Partners

On her 30^th birthday, Chelsea Stanhope purchased a treadmill and moved it into her bedroom. The impulsive move was completely unlike her. The machine was expensive. The most she’d run since high school were the few yards from the parking lot to the sale rack at Loehmann’s. Yet for years the two lived happily enough, as many couples do, keeping a polite distance from one another so as not to stir up trouble.

Their relationship changed when Chelsea returned early from a night of speed dating. Co-workers had raved about the experience and suggested she go. But in two hours she hadn’t met one man who moved her. As she transitioned from table to table, she found herself actually missing the office – which for her was saying something. She couldn’t run away from the restaurant fast enough.

“Never again,” she promised the treadmill, yanking piles of clothing from its arms and tossing them upon the bed. At last, a power cord was revealed. She plugged it into the wall. After that the two had a standing date each night of the week. The machine never did do much for her love life. But at work each morning she would fly from the first floor to the fifth in seconds flat.

            With great power comes great responsibility. This was why her boss, Capital Partners Inc.’s chief financial officer, trusted only Chelsea with fetching his egg whites and Americano from the commissary each day. He’d call for her after digesting his Wall Street Journal.

            “Secretary!” he’d thunder. The word would knock around the walls of his aerie high atop the company’s east tower before striking out toward her desk, where it would slap her straight across the ear. Chelsea would appear in his archway a moment later.
            “Mr. Winterstone?”

            “Breakfast.”

            “Of course, sir.”

            He'd stand at his cathedral-sized windows to track her streaking across the courtyard to him, steam rising from the piping-hot breakfast in her hands. His face would crack a little about the mouth which, for him, amounted to a million-dollar smile.

            Winterstone would never realize it, but the steam he saw wafting off his eggs was, in reality, coming from Chelsea’s own simmering head. “The title is executive assistant,” she’d fume to herself. “And the name is Chelsea. You’ve only had five years and 11 months to figure that out.”

            When she’d reappear in the doorway, he’d already be motioning her to his massive desk. “Come along then, secretary,” he’d boom. “Quickly, before my repast grows cold.”

           

An unexpected dividend to Chelsea’s treadmill investment was how steeped in literature she’d become. Her nightly workouts had afforded her the opportunity to listen to the audio book So You Want to Kill Your Boss over 30 times. She’d taken every dating quiz Cosmopolitan had published in the last year. And at the suggestion of Self, she’d lately decided to “date herself.”

            Indeed, she’d asked herself to a docent-lead slide talk on manga at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art next weekend. The event sounded marvelous. All the same, though, she was going to play it cool. She’d wait a day then call herself to accept her invitation.

            Chelsea’s adult exercise habit had also given her the chance to run through all the comic books she’d adored as a kid. She’d re-read the adventures of Superman, Spider-Man – even Aquaman, whose ability to marshal schools of flounder she guessed would’ve been the source of much snickering at meetings of the Justice League. God knows that kind of foolishness at Capital Partners would have gotten sacked even the King of the Sea.

She suspected the progressive editors of O would condemn her for it, but Chelsea feared she still believed in such fairytales. The realization surprised her to no end. It came to her as she read and, try as she might, she found it was something she couldn't outrun. Deep down she wanted to be rescued, at least escorted from the premises.

She hardly seemed in need of help; she had put herself through administrative professional school and was paying on her own condominium. Winterstone, however manifold his faults, authorized her taking home a nice salary. Undeniably though, within Chelsea was some small hope that a hero would swoop in to save her from her single-serving dinners and reservations for one.

            Chelsea decided she’d just jog in place until her champion arrived. After all, he was likely just rounding the corner. She figured it was only fair to break things off with herself. At the manga talk at MOCA she’d tell herself, “It’s not you. It’s me.”