Two Months Later
Cally sat in the chair at the salon and crossed her feet at the ankles as she flipped through her glossy magazine. She was exhausted and had been for the past few weeks. It didn’t seem to matter how much sleep she was getting, by the middle of the day, she was about ready to flop back into bed and snooze until midnight. She yawned and rubbed her eyes as, behind her, the hairdresser worked over her locks with precision.
She savored these moments in her hectic life. It wasn’t often that she got to spend much time by herself with her busy job and crazy schedule. Even after she had finally decided that she was better off single after the break up from hell with her ex, Gabe, she still didn’t seem to have enough hours in the day.
She closed the magazine in front of her and felt her eyes begin to drop. She didn’t know what she was going to do if it didn’t pass soon, but the last thing she wanted to do was to head to the doctors and be prodded and poked with needles.
“It’ll just be a virus,” Erica had said. “There’s loads going around at the moment.”
And Cally had nodded in agreement, remembering something that someone had said to her one day in the office about how a friend of a friend had been sick for a few weeks and had been terribly tired.
“Definitely,” Cally had agreed with a smile.
And she had pretty much forgotten all about it, until she still couldn’t shake it another week later and now she was starting to wonder if there was something more to it. Maybe she was dying. She had always been melodramatic and the first person to jump to the most drastic conclusion.
Or maybe you’re just overworked... she reasoned with herself, rolling her eyes even without being able to see her reflection.
She looked down at her watch and realized that she had already overrun her lunch break by half an hour and winced. She was sure her boss was out for the afternoon, but knowing her luck, she was bound to get caught on the one day she took a little extra time for herself.
I’ll just work it back, she thought as she chewed her bottom lip with nerves and fidgeted with her fingers. The girl was taking a lot longer than she normally would have done, and Cally couldn’t help but wonder if she was quiet and dragging it out to pass the time.
“How much longer?” she asked sweetly as she turned to the side and tried to catch her eye.
“Umm,” the girl said half in a daze, “I guess we’re pretty much done.”
“Good,” Cally smiled as she pulled the robe from her shoulders and shook off the extra hair clippings that had caught in the collar. “Thanks so much.”
She picked up her purse and walked over to the desk, flicking her hair out and smiling at herself in the mirrors as she passed. Her blonde hair was poker straight and perfectly edged off, and she liked it. It felt like a long time since she had looked so groomed and polished.
She paid the girl behind the counter and pulled her coat down from the stand. As she walked out into the brisk Fall air, she wrapped it around herself and tied the belt at the waist as she tottered along on her high heels.
Her office wasn’t far from the salon, but it felt like it took ages to get there as she weaved in and out of slow walkers and the lunchtime traffic. The city seemed busier than normal, and with the blustery wind and the icy chill in the air, it made the walk a lot less enjoyable than normal.
As Cally got to the front door of her building, she smiled at the doorman and thanked him as she walked inside. Where she worked wasn’t the flashiest place in the world, but the building itself seemed to have a few recent additions, which made it a lot more enjoyable to work in than it had been when she first started there a year before. The door-man had been one of those upgrades, along with the refurbishment of the onsite gym, which Cally was still yet to venture into. It seemed that like most parts of the city, her office building was another struggling to keep up with the demand for sleek and modern serviced premises, and as a new skyscraper seemed to pop up and open its doors every week, Cally’s firm had been seduced into staying with the promise of consistently low rents and mediocre improvements.
“Hey, Cally,” the receptionist smiled as she exited the elevator on her floor and clipped across the linoleum floor.
“Hi,” she smiled back as she pulled at her coat and checked her watch nervously again. She didn’t know why, she just had the distinct feeling that her extended lunch break was going to get her into trouble.
She pushed open the door to her room and peered around into the adjoining office where her boss could usually be found with his feet up on the desk, barking orders into his dictation machine for her to type up later. Cally breathed a sigh of relief as she realized his room appeared to be empty and she closed the door quietly behind her and hung her coat up on the stand.
She sat down and tapped at her keyboard until her computer jumped back to life and then she unscrewed the top of a bottle of water and sipped at it slowly as she began to scroll through her emails, all the while running the occasional finger through her newly groomed locks.
She had worked in the office for just over a year as an assistant to one of the firm’s junior lawyers. And even though it was enjoyable and seemed like easy money, there was a big part of her that wanted to pack it all in and take time out to figure out what she really wanted to do with her life. But she knew that she would never have that luxury. Cally had supported herself since she was eighteen, and she knew that wherever she was heading surely had to be in the right direction, even if it wasn’t all tied up to some big dream or grand master plan.
She kept on scrolling through the never ending mail in her inbox and wondered how the hell she could receive so many when she had only been gone for, at most, two hours. She felt the tiredness start to creep up on her again and she was about to let her eyes droop closed when, suddenly, her boss’s name stood out loud and proud in bold right there in front of her. It may as well have been flashing on the screen like a beacon. She felt a knot in her stomach and she swallowed nervously as she hovered her cursor over it and willed herself to open it.
She checked the time first. He had sent it only ten minutes before. She looked at her watch and felt the nausea return. That meant he had been there, in the office, up until recently, which may have meant that he knew she had taken much longer than she should have done. Cally rubbed her temples and swallowed.
She wouldn’t normally have been nervous, but it wasn’t the only time she had been caught out and she knew how he felt about her taking liberties.
“Oh please,” she whispered to herself. “Don’t have caught me out again...”
She took a deep breath and clicked on the email.
Meeting in the board room at 3pm. Don’t be late.
That was all it said. No greeting, no formalities, just one singular sentence that was clipped and concise and made her heart beat even faster with nerves.
Shit, she thought. I’m screwed.
And she put her head in her hands and sighed. There was a part of her that knew what was about to happen, but there was also a part of her that didn’t really care. She looked down at the clock on her desk and saw that it was almost five to three and she should do as he had asked and be there on time. She got to her feet, put down her bottle of water and smoothed down her skirt as she walked toward the door of the office.
“A meeting in the board room,” she whispered to herself as she ran her fingers nervously through her hair. “This is going to be bad.”
And even though she knew that her instincts were going to be spot on, she still wanted to keep a tiny glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, the drama queen in her was rising to the surface yet again.