Page 33 of Release Me

“Wow, you just gone brag about it right in my face?”

I arch a brow. “Would you prefer I do it behind your back, Mr. Adler?”

Something strange happens to his face. Emotions I can’t name clamor for my attention behind his eyes before he shuts them all down and turns serious again. Feeling self conscious about making things weird with my potentially flirty comment, I turn my attention back to the broken bag in my desk chair. I feel Sebastian’s eyes on me as I haul it onto the desk to try to get a closer look at the damage.

“So,” he says, “HR let me know they haven’t received your counter yet.”

“My counter?”

“To the initial salary offer we made.”

“Shit.” I toss my head back and let out a groan. “I knew I was forgetting something! I never even looked at it.”

“Nadia, it’s fine, you can send it in tomorrow.”

I shake my head and sit back down at my desk, shaking the mouse to call the screen back up. “No, I can do it now. I just need to log back into my computer.”

I glance up to give him a reassuring smile only to find him giving me another strange look. “Why don’t you just look at it on your phone?”

“Because they don’t have email on these.” I pull my phone out of the pocket of my bag and hold it up. Sebastian’s jaw drops, and horror dawns his features, making his disdain for the obsolete technology in my hand clear. He reaches out and plucks it from my hand, holding the relic gingerly. When my desktop finally presents the login screen, I split my attention between the keyboard and his face, watching as he glances from the phone in his hand to the bag on the desk filled with papers.

“Do you have some kind of aversion to technology that I need to know about?”

“Not exactly.”

“You have a flip phone, Nadia, and you printed off employee records when you could have just logged in to the system remotely. Surely, that’s indicative of some kind of issue with technology.”

“Or, it’s indicative of a lack of means,” I say, scanning my now full inbox for the email from HR I neglected to open earlier. I find it close to the bottom, buried underneath a bunch of responses from my staff letting me know they’ll be at the meeting tomorrow. “The flip phone was all I could afford when I got here, and a laptop, tablet or whatever other gadget I’d need to access the system remotely, has never been in my monthly budget.”

Sebastian sits my phone on the desk, his expression sober now that I’ve reminded him about the glaring wealth disparity between the two of us. “Take a look at your offer letter,” he says, pulling out his phone and tapping at the screen with his brow furrowed in concentration. “Now that you’re working here, you’ll find there isn’t much that’s out of your budget.”

I double click on the offer letter attached to the email and gasp when I see the numbers underneath the extensive, and extremely generous, list of benefits. Sebastian didn’t over state things when he said there wouldn’t be much I couldn’t afford with my new salary. He did, however, fail to mention all the things that would come along with it. The words that detail my compensation swim around on the screen in front of me, and I have to blink several times to get them straight. My voice comes out in a stunned whisper as I read the paragraph out loud.

“We will be offering you an annual gross salary of $242,000 as well as a $10,000stipend to cover any relocation fees and an $8,000 clothing allowance that will be deposited into your account on the 1st of every month.”

He’s lost his mind.

That’s the first thought that pops into my head after I add all those numbers together to get a staggering total that is more money than I could ever need. I turn my wide eyed stare on Sebastian to find that he’s still preoccupied with his phone.

“You expect me to counter this?”

“Yes.”

“But why? It’s already too much?”

He tucks his phone into his pocket, finally done with whatever it was he was doing, and levels me with a stare I know shakes even more the most formidable business men to their core. “Because even when someone is offering you something good, you should always remind them that you deserve better.”

I shake my head in disbelief as he turns and strides towards the door. I can’t believe this. I don’t know what to say, but I have to say something, right? Maybe he doesn’t know that six figures is far more than any other restaurant manager in New Haven is making. Maybe he doesn’t know that relocation fees and clothing allowances aren’t really a thing. Maybe….he’s just being nice.

There’s that word again. That reminder of the existence of good in a world that’s only treated me to evil lately. I used to believe in good. I used to have good all the time. I could look around and find it anywhere. In my mother’s smile. In my father’s eyes. In the halls of the sprawling estate they built together. In the hills of our vineyard and the sweet squish of ripe grapes under my toes. Good used to be everywhere, and then they died and it was gone. I don’t know what it means that it’s decided to reappear in my life in the form of this man.

“Sebastian,” I call out, but he doesn’t turn around.

“Submit your counter before you leave for the night, Nadia.”

It took me forty-five minutes to work up the nerve to send the email to HR asking for an additional fifteen hundred dollars, but it only took two for Sebastian to respond, countering my counter and telling me to think bigger.

By the time I accepted the offer, my salary was fifteen thousand dollars more than the initial offer and both my stipend and clothing allowance were sitting at a cool ten thousand. And just when I thought I was free to go home and relax after a long day of work, I got a follow up email from HR asking for my direct deposit information.

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