The Elevator Effect

Chapter 1

Vintage  bookstores are filled with that kind of stories;
the ones where attractive and vulnerable girls fall gracefully into the possessive hands of handsome, rich and powerful brutes who change for the better under their love's control. Cold and heartless men suddenly grow souls.
And all aspiring to be the next Gone with the Wind.
But this is not a story for that kind of story.
Because some people are unchangeable.

                                     *   *   *

Jane Archer doesn't smile.
Even if she did, it wouldn't look right with her chin-length, bob haircut of common brown hair and abnormally pale face.

She never wore much makeup either; mascara wouldn't stick to her short, scarce eyelashes, and blusher always looked more like face paint against her cold cheeks.

She never really wore dresses. They all made her seem more like a child wearing her mother's clothes. So as a result Jane Archer's wardrobe didn't have much variety. Yesterday she wore a pair of colorless jeans with a colorless trench coat. Tomorrow, since it was going to be a Sunday, she would probably spend all day in a colorless pair of sweats. But today she wore a colorless pencil skirt with just as colorless a blazer.

She seized her small sorry self in the elevator mirror. The girl inside it stared at her coldly with a straight unsmiling face as she watched her with pity.

Part of her chin-length hair was always tucked behind her ear, while on the opposite side of her face it hung loosely over the uneven, unattended curve of her left eyebrow.

The feeling of going up in the elevator for so long and not yet reaching the top floor was intimidating. It reminded her of a book she had read as a child, where the elevator flew up, and up, and out of the building and never came back down again.

That added vertigo to the strange uneasiness she felt inside elevators. The girl in the mirror now looked a little paler than the last time she looked. If that was even possible.

A breathtakingly magnificent view of the New York City stretched on the glassy top floor of the Kingston Global Finances building. The tops of blooming skyscrapers gleamed above that shimmering, scurrying magical energy of city life. A pair of polished shoes were propped up against a big glass desk. Out of them ranged a pair of long, lean legs. These belonged to Oscar, who leaned back languidly in his leather chair, regarding this view with a cynical scowl on his face.

It was all so boring.

He looked at these same skyscrapers every single day. And every single time they got more monotone. More damn boring.

As far as his memory could reach, every day was the same routine of grey morning skyline which became blue around mid day and orange in the afternoon.

It was long since black, glimmering with little yellow windows, when he retreated to his collection of Chevrolets in the car park. There he would pick the one he would go home in, and the occasional receptionist he would go home with.

He lived several glittering streets away on the top floor of the Sheraton.

He could see it from here, among the rest of the glowing mass of 60 floor buildings which had always felt so small to him. Fact, quite entirely everything felt small to him; it was a quality of somewhat arrogance or maybe more of chauvinism which had the power of enraging the average human's endurance of cockiness. But it was certainly pride -and pride was something he was unquestionably entitled to.