Just as I say it, Vance walks into the office wearing a white button-up similar to the one Nas wore last night, but Vance just isn’t capable of completing the look the way Nas did. Vance is so stiff while he walks and literally has his nose in the air as he saunters past the cubicles heading for his office. He cuts his eyes over to me as he passes us, but doesn’t linger. Everything about his posture tells me he thinks he really did something by breaking up with me. He thinks he won the imaginary game by being the one to end it, and he’s a prideful sonofabitch who can’t be gracious in his made-up victory. He’s all arrogance and smugness, while Nas is confidence and swagger without crossing the line into pompousness. The two men are completely opposite ends of the spectrum.

As Vance walks by, I think about the way Nas looked last night. When he left me standing in front of my apartment, my heart raced for thirty minutes after he was gone. He has a way with words that makes me feel like I’m standing on the edge of a tall cliff, but instead of being afraid, I actually want to fall, because his arms are waiting to catch me. He’s both intimidating and tantalizing at the same time, and I spent the entire night in bed thinking about the things he’d said to me. The man called himself a god in the bedroom. No, he said he is God in the bedroom. He’s either sexually delusional like a lot of men out there, or he knows he’s capable of something otherworldly, and he knew his magic with words would leave me starving to find out. He was right, because when I woke up this morning without a text or call from him, I was truly disappointed, and I drove to work with an attitude that wasn’t really caused by anything in particular.

Now that I’m at the office, I’m still annoyed. Is this what they call sexual frustration? The columnists and editors roaming the floor around me are like little bugs buzzing past my ears as I sit in my cubicle waiting for Vance to call me into his office so we can discuss his next column. I was hoping my friends wouldn’t even ask me about Nas, but I should’ve known better. Nas’s entrance into my life is the biggest thing to happen to our friend group in a long time, and even if it ends unceremoniously, we’ll be talking about this for years.

“Please tell me how you dated that man for seven months, Alina,” DeShaun whispers as Vance steps into his office and sits at his desk, somehow making the slightest movements seem pretentious.