After hours

Chapter Thirty-Three

                It had been three months. Three months since that night in my apartment. Three months since Daniel had told his wife he had slept with someone else. I still had so many questions. Did she know it was me yet? Did she know it was an affair and not a one night stand? Had he slept with anyone else other than me? Did he ever really love me?

                I had to actually be a little grateful that Daniel had decided to destroy me on a Friday night. It meant I had a whole weekend to lay on my bathroom floor and sob. I took a sick day Monday because I still couldn’t bring myself to my knees yet. Tuesday when I finally managed to get the will to check my phone I saw that I did not have a single missed call or text from the man I was in love with.

                I finally decided I was angry, furious even. I had called him almost obsessively after I lifted myself from the floor. Calling him every name in the book, threatening to quit, to confront Tori myself. They were empty threats and he either knew that before I did, or he simply didn’t care anymore. My calls went unanswered and messages probably deleted. I knew I wouldn’t be finding a better job than this. Why should I be the one to lose my job when he was the one who screwed up?

                So finally I made it back into work that Thursday. Yes, I had needed another few days to be a wreck. Daniel had told me relationships were sometimes a store but this was a full blow apocalypse.

                For the first few days (or more realistically weeks) after that I had tried ridiculously hard to make him regret his decision. I began dressing wildly inappropriately, but that only resulted in losing a few more modest clients. I was no longer invited to certain meetings and we had to have a sexual harassment meeting for the whole firm.

                My next tactic has been to pretend I didn’t care. I tried to pull off a charade of being ridiculously happy. Like my life was so much better now without Daniel than it had been with him. But that was useless too. He greeted me with the same curt hello as he did everyone else and didn’t so much as glance at me on his way to his office. The door was now always shut.

                My last pathetic attempt was to call up an ex-boyfriend. He called me constantly and I’d talk loudly on the phone to him all throughout the day giggling up a storm, put a picture of the two of us on my desk, even let him pick me up or drop me off to work occasionally. Unfortunately that just made me fall even further behind in work. And oh yeah, he was an ex for a reason.

                I thought once that I almost won Daniel back with the ex-boyfriend thing. Not the way I had thought, but I actually got him to pull me into his office and speak to me again. The ex was apparently, insane. Something I had long since forgotten in the years since I had dated him. He was obsessive and controlling and while it worked to my advantage at first with having him call me so often, it was a little unsettling. It wouldn’t have worked out regardless, but the final straw came when I was out to lunch with my mother and he texted me telling me how sexy my yellow dress looked on me. I called it quit immediately after but that didn’t stop him from coming around, almost even more now than before.

                Daniel had pulled me into his office with an expression riddled with concern…but not until after he’d broken into the building, all but taken me hostage in the bathroom, and had been taken out of the building in handcuffs at gun point.

                “Are you okay?” He’d asked. I’d wanted nothing else than to run across the room and leap into his arms.

                “I, I think so.” I’d stammered.  I was ready for him to cross the room and hold me but instead he had nodded knowingly and sat back down at his desk where he promptly ignored me again.