As the isolated office neared closing time, Larissa stretched out her hands while she stood in front of the air conditioner, in a desperate attempt to absorb as much as air as she could before the flap would shut close.
A contended smile was wrapped over her thin lips, eyes closed to cue pretenses of standing in the middle of a rainforest rather than the city center, clad in a blue and gray cleaning lady uniform with a mop leaning against her chest.
She inhaled the cool wind like a woman starved, feasting over the last clean gust until it was too late. The swing flap of the air conditioner swung close and with dejected shoulders, Larissa too stepped away.
She grabbed the mop again and began sliding it against the marble flooring. Her hands moved fast while her eyes kept glancing at the clocking.
'In twenty minutes, the office would heat up like a portal to hell,' her brain reminded. Her bushy brows banded in determination as worked her way through the wide expanse of an entire office and the adjoining hallway.
Her head bopped to a popular song, body swaying to-and-fro with the mop as she lost herself to the beat while mopping. So, it was consider her surprise only human when she opened her eyes and spotted an old man standing on the end of the hallway. Under dim lights. Clad in all black. Awaiting her like an angel of death.
Larissa let out a startled scream and let go of the mop. It fell with a loud thud, eliciting a similar response from the man. With one hand, he seemingly clutched his chest and gasped, with the other, he pointed an accusatory finger at Larissa.
"You— you!!"
"I—I, uh, I am sorry!" Larissa immediately bent into a ninety degree bow. "Are you okay? I didn't mean to startle you!" She called out and walked towards the man.
"I'm good, you're good," the old man replied with a gruff voice.
"Let me fetch you some water, come sit," Larissa said as she grabbed the old man by his arm and led him inside the office. "Do you work here?" She asked as she seated him on one of the cubicle chairs and speed-walked towards the pantry.
"I suppose I do," the man replied with a nonchalant shrug. "Put a slice of lemon in my water dear, it elevates the taste," he called out to Larissa shuffling inside the pantry. "Do you work here as well?" He asked, while Larissa replied affirmative to both.
"I just part-time, you know, I'm a college student so this is one of the many jobs I do," Larissa clarified as she jogged out with a glass of water and a singular slice of lemon in hand. "I didn't know how you'd want it...eh, should I just put it in? Wedge it to the brim? Squeeze it?" She asked, side-eying the lemon slice.
"Just put it in," the man sighed.
Larissa did. He thanked her and took a sip of the refreshing drink. Larissa looked up at the clock and panicked. The heat was already beginning to consume the closed space and in a matter of moments the walls would start emanating all the heat they consumed.
"Do you work for security? The office closed an hour ago, there's no other reason a person like you would be here." Larissa asked as she fetched her mop from the hallway.
The old man replied something but it was muffled owing to the distance between them. Larissa picked up the mop from the end of the hallway and ran back to the office.
"Don't you want to go back home? To the familiar warmth of your wife, a table filled with food and everything nice?" Larissa asked as she walked back inside.
"I don't anyone to go back to," the man shrugged.
"Oh— I, uh, I am sorry! Again!" Larissa bent into another apologetic bow.
"No, no, I mean, my wife is angry at me...for something, yes," the man confessed.
Larissa let out a giggle. "Bring her some flowers and apologise. I'm sure she's working her best," Larissa advised with a smile.
Even under the dim light, the old man exuded an otherworldly glow through his wrinkled skin, beady eyes and crisp black suit. His lips were pushed up in a smile as he followed Larissa's movements with his crinkled eyes.
"Don't you want to go home? It's quite late for a young girl like you," he pointed out.
"Oh don't mind me!" Larissa waved a hand in his face, "You know how it is like to earn money, don't you? I have a sick aunt at home. She's a teacher. She leaves me copies to correct each day and sometimes I make the report cards as well. She has a lot of allergies — not a sickness for a poor soul, am I right?" Larissa snorted.
"Mhm, my wife is mad at me because our grandson is in love with a wrong person and I'm not doing anything about it," the old man revealed.
"Oh?" Larissa's dark eyes twinkled and her head perked up, "Is it a man?"
"No," the old man replied promptly.
"Then what? Is it a child? A convict? A prostitute?"
"You're making her sound like a saint now," the man sighed.
"I don't understand," Larissa confessed.
"Fancy a drink?" The man asked.
Larissa made a face and took two steps backward, "Grandpa, the best I can do is help you sit in a bus."
The man let out a laugh and Larissa did not understand what in her words was so amusing. Heat had begun emanating off the walls and boiling the floor up. Larissa could feel it in the clogged air and her sweaty armpits.
"What's your major, in college, that is?" The old man asked.
"I cannot tell you that, for privacy concerns," Larissa replied. "We should get going though, this place is going to boil soon."
"Oh? You can turn on the air conditioning if you want to," the man pointed at the the remote place beside the air conditioner, drilled with a stand on the wall.
"Oh-ho ho! How can I? A mere cleaning lady? Ha! You're so funny! They're going to have me killed and hang me at the community center to make an example out of how people like me should stay in their lane!" Larissa bellowed in between exasperated dry laughs.
"You've got a vivid imagination," the old man scoffed, "Do you fancy easy money?" His words immediately stilled Larissa.
"Who doesn't?" She scoffed back.
"How far would you go for it?"
Larissa crossed her arms over her chest and threw a deepened frown at the old man. "I didn't imagine you to be sleazy, wow, there's no place for kindness in this society anymore," she scoffed, throwing disgusted glances at him.
"What! No! What even— How could you!" The man struggled for words and stood up in his defence. Larissa considered it as him making a move and took three steps back.
"I'm telling you, I will hit you!" She exclaimed, welding the map as a lance.
"Oh please," the man rolled his eyes, "I love my wife very much, thank you, but what I was suggesting is— would you fancy a wedding to my grandson?"
"A'ight, too much out time for me today, I'm going home, old man, who even are you?!" Larissa scoffed and walked into the hallway to complete the cleaning and leave as soon as possible. 'Surely, if not senile, he must be a human trafficker,' Larissa concluded, very wisely, in her head and made a mental note to report him first thing tomorrow morning.
"I understand it sounds ridiculous —" the man started as soon as he stepped out of the office, "But my wife is just so mad at me and I cannot think of any other way to get out of this. Surely, if I get him to fall in love with another person, surely he would leave that girl and marry a decent one. I am willing to pay as much as you desire. I am quite well off, you see—"
"I think you need medication!" Larissa cut him off with a shout from the end of the hallway.
"Opportunities like these never knock twice! How does 50 million dollars sound to you?" The old man shouted back from the other end of the hallway.
"Like the price of my organs that you're gonna illegally harvest!" Larissa shouted back, clearly alarmed, she threw the mop in the janitor's closet and beelined towards the stairway exit.
"No— hear me out! He's a very dashing young man! His name is Nikolai and he likes dar—"
"Hello? 110? This is an emergency! At Hurain Corp, yes, there is an old who might be trafficking girls, yes he is coming after me, please help— oh my—"
"— Here me out lady, this is actually a great deal, looking at you, you're absolutely his type—"
"—Can you hear that?! He keeps forcing me to marry his grandson?! Yes please —Help!"
Suddenly, the stairway exit door burst open and Larissa screamed with all her might.
A flash of light made Larissa look away. They were in the Police Station, bustling with cops and operators handling finncky civilians and criminals. The man flashed light into Larissa's left eye. Again, she looked away.
"You don' seem blind, you quite al'ight, lass then why can't you recognise the big boss o' your workplace? Hurain Kairos? The founder and maker of Hurain Corp? Whatchu some kinda Patrick Star?" Her assigned cop chided as he looked at Hurain and Larissa, simultaneously, giving an apologetic look to one and a pointed look to another.
"I am sorry..." Larissa sighed, properly slouched in the chair with her shoulders slumped, head bent and back curved into a shameful C.
"My husband was treating you with kindness and here you are calling the cops on him," an old woman tsked. She stood behind Hurain's chair with a hand on either of his shoulder. Her persona exuded the same otherworldly glow that her husband possessed. Her curly silver hair, sharp blue eyes and unblemished wrinkled skin qualified her as the richest woman in the entirety of the nation.
"I am sorry ma'am," Larissa slouched further than humanly possible, "Please do not sue me," she all but begged.
"They gon' do what they like. You can't jus' offend the Kairos' yaknow," the cop snorted, excitedly exchanging glances between the duo.
"We won't press charges, of course, as long as you co-operate with us," the old man, Hurain Kairos, said ever so kindly.
His soothing tone instinctively urged Larissa to glare at him through a side-eye. "You should have started with your name, old man," she grumbled, unapologetically.
"It's all the same, all the same," Hurain let out a hearty laugh and patted Larissa's slouched back. "How about we discuss this in the presence of my beloved — or do you wish to be sued instead?"
Larissa spotted an evil glint in his eye and groaned internally. What she wished was to go home, not be wedded off on the whims of an old rich couple. Surely — it must trespass some of her fundamental rights. Right?!
Nonetheless, Larissa willed herself to get up and launch into a flurry of apologetic bows for wasting a government official's time and closely followed the old rich couple out of the prison.
The old woman glanced at Larissa twice before patting a hand on her shoulder. "Go home for now, let Arnold take you. We will continue this in the morning. Know that we are only trying to do the best for everyone, okay?" She smiled at Larissa. A dimple birthed on each cheek and her lips pursed into absence while she smiled.
Her touch was warm against Larissa's cold shoulder.
She wished she had grandparents...or parents... Larissa sighed as she walked inside the small one bedroom apartment and locked the door behind her. Aunt Nora was sleeping on the sofa with her glasses still on. Her nose was puffed and red, clearly indicating that her allergies flared up again. A pile of books was placed by the foot of a sofa and a red pen gently swayed (owing to the tall standing fan placed behind the sofa) on top of them.
The table in front was laden with covered dishes and more notebooks. To the right, by the window, laid a mattress with a folded sheet on top of it. Larissa smiled gratefully.
She took off her shoes at the small shoe cabinet behind the door and tip-toed her way to the bathroom on the left. She washed her face and took her phone out to google the name of the man for whom her life was being ruined.
Her bangs were standing up and as soon as the face of the man popped in the image results, all of Larissa's body hair sprang up.
What awful fate she had.
What fucking awfully hilarious and random fate she had to have for Nikolai Rudbrek Kairos to be the same man she detested with more passion than her hopes to drop dead.
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