Chapter 2 In Which I Receive Career Mentorship #2
Just as I walked into an opening elevator, someone else walked in next to me. I didn’t see him, but I felt his arm brush my shoulder as he passed me, hurrying to lean against the back wall, the mirror reflecting the knot of black curls at the base of his neck.
“Sahir,” I said, and inclined my head. I paused my music but left my headphones in.
“Miriam,” he replied, with a slow blink back at me.
“Hold the elevator!” someone called out. I stepped forward and stuck my arm out, entering a battle of dominance with the closing door. The door submitted, reopening.
The man who’d shouted came into view, eyes flicking from me to Sahir. His nose wrinkled. “It’s okay, I’ll wait,” he said.
I withdrew my arm, following his gaze. His gaze led to Sahir, whose pointed ears and sharp features marked him Fae. Sahir’s eyebrows contracted as he realized what had happened.
The elevator doors slid shut. I leaned against the wall next to Sahir, staring at the curve of his crooked nose. His visage never ceased to fascinate me, though I knew it left many in the office unnerved.
He’d pursed his lips; his eyes were fixed on the stainless steel doors.
“How are you?” I asked, suddenly desperate to distract him.
“Weary as a winter lamb,” he said, without looking at me.
“That sounds, um, bad,” I said.
“We live to feel,” he replied, “and cannot feel joy without pain.”
“Which is why you went into banking,” I countered.
Sahir’s lip quirked, though his head didn’t turn. “Sharp tongue for a soft woman,” he said.
“I’ve got rock-hard biceps,” I replied, flexing. He couldn’t see them through my jacket, of course, but he finally smiled at me—the expression rounded his craggy cheeks, softened the bitterbark brown of his eyes into something more like molten chocolate.
“Apologies, Miriam,” he said, and chuckled. “Soft you are not.”
I smiled back. “We’re going to dinner with the Princeling tonight,” I said.
The elevator came to a stop and the doors opened on our floor. Sahir gestured for me to precede him into the stark white hallway.
“My liege may lay bounties before you,” Sahir said, pulling out his wallet. The wallet looked like two dried autumn leaves sewn together, but before I could examine it, he drew his key card from a fold and slid the wallet back into his pants.
“I’m sure he will be generous,” I replied.
“My liege will offer gifts and curses.” Sahir tapped on the card reader and then opened the door for me.
I tried not to stare at his broad back, the ripple of his shoulders beneath the taut fabric of his black suit jacket.
Until I’d met Sahir, I’d always been able to compartmentalize attractiveness and coworkers: They existed in different and unconnected circles.
Sahir had unfortunately turned those circles into a Venn diagram.
“Everyone offers gifts and curses.” I flipped my hair and traipsed past him. “No point worrying which is which until the time comes.” Every time I spoke with Sahir, the part of me that thought I was a sassy sword-wielding protagonist in a fantasy novel took over.
“Good day, Miriam,” Sahir said, turning right. I turned left past the giant painting of our founder, then three rows of cubicles, and finally slid into my rolling chair.
My team was in the office now, in the three cubicles around mine.
“What’s for lunch, Miri?” my colleague Levi asked, glancing over at my desk. I stared at the wide laminated surface, my pink reusable water bottle in one corner and my coffee thermos in the other.
“Grain bowl,” I muttered, sliding my key card into my computer.
“You gotta eat more protein, princess,” he said, helpfully. “That’s how you get gains.”
Levi believed in one macronutrient: protein.
“No pain, no gain,” I said, to say something.
He laughed. I looked over at him; his gelled brown hair had been slicked back into four distinct ridges, presumably where he’d run his hand through it. He was in his shirtsleeves, leaning back in his chair.
“Don’t report me to HR for calling you princess,” he added, his voice slightly too high to convince me he was joking.
I shrank down in my chair a bit. “I wouldn’t,” I said.
The silence settled, thick and viscous like a bathtub full of Jell-O.
I glanced around our group.
“Jeff and I are going to Faerie,” I told Levi, trying not to sound nervous. I told Levi so I wouldn’t text Jordan and Thea, who would absolutely blow up my phone, and probably show up at my workplace in the hopes of tagging along.
“Yeah, so, the thing about client dinners is, you cannot get too drunk,” Levi said, which was the only wrong response. On my other side, I could feel Corey perking up.
“There go my plans,” I muttered, clenching my thumb under my other fingers. I should’ve just texted my friends, because as unhelpful and culturally insensitive as an entourage of twenty-somethings in cosplay would’ve been, I knew it would be better than whatever wisdom Levi was about to impart.
Levi nodded earnestly. “I know you will want to drink. I know you think you can outdrink them. But don’t.
One time I double-fisted Jameson and ended up under a table narfing in a client’s bong and jangle, if you catch my drift.
” I stared at him; it wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, but I honestly couldn’t believe he was saying it out loud. On my left, Corey snorted.
“It wasn’t the client who told us he would fuck all our mothers,” Levi clarified, because this was obviously something that needed clarifying. “You remember that story, right? Anyway he wasn’t happy when I upchucked on his Chucks.”
I blinked at Levi. The others had turned around to listen to him, as they always did when anyone talked about the “good old days” of banking.
Now whenever anyone wrote fuck in an email we got a compliance notice, and Jeff had to give us a lecture, which I personally found hard to internalize when every third word out of Jeff’s mouth was fuck.
But in the good old days, which were somewhere between five and thirty years ago, you could spank a secretary or call an analyst “a smeared crust of dogshit on the underside of an old boot” and that was a fine thing to do.
I opened my bowl and stuck a fork into it, the gloopy mass immediately sticking to the utensil.
“But did you guys close the deal?” Corey asked, his face brighter than usual.
Corey had once said “investment banking is sexy” in a meeting and meant it.
Since Corey didn’t appear attracted to any of our colleagues and had never referenced a romantic partner of any kind, I wasn’t sure where he got that from.
“Oh yeah. One-point-three million fee,” Levi crowed.
“Nice,” Matt chimed in from the other side of the aisle.
I ate a bite of chewy brown goop, staring at a report on my computer and trying to erase that conversation from my head. In our operational model, the logistics of scaling one gnome under a tree into a faerie factory flattened into revenue and expense lines.
“Levi,” I said, “do you think you’ll have a chance to help me with this model soon?”
“Sure,” he said, not looking at me. “What’s the issue?”
“Well, they don’t really have a business plan to scale, so I don’t think the numbers make sense.”
“Miri,” Levi said, in the tone he reserved for me. “We don’t worry about the assumptions, remember?” He separated each word, like he wanted to make sure I could digest them. “It’s not our problem if they can do it or not. It’s the investor’s problem.”
This wasn’t true, and as I had recently taken my licensing exams, I probably could have pointed Levi to the relevant regulation stating otherwise. But it absolutely wasn’t worth arguing with him.
“Sorry, I forgot,” I said, staring at the computer. I hit F2 and started auditing the model, because we had to get it out to the client before we went to dinner.
Not that Levi or Jeff cared what I did regarding our client. Levi didn’t really engage with them, and Jeff hated them passionately.
I took another bite of grain mass and squeezed my eyes shut. It was going to be a long day.
At seven thirty p.m., Jeff came out of his office to talk to me. No one had given me details about when we’d be going to Faerie, or how we would get there, but I’d learned not to ask questions.
“Hey, Miri,” he said, standing over my chair. I spun the chair to look up at him and immediately regretted it. He was slightly too close for me to stand up, his knees almost touching mine.
“Hi, Jeff,” I said, staring into his nostrils. He glowered down at me, like a stilt walker at a Ren faire who’d just tripped over a stroller.
“Let’s get in the car.”
I glanced at my own shoes and almost bumped my head into his stomach. “I wanted to wear sneakers,” I said, unsure if I was asking for permission or stating a plan.
“Wear sneakers, I don’t care,” he said, leaning an elbow on the divider at the edge of my desk. I watched it tilt precariously. “They’re magical creatures, Miri, they don’t know about fashion.”
I didn’t know about fashion either.
“Okay.” I spun back around—Jeff still standing behind my chair—and slid my shoes off.
I waited for him to move, but he didn’t, so I had to toe around under the desk for my sneakers without sliding back into him.
After a few seconds, I found them and hitched myself into a backbend to get into the shoes without moving the chair.
“Let’s go, Miri,” Jeff said.
Assuming he’d moved, I twisted out of the seat and bumped into him. Jeff grabbed my arm to steady me. “Jesus, balance much?”
I frowned up at him. He let go and led the way out into the elevator bank, talking. I grabbed my computer, shoved it in my backpack, slung the pack over my shoulder, and followed him.
By the time I caught up, I’d clearly missed a few sentences.
“But anyway, the thing about clients is they’re always right, but they’re never right. You shouldn’t ever seriously listen to a client, but you should always agree with them.” He jabbed his finger on the down button, so hard his nail went white.