Dating My Brother's Best Friend .

Chapter 3 : Performing.

I had a list.

I made it the night before in my apartment at the kitchen table with a cup of tea that went cold because I forgot about it, which is what always happens when I am thinking about something seriously. The list had six items on it and I was proud of every single one.

Rules for the arrangement:

Professional at all times inside the building.

No unnecessary physical contact.

No lying to Kai. Omitting details is different from lying. I had decided this and I was sticking to it.

Feelings are not part of this. Feelings do not exist. Feelings are for people who have not made a very sensible and practical professional arrangement with their brother's best friend.

Twelve weeks. That is all. Twelve weeks and then life goes back to normal.

Do not draw Roman Vale's office door again.

I read the list back three times. I added a seventh item — eat breakfast, do not skip breakfast when nervous — and then I folded the paper and put it in my sketchbook and went to bed.

I did not sleep particularly well.

He was waiting by my desk at 8:52am.

Not in his office, not in the corridor, not somewhere sensible and distant. Right there, standing beside my chair with a coffee in each hand, talking quietly to someone from the brand strategy team who laughed at something he said and then noticed me arriving and straightened up like they had been caught doing something.

Roman turned around.

He was wearing a different suit today. Darker. He looked exactly as composed as he always looked, which was irritating in a way I could not fully explain, because I had been awake since five and I had a list and I had prepared and he looked like he had simply existed into the morning without any effort at all.

He held out one of the coffees.

I took it because it would have been strange not to.

"Good morning," he said.

"Good morning," I said.

The brand strategy team member — a woman named Claire who I had met briefly yesterday — looked between us with an expression of barely contained interest.

"Claire," Roman said without looking at her, "the Harmon pitch deck needs another pass before Thursday."

Claire picked up her bag from her desk. "On it," she said, and walked away at a speed that suggested she was going to tell someone something the moment she was out of earshot.

I sat down at my desk and wrapped both hands around the coffee cup.

"You told someone," I said quietly.

"I told no one," Roman said. He sat on the edge of the desk beside mine in a way I had not expected — casual, unhurried, like he had decided to be visible about this from the first moment and that was that. "I don't need to tell anyone. I just need to be consistent."

"Consistent," I repeated.

"People notice patterns," he said. "If I bring you coffee once it means nothing. If I do it every morning it means something. That is how this works."

I looked up at him. "You've thought about this a lot."

"I think about everything a lot," he said simply.

Which was, I thought, probably the most Roman Vale sentence I had ever heard.

By ten o'clock the floor knew something was happening.

I could feel it the way you feel weather changing — a shift in the air, a certain quality of attention that was not quite staring but was definitely noticing. People found small reasons to walk past my desk. Someone asked me a question about the Harmon account that they absolutely could have answered themselves. Two people from the team had a conversation near the window that went quiet when Roman came out of his office and walked past them to the printer.

I kept my head down and worked.

This was the thing about me that I needed people to understand and that they consistently failed to understand because of the sketchbook and the hair and the general impression I apparently gave of being someone whose thoughts were primarily decorative. I was actually very good at my work. Four years at Crestwood had taught me how to look at a brand and understand what it was trying to say and what it should be saying instead. I could read a brief and find the thing inside it that the client did not know they were asking for.

I had pulled up the Harmon account files first thing and by ten I had three pages of notes and two rough concept sketches and a thought about their visual identity that I was fairly certain nobody had considered yet.

I was here to work. I was going to work.

The fact that Roman Vale kept existing in my peripheral vision every time he walked between his office and the main floor was completely irrelevant.

"You're good at that."

It was just after eleven. I had not heard him approach and I startled slightly, which I immediately resented.

Roman was standing behind my left shoulder looking at the sketch open on my desk. Not the Harmon concepts — I had moved those into a folder. This was the other page, the one I had been drawing on absently while I was thinking, which had somehow become a surprisingly detailed study of the view from the thirty-eighth floor window.

The city. The buildings. The way the light hit the glass of the tower across the street and split into something that looked almost like colour.

I closed the sketchbook.

"It's just a habit," I said.

"You drew that in under an hour."

"I wasn't really paying attention to it."

"That's what makes it good," he said.

I turned to look at him. He was already straightening up, already moving away, already back to being Roman Vale the CEO rather than Roman Vale who had just said something that sat warmly in my chest in a way I had not asked for and did not want.

I opened the sketchbook again after he walked away.

I looked at the drawing.

I closed it again.

Lunch was an exercise in performance.

Roman appeared at my desk at 12:30 exactly and said, "Lunch," the way someone says a word that is not actually a question, and I picked up my bag and followed him to the lift because that was apparently what we were doing now.

The canteen was on the sixth floor. It was large and bright and loud with the midday noise of a company that had a lot of people in it, and when Roman walked in with me beside him the noise did not stop but something in it changed. A frequency shift. The kind that happens when people notice something and decide to keep noticing it quietly.

We got food. We sat at a table near the window. Roman ate with the focused efficiency of someone who thought of lunch as a task to be completed rather than an experience to be had.

I ate my pasta and looked out at the city below and tried to feel normal.

"You're uncomfortable," Roman said.

"I'm fine," I said.

"You've straightened your fork three times."

I looked down. My fork was very straight.

"I just don't love being watched," I said.

"Nobody is watching."

"Roman. Three people have walked past this table twice."

He glanced up briefly and then back at his food. "Let them," he said. "That's the point."

"Easy for you to say," I said. "You're used to people looking at you."

He was quiet for a moment. "Is it that obvious?"

"That people look at you?" I said. "Yes. Constantly. You walk into a room and everyone recalibrates."

He considered that. "I don't notice it."

"I know," I said. "That's part of why it happens."

He looked at me then. A proper look, the kind he did not give out casually, steady and direct and lasting just a second longer than was strictly necessary. I held it because looking away first felt like losing something.

Then Kai appeared.

He came from the direction of the food counter with a tray and a relaxed expression that changed very slightly when he saw where we were sitting. He recovered fast — Kai always recovered fast — but I saw it. That small recalibration.

"Hey," he said, pulling out the chair across from me and sitting down like it was the most natural thing in the world. "Didn't know you two were doing lunch."

"We're doing lunch," I said.

Kai looked at Roman.

Roman looked back at him with the same expression he gave everything — calm, unhurried, giving nothing away.

"How's the Harmon prep going?" Kai asked him.

"On track," Roman said.

"Lina settling in okay?"

"She's doing well," Roman said.

Kai looked at me. I looked at my pasta. I had straightened my fork again and I was not going to acknowledge it.

"Good," Kai said. He said it in the tone of someone who had filed something away and had decided not to look at it directly yet. "That's good."

We ate lunch. We talked about normal things. The conversation was easy on the surface, the way conversations between people who know each other well are always easy on the surface, and underneath it something moved like a current that none of us mentioned.

When Kai stood up to leave he squeezed my shoulder briefly, the way he always did, and then he looked at Roman once more with an expression I could not fully read.

Not angry. Not suspicious exactly. Just — aware.

Roman met his eyes without flinching.

Kai left.

"He knows something is different," I said quietly.

"He knows something is different," Roman agreed.

"Is that okay?"

Roman picked up his water glass. "Kai is the smartest person I know," he said. "He will figure out whatever he needs to figure out in his own time."

"And then?"

"And then we deal with it," he said. "One thing at a time."

I looked at him across the table. At the particular steadiness of him, the way he faced things head on without drama, without flinching. It was the quality I found most difficult about Roman Vale — not the coldness, not the authority, not the way a room reorganised itself around him when he walked in.

It was the fact that nothing seemed to rattle him.

And I, who was rattled by approximately everything, found that both deeply reassuring and deeply unfair.

At 5:30 I packed up my desk and put my sketchbook in my bag and turned off my monitor.

Roman was still in his office. I could see him through the glass wall — head down, working, the city darkening behind him as the afternoon gave way to evening. He had not moved in two hours. He would probably still be there at eight.

I took the lift down alone.

In the lobby I passed Claire from brand strategy, who was on her way out with her coat over her arm. She smiled at me with the particular warmth of someone who now had context for me that they did not have yesterday.

"See you tomorrow, Lina," she said.

"See you tomorrow," I said.

I walked out through the revolving doors and onto the street and let the city noise wash over me for a moment. Buses and voices and the smell of food from somewhere nearby and the particular feeling of a city in the early evening when everyone is heading somewhere.

I took out my phone.

The video had fifty thousand views.

Directly below it, on three different accounts, were screenshots of Roman and me at the lunch table. Heads close, talking quietly. His expression. Mine.

The caption on the most popular one said: seems like the intern situation just got a lot more interesting.

Already two thousand shares.

I put my phone in my pocket.

I walked to the bus stop.

I sat down and opened my sketchbook to a clean page and realised, somewhere between one breath and the next, that I was smiling.

I stopped smiling immediately.

I looked out at the street.

I was absolutely fine.