When The Heartache is Over

"Well, Elvina, thank you so much for coming," he said straightening up and getting his feet.

"You've certainly cleared up a lot. Grace was right, I do feel better," he said.

He was leading me towards the elevator. "Grace will probably be in touch," he said. "I think we can work this out so you and even Lou can keep your jobs. Tell him I'm sorry about his face. My bad."

The next thing I knew, I was in the regular elevator crying. I got out of the elevator at just the wrong time. I walked out of the building crying just as a smirking Grace walked in.

"So how was it?" she asked.

"How was what?" I asked her. I hated the bitch even more. Obviously this cunt had some kind of hold on my husband that he couldn't give her up. Rage overtook my reason and I swung at her.

She moved and my wild swing bounced off of her shoulder. She tapped me soundly on my face and it stung. I guess that was her way of letting me know that she could kick my ass easily, anytime she felt like it.

"Uhm, have you ever even been in a fight?" she asked. I shook my head and she laughed. "That is so cute," she said. "Look I know that you're pissed about something. Please tell me you didn't lie to him. I already told you not to fuck this up. It took me hours to even get him to agree to this."

I just glared at her. "Okay," I yelled. "You won. He's yours. But I will never ever give up trying to get him back. I..."

"Yeah, I know," she smirked. "You love him and all the rest...just tell me how you fucked this up."

"Why, so you can laugh at me even more. It's not like you actually care about..."I started. She pulled me back inside the building and motioned to a guard who ran over like his ass was on fire. She pointed at a beauty salon and he quickly pulled out a ring with about a hundred keys on it and opened the door. He looked around for the light switch and she told him not to bother and thanked him.

"Yes, you dumb bitch," she began. "I actually do care. I want him happy at any cost. So tell me how you messed up."

I filled her in on how I'd told him everything.

"Wait, did you say that you were willing to share him with me?" she asked.

"I'd do anything for him," I said.

"So, shit what went wrong?" she asked. "It seems like you did everything right."

"I don't know," I said. I told her about the last things I'd said to him and her eyes got huge.

"Well, you really fucked this up now," she hissed. "And I was just thinking that the two of you had built the sex thing up into something that reality could never match. Baby, you not only burned down the bridges you'd just built, you blew them sky high. This is going to take some time to fix if we can even fix it at all. This is, of course, partially my fault."

"How is it your fault?" I asked. "What did I do? Why are you trying to help me anyway? I thought we hated each other..."

"I wouldn't call it hate exactly," she said. "We just both want the same thing. In your case, it's to a desperate and scary level. In my case, I can't have him right now anyway. I fucked up with him just as badly as you did. Only in my case, it was far more recent and far worse." I looked at her and my eyes narrowed.

"Why are we here?" I asked. "This isn't WellWen. This is some beauty salon."

"Sweetie," she smiled. "Cal and I are WellWen. We own this whole God damned building. Whoever owns this salon just rents the space from us. We're not going to break anything and we need a place to talk to see if we can fix your fuck up. My life is bad enough without Cal finding a new reason to mope over you."

"I still don't understand what I did wrong," I said.

"You know more about Cal than anyone on earth right?" she asked. I nodded.

"Who are the three people on earth that mean more to him than anyone else on earth?" she asked.

"His mother, his father and probably you," I said. She just smiled.

"You have to watch that jealousy thing," she said. "You got one out of three right. I am on the list but I'm probably third and I always have been. If I'd played my cards right, I probably could have been first but fate and my stupid temper worked against me. In order for you to see how we have to fix this, I have to fill in some blanks for you. This might be a long conversation..."

"I have nothing but time," I said.

"That's true since I got you fired," she smiled. "Okay, the last thing you remember of Cal was him driving away from you while some Tina Turner song played in your house, right?" I nodded and just thinking about it made me want to cry.

"Okay, it hit him pretty bad too," she said. "He did some very stupid things. Do you know that he picked up a woman on the road and she tried to rob him? He tried to get her to kill him. You really messed him up. Anyway, he just kept driving until he ran out of land. The bitch who tried to rob him was wearing a Hawaii T-shirt. He took that as a sign. He sold his Mustang and came here. He got a job doing IT for one of the big hotels. He'd messed around with the code that became the WellWen software while he worked for the old company where he met me.

Since he had nothing to do when he wasn't at work, he ended up finishing the program. He began to see then what it could turn into but he really didn't have any idea that it would get to be this big.

He called me one Saturday afternoon when he decided to start his own company. You need to know that I'd kind of had a crush on him ever since the first day on the job with him. I'd really been looking forward to working with him and I was really pissed when they told me that I was supposed to be his replacement not his colleague. My boss had to sit me down and calm me down and explain to me how the whole thing was just so the two of you could work together.

I was really pissed at you for taking him away from me. That was why I was so shitty towards you when you came into the office all teary eyed trying to find him. Anyway, once he called that Saturday afternoon, I was gone. I withdrew all of my money and bought a ticket for Hawaii. I never even went back to work to tell them that I was leaving.

We spent about four months re-writing code to make things more universal and more stable. We became even better friends. I wanted us to become even more than that. But I was also no fool. I knew how much he loved you and that it would take a long time for him to get over you. You had this glow, and of course those tits, but it was more than that. You had this confidence...that was him wasn't it?" I nodded.

"Anyway, we didn't have a lot of money so we shared an apartment and worked at our shitty IT jobs and ate tuna and pineapples just like all of the internet rumors said. Every once in a great while, we'd splurge and go to Burger King, but for the most part it was tuna and pineapples."

"We started out slowly and over the next six months began building up the numbers of websites we had access to and also our client base. You have to understand that he called me about two months after you two broke up so about a year after he'd left you we were making money and it just snowballed and quickly. Once the money started coming in, we could have moved to a bigger place but we didn't. We stayed in our shitty little apartment sleeping on the couch together. I slept with him, practically naked and nothing happened. You were still in his head. I did the dumbest thing possible right after we started making money."

"I called my sister. Mona was a year older than me and completely fucked up. I figured that I could get her a job doing something with us and help to straighten her out. I'd get her off drugs and into a stable life. It didn't work. Some people don't want to work for anything. There's just no way to help them. Mona was twenty three then with two kids by different fathers and she was addicted to several drugs."

"She left her kids with my parents who took care of them most of the time anyway. When she got here, she moved in with us and proceeded to continue to not do anything except get high. We had a big party to celebrate our first corporate client. Cal drank a little bit that night and as you know he doesn't drink."

"I think it was you..." she said.

"How the hell could I...?" I asked.

"He still loved you, dummy. And he missed you something awful. I think we all knew that we were on the verge of things getting really big and you weren't here to share it with him. Anyway, I had a great time at that party. I danced and hung out with a bunch of guys and I did it on purpose. Like you, I was a God damned schemer and like you, it blew up in my face."

"My big plan was to try to make him jealous. He never even noticed because he was drunk out of his mind. When I made my big entrance to our apartment, I came in missing a shoe and had my hair all messed up. I was ready to make a scene. I was ready to tell him that if he didn't like the thought of what I might be doing with other guys then he'd damned well better claim me. Boy, what an idiot I was."

"I came into the apartment still pretending to be drunk and used and saw Cal and my sister in bed together on the very same couch that he and I slept on. I woke them up and called them both all kinds of names and walked back out of the apartment. He tried to talk to me several times and I even quit the company. I got my own apartment and went back to doing IT in the hotel."

"I should have noticed how confused he was but I was just so God damned jealous that I walked away from the best thing in my life. Of course, I found out a few weeks later that my sister was pregnant. I drew myself even farther away from them. Then I started my second great scheme. You see, I wanted to punish Cal. If he was going to fall in love with some woman and get her knocked up, if he wanted to be with someone instead of you, it was supposed to be me."

"Manny Manoluga, was a local surfing champ. He's the guy who taught Cal to surf. They're still very good friends. I started dating him and often showed up when they hung out, just to rub it in Cal's face. When Manny asked me to marry him, I accepted. I never expected it to go the distance. Manny had been engaged six times. I just wanted to do it to spit in Cal's face again. Shit, I loved him as much as you do and he'd hurt me badly. Anyway, Manny got into an accident. He got hit by a really big wave and his board hit him in the back of his neck. He lost all feeling from his chest down."

"While I was in the hospital visiting Manny, my sister was brought in. She almost died on the table. She'd OD'd. I couldn't help it. As much as I hated that bitch for stealing Cal from me, she was still my sister. There were all kinds of things wrong with her. Her life of drugs and alcohol and whatever else she was doing had finally caught up with. She had her good days and her bad ones. I think she knew that she was going to die."

"On one of the days that I visited her, maybe it was the pain meds, but it put her in a strange mood. She started telling me every shitty thing that she'd done to me since the time we were kids. That was when she told me how she'd purposefully used Cal's depression at the party and how much he missed you against him. She'd gotten him drunk and drugged him when she was at her most fertile time. She'd pretty much raped him. He kept calling her Elvina the whole time. She'd planned on getting pregnant and having Cal support her until the baby was grown. She'd also seen how crazy I was over him and just wanted to take HIM, like everything else I ever had, away from me."

"I felt like the world's second biggest fool," she said.

"Who's the first?" I asked.

"You," she smirked. "You lost him first and for an even stupider reason."

I nodded my head and had to admit that she was right.

"I'd been punishing the wrong person the whole time," she continued. "I felt so stupid. It had been my own fault. If I had just stayed with him at the party like we normally did, she'd never have been able to do it. If I had just been patient, Cal and I would have ended up together. By the time I found all of this out, I was engaged to an invalid. A man that I liked but didn't really love and doing a job that I hated just to try to punish the man I loved for something he hadn't done."

"I never visited my sister again. I hated that bitch more than anything I could think of. I went ahead and married Manny because it was the honorable thing to do and as kind of a penance for my stupidity. My job working for the hotel couldn't make a dent in Manny's care and the mounting medical bills. I went and spoke to Cal about getting a job. We weren't in the WellWen building yet. But we had a nice suite of offices. I didn't know what to expect but we had a long talk."

"I asked him if I could get a job with the company and he laughed in my face. I was a little bit hurt until he told me that I didn't need a job since I owned part of the company. Elvina, he even had an office for me, with my name on the door. He'd been saving my share of everything in an account for me. If I hadn't already loved him so much, I would have started then."

"I reminded him that I'd walked out on him and quit. I wasn't actually there during a lot of the really tough times when they moved from our apartment into the offices. He told me that anyone who needed to get ahead by screwing his best friend out of something they'd worked hard for didn't really deserve anything. I had treated him like shit for eight months over something that wasn't his fault and he still thought I was his best friend."

"My dumb assed sister slipped into a coma and died before they could deliver the baby. They kept her alive on machines for another month until Elva could be delivered. Cal and I have raised her and she is a very happy little girl and her daddy worships the ground she walks on. It wasn't the way he wanted to have a child and her mother was not the person he'd have wanted to have one with. But dynamite wouldn't separate him and his daughter and neither will you."

"But I thought..." I began.

"You, like everyone else thought that Cal was her dad and I was her mother because she looks like me...right?" she asked.

"It's worse," I said. "I thought that she was your daughter but I had no idea who her father was."

"That makes sense," she said. "So when you started all of that bullshit about it being just the two of you, he freaked. As much as he loves you, he ain't gonna hook up with anyone who can't accept his child."

"I really didn't know she was his," I said.

"Elvina, he named her after you. Do you really think I'd have let him name her Elva, if she was mine? Get a grip," she said.

"So, I'm really screwed aren't I?" I asked.

"Maybe not," she said smiling. "I did get you fired after all. So I owe you a job."

"I'm terrible at all of that computer shit and he probably wouldn't want me around," I said.

"That's true," she said. "But you have to do something right. Just let me handle this."

* * * * * *

Cal/Danny

"Just let me handle this," I said to her the next afternoon. "Isn't that what you told me Grace?"

"Yes it was Cal," she said smiling at me. "I handled everything just the way you'd have wanted me to."

"You gave that asshole an account and convinced his wife not to divorce him. You gave him everything he needed to keep his fucking job and somehow Elvina got fired. How is that handling things the way I wanted?"

"Well, in exchange for him signing a paper agreeing not to press charges against you, thereby preventing the possibility of you having a criminal record, I gave his company a level one account," she said. I looked at her crazily.

"I convinced his wife that she was being hasty," she continued. "She should suck all of the money she could out of him before divorcing him. I told her that she should wait until he got fired to divorce him. I figured that would be a bigger thrill for you. She agreed to do it because I offered intern positions in our summer program for both of her sons while they're in college. Think about it, he gets fired and then divorced at the same time. Plus, his kids come home after every summer talking about how great you are. That would really fuck him up."

"Yeah probably twenty years from now when it happens," I said angrily. "And Grace, you should have given them at least a level two account. They'd get more screens and more outlets and we'd get more money. They're a fairly sizable company, level ones are for small businesses."

"Cal," she smirked. "You developed the software and I came up with the pricing structure and the account levels. I dangled the carrot of a level two account to their CEO. They get to move up to a level two account..."

"When?" I asked. I knew that Grace had a nasty streak in her.

"As soon as they fire Lou," she smirked. "Which I've been assured will be the second or third day that he gets back. They'll let him work for a couple of days so he'll think that everything is fine. Just when he gets his confidence back, they'll shit can him for unsatisfactory performance. The guy can't even find a spreadsheet let alone set one up. I gave them a discount for setting it up so we can watch him being fired on Skype."

"What about Elvina?" I asked.

"I was honest with her so at least she could start trying to find a job," she said. "If she ever calls or shows up here, I'll let you handle it. Dealing with your other women is not a part of my job description."

"You were right," I said quietly. "Talking to her and getting closure was the best possible thing for both of us. It's a tough blow to take but we just don't fit anymore. It's time for me to move on. In fact, I have a date tonight."

"You have a what?" she asked.

"Don't start getting upset," I said. "You're a married woman and I'm tired of being alone." For some reason she just shook her head.

"Oh, before you leave to go out on your DATE," she said. "You should probably stop up at your place to meet the new nanny I hired. Elva met her this morning and she already loves her."

"If you and Elva like her, she's fine with me," I said.

"Cal, she's a live in," said Grace.

"Big deal," I said. "The nanny's rooms are on the other end of the apartment from my room and Elva's. I probably won't see much of her. What was the last one's name?"

"Uh Cal," she said. "The idea behind getting you a live in nanny is so you don't have Elva running around the building all the time. And so you can concentrate on work sometimes. Maybe this way, you won't be running up the God damned stairs in the middle of meetings or holding meetings on your rooftop garden while playing with your daughter. Who knows, after you get to know her you might want to date her too."

The rest of the afternoon I spent going over accounts and calling some of the new clients to get their feedback on how things were going. There wasn't time to go home before my date. I figured I'd meet the new nanny in the morning. Maybe I'd even sleep in and have breakfast with her. The last nanny was fifty seven years old and looked like a hobbit. Grace had a history of hiring ugly women as my secretaries and nannies.

I knew that Grace would have the woman thoroughly checked out and make sure she had good references before hiring her. There was also the fact that even with a nanny, at least one of Elva's hulking security men was in the apartment all the time unless I was there, so I didn't worry much.

The date ended pretty early. There was simply no chemistry between us. As I rode the elevator up to my apartment, I wondered when the last time I'd gone out and actually had fun with someone had been.

As soon as I stepped into the apartment, my security man left and went home to his own family. I sat down on my couch and wondered for the hundredth time that day where she was. Even though things hadn't worked out with us, I knew that I'd always love Elvina but maybe it was time for that divorce.