“I can’t. I slept here last night. I’m exhausted, and I’m supposed to cook dinner for Sam tonight.” I disliked the words as they rolled off my tongue. I would have rather been upstairs having a few drinks with Biggie and Tupac playing. The idea of sitting quietly at home with Sam, eating a meal I’d prepared and listening to his latest roadblock to funding for his company, seemed impossibly tedious in that moment. But I’d promised him I’d be home.
“Invite your boyfriend. We’ll order food at some point, I’m sure.”
I inwardly balked at the image of Sam in ill-fitting jeans and a worn sweater standing next to Jordan in his perfectly tailored suit. They would have absolutely nothing to talk about. “Beer pong in my office is not Sam’s idea of fun.”
“Fine. Not my problem if he doesn’t know what fun is,” Jordan said. “I gotta run. Peter and Matt are already up there with Carmen and like twenty other people.” He let the last sentence sink in, making it clear to me that Carmen would be bonding with the partners who were the gatekeepers to our career, in M&A.
“Carmen’s up there?” I asked, too tired not to take his bait.
He laughed sadistically. “She’s up there securing her spot on the fifty-sixth floor. The whole team is going to be up there as soon as it’s finished.”
“I hate you.”
“You love me. See you up there in ten.” He hung up.
I sent Sam an apologetic text saying that my deal had blown up and I was stuck in the office, promising I’d make it up to him. I pulled at the collar of my shirt and bent my head to see how bad I smelled. I couldn’t recall the last time I had taken the time away from work to shower, but it certainly wasn’t within the past forty-eight hours. I looked at my clock: 8:00 p.m. I closed the door and stripped down, changing into the last of the clean blouses I’d started to keep in my office and stuffing my dirty clothes into the Klasko dry-cleaning bag marked with my employee ID number. I darted out of my office just as the stout man with the thick mustache from Paradigm Cleaning I’d seen on many evenings was finishing his last rounds of the floor.
“Excuse me! Can you add this to the twenty-four-hour service?” I shouted, running after him. He turned to me, scanned me up and down, and dropped his jaw. I straightened my spine, attempting to appear more composed. He continued to look at me with a slightly stupefied glaze over his eyes, and I opted to return to my office with a curt “Thank you.” I threw on my winter coat, fairly certain the unoccupied floor’s heat wouldn’t be turned on yet, and headed to the party.
The floor was still bare concrete, with tape outlining where the glass office walls would be installed, but the ceiling had been finished and the windows sealed and uncovered, allowing for a spectacular 360-degree view of Manhattan. “No Diggity” blared from a set of speakers as twenty or so associates, along with Matt and Peter, stood around a keg, and Jordan arranged red Solo cups into perfect triangles on either side of the Ping-Pong table. There was a draft, but it wasn’t nearly cold enough for my down coat, so I started to unzip my jacket.
Suddenly I caught sight of Carmen in a full sprint toward me. As soon as she reached me, she wrapped me in a ferocious, tight hug as I stood, frozen, palms against my thighs. “Leave your coat on,” she ordered quietly, zipping me up as she backed away a few inches.
I looked at her, slightly annoyed. “What is wrong with you?”
She looked over her shoulder, then turned back to me and allowed a smile to spread across her face.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I demanded again.
“You’re not wearing a skirt,” she whispered, trying desperately to hold back laughter with a fist to her lips.
I shoved my hands in the pockets of my coat and felt at my hips, grasping wildly to try to prove her wrong, but felt only the top of my stockings. She had started to cackle wildly, and I giggled too, then winced as I recalled the expression on the dry cleaner’s face and my short reaction to him.
“Oh my god. I don’t have any other clothes! I just gave them all to dry cleaning.”
Carmen wiped at the corners of her eyes. “My office,” she managed.
I left Carmen, still doubled over, and headed for the elevator, where I held the call button down until the elevator doors opened.
“Thank you!” I called back to her from the safety of the elevator cab, and she held up a palm to me, unable to respond further. I smiled to myself, impressed that girl code had trumped any sense of competition Carmen might have been feeling. I wondered momentarily whether I’d have done the same for her before convincing myself that I would have.
The elevator doors opened on the thirtieth floor and Kevin entered, wearing his coat and looking done for the night.
“Hey! Where are you off to?” he asked.
“Just grabbing something from Carmen’s office. A bunch of M&A people are playing beer pong on the new fifty-sixth floor,” I told him, more than a little proud to have been included.
Kevin snorted. “Drinking the Kool-Aid, I see.” I frowned at him as the elevator let me out on Carmen’s floor. “Take care of yourself, Alex.” He gave me a friendly wave good night, but his words felt like a warning.
Five minutes later, I reemerged from the elevator on 56 wearing one of Carmen’s skirts. The hem hit my shins when I recalled it only hitting her knee, but otherwise it fit perfectly. I headed straight for the keg.
“Beer?” The redheaded associate I’d seen asleep at the salad bar offered me a Solo cup.
“Thanks. Cheers.” I extended my plastic cup to him.
“Cheers,” he said, hands at his sides. “I’m not drinking. I have a call in thirty minutes.” I nodded at his responsible decision, then watched as he rolled a dollar bill into a tube and did a line of cocaine off the folding table. I scanned the room, but nobody else seemed to have noticed.
“Skippy! It’s you and Peter against me and Carmen,” Jordan yelled over to me. I nodded, looking back at the redhead, who was now staring up at the ceiling and rubbing his lips together, before I made my way to Jordan.
Carmen winked approvingly at my skirt. “You look fab.”
“Winner gets the last office on 56 for the girl on his team,” Peter said to Jordan with a smirk. Was there really only one office left unclaimed on the M&A floor? And could a drinking game really determine who took it? Carmen and I stared at each other, our expressions morphing into competition mode. “I’m just kidding,” Peter said, and laughed. “You should see your faces.”
Carmen and I smiled, attempting to ignore the looks we’d just given each other, as “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” blared from the speakers. Matt ambled to the middle of the table to serve as referee, his plastic cup dimpling slightly beneath his short, chubby fingers. I took my spot at the far side of the table next to Peter and glanced at the small orange cones running the length of the concrete floor behind me.
“What’s with these?” I asked him, but Matt piped in before he could answer.
“They were the only way Jordan could get me to agree to a party up here. I said no one could even get near the half of the floor with the exposed elevator shaft. Nobody crosses that line. Danger zone.” Matt shook his head in slow motion, already finished with the beer I’d just seen him refill. Past the cones, I saw an expanse of raw, industrially lit space, and in its center, a square hole in the floor with caution tape around it. Even though I was a few dozen yards from the shaft, the idea that a fifty-six-story drop was that close made me queasy.