Page 26 of IRL: In Real Life
“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.
Monarch Row was the kind of place where a person could hide behind pretty language if they didn’t have real instincts, and I had learned a long time ago to separate those two things. Anybody could talk about audience, brand story, alignment, and cultural resonance. Fewer people could walk into a room, read the power in it correctly, and build something that actually held once real people got their hands on it.
That part, I could do.
That part paid me.
And if I was being honest, it had probably sharpened me in my personal life too. Years of sponsorship decks, partnership meetings, and rooms full of polished people had made me hard to fool. I knew when presentation was doing too much labor for the truth.
Which was maybe why Micah had gotten under my skin the way he had.
Because he hadn’t.
He had just stood there and let himself be exactly as appealing as he actually was.
Around one,I stepped out to grab lunch and pick up a blazer I’d left at the dry cleaner earlier in the week.
Downtown was alive in that midday way that felt less romantic than evening and somehow more honest. Office workers with badges still hanging from their necks. Delivery bikes cutting between lanes. Women in heels carrying salads they’d be hungry again after three. Men on calls speaking too loudly into the air like volume could make them more important.
I had just locked my car and started toward the cleaners when a cherry red sedan slowed in the lane beside me.
I ignored it automatically at first. Pittsburgh did not reward unnecessary eye contact.
Then a woman’s voice called out, bright and delighted.
“Sis!”
I turned.
A brown-skinned woman in big sunglasses leaned halfway out the passenger window, grinning at me like she knew me, though I was pretty sure she didn’t.
“You are gorgeous,” she said, one hand over her chest. “And that ass and that walk? Please.”
The driver laughed.
