The cost of being awake

Zed's glance tracks the winged eyeliner decorating my stoic face. It deepens the pink on my cheeks and stirs something in my chest — something I had long since filed away under unnecessary. He's just in shorts and a T-shirt yet leaves me typing nonsense in my report, fingers moving out of habit while my attention pools somewhere it shouldn't.

I catch myself and delete three sentences. Start again.

The Salsbury office pretends at prestige from the outside. Its glass and steel exteriors are enviable, yet here on the second floor, the ambiance is dungeon-like with poor lighting, exposed piping along the ceiling and chairs long past their use-by date. It's his office, his style. Deliberate, I've decided. A space that filters people — only those with something real to offer endure it long enough to be useful. I fit somewhere in this ecosystem and I've never been entirely sure where.

But I don't need good lighting to see those slender lips upturn into a devilish grin once he looks my way. I don't need warmth to feel warm.

There's a war room he's attending. Bitter words are exchanged — I can tell through the glass that no one is really left untouched. Shoulders curve inward. Someone's jaw tightens. A woman I recognise from procurement is blinking in the particular rapid way people do when they are deciding whether to cry in front of their employer. He rules his office with no stone unturned. Each must take accountability for their actions. He believes it the way some people believe in God — completely, without the inconvenience of mercy.

I watch and feel something complicated form alongside the warmth. I don't name it yet.

-

Tonight, I know there will be sweet strawberries and imported Medjool dates, arranged on a board with soft cheeses and something honeyed. He will pour something cold and sparkling and hand it to me like it's obvious, like providing pleasure is simply part of his function the way providing financial reports is part of mine.

I could barely handle sugar before Zed. Life seemed dull and lacklustre — not painfully so, just practically so, the way a grey sky is not a tragedy. Savoury oats were my staple, and that was mainly out of practicality. Efficient fuel. The body as machine.

It's not that I couldn't afford anything better. I simply did not see the point in wasting money on a few seconds of sensation in my mouth. A resource — that's how I viewed myself. Not with self-pity. Not with resentment. With the clean logic of someone who has done the accounting and arrived at an answer they find acceptable.

He came along and reminded me of me. My feminine charms. The fact that I have a body that blooms under attention, that my intelligence is not merely a professional instrument. That I can want. That wanting doesn't have to be justified, itemised or approved.

It was disorienting, at first. Like returning to a room, you had locked, and discovering someone had been tending it in your absence. Fresh flowers on the sill. Light through curtains you didn't remember leaving open.

-

Hands brush gently against mine as Zed hands me a coffee still steaming. The dark roast makes me salivate. He knows my order. Has known it since the third week, which I noted and then immediately told myself was unremarkable — it's a simple order, I told myself, it would be stranger not to remember it.

"Keep your energy up," he whispers. "It's going to be a long day."

The warmth of the cup travels up through my palms. I hold it a moment longer than necessary.

Half the day is through when Amanda comes to my desk and drops off a dusty stack of files.

“Last year’s stuff for the audit,” she says.

My eyes widen. “This is going to take me days to get through.”

“Don’t look at me,” she adds, shrugging her shoulders. “His request.”

I give her a nod.

-

The day’s almost over when I embrace Emily in the same way I would my sister. My arms go around her and I hold the weight of her quietly. She doesn't speak for a long moment and I don't fill the silence. Silence is underrated.

He fired her. Just like the previous four employees who weren't optimally performing. She had been here three years. Had a photograph of her dog on her desk and kept a small succulent alive through two office relocations. That kind of person.

I think about the woman from procurement blinking behind the glass. I think about the four before Emily. I think about the particular architecture of a person who can whisper keep your energy up with genuine tenderness and then fire someone in the same morning with the efficiency of closing a browser tab.

I think about how I am still here. What that means about me.

-

I sip the coffee. Now it's cold.

I'm left with the paradox of his velvet lips — bearing delicacies only for me to taste while spitting words that dismantle self-esteem, alter lives, send people home to sit with the particular silence of sudden unemployment.

And I am aware, sipping cold coffee, that I had once done something similar to myself. Quietly. Without anyone watching through glass. I had dismissed my own personhood with the same clean logic he uses in that war room.

He undid that, or did he?

What unsettles me is not the paradox of him. It's the question it raises about me — what it says about a person who had to be reminded that she was one. That the reminder arrived wearing a devilish grin and expensive taste. That I received it gratefully.

That I am still here, holding a cold cup, warming my hands on something that no longer holds heat, trying to decide if being awake again is worth the temperature of the room.

I log it once more: I am still here, holding a cold cup, and that, more than anything, feels like an answer.