Her eyes cut to mine. The bar noise dropped out.
“You were arguing against me all week,” she said.
“I was arguing against the rollout schedule. The concept was solid.”
She stared at me the way someone stares at a vending machine that just gave them the right snack by accident. Then she laughed — not the measured, controlled laugh she rationed out in meetings. A real one. Loose. Surprised. Like it escaped before she could stop it.
It did something I am not going to be clinical about.
“Compliments from you feel like traps,” she said.
“Only the expensive ones.”
Her shoulder brushed mine and neither of us corrected it. Her knee touched mine under the bar. Neither of us moved. That was the exact moment I should have understood the evening had shifted into dangerous territory.
Instead, I ordered her water.
Ten minutes later, she stood to inform our accounting director — loudly, with conviction — that his cologne was “an assault with cedar undertones.” She stepped down off the bar platform, missed the drop, and grabbed my tie.
