The Devil Wears My Lipstick

Monday

I wore red on Monday.

Not the same dress — a different one. Fitted, wrap style, slightly more professional than Saturday’s version but red in a way that left absolutely no room for misinterpretation. Simone had helped me pick it on Sunday afternoon in her apartment while eating jerk chicken and making decisions we would both pretend were strategic rather than petty.

“He told you not to wear red,” Simone said, holding the dress up against me.

“He made a suggestion,” I said.

“His suggestion comes with a salary and benefits.”

“His suggestion was about a dress code that doesn’t exist in any documentation I was given,” I said. “I checked.”

Simone looked at me for a long moment.

“You are going to get fired and evicted,” she said.

“Or,” I said, “he’s going to understand immediately that I am not a person who takes arbitrary instructions from men regardless of their tax bracket and he’s going to respect it.”

“Those are not the only two options,” Simone said.

She was right. There was a third option that neither of us named out loud. The one that lived in the specific way Dominic Blackwell had looked at me across that conference table when he said don’t wear red on Monday — like it was a test and like he already knew which way I was going to answer it and like that answer was the reason he was asking.

I wore the dress.

The thirty-first floor of Blackwell Industries at eight forty-five on a Monday morning was a specific kind of controlled chaos — people moving with purpose, phones ringing, the low collective hum of a machine that had been running at full capacity since before most of its parts arrived. My desk was in the open plan section outside the three glass-walled offices that belonged to Dominic, Victor, and the Head of Creative — a woman named Diane Chen who had looked at me on my brief orientation tour Friday afternoon with the specific expression of someone deciding whether I was going to be a problem.

I was shown my desk. Given my login credentials. Handed a stack of briefing documents that represented my first three client accounts.

I sat down.

Opened the first briefing.

And was twenty minutes into reading it when I felt it.

The specific quality of being looked at.

Not glanced at. Not casually observed. Looked at — with the focused deliberateness of someone who had decided to look and was not managing how obvious it was.

I did not look up immediately.

I finished the paragraph I was reading.

Then I looked up.

Dominic Blackwell was standing behind the glass wall of his office with a phone against his ear and his eyes on me. Not pretending to look at something else. Not performing distraction. Just — looking. Direct and unhurried the way he did everything.

His eyes moved from my face down to the dress.

Back up to my face.

I held his gaze across the open plan floor and the glass wall between us and did not look away.

He said something into the phone.

Did not look away either.

We held that for five full seconds — five seconds of eye contact across thirty feet of office space on a Monday morning that felt, from where I was sitting, like an entire conversation conducted without a single word.

Then Victor appeared at his office door and said something and Dominic turned away.

I looked back at my briefing document.

My heart was doing that unauthorized thing again.

I pressed my feet flat on the floor and breathed through it and told myself very firmly that I was a professional person in a professional environment and that whatever had just happened across that open plan floor was nothing and was going to continue to be nothing because I needed this job and my lights needed to stay on and Dominic Blackwell was my boss and therefore the most off limits human being on the planet.

My computer pinged.

Internal message. From an address I didn’t recognize yet.

I opened it.

One line.

You wore red.

No name. But there was only one person in this building who that could be from.

I stared at the screen.

Looked up at the glass office.

He was not looking at me now — back on his phone, turned slightly away, the picture of a man entirely occupied by his morning.

I looked back at the screen.

Typed one word.

Yes.

Sent it.

Watched the delivered receipt appear.

And then I closed the message and opened my briefing document and stared at the words without reading a single one of them for the next four minutes while I waited to see if he would respond.

He didn’t.

Which was somehow so much worse than if he had.