Consent_A #MeToo Romance

by Jason Letts

  “I’m just glad there’s a lot of daylight left. I’m not going to leave the office until we’ve landed ourselves some business. I’ll talk the phone to dust if I have to,” he said.

  Something clicked for me.

  “Why are we sticking with phone calls and meetings?” I asked.

  “What?” He squinted at me and I stepped closer to his desk.

  “If we know better than the guys at Mana Foundries, let’s prove it. We don’t need phone calls and meetings to get business. If we really believe in the premise of digital marketing, that there are people out there just surfing around on the internet waiting to buy what’s put in front of them, why don’t we try to show them what we’re offering?”

  The subtle smirk on Keenan’s face grew into a wide smile. He started rubbing his hands together and looking hungrily at the computer screen.

  “Of course! That’s brilliant, Sarah! Get Chelsea and Lena in here. I want to start running ads by lunch. We don’t need much. Just some basic components on the website, a Facebook page, an email list. I already know what our pitch will be. Something like, ‘It’s worked for the biggest companies in the world, now it can work for you. The Mouse Roar marketing approach.’”

  His enthusiasm was infectious, and soon the four of us had talked through what we needed to do and set into action.

  Keenan and I worked together writing drafts for text that would appear on the new website and advertisements. We bounced ideas off each other, critiqued language and word choices, and eventually identified a few different themes we thought would stand out and be worth pursuing.

  Chelsea cobbled together images to use from the company’s photo library and Lena put it all together on the website. We worked through lunch and finally managed to get it all together in a way that seemed reasonable. The new Facebook page to court small businesses was launched minutes before Keenan took the honor of initiating the campaign.

  “Here goes nothing,” he said.

  Then all of a sudden there was nothing to do but wait and watch if anybody responded. Most of us had an eye on the traffic counters and the inbox, but Keenan spent most of the afternoon staring out various windows as if he were trying to spot potential customers from there. I wondered if when I went home that night I’d need to start searching job postings and sending resumes.

  “We got one!” Lena called around three. Keenan flew back to his desk to check it out and I squeezed my fists in gratitude under my desk. That turned out to be just the beginning. Several more came in by four-thirty when Keenan came out of his office and pulled four chairs into a little circle.

  “We’ve gotten a thousand dollars in deposits. It’s nothing compared to what we used to get, but it shows that this is working well enough to build on. You did it,” he said, smiling broadly. His enthusiasm was infectious and the cloud that had hung around the office was suddenly gone.

  “We all did it,” I said.

  “Now there are going to be some more tricky hurdles. We’ve got to have a process to handle and respond properly to these incoming orders, which is going to mean phone calls and web chats and all that in addition to creating and running campaigns, not to mention to continue trawling for more business.”

  Everyone nodded.

  “How would you like us to handle that?” Lena asked. I still hoped she hadn’t really known how close to the brink we were.

  “It means we’re going to have to come up with some more people to help out. Sarah, I know it’ll be tricky to do more hiring while trying to help with these things, but you’ve got to manage. We need to find great people fast,” he said.

  I nodded again but was immediately struck by a sense of anxiety. I could imagine the company having a deja vu moment similar to how it started a year before by desperately needing people and bringing in flawed candidates who would turn out to be a liability. When I didn’t immediately say anything, Chelsea ended up filling the void.

  “There are always the people we used to have on staff who we could try to bring back,” she said.

  My eyes darted to Keenan, dreading the prospect of seeing so many of them and wondering if he would change his mind. Keenan pursed his lips.

  “Let’s keep that in mind as a last resort, but I think some more fresh faces would be best for our new approach,” he said, to my relief.

  “But why? If the reason we had to let people go before was that there was no work, now that we have work again we can start bringing them back,” she said pointedly to Keenan. Chelsea had a puzzled look on her face, like we’d all started speaking Mandarin. That was strange to me, since I would’ve thought she’d have been happy they were all gone as well. Her experience was nearly as bad as mine was with them.

  “I’m sure they’ve taken other jobs at this point. Skilled people like that don’t sit around idly for long,” Keenan said with a forced smile.

  “I’ve heard directly from a few of them, even as recently as the last few days, that they’re still hoping to come back. Some of them could really use it. I heard Eduardo had to move back in with his parents. Martin hasn’t had so much as an interview. Apparently he is about to be evicted from his apartment because he hadn’t saved much, and even trying to sell most of his possessions isn’t covering it.”

  I saw Keenan wince at the sound of Martin’s name. He cast a quick look at me, but I had no guidance for how to overcome the strongest stand I’d ever seen Chelsea make about anything. But of all things, why this?

  “I’ve made my decision. We need to move on,” he said.

  “But why?” Chelsea pressed again. “I’m sorry but I just don’t get it. This problem could be solved in two minutes by calling some of them up. We know they can do it. They did it here before.”

  Her incredulous look began to irritate me. I wished she would just shut up and forget about them. Keenan cleared his throat, groping for something to say.

  “Unfortunately it’s come to my attention that many of them were not behaving with proper decorum while employed here,” he said.

  “What do you mean it’s come to your attention? How?” This time Chelsea shot a curious look at me.

  “There were some audio recordings of harassing conversations,” Keenan said before I could do anything to steer the conversation in a safer direction. Chelsea looked at me with her mouth agape. I felt myself turn white but didn’t exactly know why Chelsea was giving me this horror-struck expression. If it weren’t for her warnings, I never would’ve expected to be treated so badly.

  “I didn’t know there were audio recordings,” she said, growing red-faced. “Was anything I said recorded? I have a right to know how and when these recordings were created. I never consented to that. Without a shadow of a doubt I know in the bottom of my heart that I never participated in anything that resembled harassment.”

  Keenan cleared his throat and looked down at his papers, but nothing written there would give him a way out of this. Deep down I wished Keenan would lie about how they were made. But he still looked flustered.

  “I can assure you you’re not being suspected or accused of anything,” Keenan said to her, though it didn’t soften her expression at all. “Sarah made these recordings during her first days in the office.”

  Chelsea shot me an accusatory look. Lena appeared simply stunned by the entire exchange.

  “And that’s the real reason everyone got fired except for her?”

  “No,” Keenan said quickly. “I only heard them after everyone had been let go because of the loss of our clientele. Martin had pushed Sarah out, so she came in on Monday not having known what had happened or even that she had a job.”

  It occurred to me that there was no way Chelsea hadn’t been aware that Martin got rid of me first. Only then did I realize fully that Chelsea’s line of argument was threatening me.

  “Wait, let’s back up,” Chelsea said.

  “I think we need to move on,” Keenan said firmly, causing Chelsea to stand up.

  “Excuse me? After tram
pling on my liberties the least you can do is hear me out. Something seems odd to me. Why did Sarah make these recordings around the office? Why did she keep them for so long?”

  Suddenly burning, I stood up to face her. Why had I given her the benefit of the doubt so many times?

  “You know exactly why I made them. You were the one who told me what to expect here,” I said. It barely registered to me that Keenan’s expression had changed into something dark and grave.

  “You know why people create things like this,” she said more calmly to Keenan, ignoring my response. “She was creating evidence.”

  Keenan turned to me with a hurt expression that turned my heart to dust.

  “You were going to sue me? Me?”

  I practically dropped back into my chair so I could lean closer to him.

  “I didn’t know what I was going to do with them,” I said, pleading. “I just knew what I was going through was wrong. And you hadn’t said a word to me except at the Christmas party. I didn’t have any idea who you were or that we would get to know each other well.”

  He recoiled from my extended hand, which felt like it had been dipped in acid. How had this all gone so wrong?

  Now Chelsea was shaking her head at Keenan with her hands on her hips. She extended a finger at me.

  “Is she really worth all this?” Chelsea went on after he stared at her blankly and nakedly ashamed but didn’t answer. “I’m used to seeing girls throw away their dignity to get to you, but I never thought I’d see it the other way around. Is she really good enough for you? Still nothing to say? I can’t work for someone I don’t respect. I’m done.”

  Shocked, I watched Chelsea turn her back and walk away from our circle. She yanked the plug out of her computer so it would turn off faster and not save anything, then she grabbed her bag and hustled to the exit without a look back. No part of me was happy that she was leaving because the damage that she’d just done was here to stay. Keenan wouldn’t so much as look at me.

  I felt like I could barely breathe, but that I had to do something.

  “The problem you’re now worrying you could’ve had, you preemptively avoided it by being a decent person,” I said, but it was apparent that nothing was going to get through to him. The look he gave me was angry, yes, but it was the disappointment that hurt more. I knew he felt attacked and threatened when he was already in a vulnerable place. Nothing I might say now could fix that.

  He got up without a word and I soon gathered that he was planning a hasty exit. My eyes were brimming with tears and I didn’t have to ask to know the ski weekend would be nothing more than a figment of my imagination. By the time he left, I felt like I couldn’t possibly take any more.

  But Lena was there looking at me. At the moment I couldn’t spare a thought for what she was going through, but it couldn’t have been good.

  “I’m sorry!” I said, louder and more aggrieved than I meant. I got up myself, Lena soon after, and went home.

  CHAPTER 10

  My father told me to embrace the hard parts of life, but my mother had different advice. She said nothing mattered but the skin on my face. One time she told me my sister’s face soothed people’s troubles while mine started them. Those words hung around me, inescapable, like the air I breathed.

  I went home in a bleary, tearful state, but at my core I knew that I wasn’t going to let this misunderstanding be the last gasp of my chance with Keenan. When everything inside me wanted to crumple up and collapse, when it crossed my mind that Keenan might not want me to come in on Monday to work for him at all, I forced myself through sheer will to fight to find a way to fix what had become broken.

  My only hope was that if things were better for Mouse Roar, Keenan would be in a better state of mind to understand my position. That meant doing my job to get the staff in place, which was now even more necessary with Chelsea out of the picture. I started by filling out job postings until the small hours of the morning, enduring the sounds of wild and battering sex coming through the wall. I’d given up on my hope of the perfect staff chemistry and my vision of a professional utopia where respect, diversity, and opportunities for women were front and center.

  I was willing to settle for warm bodies that could sit in chairs next to each other without fighting openly. Experience doing anything related to what the job entailed was a big plus.

  As the job posting sites promised, it didn’t take long to receive a flood of applicants for the positions, and I spent Saturday sifting through them. On Sunday I was messaging people directly, practically begging them to come right in to work on Monday even though I’d never set eyes on them or knew much about them at all. In some cases when people didn’t respond right away I went ahead and made the same offer to other people for the same job. Why wasn’t everyone sitting around on their computers on a Sunday? By the time the day drew to a close, there was a chance as many as a dozen new people would show up to the office the next day or as few as none. Not one of them could I definitively find on Facebook to see so much as a picture of their faces.

  I knew I was running headlong into another disaster, but it had the potential to be easier to deal with than the one I was currently in, if Keenan would see how hard I was trying to make this right.

  After sending messages all day, I wrote my last one to Keenan himself, attempting to share my side of the story in the way most sympathetic to his needs. I knew that the threat of being sued by a woman even for what other men had done was terrifying for him because of his high profile, wealth, and his own sense of integrity. I bent over backward about it in the hopes that he would read just a couple of lines about how being in an office full of men was a hard position to be in for a woman, that none of them took me seriously, and that without even some record of what happened people wouldn’t even believe what I went through.

  I sent it while I was already huddled under the covers in bed, nothing but pitch-black winter night outside. He’d probably been having a wonderful time skiing and making friends every which way he turned with his winning smile. I didn’t begrudge him the time to take a break after he’d worked so hard, but I hoped a second chance wasn’t too much to ask for.

  When I got into work bright and early the next morning, I was the first one there. Lena showed up and we exchanged good mornings as if nothing horrifying had happened the last time we’d seen each other. Keenan was nowhere to be found, though him showing up a little late wasn’t exactly surprising.

  New people trickled into the office. First a blond man named Miles, then a younger man with a full beard named Quincy. Two women came next, Penelope and Yesenia. They were all very nice and sat down together to wait to get started. I nervously eyed the door, afraid that this was just the beginning of them and that we would need to hustle through interviews and send people back home. I also worried about what Keenan would do when he finally came in and saw me.

  The elevator door opened to reveal a man who must’ve been at least seventy who limped in and handed over a copy of his resume, the name Rebis Clifton at the top. He claimed to be an expert graphic designer, which I wouldn’t have guessed, but I had him sit right down. Thankfully he was the last one to come, and Lena and I guided our cohort through creating logins and designating tasks.

  When Keenan did finally show up, there were seven of us at desks near the front of the office, working quietly. He looked disheveled, unshaven, and exhausted. Spotting everyone there put something like awe on his face. I carefully got up to approach him.

  “What’s all this?”

  “It’s your staff,” I said, daring to smile.

  “Really? You did all this?” Despite his worn appearance, some of his adorable inner glow was shining through.

  “Did you get my email? If we could just talk for a minute…”

  Keenan gave me a grudging nod and stepped past me, putting his hands together once to get everyone’s attention.

  “I’m delighted you’re all here. Sarah’s done a fantastic job, nothing less
than stellar. I’m Keenan Roche and I created this company to assist the biggest corporations in the world with the latest in digital marketing techniques. We’re in the middle of a pivot, and now we’re helping much smaller startups and fledgling companies do the same.

  “We need you to hit the ground running, both continuing to refine our funnel for new business and to take care of our customers once they’re in the door. We’ll have you work in pairs to create campaigns, and we’ll find time today so that I can meet with each of you one-on-one to get to know you and discuss our technique. I’ll start with Sarah. Come in once their tasks are underway.”

  He turned for his office, which was good because I felt myself flushing. It was hard to talk to the new staff members when all my mind could handle was thinking about what I’d try to say to Keenan. I was grateful for his complement about the tireless work I put in over the weekend, but I didn’t know if it would change how he felt about us. I couldn’t get rid of this picture in my head of how happy we would be together, doing things like dancing together, snuggling by the fire, or even just driving around in his car.

  When the new staff was set and Lena had her hands full, I stopped in the bathroom first to check my hair and face before going to Keenan’s office. I noticed that Chelsea had evidently forgotten one of her hair clips in there, and I was immediately pushed back into the memories of her belittling comments, like I was unworthy of being loved by anyone.

  It reminded me that as much as I wanted Keenan and I to be together, being the small person she made me out to be wouldn’t do. I wasn’t going to grovel, beg, or cry. My self-respect and integrity were my most important possessions, and I would hold onto those much tighter than I’d hold onto my job.

  I opened the door to his office and closed it behind me, holding my head up high as I approached him at his desk.

  “I think I need to clarify something,” I said. Keenan put his hands together and sat back to listen. “I’m sorry for the hardship I caused and for the way that I hurt you. I’m not sorry for trying to protect myself by making the recordings or for standing up for myself in that what I had to deal with was inappropriate. You might not believe it, but often women aren’t listened to when they voice concerns or complaints.”