01

TIME SEEMED TO dance by its own rules in Shade Enterprises’ conference room.

It was a bubble that existed away from the rest of the world, where living in confusion or dying of boredom seemed to be the only two options.

I glanced longingly at the offices outside the room through the floor-to-ceiling glass that entrapped me inside. The employees walked past, having their own problems to attend to.

I envied how time moved at a normal pace behind the glass, whereas time stretched every moment into another eternity in the bubble.

Meetings at the Shade Mansion were held for no reason at all.

People could tell me otherwise, but I was convinced that it was nothing but a tea party, which involved a manlier version of a cat fight which was basically a lot of yelling and impractical displays of manliness. They might as well have ripped their shirts off and roared.

I didn't like this room one bit- it only made it worse that there were people in it. The doors and windows were shut and the air was suffocating. Today, people were seated along the length of a long table, among old tapestries, trying to solve some dispute between their companies in a civilized manner and I was here as a part of my training.

Although, this hardly seemed civilized to me.

"Alright, stop this!"

My father commanded with such authority that everyone fell silent at once. Everyone was scared of him up to an extent, and that was completely justified. He was all hard looks and cold demeanour, which apparently came in handy when it was no-nonsense time.

Some men and women in this room just asked questions and spewed retorts that made things infinitely worse. I was suspicious that they were in this room just for the drama.

My father was an expert at handling such situations. If it were me, there wouldn't have been guaranteed results even if I stood up on my chair and yelled like a maniac.

Although Al, I was pretty sure, would get a good kick out of it.

Sitting from across me, Alejandro Valdez was obviously bored out of his mind. Screaming and disagreements got very old very soon when you witnessed them every other day.

And besides, Al, who ran his own company, must have seen such ordeals multiple times before.

He was one of the youngest CEO's of a business and almost everyone knew of the child prodigy who took over the business as soon as he turned of age. His father had left him and his mother, leaving behind his mother's company and them to start his own. His mom had raised him so that he never felt the absence of his father. He didn't like to talk about his father. I didn't know much about that side of Al's story.

My father was hostile, when it came to Al.

Of course, Al and I had been best friends for quite some time, but that didn't faze my father's paranoia. He thought Al was out to devour his company and couldn't be trusted.

No one could be, in his paranoid mind. Sometimes I thought about whether I was on that list.

Al must have felt me looking at me, because he looked up from the mahogany table and smirked. No doubt because he had noticed me slouching and sighing through the entire meeting. I hadn't even tried to be inconspicuous.

My father rarely ever brought me to meetings, but when he did, boredom killed me before I could possibly understand what was going on.

Al winked at me, a silent sign of understanding that he was just as bored as I was. I couldn't wait for this to be over. I had never been this bored in my entire life. I could practically feel my brain blanching from boredom.

"Alejandro, what do you think?" My father's voice was sharp. I cringed at the thought of him seeing that little exchange between Al and I.

Al's eyes darted to my father and back to me guiltily. He obviously had no clue about what was going on. "It's your call, Chris," he said neutrally with a shrug.

Damn, he was good. My guess was that he had learnt from similar situations that transpired in his company.

I saw a flicker of annoyance in my father's eyes when Al called him Chris, which died out soon after.

He sighed imperceptibly. "It's time for a break," he said.

I practically ran out of that room.

━━━━━━━━━━━━

"I'm free!" I flung open the doors that led us out of the enormous mansion and twirled around dramatically.

The grass was still wet, and my bare feet were now dirty with mud, but I really didn't care. Sometimes I had wished that I could see extensive fields of green or a grove of trees when I looked out of the windows, but only a stretch of tall buildings was what graced my eyes. That was the disadvantage of living in the most populated part of New York, I supposed.

"Oh, look at all this green, green grass!" I tugged on Al's sleeve impatiently. "And such fresh air!"

"Autumn you were in there for thirty minutes." Al looked at me weirdly, stuffing his hands inside his pockets.

"It's torture, Al. Torture," I whined. "At least you understand what they're bickering about. I've only just started training. If I wasn't told otherwise, I would have been sure that they were just spewing complicated words to seem intelligent."

I took his hands and spun around, face raised to the sky, moving him with me. He staggered, nearly losing his footing, until I eventually stopped. I was being weird and dramatic but at this point, I really didn't care.

"I'm pretty sure your dad is going to hold another meeting soon—" I groaned at the mention of yet another meeting, "—to discuss ways to kill me."

"What?" I turned to look at him, not seeing the end of the sentence coming.

His brown hair was a wild mess, and eyes a wicked green. Countless people swooned over him, and being just his friend, I couldn't see it as much as the others did.

"Why would he kill you? If he killed you, whose murder would he plot every night before going to bed for peace?"

He looked at me incredulously. "He just caught me, his sworn enemy, winking at his daughter."

"You're not his sworn enemy," I laughed. "You're just. . .something to channel his contempt towards," I said.

"Because that makes me feel so much better," he deadpanned.

"Why do you even want him to like you? It's not like you work for this company. You have your own."

Al shrugged, picking at the grass. "I want everyone to like me. I don't want anyone to not like me, you know?"

I did know. I knew, because whatever I had been doing my whole life had been to please my father—make him proud. It didn’t seem to be working.

Conversation faded after that, and for a long time we just sat on the grass, staring at the clouds move. Sometimes I looked long enough that when I looked back down, I would feel slightly unsettled by everything being so stationary.

"Do you want to do something later?" he asked. "I've been pretty bored out of my mind for the past few days. There's been nothing for me to do around the office except boring paperwork. I decided to rest for tomorrow." He tilted his head towards me, face hopeful, and all I could do was give him a sad smile.

"I can rarely go out of these compounds with bodyguards, Al," I tell him. "Do you really think dad would let me leave here with a guy who he wants to kill?"

"I thought you said he wasn't going to kill me," he cringed slightly.

"Oh, um, he's. . .not?" I reassured weakly.

Al rolled his eyes.

"You're twenty years old. You're an adult. You can do whatever the hell you want."

I smiled at his annoyance and said, "He only wants what's best for me."

"You're like Rapunzel, you know," he said randomly. "Minus the long hair," he tugged at a strand of my short red hair.

"Nice analogy," I laughed.

"Proof of how you torture me into watching certain movies," he said.

"But you did it willingly!" I threw a blade of grass at him as aggressively as I could.

"Oh, no! Save me from this harmfully sharp blade of grass!" he mocked blandly, and this time I ripped out a whole patch of it aggressively and threw it at him, making him laugh.

"But seriously," he said, dusting the dirt off his blazer, "for a person as busy as me, I spend way too much time watching Disney movies for you."