THE PARAGON

About this story

Aviwe Sokhulu moves fourteen hundred kilometres for this. Cape Town behind her, a Sandton flat she can barely justify, and an assistant's desk on the twentieth floor of a tower called The Paragon. She could have had a corner office instead; the money in her family would have bought one in an afternoon. She took the entry-level job on purpose, because a woman who is given things can be taken from. On the Monday before she starts, she walks the route to work to time it, stops in the lobby to help a stranger gather up her spilled change, and ends up flat on the marble at the feet of a man in a black three-piece suit. Menzi Shezi is twenty-eight, self-made, and owns the building she is sitting in. He also owns the client that is about to make her boss's career, the gym she trains at, and the block she sleeps in. By the end of that week he has told her exactly what he wants, and there is no romance in it at all. Aviwe has watched, up close, what being attached to a powerful man costs a woman. She will not be a transaction. So they negotiate instead. And what the two of them agree to is far more dangerous than what he asked for.