Slut shaming—not my classiest move but always an easy insult and deflection againstSocieteur Magazine’s Bachelor of the Year.
“Ignite profiles are full of men who refer to women as ‘females’ or want someone who ‘doesn’t take herself too seriously,’” I continue. “Translation: ‘Don’t take yourself seriously, because I never will.’ Face it, your app doesn’t respect women.”
“And that’s what Fate is doing? Respecting women? Are you respecting that women might want something other than The One?”
I let out a huff, knowing he’s right but too pissed off to admit it. Instead, I say, “You sound like an after-school special. Do you ever even get past date number one, or do the women you date manage to look past your personality to stick around for the press?”
“First dates are better than no dates at all. Or has Susie finally allowed you to find time in your schedule togo on one? I hope you’re getting credit for being single and sexless for the rest of your life.” His eyes roll as if that would be his worst nightmare.
“Not everything is about gaining credit. It’s about gaining favor. Something you’ve never had to work for!” Sensing our bosses catching up with us, I lower my voice for my closing argument. “Go back down to your floor, Wankcroft, or ideally to hell.”
A look of disappointment washes over his face as he presses the elevator call button, but it’s gone in a flash, replaced with the usual cool composure. The lift dings as it arrives to take him down to the Ignite office, a floor below Fate’s.
“Fine, I will,” he relents, stepping into the silver room. The lights from the lift cover him in an angelic glow as he waits for me to join him, but there is no way I’m sharing a confined space with him. Not for one second.
“Good. Tell the rest of the demons I said hi.” I smile, waving him off with a brief feeling of pride at getting in the last word.
In a previous life, we were able to sit in a room together without glowering icy stares in computer screen light and rolling eyes over break-room coffee. We used to be cordial colleagues, workmates, peers. We used to be friends. Now, we act like rivals on a battlefield, waiting for the other to make the first antagonistic move of the day, setting off our cycle of slights, jabs and cuts. We pretend this is how it’s always been betweenus. We pretend that talking every day for a year never happened. We pretend a lot of things never happened.
“It’s OK, Hastings. I’ll keep your secret.” Bancroft gives me that smirk one final time as he presses his floor number. “But I think we both know... you enjoy being on top of me all day.” The elevator doors push together, and I am left with cheeks flaming.
It’s pure pissed-off-edness seeping from my pores. At him, at Susie, but mostly at myself. Even when we used to be friends, he was always faster than me. A childhood surrounded by accomplished industry titans and a private school education will do that to you. Now, he exclusively uses said quickness to charm others or leave me flustered and scrambling for words.
I’m pissed off at myself for not trying harder to beat him; I should be doing more to prove I can win. Maybe if I had a square jawline, a playboy reputation and Daddy’s money I could be as laid-back about my job as he is.
Remembering the impending panel talk, I frantically press the call button so I can head to my office to spend the next hour learning everything I can about tonight’s panelists. It shouldn’t be too hard, considering I organized the entire event, but buzzing nerves are taking up more and more space in my brain with each passing minute. My stomach churns at the thought of presenting to one hundred of London’s most eligible single women. Fate users are confident, successful high achievers, usually with their own businesses or very seniorpositions at the top companies in the city. It would make far more sense for Susie to be presenting tonight; she belongs up on stage in front of those women. She’s a tech titan who, in her heyday, graced the covers of magazines and had millions flocking to her TED Talks about female empowerment. I’m not even qualified to be in the room. Stepping into the lift, I close my eyes, and take three long, deep breaths.
I am enough, I belong here, I fucking deserve to be here.
2
My whole body aches as I drag myself and an oversize duffel bag of Fate merchandise up the creaky stairs of the old town house to my flat, as quietly as I can, trying to avoid summoning Bertie, the anecdote-prone elderly man who lives downstairs. Usually, I’d quite happily sit on our steps and listen to his often thirty-minute-long stories about when he ran around the city with a group of punk activists, but tonight I need to hold on to the little brainpower I have remaining to create the expenses spreadsheet Susie emailed me about five minutes before I arrived at the panel talk. My eyes can barely stay open in the blue glow of my phone screen.
She wants me to sort through over forty images of receipts into a comprehensive spreadsheet by tomorrow. Of course, she couldn’t have told me the finance team needed it any earlier than the night before the deadline.
Finally up the three flights of stairs, I throw the bag and my jacket to the ground and immediately flop onto the pink squishy sofa we found on Facebook Marketplace, its miscellaneous stains strategically covered by a yellow cable-knit throw andbaby-blue-striped cushions. I start looking through the images Susie has sent, and my heart sinks. There is a blurry receipt for a plethora of espresso martinis at a Soho members’ club (I guess I’ll mark that under “client meeting”), a month’s worth of lunch receipts and at least fifteen separate receipts from Wilfred’s, the fancy coffee shop that Bancroft also frequents. I stop at an invoice for two tickets to an exclusive European music festival with the words “client gift” scrawled at the top. Furrowing my brow, I zoom in to the price: £1,935 for two VIP tickets.
I google the date of the festival and cross reference it against Susie’s calendar: she was away for four days including the two festival days and I find them marked as a vague and unhelpful “business trip.” I make a mental note to ask her about it in the morning.
My flatmate, Yemi, walks in and sits beside me, nudging the bag out of her way with her foot. She is the Director of Analytics at Fate and my idol. The day she told me she loved nothing more than finding a hidden gem thrift shop and buying a wardrobe’s worth of clothes for fifty pounds I suspected that I’d met a friend for life. I confirmed this when, the morning I walked in with pale skin, greasy hair and puffy eyes from a weekend of crying over William, she left the office with me at lunch and helped me pack up my things, insisting I stay on her sofa for as long as I wanted. When her lease was up, we found both our flat and Alice, our other flatmate, on an online listing and lived happily ever after.
“How did it go?” Yemi asks as I curl up into the sofacushions. I instinctively lean against her and she puts an arm around me.
“The panel?” I say, then shrug. “I stumbled my way through without any major mishaps. It would have been a lot better if it were Susie though.”
I caught Yemi up via text when I couldn’t get the tube home with her as usual; the messages hadn’t reached her until she was already home.
“You should have told me earlier—I would have come and helped.”
I sigh. “It’s OK. We didn’t both need to suffer.”
“Are you doing her expenses now too?”
I’m used to the never-ending last-minute tasks from Susie, but Yemi looks so pained as she strokes my heavy head that Bancroft’s words from earlier echo through my head until they reach my lips.
“I should just tell her I’m not doing bullshit like this for her anymore.”
I have this thought every few weeks, when the feelings of ineptitude and exacerbation spill over the edges of my willpower. I start tapping out an email to Susie. As I’m typing the third long-winded, groveling sentence about being “on the verge of professional burnout,” Yemi bats the phone out of my hand onto the thick patterned rug below us.
