Hot Driver - S01 E03

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Hot Driver - S01 E03

Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 3

And in the doorway — filling it, really — was Duane Brooke.

Twenty-six years old and built like a man who had never had the luxury of being idle. Tall — genuinely, considerably tall — with broad shoulders that his worn grey t-shirt couldn’t pretend to contain, and the kind of lean, defined frame that came not from a gym membership but from years of physical work. His face was — it was the kind of face that stopped things. Strong jaw.

Dark, steady eyes with the particular quality of someone who paid attention to the world around them and wasn’t easily rattled by what they found. A mouth that rested in something between calm and amusement, like he was perpetually a half-second away from finding something funny.

His hands were large and capable. He had an ease in his body, a comfort in his own physical space, that didn’t belong to a man who’d been told all his life that he didn’t matter.

Nobody had told Duane Brooke he didn’t matter. He had simply decided early on that other people’s opinions of him were not his business.

He was heading to work — the restaurant, Smiley’s, where he helped Mrs. Sloane serve lunch and dinner for wages that he supplemented mentally with the phrase it’s temporary repeated with enough conviction to function as fact.
He crossed to his mother first. Always first.

“Mama.” He wrapped both arms around her from behind, pressed a kiss to the top of her wrapped head. “You good?”
Celeste patted his arms. “I’m good, my son. Eat before you go.”
“I’ll eat at the restaurant.”
“That’s not eating, that’s charity.” She turned to look at him with the eyes that saw everything. “Sit and eat.”

He sat. He ate. He listened to Luis tell a rambling, increasingly incoherent story about something that had happened at school yesterday, and he asked the right questions in the right places, because Duane Brooke paid attention to the people he loved in the specific, unhurried way of someone who understood that attention was its own kind of wealth.

Twenty minutes later, he pulled on his jacket, hugged his mother once more — properly, the kind that lasted a second longer than strictly necessary — kissed her cheek, ruffled Luis’s hair over his protests, and walked out onto Albern Street.

At Smiley’s Restaurant — a cheerful, midrange lunch spot on Calder Avenue that smelled perpetually rice and grilled chicken — Duane moved between tables with the same unhurried ease he did everything, balancing plates on one arm, exchanging quick words with regulars, refilling glasses without being asked.

The lunchtime crowd was, as it reliably was when Duane was on shift, at least thirty percent women who had not originally planned to eat at Smiley’s today and had found themselves redirected by some instinct they couldn’t quite explain.
He set down a plate of grilled chicken and plantain in front of a table of three women who had been stealing looks at him since they walked in.
“Enjoy your meal,” he said, with the easy, automatic smile that Mrs. Sloane had once told him was “genuinely unfair to the customers.”
The woman nearest to him — bold, decided — leaned forward. “You have a very nice smile.”
“Thank you,” he said, already moving.

“Can I get your number?”
He paused. Glanced back. Gave her a look that was somehow simultaneously a no, an apology, and a wink, all in one expression, and moved to the next table.

The woman at the table beside her turned to her friend and said something that ended in “did you see that” and both of them dissolved

Duane was at the next table before the laughter reached him.

_

Back at the house, Celeste was locking the front door when her phone — a battered device with a cracked screen that she’d been nursing for two years — buzzed in her pocket.

She looked at the screen. A number she didn’t recognize, but a text from her friend Grace above it:

Celeste!! A driver position opened at the Bennett Mansion! The daughter drives like a mad woman apparently so they’re hiring someone for her. The pay — Celeste, are you sitting down? Call the number I’m sending right now. Immediately. RIGHT NOW.

Celeste read the message twice. Then she read the number Grace had sent. Then she called it.
It rang twice.

“Bennett residence,” said a smooth, measured female voice. “This is Diana Bennett.”

Celeste straightened instinctively. “Good morning, ma’am. My name is Celeste Brooke. I’m calling about the driving position for your daughter.”

Ivy Fashion Empire — Morning

If Bennett’s Mansion was where Ivory lived, Ivy Fashion Empire was where she existed.

The building occupied the most prestigious block on Creston City’s fashion district — a soaring fifteen-storey structure of glass and dark steel that caught the city skyline in its reflective surface and gave it back transformed.

The facade was etched with the company’s name in tall, clean gold letters — IVY FASHION EMPIRE — lit from beneath by concealed lighting that made them glow even in daylight.

The lobby was a fashion statement in itself — white marble floors, twenty-foot ceilings, a reception desk of white stone behind which two immaculately dressed receptionists sat in coordinated black and gold. Along the walls, lit display cases held iconic pieces from Ivy’s runway history — gowns and suits and statement pieces under glass like art in a gallery. A rotating digital installation on the far wall cycled through the company’s campaign imagery — beautiful, bold, commanding.

The employees moved through the lobby like a well-rehearsed ballet. Everyone was dressed. Everyone was polished. Everyone knew the standard.

When the glass doors opened and Ivory walked in, the lobby underwent a subtle but immediate shift — a collective straightening, a recalibration, the specific micro-adjustment of people in the presence of someone whose authority is not theoretical.

She crossed the lobby without slowing, her heels announcing each step on the marble, her dark eyes sweeping the space with the precise, absorbing attention of someone who noticed everything and filed it immediately.

She noticed the intern near the elevator first.

She stopped.

The intern — a girl of perhaps twenty-two.

Ivory looked at her outfit. Took four seconds. A polyester blouse. Shoes from a high street chain. Trousers that didn’t sit right at the waist.

“Did you dress yourself this morning?” Ivory asked, not unkindly. Just directly.

“I — yes, ma’am.”

“You work at Ivy Fashion Empire.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you wore that.” Not a question. An observation delivered with the gentle lethality of someone who didn’t need to raise their voice to make a point. “Clear your desk.” She looked at her PA, who had materialized at her elbow at some point. “Process her paperwork. Final day’s pay, full notice. Respectfully.”

The intern’s mouth opened.

“This is a fashion house,” Ivory said, and her voice was not cruel, only absolute. “What we wear is our argument. Our CV. Our handshake. You cannot represent excellence while wearing an apology.” She held the girl’s gaze for one more second. “I hope your next position is a better fit.”

She moved on.

Three seconds later, a senior stylist near the east corridor received a similar assessment — a coffee stain, small, on the left cuff of an otherwise acceptable white shirt. It was a very small stain. Ivory saw it from six feet away.

“You have ten minutes before your shift starts properly,” Ivory said. “Go home and change, or go to the garment room and find something. I won’t see that stain again. I hate dirtiness!”

The stylist went. Quickly.

Ivory stepped into the elevator.

The doors closed.

She exhaled once — short and controlled — rolled her shoulders, and became, by the time the elevator reached the fourteenth floor, entirely, completely CEO.

Her office was the fourteenth floor.

Floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides, giving her an unobstructed panoramic view of Creston City that made it clear, in a way that required no words, exactly who was running things from up here. The furniture was black and gold — a vast obsidian desk, a white leather executive chair, shelving that displayed awards and editions and framed covers in precise, deliberate arrangement. One wall was a mood board — fabric swatches, sketches, colour palettes, campaign references — alive and constantly evolving.

Her secretary, Miles, was already at the door with a tablet and a coffee and the brisk, prepared energy of a man who had worked for Ivory long enough to know that there was no such thing as easing into the morning.

“Schedule,” she said, dropping her bag on the desk and extending one hand without looking at him.

Miles handed her the tablet.
“Nine AM — design review with the autumn collection team. Ten-thirty — quarterly projections call with the finance board. Twelve — lunch with the PR director regarding the Vogue partnership—”
“Move lunch to twelve-thirty. I need thirty minutes between the finance call and public-facing anything.”

She was already scanning her desk.

“The Hendricks proposal?”

“On your desk. Top right.”

She sat. Reached for the coffee. Took one sip.

Stopped.

She set the cup down. Looked at Miles with the particular expression that he had privately catalogued as The Quiet Warning.

“Miles.”

“Ma’am?”

“This coffee.” A pause. “Is this sugar?”
“I — I used the usual—”

“The usual is one sugar.” She slid the cup across the desk toward him with one finger. “This is no sugar. Or something close to no sugar. This is an insult in liquid form.” She picked up the Hendricks proposal.

“Make it again. Properly. Two sugars, full milk, the Colombian blend, not the Ethiopian — the Ethiopian is for afternoons — and bring it back in four minutes because I need to have read six pages of this before my nine o’clock.”

Miles took the cup. “Right away, ma’am.”

“Miles.”

He paused at the door.

“I’m not trying to be difficult,” she said, not looking up from the proposal. “I simply have a very clear sense of how I like things. It saves time in the long run.”

“Of course, ma’am,” Miles said, and left.

Morales Beauty Store (MBS) — Same Morning

Three blocks from Ivy Fashion Empire — near enough to be an insult, far enough to pretend it wasn’t intentional — the Morales Beauty Store occupied a building that was, objectively, impressive. Glass frontage. Gold lettering. Rotating window displays. A lobby designed by the same architectural firm that had designed Ivy’s lobby the year before.

The campaign imagery on the walls featured the same high-contrast lighting style that Ivy had pioneered in her first brand overhaul.

The similarities were not coincidental.

The CEO offices were on the sixth floor, and inside the corner office — all glass and white marble and carefully curated luxury, a very familiar kind of carefully curated luxury —

Maeve Morales sat behind her desk.

She was beautiful. She had always been beautiful — that had never been the problem. Dark red hair, sharp eyes, the kind of elegant features that photographed well and read as powerful in a room. She dressed well. Spoke well. Presented an entirely convincing version of a woman who had built something.

Ron Morales, beside her, was exactly as he had always been — easy smile, hollow eyes, a charm that worked on everyone who didn’t already know what was underneath it.

The junior executive who entered was nervous before she opened her mouth. She had learned — all of them had learned — that delivering bad news in this office was an exercise in self-preservation.

“The Ivy Fashion Empire’s new capsule collection launched this morning,” she said, keeping her voice even. “Pre-orders have exceeded their quarterly target in—” she checked her tablet — “four hours.”

Silence.

“Our comparable line,” she continued, “is currently—”

Maeve’s hand moved.

The slap cracked across the room like a gunshot.

The junior executive’s head turned with the force of it.

“Get out,” Maeve said quietly.

The woman left. Quickly. Without looking back.

Maeve stood. Crossed to the window. Looked out at the city — at the IVY FASHION EMPIRE sign visible in the distance, gold letters glowing, insufferably present.

Ron appeared behind her. Slid a hand onto her shoulder. “It’s one collection—”

“She always wins,” Maeve said, and in her voice, beneath the fury, was something that sounded almost like what it actually was.

Fear.

_