The Apex of Love

The pitch deck sticks to my palms. I press my thighs together under the conference table, wipe my hands on my skirt when no one's tracking me. Annika, the woman I'm replacing, wore a size four. I'm eight. The waistband bites creating a red mark on my stomach every time I inhale, and I've been inhaling plenty because the air in here is thin and tastes of other people's sweat. The fluorescents buzz. Not a hum. A buzz. Like a horsefly beating itself dead against a windowpane. Still thinking about it, I hear a voice speaking to me. "I'm sorry, who are you?" The man across the table has a suit and a tie that costs more than my monthly rent on the east side. He studies me like an entreé he didn't order. "Lena. I'm subbing for Annika. Sinus infection." My voice spikes higher than I intend. I clear my throat. "I have the Henderson projections." "Annika has the Henderson projections." "Annika emailed them to me at six this morning." I slide the deck across the table. The wood gleams like a frozen lake. "Pages four through seven." He doesn't glance at it. He glances at his phone. Fine. Sit. I lean back in a chair that cost more than my father's last PET scan and try to remember why I said yes to this gig. The money. The money that dissolves into medical bills before it touches my account. The door opens. I don't hear it so much as feel it. The cold air displacing, carrying a burn of scotch and something starched, something with weight. The fluorescents sharpen their buzz, or maybe that's blood rushing to my eardrums. Julian Croft. He's taller than the CNBC footage suggests. Leaner. Everything about him is sharp. Look at his square jaw, cheekbones, the knife-edge of his shoulders inside a charcoal suit someone probably flew in from Milan and wept over. His hair is dark, pushed back with either zero effort or extreme precision. I can't tell. His eyes are pale blue, but in the dead light of the boardroom they read gray. I mean frostbite gray. He doesn't look at me. He looks through me, past me, toward the real people. That's fine to me. Invisible is my default setting across a dozen offices in this city. I mean I like being a temp ghost who reforms footnotes and retrieves coffee no one thanks her for. Then he stops. His gaze catches on my face. A quarter second, or less. Enough for my stomach to execute a slow, unwelcome rotation. "Where's Annika?" The suit that spoke to me earlier supplies the answer. "Sick. This is the replacement." Julian Croft doesn't nod. He moves to the head of the table and settles. The motion is fluid, efficient. Nothing wasted. He doesn't check his phone. He doesn't riffle papers. He folds his hands and begins to speak. "We're discussing the Henderson merger. Some of you prepared. Most of you didn't. If you didn't, stay silent. It saves minutes." His voice. It's low and level, stripped of the performative bark men in rooms like this usually deploy. He doesn't need volume. He knows bodies will lean in to catch every syllable. I lean in. I catch myself mid-lean and snap backward, spine striking the chair. My heart knocks a warning rhythm against my ribs. Pay attention. This one registers things. The meeting dissolves into figures and planning. I track maybe sixty percent. The rest of the time, I'm fixed on Julian Croft's hands. The way a single finger taps the table when someone drones. The way he interrupts with a question that shears through padding. "Mr. Keller." The suit that spoke to me earlier is Keller. "You propose we increase the offer by twelve percent based on a projection you haven't verified. Is that strategy or a prayer?" Keller's neck flushes. "It's a calculated—" "It's a prayer. I don't pray in boardrooms. Next." My mouth was thoroughly dried up. I'm not the target, and still my pulse thuds in my throat. I flatten my palms against my skirt. The fabric is damp. The meeting terminates without further drama. Julian Croft rises, buttons his jacket, moves toward the door. People scatter. I stay seated, waiting for the room to empty so I can gather the decks and dissolve back to the temp agency where I'm a row on a spreadsheet. I reach for the Henderson file. My hand trembles as adrenaline comes down, I tell myself it has nothing to do with the man standing at the other side of the room, discussing quarterly earnings in a low thrum I can feel at the base of my spine. His pen sits at the table's edge. The Montblanc in black, and looks heavy. I watched him initially during Keller's dismantling. He left it. I grab the file. My elbow catches the pen. It rolls. I lunged, but it was too far, and I was too slow. The pen tips over the edge and strikes marble with a c***k that splits the air like a bone fracturing. Silence floods the room. I drop. The marble bites through my tights, cold and immediate. The pen has vanished under the table. I scramble, fingers closing around the barrel just as a shadow swallows the light. Julian Croft crouches beside me. He's close. Close enough that I catch the scotch on his breath, the starch in his collar, something beneath both—smoky, warm, staggering. His eyes level with mine. Gray. Unreadable. The red neon orb of the Penobscot Building pulses through the window behind him, a slow heartbeat against the Detroit skyline. He doesn't take the pen. He waits. Heat crawls up the back of my neck and spills downward. My hand vibrates as I extend his absurd, precious pen. He doesn't move, nor blink. Just watches me, crouched on the floor of a boardroom with a temp who can't clear a table without breaking something. "You break it, you buy it." His voice runs quiet. Conversational. It hooks something in my chest and tugs. "And you can't afford it." He rises. He takes the pen from my frozen fingers without grazing my skin. He walks out. I stay on my knees, heart hammering, thighs clamped together, skin firing. The Penobscot orb bleeds red through the glass. I should be mortified. I am mortified. But beneath the mortification, beneath the shame and the adrenaline and the cold marble bruising my kneecaps, something liquid and hot and completely unacceptable stirs low in my stomach. What the hell is wrong with you? I don't know. I don't know anything except this: Julian Croft didn't fire me. He didn't even register anger. He registered interest. And I'm still on the floor, clutching the ghost of his pen, my pulse drumming in places it has no jurisdiction. I haul myself upright, gather the files, walk out on legs that feel borrowed. Outside the conference room, the air exhales around me. Rain slicks Woodward Avenue. I press my forehead to the cold glass of the elevator and force a breath. My phone buzzes. The temp agency. How'd it go? Need you for another one tomorrow. I type back: Fine. Yes. I don't mention the pen. The crouch. The way his voice landed behind my navel and nested there. The elevator drops. My reflection stares back at me in the brushed steel doors, and I see a flushed, dilated stranger. I look away. At 3:17 AM, my phone will light up on the nightstand with a message from an unknown number summoning me to his office. But I don't know that yet. Right now, there's only the rain, the red neon, and the heat still crawling slow up my sternum like a hand I can't— I stop. I didn't finish the sentence. I finish the walk to the parking structure, where my Civic smells like old coffee and the driver's seat is still molded to someone else's spine. I sit in the dark. Keys in my lap. Engine off. The rain drums the roof. I press my palm flat against my chest, right where the heat refuses to fade, and I hold it there like pressure on a wound.