The Heatwave

The air in the penthouse had turned thick and still, the kind of humidity that clings to skin like a second shirt. It was four o’clock on a Tuesday, and the power grid for the upper forty floors had given up the ghost. The glass walls of Archie’s office offered a panoramic view of the city sweating in the heatwave, but inside, the silence was absolute. No hum of servers, no whisper of the HVAC system, just the heavy, shared breath of two people who had been working in close proximity for exactly twenty-one days.

I was Jasmine, his new executive assistant, and Archie was the founder of the company we both paid our mortgages with. He was standing by the window, one hand shoved into the pocket of his charcoal trousers, watching the traffic crawl below. I was standing by the dead espresso machine, holding a half-empty bottle of sparkling water, trying to look like I had a plan for the next six hours. We were trapped. The lifts were dead, the stairs were forty flights down, and neither of us had bothered to check if the door to the terrace was locked until the elevator dinged with a final, dying groan.

The terrace door was locked, obviously. It had been since the building went up, probably. I didn’t need to check; I just needed to not stand there holding warm sparkling water like an idiot.