Page 13 of The Associate
The low, rhythmic click and sigh of the elevator doors became more frequent. The overhead lights had fully brightened, chasing away the last lingering shadows, rendering every surface, every desk, crisp and precise. Phones began their muted chiming. The large industrial printer near the south wall emitted its first high-pitched whine. Distant, fragmented conversations bloomed and faded.
None of it registered to him as more than background texture.
Samuel barely moved.
His posture remained rigid, his eyes locked on the screen in front of him. A dense, sprawling field of digital notes had colonized his monitor; sections highlighted in aggressive yellow and cautious blue, cross-referenced footnotes stacked vertically down the right-hand margin, arcane legal citations parsed and sorted into a sprawling taxonomy that only he could navigate.
Every time he blinked, the words seemed to swim. Every time he shifted minutely in his chair, the deep, persistent ache in his lower back intensified.
No one spoke to him.
Not directly. A few people passed by his pod; hurried associates, nervous interns, a junior partner who barely flicked a glance in his direction. Some exchanged brisk greetings amongst themselves.
But not a single voice was directed at him until 9:16 a.m.
It was Alina.
Her steps were light, but purposeful; he’d learned their distinct rhythm already, a cadence marked by the sensible tap of her low-heeled shoes and the soft, metallic jingle of a charm bracelet. He didn’t look up until she was nearly at his desk.
“Morning,” she said, her voice gentle.
He startled slightly, a full-body flinch, and looked up too quickly. “Hi… morning.”
She offered a small smile. Her gaze took one swift, comprehensive glance at the densely packed document on his screen, the empty coffee mug, the faint, red indentations along the side of his right hand where he’d been resting his weight too heavily on the laptop’s edge.
Her smile faded.
“I am not even going to ask. I’ll leave you to it,” she said, and turned away before he could fumble out something polite.
The hours after that blurred. They didn’t pass so much as fold into one another; an unbroken sequence of open tabs, legal citations, and flagged inconsistencies. The screen’s brightnessbegan to throb faintly behind his eyes. His stomach tightened and released at odd intervals, a dull, hollow reminder he hadn’t consumed anything since the night before.
He considered getting up. Once. Maybe twice. The thought was a vague, distant signal his body was sending, a signal his mind consistently overrode.
But then another case note would pull him back under, a single clause that directly contradicted a claim buried two PDFs and fifty pages earlier. Each time he caught something, a sense of worth sparked in his chest; sharp and fleeting, like a match struck in a vast, dark room.
If he just worked harder, dug deeper, was more perfect, maybe…
He didn’t finish the thought.
Around 1:00 p.m., something shifted in his periphery, a subtle change in the light.
He hadn’t heard her approach. Not this time. There was no warning jingle.
Alina appeared beside his desk. She didn’t speak. She set something down on the empty space beside his keyboard; a square of white parchment paper, folded with neat corners around a thick sandwich, a single, thin paper napkin tucked underneath.
Samuel blinked, slow and disoriented. “Oh. Alina, thank you.”
His voice came out rough and hoarse from disuse.
She gave a faint, almost imperceptible nod, and moved on, continuing her path down the aisle before he could say more.
Samuel stared at the neatly wrapped sandwich. The rich smell of it reached him a second later; seedy bread, the faint tang of cheese, something green. His hands didn’t move toward it. It was enough that it was just there.
He murmured another softthank youunder his breath, though no one was there to hear it.
Then, slowly, he turned his stiff neck back to the screen.
∞∞∞
