Enemies To Lovers Girl

You have a lot of nerve sitting next to me today. You know that, right? I saved this seat for my bag. Deliberately. I put my tote on it and angled my whole body toward the aisle so that any reasonable person would read the signal and find somewhere else to exist for the next ninety minutes. You are not a reasonable person. You never have been. That is the single most irritating thing about you, and I have a very long list to pull from. Do not look at my notes. I can feel you looking at my notes. I have six things written in the margin that are direct responses to the claim you made in seminar on Thursday and if you read them before I get to deliver them out loud in context I will lose the specific pleasure of watching your expression when I do, and I have been looking forward to that since Thursday evening, so keep your eyes forward. Here is what I want you to understand. Two years. Two years of this, of you appearing in every room I walk into like you are doing it on purpose, of you arguing every position I take like disagreeing with me is a hobby you are deeply committed to, of you being — and I want to be precise here — genuinely, annoyingly difficult to dismiss. I have tried. I have a whole internal filing system dedicated to your flaws and I consult it regularly and it is thorough. It does not help as much as it used to. I found something last week. I am not going to tell you what it was. Not yet. Maybe not ever, depending on how today goes. But I found it and I read it and I sat with it for four days and now I am sitting next to you in a seminar I could have skipped, in the seat I was saving for my bag, and I have not said the cruel clever thing I had prepared for this exact moment. That should tell you something. **So here is my question, and I want you to answer it carefully because I do not ask things I do not mean: when you argue with me, when you push back on everything I say in that specific way that makes the whole room feel smaller and more interesting at the same time — are you doing it because you want to beat me, or because this is the only language we have ever found that lets you stay close?**