Face-Slapping11 min read
My Tiny Company, His Giant Silence
ButterPicks12 views
"I ran a website," I said to myself the way people whisper a secret when nobody will judge them. "A five-person company in a thirty-two-square-meter office on the twenty-second floor. I am the boss."
"You're the boss," Gracelynn said, handing me a cold cup of coffee she had bought thirty seconds ago. Her voice always had that gentle, slightly confused sweetness. She believed in people the way people believe in summer rain.
"Smile for the camera, boss," Baxter teased from behind his dual monitors, fingers still smudged with color. Baxter Andrade's dad rented the office to me. "We need a hero shot."
I laughed because what else can you do when you're poor and pretending at pride? "Hero will have to wait. I paid rent with three chickens and a prayer."
"You paid with a check," Gracelynn corrected. "You write with better handwriting than me."
Arjun sat in his glass-walled room like a prince beside a small aquarium and a drawer of cricket cages. He always seemed to be doing less and producing more. He was twenty-eight, unbothered by the world, and inexplicably brilliant at programming. He never showed much expression.
I tried to count how many things about him made my chest catch. I failed every time.
"Boss, you're late," Baxter chided one morning, handing me a stack of invoices.
"I live for drama," I said, which sounded more dashing than the truth. The truth was I spent most nights worrying about bills and eating noodles with my headphone on, pretending the world wasn't catching up.
"When did we become a cult of rich people?" I muttered once, watching them. Gracelynn's breakfasts always included two croissants for Arjun. Baxter's father paid for new pipes when I complained about the toilet. Arjun once quietly paid to upgrade the office's internet when we complained it was slower than a calendar page.
They were rich kids. They called me "boss" with a grin, like that title was a dress they had found in a thrift store.
"Are you okay, Hazel?" Gracelynn asked one afternoon, eyes soft.
"I'm fine," I lied with skill. Then I stood at the head of our measly meeting and tried to be the kind of leader people could trust. I blustered about ideals. I used words like "growth" and "mission." I talked about sweat and capital as if they were close friends. Arjun listened in silence, fingers steepled.
"You two," Baxter whispered conspiratorially when we were back at our desks, "are you going to be the ones to save the world or hoard Starbucks receipts?"
"Both," I said.
Then came the month our bank account looked like a graveyard. I thought, maybe this was all a lovely joke fate had played. Maybe falling into bankruptcy would free me.
Arjun's footsteps were quiet when he came to my desk. He didn't look like a man carrying money. He looked like a man carrying winter.
"How much would save you?" he asked.
"A million?" I guessed, then realized how small my dreams sounded.
He placed a thick stack of cash on my desk like he was closing a book. "One million."
"Are you trying to hire me? Or buy me? Or..." I felt my face go warm for reasons beyond money.
"Invest," he said, precise and dry.
I stared at the cash and then at his profile. "Which is which?"
"Both," he answered after a pause, which made my heart do a stupid little hop.
Gracelynn and Baxter matched him, each adding one million without asking my permission. Suddenly, our small company had three millionaire partners and one gorgeous, uninterested chief technical officer.
"You're all insane," I said, laughing and crying on the inside. "This is my company."
"You are our boss," Arjun said, looking up for the first time, and the moment held as if an old camera had finally focused. "Formally."
That two-word "formally" was the kind of small kindness that started a thousand complicated feelings.
For weeks I tried to read why those three had flushed our office with cash. Why did they work here? Why did Arjun come and stay? The answer slowly dawned in small details: Gracelynn's breakfasts included two croissants, her eyes lit up whenever Arjun was near; Baxter called Gracelynn at night to chat for an hour; Arjun, for all his distance, had a private world he seemed to guard like a lantern.
"She likes you," I told Arjun once, pointing at Gracelynn. It was one of those idiot, meddling things bosses do when they have nothing left to manage but people's hearts.
"She does?" Arjun blinked like someone had mentioned the weather.
"Yes! She buys you two croissants every morning."
Arjun didn't smile. "I can't see her posts."
"You can't see her posts?"
"She blocks noise. Too loud."
Even his flat "too loud" felt somehow intimate. It felt like a spoon placed carefully over a fragile bowl.
I tried to nudge romance like a gardener trying to coax a stubborn plant. I suggested team outings, subtle pairings, a weekend in the suburbs. "Team building," I called it. "We go, we laugh, we bond."
"What's the goal?" Arjun asked bluntly. "To get sunburn or to work?"
"To get what you need," I said with a grin that must have been ridiculous.
On the bus to the countryside, everything bristled with possible disasters. Seats were small. Baxter's long legs invaded my space. Arjun squeezed into the seat beside me because he refused to share a bed with Baxter in the guesthouse.
"Do you mind?" he asked lightly, as if we were discussing a broken router.
"It's fine," I said quickly. I was very aware of the heat of him so close. The bus swerved. My phone flew from my lap and landed squarely on Arjun's knee. It unlocked, and there—my private messages with Gracelynn—stared up at him.
"Who likes me?" he asked, eyes hazy.
"What?" I said, mortified.
"Your screen," he said. "It said 'She likes you, that's normal.'"
"No, it said—" I was fumbling for explanations when Gracelynn, sitting a row ahead, made the small, frantic gesture to indicate silence. Arjun looked at me with an expression I couldn't read, then drew back like someone measuring a fragile object.
"Do you like me?" he asked quietly.
I choked on an answer. "Maybe? Maybe it's complicated."
"Consider it," he said, impassive, and then his long legs folded away like a claimed territory. He smiled later, once, because of a stupid joke I told, and I saved that memory like a postcard.
Things got messy in small, humiliating ways. On the second night, in the guesthouse, I woke to find Arjun sleeping beside me—by accident—and for a time I believed I had crossed into a different life. I stumbled away before anything happened, proud of my restraint and ashamed of the fluttering at my ribs.
Then the world, as small towns and small companies do, delivered a messy human blow.
He was the lawyer from the neighboring firm—the man who always lingered on the elevator steps, smiling with teeth that meant permission. Rene Sandberg.
He had a way of saying, "You're welcome to my time," like an invitation to someone else's bed. He saw women as temporary utilities. He liked to joke about conquest. He said the most dangerous things with the kind of voice that made men around him laugh.
That weekend, Rene was at the dinner when I slipped away early. He knocked into me in the elevator later, whispered something about "a nightcap," and when I refused, he smirked.
A few nights later, I caught him bragging to a friend. "I get things done," he said, voice low and assured. "Women are easy."
I should have stayed away. I didn't. For reasons I still can't justify, I met him when he cornered me outside the office after a long day. He smelled like expensive cologne and indifferent cruelty.
"You work with Arjun Cox," he said in that flat way people use to reduce other people to facts. "He's... nice. You look like you could use a friend."
"I'm not interested," I said, heart beating too fast.
"You never say no," he said. The smile in his voice changed. "You should learn."
The next thing I remember is pain and confusion. He pushed me. He struck me. I smelled blood and cheap mint. The hallway lights seemed to pulse. I staggered and hit the wall. I heard my own shallow breathing.
"You hit a woman," he hissed as if I had been the offender.
I was carried away in fragments: a neighbor screaming, the world closing in like a fist, ambulance lights like false fireworks. When I woke, my face was swollen, my mouth full of broken thoughts and a few missing teeth.
They called me a heroine later, but that was not the immediate sensation. The immediate sensation was humiliation and a hollow, nauseous shame that made me want to crawl into a drawer and stay.
Arjun did not come to see me in the hospital, and for a while I told myself the reasons he didn't were numerous and rational. Then Baxter whispered a rumor into my shaking hand—Arjun had stormed into Rene's office and "visited" him with terrifying efficiency.
"He beat him up," Baxter said, thumbs worrying his phone. "But with a strategy. There were... witnesses. He called photographers. He called his own people. They recorded everything."
"Why would he do that?" I asked, voice thin.
"For you," Gracelynn said simply. Her hands smelled like tea.
When Arjun came back to the office weeks later, he'd been in custody for a short, sharp time. Rene had pressed charges. The news did what news does; it chewed our little company into a public snack.
Arjun was quiet as the tide. He lost his father's support for a while—his father took his things from the house in a neat, final way. Jacob Best, a calmer, steady man Arjun had borrowed an efficient team member from, told me Arjun had been investigating chip designs and other weighty things, that the news would not stop his work.
Rene, meanwhile, tried every trick men like him try. He denied. He belittled. He smoothed his face into a sympathetic mask and went to speak his version at bars and interviews. He had the charm of a man who believed charm absolved him.
"People will believe me," he told a reporter once. "She was accident-prone. She instigated the situation."
The revenge I wanted was small and childish: a deserved bruise on his vanity. The revenge justice wanted was larger: witnesses, cameras, documentation. Arjun had orchestrated a sting that showed force in context, that captured every step of Rene's cruelty. The internet did the rest. The footage—recorded carefully, legally—hit the feeds and the feeds lit up.
Then came the punishment that changed things.
It was outside the courthouse, midday. There were more cellphones than I had ever seen, held like a sea of accusatory antennas. People perched on stairs, leaned from balconies, clustered by the pavement. News vans were there, flags of networks fluttering like tiny birds.
"Today," the prosecutor said into a microphone, "we present evidence of an assault that goes beyond petty violence."
Rene stood a little apart, chin tilted. He looked like a man who'd been told to enjoy a forced smile. His suit was careful, his hair immaculate. He had expected pity. He had expected private apologies. He had not expected the presentation.
"Watch," Arjun said quietly to me as we stood near the crowd, my left hand in his. His fingers were warm and steady. "Watch the truth."
A screen lit up. It played back the elevator footage, the hallways, the knocks and the shove. It showed how Rene cornered me, how he laughed when I tried to step away. For the first time, the world saw the sequence, not as a blur, but as a pattern.
Rene's face didn't change at first. Then the first murmur in the crowd—someone's intake of breath—rippled. "No," one woman said out loud. "Oh my God."
Rene's jaw tightened. He took a deep breath as if about to argue, but the next clip played: Rene boasting about "getting things done," recorded by someone who had stepped too close to his arrogance and saved it.
The change was like a weather shift. "You did not—" he began, voice brittle.
"Stop," someone shouted. "We see it."
"That's not how it was," he insisted, voice rising thin and panic-white. "She—"
"You can speak," the prosecutor said calmly. "Take responsibility."
Rene's face crumpled in slow, terrible stages. First denial; then the mask of wounded manhood; then a brittle claim that it had been mutual; then the final, collapsing realization that the recordings lined up against him and there was no public ally left on the pavement.
"People," a woman near me whispered, "he's trying to rewrite it." Another shook her head. "This is how it is."
Rene began to plead—first to the cameras, then to the people, then to me. He shifted through tones like a man trying on disguises. He moved from arrogant defiance to loud denial, to stunned incomprehension, to fractured reason, and finally to pleading.
"Please," he begged, sweat darkening the collar of his shirt, voice breaking. "Please—"
Someone in the crowd cursed. Others began to chant the word "accountable." A few recorded him with tiny, relentless phones. Children watched, eyes bright and confused at a bullying ritual that the adults had created.
Rene tried to accuse me of lying in public. "She wanted attention," he said hoarsely, like a man reciting a script someone gave him. "She tried to ruin me."
A murmur swelled into a chorus of disbelief. A woman stepped forward, voice fierce. "You hit her," she said. "You hurt her. You're not the victim."
Rene's face went gray. His knees buckled. For a moment he crumpled like dry paper, then he tried to scramble upward, reaching his hands out to the crowd like a drowning man asking for a rope.
"Forgive me," he mouthed to no one in particular.
The crowd's response was not merciful. Someone spat. Another person whooped, but not in applause—for disgust. Phones continued to click. The camera lenses were like small, impersonal juries.
"I want to be believed," he said finally, voice small, collapsing into a petulant child wrapped in a suit. "I didn't mean—"
"You meant what you did," a bystander snapped. "Aim at it. Own it."
At that, Rene broke in half. He slumped against the courthouse steps, the architect of his own undoing. He sobbed, loud and ugly, as people shouted and some applauded. The crowd's mood was a mix of satisfaction and embarrassment—public justice can be messy like that.
Arjun watched the whole scene with the same stillness he'd shown since the first day. When it was over, he leaned down and said to me, "You didn't deserve him."
"No," I said, voice small. "But I didn't expect you to do so much."
He shrugged like his gesture was only a ripple. "You fell. I got you coins to climb back up."
That was one of those moments when his reserved voice warmed like a kettle. He didn't grandstand. He moved with calm. He fixed things in ways that looked easy because they had been carefully done.
Afterwards, Rene's professional life unraveled. His firm distanced itself. Colleagues who'd once raised glasses with him now avoided looking him in the face. He tried to rebuild with triumphal posts about reputation and false narratives, but the public, once it has teeth, uses them.
The effect on me was not an immediate bloom of confidence. It was small shifts—each one a step. Gracelynn sold a script from the little novel she'd been hiding; Baxter's art was noticed by a gallery that wanted his darkness; Jacob Best helped us tidy accounts and keep the lights on. I, the boss who had been a pretender, found something I hadn't expected: I could still be useful. I could learn strategy. I could not be the person Rene had assumed I was.
Arjun stayed. He did not come immediately to kindness; he came to steadying. He sat with me while I sorted invoices. He told me once, "Your company isn't my company. I like to watch things change." He was quiet, but his actions were many.
There were small, sweet things: he took off his jacket one windy day and draped it over my shoulders because he noticed I trembled. He smiled once when I made an unpopular decision and stood firm, and he touched my hand for a second when he passed me a mug. Those heart-stopping little wrongs-and-rights of contact accumulated like coins in a piggy bank.
"Why did you stay?" I asked him one evening, looking at the aquarium he loved so much. The fish swam in slow, dignified circles.
He looked at me like I had asked a question about weather. "Because you told me to consider," he said, quiet and steady. "And I thought about it."
"Considered what? Me?" I teased.
"Considered you," he corrected, with the faintest hint of amusement. "And whatever it is that happens to people when they stop pretending."
"I pretended a lot," I said, embarrassed.
"You didn't have to," he answered. "You had to be you."
We did not finish with fireworks. We finished with a day when a broken company felt less empty because the people in it were real. We sat on the rooftop once, looking over the city's small lights.
"Remember the cricket cages?" I asked.
"You listened to them and called them 'my orchestra,'" he said.
"You called them crickets. Not my orchestra. That was me."
He leaned over and kissed my forehead. It was a small thing that felt enormous.
"Keep the tank," he said, smiling properly, a rare and fragile thing. "Keep the crickets, the fish, the stubbornness. Those are the only things that matter."
I held his hand and looked at our dim office below, at the fish jar with its silent, patient movements. The world was messy and loud, and sometimes cruel. But sometimes, justice clicked into place, not with a grand sound, but like a small mechanism finally aligning.
I kept the fish tank. I kept the memory of the crickets. And I kept the man who had moved like winter, and who had saved me in the only way a person can be saved: by refusing to let the story end in shame.
The End
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