Company - Max Barry [21]
Elizabeth sits on the toilet and stares at the stall door. There's nothing particularly interesting about the door. That's why she's looking at it. Elizabeth has had a rough morning. Her stomach is tight. She has vomited. But it's not the individual issues that bother her. It's the thought that they may be symptoms. This is the third morning in a row she has been sick.
The realization has been growing in a corner of Elizabeth's mind for some time. Now she faces it, this tiny, wriggling zygote of knowledge. She mouths: I am pregnant. The words taste alien. There is an invader in her uterus.
She knows who the father is. She closes her eyes and puts her hand to her forehead. Yes, she falls in love with her customers, but she doesn't make a habit of sleeping with them. She's interested in relationships, not one-night stands. Except . . . it was the last day of the quarter and they were hammering out details over pizza and wine stolen from Marketing, and she was already in love with him even before he started talking about a “second round” of training. He was the personnel development coordinator of Forecasting and Auditing, and he hovered his pen above the dotted line, smiling, and said, “Sealed with a kiss.”
If he'd signed first, there would have been no problem. She found them less attractive once they signed. She would have shaken his hand, maybe kissed his cheek. But with the pen an inch from the paper, her adrenaline surging, and the wine buzzing in her brain, she kissed him, this man, who was then a customer and soon after transferred into Training Sales to become her colleague, and Roger kissed her back, and they had sex on his desk with her skirt bunched around her waist and the order forms scrunching beneath her buttocks. They didn't use protection, which seems idiotic now . . . but Elizabeth doesn't want to analyze this too deeply. She is single and thirty-six and was having sex for the first time in two years; it is not beyond the realms of possibility that a small, secret part of her—a part that has very little to do with selling training packages—performed an executive veto on the condom issue, striking it off the agenda, ensuring that the decision, much like Roger himself, slipped in without adequate review.
Near the end, she cried out that she loved him, and he said, “I love it, too,” which should have told her plainly enough that it was going to end badly. But she ignored it because she did love him, at least for a while, even when it was over and he was pulling up his pants, avoiding her eyes.
“We shouldn't tell anybody,” Roger said. “I'm not one of those men.”
“What men?” But he was scribbling his signature on the order and she felt the love draining out of her, dribbling away, even as an essential part of Roger did the same. Although, she realizes now, not enough of an essential part of Roger.
“You know. Men who do this.”
“Do what?”
He handed her the order. “Have sex with sales reps.”
He might as well have kicked her. She'd thought he was going to say “affairs.” She'd thought he was going to say “lose control.” She concentrated on tugging her skirt into place and let her hair fall over her face.
“Oh, don't be like that,” Roger said. “Come on. It was good.”
His transfer to Training Sales a few weeks later had nothing to do with her; she knows that. He is not pursuing her, hoping to make things right. At first she wondered, but then he arrived in the department and Sydney said, “This is Elizabeth,” and Roger frowned. It was a small frown, a wrinkle, but it conveyed his attitude clearly enough. She snapped her mouth closed on a more exuberant greeting and grew another small scar on her soul. But that didn't matter. Elizabeth has plenty of scars already. Her whole job is rejection; Roger's was merely her first for the day. If he wants to be a jerk about it, well, fine. Of course, she didn't realize quite how much of a jerk he wanted to be, but even so, it's not costing her any sleep. It takes more than a petulant ex-lover to upset Elizabeth.