Natalie Pierce sat twelve feet across the open floor from me in brand strategy. For eighteen months, she had been the most infuriating, most precise, most inconveniently attractive person I had ever shared Wi-Fi with.
She bled red ink on my slides. I rewrote her timelines in blue. She once called my client meetings “ambitious little hostage situations.” I told her one of her slogans sounded like a Yankee Candle store having a nervous breakdown. We were technically adults. Put us in a conference room and every VP in the building leaned back like they’d bought ringside seats.
The night it changed was a Friday. Our firm landed the Bellamy Foods account. Our managing director rented the back room of a whiskey bar on West Randolph — the kind of place that charges eighteen dollars for a drink served in a glass the size of a shot. There were speeches. There were sliders nobody touched. There was the specific exhausted laughter of people who wanted to go home but couldn’t leave before the boss did.
I was nursing one bourbon at the far end of the bar, calculating my exit window, when Natalie slid onto the stool next to mine.
Not sat. Slid. She caught the bar’s edge with one hand and looked at me like I’d personally offended her by existing.
“You’re still here,” she said.
“So are you.”
“I’m celebrating.”
