Tuesday. The day the week truly dies, strangled between Monday’s brutal start and the distant hope of Friday. The air in the office tasted of recirculated nothing and weak, lukewarm coffee. Outside the window, a merciless August rain lashed the facade of the building next door, and the gray-speckled partitions in our open-plan landscape seemed to inch closer together with every passing hour.
I stared at the screen. Spreadsheets stretched toward an infinite horizon of conditional formatting, a digital desert of numbers representing sales targets and budget variances. I was good at this. Too good. I could make the numbers dance, make them sing, make them tell a story of growth and profit. But my own story was a spreadsheet where every cell was filled with the same gray value.
I felt a hunger — not in my stomach, but deeper. A dull, aching hunger for something that couldn’t be measured in percentages.
A ping. Not from a colleague, but from the collective abyss we called HR. Subject line: Get Creative! Paint & Wine for all employees!
I was about to drag the email straight to the digital trash when Nora leaned over my partition. Her hair was gathered in its usual loose knot at the nape of her neck, but a couple of dark curls had escaped and danced along her jawline. She had that look. The kind that could start a fire in a wet room.
“Did you see it?” she asked, her voice a low, conspiratorial hum.
“An invitation to spill red wine on white canvases while we pretend to be artists? I think I’ll pass.”
Nora smiled. It wasn’t an ordinary smile; it was a smile that knew something I hadn’t yet understood. She pointed at my screen with a lacquered nail.
“Read the fine print, Kaja.”
I scrolled past the platitudes about “team-building” and “creative expression.” And there, under the program for the evening, it said: “Tonight’s theme: Life Drawing for beginners, with a professional model.”
The word hung in the air between us. Life drawing.
Nora drew the word out, savored it as if it were a piece of dark, forbidden chocolate. “Think of the possibilities,” she said. “For… inspiration.”
The hunger in me stirred. It lifted its head. Woke. Nora and I had played these games before, in small ways. A gaze held too long with a bartender. An ambiguous comment to a confident salesman at a conference. Small, silent hunts where the trophy was the certainty that we could. That we had the power to disturb someone’s peace just by existing. But this was different. This was a formal invitation to stare. To study. To objectify.
“A professional model,” I said, testing the weight of the words. “It’s probably a sixty-year-old man with worn sandals and a sad look.”
“Or not,” Nora whispered. “HR hired a new, young event coordinator. One who apparently has… good taste.”
And there it was. The bait. The small possibility that this could be more than an awkward evening with colleagues. It could be a scene. A theater. And we could be the leads.
“Oh my God, how fun!”
The voice came from behind us, bright and pearly. Lene from marketing stood there, tablet in one hand and coffee cup in the other. Her hair was perfect, her blouse was perfect, her smile was perfect. She was always in the right place at the right time.
“I overheard you,” she said. “Life drawing! You have to sign up! One has to seize the chance to be a bit… artistic.”
She winked at us, a quick, comradely wink. “I’ve already signed up. The more, the merrier, right?”
