Chapter 23 #2
An actual smile forms on Calvin’s stony face.
“Now, I’ve told you to call me Cal,” he says—playfully?
—and I’m not sure which of us has the bigger crush on Ben.
Of course, Calvin’s crush is more about the money Ben stands to earn him, but still.
“All right, Ms. Miller.” He straightens his tie as he addresses me. “Let’s hear it.”
My stomach somersaults. This is it. My chance to earn my promotion. To prove I’m cut out for this. To live my childhood dream. No pressure.
I clear my throat and begin. “There are two things that stood out to me about Iceland, sir. One was the overabundance of natural beauty everywhere I looked—as you can clearly see from Ben’s photos.
” I catch myself saying Ben instead of Benjamin, but Calvin’s too busy beaming at him to notice.
“The second thing is the personal journey—the physical, mental, and emotional one—an average person like me had to take in the pursuit of seeing these stunning places.”
I slide my outline in Calvin’s direction and, always prepared as I am, slide an extra copy to Shirley.
“I’m not a hiker or an outdoor enthusiast by any stretch of the imagination, and I think that’s probably true for the majority of our subscribers.
While I could simply list out a superfluous description of each place we visited, I believe this article in particular needs to incorporate more personal aspects than normally featured in Around the Globe.
I want to write about how each of these sites made me feel, and how getting there challenged me.
” I pause before adding, “Iceland changed me, sir. It pushed me to my limit in about every way it possibly could, but it also rewarded me far beyond anything I could have imagined, and I think that should be the focus of this piece.”
Calvin peruses his copy of my outline, the only sound in the conference room the frantic scratching of Shirley’s pen. At the prolonged silence, my cartwheeling stomach performs gymnastic feats that would make Simone Biles proud.
When Calvin’s steely gray eyes finally look up again, any trace of his good mood from moments ago has packed up and left the building.
Glancing up from her note-taking, Shirley glimpses the ominous expression transforming Calvin’s face and takes a quick hit off a vape pen, waving away the puff of smoke that momentarily obscures her face.
No one says anything for the longest ten seconds of my life.
“Ms. Miller.” The chilly cadence of Calvin’s voice sends a shiver from my scalp to my toes. “Around the Globe is a respected leader in the travel journalism industry.”
“Yes, sir. I’m aware.”
“Oh. So you are aware then that I didn’t ask for a personal essay about your feelings or a quiz on which sites in Iceland you should visit based on your zodiac sign, for Christ’s sake.”
My stomach falters and crashes to the floor. “I, uh, that’s not—”
“Our readers don’t care about your personal growth, Ms. Miller.”
“Actually, I think—” Ben starts to interject, but I snap my head around and nail him with a look that makes it abundantly clear I don’t want him to rescue me. He falls quiet.
I lower my voice, defeat setting in. “I just thought our readership might appreciate someone being real about the toll a trip like this can take on someone who is not athletically inclined and has zero experience with the outdoors. I wanted to show how rewarding it was to challenge myself in ways I never expected. How I gained so much more than just a trip to Iceland, and how I discovered pieces of myself I didn’t know existed. ”
“No.” Calvin is persistent. Unwavering. “That’s the final answer. Get a new outline to me by the end of the week.”
The battle is over, and I went down in flames. So much for a promotion. So much for my dream of seeing the world. At this rate, I’ll be lucky to keep my old job as a Local. “Yes, sir. My apologies.”
Calvin stands and buttons his suit jacket, signaling the end of this meeting.
Following his lead, Shirley gathers her pens and legal pad and vape.
I clench my jaw to keep my chin from quivering.
This was a goddamn disaster, and I’m humiliated and angry and too much of a coward to do anything about it.
“Oh, and Benjamin,” Calvin turns back, already halfway out the glass door.
He chuckles smarmily, just the two of them in this boys’ club I’m not privy to.
“Going forward, you might want to rethink your insistence Ms. Miller be the one to cover any articles you photograph for us. I hate to tell you I was right when I said she wasn’t up for an assignment of this magnitude.
I apologize profusely for not being more insistent. ”
My heart stutters.
Blood roars through my ears with such ferocity that my eardrums vibrate.
“Wait. What?” I swivel my chair in Ben’s direction because this must be a misunderstanding. His pleading, wide-eyed expression all but confirms that it’s not. “You chose me? You set this all up?”
“Ems, listen to me.” He places a hand on my arm. “I was going to tell you. I wanted to tell you. But things were so good between us after all these years, and I didn’t want to screw that up. Again.”
Nausea crashes over me like an Icelandic sneaker wave. If I thought I couldn’t be more humiliated, I was so wrong. “You lied to me. I thought fate brought us back together, but it wasn’t fate at all, it was you. You arranged this.”
“Excuse me,” Calvin’s voice booms through the glass rectangle. “You two are involved in a personal relationship?”
I press a hand to my churning stomach. In the corner of the room, Shirley reaches inside her blouse and pulls a cigarette and lighter from her bra, the vape pen no longer cutting it.
“I can explain,” Ben says when I don’t say anything at all, but Calvin holds his hand up again, gray eyes locked solely on mine.
“With all due respect, you don’t work for me, Benjamin.
Not yet anyway. Ms. Miller does. She’s the one who needs to explain her actions here.
” He releases the door and moves in my direction, his gaze a laser beam pinning me to my chair.
“For Christ’s sake, when I said to recruit him, I didn’t mean by sleeping with him! ”
This cannot be happening.
“You were recruiting me? Was that what happened between us?” Ben’s words are far away and muffled, as if I’m underwater.
“I should fire you on the spot!” Calvin explodes.
I push out of my chair, uncertain my legs will hold a body that no longer feels like my own.
I’m just an outside observer to the scene in a movie where everything goes horribly wrong.
But if it isn’t real, then why are tears hovering at the edges of my vision, threatening to fall right here in front of everyone?
I have to get out of this room. Away from Calvin. Away from Shirley. Away from Ben. Now.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Calvin questions, but I’m already speeding toward the door. “Do not walk away from me!”
I stop in my tracks, only to hear myself utter words I never imagined saying.
“I quit.”
* * *
I take the stairwell instead of the elevator, aware Ben doesn’t know his way around this building, and on the thirty-sixth floor, I weave back to my cubicle on autopilot.
Jacklyn must sense my distress as I pass her by because the next thing I know, I’m at my desk and she’s sitting in the cheap plastic chair across from me asking what happened.
“The meeting went badly?” she gently says.
“You could say that. I quit.”
“You what?” Her blue eyes are huge pools of color, reminding me of the water at Kerie Crater. Which reminds me of Ben. Which makes me fold in two in my desk chair at the pang that strikes beneath my ribs.
I open my mouth to tell her what happened with Calvin, but all that comes out is, “He lied to me. Ben lied to me.”
Jacklyn passes me several tissues, but I don’t bother wiping my tears away.
“Calvin didn’t choose me because of my writing abilities or even because he thought I’d be the friendliest option for his little recruitment plan. Ben requested I be the writer in order for him to sign on. I feel like such an idiot.”
“Oh, sweetie.”
Jacklyn comes around the desk and pulls me into an embrace, and I’m sobbing against her collarbone when I hear Ben’s somber voice. “Ems, can we talk this out? Please?”
I don’t know how he found me, and I don’t really care.
Releasing me, Jacklyn turns to Ben, who stands stiffly in the entranceway of my cubicle. “I think you need to leave,” she tells him.
“Please,” he continues to plead. “I know we can talk through this.”
“It’s okay, Jacklyn,” I say. “Really.”
She gives me an uncertain look, but says, “You know where to find me,” and leaves my cubicle.
Ben kneels before me in the space Jacklyn vacated, but when he reaches to take my hands, I pull them away.
“Look. I should have told you that I asked for you on this assignment. The truth is, I finally felt like I was at a place where I was ready to see if there was anything still between us. And I knew if I just showed up at your door after all this time, you’d rightly slam it in my face.
So when this opportunity came up, yes, I asked for you.
I thought if we had time together then I could at least explain what really happened back then.
I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the full truth.
I wanted to. I even tried to that night in Akureyri, but you didn’t want to talk about work. ”
I scoff. “You mean right after we’d had sex, Ben?”
“I know I fucked up here,” he pleads. “But you didn’t tell me you were recruiting me, either. We both kept things from each other. But it doesn’t mean that what happened between us in Iceland wasn’t real.”
“You’re right,” I agree. “I didn’t tell you I was supposed to recruit you. But like everything else I do, turns out I wasn’t very good at that, either. And after things changed between us, I stopped even trying. Also, my secret doesn’t humiliate you, so there’s a distinct difference.”
“There’s no reason to feel humiliated. If anything, I was doing Cal a favor—” At the way my eyes roll at the casual name, Ben corrects his misstep. “I was doing Calvin a favor by requesting you. You’re incredibly talented, whether he sees that or not.”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “Do not placate me.”
“I’m not placating you. I swear.” He glances down at the floor before blinking back up to me.
“Look, I’ve followed your career with Around the Globe ever since I found out you worked here a couple years ago.
I’ve read every article you’ve written. Ems, those pieces are really good. Too good to not be appreciated here.”
If I’d thought I’d hit rock bottom, I was wrong.
Because this…knowing Ben read all my fluff pieces while he was traveling the world as a well-respected photojournalist…
I’m not sure I’ll ever recover. I want to crawl into a literal hole somewhere in the forest and cover myself with wilderness kindling.
But I can’t even focus on escaping this goddamn gray box because Ben is still kneeling in front of my chair, pleading with me.
“What if we travel the world together? You could come with me on my freelance assignments. You can go freelance, too. You’d have the freedom to write whatever you wanted.
Or we could start our own travel blog. There are a lot of possibilities here, but the point is that we’d get to be together and do what we both love. ”
My tears have run dry as I’ve slowly gone numb. So when I say, “I’m not going to ride your coattails, Ben,” my voice is hollow and emotionless.
“It wouldn’t be like that!” He buries both hands in his hair, pulling at the ends. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Please leave.”
“Ems, I love you.”
Despite everything that has transpired in the past half hour, I will not allow him to feel the way I felt when he withheld those words from me fourteen years ago.
“And I love you, too. But I’m not sure that’s enough.
I trusted you. I opened up to you. I told you how I felt like an impostor, like I was never good enough.
And this entire time, you knew we were only on this assignment together because of you, and you never told me.
Do you know how mortifying that is for me?
It’s one thing to feel overlooked in my career and like the work I do is insignificant.
It’s another thing entirely to have the person I love exploit that. ”
“I swear, I never thought your work was insignificant,” Ben says, voice breaking, “and that’s not what I intended to do.”
“Intentional or not, can’t you see that’s exactly what happened?
You’d read all of my fluff pieces and you knew I wasn’t where I wanted to be in my career, so you requested me on this assignment, and it worked for you because I desperately needed this assignment.
And then I had to find out the truth from Calvin, of all people. ”
“I didn’t see it that way. I swear, Ems.” There’s a watery sheen in Ben’s green eyes now, and if I weren’t numb, that alone might break me. “I never intended to hurt you.”
“Yet somehow, you always do.”
“Please don’t do this.”
“You need to go,” I say again. “I have an office to pack up.”
Ben stands, glancing over me one last time before respecting my request and disappearing from my cubicle.
When I’m alone, the numbness evaporates, and I give in to sobs that rack my body. I don’t know how much time passes before Jacklyn is back in front of me, pulling me out of my cheap, faux-leather chair as she tells me, “Come on, let’s get you home.”