Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
ariana
“You know that if you tell me something, I won’t automatically tell your brother, right?”
Arden hands me the iced coffee she made, falling onto the couch beside me. She pulls the knitted blanket over both of our laps, looking at me with pure sincerity.
I believe her, but that’s the problem. I don’t want her to have to keep secrets from Carter. That isn’t setting them up for success. It makes me a terrible sister and an even worse friend. I have no place in their relationship, and that’s the way it should stay.
“It’s nothing.”
“Stop saying that,” Arden snaps, but it’s gentle. Her dark eyes burn into my face. “If there is one thing I’ve learned from being with your brother, it’s that bottling things up only hurts you, it doesn’t help you.”
“I just know how he gets.”
“Carter?”
I dip my chin, bringing my straw to my mouth.
Yeah, Carter. When people hurt me, he wants to hurt people.
He’ll obsess over this. Whip out his phone, try to figure out a way to handle this with his connections.
He would never call Dad because he knows I’d kill him for it, but he’d want to make this right. To fix it. For me.
I’m a grown woman now. I need to fight my own battles.
I can’t tell you the amount of trouble he has gotten into in my honour.
Half of his assault charges should be mine.
He just got his life somewhat on track. He’s been behaving.
He found someone he loves and enrolled himself in both therapy and anger management.
I can’t do this to him anymore.
Arden stares at me for a couple of seconds and then slowly places her glass on the coffee table. When she straightens, she takes in a big breath and meets my eyes.
“Did someone hurt you, Ari? Because you might not want your brother to get his hands dirty, but I can also kick some ass, and I’m genuinely starting to worry that you’re running from something.”
I snort a laugh. “No. Not physically…just…Roger.”
Arden’s brows skyrocket. “Roger?”
“He’s the firm’s Interior Architect, and I was the Creative Director. I just took over when his brother-in-law left, and he…he made my life a living hell. That’s all.”
It was the job of my dreams. The salary increase was life-changing and I deserved it.
I deserved it.
And it’s gone.
“How?”
I sigh. It’s a long, painful story. I spent years at that firm, working my way up from the depths of hell.
I earned degree upon degree to make sure I was overqualified, so nobody could ever look down their nose at me.
Roger always did anyway. It didn’t matter if I got my Master’s in Computer Science just to elevate my status and my usefulness—to ensure that we had a software designer and developer in-house, so that I could successfully monitor a team if needed, and make certain that branch of the work was being done properly.
I’ve saved that place from many binds because I could do that work on top of my actual duties, which are nowhere near the same field.
I bled myself dry for that firm, only for Roger to spit on all my successes and destroy all my progress.
“Putting me down. Cutting me off in meetings. Rolling his eyes at my ideas,” I explain, and Arden’s face falls.
“He ensured that he put roadblock after roadblock in front of my projects. It was a nightmare. A literal, waking nightmare. But I just kept my head up and my shoulders back and tried to pay my dues.”
“Did he want the position or something?” she asks.
I shake my head, a solemn feeling in my chest. “No, I think he just wanted someone with a penis to have it instead.”
Arden’s eyes harden with realization. She lets out a long, angry breath through her nose and reaches forward, placing her hand on my knee. “What the fuck did he do?”
Because she’s a woman, and she can read between the lines.
My throat bobs, but I refuse to cry over this anymore. I didn’t do anything wrong. He did. They did.
“Locked me in a room and screamed in my face for about ten minutes. Shoved me against the wall when I tried to leave. Hard. I refused to respond and refused to cower, and that made him angry.”
Arden goes scarily still.
“When I reported him and they started an investigation, it was very clear that I was making too much of a fuss and it was pissing off the bigwigs. He cried and whined and had already gone out for drinks with the whole roster of them hundreds of times before I was ever employed there. It was more of a ‘take the money and leave’ request than a firing. But I knew if I didn’t, I’d eventually be forced out of the door with no money anyway, so… ”
“So, you took the severance.”
“Like a pathetic, spineless coward,” I whisper, ashamed of myself.
I was ashamed the moment I signed the paper.
I gave up, just like that. They got what they wanted from me that easily.
I, Ariana Forkerro, didn’t even fight. “I was just…so tired, Arden. So tired of dealing with Roger every single day, tired of nobody believing me, tired of exhausting myself for a job that didn’t care to keep me. ”
And then they started the smear campaign. My coworkers were told that I was making baseless accusations. That I was bullying other staff. That Roger had been a victim of my apparent tyranny.
“You’re not a coward. Don’t talk about yourself like that.”
But I am. They’re going to get away with it and potentially do it to someone else because I walked away in exchange for some cash in my bank account that hasn’t been deposited yet.
“I was just…done, Arden. I had no fight left in me.”
“And that’s okay. I don’t think you would walk away from anything if you weren’t prepared to leave it, Ari. You did what was best for you in the moment, and honestly, that doesn’t seem like a place that you want to work at, anyway.”
Every morning, I would wake up saying that I was going to change the optics of that firm. I was going to make them like me, make them see me, value me, and every night I’d go home and cry myself to sleep, knowing I might never win this particular battle. I might die in the field while I tried to.
“My career is the only thing I’m good at.”
“Wrong. You are exceptional at a lot of things. Work is just one of them,” Arden says, shooting me a look of warning, and I nod because I’m scared she’ll strangle me if I don’t believe her.
“And you’ll find another position at another firm—in California, in Colorado, in Pittsburgh, if you want, and you will thrive.
The world is yours for the taking. You’re Ariana Forkerro. Nobody says no to you.”
I can’t help the smile that blossoms on my face, but then her words hit me. Really hit me. An idea sprouts in my head and takes root. That’s never a good thing. I don’t tend to let things go once I decide I want them.
What if I did find a job in Pittsburgh? I hate the weather, but my brother is here.
I’d endure any weather to see him more often.
Plus, I’d get breaks away from my parents.
I didn’t miss the way my dad looked at me when I told him I lost my job.
He’s never been disappointed in me before.
I’ve always been his shining star. I never want to feel the way I did when I realized I wasn’t living up to my potential ever again.
I’d rather formulate my successes in private and present him with the finished product, smiling and proud, without the wounds it took to get there being visible to him. I could do that if I left California.
“Roger said no to me. Multiple times. So did my firm.”
“But they’re sexist, disgusting pigs,” Arden snaps quickly. She flashes me a menacing smile. “They deserve to be lobotomized, not asked for their opinion.”
Except that what they said, and what they thought, had the power to rip my career from me.
The only thing I have ever wanted since I was a little girl was to be successful.
In all my diaries, in the margins of all my notebooks, I wasn’t drawing hearts or clouds.
I wasn’t writing the names of the boys I had crushes on.
It was colleges, career paths, and the income levels for each choice.
I was planning on being at the top of the food chain while my snacks were still being cut up for me.
Being someone has been my only dream since childhood because I knew how much it would mean to my dad. He was someone. My mother was only known for being his wife, and he didn’t want that for me. He didn’t want my worth tied to social circles, designer fashion, or flaunting my status to other women.
And I didn’t want to be that either. I love my mom, but that life is not a healthy one, and it’s not something that gave her any sort of purpose. Plus, she’s entirely dependent on her ex-husband and his money. I don’t ever want to be dependent on a man.
So, I had goals, and they were big. Study hard. Get the best grades. Earn a career the way my father did. Go to an Ivy League, design a career path of my dreams, and smash through every obstacle to get there.
Interior design doesn’t sound super fancy, but my vision board was, and I met every single goal I glued onto that piece of paper.
I blew my colleagues out of the water—my classmates before them.
With the education I have accumulated across different fields and the time I’ve put into building well-rounded experience, I could start my own firm and hire myself for almost every damn position.
And my father was proud.
But my father has never been fired a day in his life. His pride went out the window alongside my employment.
I failed him. I’m failing, currently.
“I won’t tell your brother,” Arden reassures me, reaching forward to squeeze my knee. “And we’ll make a plan, alright? We’ll make a list and a vision board, and we’ll dream up an even better career than that firm could ever offer you.”
I smile gently, ignoring the lump in my throat and the burning in my eyes. I will not cry over this again. I’ve cried enough over mediocre men who use the still-warm bodies of the women they stomp all over to look a little taller.
“Until then, you stay here with me and your brother.” Arden’s dark eyes scan mine, full of concern.
She knows how to do the whole ‘older sister’ thing, and she does it well.
She’s taken care of me like I’m Serena or Anya since the very moment she met me.
“We will figure this out. Nobody knocks Ariana Forkerro down and keeps her there. Nobody.”