He leaves the room quietly

Callum, thoroughly humiliated, got up from the chair and silently left her office. The door shut behind him with a soft click. He stood there for a second in the quiet hallway and covered his face with both hands as he sighed deeply. The skin of his palms felt warm against his eyes. Is this what the next 10-20 years of his life was going to look like? Standing in front of that desk. Getting told he wasn’t enough. Being corrected for the crime of calling her Mom. Waiting for the day she finally decided he had earned the right to do more than fetch progress reports. The thought made him sick.

“Ummm… Callum?”

He heard a soft voice from beside him and dropped his hands. He turned around to look at the source of the voice.

Liora.

The short nerdy woman would “run into” Callum at least a few times every day. Callum knew these meets weren’t so random. The senior lab technician had a crush on him. It was obvious in the way her eyes lingered and the way she always seemed to find a reason to be in the same hallway at the same time. He was cute in a nerdy kind of way, people often told her that she looked like Velma from Scooby Doo. And she kinda did. The thick black-framed glasses. The dark auburn hair that never quite stayed in the messy bun she tried to keep it in. The soft freckles across her nose. The way she bit her lip when she was nervous. She was stacked up top like Velma too, something Callum appreciated as he stared at them when he needed a pick me up. Right now those heavy soft tits were pressing against the fabric of her pale blue blouse, the top button undone just enough. He stared at them.

“Callum?” Liora spoke again, blushing slightly as she definitely noticed him staring at her tits but clearly didn’t mind too much. Her cheeks had gone a light pink. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose with one finger and shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

“Yea-yeah, Liora?” Callum responded. His voice came out a little rougher than he intended. The leftover frustration from the office was still sitting under his skin.

“I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation with Miss Drake…” she said shyly. Her eyes flicked toward the closed office door and then back to him. “I think I can help you…”

Callum blinked. Help him? The idea was almost funny. No one helped him with Margot. People either stayed out of her way or did exactly what she said. He studied Liora’s face for a second. She looked serious. Nervous, but serious.

“Help me? How?” Callum asked, confused.

Liora glanced around the hallway like she was checking to make sure no one else was close enough to hear. Then she stepped a little nearer. Close enough that he could smell the faint clean scent of whatever soap she used and see the way her blouse shifted when she breathed.

“I have managed to create a working prototype,” she said, voice dropping lower. “I can show it to you.”

Callum followed Liora steadily through the quiet corridors of Drake Industries. The late hour meant most of the floors had already emptied out, leaving only the low hum of the building’s systems and the occasional distant click of a door. He kept a half-step behind her, watching the sway of her hips under the pencil skirt without really meaning to. His mind was still half stuck in the office with Margot.

He hadn’t known what the exact product was that they had been working on. His mother had told him that it was above his pay grade and that had been that. No further discussion. No explanation. Just the same cold dismissal she always used when she decided he didn’t need to know something. Callum had tried looking into the company, Jester’s Imaginarium, but strangely enough, no matter how much he tried to look, no information came up. Nothing public. Nothing useful. Not even the usual press releases or vague product pages that every tech firm put out. With how much his mother stressed on how important the collaboration was, he’d expected more of a presence. Some footprint. Something.

The secrecy felt wrong to him. It always had. He walked a few more steps in silence, the soles of his shoes soft against the polished floor, and let the thought turn over. Had his mother always been so stuck up? A part of him felt that she hadn’t been the case. There were old memories, soft ones, of a different version of her. Smiles that reached her eyes. Hands that ruffled his hair instead of pointing him toward the door. But as soon as the thought came to his mind it was pushed aside. Had he meant to push it away? He wasn’t sure. The feeling left a sour taste anyway.

“We’re here!” Liora spoke in front of him.