Power in Rooms That Don't Pay

In spaces where there is no financial compensation, hierarchy is a delicate illusion. No one is here for the money. That's the first lie everyone politely agrees on. They are here for meaning, recognition, influence, proximity to purpose. The currency changes, but the hunger doesn't.

Kink taught Me this long before boardrooms did.

It's been a year since I've been around Pavilion. The amount of wealth and luxury displayed, yet the traffic on that road is a nightmare. Opulence stacked on impatience.

Will the universe let us cross paths in the hotel lobby?

Our mutual friends crave dinner and durian while we wait for the last person. Overseas delegates begin arriving, and I watch people cling to titles like name badges welded into their skin. Here I am. I don't need a position to understand where I stand in the room. People assume I'm part of higher management. They pull Me into photos, shoulder to shoulder, and when those images travel back to eyes that know I hold no title, confusion follows. Why is she in Kuala Lumpur?

Don't you feel your aura speaks?

You stand out without trying too hard. Minimal makeup. Glasses to sharpen your silhouette. Red lipstick, deliberate. A dress that traces My curves while everyone else hides inside Friday casual in the humid KLCC air. A gentleman in your equivalent role, another region, another ego, texted Me the next day: "I'm scared your partner comes after me. You look pretty." The irony is exquisite. We were never romantically together.

Power is never what sits on paper. It lives in who reads the emotional temperature before anyone else notices the air shifting. Your direct head clings to perfectionism, hesitation wrapped in ego, insecurity disguised as control. While you were still somewhere between airports and train, she was losing her grip on Me again. Some hierarchies collapse quietly.

Despite no longer being in the boardroom's line of sight back home, she realises I have presence elsewhere. Threading into conversations with overseas directors I was never meant to orbit. The dinner table fills with discussions I technically shouldn't belong to. In the washroom she asks, gently suspicious, whether I took leave from an office job to be here. She doesn't understand sovereignty.

She doesn't understand a life where time isn't owned by corporation. Where I can step into rooms at hours when most people are still chained to their desks instead of freedom. I look at the Tiffany heart tag necklace resting on her collarbone and think again and how much it resembles a day-collar. I've watched her rearrange herself around her husband, subconsciously meek, over the years. Hierarchy always leaks through posture eventually.

Bukit Bintang glows. I was strolling with the delegates and laughter, and there you were at the train station exit where they coincidentally found you. Remember earlier when I wish to catch a glimpse of you at the hotel lobby but I didn't expect the universe to throw a plot twist at us. The last person you expected to see is Me.

Months of silence stretch between us, yet recognition is immediate. You pretend distance, I recognise gravity. You can't help tracking My presence, noting which higher management I laugh with in the boardroom on the final night. We both know forgetting was never the point, our late-night voice calls where you listened as I rambled about My past Kink parties between spreadsheets and campaigns. What you never realised is that My life was already built on this architecture long before our lives got entangled. Escaping into cities like a global citizen. Private hotel rooms where devotion is currency and presence is law. Workshop and parties indulging in hedonistic pleasure.

And Kuala Lumpur, for one weekend, simply reminded Me that hierarchy is portable. It travels with the person who is power literate. The night ended with our mutual friend confessing at the bar, after you slipped away from My presence at the food street. She had a gut feeling I lived this life long before, back when she first saw Me years ago at a conference. We barely spoke then.

Was it aura? Or something darker, untold. The kind of presence that hints at secrets no one dares to name, a life hidden in plain sight. They see confidence, control, allure... but they don't know the architect behind it. The discipline, the strategy, the understanding of power that comes from a world they might not delve into because of taboos. These rooms pay nothing in salary, yet they are rich with unspoken rules, subtle rivalries, and the quiet test of influence. Every glance, every world, every smile carries weight, and I move through it the same precision as I would in any play scenes I curate.