Chapter 2: Ian

Ella plopped down on the couch with a sigh that was frankly bigger than she was. Her hair was in a messy braid, she was in her post work uniform of pajama pants and a sweatshirt, and she had a Seagram’s cooler halfway to her lips.

“Long day?” I asked.

She side eyed me as she took a drink. “You have no idea. They took the Altria project, approved it, and then told me I have three weeks to generate a full client presentation.”

Ouch. She typically had a month or more to do that, based on what she’d told me in the past.

She could see the confusion on my face; “So you’re thinking: why is Ella here and not at the office?” She twinkled that tight little smile that she’d reserved for doing something truly epic since we were kids. “Because I don’t give a fuck if the work’s done or not in three days, or three weeks, or three years.”

“Uhh...” Ella was usually extremely invested in her work projects, despite what upper management had done to her the past few years. Every time she succeeded at turning shit into sapphires, they just handed her a bigger bag of shit.

Then her eyes turned soft. She looked down and took a huge breath; paused, and looked up at me again.

“Ian, I got a job offer in Seattle. For almost twice as much, even considering Seattle cost of living.”

“WHAT?!?“

I sounded like a literary fucking genius over here, because I was floored. I mean, I guess I didn’t think we’d live together forever, but, well, I’m not exactly a future planner. I’d killed myself to get the degree I wanted and get independent, and I had. I was twenty four, fit, and happy with life. I didn’t have any interest in thinking about being thirty, forty, or whatever. I’d seen what happened to my parents when they had my brother and I before they turned twenty one, and while they loved each other, they clearly had no clue how to live life that didn’t revolve around work or kids.

I put three quarters of my paycheck in the bank every other week, hit a bar every now and then and had pretty good luck with the ladies, some of whom were very interested in things like babies, houses, and wedding rings. It was enough to give a guy hives, honestly. Ella and I had been together for longer than some married couples, and she was just going to pick up sticks and move over a thousand miles away!?

I took a breath and tried to calm down. Jim Gaffigan blasting away in the background was suddenly exponentially less funny, and he wasn’t my favorite standup to begin with.

“Okay. But what’s going on? I thought you liked your job?” I felt like I was on the deck of a ship and the whole world was rocking.

She laughed, a little bitterly. “I like what I do, Ian, not who I do it for. You know that. A recruiter called me up for the third time this week. Apparently the new company is trying to corner the market on “Big Data” acquisition and do industry trending for Wall Street and other corporate interests. They fucking read my paper, Ian. They want to let me write algorithms for general application, not just massage existing datasets.”

“That ... sounds really awesome, actually.” Suddenly, my days plugging away with CAD to put together glorified LEGO bricks seemed ... boring.

“Yup!” She had that look in her eye like when she took that dare from Suzy Matthews to go up on the high dive and do a backflip when we were eleven. Excited, aggressive, laughing. I realized suddenly that I hadn’t seen that in a long, long time. It was nice, and then terribly sad as I realized her moving to Seattle meant I’d probably almost never see that look again.

Look, I like Ella. I mean, she’s my best friend, so when I say I like her I mean I like her a lot ... like a sister. She’s cute, I guess, but we’ve just never had that attraction. She knows basically everything I’ve ever told anyone about me, and a lot more that I haven’t. I’m a pretty private person; my birth mom died when I was eight, and I’ve never really felt the urge to share intimacy with anyone since. My Dad isn’t exactly big on feelings, either. He moved us to the house down the street from Ella not long after, and we just clicked.

It’s been us together against the world ever since. When she finally got a decent boyfriend in college I was glad she’d finally found someone. Then he broke her fucking heart, and she retreated back into that shell that she’d built around herself. Oh, we’d still cut up and have a good time, and she was interested in my fight training - but she got even more introverted than she’d been, and besides me she had basically three friends.

“So when would you start?” I very, very carefully hid any note of concern from my voice.

She was staring off into the distance and I knew her brain was going a thousand miles an hour. “They offered full relocation and an extended stay hotel. They want me there in two weeks...” she whispered softly.

“Well, that explains why you don’t care about the account they just dropped on you. When are you going to tell the old company?”

She looked at me and grinned that Cheshire cat smile again. “Oh, I’m going to go lay it on my boss tomorrow morning bright and early. The normal company policy is to immediately cut ties and pay out PTO, so this should be interesting!”

I’d like to pause for a moment and say that Ella is very likely the smartest person I have ever met, bar none. Like, our college professors were intimidated by her. She could have gone to MIT or Harvard, but I think she didn’t really care what the name on the degree was. All that mattered to her was that it was a good school and she got what she needed out of the material. She easily did the work of three people in our group projects on higher level math I’d needed for my engineering degree. While I was capable of doing it on my own, I didn’t feel bad at all about leaning on Ella every now and again when the workload got hefty.

All that is to say I realized pretty quickly that she was going to be leaving her current employer in a pretty awkward situation, and I didn’t feel bad for them at all.

“Heh. You think they’re going to let you cut and run like that when they just bagged the new account?”

Her brow scrunched up. She was adorable when she did that. “What do you mean? It’s not really up to them. I’m pretty much done working for those idiots, especially Mark.”

I nodded sagely; she’d come home more than a few times steaming because Mark had thought up some truly stupid new idea of how to run the datasets that were the next best thing to her kids. “Yes, Ella, but they need you. And companies like yours usually promise lots of things in the short term to keep things from blowing up. I’d be shocked if they didn’t counteroffer you.”

Giggles erupted from her lips. “They’re going to double my salary, Ian? Come on, get real. You know how cheap these people are.”