Room To Breathe • •

[Odette Morgana Neville]

Ettie had been kept busy all morning. There had been a surge of emails back and forth that Ettie had been copied into and now needed to put her input into. On top of that there was the usual amount of copying and mailing to sort out from the office. She was slowed down with those jobs by the constant pings of her email. Sometimes she wondered why people complicated matters far beyond what they needed to be. They were fussing over tiny, minute details that she had insisted would be taken care of, by herself, personally on the day of the arranged meeting. This wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. It was how things always operated there, and Ettie knew from her own experience of working with the public and with difficult people that it was just so much easier to handle things herself than to delegate to the interns they had running around. Nerves and the occasional distracted mind were not excuses that ever passed on well. Ettie was quick, or else she wouldn’t still be in this job. A slow day for her meant that she was ready to leave five minutes early when something else came across her desk or the phone rang.

As such, she hadn’t given one second of thought to the scarf that she had accidentally stolen. It had gone onto the back of her door with her jacket the moment she had arrived in her office. It was her routine. Greet everyone who was in that day, coat and outside accessories on the door, bag under her desk, and coffee on the Shakespeare coaster that came from her cosy hometown back in England. Then she cracked on with whatever the day or Fallon requested of her. Ettie had left the park, and the handsome Carson, in such a rush that morning that she hadn’t even given his scarf a second thought at all. She had practically jogged the rest of the way to work, bobbing and weaving between irritated men in suits who didn’t so much like being ducked around by a petite English girl who they probably assumed was a tourist rather than a New York resident. It was a mistake Ettie corrected on a weekly basis when she was out with friends. Strangers would ask her how long she was in the city for, or why she was visiting. Sometimes she spun wild tales, but other times she was too tired of their assumptions and simply demanded to know why, in a city full of transplants, she was the one they instantly guessed was here with a passport and some travel shots.

Maybe it was because she never looked like many of the professionals who filled New York City. She didn’t dress in suits or pencil skirts, and everything she wore came with a twist of her own personality. She still dressed like she did when she had been in university, meeting friends in a coffee shop or having a study group in the park because they always got too rowdy for the campus librarian. Her double degree had been in a language and in linguistics; neither really suggested quiet study. Still, Ettie was the lively kind. She liked to speak with wild hand gestures, emotive facial expressions, and put passion into what she did. She didn’t live for the mundane or the grey. She wanted their to be colour in all that she put her name to. Which was why, when the knock came at her door, it looked like a tornado had run through the room. It was fine though; Ettie was organising fifty copies of the same new agreement contract and it was over thirty pages long with all the fine print in tact. She had decided to use her floor for the arrangement and so there was paper everywhere, and she needed to reach her door with tip toe steps and fine balance; a particular skill in chunky shoes with a platform and wide heel. “Yo!” She greeted, swinging her head round the door first, since the rest of her body wouldn’t fit without stepping on important papers.

• • •

TAGGED! Carson Monroe Barrett
WORDS! 694!
LYRICS! The Silence - - - Halestorm
NOTES!