Here And Now

BONUS SCENE #2 The Untold Story

CLAIRE

To the world, Claire Whitmore was just another cliché: a younger woman in designer heels, married to a man twenty years older with a private driver and a wine cellar. A gold-digger, a bored housewife, a beautiful parasite — I'd heard it all. Let them talk. They hadn't seen the way Rubin looked at me in the beginning, hadn't heard the way his voice changed when he read me poetry on late summer nights with a glass of scotch in his hand and a bandage still wrapped around his wrist from one surgery or another.

I still remember the first time I heard his voice before I ever really looked at his face.

I was 24, two years into a job I'd taken mostly to prove to my mother that I could work, and not just sit around looking pretty like she'd always accused me of. I had started from the marketing team's lowest-ranking associate, fetching overpriced coffees and reformatting presentations someone else would take credit for, to a team manager all on my own. Now I was the one stealing credit. Well, sometimes.

I was good at smiling. At knowing when to laugh. At being silent just long enough to be useful, but never long enough to be threatening.

Rubin Whitmore was a myth back then. A man not known for his looks, really he was just a short, stout guy with a more than average face. I am biased though, I had always liked my men a tad bit ugly. But he was known for his dealing methods. A name that made people sit straighter in their chairs. He rarely came into our floor — too busy, too important — but when he did, people tried not to blink.

That day, I was presenting a pitch for a luxury skin care campaign, a trial assignment I'd practically begged to be assigned. I stayed up three nights straight perfecting it — and by the time I stood in front of the boardroom, my palms were sweating so hard I could barely hold the clicker.

I didn't even know he was there until halfway through.

He was leaning against the wall in the back, hands folded in front of him like he was at church, watching me with this unreadable calm.

I stumbled. Not visibly, maybe. But internally, something shifted.

"I've never seen someone bring something so cold to life."

That was all he said.

He started showing up more often after that. At first, it was always in a professional setting — offering feedback, asking questions only I could answer, casually mentioning the campaign as if it were a fluke, as if it hadn't taken every part of me to make it what it was.

But there was something in the way he looked at me.

Not like I was some bright-eyed intern he could mold, and not like I was just another pretty face in a long list of women orbiting his world. He looked at me like I intrigued him. Like he couldn't quite figure me out — and that fact annoyed him in the most delicious way.

We started talking. At first in passing, then longer conversations in empty boardrooms or after meetings. We'd talk about books. Design. Why so many luxury brands relied on artificial scarcity. I told him about my father's antique store in Maine, how he taught me to see beauty in the worn-down, the old. He told me about his mother's garden and the year he lost her.

He listened. Really listened.

It didn't feel like a seduction. It felt like something else. Like recognition.

People noticed, of course.

There were whispers. Raised eyebrows. I knew what they were saying — that I was young and he was powerful, and clearly I had figured out the fastest way up the ladder.