Chapter 3

Shane followed Carmen Morales into a small office. In the room, every piece of furniture was luminous and there were bright colors everywhere. A happy-looking rubber plant stood in a corner with its stretched out branches and smooth, glossy green leafs. It seemed to scream ‘hello’ every time Shane looked at it and she found herself smiling – again.

Carmen sat on a white leather armchair and took a pad from her desk. Then she rapidly pushed some buttons on the keyboard of her 17-inch MacBook Pro notebook. Finally, she threw a curious glance at Shane, who was still standing before the desk.

“Please, take a seat”, she said politely, and Shane sat down thinking that it was funny how things could reverse so quickly. Just a couple of days earlier, she had said those same words to Melissa Coles Smith. Please, Miss Coles Smith, take a seat and be kind, tell me why in the world I should try and fuck your smoking hot girlfriend’s brains out.

Shane took a look around and the whiteness of the whole ambient struck her strongly. Carmen had chosen to surround herself with an atmosphere that was very different from Shane’s regular environment. That itself seemed to be the first big difference between the two of them. They definitely came from two unlike universes.

Shane’s office was a mixture of black leather and reddish mahogany, of dim lights and dark carpets. Everything was very luxurious, every single detail around her seemed to exude sex and lust and mystery.

Carmen’s office was prevalently white. The warm rays of sunshine caressed her, played with her tanned complexion and her smooth hair, they peeped in like soft fingers touching everything. No carpets, just a polished marble floor of a suave tonality of light blue. The whole place looked like a fragment of Heaven.

Carmen was white, Shane was black.

Shane was darkness, Carmen was light.

Just like Yin and Yang, there was a negative, dark, passive, cold and wet side and a positive, bright, active, dry, hot side. Shane thought to herself that she was about to find out if Chinese philosophy made sense. She was trying to create interactions and balance of two opposite forces. She wondered if someone like Carmen, someone so far away from who she was, would be able to influence her behavior and fate.