My heart splits down the middle. There is a second when the world holds its breath and waits for me to choose. To step forward, to fling open the door and let him in.
He’s just said he loves me—present tense, not past—and he looks furious with himself for admitting it. Standing on my doorstep looking destroyed, telling me he loves me like it costs him everything to say it.
“I know you built IRIS,” he continues, voice gone gravelly. “I know exactly what you did for my company. How brilliant you are. Know how badly I fucked it up. How badly I let you down. I’m sorry. Christ, I’m so sorry.”
The tears spill over now, because he’s saying everything I wanted to hear, just far too late.
“You should sleep, Patrick,” I say, voice soft despite everything. “You look terrible.”
Something flickers in his eyes—surprise maybe, that I still care enough to notice.
“Georgie—”
“Please go.” The words come out as a whisper. “Please.”
I close the door in his face before I can do something appalling, like fling myself at him. Like tell him I love him too, present tense, always present tense.
I press my palms flat against the wood and listen. He’s still there. I can hear him breathing through the door, rough and broken. A full minute passes. Then another.
Finally, his footsteps fade away.
I slide down to sit on the floor, knees pulled to my chest.
Sometimes loving someone isn’t enough. Sometimes the damage is already done. And sometimes men only learn to say “I love you” after they’ve already destroyed everything.
FORTY-TWO
Men who fuck off to high mountains
Patrick
My fist comes downon Craig’s employee file photo hard enough to make everything on the desk jump.
Sarah lifts a brow from across the desk. “That behavior doesn’t really fit with the new company protocols.”
I sigh, ball up the picture, and throw it in the trash.
“Anything else you need clarified in the report?” she asks.
“It couldn’t be clearer.”
They convinced Georgie to come in yesterday, a “lessons learned” session, they called it. She didn’t have to do it. Couldhave told us all to fuck off. But she came anyway, because that’s who she is.
The report sits in front of me, each page worse than the last.
“When I explained technical concepts, Craig would interrupt to ‘translate’ for the room, as if everyone else wouldn’t understand me directly.”
“He constantly called my thoroughness ‘overthinking’ and my attention to detail ‘slowing progress’.”
“Every time I pushed back on unrealistic timelines, I was being ‘difficult’ or ‘not a team player’.”
“He joked about how I was playing with my Barbie Dream House when he was debugging COBOL. Made some of the sales guys laugh.”
“He got me to schedule all the meetings and take notes. He never asked male developers to do admin tasks.”
“He told me I should ‘smile more’ if I wanted to advance.”
“He asked if I was ‘hormonal’ when I disagreed with him in a meeting. In front of twelve people.”
