Loathe at First Sight

by Suzanne Park

Participant’s name: Melania Joo

  I, Melania Joo, acknowledge the completion of Seventeen Studios’ sexual harassment training session.

  By signing this statement, I acknowledge that I:

  Understand the company’s policies regarding sexual harassment,

  Understand my responsibility as an employee to not engage in behavior that could be perceived as sexual harassment,

  If harassed, I understand my right to request the behavior be stopped, and

  Understand it is my responsibility to bring sexually offensive behavior to my organization’s attention.

  Signed,

  ______________

  (Melania Joo)

  The course certificate had been printed with my misspelled name on expensive, heavy stock with gold-and-black embossed lettering. I tossed it into the trash along with the survey.

  “Hey, Melody, wait up.” Nolan huffed and puffed next to me.

  Staring straight ahead, I continued marching to my office, pretending I didn’t see him in my peripheral view.

  “Please? I just wanna talk.”

  I sped up and he stayed in lockstep with me. By the time I got to my office, we were both panting.

  “I just . . .” Breath. “Wanted to say . . .” Breath. “That those guys were so out of line,” he wheezed. “I thought. Training. Would be a good thing. For inclusivity.”

  I slammed my MacBook on my desk. “You didn’t have to say anything in there, you know. I deal with this shit all the time, I can handle myself.” Opening my laptop, I checked for damage. I didn’t want the IT guy to yell at me.

  His eyes widened. “Oh, I didn’t mean you couldn’t handle yourself. I just meant—” He took another breath. “It’s just that, those guys are idiots and I didn’t think what happened in there was appropriate.”

  “Look, you don’t need to jump in to save me. I’m fine!” I hissed the last two words through gritted teeth and tapped my password so hard on my keyboard that the keys could have broken from the pressure. The intern’s like-to-hate ratio had nose-dived to negative since our conference room meeting. Wait, could ratios be negative?

  “If you’re fine, then okay, I just felt bad is all, since it was one of my inclusivity initiatives and it bombed, at your expense.” His shoulders slumped and head hanging low, he shuffled out of the office, passing Asher as he entered. My gut twisted tight as Nolan disappeared from my view. My anger and pride had gotten the best of me. The last thing I wanted was to make enemies with one of the nicer guys here. Especially the CEO’s nephew.

  “Another lovers’ quarrel?” Asher smirked as he sat in his chair.

  “Can you do your job, please?” I muttered back.

  On Messenger, I found Nolan MacKenzie and sent him a quick message. I’m sorry I snapped. No sleep and too much going on here, as you witnessed in that meeting. Can I make it up with dinner? My treat. Actually, Ian’s treat, cashing in my dining dollars for working late so many nights.

  In case he got the wrong idea, I added, Nothing fancy.

  His immediate reply. Cool. I’m game.

  I smiled and closed the chat window.

  THANKS TO MY unplanned computer outage and useless sexual misconduct training, I stayed at work later than planned. My Messenger app bleeped around 7:30 P.M.

  Nolan: Ready for dinner yet?

  Oh damn, dinnertime already. Maybe I could take my computer home, assign tasks to our overseas developers in China and Poland, and then a lot of work could get done overnight and I’d be on schedule in the morning. I threw my computer into my black leather satchel. My newly inherited work MacBook weighed more than my other laptop. Those MacBooks looked slender and light, but I swear those computers were made out of the same materials as fishing sinkers.

  Nolan wasn’t at his desk but his computer screen was on, spreadsheets were up, and of course I had to sneak a look. Using fancy macros and pivot tables, he was in the middle of building a forecast for the entire company. My mouth gaped when I skimmed his financial models. I’d never seen anyone work numbers the way he did. He was right, I really should have asked for his help on those Ian projects.

  “Uh, sorry, I had to run to the bathroom. I got so caught up in work I forgot to go all day.” Nolan scooted by me and bent over the desk to save what he was working on, then shut down his computer. His brown curls fell forward, covering his eyes like a sheepdog. I resisted the urge to brush them out of his eyes.

  “I’m impressed” was all I could muster. I really was speechless, completely in awe of his expert Excel skills. People always came to me for spreadsheet help. Now I knew who to go to when I got stumped.

  “Are you making fun of me?” He raised an eyebrow and cocked his head.

  Feigning hurt, I clutched my upper chest. “I’m serious!”

  He offered a sad smile. “Well, it’s pretty obvious that inclusivity consulting wasn’t my forte.” Putting his bag strap on his shoulder, he said, “I took on some strategic planning projects with the finance team, which I love, but I’ve been working late some nights. By the way, where are we headed?”

  I held out the Ian-issued gift card options. Johnny Rockets, Red Robin, or P.F. Chang’s.

  He studied them harder than a normal person would. “P.F. Chang’s is close, just over there on Pine, so let’s go there.”

  “I can’t. I shouldn’t have even included that in the options.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t?”

  “It’s blasphemy, like Taco Bell for Mexican people. My Asian friends and I have an unspoken rule that we aren’t supposed to eat at PFC’s because it’s a fake Asian hodgepodge restaurant concocted by greedy corporate white people.”

  He barked out a laugh. “I’ll bet you twenty dollars that you like the food.”

  Twenty bucks was incentive enough for me to break trust with my Asian brethren. “You’re on.”

  The rain pelted us from all directions the whole way there, only partially shielded by the giant golf umbrella he held high above us. The entire walk there, Nolan’s phone buzzed with texts, which he continually ignored.

  “Sounds important,” I said as we turned down Pine Street.

  He shook his head and frowned. “It’s just my parents. Both of them, tag-teaming me with messages. They want me to come visit them during fall break.”

  “That sounds nice,” I murmured. “They want you home.” I couldn’t remember the last time my parents had begged me to come home to visit them.

  “Nah, it’s more dubious than that. They want me to move back to North Carolina after grad school.”

  I swallowed hard and kept quiet. Nothing could happen between us anyway. Not while I was his “boss.” Not with Asher ready to get me fired in a moment’s notice if I crossed the line.

  A booth was ready as soon as we arrived, and the hostess walked us to a table near the window and handed us our menus. My stomach gurgled and made those yeti noises again. I hated to admit it, but each time the waiters passed us with trays of food, my mouth watered. Everything looked and smelled so tasty. We got our drink orders in and pored over the menu tome.

  “Mmmm, pot stickers. And egg rolls. And stuffed wontons sound good,” I murmured.

  He laughed. “That sounds very . . . deep fried. But delicious. Maybe we need some vegetables or salad or something.”

  “You’re right. Vegetable tempura? Just kidding. Let’s do edamame. No salad.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “No salads today, or like, ever?”

  “Ever. I hate them, even the ones with fried chicken or bacon bits on top. Lettuce is no one’s favorite food. Or tomato. And combining them together to be the staple of any meal is an offensive culinary travesty.”

  “I see you have strong feelings about this,” he joked.

  “A salad is a giant, colorful bowl of disappointment. Well, except for taco salad. Taco salad is fake salad because it has cheese and sour cream on it. It’s basically nachos with lettuce confetti.”

  He laughed. “Oh, man, too b
ad P.F. Chang’s doesn’t have nachos.”

  Grinning, I raised a glass as soon as the server placed our drinks on the table. “To nachos.” We toasted and I gulped down wine number one pretty quickly. “Okay, time to be serious for a sec. I want to apologize for two things. One, for snapping at you when you were trying to be nice. And second, for assuming you got this job only because of your connections. Clearly you have spreadsheet skills.”

  His eyes sparkled under the hanging dome light above our table. “And you forgive me for breaking your mug?”

  “Nope.” I took the wine out of his hand and took a large sip. “Hey, I like yours better.”

  Nolan leaned back into his booth seat and laughed. When the waiter came by, we ordered our food. “Do you like beer?” he asked me.

  “Nah, I hate it.”

  “A beer for me then.” He glanced at me as he talked with the server. “That way she won’t steal that drink, too.”

  The waiter winked. “I do the same thing with my wife. You two are cute together.”

  My stomach did that fluttery thing again. “We’re work friends,” I clarified.

  He nodded. “Ah, gotcha. But just so you know, my wife and I were work friends, too.” He took away our empty wineglasses and walked away humming an unfamiliar tune.

  The food came quickly. I handed over my twenty bucks to Nolan while shrimp lo mein dangled from my mouth. I thought about it, but couldn’t bear ordering Korean cuisine there, that’s where I drew the line. It was already shameful that I sometimes bought kimchi from Safeway. Getting my Korean food fix at P.F. Chang’s would make me a full-blown sellout. I’d need a seventy-five-dollar wager to even consider it.

  Conversation flowed easily. I even admitted to Nolan that I googled him when he joined the company. “Why do you have so many elitist photos of you online?”

  He coughed into his drink. “Elitist? What the hell?”

  “You know, photos of you with all those politicians. All those fancy and exotic places you traveled.”

  He furrowed his brow. “You mean the ones where I was doing a microfinancing project in Lima and Harare for a nonprofit?”

  I slowed my wine to small sips. “Uh . . . yeah. And how about those photos where you cropped out that girl?”

  His eyebrows drew into a deep V. “I think I know what photos you’re talking about. She’s a friend who is good at taking selfies with fancy filters. You know, you almost sound a little bit jealous.”

  “Oh yeah, my photo filter game is pathetic,” I cut in, hoping to divert attention from his accusation.

  We laughed about the weirdos in the office, especially Asher. I told him about my old advertising jobs, and he told me he had finished his first year of business school at UW but wasn’t sure he’d go back next semester.

  “There are a lot of shark types in my MBA class. I’m not like them.” We hit a dialogue lull when he bit his lip and picked the label off his beer bottle. Something big weighed on his mind.

  “Okay, you look terrified. Spill it.”

  He sighed. “My parents are coming to visit soon, and I have to tell them I don’t know if I’m going to go back to school. It’s just not the thing for me. But I also don’t know what I want to do careerwise. Isn’t that dumb? I’m twenty-eight and have no clue what I want to do with my life.”

  I lifted up my wine and toasted him again. It was all about tipsy toasts that night. “Twenty-eight? You’re my age! Well, almost my age. I’m twenty-seven. I assumed by now I’d know what I wanted to be when I grew up too. When does the growing-up part of life end? When do we have to make final life decisions?”

  He looked at me like I just told him I believed in Santa Claus. “Really? You look like you know what you want in life. You seem like it, anyway.”

  I coughed some wine out my nose. “Sorry, I’d never heard that before. Ever.”

  We both laughed. It felt so good to laugh. This all felt so good. Thank you, wine number two!

  The restaurant became much noisier when a bus let off dozens of European tourists at the bar. He leaned forward so I could hear him. “My parents stress me out. They’re cool in some ways. They work hard and want me to make something of myself. And they talk about money all the time. It’s all they think about, and it’s kind of embarrassing. It’s hard to explain.”

  My parents embarrassed me all the time and were focused on money too. Well, at least my mom was. She tried to manage their cash flow down to the penny. Contrast this to my dad, who stuck to a “looser” fiscal approach. He bought lawnmowers and golf clubs every other month without telling my mother, and they ended up in screaming matches about their month-end budget. His parents could never top mine on the humiliation scale, though. My parents had everyone else beat. Effortlessly.

  He exhaled a sad sigh. “They just, really have strong ideas on how life should play out. And nine times out of ten, it’s not what I want.”

  Part of me wanted to hug him in consolation, the other half wanted to slap him into taking action. As they say in the sexist world I lived in, Man up, bro. Also, I knew quite well now, hugging and/or slapping would be an HR violation. “I think you need to think about whether you should fight harder for what you want.”

  He nodded. “You make it look so easy.”

  I coughed out a bitter laugh. Yeah, so easy.

  “I’m serious. You fight for what you think is right, no matter what. It’s amazing.” He cracked a smile.

  “Well, nine times out of ten, it doesn’t work in my favor,” I scoffed. “Failure ain’t pretty.”

  “You bounce back, though.”

  “Right. And by that do you mean I don’t take a hint and keep trying, or I’m successful at recuperating from failure?”

  He looked me in the eyes. “You don’t give up. And your life is what you made of it.”

  “Well, I’m not the type of person who gets things handed to them on a silver platter.” I swept my arm and flicked my hand toward him. “I don’t usually make friends with guys like you, no offense.”

  He cocked his head. “You think we’re all that different?”

  Hahahahaha. Is this guy for real? I leaned forward on my elbows. “Look, I worked hard to get my job, all by myself. None of this silver spoon shit. I don’t have any family in high places.” I fell back into my booth seat. “That’s why I didn’t want your help before. I didn’t want to be associated with you because people would think I was getting special treatment just by knowing you.” A beat passed. “No offense,” I added with a wince.

  “I don’t understand why you care so much about what other people think,” he said, thoughtfully drawing out every word. “It shouldn’t matter.”

  I shot forward. “I feel a lot of pressure at work. If I’m too tough on the team when they mess up, they call me a bossy bitch. When I go easy on them, they take advantage of me. Working late means I have no life, even though guys here do the same thing and no one makes fun of them. Can’t people just treat me the same as everyone else? Well, the answer seems to be no.”

  Taking a sip of wine, I continued. “In my old job, I was way more confident . . . and valued . . . and appreciated. They knew I worked hard and I proved myself over time. Here, I feel second-guessed all the time.”

  Nolan sighed on my behalf. “You’re great at your job and the company needs you. I think you should demand a raise. Your game has such visibility, and whether you like it or not, so do you. I bet they’d do it.”

  It hadn’t even crossed my mind to ask for a raise. It was true: the studio needed me. I was a hard worker and the only female producer at the company since Maggie left. “I like your idea. I’m going to Sheryl Sandberg the shit out of this and ask for a raise.”

  He grinned and rolled up the label of his second beer into a thin tube and put it on the table. He shifted in his seat and our knees touched briefly, sending a jolt of tingling warmth through my body. I hoped it would happen again.

  When our waiter came by, I handed her the gift card and
my credit card tucked underneath it in case we went over the limit.

  My phone buzzed and I glanced at the screen with eyes bleary from drunkenness.

  Calendar reminder. Call with China. Thirty minutes.

  I looked up to find Nolan trying to get a hot sauce stain off his shirt cuff with spit and water, his thick, wavy hair falling forward. He looked up, his eyes crinkling but his mouth frowning a little.

  I joked, “Don’t worry, you have hundreds of shirts just like that to replace this one.” Ones that fit his body perfectly.

  He waggled his eyebrows. “Ohhhh, so you notice what I wear?” Lowering his head, he peered at me through his dark eyelashes. “You know, I actually bought more of them because you said you liked the one I was wearing that time.”

  Oh my god.

  The phone bleeped again. I put it away and looked at him. “I have to run.”

  Our eyes met. He leaned in more, his warm breath reaching my face. “If you need to go, I get it. Maybe we can do a rain check.” Weren’t rain checks for half- or fully canceled plans? We had finished our meal and drinks. Was he asking me out?

  My heartbeat pulsed hard against my ribs. I wanted him to clarify without having to ask.

  But . . . I still had so much work to do. And I had to do it drunk. “I . . . I have to go hop on a call now, I’m sorry.” The waiter brought the final bill and we headed out the door. My apartment was closeish to the restaurant, he lived the opposite direction in Capitol Hill, so we ordered separate Liftr cars.

  “Did you drive to work?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m leaving my car there, I’ll just walk or take a Liftr tomorrow morning. How about you?”

  “I take the bus sometimes, but lately since I work so late I’ve been renting one of those ebikes to get some exercise.”

  Outside, we were no match for the relentless rain and the freezing temperatures. Because of some facade construction and inconvenient scaffolding, Nolan and I crammed together side by side under a small portion of the restaurant’s awning. He briefly opened his golf umbrella, but with the rampant wind, the precipitation seemed to be attacking from down below rather than from the sky.

  As more and more people left the restaurant, Nolan and I found ourselves shuffling our positions as people did in crowded elevators. While the rain fell harder, I took a few steps back under the awning to get more coverage, coming flush against Nolan. His chest pressed against my back, and I leaned into him, shivering, convincing myself it was to stay dry and to get relief from the cold, blustering winds.