The It-Bitch

That was so far from what I had imagined over the weekend of what would happen today; it took me a while to process. Of course, I agreed to Felix' stipulations and went to start work. I was quite certain I'd call it an early night though as I was totally wrecked. I also took a short break to drive Alan back to the airport after having had lunch with him and Felix.

It wasn't a surprise when Tamara strolled into my office in the afternoon while I was in a meeting with four representatives from one of the subsidiaries. As usual, the recording device was on. The record would be transcribed by my assistant and serve as meeting protocol.

"Everybody out!"

The four looked at me, unsure of what to do. They were in a similar dilemma as my assistant had been a few days ago, so I nodded to give my consent and an easy way out for them. There was no reason to make them a target for the wrath of the WOO. But I was also surprised at Tamara's attitude. If that was supposed to be the apology, she had already failed.

"I heard your girlfriend works in Marketing. Shabby or Shally or something like that."

My eyes flickered to the recorder to make sure it was still running. Her strategy was ridiculously transparent. Insult my girlfriend to put me off-balance but I wasn't taking the bait.

"And this concerns you how, precisely?"

I could see the disappointment flash through her eyes when I didn't fall for her trick, but she didn't let up and her confidence returned quickly.

"You will call my dad, tell him that he's wrong, that you molested me the entire evening and flipped out when I rejected you at the door or I'll have her fired."

It seemed as if her father had been leaning really into her and she needed a way out. But I wasn't about to give in. Felix had mentioned security footage from the front door and that he had spoken to people that were at the event. Fortunately, the recorder was still running.

"Are you really stooping so low that you turn to blackmail? Can't you just accept that I'm not interested in you? That I'd rather spend my time with my girlfriend instead of you?"

I would rather spend an evening having a root canal treatment without anaesthesia than with her but I didn't need to say that. I wouldn't drop as low as her and make it personal. Her eyes were cold and calculating and shooting daggers at me.

"Nobody turns me down. Ever."

There was the problem. I had hurt her pride. She was used to men dancing after her whistle and the fact that I didn't, was an affront to her. What's the saying? Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

"I'll give you the opportunity to revoke your threat. You will leave Shelly and me alone."

"In your dreams. If you don't do as I tell you, I'll wait for a few weeks and then accuse you of sexual abuse. You'll be publicly destroyed. You'll never find work anywhere again."

My opinion of her had always been neutral at best, but now it dropped to an all-time low. I had thought that she had reached rock bottom when she threatened Shelly only a minute ago, but she proved me wrong.

"Get out! Now."

The evil grin that distorted her usually beautiful face showed me that she was beyond reason.

"You will regret this. You don't know what you're getting yourself into."

With that, she turned and strutted out of my office.

I sat there thinking for a minute, considering my options. Coming to the obvious conclusions, I stopped the recording and sent a copy to my computer. From there I forwarded it to my private email as a backup. Then I called Felix and asked for an immediate emergency meeting in my office. I wanted to give him a warning before I called the police. He arrived three minutes later and after inviting him to sit down, I played him the recording.

It took him several minutes to process what he had heard. Then he slowly rose and walked to the door, lost in thought but before he left, he turned back around. He looked a good ten years older than when he had arrived in my office. I hated having to do this to him. Both he and his wife were some of the nicest people imaginable and didn't deserve the grief.

"I'll take care of it. You and your girlfriend have nothing to worry about. Would you mind sending me a copy of the recording?"

I didn't see or hear from Tamara Hallford for the rest of the week. As far as I could tell, nobody knew where she had disappeared to. After an uneventful weekend, I was scheduled for a trip to Japan. Partly, this was about seeing the effects of the changes to the code first-hand and sign off on the testing procedures. The other part was that Japan was an important country for Hallford Enterprises and they needed to be shown that appreciation. I met with the country director who was responsible for all Japanese intercompany relations and many different managers who would have to work with the result of my project. It was important that they were all on board and understood the manifold advantages of our solution.

To show the headquarters' awareness of their importance, I extended my stay for a couple of days when they came up with more questions than I had anticipated. It was quite obvious to me that they were playing things up a little and fishing for affirmation of their relevance. Politics was not something I was very keen on but in large organisations like Hallford Enterprises, they are unavoidable.

When I returned home after ten days, I was both jet-lagged and exhausted. To my pleasant surprise Shelly greeted me at my apartment with a light supper which was only shortly disturbed when the topic of Tamara Hallford came up. Shelly told me that seemingly Felix's daughter still hadn't reappeared.

After enjoying a bath together, being massaged by my girlfriend and then literally fucked to sleep, I awoke the next morning still a bit jet-lagged.

When I entered the office building, the receptionist forwarded a message from Felix to come to his office as soon as I arrived. His assistant sent me in the moment I showed up but surprisingly Felix wasn't there. Instead, I found Tamara sitting on a chair, not behind but in front of his desk. For the first time since I knew her, she wasn't impeccably dressed and styled. She was in a jumpsuit, a dirty and wrinkled one at that, didn't have any makeup on, and I could only guess when her hair had last had a close encounter with shampoo.

"Hello, Rick."

"Tamara."

My greeting was cautious and I had stopped immediately after recognising her.

"I've besieged my Dad for over a week now and he finally agreed to let me speak to you for a few minutes. There is just one thing I need to know. Will you answer my question?"

That wasn't the bitchy, over-confident, and obnoxious WOO who had tried to blackmail me. This was almost a human being.

"Maybe," was my non-committal reply. "It depends on the question."

"Why?"

I shook my head, not understanding her question.

"Why what?"

"Why would you rather spend your evening with Shelly rather than me? She's fat, doesn't know how to dress or present herself, and I can't imagine that she lets you do the things in bed that I would have let you do."

Somehow, shaking my head seemed to be my most common reaction whenever Tamara opened her mouth.

"You really don't know, do you?"

She also shook her head.

"It's simple. Shelly's nice, friendly, genuine, warm, helpful, and a generally wonderful person. We both know that we won't stay together forever because she and I have different goals in life, but we enjoy being around each other. She makes my life better, brighter, and happier and I really hope that she feels the same way about me. When we split up in the future, we'll both be richer for what we have experienced together."

I looked into Tamara's eyes and I could see her brace herself for the verbal punch she was expecting. For an instant, I considered tempering my reply. In her eyes, I saw anxiety, self-doubts, and despair. I got the impression as if her entire self-perception was on trial. But I decided on the full truth the way I saw it.

"You, on the other hand, are a selfish, obnoxious bitch who uses people as she pleases for her own amusement. After only being in the same room as you, I feel the need to scrub my whole body with bleach. You had all the possibilities in the world. You could have become any person you wanted to and you decided to become a superficial, egotistical, unappealing skank that has no respect for anything or anyone. How you could turn out so completely the opposite of your parents is beyond to me."

I tried to read her face, to see if the message had arrived, but it didn't look like it.

"I find you so unappealing that I wouldn't go out with you if you were the last female on the planet. From my point of view, you ask the wrong question. You ask, why I don't want to be with you. The question you should ask is, 'why I should want to be with you'. No matter how much I try, apart from your looks, you have absolutely nothing going for you. Where Shelly is kind, you're mean. Where she's nice, you're demeaning. Where she's helpful, you're a bitch. Maybe you need to ask the people you usually party with. They might give you a perspective I can't see."

I still wasn't sure if she had understood but I didn't know what else to say. It took Tamara a minute to understand that I had finished. She slowly rose, I could see her father in her movements, even though her displayed character was so different from his.

"You might well be the first person to tell me honestly what you think of me. You've given me something to reflect about."

She left and I found myself standing alone in her father's office. That felt strange and I quickly departed to go to my own.

+

That was the last time I, or anyone as far as I knew, had contact with Tamara for the remainder of my stay at Hallford Enterprises. We missed the original time schedule by a month. Instead of having the Go-live in the middle of November, it was middle of December which caused a lot of interference with the preparations for the year-end-closing procedures. We also overdrew the budget by two per cent. That was not bad for a project of that size but I took it rather personally that I had failed to achieve at least one of these two milestones. At least, as would be proven later, the software was a huge success and quickly accepted by everybody who had to work with it.

It was with a heavy heart that I held my farewell speech at Hallford Enterprises' Christmas party. Apart from the short intermezzo with Tamara, it had been a fantastic experience and when I handed Felix the scissors for the symbolical cutting of the ribbon, eighteen months after the project had started, I had to suppress a tear or two.

The next day, I had to say goodbye to Shelly. We had already ended the physical part of our relationship when she had met somebody she saw a future with. As I was busy travelling the world, supervising installations and employee training, we hadn't seen much of each other since then. In a tearful farewell, I wished her all the best and insisted on being invited to her wedding, whenever that may be.

Of course, I had been in close contact with Alan and Leo during my stint with Hallford. They had everything prepared and I took over as a member of the executive board as soon as I had returned. This change kept me more than just busy and it took me a while to find my footing in my new function. At times I found myself missing the 'good old days' when I was out in the field, solving actual problems for real customers instead of managing those who did.

Three years later, I received the invitation to Shelly's wedding and was a bit surprised but proud to be seated in the second row directly behind her immediate family.

+

Today

And now we are here, two more years later and I'm attending a fundraiser for an organisation that dedicated itself to improve the educational opportunities for orphans. I had heard a lot about Tamara lately. For the first two years following the exchange in her father's office, she seemed to have vanished from the surface of the earth. When there hadn't been a single week when she hadn't been in the yellow press before, there was not a word of her whereabouts or her activities after that. Soon, she had disappeared from the public's awareness.

Then, after about two years, the name 'Tamara Hallford' started to reappear in public. I had been scrolling through the headlines of my favourite newspaper app when I saw her mentioned. It was with an almost masochistic curiosity that I opened on the article. I found myself rather surprised that she came across as a responsible and reasonable person in the interview. She talked about the goals of an animal rescue foundation and what she did to support them.

I started to keep an eye open for news about her. That's how I learned that, after a short but successful stint with the animal rescue foundation, she had moved on to a non-profit organisation that supported the education of women in second and third world countries. She didn't stay with them for long, but I read a couple of very interesting interviews where she publicly apologised for her, what she called, abysmal, demeaning and often irresponsible behaviour from a few years ago. She also urged young women to not repeat her mistakes and work hard for a good education.

Next, she started working for this foundation which was dedicated to improve the scholastic and vocational support for orphans. She has been with them for just over two years now. A few weeks ago, I had watched a TV-report about her and had to admit that she seemed to have really changed since I had last met her. She barely spoke about herself and constantly twisted the interviewer's questions, so she could laud the work of the psychologists and their helpers, the resilience of the orphans, or the contributions of her co-workers.

Then, a few days ago, I had seen another interview with her on TV after she had participated, highly successfully, in a celebrity gameshow where the winnings were given to charity. Again, she had seemed a different person compared to how I had experienced her. It was difficult to identify over the TV screen but the previously ever-present air of self-importance had been replaced by something I could not really put my finger on but whatever it was, it suited her well. She also showed that she had indeed inherited her father's intellect. She didn't have an eidetic memory but she could recall almost anything she had ever heard or read.

During the interview, she was asked what had brought that change upon her compared to what was now referred to as her 'wild days'. She had looked straight at the camera and smiled when she replied. The interviewer had been left speechless but I had laughed out loud.

"An impertinent, arrogant, selfish, stuck-up, ugly, gay ass."

I took this as the challenge it was intended to be and told Alan and Leo that I would like to represent ALM at the charity event. We had received an invitation for what was announced as an opportunity for companies to improve their reputation on the job market.

I listened to her speech and was impressed by how she used her charisma to enthral the audience. She detailed the different ways by which we, the employers, could help. Apart from the obvious financial aids, she urged us to offer trainee opportunities to allow students to gain professional experience and, even more importantly, start creating their own networks. Another option would be to sponsor surveys or degree theses.

After the presentation had ended, I hung around, chatting with people I knew. I was curious how she would react to my presence. I didn't know if she had seen me yet as I approached her from behind while she was talking to two local politicians and their wives.

"That was a rather strange reply you recently gave the interviewer when he asked about the reasons for your transformation," one of the wives just commented. "How did you phrase it? An arrogant, egotistical, gay ass?"

She chuckled politely and a bit bashful before she replied, "An impertinent, arrogant, selfish, stuck-up, ugly, gay ass. Well, I hope that the person in question knows that this time, it was meant in jest. One day, I might tell the story, but before I can do that, I need that person's approval for it. He's probably the one I've wronged the most, but so far I haven't found the courage to contact him and without his agreement, I won't give more details."

"I'm not sure if he really needs to approve anything, but I'm almost certain he's by far not as terrifying or resentful as you make him out to be," I interjected, loud enough for her and the surrounding people to hear.

She froze and while I couldn't see her face, I could see those of the people around her and their expressions spoke volumes. I saw one of the wives take Tamara's champagne from her hand as a precaution and that seemed to pull her out of her shock.

She turned around and I could see tears quickly filling up her eyes.

"Rick! Thank you so much for coming. I hoped you would when I sent the invitation to your company. May I?"

The last question was accompanied by a slight spread of her hands and a sheepish movement of her head, asking for permission to hug me.

"Of course," I replied, opening my arms for her. She sank into them and gave me the strongest and longest hug she could get away with in the current company. When she pulled back, her hand hooked onto my elbow.

"Would you mind hanging around? I'd really like to talk to you in private, but I can't leave here until it's over."

"Sure. We could do some catching up."

For the rest of the evening, she barely let go of my arm. She introduced me to all the big names even though I already knew most of them. I was, after all, a partner in one of the city's more successful companies.

When the event ended after midnight, Tamara invited me the hotel bar for a nightcap. We settled onto a small couch in a quiet corner. The waiter saw us enter and came to take our orders even before we had time to settle. I tried to get the chatter going while we waited for our drinks to be served but Tamara was clearly distracted by thoughts of her own. I was still trying to figure out a way to pull her out of the contemplative mood she had dropped into as soon as we entered the bar. When she finally spoke, she completely ignored the question I had asked just moments ago.

"Rick, first I have to tell you how really, really sorry I am for everything I did and planned to do to you and Shelly."

A sincere apology was not what I had expected, but there was no doubt at all that this came from the bottom of her heart.

"You don't have to..."

She interrupted me by softly holding her fingertips on my lips.

"Yes, I do. I don't have the words to describe how deeply ashamed I feel for that today. I was willing to destroy your life, just to get my way. I wasn't sorry for the first week or so, except for myself, maybe, but instead, I was seething. Dad cut me off completely. He cancelled all my cards, he returned the car, and he axed my allowance. Then he gave me a choice. Anger therapy or prison. He would have sent me to prison for what I almost did and that got me thinking. How disappointed did he have to be if he was willing to do that? Your rejection was at the beginning and I didn't understand it. So I first asked, then begged my Dad to let me talk to you. Then you and I met in his office and you laid it all out in the open. Over the next few weeks, with the help of my therapist, I started to really reflect about not only what you said, but what you had meant and that's when I began to realise what a horrible and disgusting person I had become over the years."

I saw one of the tears that had been threatening to spill since I walked up to her during the reception slowly make its way down her cheek. I pulled out the handkerchief I had in my breast pocket and softly dabbed the tear away before handing it to her.