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The Design(5)

By:R. S. Grey


I did my best to pay attention during his lecture. The class was absolutely silent as he spoke. The girls all leaned in to hear each syllable he uttered, while the guys tried to dissect how he was able to captivate a room with zero effort at all.

After weighing the pros and cons, I’d worked up the courage to talk to him after class. It’d been a few years since I’d last seen him and I felt like I’d grown up a lot in that time. I wasn’t Brooklyn’s little sister. I was Cammie Heart, architecture student. (I mean, I’d traded my sports bras in for the real thing, and I knew how to style my hair properly. How could he resist me?)

So, after the lecture I joined the line behind the other students—all conspicuously female—who wanted to have a chance to speak with him. I craned my ears to hear him speak to each one of them. He was quick, but polite. He offered them real advice and encouraged them to apply for summer internships at his firm.

The line continued to move until I was one person away from getting to talk to him. I knew he saw me standing in line behind the girl he was chatting with, but just before they finished talking, he smiled down at her and gestured for her to lead the way out of the classroom. I was left standing there like a fool as I watched them leave. He had his hand on her lower back and his gaze focused on the door. A part of me wanted to yell after him, but I knew it was futile. To Grayson Cole, I was as good as a ghost. He might have humored me around Brooklyn, but whatever politeness he’d once shown me was long gone.

From that point forward, I attempted to block Grayson from my mind. I did my best to ignore him whenever we saw each other, and he did the same. We had an unspoken agreement to pretend the other person didn’t exist.

That is… until a few days ago—the day of my college graduation. I’d just arrived at the restaurant for my celebratory brunch when I saw Grayson waiting for me on the sidewalk, wearing his classic navy suit. I was shocked to see him—I hadn’t invited him to my graduation, obviously. Yet, there he stood, turning heads on the sidewalk and forcing my heart to kick into overdrive.

“Could I speak with you for a moment, Cameron?” he’d asked, ignoring the other four people in my group altogether.

I froze with his confident gaze on me. Actual conversation was against our unspoken rules. I couldn’t recall him ever asking to speak with me privately.

Despite my nerves, I agreed and once we were alone, he stepped forward and presented an offer I couldn’t refuse: an interview at his firm, Cole Designs. The exchange was brief—he turned back to his car as soon as I’d accepted—but the fact remained: he’d gone out of his way to offer me an interview.

So tomorrow morning, I’d sit across from him with every bit of confidence I could muster, all the while wondering how he could hate me so much yet still consider hiring me.





Chapter Two





The dynamics of an architecture firm harken back to the stone ages. No, really. Over my morning coffee, I browsed the employee section of the Cole Designs website. Out of fifty-five employees, there were thirteen females. Of those thirteen females, seven were in the interior design department, three of them were in the accounting department, two were in reception, and yep—you guessed it—there was ONE female architect in the entire firm. Her name was Gina and she was an older looking woman with graying hair and a flat smile. According to her profile, she’d been with the company since it was founded a few years back.

I’m sure the disparity in gender wasn’t by design, but due to the fact that architecture (or rather, solving differential equations for systems of cantilevered beams) doesn’t excite most young girls. Even in my graduating class of one hundred students, there were only fifteen females. I’d known all along that I was entering a world dominated by men. I’d even had one asshole professor ask me if I honestly thought I’d be able to delegate orders to general contractors or supervise rowdy construction workers. I’d walked out of his classroom without gracing him with an answer, fighting away the urge to flip him the bird. Six weeks later, I received my final grade and it was the highest one in the class. “How ’bout them apples?” - Matt Damon.

I smiled at the memory and closed my laptop with a newfound sense of resolve. There was less than an hour and a half until my interview, just enough time to prepare and get across town.





As I sat in the back of a cab on the way to the interview, I attempted to snap a photo of my dress to send to Brooklyn. It was hard to get the right angle, but she’d get the idea.



Cammie: Does this scream “Confident, worldly architect?”