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She brushed past him, careful not to touch him, because she was sure that his shirt was wringing wet at this point. “Good luck with everything, and by everything, I mean finding an assistant who can take on your whole workload for you so you can sleep for an hour every afternoon in our office behind your computer, so it looks like you’re working in there. Good luck finding someone who covers for you when you’ve had a little too much to drink and you’re worried it will show and someone will notice and you’ll get your ass canned. Good luck on finding someone who does like, all of your reports. And good luck covering the gap until then.”
“You can’t walk out on me like this,” Stewart blustered behind her.
“Yes, I can. I’m not under contract. I’ve given this place ten years of my life and I’m sure as hell not going to give it a moment more. Oh, and, Stewy, I only spat in your coffee once. And seriously, if you try and bring me up on charges for it, I’ll let everyone know that you’re screwing Bill’s wife. Though what she could possibly see in you, I have no idea.”
“Sydney! You get back here this minute. Get your ass in that chair and finish those reports. We can talk about this another time.”
She felt her eyes go wide with astonishment. Even now, he thought he could control and intimidate her into doing what he wanted. She wanted to laugh, but not at him. At herself. At herself for being so stupid that she’d actually stuck around all those years and put up with all the crap, the after-hours work email, the frantic last minute reports that needed to be done. God, she’d done this man’s dry cleaning for years. Got him coffee every single morning. Decaf. Fucking decaf. What was the point? What was the point of any of it?
“Yeah, about that… no thanks.” She balanced the box in one hand and with the other, she flipped off the asshole she’d been flipping off in her mind for a very long time.
She kept the bird flying high as she walked through the entire office, her head held high.
As she pushed out the front door, into the warm morning sunshine, she took a few confident steps, testing out what freedom felt like.
Turned out, even if she couldn’t have what she’d really always wanted, starting fresh was the next best thing. Freedom… it felt pretty dang good.
***
Too bad her mom didn’t agree.
When she’d called her over to her apartment, she wanted to sit down and have a heart to heart. She thought it was time. It was just another step in her reinvent yourself after thirty plan. She wanted to get on the right track and lying to herself and her mom wasn’t going to help her any more than sticking it out in a job she hated was going to put her on the right path to happiness.
Instead, her mom looked at her like she’d just sprouted a third nipple the size of a dinner plate on her forehead.
“You did what? You quit your job?”
“Yeah. I quit my job.”
They were sitting in her small kitchen. She’d poured her mom half a glass of red wine, the last bottle she had left in the apartment. She’d even gone to the trouble of cutting up some cheese and put out a few slices of salami and some pickles on a plate, like they were having a classy girl’s night out.
It took her mom a second to pick her jaw off the tiny glass table. “Well- I mean- if you weren’t happy there, but don’t you think you should have waited until you found something new? How are you going to pay rent?”
“That’s the thing. It’s really expensive here. I came because I didn’t know where else to go. Everything costs a lot. You followed me here because it’s always been just us girls and we wanted to stick together, but hell. We should find somewhere cheaper to live. Somewhere that’s just as nice. I’m sure other places exist. We don’t have a ton of friends here. We’re not in relationships. It’s easy for us to just… leave. Maybe that’s what we both need.”
“I- Sydney…” her mom took a huge pull of wine, nearly draining half the glass, and started over. “I mean, this is great and all, but- well- aren’t you a little young to be having a mid-life crisis?”
“Mom! This is not a mid-life crisis. I just wanted to do something new. I don’t want to stay in a job I hate for the rest of my life. All of that time I spent working my ass off just went into paying for this place. I don’t even really like it.”
