I am free to walk away now.
To my surprise, almost two dozen people walk me out to my car to say goodbye.
I have always had more love than I realised, I marvel. How could I have not noticed it?
Betha is there sitting my car, reading, looking like a model on the cover of Vogue. I know she’s here because she’s unsure about what emotion I would be feeling when I walked out. She wants to be with me just in case I am miserable instead of euphoric.
Without telling me, she’s taken a day off and parked herself here waiting for me no matter how long it took. She’d asked Ravi to tell her when he packed my things and came over immediately.
I shatter into a zillion tiny, tiny hearts at this.
Love, people…this is love…I announce silently to the world.
I forget all the people accompanying me at the sight of her. I fall into her and kiss her. It is when the catcalls and claps start that I get conscious and then self-conscious at our hugely and avidly watched PDA. I lean back in her arms, look at her and say, “Happy.” She is reassured.
After a flurry of introductions, we drive home.
******
I go to meet El at six in the evening.
Madira is this slick, hip, new-age edgy joint. It is a three storey building housing a variety of speciality restaurants. It opened about three years back and has been the talk of the town ever since. Their food is absolutely to die for and the ambience of every restaurant is seductive.
I’d expected to have a one-on-one heart-to-heart with El, but there are about fifteen of my colleagues waiting for me – men and women. Each one has been a friend and clearly, each one feels I am a dear friend.
I tell them exactly what happened and why I left. There is a tsunami of righteous indignation. I tell them about my plans of starting off on my own and good wishes flow my way.
We spend almost three hours and I have drunk too much (which means I’ve had three cocktails fairly low on the alcohol content). I call my knight in shining armour to come and pick me up.
When Betha arrives, the party restarts so that everyone can get to know her. She charms the pants off all of them. Okay, I don’t know about the ‘pants off’ part for everyone, but she has charmed everyone…and certainly the pants off me again.
I can’t wait to get her home and into bed.
******
The next few days are unreal. It is like an out-of-body experience for me.
I tell Tay that my last day is done and on Tuesday, the day after my exit from Franklin, forty-five clients pull out their business from the company. Led by Tay.
Tay’s been busy working some weird kind of multi-layer-marketing system talking to the people she brought into Franklin and they in turn talked to their contacts and the effect of her campaign has been that clients representing seventy percent of Franklin’s business have left and are waiting to sign up with me.
I’m inundated with Memorandums of Understanding and Letters of Intent which have been drawn up by Tay’s lawyers.
And I have not even started!
I’m moving into a panic mode about this. Handling Tay’s account would have been big, but I just do not have the bandwidth to handle these many clients of this size.
I am still grappling with this when I receive a formal application from El. What?
“El, what are you up to?” Obviously, I call her immediately.
“I’ve resigned. I refuse to work with such narrow-minded jerks,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’m looking for a job and I heard about this hot new joint opening, so I applied,” I can hear her smile. “Maybe you can interview me and see if I’m a good fit.”
“You nut!” I say through tears, “I would be lucky to have you with me while I struggle.”
But it doesn’t end there. In the next few days I am flooded with applications from all departments and for all levels.
Apparently, I have become the centrepiece and the poster girl for some sort of a revolution going on in Franklin.
All my friends have resigned in solidarity and want to join me. They have whipped up a storm amongst their friends and more people than I can count have resigned.
Four of the five Senior Associates have resigned (though a couple of them panicked at the fact that so many clients kicked out Franklin). The only Senior Associate who has chosen to stay is Theodore Franklin’s nephew. All four have reached out to me.
The entire junior level of the company and all interns – all the people in their twenties – have resigned. Products of a more accepting generation, they refused to stay quiet in the face of prejudice and bigotry. It is a rebellion against intolerance. Every single one has approached me or Eleanor.
Eleanor’s entire HR team has followed their leader and resigned to move with her.
I hire every single one of them.
I now have a strong team. I have a large number of clients.
I am set for success even before I have formally launched.
I am giddy at this turn of events. Betha is totally gleeful.
******
I find an office space in a hurry. My team is already working on a temporary telecommute basis taking care of the clients. Eleanor is handling the entire working of the spread out office.
Betha takes a month off from work. She brings in an interior designer and between her and Ravi, they get the furniture and fixtures into place within ten days. People can now start coming to office to work even if the place is not fully functional.
When Betha asked for a month off, it was so uncharacteristic, that it came to Radhika’s notice. Radhika called Betha to inquire about her well-being and Bethy told her exactly what had happened.
The next thing we know is that there is a tech team from Translink in the office identifying all our hardware and software requirements and setting it all up for us in less time than it would have taken me to identify the right vendor for this.
When I insist on paying for it all, I am given a quote that must be about twenty percent of the actual cost. But that is all they are willing to take.
Tay and Joy move in with us for two weeks to help me set up. While Betha is working with the interior designer, Joy actually makes murals on the walls. My office is officially a museum with original work from an artist showcased in Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain and the Met, New York.
Tay is invaluable with her vast experience with start-ups.
Tay and Joy are celebrities and my entire team is somewhat awed by their presence. I can see people gazing at them looking like emojis with stars for eyes. It is a very close call who garners more starry-eyed gazes…but I’d put even money on Tay. Clothes are more ubiquitous than art and photographs, and designers more famous than artist/photographers.
I think some of the Tay/Joy shine rubs off on my in the eyes of my newly minted team and I’m crowned a minor celebrity in their reflected glory.
But it is when Radhika flies in on the day I’m formally launching my company that people totally lose their minds.
While they are still coming to terms with Radhika’s presence, Reeth arrives.
Tay/Joy and Radhika/Reeth have been friends for years…probably decades. When Radhika found Tay with me, she asked Reeth to join them…and by default us.
Eleanor assures me that she has never found so many people fainting, close to fainting and hyperventilating in all her years as she did in the two hours that Reeth was in my office.
Before they leave, Radhika has added two more accounts to the Pride portfolio. She has signed us up for their Digital Learning, Advertising and Marketing Solutions company and their restaurant chain.
It turns out that the Madira complex and restaurants are theirs and they have similar complexes across a dozen cities with plans for multinational expansion if need arises. This piece of information is one for Believe it or Not, but they’ve opened this business line only to give opportunity to all those ambitious people who want to spread their wings further after Radhika and Reeth have got the
m trained in a clutch of culinary schools. What did I say about these two being unreal?
My company is launched in the presence of all these high-profile people.
I couldn’t have dreamt up of a more auspicious beginning.
Or a more fantastic support system.
Or a more unreal scenario with the clients and team.
The whole thing has been like being in the centre of a whirlwind. In the best way possible.
******
Betha and I are in no state to handle any more drama. We’ve been emotionally overloaded and a pretty drained. But we want to get married fast. So we decide to have a very, very quiet wedding. A court marriage. As close as Tay and Joy have become, there is no way they couldn’t be a part of the ceremony. So they, and Anita and Ravi – who are practically family to us – are our four witnesses.
Betha and I exchange our real promises in bed that night.
There is very little we haven’t yet done or experienced in bed with each other, but this night is special.
Bethy undresses me so gently that it makes me feel like it’s my first time ever. Her fingers skim over me with a tenderness that has me tingling and shivering uncontrollably. She kisses me with the sweetness of innocence and purity.
Her lips and fingers are running over me like they are learning me. I am an instrument of music and she is playing the melody of love on me.
From the tips of my toes to the crown of my head, she makes love to every millimetre of me and I am a quivering mass of sensation.
When she touches my pussy, I come at the mere first touch.
Soon I am thrashing, wiggling and flailing all around the bed. My hips are jerking and thrusting with an unfettered and uninhibited abandon.
She is around me. On me. In me. All at the same time.
She is whispering her love for me all through. I am so spaced out that I only know her voice but cannot make out any words.
I am moaning because I can no longer scream and I have no words left. Only sounds. Sounds of ecstasy.
She makes love to me all through the night.
When the first light breaks, I am physically a rag doll but emotionally the entire cosmos and sexually an empress.
“I love you, Betha,” I whisper with the last of my strength before giving in to the most delicious exhaustion and fall asleep.
******
Eleven Months Later
“Congratulations Mrs. Swift…you have the most stunningly gorgeous baby girl,” the doctor lays a tiny bundle of screaming, demanding, red-faced perfection in my arms.
Our little Baby Bird (one meaning of the swift is fast…but it is also a bird ).
Because Betha proposed to me, we are Ms. and Mrs. Swift.
We didn’t want to waste any time (what with that fast ticking biological clock) in starting our family. After my check-up, our gynaecologist told me that I was the human equivalent of a preheated oven ready to have my baby straightaway.
She was right.
I got pregnant at first try.
Betha was the most perfect partner ever. It was like she had melded entirely with my moods, thoughts, needs, wants…soul.
When I was fluctuating between being a hormonal horror and hungrily horny, she knew just how to handle me in every minute.
I’ve never felt as loved as she made me feel when I was a howling nightmare of wildly oscillating moods – most of them various degrees and levels of bad moods.
She knew when to soothe, when to pamper. When to leave me alone. When to give me the drama that my hormones were craving. When to be gentle. When I was fed-up of being treated like I was breakable and wanted rough sex.
She’s made me feel sexy and desired every single minute of every single day. I have never felt as attractive as she made me feel when I was essentially a hippopotamus with a bladder the size of a mustard seed.
And here we are with our flawless Baby Bird.
During the delivery, Bethy choose to stay by my head, soothing me and holding my hand instead of witnessing the arrival of our baby. She felt – and rather strongly – that we both should see the baby at the same time. I couldn’t agree more.
I hold our little girl in my arms, Betha has one arm around me and her hand on our baby’s head.
We turn to look at each other in the same instant.
Both our eyes are elated and misted over.
She bends down to kiss me.
Perfection.
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