Page 68 of Mostly My Boss
I nodded. “I told you I’m ready. I wouldn’t be back here if I wasn’t. You first. Them second.”
My parents. I hadn’t seen or spoken to them directly since the one call I’d promised Jules I would make. To say that the call hadn’t gone well was an understatement.
My father had accused me of compromising my mother’s mental health. Maybe I had. Maybe that was my shame to live with, but after years of feeling like I was in a prison, I deserved the freedom.
Or thought I did.
She looked me up and down then, as if realizing how long it had been since she’d seen me. Unlike me, she hadn’t asked for a picture.
I’d filled out some but was still lean. I spent time lifting weights, but I would never be ripped. I kept my hair more trimmed to my head after her brothers kept asking me aboutThe Big Bang Theory. Other than that, I didn’t think I’d changed too much.
Not like her.
I’d left a girl. I was standing in front of a woman.
“You look good, Jules.”
“Your eyebrows need a trim,” she replied. She reached for my hand and pulled me upstairs. “I have a roommate. Her name is Kaitlyn. Don’t fuck her.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said with a smile.
Jules and I were back. I was finally home.
* * *
Therapy
Julia
“And that’s how it all started. Our working relationship, anyway,” I said. “If we’re not counting that first year when he paid me to take notes.”
“Just like that, you quit your job and went to work for him?” Carol asked me.
Just like that. Simple and not simple at all.
“I never told you how happy I was to see you that day,” I said, admitting the truth to myself. Feeling like, now, it was safe to say it out loud. “I told myself a hundred times that you would come for me someday. I took the subway to work for almost six months wondering when that day would come. Then you were there at the bottom of the steps and…”
I stopped talking because I couldn’t say anything more without revealing everything. And I didn’t want to do that. Not at the end of us.
This wasn’t a good idea. Therapy, counseling. Truth and honesty. It would have been easier to just walk away.
Or maybe it would have been easier to just leave things the way they were. To do what he wanted and to put us back into the friend and coworker zone. That’s really what he wanted.
“We should leave, Ethan,” I said, even as I swallowed all the emotions that wanted to burst out. “We should go right now. I’ll come back to work for you, if that’s what you want. Nothing has to change.”
“You said you weren’t happy. You said you were hurting,” he reminded me. “That I was hurting you.”
Yes, but I was going to hurt worse if this all broke apart. I’d been a basket case after he left me. I was worse after I quit. How foolish to think I could end this cleanly with a resignation letter. That I could break my addiction of him with a snap of my fingers.
So, fine, I was weak. I was backsliding. I knew it, but I couldn’t stop myself. I just wanted him to stop saying those things. All those things that couldn’t be true.
Ethan shook his head slowly and I wanted to slap him. I wanted to slap him so hard. Didn’t he understand what was happening? Couldn’t he see where this was all going to lead?
Did he need my pride, too?
“We can’t go back, Jules. It’s only forward for both of us. No matter how scary that is. Ask the question again, Carol. The one you asked us at the start of the hour.”
I blinked a few times and wiped the sleeve of my blouse across my nose.
