Howard Sterling walked the corridor with the measured, deliberate stride of a man who refused to look like he was retreating.
But the taste in his mouth was bitter. The specific flavour of a rejection he hadn't seen coming.
Tisha's voice echoed in his skull, polite, dismissive, and each replay made the humiliation sharper.
She hadn't even been rude. She'd treated his advance like a scheduling conflict... noted, declined and forgotten before he'd even left the room.
That alone would have been manageable.
He'd been rejected before. Rejection was just the opening act—the part of the performance where the woman convinced herself she wasn't interested before he began the real work.
He thrived on the slow, methodical dismantling of a woman's defenses, peeling away her resolve layer by layer until the no became a maybe, and the maybe became a desperate, broken yes.
He didn't just want them; he wanted to prove them wrong about themselves.
