Unprofessional Conduct

Greyson adjusted his tie, the silk knot a small, perfect anchor of control in the chaos of a Monday morning pitch. On the polished surface of the boardroom table, his presentation was laid out with surgical precision: a single, sleek tablet displaying the title slide, flanked by bound copies of the full data analysis for each executive. Every chart was triple-checked, every projection conservative yet compelling. It was a fortress of logic, impenetrable and irrefutable. It had to be, because on the other side of the table, his personal and professional nemesis was getting ready to unleash a hurricane of bullshit.

Ignacio Reyes. Even his name sounded like it should be announced by a flamenco guitarist. He was leaning back in his chair, not reviewing notes, but laughing with one of the junior account managers, his teeth a flash of brilliant white against his olive skin. He wore a suit that was just a little too fashion-forward for their corporate environment, tailored to perfection over a frame that was lean and deceptively strong. He hadn't brought a single piece of paper with him. He never did.

Greyson despised him. He despised the effortless charm that seemed to ooze from Ignacio’s pores, the way he could sell a half-baked concept with a winning smile and a story about his grandmother. It was performance art, not marketing, and it infuriated Greyson that so many people fell for it.

"Alright, people, let's get started," Eleanor Vance, their boss, said, her sharp voice cutting through the chatter. "New client pitch for Aura Skincare. Greyson, you're up."

Greyson stood, the familiar calm of being prepared settling over him. He walked the room through his strategy, his voice even and confident. "As you can see from the Q3 analytics, Aura's target demographic isn't responding to aspirational messaging. We're seeing a 22% drop in engagement on all social platforms when the copy deviates from product efficacy. My proposal is a data-driven, multi-platform campaign focusing on transparent ingredient sourcing and verified user testimonials. We will leverage micro-influencers in the dermatology and chemistry spaces to build trust, aiming for a 15% increase in conversion rates within the first six months."

He laid out the numbers, the phased rollout, the budget allocation. It was clean, efficient, and guaranteed to work. He sat down to a series of appreciative nods from the senior partners.

Then, it was Ignacio's turn.

He didn't stand so much as uncoil from his chair, moving to the front of the room with a languid grace that made Greyson’s teeth ache. He smiled, a slow, magnetic thing that seemed to warm the sterile conference room by several degrees.

"Data is a story the past tells us," Ignacio began, his voice a low, resonant hum. "But we're not selling the past. We're selling a feeling. We're selling the future." He didn't use the projector. He used his hands, painting a picture in the air. "Imagine this: a woman, she's not a model, she's a ceramicist. Her hands are covered in clay. The sun is setting through her studio window. The tagline isn't about hyaluronic acid. It's 'Find your light.' Aura isn't about covering things up. It's about revealing what's already there."

Greyson felt a hot spike of irritation. It was meaningless. Vague, emotionally manipulative nonsense with no measurable KPIs. But as he scanned the room, he saw he was alone in his assessment. The others were captivated, leaning forward, caught in the spell of Ignacio's narrative. They weren't seeing the lack of substance; they were seeing the beautiful ceramicist and the sunset. They were buying the feeling, hook, line, and sinker.

When Ignacio finished, the room was quiet for a moment before a junior executive sighed, "Wow."

Greyson gripped the edge of the table, his knuckles white. Across the room, Ignacio’s dark eyes met his, a flicker of smug triumph in their depths. The battle lines were drawn, as they always were. Logic versus charisma. Substance versus style. And Greyson was losing.

"A feeling isn't a strategy, Ignacio," Greyson said, his voice low and sharp, cutting through the lingering awe in the room. "It's a liability. What's the ROI on a sunset? How do you quantify a ceramicist's dirty hands?"

Ignacio turned his full attention to Greyson, the easy smile tightening almost imperceptibly at the corners. "You don't quantify it, Greyson. You evoke it. Something you wouldn't understand, since your idea of creativity is a well-formatted spreadsheet."

"My spreadsheets deliver results," Greyson shot back, leaning forward. "They don't just 'evoke' a budget deficit. Your concept is a beautiful, empty box. The client opens it and finds nothing inside but a bill for your services."

"And your concept is a user manual," Ignacio retorted, taking a step closer to the table, his posture shifting from relaxed to predatory. "It's functional, it's boring, and no one will ever read it twice. People don't fall in love with user manuals."

"We aren't selling love! We are selling a niacinamide serum to women over forty!"

"Enough."

Eleanor's voice was not loud, but it sliced through their argument with the finality of a guillotine. The room fell silent. She looked from Greyson to Ignacio, her expression one of profound disappointment, as if she were scolding two bickering children.

"Neither of you won the Aura account," she said flatly. "I'm giving it to Sarah's team. Your pitches were perfect demonstrations of your individual weaknesses. Greyson, you have the strategic mind of a general but the soul of an accountant. Ignacio, you could sell water to a drowning man, but you'd forget to build the boat first."

The rebuke stung, and Greyson felt a flush of heat crawl up his neck. He saw Ignacio clench his jaw.

Eleanor let the humiliation hang in the air for a moment before she continued, her tone shifting to one of pure business. "Which brings me to my next point. As of this morning, we have officially landed the Aethelgard account."

A collective intake of breath went through the room. Aethelgard. The struggling luxury eco-resort chain was the white whale of the industry. A massive, international brand with a tarnished reputation and a budget that could float the entire agency for a year. Landing it was a coup of epic proportions.

Greyson's mind immediately started racing. The data dive alone would be monumental. Market segmentation, brand perception analysis, a complete digital overhaul… It was the kind of complex, high-stakes problem he was built to solve. This was his chance to prove, once and for all, that his method was superior.

Eleanor scanned the faces of her senior staff, her gaze finally settling on Greyson, then flicking to Ignacio. "This is the most important project this agency has handled in a decade. It requires a complete rebrand, from the ground up. It needs structure and it needs soul. It needs logic and it needs magic."

She paused, letting the weight of her words settle. Greyson held his breath, waiting for the assignment.

"For that reason," Eleanor announced, her voice leaving no room for argument, "Greyson and Ignacio, you will be co-leads on the project."

The words hit Greyson like a physical blow. A cold, sick feeling washed through him, followed by a surge of white-hot fury. It was a joke. A punishment. A death sentence. He stared at Eleanor, certain he had misheard, but her expression was hard as granite. The entire room was silent, paralyzed with shock.

His gaze snapped across the table to Ignacio. The smugness was gone, replaced by an expression of guarded disbelief that mirrored his own. For a single, horrifying second, they were united in their shared shock.

"Your constant fighting is exhausting," Eleanor said, her eyes pinning them both in place. "But your creative friction, that relentless push and pull between your two opposing approaches… that is exactly what Aethelgard needs to be saved from itself. Don't prove me wrong."

The moment the door clicked shut behind the last departing executive, the silence in the room became a weapon. Greyson didn't move. He could feel Ignacio’s presence on the other side of the table like a low-grade electrical current, humming with an energy that was equal parts arrogance and defiance. The air was thick with their shared humiliation and the crushing weight of Eleanor’s mandate.

Greyson was the first to break. He stood, methodically gathering his tablet and the bound copies of his rejected pitch. Control. He needed to establish control. "My office. Ten minutes. We need to set the parameters for this project."

A low chuckle came from across the table. Greyson looked up to see Ignacio pushing a hand through his dark hair, a gesture of feigned casualness that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Parameters," Ignacio repeated, tasting the word as if it were something foul. "You want to put the creative process in a cage before we even know what animal we're dealing with."

"I want to build a foundation before the house collapses," Greyson said, his voice clipped. "Something you seem to have a problem with. My office. Be there."

He didn't wait for a reply, turning and walking out of the boardroom with stiff, measured steps.

Nine minutes later, Ignacio sauntered into Greyson's meticulously organized office, closing the door behind him without being asked. He didn't sit in the chair Greyson indicated but leaned against the floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the city, crossing his arms. He was claiming the space, turning Greyson’s own territory into a neutral ground. The power play was so obvious it was insulting.

Greyson ignored it, turning to the large whiteboard that dominated one wall. He uncapped a black marker. "Phase one," he began, writing in clean, block letters. "Full immersion data analysis. We'll need two weeks to collate global tourism trends, Aethelgard's internal booking data from the last five years, brand sentiment reports, and a full competitive analysis. From there, we can build our core demographic profiles and—"

"No."

The word was quiet, but it stopped Greyson cold. He turned from the board. Ignacio hadn't moved, but his posture was no longer relaxed. "No?"

"No," Ignacio repeated, pushing off the window and taking a step forward. "We are not starting this project by burying ourselves in the past. The data tells us why they're failing. We already know they're failing. We need to find out how they can succeed."

"And that discovery process is based on what, exactly? Your gut feeling? A particularly inspiring dream you had?"

"It's based on experience," Ignacio said, his voice dropping, becoming serious. "Not the kind you find in a report, Greyson. We need to go there. To one of the resorts. Costa Rica, maybe. We need to walk the grounds, talk to the staff, eat the food. We need to find the story that's been buried under years of bad management and corporate neglect. The brand's soul isn't in a pie chart."

Greyson let out a short, sharp laugh devoid of any humor. "The brand's soul. You can't be serious. We have a deadline and a nine-figure budget to account for, and your brilliant opening strategy is a taxpayer-funded vacation?"

"My strategy is to understand the product before we try to sell it," Ignacio shot back, his easy charm completely gone, replaced by a raw intensity. "A concept that seems utterly foreign to you. You'd rather sell a schematic of a car than let anyone test drive it. You're so terrified of the abstract, of anything that can't be neatly confined to a cell in a spreadsheet, that you'd rather produce something sterile and foolproof than something brilliant and alive."

"And you," Greyson countered, taking a step toward him, the marker a weapon in his hand, "are a professional charlatan. You sell 'feelings' and 'soul' because you lack the discipline and the intellect to build a strategy with a tangible backbone. You talk about stories because you can't be bothered to learn the language of results. Your process is a reckless gamble, and you're planning to take this agency's biggest-ever account to the casino with you."

They were close now, standing in the middle of the room, the whiteboard with Greyson's single, abandoned heading forgotten behind them. The air was electric, charged with years of professional animosity and a new, unsettling proximity. Greyson could smell the faint, spicy scent of Ignacio's cologne over the sterile scent of his own office, and it was infuriating.

"You're just scared, Greyson," Ignacio said, his voice a low murmur. "Because for this project, your numbers aren't enough. And that means you're not enough."

He held Greyson's gaze for a second longer, a silent challenge, before he turned and walked out, leaving the door open behind him. Greyson stood frozen, his hand clenched so tightly around the marker that he could feel the plastic creak. The silence that rushed back in was heavier than before, filled with the echo of Ignacio’s insult and the terrifying possibility that he might be right.

He spent the next several hours in a state of controlled fury. Back in the sterile silence of his apartment, a space designed for order and calm, Greyson found himself restless, prowling from room to room. He poured a glass of whiskey, the sharp burn a familiar comfort, but it did nothing to quiet the echo of Ignacio's voice in his head.

You're just scared.

The accusation was ludicrous. Greyson wasn’t scared; he was strategic. Fear was an inefficient emotion, a messy variable he had meticulously engineered out of his life and his work. He dealt in certainties, in projections based on verifiable facts. And yet, the insult had landed with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, cutting straight to a place he refused to acknowledge.

He opened his laptop, determined to get a head start, to build a fortress of data so impenetrable that Ignacio’s vague notions of 'soul' would be rendered irrelevant. He pulled up the initial Aethelgard prospectus, the market analysis reports, the quarterly loss statements. But the columns of numbers and blocks of text swam before his eyes. All he could see was Ignacio leaning against the window in his office, claiming the space, claiming the very air with his infuriating, unshakeable confidence.

Your numbers aren't enough. And that means you're not enough.

Greyson slammed the laptop shut. The anger was a clean, hot thing, but underneath it, something colder and more complex was beginning to curdle. He hated Ignacio. He hated his perfectly tailored suits that always looked effortless, his easy charm that Greyson knew was a calculated performance, and most of all, he hated that the man was not an idiot.

That was the most frustrating part. He could dismiss a fool. But Ignacio wasn't a fool. His arguments were maddening because they weren't entirely baseless.

We need to go there… We need to find the story.

It was a theatrical, impractical suggestion. A waste of time and money when the core problems were clearly visible in the booking data and negative sentiment tracking. It was a plan born of impulse, not intellect. But as Greyson stood staring at the rigid, geometric lines of the city skyline from his window, he couldn't entirely shake the idea.

A brand wasn't just its stock price and public perception. Aethelgard was a collection of physical places. It was the scent of rain in a Costa Rican jungle, the feel of sand on a private beach, the taste of food prepared by local chefs. Those were sensory data points his spreadsheets could never capture. His methodology could diagnose the sickness, but could it prescribe the cure without understanding the patient's heart?

The thought was a betrayal. It felt like conceding a point in an argument he was still having in his own head. He despised Ignacio’s reliance on the intangible, but he couldn’t deny the results it sometimes produced. He’d seen Ignacio rescue failing pitches with a single, perfectly crafted narrative. He'd watched him connect with clients on a level that Greyson, with all his charts and figures, could never reach. He'd always written it off as slick salesmanship. Now, for the first time, he was forced to consider that it might be a different kind of genius—one that was intuitive, chaotic, and completely alien to him.

He finished his whiskey, the empty glass feeling heavy in his hand. The animosity was still there, a solid, reliable core of his being. But it was no longer simple. It was now tangled with a grudging, venomous thread of respect for his rival’s conviction. He was furious at Eleanor for forcing this partnership, but a deeper, more unsettling part of him was buzzing with a flicker of professional intrigue. Ignacio had challenged his entire worldview, and Greyson, a man who loathed unpredictability, had no idea what to do next.