For the longest time, Bruce stared at the boarded up façade in stunned silence. His eyes no longer held the faintest detection of bleariness from the whisky, yet he found it hard to believe them.
Finally, his lip curled in the slightest tilt of a smile.
His initial thought to retreat before he was recognized disintegrated. Bruce chuckled at the foolishness to flee. There was no need to leave this place.
He belonged here.
He had been here years before Preston and Moore had bought the building as part of their meteoric expansion. The years had not been kind to Bruce since their arrival. Bruce had once walked these streets for years, considering himself the ‘Lord of the Financial District.’ He was as much of a sales rep, signing new clients to the firm, as he was an analyst. For years, he felt like there was the go to guy for getting the job done at Hadley Financial Co., and that there was nothing he couldn’t do when he walked through their doors.
Then this firm that no one ever heard of from Arizona started buying up property all over the country, expanding into different regional offices, and all the clients he had wooed from competitors went flocking to the new kid on the block. This new firm delivered haymaker after haymaker, long after Bruce had been pummeled into the canvass.
But I’m still here.
The passersby were too busied absorbed in their own lives to notice him spit on their front door. The gesture didn’t quench his thirst to lash out. He doubted people would still ignore him if he exacted any further revenge, and decided to disappear into the alley surrounding Preston and Moore to relieve himself along their walls instead of on their front stoop like he wanted to.
Bruce chuckled as he emerged back onto the sidewalk. He felt a sense of vindication, not in what he’d just done, but that he’d outlasted them. He’d said for years that something was fishy about the way the firm was operating, that there was no way to have that much sustained growth. It was reinvigorating to have lived long enough to see he was right.
It was all unfair, he thought to himself as he looked around the street again, this time regaining his long lost perspective that he not only belonged here, but that these streets belonged to him.
They’ll see that now. They might not recognize me at first, but if they see me now…they’ll probably be eager to see me…eager to apologize, ready to admit they were wrong.
Ready to welcome me back.
Bruce felt he could’ve flown back to his old office building. It hadn’t been so long that he’d forgotten the way. He arched his scraggly brow when he saw it. The façade looked dingy and faded, not the glowing beacon he’d expected, or had envisioned it to be through the lenses of nostalgia.
No. It’s definitely different.
The sun didn’t shine off the windows because they hadn’t been cleaned in some time. There wasn’t a steady flow of people walking in and out of the front door, both customers and employees alike. He realized he hadn’t been the only casualty in Hadley Financial’s purge.
“Bruce?” a familiar voice asked behind him.
Slowly, he turned to face her.
“Hello, Miranda.”