Lorelai Sterling stares at the clock with an unamused face, watching it slowly tick by and hoping that time would go a little bit faster. It was Friday today and time at work always seemed to drag at this point of the week. Just twenty more minutes and Lorelai could leave and spend the weekend lounging around her apartment and watching reruns of whatever television show was on. She wouldn’t say she was lonely, but her lack of friends was always apparent to her during her weekends in when she could be out partying it up in the big city of London. But lonely she was not.
She swivels back and forth in her chair as she attempts to finish some last minute work. She is a secretary at a law firm called Clemens & Son. It is a small place with just under fifty workers. They prided themselves on being a family business, or maybe they did when they opened half a century ago. Nowadays, it was run by the only living Clemens left, Bertram Clemens, and he’s turned the business from a family friendly place to a beehive where scorned partners go to file for divorce. He’s a sleazy old man who's running this company into the ground. He only does two things throughout his days in the office: trying to look down Lorelai’s blouse and scamming customers out of thousands of dollars. Lorelai wouldn’t be surprised if she would be out of a job within the next couple of months; she’s surprised she’s made it the two and half years she’s been stuck here already.
The ringing of the company phone scares Lorelai out of her work. She glares at the device, cursing whoever it is before she even answers. Hopefully this phone call would only take a couple of minutes and she would still be able to leave at her designated time, but then again nothing was ever that easy at Clemens & Son.
“I have a call for you from Mister Styles,” Lucy chirps over the phone. She was an older woman who worked at the front desk two floors below Lorelai. She always had a new story to tell about her two grandkids, and Lorelai has always found those endearing.
Lorelai rolls her eyes at the time. Harry Styles worked down the hall from where Lorelai sat in front of Bertram Clemens’ office. She’s told him time and time again if he needed to tell her something then he should just walk down the hall to tell her whatever it was, but he has always insisted on calling her over the company’s phone instead. He knew it pissed her off and that’s exactly why he did it.
“Patch him through,” Lorelai sighs. She looks down at her nails and picks at her slightly chipped nail polish. She was already done with this conversation and it hadn’t even started yet.
To put it lightly, Lorelai hates Harry Styles with every fiber of her being and hopes he goes bald. He was her one and only nemesis in this world. They met almost a year ago on his first day at Clemens & Son. He was the new hotshot lawyer Bertram had hired who would turn this company around. Harry had been fresh out of law school with a look to kill in his eyes. When she first laid eyes on him as he stepped out of the elevator Lorelai had thought he was quite attractive with his short brown curls and daring green eyes. She had even thought about flirting with him a bit, but then he opened that big dumb mouth of his and ruined everything.
He had called her job cute, and not as in he had thought the job was nice and adorable. No he said it more like, it’s...cute. As in pathetic and mind numbing and that she was a fucking idiot. She brushed the comment aside though because she thought maybe he was nervous about his first day and was just trying to find his footing. But then she heard what he said about her in Bertram Clemens’ office through the slightly cracked door.
“She’s a bit unprofessional, don’t you think? Her skirt’s a bit too short and her blouse has one too many buttons undone. Looks to me that she should be on a street corner rather than this esteemed law office. No wonder this firm has been suffering if you’ve been having her greet your clients. They won’t take you seriously as soon as they meet her.”
Lorelai had snapped a pencil in half at the comment. When Harry stepped out of the office he instantly noticed her heated glare and was well aware that she had heard what he had said. All he did in return was give her a lazy stare before wandering down the hall with his briefcase in hand to find his new office. Every day since they’ve made each other’s lives a living hell.
“Hello Mister Styles,” Lorelai greets as she logs off of her computer. She decided to dash out of here as soon as this conversation was finished. There were only two minutes left until the small hand of the clock hit the number five and she could leave for the day.
“Miss Sterling,” Harry replies back, his voice laced with exhaustion. Lorelai may not like him, but she had to credit him for sticking around with this company for so long. It was obviously a harder task working here than he had originally thought on his first day, and it wasn’t because of Lorelai’s outfit choices.
“What is it that you need?” Lorelai asks with absolutely no patience in her voice.
“I emailed you earlier asking to send me all of the information on the Rollins case.”
Lorelai sighs. “And I emailed back stating that I couldn’t give you the information until Monday as the fax machine is broken and the Rollins family refuses to email it over.”
“You should have pushed them harder to give it to you,” Harry argues with a hard edge in his voice.
“If I remember correctly, Mister Styles, I am Bertram Clemens’ secretary, not yours. I do not have to help you get information from your clients. Mister Clemens has offered to hire you a secretary yet you refuse because you, and I’m quoting, ‘do not need help from someone who would probably just end up screwing up the job.’ So do your job Styles and get the Rollins information yourself.” Lorelai slams the phone down back onto the receiver with such force that it causes a few of her pens to roll off the table.
Lorelai stands, replaces the pens back onto the table, and grabs her coat off of the coat rack only a few feet away. She wraps it around her body, walks to the elevator, and clicks the down button a few hundred times. This was a sort of game they played- could Lorelai get on the elevator and get the doors to shut faster than Harry could pack up his things and get on there as well. Lorelai’s yet to win, and today wasn’t any different.
Harry sticks his arm between the elevator doors before they could officially shut. Lorelai lets out an annoyed huff which Harry only rolls his eyes to.
“Was already packed up before I gave you a ring,” he mentions as soon as he steps beside her. Their shoulders lightly brushed against one another. Lorelai would have stepped away, but the elevator was small and there was nowhere for her to go.
Lorelai says nothing in response and watches the numbers go down once the elevator starts to move.
“So what are you up to on this Friday evening?” He asks once he realizes she won’t give him a response. She knows he’s trying to bait her into saying something he can mock.
“Oh, I’ve got big plans.” He didn’t need to know that she didn’t plan on leaving her house at all over the next two days.
“Hmmm.” Harry turns his head a little towards her and raises his eyebrows. She doesn’t give him the satisfaction of looking back to him. “And what kind of plans are these?”
“What’s it matter to you?”
“It doesn’t,” he responds a little too quick. “Was just trying to make conversation, you don’t have to jump down my throat.”
The elevator doors finally open and Lorelai walks out into the lobby with a speed she probably shouldn’t have been able to possess in her high heels. Harry’s right behind her though. Damn his long legs.
“You still take the Tube to get home? Why don’t you just buy a car?”
Lorelai almost shrugs. She never told Harry that she didn’t know how to drive, it’d only give him more ammunition. “Don’t need one.”
“I could give you a lift if you need it,” he offers. It wasn’t the first time he offered either. At least once a week he would, but each time Lorelai would reject his offer. She didn’t want him to find out where she lived in case his plan was to break in and murder her. Over dramatic, maybe, but she’s always been that way.
“I’m fine, thanks,” Lorelai hums as she wraps her coat tighter around herself. It was bloody freezing outside, and maybe Harry’s offer would have been the smart thing to choose, she thinks, but Lorelai’s pride was too big to ask after she refused.
“I’ll see you on Monday then.” He nods her way before heading across the street to his car.
“Bright and early,” she mocks before turning on her heel, heading in the direction opposite of Harry to the station.
~
November 26th
The perks of being Lorelai Sterling are having great hair and being an overly organized person. So organized that even her label maker had a label on it. She knew where everything was at all times because everything had a place and the place is where it should be. Bertram says it’s one of the main reasons why he had hired her, because she could get him any of his documents that he needed in under a minute. She knows for a fact that that wasn’t the reason he hired her because he hadn’t a clue about her skills until after she was hired, but she doesn’t want to dwell on why he had actually hired her. No woman should ever try to peer into Bertram Clemens’ mind.
Anywho, currently she was looking for the Pierce’s case Bertram had been working on about a month ago, but it was not where she had placed it. And that of course didn’t make any sense because it was supposed to be in her huge filing cabinet with all of the other cases, but it was nowhere in sight. Not even misplaced elsewhere in the cabinet as she’s checked the entire thing three times.
“Shit shit shit,” she mutters before slamming the drawer shut with a loud thud. This couldn’t be happening. Never ever in her time here has she ever misplaced a case. The only bright side was that Bertram had asked for the case to be placed on his desk after his lunch break, which he takes for two hours at a time and there was still another hour left on the clock, but she hadn’t a clue where else to look for this damn case.
“Is everything alright out here?” Harry’s head pops around the corner. His eyebrows furrow on the top of his head as he spots Lorelai’s stiff body leaning against the cabinet.
“No everything is not bloody alright. Someone stole a casefile!” That’s the only logical thing to Lorelai in this moment. There was no way she had lost it.
Harry lets out a breath that kind of sounds like a laugh. “What do you mean someone’s stolen a casefile?”
Lorelai elaborates, “I mean, someone broke into my filing cabinet and stole the Pierce’s casefile.”
“The Pierce one?”
Lorelai throws her arms up above her head. “Yes!”
“I’ve got it in my office,” Harry states like it was no big deal.
Lorelai narrows her eyes at him. “What?” She storms past him towards his office. He’s hot on her heels.
“You can’t just tear my office up. Jesus, you’re a mad woman. Give me a second and I’ll get it for you,” Harry starts and nudges her away from his desk after she started to haphazardly flip through his papers. He opens the bottom drawer of his desk and produces the Pierce file.
Lorelai snatches it from his hands. “Why the bloody hell did you have this? It isn’t one of your cases!”
“I got bored. Wanted to look at some of Bertram’s cases to see if I could take the load off of him.”
Lorelai’s face turns an ungodly shade of red. She almost crumples the file in her tight hands, but refrains herself from doing so. “You got bored?” She ticks off.
“Yes,” Harry answers simply.
Lorelai tilts her head a bit and her eyes narrow at Harry. “Well don’t,” she snaps. “And next time you touch my filing cabinet you’re a dead man, you hear?” She presses her index finger against his firm chest.
“It isn’t that big of a deal,” he says after Lorelai was nearly out the door.
She flips around on her heel after his words though. “Not that big of a deal? You entered my workspace, broke into my filing cabinet, didn’t tell me that you took the file, and didn’t even apologize for doing so! You know how mad you got when you saw me searching through your papers a few minutes ago. Now imagine how you’d feel if I were to do that during your lunch break and never told you that I did so!”
Lorelai slams Harry’s office door behind her before Harry can say another word. That fucking prick. He’s such a bloody knobhead. God how she wishes he never came to work at Clemens & Son. How glorious her life would be. But no, for an undetermined amount of time she has to work down the hall from the most egotistical, selfish, and rudest person she’s ever met. Harry bloody Styles.
