by Hazel Parker
But the day had taken something of a toll on me. I knew the direction I needed to go with my life, but every time fate tried to push me forward, I was left with a bit of an aftertaste that made me wonder if it was such a good idea. Even though I’d wanted Gerald to fire me, I couldn’t help but feel a little concern when it all went down.
Instead of sticking around and having some drinks, I went to the rear of the building and grabbed my motorcycle. I wheeled it out to the front of the building and paused. Finally, I could be free.
I put my helmet on, swung my leg over, and revved the engine.
I may have had golden handcuffs at work and the lowest step on the ladder at the club, but when I was on the bike, I could practically fly to the top of the world. Finance, politicking, money...none of it mattered.
I guess you could say that’s why I joined the Savage Saints.
To be free.
Chapter 2: Amelia
He’s pretty cute.
It’s too bad that I’m too dedicated to this job, and it’s someone whom I will probably work with for the next decade and a half or so. Otherwise, I might just have a drink or two with him.
Assuming that I could ever find the time to break away for a drink or two, that is.
As I walked away from Thomas, I had to fight not to turn and look at him. Guys like him at a place like Rothenberg Banking were few and far between—actually, scratch that, guys like him in the world were few and far between. He was someone who seemed to have his shit together in all areas of life—his career, his fitness, his personality...and to boot, I was sure that he was single.
Meanwhile, here I was, a hot mess whenever I wasn’t running numbers or creating reports. Of course, no one knew it. I had so perfectly crafted an image at work of a hard-nosed, grinding professional that no one ever bothered to question if I was burning myself out. Ben was literally the first person to have ever told me to slow down.
Sometimes, when I got home, I would have a quasi-nervous breakdown. I would start to cry. I would start to laugh. I would start to drink. I’d do all the things that normal people evenly spaced out. Crying was normal when you did it at sad moments. Laughing was normal when you saw something humorous. When you did both in the span of ten minutes over nothing more than the thoughts in your head, you were a hot mess.
But hey, I was making over five hundred grand a year, not including bonuses and such, and I was well-liked at the bank. So clearly, that more than made up for the fact that I was fucking crazy, right?
Secretly—I barely admitted this to myself, but in those moments of nervous breakdown, it was laid out fully in my mind—I would have loved to have had a day where I just walked into the bank, gave everyone the middle finger, and walked out, never to return. I’d take all the money I had saved, retired to Maine or some remote state out west, and never see any of them again. I would unwind, find the meaning of life, and write the next great American novel.
There was just one problem with that. It assumed that I had the ability to unwind and find meaning in life. My job was everything to me. It had been instilled in me by my father that my work was my worth, and the more work I could do on my own, the better. If I were to suddenly quit, I wouldn’t just be letting down my bank account. I’d be letting down my very self-esteem and self-worth.
So, yeah, no fucking wonder I was so tightly wound and just bursting at the seams with blunt truths every opportunity I got.
I got myself two cups of coffee while considering finding a pill at a nearby pharmacy to calm my anxiety. That seemed like a terrible idea to suddenly kick myself into gear with one substance while simultaneously calming myself with something else, but there just had to fucking be something in the world that could do both at once. Make me productive at work and calm in the head. Why the fuck didn’t anything exist? Why the fuck weren’t we investing in companies that could do that?
Ignoring the insane thoughts that danced in my head—the white noise equivalent of my mind—I went back upstairs and started fretting over what I always did. Numbers. Reports. PowerPoints. Excel sheets.
I swore, I used Microsoft Office products more than anyone else in the entire world. I could have given a better presentation on how to use those programs than the fucking engineers in Seattle. I’d probably get paid a tenth of what I was doing now, but at least I’d have a twentieth of the stress.
I was up in my office until eleven, and the only reason that I left then was because I had to be back in at seven for a conference call with our office in the UK. While that might have suggested I was going to get seven hours of sleep, in reality, I had to wake up at five-thirty to get dressed, and it would take me a good hour to unwind just enough to get sleep. So five hours was the ideal that I was aiming for, but in reality, I was probably going to get three or four.
I got home about half an hour later, and as soon as the door closed to my apartment, I kicked my heels off, rubbed my toes on the carpet beneath me, and slumped against the wall. Exhaustion was an understatement.
So was the fact that I needed a drink.
Once I gathered enough strength to move to the kitchen—a much harder task than it sounded, given how all of my fatigue seemed to catch up at once—I poured myself a vodka tonic. My hands shook as I stirred, a surefire sign that my nerves were at the end, and I was running on fumes. Still, I took a sip of the drink.
It was much too strong. Somehow, I had gotten the volume of the tonic mixed up with the volume of the alcohol. It was exactly what I didn’t need to do, and yet I had gone ahead and done it like an idiot.
Fuck, I needed a vacation.
But double fuck, I couldn’t take one.
I went to the window of my apartment, some thirty-eight floors above the streets of Manhattan. Even from this high up, I could hear taxis honking. But on this night, I was more taken in by the view. The Empire State Building’s majestic lighting was easily visible, as was almost all of downtown Manhattan. I could see Brooklyn in the far distance, a borough that seemed like suburbia to Manhattanites but was as much a city as anything else with a population of over two million people.
It felt like I had fallen into a soap bubble and I was surrounded by fireflies that never stopped being lit up. It was gorgeous.
And I couldn’t unravel in the fucking slightest to enjoy it.
Maybe you do need someone to share it with. Someone to enjoy it with.
The thought made me laugh out loud. I hadn’t been on a date in ages. I was pretty sure it had been almost five years since I’d had sex, despite multiple fat cats at Rothenberg egging me on to sleep with them in return for a promotion. If they thought I was going to sleep with them, then they were dumber than I was for thinking I could relax after work.
I had always told myself that I didn’t need love, and while I still believed that was true, I was finding it hard to argue with the possible truth that I wanted love. Some people could certainly live happily single for their entire lives. I was, I feared, not such a person.
Whenever I went out to dinners and saw couples happily chatting, blissfully unaware of how much stress all of us were under at the business dinner, I was extraordinarily envious. I made investments in companies looking to go public; they made investments that would return the favor ten times over, from now until death. Their investments ensured loyalty to each other; my investments ensured nothing more than a bigger number in my bank account and absolutely no job security. The moment my performance slipped, my ass was on the chopping block.
But how I was going to turn that around, I had no idea.
So I did the one thing that I couldn’t believe I would do, but I did it anyway. I Googled “investment banking dating tips.”
I scoffed at most of the initial results, which dealt with significant others asking how to handle the stress of an investment banker. While those might have been fine for the artists and fashionistas working in the city, they did not tell me how I, as an investment banker, could date effectively. What the fuck, Google?<
br />
I gave up after two pages of search results and changed my search to “getting dates as an investment banker.” That just produced even more of the same, but it got even worse when I saw the number of results that were from bro bankers bragging about the number of women that they had banged. Frustrating was an understatement, and I swore that if I ever met the author of such a blog post, I’d sock him right in the fucking nuts.
These results weren’t getting me anything. But I did have two options in the back of my mind.
The first one was someone whose name brought a smile to my face, but then a laugh at the ridiculousness of it. Thomas Fitzgerald. But without even trying, I could think of three strikes. He was a coworker, he was stable, and he had free time—which meant he’d want me to have free time. I canceled out that thought faster than I typed, which was a real shame considering he seemed like a nice guy.
But the second option...well, it either would hold the potential for something much worse than what I was discovering online, or it would work as it had for some of my friends from Princeton.
I could do online dating.
I shuddered at the thought while still staring out at the window. I would have to deal with so many bad dates, so many terrible dudes, so many awkward encounters...but if it worked out…
It was a game of asymmetric payoff. If I went on a hundred dates, all but one would suck. But the one that didn’t suck might wind up being a guy I could take to weddings, have genuine, real laughs with, and enjoy slow dinners with. Instead of investing even more time into my career, I could invest into a loving relationship.
OK, Amelia, stop being so fucking sappy. Get on with it and download the apps.
I looked at my first couple of options: Tinder and Bumble. Bumble seemed to offer better dates, but it also put the onus on the woman to talk first. That was laughable—there were periods in my life where I went over seventy-two hours without having a spare moment. Maybe if the app gave me five days to start communication, I would have been interested, but a mere twenty-four hours was like telling me I had to respond instantly to the guys. Sure, some of them could boost me, but then I’d judge them as desperate.
I knew I was acting like a terrible bitch, but the stress of work was beating me down so severely I couldn’t look at it any other way.
Tinder was going to give me a lot of dick pics, assholes, and ghosted dates. But it also was the app I didn’t need to invest any time with. I could check for thirty seconds, decide who I wanted to respond to, and run with it. And so Tinder it was.
Immediately, I became impatient with the app. I uploaded my most recent photos, which included a professional photo, a photo of me at a wedding, and one with me and a close friend—which was actually from three years ago, but she had just recently resent it to me by text, making it look like it was recent. Which reminded me, I needed to respond to her about the photo…
As soon as I had my profile up, I had the option to swipe.
But first, I sat down on the couch for a quick nap.
* * *
My alarm went off at five-thirty.
I was still in my work clothes from the night before. And I wasn’t concerned in the slightest. The life of a workaholic meant that when I decided to fall asleep, when my body finally allowed me to pass out, it was practically instant. There was no closing the eyes and counting sheep. It was like an on-off switch, and only my body could decide when that switch got thrown.
I muddled my way through my morning routine, somewhat curious to check Tinder. As I placed an order to go on my phone to the local bagel shop and walked over, I started swiping.
The dudes that I saw were, well, not impressive. And I didn’t even think that was because I was being mean!
Most of the dudes, for starters, weren’t smiling. They were trying to look cool, either with selfies or with their overpriced suits, but all they wound up doing was looking smug and arrogant.
Of the ones who smiled, a decent portion of them weren’t healthy. I was really trying to be nice, but seeing everyone look like this was not doing me any favors in thinking that I would find love.
I would guess that of the first fifty profiles I saw, I probably swiped right on about four of them. I wasn’t sure if it was reassuring or troubling that all four of them had already liked me, enabling chat to take place. At least, though, they would have to initiate conversation if they wanted to see me. I didn’t have to do that.
There has to be a better way than this. I can’t just spend the next three years of my life going on a bunch of app dates and expect to find love, right? If I want to have sex, sure, but I mean...this isn’t going to work out, right?
I grabbed my bagel sandwich, making a point to thank the restaurant staff in the hopes that it would make me be a slightly better person today. Maybe being nice would also appeal to Ben in some fashion, though I had my doubts about that. He tended to like aggressive people who got theirs, not people who had manners and who said please and thank you.
I walked to the lobby of Rothenberg Banking, swiping my work tag and taking the stairs for the second floor. I had arrived early, about twenty minutes before my long-distance conference. I took the rare opportunity to eat my breakfast somewhat slowly.
It was also perhaps the first morning I’d had where I even had what felt like five minutes of free time, let alone twenty.
I looked at Tinder and started swiping some more—though most of my swipes were left, not right. This is so inefficient. This is just not effective. You need something better. Not…
Not this.
And I was afraid, as I put my phone down and mindlessly munched on my bagel, that I wasn’t just talking about Tinder.
I was talking about much, much more.
Chapter 3: Fitz
The ride the night before had gone a long way toward clearing my head.
It didn’t solve all my problems, of course, but it did mean that when I showed up to the office shortly after seven, I was feeling pretty good. I slept nearly eight hours, and they were a restful eight hours. In the world of Rothenberg Banking, I might as well have slept like a teenager on a Saturday.
That wasn’t too far from the truth, given it was now Friday. I nodded to my colleagues, who were trying to awaken their minds with coffee, with multiple shots of espresso in my own hand and sat at my desk. I took one last glance at my phone before putting it away from the evening. Uncle, as someone who also worked in the industry, had texted me in the morning.
“Don’t forget club party tonight,” he had written. “Make sure you come. Chance to unwind from our bullshit lives.”
I chuckled at that, taking care not to laugh too loudly lest someone hear me and try to ask questions. But there was something that Uncle hadn’t mentioned that I needed to learn more about. I sent him a text, requesting a private meeting. I had little doubt as I put my phone away that he would grant me that audience.
The only question that remained, then, was if he would provide me the information I needed.
The morning came and went without much trouble. Fridays tended to be the slowest day at the bank, as many of my colleagues struggled with hangovers from a variety of substances—including some of my bosses. Gerald, for his part, did not show up until eight, practically a mortal sin for someone of his position, and he quickly shut the door to prevent anyone from bothering him. It would not have surprised me in the slightest if I had walked in and discovered him sleeping.
When lunch came, I headed down to the cafeteria to grab a quick bite. I usually ate alone, but on this day, when I saw Amelia sitting by herself, moving her thumb across her phone screen multiple times, I remembered how we had interacted the day before. I remembered how I was seemingly the only person who could get away with pushing my words with her.
Wonder how much further I can go. Who knows? Maybe it’ll get me fired, and I’ll have to live a life of being a Savage Saint. There are worse things in the world than that.
“Mind if I sit here?” I aske
d.
Amelia’s face immediately lit up, and she put her phone away.
“As long as you won’t bore me with whatever bar you went to and whatever bimbo you slept with, then sure.”
“Oh, I don’t think that will be the case. I just went to Brooklyn and caught up with some friends.”
“Wait, you had a Thursday night like every other person outside of this office did?” Amelia said, leaning forward as if I had just dropped a bombshell of a conspiracy. “Tell me more. What’s your secret? How did you do it?”
I murmured a quick laugh as I grabbed my fork to dive into the pasta served for the day.
“I left right after we chatted, kept my phone with me, and headed east. Once I got to Brooklyn, I cracked open a beer, chatted, and left it at that.”
“Wow. Friends in banking?”
“Eh, one of them. But the rest, nah.”
“Holy shit. A normal person works here. What the fuck are you still doing here?”
I laughed to deflect the fact that I asked myself that question with far more frequency than I wanted to admit.
“I don’t know that I’d call myself normal per se. I mean, I am in investment banking. I like motorcycles. I—”
“You like motorcycles?” Amelia said.
Shit. I shouldn’t have said that. She’s just going to ask more questions now.
“Do you ever get to ride one? Do you feel like they’re as unsafe as people say they are? Are you out of your fucking mind?”
I laughed again. God bless Amelia Hughes for never being afraid to ask the tough questions.
“I ride from time to time. It’s like anything else. If you do it right, you’ll probably be fine. If you try to flaunt fate and push boundaries, sooner or later, fate fights back. Fate has a way of winning in the end.”
“Interesting.”
She took a few more bites of her lunch. She reached for her phone and paused, almost as if she had done it by instinct. She chuckled and then leaned forward, resting on her elbows.
