Second Ave Offices: Labor Day (WLW)

Just Another Morning...So to Speak

Maya opened her eyes as her alarm on her phone resounded throughout her spacious loft and squinted in the direction of her bedside table with a groan that turned up at the end as her mind strayed to her first morning thought after, maybe I can throw it across the room. Grabbing her phone from the table and sitting on the edge of her bed, Maya ran her fingers through her dark waves and gulped at the unanticipated sensation the thought brought to her gut. It flourished like little fireflies illuminating the paths through her innermost workings and she glanced up at the floral patterned, foldable divider separating her bedroom from the rest of the loft as she put a name to the thought. Or rather, the person.

Rose's image riddled her mind and she gulped, gazing down to her phone still ringing in her hand. She turned it off when Henry began squeaking at her from the table on the other side of her bed and as her mind continued reeling, she crawled over her bed toward him. He was a highly sociable, satin rat with chocolate fur that he loved being pet first every morning. With her six month long sabbatical schedule so disrupted, she hadn't been able to spend as much time with him and her mother had taken it upon herself to visit her loft when gone to alleviate some of his loneliness.

Maya wished she could take him with her to work, though she was sure having a rat in the office would be seen as relatively unprofessional. Still, as she took him from his two-tiered rat habitat, she really didn't want to part with him. Henry immediately began rubbing himself along her cheeks as she lifted him to her face, then kissed the top of his head. One of the reasons why Maya preferred her new loft to her old apartment was that she was able to install a large tube along the walls and counter or table tops all throughout its sizable girth.

She set him in front of the tube entrance at the head of her bed and he promptly ran inside, squeaking all along his path with an energy she wished she could mirror. Maya was exhausted and after having to reschedule her meeting with Rose due to her previously established schedule doing home repairs in the home of the man who graciously let her enter when she confronted her client about her true motivations. That would be taking several days of her time and Maya had changed the meeting to Friday after a long weekend of grueling case studies from home.

Throughout her busy weekend of cataloging documents and contacting her growing number of clients, Maya's mind strayed back toward Rose. Even as she opened her eyes, one of her first thoughts was of the woman and she moved to the edge of her bed once again, watching Henry running around the loft as her head just wouldn't calm. She glanced down at her phone sitting atop the bed and tapped the screen. Once it shined, she read the time was just after seven and she nibbled on her bottom lip as she tilted her head to the side, trying to rid it of that very person until they were able to discuss and investigate more about her case.

It didn't work.

Maya stood and made her way to her large kitchen, fixing her coffee and turning it on. She leaned back against the kitchen island as she thought of their last conversation over the phone. Rose was still reluctant to disclose their new information that her mother may have been carrying on an affair and feared her brother or sister being hurt over its true revelation, so she wasn't about to fill them in on it all unless she had very hard proof that it even existed. Maya could understand that, but she was an excellent poker player. If she proposed the idea to Bex and her lawyer, things may work in their favor without any proof, or they could fall apart and she would have the opportunity to warn the man with whom she had the affair. That would ruin any chances they had of using his connection to Bex to their advantage and Rose didn't care to risk it.

She needed certainty that they could collapse her mother's plotting and evenly distribute the funds between her and her two younger siblings alone. Rose had two goals. The first was to make sure that her younger siblings got a hefty summation and possibly held shares in their late father's conglomerate. The second was that she planned on selling her own shares, adding the funds to that of his left for her and dividing it evenly between her siblings and her coworkers, of which there were six. In no way was she considering keeping any of it for herself and when she'd finally revealed all of this over their dinner last Thursday, Maya felt a wave of not only relief, but determination take over her entirety.