“Fucking Friday fucking finally!”

My guess is that the cashier at the office supply store doesn’t realize there’s a customer waiting at the pickup counter, so he feels free to let loose with his joy about the coming weekend.

I can’t say I blame him. Some days just call for jubilation.

I can’t say that this is one of them for me, but that doesn’t mean he should hold back.

“May I help you, sir?”

I guess he did see me here.

Fuck it, why should he care about swearing in front of customers? What the fuck do we know, anyway?

“Yes, I’m here to pick up a print order. It’s a poster.”

That should be specific enough, right?

Fuck. If you hadn’t guessed, I’m still not sleeping that great.

“Name?”

“Ethan. Ethan fucking Barrett.”

Hey, it’s what some people like to call me, right? Plus, this seems to be one of those office supply stores that encourages f-bombs.

“Yes, Mister Barrett, we have your order ready. And it looks like you paid online?”

“Fuck yeah, I did.”

“Okay, terrific. So, here’s your fucking poster. Have a great weekend.”

It’s about half an hour until it’s time to give my presentation.

Yes, I will be competing against established presentation guru Kallie Fern, but I decided to not let that throw me.

No, I kept my creative process pure. So pure, that I waited until I left for work this morning to even think of something.

The design consisted of some text typed into an email to the office supply store. It took ninety seconds.

A pure, unaffected creative process.

I unroll the poster to check the printing before leaving the store. It came out perfectly: a dollar sign, followed by a very large number.

That’s my entire presentation: a dollar amount.

My dollar amount.

No, no my net worth or some shit.

This is what the firm should think of as my dollar amount: The amount of capital I’ve raised as a hedge fund manager throughout my time here.

It’s a fucking lot of money.

My plan is to unroll the poster, hold it, stand there without saying a word, and…

Kallie Fern, presentation guru, is browsing the aisles of the same office supply store that my procrastinating ass is about to leave.

She doesn’t notice me. She’s much too focused on the shelves full of colored markers in front of her.

Maybe they’re better fresh or something.

Maybe her mad presentation skills are reliant on improvisation—and this is part of her process.

Maybe this is all just a fucking farce.

Or maybe, I just don’t fucking care anymore.

* * *

“Mister B! How long has it been?”

According to the wall clock at the deli, it’s now four minutes to nine. I check my wristwatch, and it tells me the same.

That might be enough time for a cup of coffee. And an egg sandwich.

“Too long, Rodrigo, I need to start coming here more often.”

“You need to, Mister B. We’ve got plenty of tourists stopping by, but not enough loyal customers.”

“That’s this neighborhood—for better or for worse.”

“Right you are, Ethan.”

Rodrigo doesn’t use my first name very often. This might be his first time doing that, in fact.

It takes me more than four minutes to enjoy my large coffee and my egg sandwich. Glancing at my wristwatch on my way out, I’m on track to be twenty minutes late for the presentation.

So, I stop dead in my tracks and turn around. I walk over to Rodrigo, who’s cleaning the counter by the register.

“How long have you been doing this, Rodrigo?”

“Doing what? Cleaning?”

“Working.”

Rodrigo laughs. “I don’t even remember when I started. I was probably born working.”

“When was your last day off?”

Rodrigo laughs even harder.

“Are you talking about a day of not working? Maybe on my wedding day…my memory’s not so good, but I was running a diner uptown, and I may have only done some light bookkeeping that day. Just a couple hours.”

“On your wedding day?”

“Yes. In nineteen sixty-seven.”

Unable to wrap my head around that, I stare silently down at my shoes on the linoleum floor for a second.

“Do you enjoy working so much? For decades on end?”

“Eh, since I came here, I’ve only worked for myself, so...it hasn’t been so bad.”

I check my wristwatch. Even if I were to somehow magically teleport up to the boardroom at this moment, I’d still be over fifteen minutes late.

“Speaking of work, shouldn’t you be getting to work soon, Mister B? I’ve never seen you here this late. Not on a weekday.” Rodrigo laughs again.

“I know it’s a little late, Rodrigo...”

“Hey, I’m not your boss…”

“No, I mean for a wedding gift. But, I’d like to give you one, anyway.”

I slide off my wristwatch and leave it on the counter by the register. Rodrigo freezes, stunned, staring at it. “What’s this?”

“I know you know what a watch is—and that’s a Bulgari Diagono. You can use it, or you could probably get a few grand for it if you wanted.”

Rodrigo picks it up, delicately, his face still halted in shock.

“I’ll see you around, Rodrigo.”

When I get to the corridor outside the boardroom, I can hear Kallie’s voice in presentation mode. I probably forfeited by chance to go first. That’s understandable, seeing as I’m twenty minutes late, at least.

Without a wristwatch to check, I pull out my personal phone to look at the time.

It’s 9:25 a.m.

I listen to what I can hear of Kallie’s presentation outside the boardroom—and I realize that I left my presentation at the deli.

I decide to take a page from Kallie’s book and improvise.

There’s no time to overthink it, so I let instinct take over.

With my personal phone in my hand, I call the last person I spoke with on that phone.

This is supposed to be a visual presentation, so I make it a video call.

Two seconds later, those electrifying emerald eyes, which I had resigned to never seeing again, appear on the screen.

“Ethan, what are you doing?”

She looks so fucking beautiful.

“Madeline, I’m so happy you picked up.”

“I’m at work, Ethan. It looks like you are, too.”

“I am. I just wanted to show you something...”

“Could it wait? I was about to leave, actually.”

“I don’t know. I’m already running late.”

Maddie looks around quickly. “Okay, Ethan, but it needs to be brief.”

Angling my phone so only I can see the screen—and Maddie can still see me—I burst through the boardroom door.

Kallie stops mid-word, pointing at a whiteboard mounted on the wall. Rosen, Barrister, and Phil turn to look at me.

“Nice of you to join us,” Barrister says.

“I don’t know what’s on,” I begin.

“I’ll say,” Phil comments.

“I don’t know what’s going on with the company,” I continue, “or what kind of farce this presentation thing is, or why you’re moving. And I could fucking care less.”

I allow for a dramatic pause. There’s no response, but all eyes are on me.

I continue.

“I’m finished. I’ve given this firm and this job enough of my life. I’m out. Out of the competition, out of whatever the hell this job is supposed to be now. I’m finished, and I’m not giving any of this another fucking second of my time.”

Making good on my word, I’m out the door and on my way down the hall before anyone can respond.

The only response I care about is Maddie’s. On my phone’s screen, it looks like Maddie is also walking down a hallway at her office.

“Hold on, Ethan, I’m going to be outside shortly so we can talk.”

I walk faster and faster until it starts to turn into a run.

If I get on the elevator, I would risk losing the connection to Maddie, and that is a risk I can never afford to take again—not in a million fucking years.

So, I run into the stairwell.

“Maddie, I love you.”

And I start running down the stairs.

“I’m in love with you, Maddie. I’m so fucking in love with you”

And I keep running down flight after flight of stairs.

“I love you, Maddie!”

And my voice rings through the stairwell—and so does another voice.

“Ethan...”

Running down the last flight of stairs, I see Maddie’s angelic face. She’s now outside, and her cheeks are bright red.

“Ethan, I’m on speakerphone, on the sidewalk, and there are tour groups all around me...and I love you, too.”

After exiting the stairwell, I tear through the lobby and out onto the sidewalk at breakneck speed.

Running down Broadway, I hold my phone as steadily in my hand as I possibly fucking can. I can see Madeline so vividly, and I can hear her voice so clearly—including those last four words—that I can hardly believe it.

“You started breaking up,” I tell Maddie. “Could you repeat that?”

“I said I love you, too!”

“I’m in love with you, Maddie,” I say, now sprinting west down Vesey, “and could you repeat that?”

“I’m in love with you, too, Eth!” Maddie’s yelling, and crying, and it looks like she’s racing up the West Side Highway sidewalk. “I’m so fucking in love with you I can’t stand it anymore, and I can’t hide it anymore, and I missed you so fucking much.”

At the intersection of Vesey and the West Side Highway, I can now see Maddie, in person, standing across the intersection.

And she’s no longer looking at her phone. She’s looking at me across the highway.

And I’m looking at her.

“Could you repeat that?” I ask, softly, putting my personal phone back in my pocket.

The light at the intersection changes. The traffic—trucks, taxis, city buses—stops speeding up and down the highway.

My feet cannot carry me fast enough, but I try.

Bolting out into the highway, I reach into my pocket and grab my other phone, my business phone, and lob it straight out into the street.

Maddie does the same thing with the phone she’s holding as she runs towards me.

And we reach each other. We’re the only two people in the small island in the middle of the highway, with tiny patches of grass just north and south of us.

Just as the light changes again, and the buses and trucks start moving again, we fall into a kiss on our little island.

And we stay in our kiss until long after both our phones are surely demolished by countless tons of moving steel.

After the light changes once more, or twice more, or three or four more times, we fall sweetly and slowly out of our highway island kiss.

“Could you repeat that?” I ask.

“I said I’m in love with you. And I just quit my fucking job, too. So, what a coincidence...”

“Why?”

“Because it was killing me, and they were letting my case go cold.”

“Is there anything I can do to help, though? I was at the firm for years.”

“Nah, the SEC is finished with it. But I have a feeling that the Swiss authorities may not be so forgiving.”

We share another kiss as the traffic barrels north and south around us.

The light changes again, and the highway traffic halts for us, and without saying another word, Maddie and I cross the highway and head back east—back towards Ten Barclay and my apartment.