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“I decided to go to Dupont Circle and walk up Connecticut Ave to Nigel’s favorite store—so I could buy him a fucking tie. He was in California for the week and I thought I’d be wearing it, and nothing else when he got back in a couple days ...” The image s
he paints turns me on until I remember that she did that for another man. The surge of jealousy I feel is dismissed for the ridiculousness that it is. She’s not mine. Nor do I want her to be. But, I have to admit that seeing her naked with only one of my ties around her neck would have been fucking nice.
“Well, turns out his ‘I’m going to be in California for work all week’ was a lie,” she says.
“He was at the store?” I ask.
“Yup, with his fiancée. I saw him, and at first, I was excited. I called his name. They both turned around. You should have seen his face.” She snickers, and it makes me smile, too. “It was the classic, I think I’m going to shit myself, so I’m clenching my ass as hard as I can face.” She laughs to herself and I find it miraculous that she can laugh at the memory even while she’s lying there in pain.
I feel my first pang of doubt about the conclusions I drew about her.
“Can you believe that at first he tried to act like he had no clue who I was?” she says, and I guffaw incredulously.
“No fucking way.”
“Oh, way,” she says.
“I mean, hello, motherfucker. Your tongue was buried between my thighs two days ago, remember that?” She laughs and I do, too. But my laugh isn’t a loose, easy one. It’s knotted around the discomfort I feel every time she refers to her sexual relationship with that man.
I don’t like it. Not one fucking bit, and I have no idea why or where that feeling came from. Because honestly, half an hour ago, I didn’t give two shits whether I saw her again or not.
“‘Come on, Rebecca, look at her, would I date a girl who shops at The Gap?’” She says this in a deep voice that I’m assuming is meant to be the boyfriend. “I mean, who says things like that?”
“Well, apparently, your boyfriend. So, what’d you do? I hope it was worse than throwing yourself off a cliff because what he did was way worse than what I did … and look how you’ve punished me,” I quip.
And when she laughs, I feel a swell of pride. And then immediately wonder who the fuck I am. Maybe I’ve had too much to drink.
“I didn’t throw myself off a cliff, and I wasn’t trying to punish you. You’re so vain. Not everything is about you,” she says angrily but with no malice.
“Anyway, I wish I’d done something to punish him then. It would’ve been much more satisfying getting arrested if I’d actually done something to earn it,” she says irritably.
“You’re like one of those Russian dolls. So many layers,” I say in wonder.
“Huh?” she replies.
“Nothing, keep going,” I prompt, eager to hear what came next.
“He had the nerve to call security. In seconds, they swooped in and escorted me out. I was truly speechless. Shocked beyond belief.”
I can be ruthless with people I’m not happy with. But, I can’t imagine pretending not to know someone you’ve been intimate with.
“What next?” I ask, intrigued beyond belief.
“I get back to work and find out the girl he was with is the daughter of our firm’s managing partner. Overnight, my job became a different kind of hell. It wasn’t just long hours and hard work. It was impossibly long hours, being assigned to cases in practice areas like white collar crime—places where I had no expertise and no interest. They gave me all these extremely technical questions to answer for super valuable clients. Then they’d tell me they needed the answer back in a matter of hours. These questions required a full day’s worth of work in less time than I was given to complete the job. So of course, I made mistakes. I fucked up assignments. I took too long to return phone calls. Whatever you can think of, I did it. I was constantly being called to task,” she rants. “They started saying things like, maybe I couldn’t do the work because I didn’t go to Harvard or Cornell like everyone else. For nearly an entire month after the incident at the store, they did everything they could to get me to quit.
“I knew what they were doing. I tried to stay strong. I was finally taking care of my mother the way she deserved. So, I hung on because I liked the money too much, and I thought I could outlast them. I’d never lost a fight in my life. And I have fought some really big demons,” she says, and her voice is clogged with heavy emotions.
“Wow,” is all I say, despite the dozens of questions I want to ask. Her honesty is so refreshing. I want more of it.
“But one day, the fuck up was too big. And a partner threw an entire three-ringed binder at me from across a conference room,” she says.
I was stunned at that.
“I know,” she says as if she can hear the shock in my silence. “No one did anything. In fact, they asked me to clean up the papers that had fallen out when it slammed into the wall next to my head.
“I started to think about quitting. I decided that there was no amount of money worth all of this. And if, at the age of twenty-eight, I was making nearly 200k a year, it meant I could find something like that again, right?” she posits.
“Right,” I agree.
