Page 4 of Mostly My Boss
“Effective immediately. I’ve prepared Jordyn. I knew I had to stay until you came back, but once you did…well, you’re here so I can leave. She’ll have the status of everything I was working on and will be able to get you up to speed fairly quickly.”
“Jules, you can’t quit.”
Yes. I could. I could quit him and get free.
“Goodbye, Ethan.” I heard my voice crack as I said it. Had I thought this was going to be easy? I should have known it wouldn’t be. I turned to leave but he was up in an instant. Moving around me to stop me.
“Get out of my way, Ethan.”
“I can’t let you do this.”
“You don’t have a choice,” I told him. “It’s done.”
“No!” he shouted. Then he clearly reached for control of his temper. He took a few breaths. “You have to give me one chance. Once chance to fix this.”
That was something, I thought. That he was acknowledginghebroke us. But it wasn’t all his fault. I was equally to blame really. After all, I was the addict. Not him.
“Ethan,” I said, reaching for every ounce of calm reasonableness left inside me. “Please let me do this. Please just let me go.”
He shook his head. “No. I screwed up, but I can fix this. You promised me. You promised me twelve years ago that when I did the thing that would fuck us up, you would forgive me. You promised me that. All I want is one chance.”
I closed my eyes. “A chance to do what? What are you going to say? Or do? You left, Ethan. You’ve been gone for three months. Anything you could have said or done… now it’s too late.”
“No.”
I puffed out a sound. Half laugh, half exasperation. “You’re not a king, Ethan. You don’t get to decree something and simply make it so. And now you’re not even my boss. Please step aside and let’s just do this. End this. End us. Once and for all.”
His mouth got tight and I knew his brain was racing. Looking for angles and areas of weakness in me he might exploit. Things he could use against me to bend me to his will. I had to be strong.
“Okay,” he relented. “I’ll let you go. Under one condition.”
“I don’t have to give you any conditions,” I told him.
“Twelve goddamn years, Jules!” he railed. “That’s how long we’ve beenus. So yes, you owe me a fucking CONDITION!”
“What is it?” In the long run it would be easier to give in to what he thought might put us back to the way were. Except I knew that nothing would work. Because I was determined to get clean of Ethan Moss. And then, once I’d done that, then I could look forward to what came next.
“I’ve been thinking about this. A lot. For three months to be precise. Let’s talk to someone. We…we can’t…we don’t say…sometimes the things we need to say. If we had help…”
“Help?”
“A therapist. Someone who could listen to both us. Help us work through some of this shit. One hour. That’s all I’m asking.”
One hour. With a therapist. Yeah, that wasn’t going to change anything. But maybe it would help. Maybe we could talk it all out and find some kind of closure. Like easing away from the thing that you were addicted to in gradual steps instead of quitting cold turkey.
“Fine,” I agreed. “You’ve got your one hour.”
2
Therapy
Julia
“It’s not even close to being as simple as her quitting,” Ethan said to Carol. “Jules and I have an unusual relationship. One that, I will point out, has been fine for the last twelve years. One fuck-up shouldn’t destroy that.”
That was so typical of him. To think that because things were fine for him everything else was fine, too. I’d agreed to this hour as a way to help me get closure. Maybe the only way to do that was through the truth.
“It’s not one fuck-up, Ethan! It’s a thousand fuck-ups. And maybe what you think is fine, I think is messed up. You used me!”
