Page 4 of I Love You, I Hate You
Have we done most embarrassing moments yet? I feel like we have, but I also feel like I would remember mocking yours, and I don’t.
@Lukethebarnyardcat
My most embarrassing moment is probably in college when I got drunk and tried to prove to a pretty girl that I was a hockey superstar. I am not, and it turns out I’m actually very bad at skating while drunk. Long story short I now have a cap on one of my front teeth
@Noraephronwasagenius
OMG
Did you cry? I might have cried.
@Lukethebarnyardcat
NO
Okay maybe a little
Chapter Two
One of the many good things about Victoria’s job, aside from the salary, was she didn’t have to see Owen Pohl very often. He was a nuisance, to be sure, but unless one of his numerous lawsuits made it through layers and layers of red tape, she rarely had to deal with him head on. It would be even easier if she didn’t secretly agree with him, but that was irrelevant. Her job was to defend Smorgasbord Corporation from lawsuits, full stop, regardless of her personal opinions. Smorgasbord was an enormous company, having cornered the market on not-super-cheap-but-also-not-expensive groceries in the United States, and they paid her handsomely to make sure no lawsuit filed against them made it to litigation. Smorgasbord was proud of its completely undeserved reputation as a socially conscious company. No, she wasn’t making a difference in the world, but Victoria hadn’t gone into law for anything so idealistic as that. She went into law because she needed the money.
She had grown up semi-nomadic, her childhood spent floating from small Minnesotan town to small Minnesotan town while her mother worked whatever job she could find. Kimmy had a habit of falling behind on the rent, less because she was irresponsible and more because being poor was fucking hard. Sometimes her job was standing on the line at a meatpacking plant or working as cashier at Smorgasbord, and sometimes it was cleaning scummy motels just off the interstate. As a result, Victoria spent her early years in a series of crappy apartments, run-down duplexes, and the occasional trailer park where the winters weren’t just cold, they were downright brutal.
It wasn’t that Kimmy was a bad mother. In fact, Victoria thought back on some of their worst housing situations almost fondly, because her life had always been filled with more than enough love, if not enough money. But Kimmy had Victoria when she was in high school and with only a GED there weren’t a whole lot of employment options, especially out on the prairies. Kimmy Clemmons always wanted more for her daughter—so much so that she gave her a new, fancier-sounding last name in hopes that she would rise above their working class status—and Victoria busted her ass to get good grades at each of the three high schools she attended. She worked herself to the bone studying for four years in undergrad and then another three in law school, taking out more loans than one human should ever have to face repaying. The best day of Victoria’s life was graduating from the University of Minnesota’s law school, and her mother’s beaming face out in the crowd made it all worth it. Every pricked thumb from patching the torn clothing Kimmy found for her at a thrift store, every late night studying, every box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese with hot dogs because they couldn’t afford anything better; all of it was worth it if it meant making her mom smile like that.
Landing the gig at Smorgasbord was pretty damn good, too. Victoria was now making enough to pay her loans, make rent on her apartment downtown, and have money left over to make sure her mom never had to leave town ahead of an eviction notice ever again. She dreamed of one day buying the home Kimmy always promised her—a yellow house with a blue door and a white porch, complete with swing—but for now, she contented herself with monthly contributions to a savings account in her mother’s name. Victoria had a few splurges that she allowed herself, like one pair of expensive shoes every six months and an appointment at a fancy salon every eight weeks for her hair and eyebrows, but frugal habits died hard. She still tended to buy her clothes from consignment stores and tailor them herself, and her only pricey indulgence in makeup was a $50 lipstick palette. And even that came with seven different shades, so in the end it was still a good deal. Few of her law school classmates had understood her strict budgeting—stinginess, most of them called it, or being just plain cheap—but Victoria didn’t give a shit. She had worked hard to get where she was, and even harder to make sure she looked like she belonged.
Victoria wasn’t ashamed of her mother or her childhood, but she knew how rich people operated. If they suspected you weren’t one of them, you’d be boxed out forever. You had to fit in with them, and she was good at that. Very few of her high school classmates had ever figured out just how poor she was, thanks to her sewing skills and steadfast refusal to be close enough to anyone to have them over. It made things a little lonely, and Kimmy had always tried to push her into making real friends, but by the time she was fourteen Victoria had her armor and walls securely welded shut, and that was that. The only place she let her guard down was online, where she could be safely, utterly anonymous. That was where she found her friends, and where she let herself trulybe.
Victoria walked down the long hallway of the twenty-seventh floor of Smorgasbord Corporate and had her office keys out when Gerald rounded the corner in front of her. A thin, spare man with a greying mustache, her boss was a decent enough guy, if somewhat prone to avoiding his kids and wife by working too much overtime. Decent enough, but still shitty. “New addition to the big one,” he announced. “Details in your inbox. It’s our favorite pain in the ass again.”
Victoria grimaced sympathetically, but her stomach turned inside out. It had been a week since her ill-considered, martini-fueled fuckup, and she’d been hoping she would get more of a break from Owen.Maybe I can bury him in paperwork, she thought, but once she had her computer on and scanned the details she knew she wasn’t going to be so lucky.
Owen was, for all his faults—and she could list them for days—a highly competent attorney. He didn’t pick just any cases; he picked the cases that would most damage Smorgasbord’s faux-progressive image with devastating accuracy. Smorgasbord’s employment contracts for retail employees were legal in the strictest sense of the word, but they were, to put it mildly, exploitative. The law was on Victoria’s side because Smorgasbord spared no expense hiring lobbyists to make sure it was, but more often than not Owen could lay claim to being on the side of moral righteousness.
Unfortunately for Victoria, this was yet another one of those cases. He was allied with a local worker’s rights organization and he had clearly done his homework before stepping in as lead counsel last week. This meant she was almost guaranteed to see him again, and probably sooner than she’d like. She sighed and rubbed her eyes in exhaustion.
Owen had never worked for anything in his life and she hated him for it. Rumor had it he had a giant trust fund that came through when he turned twenty-five, and she’d bet good money he never spent six hours after school smelling like fries and scrubbing down a burger grill. He could afford to take on these minor, long-shot cases against a behemoth like Smorgasbord because money literally didn’t matter to him. He didn’t have loans to pay or a family to support, either. If it wasn’t for the fact that she resented that he could do whatever he wanted just by virtue of being born into the right family, she would almost admire his commitment to altruism.
But for now, there wasn’t much for her to do about it other than get to work. Victoria settled into the familiar routine of her workday. She had a meeting in a few weeks where she was going to pitch allying with Reproductive Justice for a Uterus-Havers 5k sponsorship. It would be a big lift to get anyone at such a conservative corporation on board. But she wanted to try, at least, if only for her own conscience. She read files, typed briefs, prepped her presentation for the 5k, and slurped coffee until it comprised 80 percent of her body mass before taking a long lunch out on the plaza, soaking in the sunshine.
Lunch was the highlight of her day for many reasons, and not just because it was when she and Luke stole a few minutes to chat. She wasn’t sure what he did, but she suspected it was legal-adjacent. Politics maybe, or lobbying. Sometimes he sounded just like a lawyer, but there was a lyricism to his words that law school tended to beat out of you. Whatever he did, she suspected he was very good at it, because he was so clever he’d made her break her one hard-and-fast internet rule: no dudes.
Victoria had made that rule after far too many Twitter interactions that ended in death threats, rape threats, dick pics in her DMs, or all of the above. She had a mildly popular Twitter account, largely because she had the skin of an elephant and a habit of picking fights with smug jackasses, which was oddly enough a one-way ticket to Twitter popularity as well as a good way of working off some latent aggression. She had made plenty of friends online, bonding over dumb memes and thought-provoking articles at the same time. But all of them were women, because her interactions with men were almost universally negative. So when @Lukethebarnyardcat showed up in her mentions one day, wading into a cesspool of grossness to tell off some Gamergate bros, she had been surprised and pleased to see him taking up the mantle. She couldn’t even remember exactly what that fight was about; a thread of hers had gone viral, which attracted the usual mix of white supremacists, misogynists, and obnoxious men who simply had to correct her on something pedantic, and then there he was, hilariously taking each of them down a peg. He never once tried to white knight her and get her to thank him for helping her out, he just quietly joined in to tag team them into submission. She monitored his account for a solid two weeks after that to make sure he wasn’t a creep, but mostly he seemed like a liberal politics junkie who was entirely too fond of his cat. His Twitter profile picture and header were even both pictures of his cat looking grumpy in ridiculous costumes, one as Santa and the other as a jedi. Once he’d passed her Creep Test she followed him, breaking her No Cis-Dudes Except Lin Manuel Miranda rule for the first and only time since she instituted it.
They chatted more after that, but only publicly. She would reply to his tweets and he to hers, and one night, after two glasses of wine and the discovery that he hatedWestworldas much as she did, she did the unthinkable: she DMed him.
Within weeks, they were talking every day. First just in the evenings after work, and then eventually on their lunch breaks too. She was careful to guard her identity—he called her Nora, and she let him believe she lived in Chicago, which she often hinted at publicly to further protect herself from creeps—and by the time she trusted him enough to tell him the truth, she found she didn’t want to.
The anonymity of their DMs let her tell him things she barely even told herself. She had thought about seeing if he wanted to meet, to find out if they had the same chemistry in person, but she was scared they wouldn’t click and she’d lose her best emotional outlet. So, anonymous they remained, even if part of her wondered if more might be possible.
Luke, Owen’s cat and the reason for his Twitter name, leapt into his lap and meowed plaintively for attention. “Shush, Rogue Leader,” he said fondly. He couldn’t remember the last time he had used his cat’s actual name, preferring to use a vast array ofStar Wars-based nicknames instead. It drove his father nuts, but that was just icing on the cake. He scratched his head absently and clicked over from his email to his browser. He had to meet a client later today, but one of the advantages of running his own firm meant he could set his own schedule for the most part. It also meant the freedom to check Twitter at exactly 12:35, which was usually when Nora started her lunch break. And right on schedule, her daily message popped into his inbox.
@Noraephronwasagenius
What is it about midwestern summers that compels us to be outside as much as humanly possible? Is it just fear of winter, or something deeper?
@Lukethebarnyardcat