Borrowed Time

The email from HR said to arrive at 8:45 sharp. I arrived at 8:15 because I didn't know how the trains ran yet, and I stood outside the building for twenty minutes pretending to check my phone. The building was forty-two floors of black glass and the lobby had a ceiling like a cathedral, and I was wearing a blazer I'd bought at a thrift store on Flatbush for eleven dollars. The tag said Jones New York. The sleeves were a little short.

My name is Aaliyah. Nobody at this company knew that yet. I was a temp, technically. Temp-to-perm, the recruiter had said, which meant if I didn't screw up for ninety days I might get health insurance and a salary that could actually chip away at the sixty-eight thousand dollars I owed in student loans. Sixty-eight thousand. I did the math on the train every morning like counting rosary beads. If I got the perm job, if I lived with three roommates in Crown Heights and never bought coffee, I could pay it off in eleven years. Eleven years.

So when the elevator doors opened on the fourteenth floor and a woman with a clipboard looked me up and down and said, "You're the new floater?" I said yes before she finished the question.

"Good. Follow me."

Her name was Deb. She had gray roots and reading glasses on a beaded chain and she walked like she was being timed. I followed her through a maze of cubicles, past a kitchen that smelled like burnt popcorn, past a conference room where three men in shirtsleeves were arguing about something on a whiteboard. Nobody looked up. That was the first thing I noticed about corporate life. Nobody looks up.

Deb sat me at a desk near the copy room and gave me a stack of vendor invoices and a login that didn't work. It took forty minutes and three phone calls to IT to get the login fixed. By then I'd already organized the invoices by date and alphabetized the vendor names because I didn't know what else to do with my hands. The desk was a loaner. The chair squeaked. My phone buzzed in my bag and I didn't check it because Deb was watching me from across the floor, and I needed her to see me working.

At lunch I went to the bathroom and checked my phone. Two messages from Marcus.

*Morning babe*

*U good?*

I stared at the screen for a while. Marcus and I had been together since junior year. He was in Atlanta now, doing a master's in computer science, and we talked on the phone maybe twice a week, and every conversation ended the same way. *I'm tired. I'll call you tomorrow.* Tomorrow came and went and the calls got shorter and the texts got fewer and I told myself it was because he was busy, because grad school was hard, because long distance was hard. I typed back:

*At work. First day. Talk later?*

He didn't reply. I put the phone in my bag and went back to the invoices.

The afternoon was a blur of data entry. Vendor names, invoice numbers, amounts. The numbers blurred together until I couldn't tell a seven from a one. At 4:30 Deb came by and said, "You're doing fine. Same time tomorrow." It was the first nice thing anyone had said to me all day and I almost cried in the elevator.

The second day was the same. The third day was the same but with more invoices. By the end of the first week I'd learned the office geography. The kitchen on the north side had the good coffee. The bathroom on the south side was always empty. The copy room was where people went to have whispered conversations they didn't want anyone else to hear. I learned the names of the people in my row. There was a woman named Priya who handled accounts receivable and never spoke to me. There was a man named Tom who handled accounts payable and spoke to me too much, always leaning over my desk to ask if I needed help, his breath smelling like the tuna sandwich he ate at his desk every single day.

And then there was him.

I noticed him on the fourth day because he was the only person in the office who didn't look like he was rushing somewhere. He walked slow. He wore his shirt untucked at the back, just a little, like he'd given up on the last button. He had dark hair going gray at the temples and a jaw that looked like it had been broken once, a long time ago, and set by someone who knew what they were doing. He was older. Forties, maybe. He sat three rows over, near the window, and he was on the phone a lot, and when he laughed it was loud enough that people looked up.

He caught me looking at him on the fifth day. I turned back to my screen so fast I knocked over my water bottle. He didn't say anything. He just smiled, a small one, and went back to his work. I spent the rest of the afternoon with my face burning, entering invoice numbers wrong, having to go back and fix them.

His name was Daniel. I learned that from the email directory. Daniel Reyes. Senior Account Manager. He'd been at the company for nine years. His office was technically a cubicle but it had a window and a door that actually closed, which meant he was important enough to have privacy and not important enough to have a real office. I looked him up on LinkedIn during my lunch break and felt stupid about it immediately. He had a wife. Two kids. A house in Jersey. The whole thing.

I closed the tab and ate my sandwich and told myself I was just curious about the office hierarchy. That was all.

The second week, Deb moved me to a desk closer to the window. "You've got a good eye for detail," she said. "The invoices have been cleaner since you started." I didn't tell her that I'd been staying late every night to double-check my work, that I'd been waking up at 5 a.m. to practice the train route so I wouldn't be late, that I hadn't slept more than five hours a night since I started because I was so scared of screwing up. I just said thank you and moved my things.

The new desk was two rows over from Daniel. Close enough that I could hear him on the phone. He talked to clients in a voice that was different from his regular voice, smoother, like he was running his hand over a piece of wood to check for splinters. When he hung up he'd lean back in his chair and rub his eyes, and sometimes he'd catch me looking and I'd look away.

He started saying good morning to me. Just that. *Morning.* And I'd say *morning* back and keep walking, my heart doing something weird in my chest. He never tried to talk to me beyond that. He never leaned over my desk like Tom did. He just acknowledged me, the way you'd acknowledge a neighbor you didn't know well, and that was it.

But I noticed things. The way he rolled his sleeves up when he was concentrating. The way he drank his coffee black, no sugar. The way he had a photo on his desk of two kids, a boy and a girl, and he never looked at it. Not once. It was just there, a fact, like the stapler.

On Thursday of the second week, I stayed late. It was almost seven and the office was empty except for the cleaning crew and me. I was trying to finish a batch of invoices that Deb needed for a meeting in the morning, and I was tired, and I was hungry, and I hadn't talked to Marcus in three days. I'd texted him twice and gotten nothing back. Not even a thumbs up. I was staring at my screen, trying to remember if I'd already entered invoice 4472 or if I was about to enter it twice, when I heard footsteps behind me.

"You're still here."

It was Daniel. He was standing at the end of my row with his jacket over his arm and his bag on his shoulder. He looked tired too. The lines around his eyes were deeper than they were in the morning.

"Just finishing up," I said.

He nodded. "Deb works you hard."

"She's been nice to me."

He smiled at that. "Deb's nice to everyone who works hard. She's not nice to people who don't." He shifted his bag to his other shoulder. "You're the floater, right? Aaliyah?"

"Yeah."

"I'm Daniel."

"I know."

The words came out before I could stop them and I felt my face go hot. He didn't laugh. He just looked at me for a second, and something in his expression shifted, like he'd noticed something he hadn't noticed before.

"Well," he said. "Don't stay too late. The trains get weird after nine."

"I'll be done in a minute."

He nodded and walked toward the elevator. I watched him go. I told myself I was just watching to make sure he left, so I could relax, so I could stop feeling like someone was watching me. But that wasn't true. I watched him because I wanted to. Because the way he walked, slow, like he had nowhere to be, made me feel like I had somewhere to be too, even if I didn't know where.

I finished the invoices at 7:45 and went home. Marcus had texted me back. *Sorry, busy. Talk tomorrow?* I typed *okay* and put my phone on the nightstand and lay in the dark for a long time, listening to my roommates argue about dishes in the kitchen.

The third week, I got my first real assignment. Deb called me into her office and told me that the company was short-staffed on the account management side and that she'd recommended me to help with some administrative work for one of the senior managers. "It's a trial run," she said. "If it goes well, there might be a permanent spot for you. If it doesn't, we go back to invoices."

I said yes before she finished the sentence. I would have said yes to anything. I would have said yes to cleaning the toilets if it meant a permanent spot.

"Good," Deb said. "His name is Daniel Reyes. He's expecting you at nine."

The air went out of the room. I didn't say anything for a second. Deb looked up from her desk and raised an eyebrow.

"Is that a problem?"

"No," I said. "No problem at all."

Daniel's cubicle was at the end of the row, next to the window. He had a view of the building across the street, which was also black glass, so the view was mostly reflections. He had a plant on his desk that was dying. He had a stack of files that looked like it hadn't been touched in weeks. He had a photo of his kids that he never looked at.

When I showed up at 8:55 he was on the phone. He waved me toward a chair that was tucked into the corner of his cubicle, a chair that was clearly there for exactly this purpose. I sat down and waited. He was talking to a client about a contract renewal and his voice was doing the smooth thing, the wood-sanding thing, and I watched his hands while he talked. He had nice hands. Long fingers. A wedding ring that was slightly too tight.

He hung up and turned to me. "Aaliyah. You're early."

"Deb said nine."

"Deb says a lot of things." He leaned back in his chair. "You're not getting paid for the extra five minutes."

"I know."

He looked at me for a moment longer than he needed to. "Okay," he said. "Let's get started."

The work was simple. Filing, scheduling, responding to emails that Daniel didn't want to respond to himself. He explained things quickly, without condescension, and when I asked questions he answered them like they were good questions, even when they weren't. He had a way of looking at me when I was talking, really looking, like he was actually listening instead of waiting for his turn to speak. Marcus hadn't looked at me like that in months.

By the end of the first day I'd organized his entire filing system. By the end of the second day I'd scheduled three meetings and drafted four emails. By the end of the third day he told me I was doing good work.

"You're a quick study," he said.

"I'm trying."

"I can tell."

He was leaning back in his chair again, his sleeves rolled up, his tie loosened. It was almost six and most of the office had cleared out. I should have gone home. I should have said thank you and packed up my things and gotten on the train. But I didn't. I stayed in the chair and looked at the dying plant on his desk.

"Your plant is dying," I said.

"Yeah."

"You should water it."

"I know."

He didn't water it. He just looked at me with that expression again, the one that made me feel like I was being seen in a way I wasn't used to, and then he said, "You should go home. It's late."

I went home. Marcus called me that night. We talked for eleven minutes. He told me about his thesis and his advisor and the new ramen place near campus. He didn't ask about my job. He didn't ask about anything. When he said he had to go I said okay and hung up and lay in bed staring at the ceiling, feeling something I couldn't name. Not anger. Not sadness. Something emptier than that. Like a room with the lights off.

The fourth week, I started noticing things I shouldn't have noticed. The way Daniel's voice changed when he talked to his wife on the phone, how it got flatter, more careful. The way he'd rub his wedding ring with his thumb when he was thinking. The way he'd look at me sometimes, quick, like he was checking something, and then look away before I could look back.

I started dressing differently. Not for him. For me. I told myself it was for me. I bought a new blazer, navy blue, from a store in the mall, and I wore my hair down instead of up, and I put on mascara in the morning even though I'd never worn mascara before. I told myself I was just trying to look professional. I told myself I was just trying to fit in.

The thing is, I didn't know I was attractive. I'd never known. In college I was the skinny girl with the glasses who sat in the back of the lecture hall and never raised her hand. In high school I was the one who got picked last for everything. When I looked in the mirror I saw my mother's face, my grandmother's face, and I didn't see anything special. I saw a girl who was too tall, too thin, too quiet. I saw someone who was easy to overlook.

But Daniel didn't overlook me. He looked at me. He looked at me when I walked into his cubicle in the morning and he looked at me when I left at night. He looked at me when I was talking and when I was quiet, and I started to feel like maybe there was something to see.

On Thursday of the fourth week, he asked me to stay late. There was a report due Friday and he needed help formatting it. I said yes. I would have said yes to anything.

We worked until eight. The office was empty. The cleaning crew came and went. The lights in the hallway flickered off and on. Daniel ordered takeout from the Thai place down the street and we ate at his desk, sitting close because there was nowhere else to sit, our knees almost touching under the desk.

"I used to be like you," he said.

"Like me how?"

"Scared. Trying too hard. Staying late because you think if you leave early someone will notice and you'll get fired."

"Does it get better?"

"No." He laughed, a real laugh, not the smooth one. "But you learn to hide it better."

I didn't know what to say to that. I looked at the dying plant on his desk and then at the photo of his kids and then at him. He was watching me. Not in the way he usually watched me. Something different. Something softer.

"You're very pretty," he said.

The words landed in my chest like a stone in water. I didn't say anything. I didn't know how to say anything. Nobody had ever said that to me. Not Marcus, not anyone. I felt my face go hot and I looked down at my hands.

"I'm sorry," he said. "That was inappropriate."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine. I shouldn't have said that."

"It's fine," I said again. "Really."

He didn't say anything else. We finished the report and he called me a car and I went home. I lay in bed that night and thought about his voice and his hands and the way he'd looked at me when he said it. I thought about Marcus, who hadn't called me in four days. I thought about the sixty-eight thousand dollars and the eleven years and the tiny apartment in Crown Heights and the life I was trying to build out of nothing.

I thought about the way Daniel had said *you're very pretty* like it was a fact, like it was something he'd been noticing for a while and had finally decided to say out loud.

I didn't sleep. I got up at 5 a.m. and took the train to work and sat at my desk and waited for him to come in. When he walked past my cubicle he didn't say good morning. He didn't look at me. He went straight to his desk and sat down and started typing, and I sat at my desk and stared at my screen and felt something I couldn't name. Not rejection. Not disappointment. Something else. Something that felt like the beginning of something I wasn't supposed to want.

At lunch I went to the bathroom and checked my phone. Marcus had texted me. *Hey. Sorry I've been MIA. Things are crazy. Miss you.*

I stared at the screen for a long time. *Miss you.* Two words. He'd typed them with his thumbs and sent them into the void and expected them to be enough. I typed back *miss you too* and put my phone in my bag and went back to my desk.

Daniel was standing by the window when I got back. He was looking out at the building across the street, the black glass, the reflections. He didn't turn around when I sat down. He just said, "I meant what I said. For what it's worth."

I didn't say anything. I opened the report we'd been working on and started formatting the tables. My hands were shaking. I typed the numbers wrong and had to go back and fix them. He stayed by the window for a long time, and then he went back to his desk and sat down and started typing, and we worked in silence until six o'clock, when he said, "You should go home."

I went home. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about the sixty-eight thousand dollars and the eleven years and the tiny apartment and the boyfriend who didn't call and the man at work who looked at me like I was something worth looking at. I thought about the way he'd said *you're very pretty* and the way he'd said *I meant what I said* and the way he'd stood by the window, not looking at me, like he was trying not to look at me, like looking at me was something he had to resist.

I told myself I was imagining it. I told myself he was just being nice. I told myself I was lonely and tired and desperate for someone to see me, and that I was projecting all of that onto a married man who was probably just bored.

But I didn't believe it. Not really.

The next morning I wore the navy blue blazer and my hair down and the mascara, and when I walked past Daniel's cubicle he looked up and looked at me and didn't say anything. He just watched me walk by, and I felt his eyes on my back, and I felt something shift in my chest, something that felt like a door opening, and I knew, even then, that I was in trouble.