Scene 2
“What the fuck did you do Lexa?” antagonised Quint. His hands were gripping the ends of his desk, rage dripping out his voice.
“What the fuck do you think?” Lexa raised her voice an octave. Her buttoned up shirt felt tighter around her neck. She stepped back a few steps almost leaning onto the revolving chair for support. Her steel eyes prying out to her colleagues in the conference room, as she pointed out. “I did what any of you didn’t have the guts to do. I bought the rest of the stocks of Brooke’s company and put it up on the market for the triple range.”
The words evoked another last of venom from Quint.
“Based on what? We told you it wouldn’t be safe. We practically warned you every way and yet you go behind our back.” The veins that trumped down his loosened tie grew prominent as he emphasized each word. They ran bizarrely in Lexa’s ears.
“We already have a debt in the bank and you asked for more. You literally threw us to the sharks.”
Another voice spoke out from amidst the remaining two men in the room. Nyko.
“The market crashed, Lexa. The fucking market crashed and we don’t have the money, a dime to pay.”
Lexa forestalled her thoughts, like she didn’t fucking know, she wanted to scream in their mouths. She had been awake the whole night through out and had rushed into the office no sooner the offensive, ground shattering news had spread like a forest fire. She gritted her teeth in agony, in frustration. But mostly anger. Anger at herself. And everyone else in her view point.
“Nyko, this was what we needed to get us ahead of the race. How would I have known the fucking market would have fucking crashed overnight.”
Nyko wasn’t that intimidating in appearance, he was one of the cool heads that Lexa had met but the shrill in his voice, the way he baffled his shaking hands through his unsettled hair, the red in his eyes evicted another persona.
“So you sold us out? So you put the whole company at stake?”
But Lexa held her ground. Her solid footing clattered at the train of accusations but instead of stepping back, she stepped up, held her shoulders high and met Nyko eye to eye.
“Hold your tongue right there Nyko. You wouldn’t be here, fuck this company wouldn’t be here because of me. You would all be bloody losers scraping behind desks, if it was not for me.”
They had known each other for almost 3 years now. Four would be by the end of New Year’s. Any sane person would probably shout out at the low blow, or to the extreme night even slap her face. Any sane third person would.
“What the fuck you say?” This time it was Quint again who stepped up. In her hindsight Lexa could catch his clenching and unclenching her fists, maybe dwelling on the fact on whether he should actually hit her right across the face or dismiss the thought for she was the weaker sex. Lexa read him like a book, like she did everyone. The emotions flashing like a cinema screen before her eyes. And somewhere in the back of her mind she knew she deserved it. Betrayal never sits well anywhere, even enemies play the certain code of honour, but only Lexa didn’t see it as betrayal. She did what she thought was right for her company. She raised her eyebrows, silently challenging him further.
Quint quipped, “You always wanted to end up first on every fucking list, make everything a competition. And after all these years this is how you repay us. Selling us out, damn it.”
“I did what any good stockbroker does. Gamble on the prices. I didn’t know it would …..”
Quint seethed out again, “What, backfire up our asses? I have a fucking family to feed Lexa. We all have a family to feed unlike you.”
Gustus jolted as he stood washing hell unfold in front of his eyes. He tried to simper down the venom of his latest words but Quint’s words had already left his mouth. It couldn’t be reinserted back. They had left and the damage was done and Quint himself look mummified by his words. He put a respectful amount of distance between the brunette and himself, bumping into the shoulders of the almost shocked Nyko.
In all honesty, Quint didn’t even see it coming. The punch the Lexa threw on his right cheek in slow motion as it collided with his jaw, gashing his lips. He felt his body shake out in misbalance as he hit the hard concrete floor.
Gustus and Nyko kneeled down to their fallen friend helping him out to stand on his wobbly legs. Lexa retreated her hand almost immediately. The pain was numbing. But the gash of blood that oozed out of Quint’s nose halted her anger.
She had gritted her jaw once before shagging the overcoat and the scarf from atop her desk. Once outside the building she glanced up at the bold black letters POLARIS COMPANY . Ice cold tears wheeled down her cheeks at the possibly unknown tomorrow, the company where she had spent every day and night, sweated out on every brick, the company for which she had left her home, her grandeur of a bloody job all those years ago would be crumbling down before her eyes and she could do nothing about it. Just watch from the side lines as it will shatter.
She coughed up as the bare throat caught up and the first words to mumble out form her shrivelled self was “Water”.
The nurse that was sculling about the light blued hospital room presumably, helped her sit up from her aligned bed ridden position and poured her a glass of water.
She felt aching on the upside of her head and when her muffed hands injected with saline water travelled up she found her skull bandaged around, circling the entirety of her head. Lexa closed her eyelids and hummed to recollect whatever detail led her to traverse the dormitories of a chloroform reeked hospital room but they were all hazy at least upto the point where she downed herself with alcohol. She might have had a questioning furrowing eyebrow kinda face because the nurse seemed to be kind enough to fill in the missing details of yesterday or rather the twilight hours of today’s morning.
“You, dear and your pretty companion were found high in alcohol swimming in the wintry waters of the East River. You both would have drowned otherwise if the Captain at the dock hadn’t pull you out. He wasn’t very happy about it.”
Lexa vaguely remembered a blonde girl contemplating of undergoing the same ordeal as she was but then again as everything was pretty vague, as if seeing through a coloured glass only greyer, but nonetheless, she meekly nodded at the old nurse.
“And in your drunken profile, you .. you both were a bit … handful which ended in a hassle which led to a concussion on your head.”
Yet again, Lexa didn’t reply. She nodded. But under her breathe she berated herself for being so stupid, she couldn’t even drown without being trolled down to the hospital, paraded about her utter unsuccessful failure, that too with a complete stranger.
There was a knock on the entrance that interrupted her suicidal attempt. The nurse took a glance up from her charts and headed out, before adding,
“Oh, and dear, your friend is in room 49 down the hall.”
“Of course.”
Hands shoved inside his black overcoat, stood Gustus. He was a tall man, one of the very handful that Lexa trusted, and one of the few that Lexa actually deemed of calling something next to home. Several moments trailed off before he finally spoke his thoughts,
“What were you thinking?” his eyes trailed back and forth the awful fragile state of Lexa’s bode. The mere inspection of pity enthralled Lexa out of her static sitting.
“As it turns out, I wasn’t thinking at all.” She shrugged, tugging onto the white hospital band on her wrist.
There was that shuffling of nervous feet again and even if Gustus wanted to say something, he seemed to rethink his words. Instead he spoke on his dismal tone,
“I don’t want to beat around the bush more than it needs too but your apartment has been sealed off by the bank since it’s the office’s property and the bank has called for a hearing on 28th December.”
Lexa took in those words without slipping into a constant ache. It was inevitable. Lexa knew that vultures and the insurance company would have been crawling up their bones pretty soon, but this was all too soon. She apprehended the words, but somehow she didn’t approve them.
You are very beautiful, blue eyes. Lexa’s eyes narrowed at those uneventful words that seemed to cloud her mind out of the blue but instantly schooled her expression. She roamed her eyes about the uncharacteristic room and her eyes got stuck onto the window pane. It was foggy. She could probably warm her breathe on it and make out a smiley face against the tilted glass.
“You are our guarantor, Lexa and you need to be present at court. You must be. Whatever’s there to savage, even if there’s anything left... “
Lexa didn’t reply to the ongoing baffle from the only visitor. That didn’t mean she didn’t listen. She’s a good listener and she was holding onto every word that he was saying but now she was feeling tired. Exhausted.
It’s like a month away from Christmas now, only a month away. And New York has always danced in its own rhythm to the tunes of the white Christmases. But despite all the screams for chocolate delights and merry chuckles, Lexa was alone. Christmas echoed the jingle bells of family time, something she has left behind long ago. She felt lonely, to be brutally honest, something she would never tell another soul.
I always felt lonely on Christmas, here in New York. Lexa almost shrieked at yet another look into yesterday’s memory lane.
“Lexa?” came a concerned call who rushed to her side. “You were listening, right?”
She gripped the white railing on the side of her bed and weakly nodded.
“I have to go now, gotta start looking for a job, eh?” Gustus joked poorly and the frown on Lexa’s face deepened. She felt a light squeeze on her leg, “We’ll be ok. Just … just be present on the 28th. Please.”
Lexa laid back onto her bed before shuffling out from the hospital bed sheets. Her clothes were placed accordingly on the upper shelf of the nearest table. She tugged on her jeans, over the obnoxiously green hospital gown, which was still drenched around the edges and pulled on her overcoat.
She peeped outside the empty corridor, lest someone saw her escaping without the doctor’s consent. Seeing a clear coast, she rushed forward down the corridor hopefully to find a nearest exit somewhere only to literally bulldoze into another rushing body.
Bewildered cerulean irises peeked through unrifled blonde mane and recognition evicted her features.
“You again.”
“Oh my god, you.”
Came both simultaneous replies.
Imagery of every fucking moment stormed Lexa’s mind on seeing her. Blue eyes, she had called her.
“Glad I saw you before I was fleeing, you are the fucking reason I ended in the hospital place, greeny.” The girl seethed out, her hand holding her plastered neck in place.
“As if I asked you to follow me to the unknowing dark plunges of the underworld.”
But there batter was cut short when the screeching sounds of approaching wheels paved down their very path. Panicking, Lexa immediately back stepped to the opposite corridor and so did the blonde but in her polar opposite direction, and soon they were out of each other’s sight.
Much to her luck, the first door or rather an enlarged glass window greeted the brunette on her first turn down the corridor. FIRE EXIT. The writing was printed out in shocking red over the white wall.
Without a second thought, Lexa pulled the glass up and scrunched under it which quite convincingly led her to a back door spiral staircase of sorts. How convenient, Lexa snorted. And down the very next turn of the staircase, the same old familiar face greeted her.
“Are you following me?” came a redundant question. To be fair, it was thrown at her.
Lexa snorted and rather unceremoniously added, “Yes, because you are so attractive and I just can’t get enough of you.”
The blonde rolled her eyes as the sarcastic comment. She smirked. “You did call me beautiful.”
Lexa watched her step at her pull down another connecting ladder. “One says many things when drunk.”
“What happened to your neck?”
“Got bummed, I guess. What about your neck?”
“Something along similar lines.” Lexa realized the blonde was wearing green scrubs only with tainted boots that revealed too much unclothed skin but even in minimal wear the blonde stranger had a certain flair about herself, albeit her physical attractiveness, of course.
“Where you actually going to” , Lexa paused and searched for a pretty wording for her terms but nothing worthy came in mind,” …. You know, planning to die?”
“No, I just wanted to take a dive in the East River on the onset of December. Can’t say the incident was pleasant though.” Clarke fluttered her eyes deliberately like a fucking china doll before throwing her a pointy glare.
Point taken, noted and saved. Geez.
“Are you planning on doing it again?”
Lexa didn’t answer her directly but in a twist about way asked, “You too?”