Not a Reunion

Chapter 33

Mason
Three months later

"And that is why we need to all work together to have this part of the project done by Monday." I'm talking to the group of people looking up at me. It was nerve-racking to be up here, but with the number of meetings I had to hold these past months, I had gotten used to it. I haven't gotten used to how stiff and perfect the suits I'm required to wear are. Actually, I'm not required to wear them, but if I didn't, then what would I show up in? Certainly not the one shirt I seem to be wearing in my home.

Fancy things didn't appease me in my private life. I follow some guidelines for my public image, but I don't have the same mindset when no one can see me. The shirt happens to be my favorite. I had picked it up at a store once, thought it looked good, and now I wear it. I'm not sure why there needed to be a whole spiel about a shirt, but that wasn't the point.

The point was that even though I had put up a front where my posture would always be perfect, my chin set straight, and my eyes always obscured on the task at hand. It's the way I was taught to carry myself. It's the way things went. But that didn't mean I had to act this way in my private life. There was a line, but I honestly think it is going to blur if all I do is come to work.

I wasted the whole summer without ever going out. The only time I went out was on a run every morning, but that was it. The problem was that I didn't have any vomiting around here. I didn't have any company outside of work, so it was hard to go out. Whoever said you could go out on your own and have a good time had a point. To me, the point was small: what are the things you could really do on your own?

"Any questions before we wrap up this meeting?" I ask the team, my hands already going to fold up the binder I had been using. I look forward to finding a few people shaking their heads while the others mutter no. I pick up the binder and say, "Perfect. I'll see you guys, tomorrow."

I head out of my space and toward the door. Once I'm opening the double glass doors, someone else walks with me. I turn to my side to find a man who is around the same age as me, giving me a smile. He needed something from me; I could see it. I was glad to be of help anyway; it felt like that meeting was super boring and overall unproductive. Not in the sense that work had to always be upbeat, but maybe I had wanted that.

There was a phase when I finally had employees, and they started to treat me with the least respect. It was scary; I was younger than all of them, yet they were being overly sweet to me. It turned out they were scared to do something wrong in front of me, so I had to ease myself into getting them to see me differently. Not that it wasn't great how they were treating me, just that I didn't want them to be so weirded out with me. It had taken them half a month to get used to me wanting to be treated the same way they treated other people, but that was okay. We are still working on it now.

"Hi, Vincent," I say with a smile as I wait for him to go on. He walks past me and then waits for me to walk up to him. I do so, and he seems nervous as he places a hand in his hair and gives me a glam. I only keep my smile on my face, if not a little nudge, in trying to get him to go on.

It takes him a minute, but he says, "No offense or anything at all." He catches my eye and repeats the last part, and I give him a little chuckle. He was the only employee who was younger than me, so I could see where he was nervous. Not that he needed to be, just that he was more intimidated by me. "Right, so I was thinking of a few things," he says with a little smile when his eyes catch the curiosity in my eyes.

"Yeah, I was thinking of a few ideas where I wanted to try to do something different from what we do here," he says. What I did for my company was that we were most centered around technology, and so IT was the most important part. We worked in that sense, and that's why my company didn't need too much of a stretch. I had enough employees, not to mention the part where I loved to do my job as well.