1. Bee #3
Skylor holds Todd there for one long, measured breath, then sets him down and steps back as if he has not just rearranged my understanding of gravity. “Security will see you out. Your personal items will be sent to you.”
Todd straightens his jacket with hands that are not steady.
He does not look at me again. His shoes squeak across the stone floor, and the doors close behind him.
The room exhales at last, or maybe that is me remembering I still have lungs.
My hands are fisted at my sides. I open them.
My notepad has a dent where my fingers gripped too hard.
Skylor turns to me.
“Miss Watson.”
My name in his mouth does something unfortunate to my spine. I straighten to compensate.
“These are your projections,” he says.
“They were based on his editorial direction, which was the wrong direction.” The words come faster now that the adrenaline has somewhere to go.
“Athena started bleeding readership when Todd shifted toward gossip. Celebrity divorces. Detox pieces. Shame dressed up in glossy covers. That’s not what your mother built. ”
His expression does not move. “You know my mother’s vision.”
“I know what she wrote in the first editor’s letter. I know what this magazine was before it became what it is now.”
“And what was it?”
A test. Fine. I have been taking tests since the day my body decided it was going to become a public conversation.
“It was a place people picked up when they needed to feel less alone inside their own skin. Not smaller. Not ashamed. Not like their body was a project everyone else had permission to grade.”
His eyes stay on mine. My pulse has still not forgiven him for existing.
“Everything’s changed,” I say. “You can get anything delivered from anywhere now. Shoes from Paris. Skin cream from Mars colony labs. Coffee from a mountain farm halfway across the world. Half this city has alien neighbors, and nobody even looks up unless someone’s blocking the subway stairs.”
His mouth almost moves. Almost.
“But you still can’t have someone reach through a screen and remind you that you matter,” I continue. “That your body is yours. That your life has worth before anyone buys it, rates it, claims it, rejects it, or tells you how to fix it.”
I stop because my throat has started to close around the words.
Too much. I have said too much. The old memory rises anyway.
Sixteen. Bathroom stall. My thighs stuck to cold tile.
Girls laughing outside the door. An old copy of Athena folded in my lap later that afternoon like a hand I could hold without admitting I needed one.
“That’s what Athena was supposed to do,” I say. “That’s what we lost.”
For one breath, Skylor says nothing. Then he says, “The magazine is called Athena for a reason. My mother understood beauty. Fashion. Desire. It was never only philosophy.”
“You’re right.”
His brows shift a fraction.
I don’t look away. “Beauty matters. Fashion matters. Wanting to feel good when you walk into a room matters. But beauty that starts with punishment curdles. You need both. Substance and shine. The women who pick up that magazine deserve to know both exist in them before they buy a single product.” I pause, hating the raw place my voice has found.
“Believe me. I know what it is to need to read that.”
A fracture crosses the royal stillness. Thin. Fast. Warm enough that I almost miss it.
“Budget,” he says.
“Three hundred thousand, first quarter.” I turn to the tabbed section before my courage realizes what I’m doing and bolts.
“We cut the freelance gossip budget. It’s expensive and actively hurting us.
Reallocate to photography and reporting.
Launch a profile series. Real women. No retouching.
Photographers who shoot laugh lines and stretch marks like proof of a life lived, not flaws to erase. ”
His eyes drop to the page. I keep going because stopping now would feel like falling.
“Essays from writers who’ve actually been broke.
Actually been broken open. Actually had to rebuild something other than a brand.
A feature package anchored by Dr. Kenzie MacArthur’s coffee research.
Deforestation, environmental impact, supply chains, the cost behind the cup everyone pretends is harmless because it comes in cute cups”
Skylor goes very still.
Too still.
My body reads the warning before my mind does. His fingers rest against the edge of the binder, long and elegant, nails carrying a faint pearlescent sheen. Not painted. Naturally wrong in a way that makes my stomach pull tight.
“Coffee,” he says.
One careful word.
“Yes.” I turn another page. “It’s exactly the kind of story Athena used to run. Science, culture, labor, beauty, ritual. A woman doing hard, complicated work and a world pretending that work appears by magic.”
His gaze lifts to mine. There it is again. The flare. The calculation. The danger wearing a better suit.
“You would begin with this MacArthur piece,” he says.
“I would begin with a relaunch issue strong enough to tell readers we mean it.” My hands start moving, so I still them against the binder.
“Make them remember they’re human. Make them cry on the train and text their mother after.
Make them send the article to a friend with no caption because the friend will know exactly why. ”
He moves to the window and turns his back to me. The city reflects around him, glass and steel bending to hold his shape.
“My mother used to say things like that.”
My chest aches. I say nothing. The silence stretches long enough for doubt to find its teeth.
Maybe I pushed too hard. Maybe Todd was right and I don’t know how rooms like this work.
Maybe I’ve mistaken a good speech for power, which is exactly the kind of embarrassing thing a woman does before security escorts her downstairs with her cardigan and her overdeveloped sense of justice.
Then Skylor turns.
“Ninety days, Miss Watson.”
My breath catches. “Thank you. I won’t waste—”
“Don’t thank me yet.”
He crosses back toward me, each step measured, and my pulse marks every single one.
He stops close. Professional distance. Nothing more.
Nothing that could be named in an HR complaint, a gossip thread, or Loora’s worst possible group chat.
But he is close enough for his scent to reach me again, and the wall my suppressants have spent years building goes thin as paper.
“As of tomorrow,” he says, “you’ll work on this floor. Forty-seven. Directly across from my office.”
My mouth goes dry. “Across from your office.”
“Under my direct supervision.”
The low pull beneath my ribs tightens. His eyes hold mine.
“I intend to be very hands-on with this process, Miss Watson.”
Very hands-on. The phrase drops through me like a swallowed coal, sinking slow and burning the whole way down.
There are several correct professional responses. Unfortunately, my brain has chosen to play dead.
“That won’t be a problem,” I say. My voice stays steady, the single greatest performance of my life.
“Good.”
His gaze stays on mine one beat longer than necessary. His nostrils flare again. Tiny. Controlled. Furious at himself. Then he steps back.
“You may go.”
I turn and walk. The floor is a very long way across, and I take every step with my shoulders back, my notepad under my arm, and my chin level.
The elevator doors open. I step in, and when they close, I press my back against the wall and tip my head up while my lungs work through their resignation letter.
My hand goes to my phone before I make the decision to move it. Pharmacy app. Emergency suppressant refill. Requested before the car reaches thirty.
Ninety days. Across from his office. Very hands-on.
The elevator drops, and my stomach goes with it. Somewhere in the falling, I accept that Loora is going to be unbearable about this. She is going to say she knew. She is going to be right. Worse, she is going to order the expensive sushi and make direct eye contact while eating it.
And the part I’ll carry to bed tonight, the part that will not be reasoned with, medicated into silence, or buried under quarterly projections, is that when Skylor Ak Layn’s eyes found mine across that room, before Todd, before the folder, before the ninety days, my body did something it has never done.
It recognized him, and I don’t know yet if that is the best thing that has ever happened to me or the beginning of something I won’t survive.