The next night, I arrange to have dinner with Luke in Brookline. I want to be on my own turf, just in case I need to storm out. Luke hates Brookline. He says it’s too congested and he can barely wheel around inside the restaurants. And everything has stairs and doors that don’t open automatically. He says it’s the most inaccessible place he’s been to. My argument is that there’s an older guy in a power wheelchair who always hangs out near my block, and that guy doesn’t seem to have any issues, so Luke needs to suck it up.
Anyway, he does suck it up. He meets me outside my building, waiting patiently in front of the flight of stairs to get to my front door. Funny how just the other day I was thinking that I should move soon to a place that Luke could get inside.
When I get outside, Luke seems very pleased to see me. He’s wearing his shirt and tie from work, but a more casual jacket on top of it because the weather’s gotten a bit nippy this week. He’s hair is tousled from the wind and his cheeks have a little bit more color thanks to our recent outings. He looks, actually, incredibly cute. Yeah, his body isn’t fantastic or anything. But it’s not “disgusting” like some of the people on the web implied. Not even close.
“I missed you last night,” he says to me, wheeling closer to me. “The meeting was so fucking boring. You were all I could think about.”
“I missed you too,” I say, but my voice sounds a little choked.
“Where do you want to eat?” he asks me.
I’m hoping he’ll start whining that all the restaurants are too small and crowded, but he seems in a great mood and genuinely happy to be with me, so he quickly suggests a burger place up Harvard Street that usually has free tables. “Sounds good,” I say agreeably.
We start up Harvard Street and Luke seems a little pensive. “I really am sick of these meetings,” he says.
“Well, nobody tells you to work so hard,” I point out.
“You’re right,” he says. “Actually, to be honest, I’m thinking of cutting back a bit. Or… a lot.”
“Really?” I’m shocked. This is the first time Luke has implied anything like that.
“I’m exhausted, Ellie,” he says. “I kept going because I was good at it and it was really the only thing in my life, but… now there are other things I want to focus on.”
“Oh? Like what?” Like killing puppies?
“Like you,” Luke says, looking up at me.
I swallow hard and am glad we’ve come to the restaurant, so I get a reprieve from this conversation. We place our orders, get drinks, and take our seats near the back. I know what I have to say to Luke, but the words are sticking in my throat. When I look at him, I can’t believe it’s true. I can’t. But it must be.
“Anyway,” Luke is saying, “I told Michelle that I’m absolutely not doing any more evening meetings unless—”
“Luke, are you planning to fire everyone at my company?”
Luke blinks. He leans back in his wheelchair. “What?”
“You heard me,” I say, my voice wavering only slightly. “Is that your plan? To fire everyone and replace us with kids who just graduated from college?”
“I’m not going to fire you, Ellie,” he says, his brow furrowed.
“But what about everyone else?” I press him.
He stares at me for a minute and rubs his forehead. Finally, he says, “Yeah, that’s the plan.”
At that moment, the waiter comes by with our burgers. The two cheese covered slabs of meat sit in front of us, but I have no appetite and I doubt Luke does either.
“So,” he says, “you finally learned to search the internet.”
“This isn’t a joke, Luke,” I say.
“No, it’s not,” he says. “And I told you before that when someone has a lot of power, people say vicious things about them. Things that aren’t necessarily true.”
“You just told me it was true!” I nearly cry.
“It’s not the entire truth,” he says. “I don’t fire anyone who doesn’t deserve to be fired. I have my people look at each individual and determine if they’re doing their job properly. If not, I let them go.”
“So you think nobody in my company is doing their job properly?” I shoot back. “They all deserve to be fired? Does that really make sense?”
“Ellie,” he says quietly, “are you aware that your company was struggling? In another year, it would have been belly up. That’s how I bought it so cheap. Your bosses were thrilled to sell to me.”
“That’s not true,” I say, although I’m not entirely certain of that. I heard some rumors that the company was having trouble making ends meet.
“It’s absolutely true,” he says. “And the reason for that was that there’s rampant waste in your company and people who are not doing their jobs.”
“That’s not true,” I say again, because I don’t know what else to say.
“For example,” he says. “Take your friend Jenna. You’re her boss. What exactly has Jenna contributed to the company recently? How has she made the company any money?”
I have a sinking feeling in my chest. “She debugged the Kingston software…”
“You mean the software that had to be recalled because it wasn’t working properly?”
Somehow I find myself thinking back to expository writing class in college. How Luke and I used to argue and somehow he’d always seem to get the better of me. But not this time. I won’t let him.
“What about that pregnant woman you fired that lost her house?” I point out.
“I didn’t know about the rule that pregnant women can get paid for not doing their jobs,” Luke says. “That woman hadn’t contributed anything of substance in a year. I logged two thousand games of solitaire on her computer. She actually had the nerve to complain when I blocked Facebook on the company computers. So yes, I fired her. And I know she’s written online that I drove her into preterm labor when I had security throw her out of my office, but she didn’t really leave me any choice when she burst in uninvited, screaming threats at me.” He shakes his head. “She sued me too. Did she mention that? She sued me for wrongful termination and a bunch of other bullshit charges. And I won, because every reason I had for firing her was entirely justified.”
As usual, he has an excuse for everything. And of course, it sounds so logical and rational when he says it. “So it doesn’t bother you at all to see people with families lose their jobs?”
“I give them a chance to pull their weight.”
“But asking them to work nights and weekends?”
He frowns. “If they’d do their goddamn jobs during the day, they wouldn’t need to put in nights and weekends.”
I don’t know what else to say. I look over at our uneaten food, slowly growing cold.
“Ellie,” he sighs. “You have a fantastic work ethic. You must have realized that a lot of your team wasn’t pulling their weight. I bet you were just doing all their work and not thinking anything of it. But you have to understand that you can’t do the work of an entire department. It’s because of your friends that you’re so concerned about that you were going to be unemployed in a year when the company failed.”
I want to believe him. It would be so much easier to believe him. But there’s still one more thing that’s tugging at the back of my mind. “What about Rita Barnes?”
“Rita Barnes?”
“She worked at a company you took over about a year ago,” I say. “She was a great programmer with a good work ethic and you laid her off.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know who she is and I didn’t fire her personally. But if she was fired, there must have been a reason.”
I feel unsatisfied by his answer. I pick up a napkin from the table and start fiddling with it.
“What do you want me to say, Ellie?” he asks. His eyebrows are furrowed and he looks nervous.
“I don’t want to see anyone in my company fired,” I say.
He doesn’t even hesitate. “Okay.”
“Okay? Just like that?”
He shrugs. “I’ll lose a few million dollars. It’s okay. It’s worth it.”
I’ve never heard anyone talk like that before. A few million dollars either way, no big deal.
“Are we okay then?” he asks.
I can tell he desperately wants me to say yes. And I want to say yes. I’ve been so happy with Luke the last few months. But I can’t get the things I read out of my head. I can’t stop thinking that there must be some truth in it.
“And what about the… you know, escorts?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “What about it?”
“A people on the web said that you went regularly?” I say. “Is that true?”
I look at Luke and he hesitates. I suddenly feel desperately ill. It’s true. My boyfriend has been having sex with prostitutes. Oh god.
“It’s not true,” he says.
“You hesitated.”
“I didn’t hesitate.” Luke’s eyebrows come together. “Ellie, I wasn’t lying about that. Come on, I told you it was a one time thing. It’s embarrassing to even talk about it, much less…”
I keep thinking of that post from the woman who claimed to be an escort. Is it possible all that was fiction? Is it possible that the dozens of people who hate Luke are all in the wrong? That their stories are all exaggerations?
“You don’t trust me anymore,” Luke observes. His voice is quiet, sad.
“I guess I don’t,” I admit.
“I was afraid this would happen someday,” he says. “I was just hoping it wouldn’t.”
Luke and I just sit there, not saying a word, not making any move to try to eat our cold burgers. I wish I could undo everything I read about him last night. Or at least, I wish it had never been written in the first place. But he’s right. I can’t trust anything he says anymore.
“I think I should go,” I say, rising to my feet.
Luke’s face fills with panic. “Ellie, no…”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I have to.”
“Tell me what to do,” he says. “Please, Ellie. Please tell me what I can do to make this right. I’ll do anything.”
For a second, I take his offer seriously. I try to think of something Luke could do that would change the way I’m feeling right now. But there isn’t anything. I don’t think I could trust him again. I don’t want to be with a man that other people think is a monster. I feel like everything Luke has ever told me has been a lie and you can’t be in a relationship when you feel that way about the other person.
“I’m sorry,” I say again, and just like that, it’s over.
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I’ve never cried over a boy before. I always thought of it as something that dumb angsty teenage girls do. That’s something I never was. Even as a teenage girl, I was smart enough to know that boys weren’t the most important thing in the world. Of course, I didn’t get any dates in high school, so that helped.
True to form, I don’t cry over Luke. Did you honestly think I would? Anyway, I don’t, or even close. I do feel shitty over the whole thing though. I find myself thinking about him a lot, picturing the look on his face when I walked out on him. And even though I don’t cry, I pick up the phone no less than three times with the intention of calling him and telling him I made a terrible mistake.
And yes, there’s a part of me that does feel like I made a mistake. I miss Luke. I want him back. I miss cuddling with him, I miss his smile, and I miss… well, you know. That.
And I did love him. I mean, how could I be so wrong about a person? Maybe he was really telling the truth about everything…
When I come to work the next morning, I tell Jenna that I broke up with Luke. My intention was to tell her first thing in the morning, but she was half an hour late. When I went to her empty cubicle at 9:15, I couldn’t help but remember what Luke said about work ethic and how the reason my company is failing is because ours is so poor.
In any case, Jenna looks horrified when I finally tell her about me and Luke. “What did you do that for?” she cries. “Now he’ll fire all of us!”
“No, he won’t,” I say, although I can’t help but feel a twinge of guilt. Before I broke up with Luke, he offered to save the jobs of everyone at my company. I’m guessing that offer no longer stands.
“Of course he will!” Jenna says. “We already know he’s an asshole. Why wouldn’t he fire us all? Especially now that you’ve pissed him off.”
“So it’s my responsibility to keep dating a guy that you think is an asshole?” I say. “Jenna, why don’t you date him then?”
To my shock, Jenna actually seems to sort of be considering this idea. This whole conversation makes me feel yet another twinge of sympathy for Luke. I wonder of all the women who have hit on him, how many have liked him for anything besides his money or power.
I finally send Jenna back to her cubicle to get back to work, but as Luke astutely pointed out, she hasn’t done anything worthwhile in years.
I’m going through and debugging some code when I hear some loud breathing that breaks me out of my coding trance. I look up and see Lewis standing over me. Yet another example of a person who manages to do very little work in the course of a given day.
“Ellie,” he says, “I just wanted to say that I heard that you and Luke Thayer broke up.”
He “heard.” I imagine that means he was eavesdropping on the conversation I had with Jenna.
“Yes,” I say.
His brow creases into an expression I’d imagine he thinks is “caring.” He puts his hand on my shoulder and I practically jump away from him. “I want to apologize,” he says.
“Apologize?”
“Yes,” he says. “For saying I lost all respect for you because you were dating Thayer. It took a lot of guts to break up with him, even knowing it was going to cost you your job.”
God, why do people keep saying I’m going to lose my job?
“Right,” I say. “Well, thanks.”
I feel like our conversation is done, but Lewis just stands there, leaning on the edge of my cubicle. I’m afraid he’s going to knock the wall down. I don’t know if he wants me to say anything, but I’m hoping if I look absorbed in my work, maybe he’ll leave.
“Ellie,” he says. (No such luck, I guess.)
“Uh huh?”
“I was just wondering,” he says casually, “if maybe you’d like to get dinner with me this Friday night?”
Oh yuck. Barf. I know that’s not a very mature reaction, but it’s the visceral response I get at the thought of going out on a date with Lewis.
“Um,” I say. “I’m sort of busy that night.”
“Well, what about Saturday?”
“I’m busy all weekend.”
“How about next weekend?”
Oh my god, does this man have no dignity he wishes to preserve? Does he not have any idea how to take a hint? Is he really going to make me tell him no a third time?
“I think my parents are coming into town next weekend,” I say. Or I’m washing my hair. Whatever. I’m not going out with you.
For a second, I’m sure that he’s going to ask me about the weekend after, but instead he just shakes his head and smiles, “Well, we’ll have to connect one of these days.”
God, I sure hope not.
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There’s something kind of classy about the way Luke doesn’t overwhelm me to get me back. He sends me flowers on the second day, a dozen roses left at my door step. The card says simply, “Forgive me. I love you, Ellie. –Luke”
He doesn’t call at all. Not even once. I understand that he’s trying to give me some space to work out my feelings as well as trying to maintain his own dignity. While I appreciate that, I also sort of wish he’d make some grand effort to show that he loves me, like sitting outside my window, blasting Peter Gabriel on a boom box. But that’s just not Luke’s style.
I guess one thing I appreciate is that he doesn’t fire everyone at my company. Everyone is on edge because Luke’s legend has grown in the months since he’s taken over the company, but there haven’t been any pink slips distributed yet. So far, everyone’s jobs are safe.
After a week goes by, Luke leaves a message on my voicemail. His voice is quiet, subdued: “Ellie, I just wanted to let you know that I have some meetings overseas so I’m going to be gone for a couple of weeks. I’ll have my phone, so if you feel like talking, well, give me a call. I… I love you.” I’m embarrassed to admit that I listen to the message a dozen times.
I want to call Luke back. I miss him. I don’t want to believe what people say about him on the internet. But as I scour the web for information about Lucas Thayer, I find that I’m unable to find even one positive comment about my ex-boyfriend.