Page 9 of A Fae in Finance
“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 compartmentalizeattractivenessandcoworkers: 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 youprincess,” 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 wrotefuckin 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 wasfuck.
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.
