I wanted Adam. And not in an adult way. I wanted him the way you want your mommy when you skin your knee. I wanted him to make it all better. He believed in me. He believed in me so much, he would trust me to support him. I couldn’t imagine the horror of losing my job, because it would mean I was somehow broken and useless. I couldn’t lose Adam because it would mean the same thing. I wanted to be valued. I wanted to matter.

My voice was breaking when I called him. He promised to meet me out for a drink at Forbidden City. I thought, “Thank God. It looks like we just went through a rough patch. No biggie. Couples weather them all the time. It’s a mere blip, and now that I need him, he’s here for me.”

That evening, I walked inside Forbidden City and looked around the bar. The place was crowded, and there was no where to sit. I managed to squeeze in between patrons waiting to get served and I picked up the drink menu. My eyes were drawn immediately to a cocktail called A Moment of Romance. I didn’t care what was in it. As the bartender made eye contact with me and I leaned forward to place my order, I felt someone run their fingertip across my butt cheeks.

I jerked away from the bar and turned, but there was no one behind me. Ew. I felt like I needed a shower. What kind of skeeve would do that? I felt jumpy and anxious after that, and I couldn’t stop looking around for Adam while I gulped down my drink. A barstool opened up next to me, so I whisked my violated buns to safety by taking the seat. I picked up the drink menu again. The guava martini entitled Happy Together was looking inviting, so I ordered that.

I looked at my watch. Adam was a half hour late. I debated calling him. Nah, I wanted to play it cool. If he wasn’t there in the next fifteen minutes, then I would call. Forty-five minutes was officially Very Late, so I couldn’t possibly come off as a stalker for checking in at that stage. Happy Together slid down my throat in no time and I picked up the drink menu again. Better Tomorrow. I definitely needed a Better Tomorrow.

By the time I was holding my drink glass upside down over my face to catch the last drops of Better Tomorrow, it was time to call Adam to see where he was. I was feeling giddy as I dialed.

He picked up the phone and sounded impatient as he snapped, “Hello?”

“Oh hey, what’s going on!”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Kelly! I’m at Forbidden City. Where are you?”

“Oh, right, Kelly. Hi, I’m sorry, I forgot. I’m actually at the airport waiting for my friend Reginald. His flight was delayed, but he should be landing any minute now.”

“Okay, no problem, I’ll just wait for you guys here then. You think you’ll be about an hour?”

“Yeah, sure, okay. I guess we didn’t really have anything planned for tonight anyway, so sure, we’ll just drop his stuff off at my place and come straight out.”

“Cool, see you soon!”

I had a good hour to ponder this. He forgot. How could he forget? I couldn’t stop thinking about him for thirty seconds, yet he actually managed to forget we had plans. This was not good. Not good at all. Where was that drink menu.

I was caught between wanting to order a drink that sounded ferocious, like The Killer, in an effort to remove the he-forgot torment from my system, or something that would calm me down, like In the Mood for Love. Maybe I had time for both. I’d start with The Killer, because it was a peach-flavored martini, and after all, Adam was a peach.

The drinks were really hitting me and it occurred to me, in a detached way, that I was getting quite drunk. I didn’t even know he had a friend coming to town. Why hadn’t he told me? Don’t you tell someone that you just had sex with when you have a friend coming to town? That seemed like big news to me. I realized that we really were drifting apart, and it wasn’t just my imagination.

Apart. Were we even together to begin with? It had all the signs of a whirlwind romance, but now it looks like it was just the first blush of a new relationship. A crush, really. A crush with good sex.

As I sat at the horseshoe-shaped bar waiting, a scene was developing across the way. An extremely inebriated chick ripped off her t-shirt. Now there she was, in a very small green bra with her large bosoms straining to get out, tattooed arms, and long black hair hanging down to her waist. She had a pretty orange flower tucked behind her ear. She was gyrating like a maniac, and those big boobs were bouncing everywhere.

Eventually the chick jumped up on the bar and was dancing like a stripper. I heard the sound of breaking glass, and then the bartender told her to get off the bar. Some male hands reached up to help her down. She continued her aerobic workout while all eyes in the bar stayed riveted on her performance. I ordered another drink and sipped while I watched the entertainment.

The hour passed surprisingly quickly and I wanted to go to the ladies room to check my hair and makeup before Adam arrived. I wasn’t crazy about giving up my barstool, but I felt it was more important to primp. Once in front of the mirror in the dim bathroom lighting, I saw that I looked awful. My pores looked big, my lips were chapped and my hair was flat against my head. All that drinking did not do a body good. I set about primping and preening, spackling and fluffing. It would do. I worried that my drunken make-up artist skills weren’t up to par, but I had already spent too much time in the bathroom already.

As I came back to the bar, I saw the back of Adam’s head about ten feet away. I smiled and snuck up behind him. I put my arm around his waist, peeked around to his face and said, “Hey, handsome!”

“Hey,” he said, and then turned back to the guy I assumed was his friend Reginald. I stood there waiting for him to introduce me, but they kept talking. I figured maybe they were in the middle of some important conversation. I listened in while I waited and realized they were talking about sports. I could not believe I was being ignored. Forgotten, and then ignored.

I recognized that I was about to have a booze-fueled freak out, and the safest thing to do was to remove myself from the situation before anything happened. I went outside and my hands shook as I called Terry to tell her what was going on. She said, “Kelly, it sounds like Adam probably hasn’t seen this guy in a long time. Let it go. Stand there politely and listen to their conversation, and I’m sure you’ll get introduced. But please, don’t bring on the crazy. Just calm yourself. And have a glass of water, you’re slurring.”

When I walked back in, I could not believe my eyes. Adam and Reginald were talking to the chick in the bra. I swear if she sneezed, her boobs would have exploded and taken out somebody’s eye. And then Adam would get boob shrapnel lodged in his brain. I briefly imagined his death scene before becoming incredibly angry. He could ignore me, but he would talk to the frigging BOOB GIRL? Oh, I was pissed.

I stomped up to him and dug my fingernails into his arm as I said, “You’re talking to her? Didn’t it mean anything to you when we had sex the other night?”

Adam jumped back and looked at me in fear. Genuine, adrenaline-fueled fear. Good, I thought. He should be afraid. I relished the only power I had over the situation and said, “And this is Reginald, I presume. I’m sure you’ve met BOOB GIRL here, but we haven’t met. Nope. No we have not met. Because Adam here hasn’t introduced us, though I’m sure the boob girl was given a proper introduction.” The boob girl’s eyes got very wide and she took a step backwards. I continued, “I’m sure you’ve even met her boobs by now, haven’t they, BOOB GIRL. I’d like to meet them, what are their names? Tom, Dick and Harry? You’ve got to have at least three of them in there.” She turned and walked away.

Adam looked disgusted. I said to him, “Oh, I’m sorry, did I cockblock? Did I get in the way of your conquest there? Good. You deserve it. You practically stood me up, and I’ve been sitting here alone drinking my face off for nine hours. Then you show up and blow me off. And now you’re talking to HER.” I couldn’t go on. I started sobbing. Through the snot and tears, I said, “Well you can forget it. You’re not coming home with me anymore. You had your chance.”

I stormed out of the bar and stood on the sidewalk. I needed to orient myself, because I had to figure out which way was home, but more importantly, I hoped that Adam would come outside after me. I blew my nose as I waited and pulled out my compact to check my make-up. I had streaks of mascara down both cheeks.

I was startled by a small scuffling noise in the bus shelter to my right. It was the boob girl, and she was pretending the upright post was a stripper pole. She tried to swing around it, but was stopped short by the glass.

I stifled a laugh and wiped the black tears from my cheeks as I walked home.

Comments, questions, suggestions? Fire away. 

The first thing I did when I arrived to the office was make an appointment to see the head of HR, Victoria Gannon, for that afternoon. I’d never met her in person before, but I had seen her in the hallways. She was a woman of vast dimensions in all directions, and her clothes, hair and makeup were always pristine.

I spent the rest of that morning planning what I would say. I didn’t want to be emotional about it, because I didn’t want this to become about me. I only wanted to report the facts about PowerPoint Monkey, and how he stole credit for my work and was promoted as a result.

When it was time for my meeting, I took a deep breath, grabbed my notes and walked to Victoria’s office. Her door was open, so I knocked lightly on the doorframe to announce my presence. She looked up and smiled a welcoming smile as she said, “Come in, Kelly, come in, please, have a seat.”

I closed the door behind me and sat down on the edge of a chair with my knees pressed together, my hands in my lap and my back straight. I could feel my palms begin to sweat. I took a deep breath to stem the small panic rising in my chest. I tried to look calm as I plastered a prim half smile on my face.

Victoria looked at me expectantly as I sat there sweating before finally asking me, “So. What can I do for you.”

As I started to talk, my voice began to shake. I cleared my throat and took another deep breath while I searched my mind for my canned speech. I was drawing a blank. I needed to start talking before this woman thought I was having a breakdown, so I blurted out, “Well, it’s Brad.”

Now it was Victoria’s turn for a prim half smile. “What about Brad.”

“I caught him on more than one occasion telling other people about my work and my ideas and implying that he was the one who did it or thought of it.”

She pressed her lips together tightly. She was no longer smiling and she sat there blinking at me. I wondered whether I was supposed to keep talking, or if she was going to respond. I could feel the silky lining of my suit become cold with my sweat. Finally she said, “So, am I to understand you are under the assumption that Brad has claimed responsibility for your work?”

“Assumption? No, not the assumption, I know this. I know this for a fact. I’ve caught him.”

“I see.” She focused on me with this weird, scary gaze. It could have been a murderous gaze. How could she not understand this situation? Why was she looking at me like she wanted to twist my head clear off my neck and eat the innards of my skull?

While I waited for her to respond in a way that didn’t entail shooting laser beams at me with her eyes, I was screaming on the inside, “I said I caught him! Shouldn’t she be thirsty for details? Why wouldn’t she ask me what happened?”

After what was probably only a split second, I couldn’t take her stare any longer. I had to spill the details. “Yeah, so I designed this encoding operation.”

Victoria snapped at me, “You designed it.”

“Um, yes. I designed it. And well, Brad was walking around with my diagram…”

“Your diagram? You put the diagram to paper?”

“Well, no. I mean, I designed the work-flow and how all the people and the equipment fit together, and then I told Brad, and he made the diagram for me, but then he was telling everyone that he…”

“So it was Brad’s diagram that, as you say, he was walking around with.”

I felt lightheaded. I began to shake and I couldn’t keep my voice from wavering. “Yes. I mean no. Well, he wouldn’t have been able to make the diagram if … Look. Brad is nothing but a PowerPoint Monkey. He wouldn’t have an original thought if you pumped him full of LSD and threw him into the ring at Cirque du Soleil!”

Victoria drew herself up to her full Godzilla height and breathed fire at me. “Miss Brennan! That is highly inappropriate! We are done here. Please. Just get out. Go. I don’t want to hear any more about this. Out. Now. Leave.”

I didn’t say another word as I wobbled out the door of her office and hyperventilated all the way back to mine.

Terry was always successful in relationships. Through all my days of frantic romantic obsessions, she always had a boyfriend. She made it look effortless, and I suppose that's how it was for her. She knew that the way to woo a man was to back off. I, on the other hand, was remedial. I knew I shouldn't try so hard, or really, that I shouldn't try at all. So a daily massive effort was expended on restraining myself. I never could grasp the essence of male-female relations, the subtle dance, the delicate passivity of the woman in courtship. I knew I was supposed to allow the man to give chase. Doing nothing should be effortless, right? Not for me. I was always trying desperately to attain that look of nonchalance that drives men wild.

Some men will tell you that they want to know when a woman is interested. I loved those men, because they gave me license to just be myself and show my interest. However, what they really mean by that are the almost undetectable signs of the animal kingdom -- a piece of shiny hair twirled around an index finger, a demure Mona Lisa smile, a fluttering of the eyelashes. What they don't mean is the third phone call, the tenth email and the uninvited visit to their office for good measure. I didn't know that yet.

That's why I was having a spectacular meltdown in my office on a bright Friday afternoon in September. I was fast approaching 30 years old, and the previous weekend in Paris, I broke up with Patrick, the umpteenth love of my life. I was suffering the appropriate levels of devastation one feels when you look down the barrel of the rest of your days and you see nothing but muumuus and kitty litter. I didn’t even like cats. In short, I was inconsolable.

Terry knew I would be dead meat if my ruthless boss, Sadie, saw that I had been crying, so Terry convinced me that it was okay for the two of us to leave work early. I told Sadie’s beleaguered assistant that I must’ve eaten a bad falafel from the vendor on the corner, and Terry and I slipped out. Terry had no need for excuses. She had the kind of boss who would totally understand if you needed the afternoon off to console a broken-hearted friend.

We walked the ten blocks from NBC at 30 Rock where we worked to the lobby lounge of the Mandarin Oriental for a midday cocktail. As we trudged up Sixth Avenue, I told her all about the break up.

While Patrick and I were in Paris for the long Labor Day weekend, I secretly hoped that he would pop the question. I knew it was an impossibility, as he’d never given any indication that we were as serious as that, but I’m a dreamer, which is a euphemism for delusional.

I woke up anxious the morning we had plans to visit the prime engagement spot, the Eiffel Tower. I was with the man I loved in a romantic city, I was more than ready to give my life to him, and I knew that he didn’t feel the same way. I was feeling rather bitter about that.

I told Terry how Patrick and I slogged umbrellaless through a downpour on our way to the Eiffel Tower. I was cold and soaked by the time we neared a quaint café about halfway along our route, and I suggested we stop for a hot tea so we could dry off while we waited for the rain to let up. Patrick called me a lazy whiner, and I told him he could continue on his forced march without me. We were miserable in Paris. We were primed for destruction.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Please leave me a comment or email me: katie at katie morton dot com.