"So far so good right? All in all, I haven't yet caused any sort of natural disaster, nor have I caused the entire business world to keel over completely, and believe it or not, I haven't even elicited a single revolution against me. I think I'm doing quite well if I do say so myself. Yes, I did disgrace myself at my own father's wake. Yes, I did also nearly send three or more members of the board of directors into the emergency department, what can I say, I'm a natural. If you didn't catch the irony then, please, pick up a dictionary and look up: sarcasm.
I never thought when I was younger, that I would ever join the ranks of the nine to five office workers. Hell, the very idea had me in cold sweats and shivering uncontrollably. But then again, I naively thought that I would be able to live off of the steady stream of income that I didn't even know the origins of. Truly, if it had not been for my truly disastrous stint as a socialite, my time away at university and then my father's death, I probably would have spent the rest of my days as a socialite, a b*tchy, self-absorbed and conniving socialite at that. I was the true definition of a trust fund baby, but now having done a few days behind a computer screen and a mountain of papers and folders and other miscellaneous office stationery items, it doesn't seem so bad. I have big dreams and also a giant company that I don't really know how to run, but, who's counting? I'm not and if you are then, feel free to do as you please. Clearly, you have far too much time on your hands and don't know what exactly you should be doing with it."
Selena didn't like her father's armchair, it was too small for her to sit comfortably so her arms were lifted at an awkward angle at all times which made her ache in places she didn't even know existed within her body, the back of the chair was stiff as a board and hard as wrought iron and then there was the small matter that her father had not embraced the digital age. At all.
Although the Zhao Hai Industries headquarters building had been designed by architect, Heigelle Dtartz, famous for her radically modern outlook on both life and the buildings that she designed, Selena could not help but feel as though she was trapped in some kind of old age gentleman's study, not unlike her father's Rosewood study at Zhao Manor. The walls were fully glass, bulletproof of she were to believe Elise, and at this point, she didn't really want to test out the theory for herself. No matter how safe the glass claimed to be, looking out of the window down at the smooth slabs of stone that paved the front of the office block made her stomach churn as if it were churning butter and caused her to wretch involuntarily so that she could taste the bitter bile on her tongue. Despite not having any particular aversion to heights, the unpleasant thought of even the most minuscule chance of the glass breaking and Selena falling to her death was not one that she liked to entertain often.
The office had her father written all over it. As much as the architect and the interior designer had tried to make the office look like it was at least from this century, her father's taste for ludicrously expensive mahogany and dark oak furniture meant that the office looked rather juxtaposed against the huge glass panels that made up the walls. The interior design diva inside her itched to get out and start flicking through office furniture catalogues and trawling through her favourite homeware websites with her handy black card within arms reach. However, the more sensible office lady side of her won over and she shifted her posture again, to find a more comfortable position.
Having had IT come over to help her set up her office with all the technology she would need and figure out how her father had organised his files, Selena had spent over four hours buried under a mountain of paperwork and whenever she blinked, she could see rows upon rows of non-descript letters marching in zigzags across a blinding white screen. She stopped and pushed the armchair away from the desk, swung her legs out and stood up. Her head felt woollen as if someone had replaced the contents of the inside of her skull with cotton wool. She stumbled to the glass windows and wrenched at the fastenings until one by the bookshelves that lined the back of the office gave and she poked her head out with her eyes clamped tightly shut.
She instantly regretted her decision. Selena knew that if anyone could see her at that precise moment, they would have thought that she had gone mad for sticking her head out of a thirty-something storey building in the middle of a storm in a thunderstorm season, marking the end of a barren winter. She hadn't quite realised before opening the window how heavy the rain had gotten but as the fat drops splashed across her face and matted her dark curls to her skull, she realised that this was what she needed.
By the time she had come to her senses and pulled her head back into her dry office, she was gasping but Selena couldn't help a rush of adrenaline that surged through her bloodstream at a million miles an hour.
"Well, it's official, I'm calling for an ambulance and security too."
The voice made her jump and she swung around, her hair, which had knotted itself into long rats tails, swung around and whacked her in the face. She pushed her hair aside only to see Adrian Lee standing before her as immaculately dressed as he had been that morning. There were some discrepancies between the two images though. The Adrian who stood in front of her now had messier hair than before as if he had spent then entire day raking his fingers through the mess and his tie had gone missing. She took a moment to take in his presence and admired that even after a day's worth of work he still managed to look so handsome. Their eyes met and she could have sworn that she saw something change in his eyes, a flicker of something that disappeared as suddenly as she had noticed its presence.
"Hello, umm, I need security in the head offices, I do believe that I am trapped here with a woman who is completely deranged and a danger to her own safety," Adrian said into the receiver of a pretend phone he had made with his closed fist and two fingers that he was holding up to his ear.
"Mr Lee, what are you doing here? Also, how did you get in? I specifically asked Elise to not let anybody in. I swear to god if I find that you have the key pass for these offices as well, the head of security is going to be hearing from me in the morning."
"Call me Adrian. Also, it's gone eleven at night."
Selena raked her fingers through her soaked hair and pulled the rats' tails into a quick low ponytail. "Mr Lee, I- "
"Adrian." He repeated insistently before moving past her and, with a sharp tug, wrenched the window closed again.
"I don't think that that's appropriate given our relationship," Selena muttered.
"What relationship? I wasn't aware that we were in a relationship."
Selena scowled, "that's exactly my point. We don't have a relationship, we are merely acquaintances at best. And even then, we aren't close enough for anything else."
"I'm asking you to call me by my first name, not marry me," Adrian chuckled darkly, grabbing her chin and tilting her head up so then their eyes met again for a brief second. Her eyes darted every which way and she struggled, contorting her head and neck to near-impossible angles, all in vain as he held her head in position while exerting seemingly no force at all.
"Adrian, let me go!" She screamed and jabbed two fingers into his side, under his ribs.
His reaction was almost comical. The smirk slid off of Adrian's face and was replaced with surprise, pain, anger and surprise again.
"You were asking for it," Selena muttered, more as an explanation to herself, rather than to Adrian, before stomping back to her desk. She plonked herself back into her father's highly uncomfortable seat and stared at the screen again before continuing with the headache-inducing pile of paperwork.
Adrian who had done a sort of spiral motion and ended up on the floor for the second time that day sat, with his head leaning against one of the sofas and just observed. No one had dared to do something like that to him in a long time. It was so nostalgic, so reminiscent of his childhood that suddenly, he found that he had a lump in his throat and struggled to get any words out in a coherent manner. So he didn't, he just sat on the floor for a while, which for him, was normally completely unheard of, but he couldn't find it in himself to care.
The pair sat in their respective seats for a while, neither noticing as the time whizzed past. For Selena, she was super focused and the project management streamlining she was working on had her completely absorbed. She no longer peeked under her lashes to see whether Adrian was still there or to check up on his every action. Adrian, on the other hand, had fallen asleep, leaning on her father's sofa. The comfortable silence was peaceful and slowly throughout the night. The pile of paperwork dwindled.
Selena woke with something heavy draped across her shoulders and someone gently shaking her awake. She pulled her head up off of her piles of paperwork and looked around, more than a little confused as to what was going on. Her eyes were met with the bright harshness of daylight and she clamped them shut again.
"What's going on?" she groaned, which sounded more like a wounded animal than English, and buried her face back into the crook of her folded arms.
"You fell asleep, it's 7:30 and you've got a meeting with PR in an hour and a half. I suggest you go and get changed."