The Devil Wears My Lipstick

Two O’Clock

I sent the Meridian notes at one fifty-three.

Seven minutes early. Not because I was trying to impress him. Because I had been so aggressively focused on the document for the last forty-seven minutes — using it as a wall between me and the glass office and the three words sitting unresponded to in my message thread — that I finished it faster than I intended and sitting on it until two felt like a game I didn’t want to play.

I hit send.

Opened Simone’s texts.

She had sent eleven messages since noon. I had read none of them.

How was the office meeting

Zara

ZARA

I swear if you don’t answer me

Okay I’m assuming you’re either fired or making out with your boss and either way I need details

Please be making out with your boss

Actually no don’t do that you need the job

But also do it

Zara I’m at my desk losing my mind

Fine. I’m going to lunch. If you’re alive text me.

You’re not dead you’re just ignoring me which is worse

I typed: I’m alive. Meeting was about work. Nothing happened.

I stared at that last sentence.

Deleted it.

Typed: Meeting was about work. I’ll tell you everything tonight.

Sent it before I could think about what everything meant and whether I was actually going to say it out loud.

My computer pinged.

I looked at the screen.

Internal message. Him.

My stomach did something I was going to file a formal complaint about.

I opened it.

Notes received. The audit structure is good. Better than good. Come back at five. We need to discuss implementation.

I read it twice.

Five o’clock. End of day. When the floor would be emptying out and the open plan would be thinning and the glass office would be considerably less observed than it was right now at two in the afternoon with thirty people at their desks.

Every sensible part of me said — respond professionally, confirm the meeting, close the thread.

I typed: I’ll be there.

Sent it.

Then immediately typed: And thank you. For the notes feedback.

His response came back in under a minute.

Don’t thank me for accurate assessments, Ms. Mensah. If the work is good I’ll tell you. If it isn’t I’ll tell you that too.

I looked at the message.

Typed: Most bosses just say good job and mean nothing by it.

I’m not most bosses, he sent back.

I looked at those four words on the screen and thought about how completely and accurately true they were and how that truth was the specific problem I was currently dealing with.

No, I typed. You’re really not.

I closed the thread before he could respond.

The floor started emptying at four-thirty.

I watched it happen from my desk — the gradual thinning of the open plan as people packed up and said their goodbyes and filtered toward the elevators in ones and twos. By four fifty the section around my desk was down to three people and by four fifty-eight it was just me and the hum of the building and the light still burning behind the glass wall of Dominic Blackwell’s office.

I gathered my notes. My laptop. The specific version of my composure that I used for high-stakes situations and had been reconstructing since one fifty-three.

I walked to the glass door.

Knocked twice.

“Come in.”

The office felt different at five o’clock than it had at noon.

The same square footage. The same desk, the same chair, the same cedar-dark smell that I was going to have to find a way to stop noticing. But the quality of the light had changed — the afternoon sun was low and coming through the west-facing window at an angle that made everything amber and specific, the kind of light that made ordinary rooms look like they meant something.

Dominic was at his desk but standing now, jacket back on, one hand braced on the surface, looking at something spread across it. He looked up when I came in.

“Close the door,” he said.

I closed the door.

The click of it felt loud in the quiet office.

I walked to the desk and he turned the papers toward me — printed versions of my notes with handwritten additions in the margins. His handwriting was exactly what I would have expected from him — precise, no wasted strokes, every letter doing exactly what it needed to do and nothing extra.

“Here,” he said. And pointed at the first margin note.

I leaned in to read it.

Which put me close to him. Not inappropriately close — close in the way of two people looking at the same document, the normal geometry of a work conversation. His shoulder near my shoulder. The cedar smell much more present at this proximity. His hand on the desk near my hand on the desk, not touching, just — near.

I read the margin note.

It was a question about the audit timeline I had proposed. A good question. A question that meant he had actually read every word and thought about it properly.

“I can compress the first phase by a week if we front-load the platform analysis,” I said. “It means more work in the first ten days but the timeline tightens overall.”

“Show me,” he said.

I reached past him for the pen on his desk.

My arm crossed in front of him. Not touching him. The air between us the only thing occupying the distance.

He went completely still.

Not visibly — if someone had been watching from the floor they would have seen nothing. But I felt it. The specific quality of a person who has stopped moving in a way that has nothing to do with stillness and everything to do with awareness.

I took the pen.

Drew the revised timeline on the margin of the page.

Talked through it. Kept my voice even, my explanation clean, my eyes on the paper rather than on the six inches of space between my shoulder and his.

When I finished I put the pen down.

Straightened up.

And found him already looking at me. Not at the paper. At me.

Up close his eyes were darker than they looked from across the floor. Not brown — something deeper than brown, with a quality of attention behind them that made being looked at feel like being read.

“That works,” he said. About the timeline. Presumably about the timeline.

“I know,” I said.

The corner of his mouth. One degree. The infrastructure of a smile on a man who had decided not to have one.

“You do that a lot,” he said.

“Do what.”

“Confirm your own assessments after I agree with them,” he said. “Like you knew you were right and you’re noting that the record now reflects it.”

“Because I did know,” I said. “And it does.”

He looked at me for a moment.

“How old are you,” he said.

“Twenty-three,” I said. “How old are you.”

“Thirty-eight,” he said. Without hesitating. Like the number was just a fact and not the fifteen-year gap it represented.

“That’s a big difference,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

Neither of us moved.

The amber light came through the west window and sat on everything.

“Is that going to be a problem,” he said. And the question was not about the Meridian account.

I looked at him.

At the dark eyes and the precise jaw and the rolled-back-to-forearm shirt sleeves and the handwriting in the margins that meant he had actually read every word I wrote.

“I don’t know yet,” I said honestly.

Something shifted in his face. The specific look of a man who had expected a different answer and found this one more interesting.

“Honest,” he said.

“Always,” I said.

He picked the papers up from the desk. Squared them. Set them in a folder with the specific deliberateness of a man drawing a boundary around something.

“Implementation meeting with the Meridian team is Thursday at nine,” he said. “I want you in the room.”

Back to work. The folder closed. The boundary drawn.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

I picked up my laptop. Walked to the door. Put my hand on the handle.

“Ms. Mensah.”

I stopped. Did not turn around immediately. The two seconds. Then I turned.

He was standing behind his desk with both hands flat on the surface and his eyes on me and the amber light on everything.

“The answer to my question,” he said. “When you know — tell me.”

I looked at him across the office.

“You’ll know when I know,” I said. “You’re very good at reading things.”

I opened the door.

Walked out.

Crossed the empty open plan floor to my desk, picked up my bag, and walked to the elevator without looking back at the glass office.

The elevator doors opened.

I stepped in.

Pressed lobby.

The doors closed.

And the second they did I pressed my back against the elevator wall and put both hands over my face and stood there for four floors just breathing because Dominic Blackwell had just asked me if the fifteen year age gap between us was going to be a problem and I had told him I didn’t know yet which was the most honest thing I had said all day and also the most catastrophically stupid.

My phone buzzed.

Simone.

Tell me everything. I have wine. Get here.

I typed back with both hands still slightly unsteady.

I’m coming. And Simone —

What.

I think I’m in serious trouble.

The elevator hit the lobby.

The doors opened.

And my phone buzzed one more time.

Not Simone.

Internal email. From Dominic Blackwell. Sent forty seconds ago — which meant he had sent it while I was still in the elevator, which meant he had walked back to his desk and opened his laptop and typed it the second I walked out of his office.

Subject line: Meridian Implementation — Thursday

I opened it.

The email was four lines about the Thursday meeting. Professional. Clean. Completely appropriate.

And at the bottom, below his signature, one line that was not part of the email.

For what it’s worth — I don’t know yet either.