Present 12 ♡ Not Enough

I made it to work the next Monday like I was a zombie and someone had eaten my brain.


It was early and most people hadn't arrived yet, so I sat at my work bench and prayed as I drank my coffee that it could help me clear my mind from the exhausting weekend.


My father and I had reached something of a truce, which I'd never have thought possible under different circumstances. He admitted as much. But there we were, with a shaky and weak relationship that was going to die soon with him and I didn't know how to handle that.


But work was my passion, and although the pain and discomfort where there in the back of my mind, I let creativity take over and direct my thoughts. I sketched concepts that could be combined, trying to look at clothes as though they were LEGO pieces beyond just combining different fabrics and prints. I started easy, using some skirts as reference. But as I moved on to bottoms and tops, I figured the actual key wasn't going to be in the patterns but in the sewing techniques. It could get complex to do this by hand and quickly enough to serve an oversaturated market by fast retail. But if we could do this with robots, programed to reproduce a certain set of combinations, then maybe we had a viable idea.


And by having a limited set of combinations, just wide enough that customers felt like they had good options and had fun coming up with their own designs, we could also minimize the issue of having so many variants that the volumes would be low, which would drive the costs up. Robots would be the one big investment we had to do to make this, but maybe there was some sort of government incentive with keeping production local.


I thought it was a worth pursuing, so I stood up from my work bench and looked around to see if Miguel was already in his office. He was on the phone, with his back turned to me and I wasn't going to interrupt a conversation that looked intense.


That was when I noticed it was later than I'd thought, somewhere mid morning. The office was already full of people, and every eye was on me.


"What?" I asked.


"Um," Marisol rolled her stool closer to me and said. "You may want to sit down."


I frowned but did so, wondering what was going on. She turned the screen of her iPad over to me and I started reading the email.


To: TROPICANA ALL


From: Jean Paul Mercier


Subject: Illicit Office Relationship


Hi all,


I'm writing to inform you that I have proof that Adele Holt and our new CFO are engaged in an unsanctioned relationship. This is extremely concerning, seeing as how this can be considered to give Miss Holt an unfair advantage over those of us whose performance is based solely on their own merit. I have added our HR team on CC to address this most unfortunate circumstance, and I present said proof in attachment.


The purpose of this email is to inform the Tropicana team that these kinds of things will not be tolerated by management. Therefore, Miss Holt is no longer part of this organization effective immediately.


Best,


JPM


With trembling fingers I opened the attachments. First there was a picture of me crying my eyes out in Miguel's arms in the stairs, which I recognized from last Friday after getting Schmitt's call. Second and even worse, was a picture of Miguel and I coming out of his apartment building hand in hand, and the third one was of us getting into my Jeep to drive up to my father's hospice.


I set down Marisol's iPad with much more calm than I felt. Furious didn't begin to describe what I was feeling. I felt violated. I felt like an idiot for letting this happen and worse of all, I felt humiliated at having such a difficult moment exposed like that in front of all my colleagues.


"Is it true?" Marisol asked in a whisper. The people around us leaned closer, to hear the answer.


But I wasn't going to give it. I just grabbed my bag and my phone, and tossed my badge in the trashcan. No one stopped me from leaving and I didn't wonder why.


I got on my car and drove away, but the bravado started to give away soon. I pulled into the parking lot of a Starbucks and broke down over my steering wheel. I banged my head against it once.


I should've stayed. I should've fought. But what was I going to accomplish with that when my psychopath ex-boss had it out against me? All that would've happened was me admitting that yes, Miguel and I were in some sort of relationship. I had no basis to say that didn't influence the decision for me to take on the app project. I could defend my hard work all these years all I wanted, but the truth was that it was buried under Jean Paul's successes, because everything he'd ever done had been stolen from me or my other colleagues.


And oh, God. Marisol and the rest were probably feeling so betrayed. I knew they liked me, but after a bombshell like this how could they keep any respect they had for me left?


My life at Tropicana was over.


What about Miguel?


The moment I asked myself that question, my cellphone started blowing up with phone calls from him. What I had feared at the beginning had come true. Getting involved with him, someone from work, had been the worst decision of my life. This was going to follow me in every professional venture as long as I stayed within this industry—and clothes were all I knew how to do or cared about. There was nothing else I could do that would be as fulfilling. I couldn't just give it up.


As his name dimmed from the screen of my cellphone and reappeared in it over and over, I wondered what the right thing to do was here. I wanted to run into his arms and cry and hear him say everything was going to be alright, but even though I knew he wasn't the one to blame for this, a niggling part of me said that if Miguel hadn't come back to my life none of this would've happened.


It took me a while to calm down enough to drive, but eventually I made it back to my apartment. Poonam and her boyfriend were at work, which was great. I needed to be alone. I turned off my cellphone and climbed into bed. But I couldn't sleep. The hideous email appeared in my mind every time I closed my eyes and it twisted my gut into knots. The son of a bitch didn't even have the balls to say this to my face.


I got publicly humiliated and fired by email.


My makeup smeared across the pillow case and I used it as a giant, fluffy tissue. There was so much pent up rage in my body that I kicked and punched my bed and everything on it. In the end, I decided to deep clean the entire apartment because that was going to be a much better use for my anger. I blasted Casual Friday Funeral and if any neighbor decided to call the cops, so be it.


Sure enough, after a while someone started banging on my front door. I ignored it, but a while went by with whomever still knocking on the door like it was their personal mission to get me to open it. I took a look at the peephole and it just made more tears cascade down my face.


"Go away," I said, but he probably couldn't hear over the sound of the music.


Miguel's expression was grim but he kept pounding on the door. A woman came over to him and I recognized her as one of the apartment managers. I actually didn't want to get into trouble with anyone, so I paused the music and opened the door.


"Everything okay over there?" the woman asked me, eyeing me with obvious interest. I was still in my nice work clothes, a plum colored dress that was currently accessorized with a polka dot apron, yellow rubber gloves and fuzzy slippers.


I gave her a wide, brilliant smile that fooled no one, especially since I knew my nose matched the color of my dress and my eyes could barely open anymore.


"Yes, everything is fantastic. Hope you have a great day."


Then I shut the door, but Miguel didn't even care that the manager of the apartment complex was there and started knocking again.


"Addy, please open the door."


"What for?" I asked from the inside.


"Let's talk, you can't just shut yourself off right now."


Like an idiot, I opened the door. But it was only so I could scream in his face, "I can do whatever the fuck I damn well please."


The manager raised her hands. "Um, please keep your voices down or I may have to call the authorities."


My fake bravado from earlier deflated. Really the last thing I needed was to get fined for a public disturbance, so I apologized and let Miguel into the apartment. But that didn't mean I had to cooperate. I left him there and went back into the bathroom, falling to my knees as I scrubbed the bathtub until it was clean enough to eat off of it. I could feel his presence behind me, but now that we were here he suddenly didn't know what to say.


"You should leave," I told him.


Miguel surprised me by answering, "No."


The cleaning brush fell from my hand. I twisted around to glare up at him.


"I shouldn't have let you seduce me. Now I don't have a job anymore and I'm possibly out of a career."


He choked up. "Seduce you? As in, you didn't want to be with me and I coerced you?"


My lips were trembling. I knew that wasn't it, at all. He hadn't had to convince me to go out with him, to sleep with him. I'd already done all that on my own at Page and Jace's wedding. With one look at him, I'd fallen. But right now I wasn't right in the head. I was grieving what could've been with a father who was dying and what had just happened at the office was something straight out of a telenovela. Clearly tragedy followed me where I went, and something terrible was bound to happen between Miguel and I soon.


Why not accelerate it? Why not cut my losses here? Everybody at work already thought I was a hussy who had seduced the hot new CFO and owner to advance her career. He'd be better off if we broke up and he returned to work a victim of my ploy. I was doing him a favor.


And so I said, "That's right."


Miguel drew in a shaky breath. His big body recoiled away from me and he took a step back. His eyes roamed over my face, trying to find the lie behind my words, but I put up an invisible wall between us.


"Are we done here?" I asked with the last shred of strength I had left.


Miguel swallowed, but the businessman look took over his facial expression. "I'll have your personal items delivered to you. Please make sure to return any proprietary assets or information back to Tropicana in the next twenty four hours."


"Fine," I bit out.


He wanted to say something else, but in the end he took one last look at the mess of a person I was and he walked out of the apartment. If I felt miserable before that, it didn't compare to what was left of me after he left.


Not only was I jobless now, but I had just ruined the best thing that had ever happened to me.





just in case you didn't think it could get any worse




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