Christy McKellen - After Hours...

* * *

Monday morning rushed around, bringing with it bright sunshine that flooded the house and warmed the still, cool air, lifting his spirits a little.

Max had just sat down at his desk with his first cup of coffee of the day when there was a ring on the doorbell.

Cara.

Swinging open the door to let her in, he was taken aback to see her looking as if she hadn’t slept a wink all night. There were dark circles around her puffy eyes and her skin was pallid and dull-looking. It seemed to pain her to even raise a smile for him.

Was she hung-over?

His earlier positivity vanished, to be replaced by a feeling of disquiet.

‘Did you have a good weekend?’ he asked as she walked into the house and hung up her coat.

She gave him a wan smile. ‘Not bad, thanks. It was certainly a busy one. I didn’t get much sleep.’

Hmm. So she had been out partying, by the sound of it.

Despite his concerns, Cara appeared to work hard all day and he only caught her yawning once whilst making them both a strong cup of coffee in the kitchen, mid-afternoon.

At the end of the day, she waved her usual cheery goodbye, though there was less enthusiasm in her smile than she normally displayed at knocking-off time.

To his horror, she turned up in the same state the following day.

And the next.

In fact, on Thursday, when he opened the door, he could have sworn he caught the smell of alcohol on her as she dashed past him into the house. She certainly looked as though she could have been up drinking all night and plainly hadn’t taken a shower that morning, her hair hanging greasy and limp in a severely pulled back ponytail.

Her work was beginning to suffer too, in increments. Each day he found he had to pick her up on more and more things she’d missed or got wrong, noticing that her once pristine fingernails were getting shorter and more ragged as time went on.

Clearly she was letting whatever was happening in her personal life get in the way of her work and that was unacceptable.

His previous feelings of magnanimity about having her around had all but vanished by Thursday afternoon and he was seriously considering having a word with her about her performance. The only reason he hadn’t done so already was because he’d been so busy with back-to-back conference calls this week and in deference to Poppy he’d decided to give Cara the benefit of the doubt and put her slip-ups down to a couple of off days.

But he decided that enough was enough when he found her with her head propped on her arms, fast asleep, on the kitchen table when she was supposed to be making them both a hot drink.

Resentment bubbled up from his gut as he watched her peaceful form gently rise and fall as she slumbered on, totally oblivious to his incensed presence behind her. He’d been feeling guilty all weekend about how he’d spoken to her on Friday and here she was, only a few days later, turning up unfit for work.

His concern that her presence here would cause more harm than good had just been ratified.

‘Wakey, wakey, Sleeping Beauty!’ he said loudly, feeling a swell of angry satisfaction as she leapt up from the table and spun around to look at him, her face pink and creased on one side where it had rested against her arm.

‘Oh! Whoa! Was I sleeping?’ she mumbled, blinking hard.

Crossing his arms, he gave her a hard stare. ‘Like a baby.’

She rubbed a hand across her eyes, smudging her make-up across her face. ‘I’m so sorry—I only put my head down to rest for a moment while I was waiting for the kettle to boil and I must have drifted off.’

‘Perhaps you should start going to bed at a more reasonable time then,’ he ground out, his hands starting to shake as adrenaline kicked its way through his veins. ‘I didn’t hire you as a charity case, Cara. For the money I’m paying, I expected much more from you. You had me convinced you were up to the job in the first couple of days, but it’s become clear over the last few that you’re not.’ He took a breath as he made peace with what he was about to say. ‘I’m going to have to let you go. I can’t carry someone who’s going to get drunk every night and turn up unfit to work.’

Her eyes were wide now and she was mouthing at him as if her response had got stuck in her throat.

Shaking off the stab of conscience that had begun to poke him in the back, he pointed a finger at her. ‘And you can hold the “It’ll never happen again” routine,’ he bit out. ‘I’m not an idiot, though I feel like one for letting you take me in like this.’

To his surprise, instead of the tears he was readying himself for, her expression morphed into one of acute fury and she raised her own shaking finger back at him.

‘I do not get drunk every night. For your information, I’m homeless at the moment and sleeping on a friend’s couch, which doesn’t work well for her insomniac boyfriend, who likes to party and play computer games late into the night and who came home drunk and spilled an entire can of beer over me while I was trying to sleep and who then hogged the bathroom this morning so I couldn’t get in there for a shower.’

Her face had grown redder and redder throughout this speech and all he could do was stand there and stare at her, paralysed by surprise as she jabbed her finger at him with rage flashing in her eyes.

‘I’ve worked my butt off for you, taking your irascible moods on the chin and getting on with it, but I’m not going to let you treat me like some nonentity waster. I’m a real person with real feelings, Max. I tried to make this work—you have no idea how hard I’ve been trying—but I guess this is just life’s way of telling me that I’m done here in London.’ She threw up her hands and took a deep shaky breath. ‘After all the work I put into building myself a career here that I was so proud of—’

Taking in the look of utter frustration on her face, he felt his anger begin to drain away, only to be replaced with an uncomfortable twist of shame.

She was right, of course—he had been really unfriendly and probably very difficult to work with, and she was clearly dealing with some testing personal circumstances, which he’d made sure to blithely ignore.

He frowned and sighed heavily, torn about what to do next. While he could do without any extra problems at the moment, he couldn’t bring himself to turn her away now he knew what she was dealing with. Because, despite it all, he admired her for standing up for herself.

* * *

Cara willed her heart to stop pounding like a pneumatic drill as she waited to see what Max would say next.

Had she really just shouted at him like that?

It was so unlike her to let her anger get the better of her, but something inside her had snapped at the unfairness of it all and she hadn’t been able to hold back.

After spending the past few days using every ounce of energy keeping up the fake smile and pretending she could cope with the punishing days with Max on so little sleep, she’d hit a wall.

Hard.

The mix of panic, frustration and chronic tiredness had released something inside her and in those moments after she’d let the words fly she had the strangest sensation of the ground shifting under her feet. She was painfully aware that she’d probably just thrown away any hope of keeping this job, but at the same time she was immensely proud of herself for not allowing him to dismiss her like that. As if she was worth nothing.

Because she wasn’t.

She deserved to be treated with more respect and she’d learnt by now that she wasn’t going to get that from Max by meekly taking the insults he so callously dished out.

At her last place of work, in a fug of naïve disbelief, she’d allowed those witches to strip her of her pride, but there was no way she was letting Max do that to her, too.