Vale maybe a dozen times over the past three years. Always at Kai's. Always briefly. He was the kind of person who was present without filling every space — he would be sitting at the kitchen counter with a coffee and somehow the whole kitchen knew he was there without him doing anything about it. He and Kai would talk about the company for hours, the kind of easy shorthand that two people develop when they have built something together from nothing. He had always been polite to me. Distant, but polite. The kind of polite that kept a careful, specific amount of space between itself and anything more. I had always told myself that was fine. It was fine. It was completely, absolutely fine and I was ready. "You've drawn that corner four times," Zara murmured beside me. I looked down at my notebook. She was right. I closed it. After orientation Patricia handed us our floor assignments and our access cards and told us that the next two weeks would be a rotation across departments before we were placed permanently. My first rotation was brand strategy. Thirty-eighth floor. Roman's floor. I stood in the corridor outside the lift and read my assignment sheet and thought several things in quick succession, none of which I am going to write down. Zara was going to digital strategy on the twelfth floor. She gave me a look when she saw my sheet. The kind of look that contained an entire conversation. "It's fine," I said before she could open her mouth. "I didn't say anything." "You were about to." "I was going to say good luck," she said. "That's all. Just good luck, Lina. Completely normal thing to say on someone's first day." She patted my arm in a way that was not reassuring at all and headed for the stairs. I pressed the button for the lift. The doors opened. Roman was already inside. He was looking at his phone. He glanced up when I stepped in. I stepped in because there was no version of this morning where I was going to stand in the corridor and wait for a different lift because Roman Vale was in this one. I had dignity. I had four years of arts school and a portfolio and a plan and I was going to be professional about this if it was the last thing I did. The doors closed. The lift began to move. It was very quiet. "Brand strategy," Roman said, without looking up from his phone. "Rotation starts at nine." "I know," I said. "I have my sheet." "Good." Silence. The floor numbers climbed. We were at fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. "How's Kai?" I said, because silence in small spaces had always made me fill it with words and I had apparently not grown out of that. Roman looked up from his phone. "Fine," he said. "You could ask him yourself. He works here." "I know he works here." "Third floor. Partnerships." "I know where he works," I said. "I was making conversation." Roman looked at me for a moment. Then he looked back at his phone. "He's fine," he said again. Quieter this time, like he had decided to actually answer instead of just stating facts. "He'll probably find you at lunch." "Okay," I said. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. "Lina." I looked at him. He was still looking at his phone but something in his shoulders had changed. Something careful had entered his posture, the way a person looks when they are about to say something they have already decided needs to be said. "This doesn't have to be strange," he said. I almost laughed. Not unkindly. Just because strange was such a small word for whatever this morning had already been. "I know," I said instead. "You're here on your own merit," he said. "Whatever Kai told you about this place, whatever you think you know — that's separate. You got this internship because your portfolio was the best one we reviewed. That's the only reason." I looked at him properly then. At the side of his face because he still wasn't quite looking at me. At the line of his jaw and the way he said things like they were settled facts rather than opinions. I didn't know what I had expected him to say in this lift but it wasn't that. "Thank you," I said. And I meant it. He nodded once. The doors opened on thirty-eight. Roman stepped out first. Then he paused in the corridor and looked back at me, and for just a moment — one single unguarded second — he looked at me like he was seeing something he wasn't sure what to do with. Then it was gone. "Nine o'clock," he said. "Don't be late." He walked down the corridor towards his office without looking back. I stepped out of the lift and stood on the thirty-eighth floor of his building with the city spread out behind the glass walls and the morning light coming in golden and wide and thought one very clear thought. I was not ready. I had never been ready. But I was here, and my sketchbook was under my arm, and Roman Vale had just told me I had earned this place on my own, and that — that was going to have to be enough to start with. I straightened my jacket. I walked towards my desk. Day one had already begun.