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Kate had always assumed that when she got to the top, she’d be taken seriously. She always thought that those powerful, working women didn’t have to put up with sexist crap.
Clearly, it still mattered, but those women were hard working and didn’t let the men around them get in the way. Kate wasn’t sure if she could be like that. How could she let words roll off her back like they meant nothing? That wasn’t a skill she had.
Walter stood up from his seat slowly, his old stiff joints giving him trouble. He groaned and sighed as he tried to balance himself. When he was finally standing, he began to move over to Kate.
She watched him carefully. His coming over to her wasn’t going to be anything good. Out of all of them, Walter was the worst. Kate couldn’t count how many times he’d told her that the office wasn’t the place for a woman. Just his presence irked her.
As he approached, Kate saw that his arm was reaching out for her, aiming right for her shoulders. Before she could move away, she felt Walter’s arm over her shoulders, his hand winding around her back to hold onto her upper arm.
“I think what Kate was trying to say,” he started, giving her arm a gentle squeeze, “is that she’d like it if people listen to her while she speaks.”
“That’s exactly what I said, Walter,” Kate said, feeling the anger rising up her throat like bile.
“Well, I think Kate needs to work on her communication skills,” Walter said with a patronizing, happy tone in his voice. “How about you leave your presentation here, go and cool down for a little while, and we’ll continue on without you?”
Kate shrugged off his old, wrinkly arm and stepped away from him. The projector beamed onto her body, blinding her from the rest of the room.
“Are you kidding me?” Kate asked. “I worked on this for weeks and now you’re going to take it away from me and take all the credit yourselves because some asshole couldn’t keep his fucking mouth shut?”
Kate moved to her laptop and slammed the lid closed before yanking out all of the cables. She clutched it under her arm as she stared at her boss, the anger seeping out of her skin and into the air around her.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “If a man was standing here, giving this presentation, the whole fucking room would be silent. And you all know it. But none of you believe that a woman has anything worthwhile to say and that’s why you’re all allowed to speak over me. And that’s why I’m being punished for speaking out against it. You’re all fucking assholes.”
As soon as Kate had closed her mouth, she knew that she’d fucked up. Why the hell did she think that it was okay to talk to her boss like that? Or the other men in the room? They were all higher in the company than her, and their delicate male egos weren’t going to let her get away with this.
She was too embarrassed to take a quick look around the room but, out of the corner of her eye, she could see the men shifting uncomfortably in their seats.
Damnit, Kate thought.Damnit, damnit, damnit.
“Kate,” Walter said sharply. “I’m going to need to talk to you outside. Now.”
Chapter two
Red hot
Theangerhadtakenover her whole body. Kate could barely control herself as she stormed into her house. She kicked the front door shut so hard it made the whole front of the house shiver. If she’d been bothered to glance back at the door, she’d have seen the black outline of her high-heeled shoes in the paint.
Once she had kicked off her shoes, watching them as they flew across the hallway in front of her, she tried to steady her ragged breaths. Bare-footed, she stood in the middle of the hallway as she stroked her free hand through her hair.
Her golden rings got stuck in her knotted locks but that wasn’t going to stop her. She continued raking her fingers down her head, trying to see through the red fog that had fallen over her eyes.
It wasn’t easy for her to see through the fog, let alone breathe. Her lungs were burning from the deep breaths she was taking and large, black and red spots were clouding her vision.
Kate set her laptop on the side table beside her, not angry enough to smash it yet, and stumbled through her home. The rage was in every inch of her, turning her legs to jelly and making her stomach cramp painfully.
The living room was immediately to her right, filled with cream couches and brightly colored cushions. She roamed through it, her feet padding loudly against the dark wood floor below, as she made her way to the back of the house where the kitchen was.
All she wanted was a glass of water. Ice water. That was it. It would cool her down and give her a chance to regain herself. There was so much pent-up anger inside of her body that she was afraid her heart might explode.
Her hand reached up and slapped against her chest, sending a wave of vibrations through her rib cage. Beneath her palm, she could feel her heart thundering inside her. The blood was rushing through her veins, helping the adrenaline flow through her.
It felt like it would never stop. Her hands shook as she reached for the refrigerator and clutched onto the handle of the glass jug of water. As she brought it out into the warm air of her house, the glass turned cloudy.
When she had a glass of water in her hand, bringing it to her lips to sip at it, she let her finger slide across the glass jug. The cold condensation chilled her finger to the bone. For a moment, it felt like she was calming down.
The water slipped down her throat, cooling her down to her very core. Kate tried to clear her head as the water went down but the memories continued to pulse behind her eyes.
The way Walter had put his arm around her shoulders, the way the men had talked over her so openly, the way that they had disrespected her day in and day out. Kate’s stomach clenched and her teeth gritted together. Her fingers around the glass gripped harder, making her whole arm shake under the strain.
