Chapter Text
NOVEMBER 2009
He is twenty-eight and halfway to becoming a millionaire when he finds her again. He’d have preferred for them to reunite somewhere else— preferably a dive bar, with obnoxious lighting and quirkily named drinks that would’ve made her snort-laugh once upon a time— but George supposes that a cocktail reception isn’t so bad.
It doesn’t take much for someone to surmise that this would be inevitable— that awkward, exhilarating moment of meeting your so-called high school sweetheart again and realising that this is the first time in what, ten years, that we’ve seen each other? Oh, it’s not like I’ve been counting or anything. Wow. Ten years. How’ve you been? What are you up to? And then you’ll hold painstaking small talk with the person who once served as your unshakeable foundation, politely exchange business cards as if you met twenty minutes ago— and you technically have, because no one is the same as they were at seventeen— and walk away with your head light and your heart heavy.
That’s how it always goes in a comforting Hallmark romcom. That’s how this scenario is likely going to unfold when he finally gets to speak with Bertha O’Brien, who, armed with a flute of champagne that George suspects will remain untouched all evening, is currently holding court halfway across the rooftop bar.
From where he’s standing, George has a full view of Bertha’s outfit of choice tonight; she’s in a navy backless dress that swishes about her calves, with fabric that ripples in the dim glow of the outdoor heaters. A handful of pearls sandwiches a singular diamond in a necklace that’s straining hard against the dress code of a low-key event like this, but that has always been Bertha’s way; she makes statements, but she’d rather die before someone calls her gaudy .
He looks down at his tuxedo— custom-made, of course— and his wine-red tie, and smiles wanly into the dregs of his drink. It’s unnerving, really, when he thinks about how far they’ve both come from their high school days. He still remembers when he would shiver in shapeless T-shirts while Bertha napped through Health and Sex Ed— her “free period”— in his sweaters. She always had an excuse for why she didn’t have her own: it was in the wash, or her sister had taken it to work, or it had simply clashed with her outfit. George had never questioned her. He’d simply started bringing an extra sweatshirt, just in case.
Reverently fingering his tie pin for luck and attempting to banish all thoughts of the past from his mind, George slowly begins to work his way through the chattering crowd. There’s nothing particularly difficult when it comes to navigating a reception like this one. He simply charms his way into conversations with potential investors, reassures his current trustees that everything is smooth-sailing, and deals swiftly with the barnacles attempting to leech from his astounding successes. George doesn’t handle partnership deals often, though. That’s more Clay’s forte, but Clay had the audacity to get sick— just kidding; George isn’t a complete monster— so it’s just him today.
All things considered, Clay’s absence is probably for the better. He’d have a field day if he knew that the Advertising Manager at Miller & Co. was George’s ex from Auburn High School’s class of ‘99.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her moving in his general direction, too, and George predicts that they’ll meet somewhere in the middle of this poorly lit rooftop bar. He replaces his current flute of champagne with the waiter who’s floating about the groups, bids a courteous farewell to Mr and Mrs Goldsworthy, and feels his feet freeze when he looks up from his shoes.
Makeup and poor lighting aside, she looks just as he remembers; despite its perpetual crawl onwards, time has left Bertha O’Brien largely unscathed. Her eyes are narrowed when they meet his again for the first time in what feels like an eon. George’s heart sinks when he realises that she’s doing the thing — where she pretends to have forgotten you just to make you remember that you’re nothing but an irrelevant cog in the grander machine that is her life.
But then her gaze softens from steel to satin, and her heels click resolutely against the floorboards as she breaches the remaining space between them. She sticks out her hand for George to shake. It’s smooth, supple, and smells faintly of cherry blossoms.
“You clean up nicely,” she says, and he just knows that she must’ve picked up smoking again in the years they’ve been out of each other’s lives. Her voice is huskier and richer than it was, but maybe it’s a byproduct of too much yelling. From what he’s heard about her, Bertha O’Brien runs her department like a tyrant whose sole goals involve exceeding KPIs and achieving superior customer satisfaction.
“And so do you,” he replies, more flabbergasted than he’d like to admit. “How long has it been since I last saw you?”
George asks as if he doesn’t know the answer to his own question— as if he hasn’t seen or heard something that reminds him of her at least twice a day for the past ten years and two months.
“Give or take ten years,” Bertha says, laughing a little. “And how have you been?”
“So-so,” George admits.
“I don’t think ‘so-so’ necessarily encapsulates owning a company worth half a million at your age,” she corrects; she swivels her champagne, which has since gone flat, with a deft flick of the wrist. “I’d say that you’re doing very, very well.”
“Thank you, but the company’s not solely mine,” he deflects. “We’re a collective startup, so—”
“But you’re the innovator,” Bertha posits. “The game was your idea, wasn’t it?”
The game , George thinks. Of course she knows about the game. Jesus .
“Yeah,” he says. He is so out of his element here; so lost as she leads the conversation, so confused as to how old he is and what exactly he’s doing. “I started fiddling with it when I was at college.”
“College. Right,” Bertha echoes, nodding along. “You ended up going to Berkeley, didn’t you?”
“On a full-ride,” George says. She knows the answer to this question as well as he does— as well as anyone, really, who’s so much as seen his LinkedIn— but he knows why she’s asking. He’s a fool to think that he’d escaped her scrutinising gaze unscathed. “I was sad to leave home, but it was too good an opportunity to miss.”
Bertha’s hum is as noncommittal as anything he’s ever heard. “I can imagine.”
She takes a sip of her drink— George thinks it’s the first she’s had all night— and coughs a little before she looks back up at him with a coy smile curved on her lips. “But enough of our private lives; I think we’ve got business to discuss. Richard told me that you were looking to advertise a new update.”
“Yes,” George says, and something inside deflates a little to see her like this with him, all businesslike and detached. “We’re after something that’ll be flashy enough to promote the new features, but nothing that’ll detract too much from the actual gameplay. I trust you’ll be able to handle it; I’ve heard nothing but good things about your work.”
“Thank you,” she says. “I suppose ten years in the same line of work makes for an excellent reputation.”
“Yes,” he says. Ten years in the same line of work makes for an excellent reputation. The mental puzzle he had longed to complete over the years has finally found its missing piece— so this is what Bertha has been doing in the wake of their separation. Unless she’d somehow managed to juggle university, full-time work, and cutthroat bids for promotions— which, if he thinks about it, is frankly impossible— she must’ve forgone one or… Oh. He swallows. “I, uh. I suppose it does.”
“Your game’s very charming,” she says, in an expert pivot away from something George regrets bringing up. “It’s… alike so many others in the market, but singular enough to be distinctive.”
“If I’m being totally honest with you, people have compared it to Animal Crossing,” George admits. “But with… Oh, you know. Train stations instead of houses. Anthropomorphic station managers instead of villagers. A regulating economic presence that’s slightly more threatening than a raccoon.”
She laughs. It’s bright and melodic, and George Russell is suddenly sixteen again, making a fool of himself in a Denny’s as he stuffs his face with pancakes in a bid to make his best female friend smile. He can almost feel the vinyl of the booth beneath his twitching fingertips; her drugstore perfume has never smelled sweeter. But a subtle layer of lipstick now coats the mouth he’d once devoted everything to, and George cannot help but think that he’s never been more disoriented in his life as he comes crashing back to the rooftop bar, with its crappy lighting and horrible jazz music.
“Well, I mustn’t keep you, George,” she says. He has always loved the way she stretches his monosyllabic name into four separate sounds; George tries his best not to ruminate on it as he takes her business card. “I suppose you’ve got someone to go home to, and I know how exhausting these can get.”
“Unless you count my computer as a ‘someone,’ I’m afraid I live a fairly lonely existence,” he replies. Slipping her card into his case, he adds, “But I look forward to hearing from you about how the rest of this project will progress, Bertha. It was lovely to see you again after so long.” As he slides her his own, he realises that his words must sound hollow to her; after all, words like this are nothing but professionally required endearments that are completely devoid of sentiment.
“Likewise,” she says, but then something strange happens to her face. Upon hearing of his attempt to reconcile their past, the steel seems to melt; her posture softens, and she gives her foot a gentle shake. “You haven’t changed much, you know.”
He exhales at the rush of familiarity. “Neither have you.”
“Are you going to the reunion? They’ve got it planned for Christmas.”
“If I’m being perfectly honest, I was only going to go if you were attending,” he says, attempting to keep his voice as neutral as possible. “To, well. You know. Tie up some loose ends. Make sure that the air between us isn’t thick with tension. And since I’ve seen you here tonight…”
“Fair enough,” she says. “It’s not like there’s anyone else that I particularly miss from Auburn High School.”
George snorts. “I think Enid Turner would be very offended to hear you say that.”
“Oh God ,” Bertha says, and it’s the most juvenile he’s heard her tonight. “I can’t believe you remember her.”
“I remember everything, Bee.”
Neither of them says anything for a moment. George lets his eyes run over her dress, her shoes, her hair. He picks up on her new perfume— something name-brand, he’s sure— and notices the subtle bronzer on her cheekbones, the glittering studs that sparkle from her earlobes. Most importantly, George watches as she fidgets with the flute of champagne; this, he thinks, is what shocks him most about an aged Bertha O’Brien. She wouldn’t even touch root beer when he’d take her to Applebee’s, and now she’s laughing and sipping tentatively at cocktail receptions.
As he takes in the woman who has blossomed from the girl he fell in love with all those years ago, he tries to insist that this isn’t the same person who used to split a pretzel with him after school, or who he kissed in front of everyone at Homecoming. Try as he might, however, it appears as if his mind can’t tell the difference. The sputtering flame of old love licks hungrily at his psyche like a slobbering dog.
He wonders if Bertha is doing the same; if she, too, is committing this new and improved George Russell to memory and replacing the data file that had been last updated ten years ago.
“I should go,” Bertha says, and what little ease she had allowed herself to show has now disappeared. Her smile is all but frozen on her face— it’s a little too wary to be completely genuine, and George curses himself for slipping too far into their shared history; for letting himself sink too deep into the intimacy that once encircled them in droves. “But thank you for taking the time to consult with me in person about that project. I look forward to working on it with you.”
“Likewise,” he says. “Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you need more information.”
“I won’t,” she replies. “I’ll see you around, George.”
He nods as she takes her leave; he watches as she flags down a waiter and abandons her flute of champagne; he turns away as her silhouette fades into the homogenous mass of tuxedos and velvet, just as it had all those years ago.
“Ten years,” he mumbles to himself. “Jesus Christ.”
George waits three days to see if she’ll text him first. All he can think about is her business card, with its block lettering and fancy blue decals that are probably company-standard, but there’s no denying that the entire aesthetic of the company fits her exceptionally well. It’s like she was born to manhandle the employees at Miller & Co, to earn promotion after promotion, and to stun at cocktail receptions.
It’s slightly embarrassing to admit, but he had given her LinkedIn profile a sneaky read the moment he found himself home after draining his social battery on that rooftop bar. As he’d scrolled through her incredibly impressive resume— in true Bertha fashion, she had managed to claw her way up through the company, going from a casual receptionist to an “integral member of the Senior team” in less than four years— George had realised that he wasn’t the least bit surprised to read about her success. Never in a million years had he ever doubted her ability to get what she wanted; Bertha O’Brien was nothing if not single-minded, a blinkered horse galloping relentlessly towards the finish line.
The absence of a college credit, however, was what had soured the champagne in his gut.
Whenever she stayed over at his place, their conversations would invariably turn to their fast-approaching, post-high-school futures. George had never liked that kind of talk; it made his hands sweat whenever he thought too hard about the prospect of more school when he was still struggling through his math worksheets. If you had cornered George Russell in the boys’ locker room after Wednesday afternoon football practice and asked him what he was thinking of studying at college, he’d tell you to fuck off and leave him alone.
But Bertha had always had a plan. Even before they’d started dating, he had known what she wanted to do; in tenth grade, she had entertained him during study hall with a collection of fliers she had magpied from the university expo that her sister had attended a while ago. Back then, Bertha had been hell-bent on going to Berkeley. She liked that the photos on the flyer captured just how big the campus was, and just how beautiful the libraries were. Interstate study was expensive, of course, but she was saving up for it from her part-time job at Dairy Queen, and she was ninety-five per cent sure that she would score a full-ride scholarship anyway, so finances were the least of her worries at the moment.
Then, she had turned to look at George, who was pushing up the bridge of his glasses and fiddling with a ballpoint pen; shaking her head, she had pointedly said, “What I am worried about, however, is you.”
“You shouldn’t be. I’ve got plenty of options.” He flipped to the back of his math textbook for the answer key and crossed out the number he had scrawled into his notebook. There’s a university three hours away. And I could always take a gap year, or get work experience, or whatever. Or I could just… work. Do something. Do anything .”
He had then proceeded to pause, frown, and rub his thumb over the clicker of his pen. “And hey— what’s the point of thinking about something that’s two years away, Bertha? Do you know what’s closer? Homecoming. Why aren’t you excited about that, huh?”
“This isn’t about college,” she replied, voice dry as ever as she tucked the fliers back into an accordion folder. “This is about the fact that you’ve been looking at the wrong answer key for the past ten minutes.”
“ Shit .”
College or not, the presence of so many career successes on her LinkedIn profile had certainly served as an indicator that Bertha was still the same woman she had always been. He had scrolled and scrolled and scrolled through her comments and likes until two a.m., granted peace of mind only by the fact that she wouldn’t see how diligently he was scouring her employment history.
Sighing, he sinks against his couch. The leather is still fairly new, so it’s got that weird smell that seems to permeate the skin coating George’s nose. Working for a startup that’s doing relatively well means that he’s got flexible working hours, which in turn suggests that he’s got more time to ruminate on whether he should send a courtesy text to the Advertising Manager at Miller & Co, who also happens to be The Ex he never really got over.
As he fiddles with his phone, George admits that it’s strange when he considers how his and Bertha’s fates had been swapped. He was the one who had ended up going to Berkeley on a full scholarship; she had ended up with ten years of work experience. Regardless, they’ve still managed to make their way back to each other with success and glory tucked under their belts. That, he thinks, is a testament to her work ethic and his luck.
He stares at her number again. It’s probably linked to her work phone. She’s probably not going to make the first move; it’s his project, after all. Her reaching out would seem desperate. Professionally, it’s up to him to send that first text.
But then his phone buzzes; it’s from Bertha.
Bertha O’Brien
Hi, George!
This is Bertha from Miller & Co. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to get back to you as quickly as I’d have liked— you know how busy it gets. I was just wondering if you still wished to continue with that advertising campaign; if you do, I’ll get my secretary to send over some packets for you to peruse before our first meeting, which I can schedule as soon as you confirm your interest.
Thanks for your time— have a great rest of your afternoon, and I look forward to hearing back from you soon!
George Russell
Hi Bertha,
Thank you so much for getting back to me. I would love to pursue that campaign with you and your company; I’m very confident that everything will be in safe hands. Richard will send you everything you need to get you started.
When and where would you like to meet? Most of my vacancies for next week should be in the afternoon, so we could catch up over coffee. Let me know.
Bertha O’Brien
George,
I believe it would be best if you met me in the boardroom at our office for this first meeting, as it involves important factors that I think would best be explained and discussed with a projector in the room. Subsequent ones with lower stakes could most definitely be best held at a cafe, though. It’s up to you.
I think we’ll settle on next Wednesday afternoon at 13:00. I can’t guarantee how long the meeting will last, but I don’t think it will be any longer than four hours. Does this time suit you?
George Russell
Yes, that’s perfect. Thank you! Look forward to seeing you.
Turning off his phone, he all but slams it against the cushions as he swipes an arm across his face. What was he thinking, asking her out to a café? This isn’t a date; it most certainly isn’t frolicking about a mall food court with a high school girlfriend to discuss a class project, and he is a class-A fool for thinking otherwise. Thank God she’d been kind enough to deflect it without causing either of them more embarrassment than necessary.
“Right,” he murmurs, after he’s pencilled in the appointment. He rolls out the crick in his neck and lumbers over to his desktop setup, where his trains— wrapped up in countless lines of code—and keyboards lie patiently in wait. “Time for work.”