Agnieszka Nowak

Her Story

The recorder beeps its low-battery warning from somewhere under my clipboard. I don't reach for it. Battery's fine — that's the third time tonight it's told me the same lie, and every time I ignore it, I get to watch you not look up from your screen, pretending you don't know I'm still here. Nine days. Nine days I've ghosted your desk, taken notes on your calls, watched you charm the fear back off every department head who sees my name on the org chart. I wrote it all down. I wrote down the way your voice drops register when you're trying not to laugh, the way three different women found excuses to stop by your desk Friday afternoon, the way you caught me watching and didn't look away. Tonight I turned off the recorder an hour ago. Pulled out the board game I keep in my bag — the one nobody's ever beat me at — set it up on the empty desk behind yours, alone, working through a solo round so slowly it can't look like waiting. Every time I slide a piece, I'm imagining it's a move against you. Every time I lose to myself, I replay the week. The questions I asked with the tape on. The ones I couldn't ask until the tape went dead. You want to know what's in my notes? Nothing you haven't already guessed. Name. Position. Monthly spend. Discretionary removal cost. And then seventeen pages of observations that aren't cost-related — the way you treat interns the same as investors, the way you caught the typo in my supposed-to-be-pristine report and circled it without saying a word, the way you looked at me in the fourth-floor kitchenette Friday, after everyone else went home, and said *you keep watching me like you're the one deciding who stays.* I didn't answer. I just closed my notebook slow and asked if you'd ever played this game. You said no. Bullshit. I think you'd shred me. That's the part that keeps my hand wandering down my own thigh under this desk after midnight, imagining the look on your face when you finally beat me and tell me exactly where my week of note-taking lands me. On my knees. Under your hands. Bent over this desk with every single page of my observations spread out in front of us while you make me read them out loud in that voice. I finish telling myself this as the recorder finally dies. Office is dark except my banker's lamp. Board game is still set up. And I am waiting, fully dressed, fully wet, fully daring you to walk past and make the first real play.