Chapter 4
four
. . .
I slept, eventually.
Not well—but enough to take the sharpest edge off before waking with my body feeling heavy in that strange, oversensitized way a good orgasm sometimes left behind when it had not really been about satisfaction so much as survival.
Morning came pale through the bedroom windows.
For a second, before my eyes fully opened, I lay there with one arm over my stomach and let myself be still.
Then memory came back in pieces. The way my body had come apart under hot water with his eyes in my head like they had every right to be there.
I dragged a hand over my face and groaned into the pillow.
“Embarrassing,” I muttered to the room.
The room, as usual, offered no help.
My phone sat on the nightstand, screen dark until I picked it up. One glance told me everything I needed to know. A few routine notifications. Kendra had sent me two messages sometime after midnight.
Kendra: You got home?
And then, twenty minutes later:
Kendra: You were quiet and that’s how I know it was serious.
I smiled despite myself.
Monarch Row sat downtown in the kind of building developers loved to describe as reimagined. Exposed brick. Old steel bones. Expensive glass and a lobby that smelled like hotel aromatherapy mixed with coffee.
The company wasn’t mine, even though some days it felt like I carried enough of it on my back to claim a few square feet by adverse possession.
Monarch Row belonged to Porscha Whitaker, a brilliant woman with a calendar full of flights, board meetings, donor lunches, panels, and selective appearances that reminded everybody why people still wrote checks when she walked into a room.
She was the vision. The name. The woman who could make a client believe their event, campaign, or brand partnership was about to become more elevated simply because she had blessed it with her attention.
She was also rarely in the office long enough to know which vendor was lying, which client was panicking, and which internal deadline had started smoking behind the curtain.
That part usually landed with me.
I was the senior director of partnerships and brand strategy, which sounded elegant and still did not cover half of what I did.
I managed client relationships, sponsorship decks, cultural activations, campaign rollouts, hotel partnerships, nonprofit collaborations, and the delicate art of making wealthy people, creative people, and anxious people believe they were all speaking the same language.
I had not planned on staying this long.
I started at Monarch Row five years ago after leaving an agency where I had been good enough to carry accounts and still invisible enough to watch other people present my ideas in better shoes.
Monarch Row had been smaller then, ambitious and beautifully chaotic, with more taste than structure.
I came in to build strategy around the pretty.
To make the work hold. To turn instinct into systems without killing the soul of it.
Somewhere along the way, the founder started trusting me with more. Then more turned into most. And most, if you weren’t careful, could become your whole life with better lighting.
Our floor opened into a polished workspace lined with glass-front offices around the perimeter, all of it bright, expensive, and a little too eager to impress until you got to mine.
My office sat near the windows with a wide slice of the city behind it, enough skyline to remind me I had earned my way into that room and every square inch of what it held.
The desk was a dark walnut beauty by BDI, wide enough for the real work and pretty enough that I never let too much mess disrespect it for long.
In front of it sat two cream leather guest chairs with slim brass legs, soft enough to take the edge off a hard conversation without making anybody forget why they were there.
A low bookshelf against the wall held pitch decks, binders, and campaign books lined up straighter than they probably needed to be, along with a few art and branding titles I actually loved.
Over it hung a framed print by Tiffanie Anderson, all Black woman elegance, color, and command, the kind of piece that made the room feel like mine before I ever opened my mouth in it.
There was a fiddle-leaf fig in the corner I kept alive out of spite and good lighting, a candle I only lit after hours when the office went quiet, and just enough gold and glass in the styling to let people know I liked beautiful things and had no intention of pretending otherwise.
The whole office said the same thing I did without getting loud about it.
I did serious work in here, and I liked my seriousness dressed well.
By the time I stepped off the elevator, my inbox had already started trying to disrespect me.
Mariah looked up from the open workspace as I crossed toward my office, one brow lifting before I even made it to the glass door.
Mariah was the office manager in title and the keeper of everybody’s business in practice.
She knew which invoices were late, which conference room had a bad HDMI cord, which client needed sparkling water to feel important, and which staff member was two emails away from acting out.
She handled calendars, vendors, supply orders, travel changes, office fires, and the thousand tiny problems nobody noticed unless she stopped solving them.
She was all smooth brown skin, long honey-blonde braids pulled over one shoulder, and the kind of brilliance that let you know she missed very little and enjoyed most of what she caught.
Her blouses were always pressed, her nails always done, and her desk always looked like she could run a department from it if somebody got sick or stupid.
By the time I reached my door, the look on her face said she had already clocked something worth asking about.
“There she goes.”
I kept walking. “Good morning to you too.”
“Mmhmmmmn.” Her eyes tracked me shamelessly from blouse to heels to face. “You look rested in a way that offends me personally.”
“I hate when people start lying before nine.”
She laughed and turned in her chair to keep up with me. I paused in my doorway, my purse still on my shoulder.
“No, for real,” she said. “You went to that mixer, right?”
“I did.”
“And?”
I gave her the look she earned. “And what?”
“And don’t do that with me. You either had a terrible time, a great time, or a man made eye contact long enough to rearrange your blood pressure.”
I stopped with one hand still on the glass door.
Mariah’s smile widened.
“Exactly.”
“You are very annoying.”
“And right.”
I stepped into my office, set my purse and laptop down beside one of the guest chairs, and woke my monitor. “It was fine.”
“Awww,” Mariah said from just outside. “That bad?”
I shouldn’t have smiled.
That was my mistake.
Mariah made a little sound like she’d just won something expensive. “Oh, wow.”
“Please go sit down.”
“No, because that smile means there was somebody.”
“There was exactly one.”
Her brows jumped. “Oh, wow.”
“Mariah.”
“Talia.”
“Go work.”
“You first.”
I hated that she made me laugh before coffee.
A few minutes later, a soft knock sounded against the glass.
Zaria stood there with her tablet tucked against her chest, sleek bob shining, expression composed in that way people wore when they were trying to stay professional through somebody else’s business.
Zaria was my assistant, officially. Unofficially, she was my shadow, my early-warning system, and a twenty-four-year-old with enough ambition tucked behind her polite voice to power the whole floor if the Wi-Fi went down.
She wanted strategy one day. I could tell by the questions she asked, the meetings she lingered near, and the way she studied my edits like they were breadcrumbs leading somewhere she intended to go.
I liked that about her.
I also liked that she was smart enough not to say it too loudly yet.
I waved her in.
She stepped inside and set the tablet on my desk. “Morning. I tightened up the hotel deck, flagged the slides that still need your eyes, and highlighted the client email that used the phrase elevated experiential synergy like it meant something.”
I closed my eyes for one second. “Of course they did.”
“I figured you’d want caffeine before replying.”
“See?” I said, looking up at her. “That’s why I keep you.”
One corner of her mouth moved. “That and my winning personality.”
“That too.”
Zaria smiled properly then, quick and pretty. “Your ten o’clock confirmed. Mariah moved your eleven-fifteen to noon. And the food-and-wine activation vendor is pretending their revision delay is somehow our emergency.”
“Love that for them.”
“I didn’t,” she said. “I told them you’d review and circle back.”
“Bless you.”
She picked the tablet back up, then paused at the door and looked back at me once.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You just look... pleased with life.”
I leaned back in my chair, thinking of how last night’s orgasm was better than makeup. “That sounds dangerously close to a personal observation.”
“It is.” Her mouth curved. “I’ll bill you later.”
That took me out.
“Please leave my office.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Once she stepped out, the floor settled into its usual rhythm. Keyboards. Soft calls behind glass. Somebody laughing near the kitchen. The hum of a place that liked to look creative but still answered to deadlines.
By ten-thirty, I was deep in revisions and moving.
One meeting with our design lead about a hotel partnership install.
One call with a local arts nonprofit looking for a better presenting sponsor than the one currently wasting everybody’s time.
Two separate Slack threads that could have been one.
Exactly fourteen minutes spent rewriting an email from a client who thought panic counted as urgency.
This was the part of my life that always settled me.
I was good at it.