Author's note: A two-part story this time (seems I'm getting more ambitious). Fair warning, though, there is not a lot of sex in part 1 (just a little bit). Hope you'll still choose to stick around for the story.
Paul and I had reached a milestone in our relationship. Our first fight.
I'm not a dogmatic person. This despite -- or more likely because of -- my religious upbringing. But there is one point on which I refuse to compromise. My ambition.
The world is full of women whose careers have been strangled in infancy by men, whose careers have been shot down in full flight by childbirth, and (worst of all) whose careers have succeeded only because of the help men gave them. I have vowed never to be one of those women. I don't mean I won't accept male help or mentorship (a vastly overrated concept, in my experience), rather that I will only take advantage of them in a spirit of cynical self-advancement. In other words, I play tough, and if that doesn't work, I play unfair.
So when Paul and I finally had a falling out, it was no surprise at all that the immediate cause was work. In truth it was a trivial thing, but underneath it all was a point of principle.
It happened on a Friday evening. I'd agreed to meet Paul in town for an after-work drink. We'd texted to and fro through the day, finally agreeing on a bar roughly halfway between our workplaces. While all this had been going on, one of the young developers -- not one of mine, I might add -- had got it into his inadequate male brain that late on a Friday afternoon was a good time to install an update on a customer system. As if violating this longstanding tech-world folk wisdom wasn't bad enough, he then went on and botched the install. When his changes went down screaming, there was no rolling back to the old system, not without losing all the orders that had been put through by his crap code. The only option was to fix the bugs and manually repair all the corrupted transactions.
All of which would have been someone else's problem were it not that Jamie Chen, his boss and my fellow project manager, was hundreds of miles away in an airport lounge.
So, like it or not, it was Lisa to the rescue. A complete shit-fest, in other words, and none of my own doing, but there I was in the midst of it all, in a filthy mood, splitting my time between glowering at the developer, pleading with my own crew to stay late and help out, and groveling before the customers -- all of whom were managerial types who hadn't the first clue about what was going on, an ignorance they saw fit to demonstrate by demanding the impossible and generally getting in the way.
By the time Paul got through to me I was covered in the blood of a bleeding martyr (metaphorically, I mean). When his first words were to complain about my not showing up at the bar, it's possible I was less than sympathetic in my response. "Screw you too then," he replied. "I'm going home." This was pretty stern stuff for Paul, the archetypal mild-mannered guy, but at that point in time all I could do was park his outrage at the bottom of my mental in-tray and get back to more immediate concerns.
It was after nine when the mess was finally sorted. Jamie, to her credit, had come in from the airport, arriving just as the dust was settling. I didn't notice her at first -- a shadowy presence hovering in my peripheral vision, as if reluctant to come forward. Understandable, I suppose. I would have loved nothing better than to relieve my frustrations by bawling her out with a few choice pieces of professional advice, but in truth none of this was her fault either. She had only just started that week (her business trip being a meet-and-greet with some of our more far-flung customers), so hadn't had the opportunity yet to make her mark, one way or the other. The whole catastrophe was more fairly described as a farewell gift from her predecessor.
When she finally did step up, she at least managed to look contrite. "Come on. Let me buy you a drink," she offered, "I feel I owe you one."
I certainly felt that someone owed me something, and seeing as she was the only one offering ... I was mentally exhausted from all the rushing about; dealing with Paul right now was the last thing I felt like doing. A drink, on the other hand, seemed like a very good idea.
I told her all about it as we walked to a nearby bar.
"Why don't you just apologize?"
"Because he knows. He's in the same business. Work is work and nights like tonight happen from time to time. It comes with the territory."
"Why didn't you just text him to say you'd be late?"
"I was preoccupied, okay?"
"Still. It might be diplomatic to say sorry."
"What? Just because I'm the one at fault?" I wasn't in the mood for that.
She acknowledged this with a short laugh, then looked at me shrewdly. "I do know one way that might make it easier to ask forgiveness."
"What's that?"
"Do something worse that he doesn't know about."
This made me sit up and take notice. We'd just arrived at the bar and my attention so far had been divided fifty-fifty between Jamie and getting some wine into me. It was a low-key sort of place -- in a generous frame of mind you might call it a cocktail lounge -- catering to the after-work crowd from the surrounding offices. Still fairly busy, this being a Friday night.
"Like what?"
"A girls' night out? I'm new in town and your plans for the evening appear to have fallen through."
A girls' night out didn't seem much of a crime. We were two girls. We were at a bar.
Ipso facto
, a girls' night out. Perhaps her standards for misbehavior were tamer than mine. Or perhaps she had something else in mind. Either way, I still wasn't ready to let the previous subject go.