Addicted to My Enemy

The Rewrite

Ivy didn't sleep.

She sat at the kitchen table until two in the morning. Her laptop screen threw pale light across the old, chipped table while her mother's box fan rattled in the window. Diane worked the early shift at the hospital now, so she was usually asleep by ten. That meant Ivy had the apartment's quiet hours all to herself, and she used every one of them.

By the time the sky turned gray outside, she had eleven slides that said what she really believed. The logistics client didn't want a better price. They wanted to stop feeling like just another number. So she built the whole pitch around one simple idea, a dedicated team for the client, a real check-in each quarter with an actual partner in the room, not a junior worker reading from a script. It would cost the company more money than the discount Priya had planned. But Ivy was sure it would actually work.

She printed the pitch at the twenty-four-hour copy shop two blocks from her building. She didn't trust the office printer with anything before she'd said it out loud to a real person first. She reached the thirty-second floor forty minutes before her shift even started.

Ronan was already there.

Of course he was. She was starting to think the man never slept, or maybe he just stood in that glass office all night like some very expensive plant.

"You changed the whole plan," he said, not even looking up from his screen before she'd set her folder down.

"How do you know that?"

"Because you're forty minutes early and you look like you didn't sleep. People who stay up all night rewriting something don't walk in with the same plan they started with." He finally looked at her, and something in his gaze felt too sharp, too aware, like he could see straight through the tired mask she was wearing. "Sit. Walk me through it before the nine o'clock meeting."

She did. She talked faster than she meant to, nerves creeping into her voice. Halfway through, she made herself slow down. She remembered her father's voice, teaching her how to talk to landlords when she was sixteen. The moment you sound desperate, you've already lost.

Ronan listened without stopping her once. That was the thing that unsettled her most about him, not the coldness people warned her about, but the attention. He looked at her like she was a puzzle worth solving, not a person to manage or dismiss. Something about that felt more dangerous than any insult could.

"This is better," he said finally.

"Just better?"

"I don't hand out more than that on someone's second day." But there was a small shift at the corner of his mouth, something that in a warmer man might have been the start of a smile. It made her stomach flip in a way she didn't like at all. "Present it yourself. Nine o'clock."

Ivy's stomach dropped. "That's not, I'm an intern. Priya made the first version, she should be the one to..."

"Priya made the wrong version. You made the right one. The client doesn't care who has more seniority. They care if the person across from them actually understands what they need." He was already standing, already walking toward the door, done with the talk the moment he'd gotten what he needed from it. "Nine o'clock, Monroe. Don't be late to your own pitch."

She watched him go, and hated the way her heart was still racing, and not just from nerves.

She wasn't late. She was, in fact, eleven minutes early, standing outside the big conference room trying to remember how to breathe normally, when Julian found her.

"You look like you're about to be sick," he said, handing her a coffee she hadn't even asked for. "That's a good sign, though. It means you actually care."

"Is that supposed to help?"

"Not even a little." He grinned and leaned against the wall next to her. "Word's already going around the floor. Ronan never gives his own pitch slot to an intern. Ever. Priya's been in a mood about it since eight in the morning."

"Great. Day two and I've already made an enemy."

"You made that enemy on day one, when you were right and she wasn't, in front of everyone." Julian's grin softened into something more careful. "That's not really on you, though. Priya's used to being the smartest person in most rooms. It's hard to break that habit once someone finally proves you wrong."

Ivy studied him for a second, the easy warmth in his face, the way he seemed to actually want her to do well. She couldn't find any hidden reason behind it. "Why are you being so nice to me? Everyone else here looks at me like I walked into the wrong building."

"Because you're interesting," Julian said simply. "This place is full of people who say the safe thing. You said the true thing, on your first day, in front of people who could've made your life hard for it. That's rare here. I like rare."

Something in the way he said it, easy, honest, maybe a little too honest, made Ivy's chest feel tight. She didn't have time to think about why, because the conference room doors opened. It was nine o'clock, and there was nothing left to do but walk in.

The room was full when she stepped inside. Selena sat near the front, arms crossed, watching with sharp, careful eyes. Priya sat a few seats down, her jaw tight. And at the head of the table, Ronan waited, his face unreadable, though something in the way he watched Ivy walk to the front felt like a quiet kind of support, even if he'd never call it that.

Ivy set her laptop down and looked out at the room. Her hands were shaking, just slightly, but her voice, when she finally spoke, came out steady.

"I want to show you why this client is really thinking about leaving," she said. "And it isn't about money."

She caught Ronan's eyes for just a second before she started, and something passed between them, quiet, electric, and gone just as fast. It felt like a dare. It felt like trust. She wasn't sure yet which one scared her more.

Then she began the pitch, and for the next fifteen minutes, she forgot to be afraid at all.