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They wouldn’t have been so rude to me if I were a man,she thought bitterly, staring down at the jug in front of her.They’re so obsessed with what’s between my legs that they can’t concentrate on what’s coming out of my mouth.
Kate tried not to think about it, tried to push it from her mind, but the images just kept coming back. She could still feel Walter’s arm over her shoulder, his hand gently squeezing her. Kate rolled her shoulder as if she were trying to get Walter’s hand off her once more, and a shudder went through her body.
“Why are all men so obsessed with their cocks?” Kate shouted the last word, letting it burst out of her mouth and echo around the empty room.
She set her glass on the counter, next to the jug, and put both of her palms on the counter. As she breathed deeply, she leaned her body forward and let her head hang loosely between her arms. She stayed like that for a while, trying to center herself. The rage was controlling her, making her angrier than she needed to be, and she knew she had to get it under control. If she didn’t, she’d just be stuck as a raging bitch for the whole day.
A long, loud scream came out of her mouth, turning her voice instantly raw with the veracity of it. It went on and on, a never-endingfuuuuuuuuuck!that could probably have been heard for miles around her home.
Kate didn’t care what other people thought of her, though. All she knew was what she needed, what she had to do for herself to keep her head above water. And this wasn’t it. Tolerating Walter, the board of directors, all of them. It was bullshit.
Their sexism was eroding away at her mental health, taking her to the breaking point. There was no way she would be able to handle this for much longer.
Well, I do have a month to myself now,Kate thought as she stood up straight, her tired red eyes gazing around her empty kitchen.
Just thinking about taking a week off terrified Kate. She’d not been on vacation for as long as she could remember. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the money for it—because she did, she had more than enough of that—but it was the fact that she could so easily be replaced.
How many men were there, looking to get into the higher rankings of her job? How many men would love to be the head of a department in a huge electronics brand? There were so many qualified men underneath her, in her own company, constantly vying to get her job.
They would try to discredit her, to show her bosses that she was inferior because she had a vulva between her goddamn legs, but she’d always managed to clap back and show them who was boss. Kate was the boss… or, at least, she had been.
What was she going to go back to, after this month-long vacation? She couldn’t be sure of that. Someone was going to have to step in for her and it was probably going to be a man.
A man that would have the same ideas as her, the same vision, onlyhewould be listened to and therefore rewarded for his insight. There was no doubt in her mind that the man would have the same insight as she’d had. Maybe even inferior insight. But he’d be regarded as a hero of the department.
Fuck, no, Kate thought, squeezing her eyes shut.I can’t think about this. I’m going to have a fucking heart attack.
Instead of focusing on the things she was going to miss at work, she tried to think about what she was going to do with her newfound freedom. To Kate, it was like finding a huge pot of gold.
As she moved out of the kitchen, she tried to think about whatnormalpeople did when they had time off: they went on vacations, relaxed, and didn’t think about work.
That wasn’t possible for her, though. She’d spent her whole life working hard to get to where she was. She wasn’t about to just forget about it for a month. If she was going to relax and enjoy her time, she was going to have to find an activity to do that would enable her to stay up to date with work.
Spying on the emails would be the easiest way. No one would see that she was reading them and, by office protocol, she would still be CC’d in. So all she needed to do was make sure she had internet access and she’d be fine.
In theory. Kate went into the hallway to get her laptop, wondering if anyone had started gossiping about her over emails. Of course, she doubted it, and if they did they would at least be smart enough to remove her from the CC. Or were they?
Kate put her laptop on the breakfast bar in the kitchen and sat on the high stools as she waited for it to boot. The anger was still inside her, trying to bubble up and come out of her mouth, but she wasn’t going to let it. She’d somehow gotten control of her emotions and that was exactly how it was going to stay.
If she let herself scream and shout and rant and rave and curse the heavens for everything that happened, she knew she wouldn’t be able to get anything meaningful done. She’d just hole up in her bedroom and sob the month away.
That wasn’t the kind of person she wanted to be. That wasn’t the kind of woman she wanted the world to see when they looked at her. She wanted to be robust, strong, and independent. A force to be reckoned with. None of those things meant crying in bed all day.
Kate scrolled through her emails but nothing there was out of the ordinary. There wasn’t any mention of her being out of the office for the next month, so Kate knew that they had probably put out a bulletin on the computer system for her team to see.
How embarrassing,Kate thought.
The idea that her colleagues were wondering about what happened in the meeting set her teeth on edge. No doubt they were going to assume that she’d fucked everything up and now they didn’t have a plan going forwards.
That wasn’t true, though. Sure, Walter forced her to take a month-long vacation torelax, reset, and unwind. But that didn’t mean she was going to forget the progress her team had made. As soon as she got back to work, she knew she was going to reschedule that meeting.
Kate paused scrolling as she thought.What if the same thing happens? What if I get talked over? What if more people do it? Will I lose my shit and get fired?
That was completely and totally out of the question. She’d worked herself into the ground to get to where she was, fighting the male ego and bureaucracy, all the way to the top.
There was nothing else for Kate to do but close down her email program. Torturing herself wasn’t going to do anything besides make her more unstable. She needed to take Walter’s words to heart. Relax, reset, and unwind. That was her job for the next month. That was what she needed to focus on.
As Kate went to close her laptop, she hoped that her job would still be waiting for her when she returned. Her palm rested against the top rim of the screen as she stared at her background picture: it was grainy and frayed at the edges where she’d scanned the terribly old picture. Kate had to be only eighteen in it. Her mother was standing beside her, her long, blonde, curly hair falling down to her shoulders in thick, luscious waves.
