Chapter One
Fed up would be an appropriate adjective to describe how Lauren feels at this precise moment. Bored, annoyed, exasperated and close to losing the will to keep going are equally fitting. Especially losing the will. The will has been creeping away from her at a rate of one meter per impatient sigh, and now, as she sits back in her apparently ergonomic office chair, she sees it wave her goodbye, middle finger proudly raised. She’ll never get this done.
Becoming a chauffeur was supposed to be easy, in theory; it’s just driving people around, right? She has a driver’s license, she could do that. And it was easy, to begin with. She knew the route to O’Hare like the back of her hand, she could put on a smile and a suit and sound like she knew what she was doing. But then success hit her in the face like a baseball bat, and now she’s slumped in an office, trying desperately to shuffle schedules around just so that stupid Julia can have her stupid vacation with her stupid new husband and their ratty little dog.
She shakes her head - snap out of it Lauren - and tries to focus on the good parts of her business. She loves being her own boss, and she gets to work with people she considers friends. She even gets to help those friends out by offering generous benefits, including health insurance - who the hell gets that these days? She built this business from the ground, and she’s damn proud of that.
The positive self-talk isn’t working. Her eyes burn from staring at her computer for six hours straight, her wrists ache from scattering over the keyboard since 8:30 am. Her business success might have granted her slightly less awkward working hours, but the routine has sunk exhaustion into her bones, and no matter how many good reviews her company receives, she can’t quite shake the anxiety at the sight of declining income and plummeting profits.
It’s not that she’s bad at her job, she’s made it a flying success, thank you very much, but the figures don’t scream triumph when she decides to stare at them a little longer. The discounts weren’t supposed to get this out-of-hand; it was a favor for returning clients, to drum up business, and it worked – for a while. Now she’s built up a reputation as the pushover, the silly woman who’ll beg to give you a discount, and it makes her seethe.
She nearly lost it at the rates the Kingswood CEO asked for. Kingswood’s offices took up half the city skyline, and being one of the richest organizations in town, they were perfectly able to pay her usual rates. But no, they strong-armed her and told her they’d pay the usual rates over her dead body, so what choice did she have? She’s clinging on to the hope that they’ll refer her to other potential clients, clients with less skyscrapers and more common decency.
It's the clients who both make her job and ruin it; they smile and pat her on the back and tell her that her company is the best in the city, all while robbing her of both her money and her sanity. She’s trapped in a paradox; she won’t charge exorbitant rates, she won’t ask for more money than she deserves, but she has to raise prices to cover expenses. The numbers on the screen just aren’t adding up anymore. But, as usual, she tells herself it’ll be alright, she’ll deal with it some other time. She listens to the soft rush of her computer powering off and tries to do the same with her brain. It’s far too late for her to still be here.
Everyone’s gone home by the time she’s packed up – and of course, stupid Julia wouldn’t think to stay back and help her – so she turns the lights out and digs out her keys with a sigh and a bitter smile at the mess still spread over her desk. Again, she’ll deal with it in the morning.
There’s still a winter chill in the air as she steps out of the building for the first time all day – lunch is for slackers – and she hurries to her car, her breath misting the air in front of her. She struggles not to think about clients as she checks her phone for anything other than their petty messages and eases her toes out of shoes she shouldn’t have bought before chucking everything in the passenger seat and driving as fast as her safety-conscious chauffeur brain will allow, out of the parking lot and off into the night.
***
Home is dark and cold. She promised herself she’d move out of this cramped apartment at some point, but she’s been making promises for five years now, and they’re becoming difficult to keep. She tells herself she can’t have stagnated, that she’s a prodigy, a competent business woman; but it doesn’t feel like that as she scrapes the tomato sauce off yesterday’s dishes. She wants her own house and a car that doesn’t rattle and a business she doesn’t have to take home with her. A man would be quite good too – or even just a cat, some other life form to make her empty home a little less empty.
Still, it’s not all doom and gloom – there’s re-runs of Friends right up until midnight, and leftover lasagna in the fridge, so she showers work out of her mind and flops on the sofa, remote in one hand and dinner in the other. She manages to smear sauce across her face and down her top, too, but that’s just one of the perks of living alone. She can burp as loud as she likes and there’s no-one to berate her – then again, there’s no-one to applaud, either. A cat. A cat would definitely be a good addition.
Before bed, she rakes through some more emails from various clients – God, Kingswood is keen, they never seem to leave her alone – and stops on one from the CEO, no less, who seems to be asking her to personally chauffeur someone. Well, that’ll never happen in a million years, she thinks as she taps out a polite yet blunt reply that says no, she does not personally chauffeur, that’s not how the company operates anymore, but she’ll request the most senior driver to complete the job first thing tomorrow.
The very thought of tomorrow is enough to make her groan in frustration and push the heels of her hands into her eyes. She sets her alarm for ass o’clock the next morning and stretches out in the sheets, trying to blink the endless statistics from behind her eyes. Only after an hour of sifting through thoughts does she finally fall asleep.