Twitterpated (18 page)

Chapter 29

W
E’D TEXTED BACK AND FORTH
since Wednesday and exchanged e-mails too, but I wouldn’t let myself pick up the phone to call him until now, afraid of lacking the willpower to keep the conversation to a few minutes when I so badly wanted to talk to him for hours. I listened to the ringing, hoping he’d pick up, hoping I wouldn’t giggle like an idiot at hearing his actual voice.

He answered after the third ring. “Hi, this is Ben. You’ve reached my live voicemail. If this is Jessie calling to tell me your major project is done ahead of schedule, press one. If this is Jessie calling for any other reason, press two.”

Amused, I asked, “Isn’t it going to hurt your ear if I press a button?”

“This is Ben’s live voicemail,” he replied. “You have to follow directions.”

I pressed two.

“Ow.”

“I did warn you,” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s all going to be worth it if you pressed one. Turns out, I have no idea what the beeping sound means.”

I laughed.

“So what is it? Did you press one?” he demanded.

“Not exactly,” I hedged.

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’? One is one, not kind of one.”

“Well, two is made up of one plus another one, so it’s kind of the same thing.”

“You accountants and your funny math. You can’t run a business like that,” he said.

“Thank goodness I’m not running a business, then. Just trying not to run this one into the ground.”

“So you’re still in emergency mode?”

“I will be on Monday. I called it quits for today though.”

“Good for you. How many hours does that make for this week?”

“Seventy-five, maybe.”

“Ouch,” he said. “It’s that bad, huh?”

“Unfortunately. We have a huge report due to my boss by this coming Friday, and we’re working like crazy people to get it done.”

“Wow. That does not sound fun.”

“Uh, hold on . . . Nope, I can’t think of anything less fun.”

“So is this a brain break for you?”

“No. Like I said, I’m done until Monday. I thought maybe if you had some free time before then, we could hang out or something.”

“Hang out or something, huh?”

I held my breath while he paused, hoping he’d take the offer. But when he spoke again, my heart sank.

“I’m sorry, Jess.” He sighed. “I would love to, but I think I’d feel like you were squeezing me into your schedule, and I don’t want to go there again. I want to be with you and not wonder if your mind is on all the work stuff you’ve got to deal with or could be dealing with if you weren’t with me. I’ll wait out your deadline and see if things calm down for you.”

All I could come up with was a lame, “Oh. I see.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, but even in my best weeks, I put in more than forty hours. I don’t know what to do about that,” I said.

“You’re generous with your time, considering you don’t get paid for the extra,” he said.

“I guess. It’s just that I’m a new manager, and I don’t want them to regret promoting me, so . . .”

“That translates to a lot of hours?”

“Basically.”

“Has anyone suggested that you shouldn’t have been promoted?”

“Yeah. It’s kind of stressful.”

“Who said that? Your boss?”

“Well, no, not Dennis,” I conceded. “Actually, it was—”

“Craig?” he finished for me.

“Craig.” I sighed.

“So you’re working yourself into a stroke because Craig said ‘Nanny nanny boo boo?’” Ben sounded frustrated. And condescending. It irritated me, and I didn’t say anything.

Ben didn’t say anything either for a moment and then mumbled, “I’m sorry. That was lame.”

“Apology accepted.”

He sighed. “Do you ever feel like Craig’s pushing your buttons just to see if he can?”

“It’s not like that. Craig is obsessed with climbing the corporate ladder, which is fine, but Dennis Court watches our teams pretty closely, and I need to make sure I’m staying on top of things so I don’t look bad by comparison. And I need to set a good example for the people I manage too. It’s not just Craig,” I said, hating the defensive note in my voice.

“Does Dennis require anyone else to work so many hours?”

“No.”

“Does anyone else work so many hours on their own?”

“Sure, sometimes,” I said, feeling like I was standing on more solid ground.

“But not all the time? Not as often as you?”

I didn’t answer.

“Jessie?” he coaxed. “Does anyone work as much overtime as you?”

I wasn’t in the mood to hand him my psyche and have it returned sliced and diced. “What’s your point, Ben?” I bit out, despite the fact that his questions were both patient and reasonable. “That I work too much? You’d have to stand in line behind my mother, all of my sisters, and Sandy to take your shot at beating me over the head with that news flash.”

“Whoa. I’m not trying to pick a fight here. I’m trying to understand why you push so hard,” he said.

“I told you, I like to be the best,” I said.

“The best overworked and underpaid accountant at Macrosystems?” he asked.

“Why is this such a big deal to you?” I asked him. “Didn’t you say you had to put this kind of time in when you first started out?”

“I did. But it was totally different. I was working for myself, building a big enough client base so I would never have to work eighty-hour weeks again. And I don’t. I work a regular week now, and all the money goes straight to
my
company, not someone else’s. I set my hours and my terms, and that’s exactly how I want it. But I paid a price to get here because I’m looking around at friends who are married and having kids and trying to figure out how I let that pass me by. Don’t you worry about that?” he asked softly.

“No. This isn’t going to go on forever.”

“Let me ask you this. When is the last time you worked only forty hours in a week?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t remember.

“How about a vacation?” he pressed. “Have you taken off a week or more in the last year?”

“Sure. I visit my parents a few times a year.”

“For how long? Over holiday weekends?” he challenged me.

Yes. I never missed more than a day or two of work if I planned it that way. But I didn’t want to admit it.

“Why is this a big deal?” I asked again. “We barely know each other. There’ll be plenty of time to get this figured out if we’re still hanging out later.”

“You keep using that phrase, ‘hanging out.’ Or calling us friends. Or talking about later like it’s the distant future.” He sounded frustrated, and I heard him draw a deep breath and sigh. “I didn’t want to do this, but I’m going to lay out my reality for you. I’ve been in Seattle for almost five months, and I have a six month contract. All my stuff and most of my clients are back in Arizona. I came up here to get a job done and clear my head, and I have. I’m as clear as I’ve ever been on one thing: I don’t want to be your friend or your hangout buddy or your side project or your part-time boyfriend.”

“What do you want?” I almost whispered. Ben was leaving?

“You,” he said. “Not your leftover time and energy. I thought you felt the same crazy click I did from the first time we talked on the phone. I hoped that meant you would want to spend as much time with me as I do with you. I feel like an idiot even having to tell you I’ve only got a month left here so that maybe you’ll want to hang out with me more instead of giving this thing between us time to do whatever it’s going to do on its own. I just—”

He paused for a breath, but the revelation of his contract expiration had stolen my breath, and I didn’t say anything.

“You say we barely know each other, but I disagree, Jessie. Big time.” He sighed, and it sounded so frustrated. “I know you make me laugh, and you make me think. You have an amazing mind, and you’re incredibly disciplined. But when you relax, something different happens, and I see something inside of you that drives me to know more. I could spend months learning new things about the way you work and look at the world. But I don’t have months. I have one month.”

“Ben . . .”

“I’m a risk taker with good instincts, and every one of them is telling me that time with you is the best investment I’ll ever make. Tell me how I convince a risk-averse accounting genius to see it the same way.”

“Ben . . .” I trailed off again. I had no idea what to say. Funny, laid-back Ben had disappeared, replaced with this intense Ben who unnerved me and fascinated me at the same time.

“I know you want time to think this over. And as much as I want to hoard every free hour you have, I do respect that you have a deadline next week and a job to do. So how about this? Don’t answer. Think about what I said. And if you’re feeling even half the impulse that I am to explore whatever is going on between us, come to dinner at my place next Saturday, after your deadline is done. You don’t even have to call and let me down easy if you decide this isn’t what you want. If you don’t show up, I promise to leave you alone, and if you do, we can talk this out and see if there’s even any reason to worry about where I’m going to be at the end of the month. Okay?”

“Okay.” Bewilderment swirled in my brain, like when my sisters used to twirl me too fast on the death trap of a merry-go-round at the playground near our house. Even as I begged them to stop, I reveled in the giddy, dizzy thrill of whirling out of control. As a kid, as soon as they let me off and I caught my breath, I’d screw up my courage and hop right back on, spinning around like mad again. It was tricky though. They never slowed down, so I had to pick my moment to leap.

This time, though, Ben had stopped the ride to give me a breather. And I already missed the thrill, but I didn’t know if I had the guts to make the leap again.

Chapter 30

I
DON’T USUALLY PAY ATTENTION
to the passage of time. I work until the job is done, or I fall asleep, whichever comes first. Then I start again the next day. Watching time drag by on a clock was a Ben-related phenomenon. The last twenty minutes before I knew I’d see him were always the worst. Imagine, then, how painfully slowly the weekend passed. The seconds stretched like pulled taffy, time morphing beyond recognition. I couldn’t even imagine enduring the rest of the week.

Saturday after I got off the phone with Ben, I went home and collapsed, sleeping the afternoon away and then hitting a movie with Sandy, an independent film she had picked to “expand our cultural horizons.” It was mostly independent of a plot or good acting, but chock full of people sitting around and staring at each other meaningfully. Oh, and the director had included at least two dozen artistic shots of rain. Rain on a child’s face, rain on a car window, rain on a beach, rain on a dog.

I live in Seattle. I was over it.

I tolerated Sunday only because I threw myself into my Primary lesson and taught it with so much energy and enthusiasm that one of my kids offered to share his ADD meds with me. At home, I tried to do the thing where you lose yourself in service so you can forget your problems, but when I baked cookies for my visiting teaching sisters, I burned the first batch while I mooned over Ben. The second batch looked fine, but a nibble revealed I had oversalted the dough, so I pitched the batter and spent the rest of the day trying to work through
Jane Eyre
for the fourth time. Not my fourth time finishing it, my fourth time trying to get past the halfway point.

By midevening, my nerves reached the snapping point. I pounced every time my phone rang, but each time, it was friends or family calling to catch up. When the phone shrilled for the fifth time with someone other than Ben on the caller ID, I gave it up as a lost cause and turned the phone off.

Sandy wandered in from her room with a book in her hand, her finger marking her spot in
Healing the Inner You.
“You should read this,” she said. “I’m learning a lot. For example, did you know that whatever our predominant emotion is, it’s almost always just a masking emotion for something else?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “So what your book is saying is that whatever I’m feeling is not what I’m really feeling? That makes total sense.”

“You keep joking, but you’re as messed up as me in a whole different way, girl-who-haunts-her-phone. You’d be having a more satisfying life experience if you did a little soul-searching.” She floated toward the kitchen with a serene New Agey expression on her face.

“You know, there’s a book I could suggest that would probably do more to help you figure out your life than anything you’ve picked up so far,” I said with a grin.

She poked her head back around and scowled. “No church talk. It’s on my list of stuff to work through, but I’m not there yet.”

I held up my hands in surrender and tried out an innocent expression.

She rolled her eyes. “Seriously, you need to think through your emotions. Avoiding them isn’t helping you.”

She reached for a cookie, and I decided not to warn her about the measurement mishap. It served her right for snitching. And pointing out uncomfortable truths. She took one bite and spit it out. “Mean,” she said.

“No one told you to take it.”

“Point goes to Jessie,” she grumbled and then fished a yogurt from the fridge and retreated to her room.

I dumped the rest of the salty cookies into the trash and considered her advice. I had nothing else to do. Maybe I should muck around in my muddle of feelings to see what I could find. In my room, I stretched out across my bed, feet propped against my wall in my favorite thinking pose. Trying not to think about Ben certainly hadn’t gotten me anywhere, so I gave in and brooded over him instead.

I peeled back the lid I kept on my feelings and stirred them up a bit, examining each one that rose to the surface. Anxiety and curiosity mingled with longing and insecurity and anger.

What?

I separated anger out to study more closely. Why was I mad?

It was a subtle feeling, much less obvious than when my temper flared over Craig’s antics. But anger definitely underlined some of the other anxiety and insecurity. I explored the possibility of being mad at Ben, but I didn’t turn up much. While I didn’t love his Saturday ultimatum, I understood why he’d given it. Kind of. He didn’t exactly demand that we do things on his terms, but he controlled the pace right now. I found that uncomfortable. But not maddening.

Something else was at work here. Frustration, confusion . . . about what? Ben had been direct in his intentions. I was the problem.

Wait.
I was the problem
.

My confusion frustrated me. I felt like every dumb girl in every dumb chick flick I’d ever seen who gets in her own way with the guy she likes. She has commitment issues or workaholic tendencies, and it makes the audience want to whack her in the head with their overpriced theater sodas and say, “Go for it, already! We want the big kiss!”

Maybe I needed my own head whacked, but for the first time ever, I found myself in sympathy with the Dumb Girl in the chick flick. If I were living a movie, I’d take a long walk in the rain, leave a voicemail at work that I wouldn’t be back, and then I’d drive over to Ben’s house in soaking wet clothes but perfect makeup and pound on his door. It would fly open, and I would profess my idiocy and my love, and we’d have our own big kiss. So exciting.

In my real life though, I felt something more like a boring responsibility to my job and absolute confusion about Ben. Was Ben even the right guy for me? He respected my commitment to my job but not enough to tolerate the long hours it sometimes demanded. Driven women attracted him, but it hadn’t worked out for him before, so maybe that wasn’t what he really wanted. Did I want to risk another relationship implosion if he changed his mind? I thought about the year after my breakup with Jason, the days where it was hard to even get out of bed and face the day because the hurt made it hard to breathe after losing someone who had been woven into my life’s fabric. I wasn’t sure I had the emotional currency to invest in a compromise that would let Ben in further but that also might fall apart. Who knew how different our priorities would be if we sat down and hashed it all out. The more entangled we were with each other, the worse it would feel if I wasn’t what he really wanted after all.

Tension squeezed the back of my neck, sending a headache creeping behind my eyes. It matched the twisting in my gut as I examined each fear, looking for a resolution. Ben embodied the guy every girl wanted; he had success, good looks, a sense of humor, and a testimony. He treated me like gold, and if I were a braver girl, I’d go tearing down the freeway in search of my movie ending on his doorstep.

Instead, indecision paralyzed me and made me furious with myself.

Rolling off the bed, I landed on my knees and took some of my dad’s advice. God probably wondered what had taken me so long. Offering a simple thank you for my many blessings, I then asked for clarity and courage to find the right course. Then I collapsed back into bed, exhausted, and listened until I fell asleep.

* * *

When Monday dawned, for the first time in a month, I welcomed my alarm clock’s announcement of a new work week. At least with work, I could concentrate on something other than Ben.

Ha.

I sat in our Monday management meeting and watched Craig do his thing. He wore a lavender shirt with shiny gray trousers, a skinny man belt and pointy-toe shoes. His hair didn’t move with the roar of air from our overtaxed office heating vent, and his voice maintained a pleasantly calculated cadence. Surveying the faces of the other managers, I saw one woman listening with a dopey smile on her face. The other women were all married and indifferent to his show. The men mostly watched with polite interest, one of them contributing a head nod here and there. A couple of people jotted notes, but I suspected it was only to convince Dennis that they were paying attention.

Craig concluded his update about three minutes after he should have and sat down with a self-satisfied smile. The group moved on to the next report without any discussion, leading me to wonder how Craig could dominate so much of my work energy when he barely registered as a blip on anyone else’s radar. Did I rate any higher than he did with my peers? Surely hours and hours of extra work deserved some type of recognition.

Three more managers presented their productivity recaps and outlined their tasks for the current week, and then it was my turn. Normally, I said my piece and hurried to reclaim my seat as someone who didn’t enjoy public speaking. Today, I paid closer attention to people’s expressions while I delivered my weekly report. The captain of Craig’s fan club had lost her grin and now looked moderately bored. Other than that, I faced the same range of disinterest to polite attention that Craig had faced.

For some reason, this floored me. How could I have pulled in my team and invested twice as much time as Craig had last week and garnered exactly the same level of inattention and, in a couple of cases, borderline disrespect? I made my report succinct and sat down to consider this.

Somewhere between my promotion and this latest project, my focus had switched from doing the best job I could to beating Craig. I told Ben I liked to be the best, but I realized that wasn’t strictly true; I liked to give everything my best, but I disliked competition. It didn’t matter whether I beat someone else as long as I met the standard I set for myself. Often I ended up “winning” anyway, but it was a fringe benefit, not a goal. So why this fixation on Craig? True team spirit would be congratulating him if he improved the company’s profitability, not pushing to keep a foot on his neck in a mad scramble upward.

I thought back to the view from the Space Needle, the moment of clarity I had when I realized how small Macrosystems measured in the big picture. Craig’s significance measured even smaller compared to the important people in my life. It bothered me that it was so hard to maintain that perspective in the middle of things. When the morning briefing ended, I walked back to my office in deep thought, oblivious to the swarm of cubicle dwellers rushing around me. Katie had to shift out of my office door so I wouldn’t collide with her on my way in. Only her amused, “Jessie?” dispelled my daze.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. What’s up?”

“Are you trying to drive me to quit or to the nuthouse?” she asked.

“What?” I felt cotton-headed.

“The raging shred and copy piles? Really?”

“Sorry about that,” I said, finally picking up the thread of the conversation. “Mike and I audited a couple more months on Saturday.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t a couple of years? Those are huge piles,” she said.

“No, I promise. We didn’t have the stamina for more.”

“I guess the piles you made reproduced and spawned more evil paper files. This is going to take all morning.”

“Don’t worry about it. Do what you can, and I’ll make Mike work through his lunch to finish whatever you don’t.”

“You’re the best boss ever.” She grinned, satisfied. She whirled around and hurried to share her good news and his bad news.

I shook my head and opened up my e-mail, hoping maybe something from Ben might be waiting for me. Nothing more than the usual clutter of spam and family messages filled the screen. I guess he really meant that he would wait to talk to me until Saturday. If I showed up. I mean, he had practically
threatened
me with a define-the-relationship talk. No one with good sense would walk into one of those if they saw it coming.

But . . . I wanted to see him, no question there. And the crazy hours were paying off; the report would be ready on Friday. I could easily meet that condition, but more than that held me back. I was caught on my own mental merry-go-round, spinning the same questions around like mad. If I showed up, what was I agreeing to? That I would hang out with Ben for a month and then wave bye-bye, like he hadn’t gotten under my skin? That if we totally clicked for a month, I’d accept a long-distance relationship when he went back to Arizona? Would my showing up to Ben’s house signal my readiness for some kind of leap? Of faith? Of hope?

I closed my e-mail in frustration and clicked open the next report in the massive string of remaining files to audit. Thinking about Ben accomplished nothing. I got off task and confused, and I found no answers. At this rate, not only would I not “beat” Craig, but I’d also fall far short of my own expectations. I had no answers and no time to find them while we hit the home stretch of prepping our presentation for Dennis. I told myself to get through five more long, fatiguing days in the office, and then I would think about Saturday and what to do.

I had that conversation with myself on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I had that conversation with Sandy when she asked why Ben hadn’t been over in a while. Her side of the conversation involved a whole lot more answering back and sassiness than when I talked to myself, but the gist was the same. I would think about Saturday when I finished this stupid report. I mean, this incredibly important report.

The conversation would not go away.

I suppressed it, repressed it, oppressed it, and ignored it. It lingered there, asking, “What are you going to do about Saturday?”

I desperately wanted to see Ben. But I didn’t feel ready to sign up for a new complication. For the fiftieth time since hearing the news, I cursed his contract expiration. The curse sounded something like, “Dadgum-shoe-licking-ditch-dwelling-puppy-kicker-of-a-contract.” Which almost covered my utter contempt for its existence. Almost. It would take real curse words to encapsulate my full loathing. I needed more time with him. Way more.

Grrr. Thursday offered me my only break from the stupid internal argument. In the insane crunch of last-minute preparations for the presentation, the question of what to do drowned in a sea of spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides as I worked with my team to polish our projections for Dennis. Once, late Thursday as I drifted out of an argument between Mike and Doug the New Hire about whether blue or red looked better in the slide background, the dilemma intruded again. In barely over twelve hours, this whole project would be over, and I’d have all day Friday to think about anything besides our audit findings. I’d
have
to spend it figuring out the best thing to do. I wanted to show up at Ben’s on Saturday, but that didn’t make it a smart move. I distracted myself with a meditation on why Doug the New Hire held that title when he’d been with us for almost three months.