by Jason Letts
“I get that the challenges are real. No one is disputing that,” he went on. “And there are crazy people who do criminal things and can’t be put away fast enough, but it’s not like generally good people are trying to hold you back.”
“Really? How come you haven’t given me a promotion or a raise?” I said before I could consider whether it was a good idea. Keenan’s eyes flashed wide for a moment, and I rushed to quell the shock.
“Let me try to talk through what seems to be happening right now. You seem a little stunned, and part of that might be because you’re not used to women advocating for themselves when it comes to positions and pay. It might seem threatening or unattractive for me to do that. In your head you’re doing all sorts of calculations about what the business makes and what it might make if things keep going the way they’re going and probably concluding that this is a horrible time for anyone to get a raise on top of all the hiring. But you just said yourself that I’m doing a much different job than what I was hired for, and I think you or any man in my position would thumb his nose at considerations about what the company makes and demand to get paid something reasonable for the job now being done.”
Keenan watched me for a few moments while I waited nervously for any kind of a response. As far as I knew he’d tell me I was right that it wasn’t a good time and I could keep getting what I’ve gotten or leave. But a smirk spread across his face that broke into a full-throated laugh. Being told no would’ve been much preferable to being laughed at and my point taken as a joke.
“I can’t argue with any of that,” he said, nodding. “You’re doing Martin’s job, occupying his office, and you can have the rest that goes with it. You’ve got the second-most seniority on the staff after all, so no one should bat an eye that you’re now our Operations Manager. Your pay will double. It might even be enough to get you out of that apartment of yours.”
I couldn’t suppress the grin bursting through.
“You mean the closet I live in? My student loans will eat up that money for a long time before I can get out of there,” I said.
“I’d much rather you were able to do something fun and enjoy it, but we all have our dues to pay,” he said. As the waiter filled our long-stemmed flutes with champagne, my mind got stuck on a tiny detail Keenan had mentioned, the person whose job I was going to fill.
“Do you think Martin is really doing as badly as Chelsea mentioned? I can’t feel sorry for him, but I hate to hear about anybody practically starving and being thrown out on the street. He must be able to get another job elsewhere, right?”
Keenan shrugged, eyeing the bubbles rising in the champagne.
“I only first heard about him from an old high-school friend who’d been living in London and practically begged me to give Martin a job. He didn’t have much other experience but he had some programming skills and we got along easily enough, so I thought he could help me bring on more people as our staff grew. When he came over here, I think he actually tried to do everything he could to emulate my lifestyle, except he had to do a lot of it on credit instead of cash. The car he got was more expensive than mine. All of that could’ve been taken away. I haven’t gotten a single call asking for a reference about him. There a chance with all of the highly skilled people out there that he’s just not cutting it.”
I looked down at my empty plate, sorry that I’d brought it up. Having tete-a-tete’s about work and women were leagues better than parsing the sorrows of Martin. I picked up my glass of champagne and smiled with a renewed sense of optimism.
“OK, let me belatedly enforce the rule I’d mentioned earlier. No more talk about work or anyone we know from work.”
“To leaving work at work,” Keenan said in something of a toast. We clinked our glasses and I felt the subtle burn as the golden liquid slipped down my throat.
As one might’ve guessed, the food was divine and from the very first taste I knew that I didn’t want it to ever end. The only way to drag it out was to keep the conversation going.
“In that spirit, tell me more about some of the things you do in your free time. And don’t say following emerging technologies and electric cars,” I said. I was sure there was so much to Keenan and that I’d barely scratched the surface. He shrugged and took a bite from his buttermilk fried chicken and duck fat potatoes.
“I wish I had something amazing to say, like I’m an amateur veterinarian who helps deliver horse foals. But mostly when I have time for myself I end up at the gym or just watching TV or watching TV at the gym.”
“Including early seasons of Grey’s Anatomy?”
He looked away in embarrassment.
“But there is one thing I do that I don’t really talk about that much. There’s something about running a technology company that chains you to a computer every day that really gives me a desire for tangible things made by hand. I’ve been trying to learn woodworking and stone carving. Not easy to do in my apartment in the city, but every now and then I get to take a crack at it,” he said.
“That’s cool too,” I said encouragingly. “Have you made anything you can show me?”
“Not even close. I’ve got a few tiny figures that look like monsters that should be crushed and buried. But one day I’d like to make at least one decent object and put it out somewhere in the middle of nowhere and have it be there for hundreds of years. That would make me feel good.”
I nodded, contemplating the thought behind it.
“What about you, are you ever going to write any more for your blog?”
I blinked a few times, surprised to hear him mention it.
“I don’t know. I feel like I haven’t had two seconds to rub together lately, much less time to write anything,” I said.
“I think you should if you get the chance. Maybe now that you’re an Operations Manager at what was until recently a hot web startup you might be able to flesh out your philosophy a little more. It could help us get where we’re going with our staff and provide some insight for others who could use that kind of inspiration.”
I smiled. It was a brilliant idea I should’ve thought of myself.
“Are you sure you want me busy in the evenings writing blog posts?” I asked with all the suggestiveness I could.
“You don’t have to do it every night,” he said.
I felt his leg graze mine under the table, sending a thrill up my spine.
“How about something for dessert?” His question came after we’d spent another twenty minutes talking over empty plates. I’d enjoyed every last morsel of my meal but wasn’t against finding an excuse to stick around and keep talking longer.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were trying to fatten me up,” I said, thinking back to the junk food he’d packed his cars with. After what I’d just had there was no way he could accuse me of not eating enough.
“Working hard requires a lot of fuel,” he said, snatching up the dessert menu. “Come on, this chocolate mousse cake sounds too good to pass up.”
“All right,” I said, sure I could cram in a bite or two if I had to. Keenan waved over the waiter, who’d earlier been told to hold his horses when he asked if we wanted the check.
“We’ll share a slice of the chocolate mousse,” he said, handing over the menu.
“Of course.” The waiter flashed a bright, wide smile and zipped away, leaving us a few more minutes to talk until he returned with a small plate underneath a mouth-watering pile of sugar and two forks. The cake had little chocolate shavings and lots of foamy cream. I’d forgotten I’d even had dinner and was ready to bury my face in it.
“Mmm.”
We didn’t do the thing where we put forkfuls of it into each other’s mouths, but we were eyeing each other the entire time we swallowed. I sucked hard on the fork as it passed through my lips to get every last crumb. By the time there were a few bites left the sugar rush had hit and we were both eyeing each other more than the dish between us.
Keenan called for the ch
eck this time, and I marveled at my phone for a moment when it said the time was well past seven. The waiter came, slid the check case onto the table and moved on. I reached around to grab my coat and get this show on the road, but I stopped when I saw that something put a piercing look on his face.
At least I knew better than to ask if the meal was expensive.
“What?” I asked simply when he continued to glare at it.
Keenan tore his eyes away from the little slip of paper in the black case and began to look around the room anxiously.
“They double-charged us for the cake,” he said, his voice suddenly more of a growl. “Did they think I was going to just hand over my card without looking at what I was paying for?”
The way he picked up his napkin from his lap and threw it down made me think he was going to flip the entire table over. I’d never seen Keenan get genuinely angry before, and it was a little hard to believe cake had set it off.
“That is ridiculous,” I said quietly, ready to get back into our rhythm.
“I’ll get this taken care of.”
Keenan got out of his seat and stalked off after one of the waiters, who glanced over his shoulder and seemed to speed up slightly as he rushed back to the kitchen. Some of the times I’d seen Keenan chew out staff over their mistakes during my first few days at Mouse Roar was nothing to this. He was furious and I was thankful it wasn’t directed at me, but it did remind me of the warnings Chelsea and Cassie had given me.
The host’s reception counter back with the fighting artwork on the walls was a fair distance away, but I could still make out Keenan letting them have it. I expected the matter to get fixed quickly, like when he caught someone at work making a sloppy mistake and chewed them out, but instead it dragged on and Keenan only seemed to be getting louder. It stopped abruptly, and he returned quickly.
“We’re getting out of here. I guess when you share dessert they count it as two dishes. Using that second fork is the equivalent of an entire second piece of cake. I paid, but I told them I’ll never set foot back here as long as I live and make sure no one else I know does either.”
He was still steaming, and I hastily put my coat on and accompanied him to the exit, not sparing a look at any of the staff and not hearing any friendly goodbyes from them either.
“What a stupid policy,” I said as we walked through the doors into the chilly night air that I hoped would clear away what had just happened.
“I just don’t like getting screwed,” he said.
The valet seemed to have caught wind of the situation by the looks on our faces and took a full five minutes to bring the car around. Keenan looked murderous and his grab for the keys seemed a hair’s breadth away from being an attempt to break the valet’s wrist. It was only when we climbed into the car that my new boyfriend seemed to break out of it.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I just can’t stand things like that. I shouldn’t let it get to me. Where to next?”
His apology was sincere and it looked like he was ready to go back to being his normal, charming self, but for me the magic was gone as I continued to think about Chelsea saying that this was the kind of thing his girlfriends all succumbed to. I couldn’t have believed it before, but I felt like I’d gotten an irrefutable look for myself.
“If you don’t mind I’d really like to take a stab at your idea of writing a blog post tonight,” I said, noticing a momentary sign of disappointment on his face. He dropped his eyes to his lap, and I could tell it was disappointment in himself, not with me.
“That’s great. I hope you won’t mind if I read it. And I just had an idea. How about I save you from the subway ride to work by picking you up tomorrow morning?”
“OK,” I said, very willing to accept a few perks of having a handsome guy like him in my life.
“I’ll bring donuts and coffee for breakfast on the way over,” he added.
More food, seesawing me back to a state of concern that he’d try to fix a problem about me that wasn’t there.
I said goodnight with a quick kiss and a thank you before dashing up the steps to my modest apartment and firing up my laptop. Writing something meant to inspire others to build diversity and respect in their companies was much different than the epic scandal takedowns that I could crank out mostly on autopilot after doing so many. I felt like I needed every word to be perfect, and that it required doing some research as well. After producing a few paragraphs and spending an hour reading books about management I’d downloaded, I chalked it up as a good start and turned around from my desk to fall straight into bed.
It was back to work the next morning, and although my date with Keenan had ended on a sour note my mood was still lifted by my new relationship. I tucked my worries about glimpsing his angry streak away as I got ready. I expected my door to buzz, but instead my phone went off with a text from him. Apparently his lucky streak of finding the perfect parking place had come to an end, leaving him circling the block. I was going to have to come down and hop into the car in the middle of the street.
I shuffled down the stairs to the ground floor, stepping out into the cold air on another deeply cloudy, gray day. This particular one gave me the impression it didn’t want to start at all, but rather than let it affect me I ignored the weather and searched around for Keenan’s bright-red car.
I spotted it down toward the end of the block, where the flow of traffic was forcing him to turn down the adjacent street. That left me to begin walking in the opposite direction, figuring I’d catch him somewhere in the middle coming along the other side.
For a second it was exactly like every previous trip to work started for me, walking the same way toward the subway station as I always did, but that didn’t last for long as a hand suddenly wrapped around my forearm and pulled hard, yanking me away from the sidewalk and into a narrow alleyway between buildings.
I yelped but my mind instantly went back to being pulled off the running trail that one day at the park when my life had been changed forever. The flood of images almost made it impossible to see what was right in front of me, but I caught glimpses of a tall figure in a thick black coat, the smell of alcohol.
Between the man’s slate-gray hat and his coat’s collar, it was hard to get a look at his face at all, but his voice and particularly his accent gave him away instantly as he gripped my arm even tighter.
“You’re late this morning. Think you’re so special the train was going to wait around for you so it could take you in to do my job? That’s not how it works.”
“Martin!” I gasped, causing him to look back at me with his long face and a crazy look in his eye. An icy laugh sputtered through his lips before he barred his teeth at me.
CHAPTER 12
The horror of being pulled off of the sidewalk was compounded by the flashbacks I was having of my previous attack. Together it made my heart feel like it was seizing up; everything I saw was blurry. All I could think was, No, not again!
It was impossible to remember what I’d just seen seconds before. Was there anybody else on the sidewalk to see me get grabbed? The street had been lined with parked cars. Had anyone driving by been able to see me? If they did, would they help?
I fumbled in my pocket with my free hand to get my phone. If I could only get a message to Keenan he would be able to help, but Martin saw what I had in my hand and rounded on me. He stripped it out from between my fingers, threw it against the brick wall as hard as he could, and when that wasn’t enough he stomped on it until it had been smashed.
I jerked my hand, trying to get away, but he had me by the wrist too tightly to break free. Once he was done with the phone, he yanked me toward him only to shove me back hard into the wall. The back of my head smacked against the brick and I immediately felt dizzy. I’d always told myself that I’d be strong enough to fight back if anyone ever attacked me again, but I’d been caught and overwhelmed too quickly, and my memories weren’t helping.
In my head, I could see it all
playing out again. The hitting, the torn clothing, the feelings like I wanted to escape my body and die.
“No, no,” I muttered, feeling like I was barely lucid. More harsh laughter breached my ears.
“Is that all you can say?” Martin shouted at me. “Everything out of your mouth is no. Want to see a great concert? No. Want to spare us the agony of your presence by leaving us alone? No. Want to extend a helping hand to someone who desperately needs it? No.”
“What?” I asked, barely able to hear him. Martin was crushing my arm and I felt like I was going to lose the ability to stand any second. He looked at me and produced a bloodthirsty grimace.
“You think I didn’t hear about that? We could’ve all had our jobs back but you pushed to shut us out just because you couldn’t handle some friendly invitations from the boys. Chelsea told me.”
“Chelsea?” I said, and for some reason hearing her name seemed to make me more conscious. I grew angry and struggled more.
“Oh yeah, Chelsea. She said to me on the very first day you were going to be trouble and that we needed to do something about you. I should’ve listened to her and pushed you right out the window. But it’s not too late now, I suppose. Let’s see how far your obstinacy gets you. Can I touch you?”
“No,” I said through gritted teeth. Lights went off in the side of my head from the blow, leaving one eye that suddenly wouldn’t open. I could tell he was pulling at my jacket and attempting to touch my breasts. Trying to fight back, I tried to kick him, but he had me pinned in so close that I wasn’t able to do anything to him.
“Can I give you a kiss then, my dear?” He cackled and leaned in, exhaling more of his noxious breath on me.
My heart was racing, I was full of revulsion, tears were running down my cheeks, something was cracking or clicking. No, that wasn’t what that sound was. It was footsteps racing toward us. By the time I’d figured it out something collided with Martin, knocking us all over. I managed to get a hand up in time to block my head from striking directly against the pavement. I blinked and tried to focus on what was happening and the new sounds.
