I do not own Twilight. I thank Stephanie Meyer for the lovely characters to play with.
Summary: Bella isn't sure where her life is going, what the next step should be or even how she is where she is now five years after graduating college. Due to circumstances beyond his control Edward finds himself burdened with responsibility and yearning for stability. AH\AU
Chapter Two: New Things at the Office
Bella's alarm clock went off at 5:30 the next morning as it does every Monday-Thursday. She managed to turn that one off and roll over, but when the second alarm she set for 5:45 started blaring, she knew it was time to get up. It's not that she wasn't a morning person, but she had trouble dragging herself out of bed before the sun came up.
As she went about her morning routine, Bella was careful to open the bathroom skylight. In the time she'd lived in her new home, the bathroom skylight had quickly become the bane of her existence. If she left it closed during her shower and didn't completely shut the bathroom door, the steam would set off the smoke detector in the hallway, which at 5'4, she was not tall enough to reach without running to the kitchen for a broom. If she opened the skylight, there was the chance she'd forget to close it before leaving for work. Most days this wasn't a problem, but last week an all-day storm had ravaged the neighborhood and she came home to a bathroom full of puddles, leaves and dirt. The twenty minutes she spent mopping up her bathroom were enough to make her extremely careful to close that damn skylight every day. It was one of the few things Bella did not love about her new home. The house was part of a brick row home community and Bella loved having so many neighbors around, they made her feel less lonely coming home to an empty house. She also fell in love with the brick exterior, front patio, back deck and spacious rooms. It was just the tiny, windowless bathroom she wasn't a huge fan of, but in the grand scheme of things it was a small fly in the ointment.
Making sure to turn off all the lights and lock the doors, Bella was out the door before seven and headed to Wawa to pick up breakfast. She had recently changed her schedule at her fulltime job to a four-day, ten-hour work week. While the days were long, the Friday's off were a huge incentive. She was also lucky enough, if you considered leaving for work before the Today Show starts lucky, to miss much of the Philadelphia-area morning rush hour traffic. That in and of itself was worth it to Bella to jump at the chance to begin the new schedule. Most days she worked 7:30-6, but her hours were flexible and if she needed to go in earlier or later, it was not a problem. It made for a long day, but Bella felt the advantages far outweighed the disadvantages.
She settled into her desk in the quiet office, which wouldn't start filling up for another hour, and dove right into her workday. Having grown up with Charlie who was a huge sports fan, his passion could not have helped but rub off on his only daughter. Earning bachelor's degrees in English and Journalism in college, Bella was able to combine two of her loves, sports and writing, at her current job. She spent her days creating previews for various sports matchups that were distributed to a number of websites nationwide. While she wasn't out actually interviewing the Chase Utley's and Peyton Manning's of the world, Bella enjoyed researching and analyzing stats and trends to find something unique about each mathcup she wrote. She loved her job, co-workers and especially enjoyed working for her boss, Garrett, an Aussie import who still hung on to a hint of his accent. The only downside was that she was the only female in the office and was considerably younger and less married than her co-workers. Most days it didn't bother her, she fit in well and could banter and hold her own in sports debates as well as any guy her age could, but there were the days they'd point out her age or gender difference and she'd feel slightly like an alien life form, not quite sure she belonged. Thankfully those days were few and far between. Another perk of the job was the relaxed dress code. This morning Bella was happily wearing jeans, a long sleeve t-shirt and sneakers.
Tyler was the first to arrive after Bella each morning. He wasn't much of a morning person so Bella usually didn't hear much from him until after he had his morning coffee. If she was completely engrossed in her work she wouldn't even noticed he'd come in until the smell of percolating coffee made its way to her desk. Tyler Crowley was old enough to be her father and had kids in college, but he was always pleasant to Bella and never doubted her knowledge like some men his age had in the past.
The next of her co-workers to arrive was Eric, who on most days strode into the office whistling a nameless tune as he set up his laptop. Eric Yorkie was their resident stat geek. While the whole office loved sports and stats, he could tell you about a random game from June of 1994, where the Phillies beat the Padres 6-3 and John Kruk had two homers, off the top of his head. We had no idea where how he'd retained all of this seemingly useless information, but it came in handy quite a bit.
Austin was the last of their small office group to stroll in. He usually looked fairly frazzled by the time he got to the office, having had to get his toddler son up, ready and dropped off at daycare before he came in. Quite a feat for a man, who like Tyler, was not a morning person. Austin Marks arrived each morning with the largest coffee cup Wawa has to offer and could be seen refilling it repeatedly throughout the morning. His humor synapses usually didn't start firing until about lunchtime and then he'd join in the office conversations.
They were all quietly working with a soccer game playing softly on a television in the background, Garrett and Eric were huge fans of the sport, when Garrett called Bella into his office. While this wasn't an unusual occurrence, she was intrigued. Garrett never really yelled or even reprimanded her for that matter. Whenever she was in his office it was usually to discuss a new project or some issues that a customer had found in one of her previews. She also liked going into Garrett's office because he kept a small dish stocked with candy that he encouraged his employees to raid, even when he was out of the office, but Bella only felt comfortable entering his inner sanctum when she'd been called in.
Bella wrapped up a preview of an upcoming NHL game, making sure to save her work, before heading to Garrett's office. At the sound of her knock he waved her in, but remained with his back to her, finishing an email before facing Bella with a smile. She quickly took a seat and unwrapped a mini 3 Musketeer bar, her favorite, and waited for Garrett to begin.
"Good morning Bella," Garrett began in is Aussie lilt, "We were just contacted by one of our biggest customers, and while they love the work we are providing them now, they want us to expand and create profiles chock full of information for each team in the NFL, MLB, NHL and NBA. And if this works out the way they hope, they to expand into college teams next."
"Wow, that's big," Bella responded, unsure why Garrett had called her in specifically and not brought it up at their weekly team meeting later in the day.
"It is," he confirmed, "And I'd like you to head up the project."
Bella was speechless. She was the youngest and least experienced member of the team, but here was Garrett handing over the reins of this huge project to her. Realizing that Bella wasn't sure what to say next, he continued.
"I want you to create a mock profile for a team, picking what you think would be relevant information, thinks like venue, coach, year the franchise formed, etc… and once you have all that, you and I will go over it and see how we can work on setting something up in the database to roll out to everyone so that they can begin working on just plugging information into the profiles. Do you think you'll have time to fit this in this week? I know its short notice, but we want to get moving on this right away."
"No problem," Bella replied without even thinking of the mountain of work waiting for her back at her desk. She was dying for the chance to do something new and didn't want Garrett to think she couldn't handle the new challenge.
"Excellent," he said. "We'll meet on Friday afternoon and go over what you have and see what kind of changes we should make."
"Sounds good," Bella replied. "I'll start working on it this afternoon."
After exchanging goodbyes, Bella walked back to her desk, drawing the curious eyes of her co-workers. It was rare for any of them to spend 20 minutes in Garrett's office with the door closed. Garrett had an open door policy and most people just popped in to ask simple questions.
She, Tyler, Eric and Austin sat in an open and airy room outside of Garrett's office with their desks clustered in a square. For the most part the arrangement worked out well, they were able to bounce ideas off each other, take part in typical work place water cooler chat and on rare occasions, or more often then they'd like to admit, they played a little desktop football to relieve some stress during their busy season. There were times that the arrangement didn't work out so well. Eric's mother called at least twice a week to harass him, and more often now that his wife was expecting their first child, and the lack of privacy meant that pretty much everyone heard at least half of the conversation. Austin had a tendency to curse at his computer or slam things on his desk when he got frustrated, which usually caused Bella to jump. Tyler was a bit of a hoarder and having been there longer than any of them, he had so much on his desk, under his desk and surrounding his desk that some days it seeped over to everyone else's work stations. Bella, who spent at least a few hours a day listening to her iPod as she worked, was known to randomly burst into song without realizing it. Normally when this happened one of the guys would toss a wadded up piece of paper at her to gain her attention and she'd blush furiously, packing up her iPod for the day.
Feeling good about her meeting with Garrett, she decided to shoot an email to her brother Emmett to see if he and his wife Rosalie wanted to grab dinner that night. Bella was off from Pathmark and aside from not wanting to cook, she felt like sharing her good news with her older brother. Emmett, an accountant at a local Ford dealer, quickly answered saying that he and Rosie were free and would meet her at Olive Garden at 7. She had to laugh at Emmett's choice in restaurants, her bottomless pit of a brother was a huge fan of the endless salad and bread sticks.
With her evening plans set, Bella got back to work on her previews due that day. She finished quicker than normal, eager to get a jump start on her special project from Garrett. Preview, Inc., the company for which she worked, was rather small, without much room for advancement unless she was gunning for Garrett's job, but Bella knew that impressing her boss on this project could lead to bigger and better things. She just wasn't sure what or where.
Before she knew it, Tyler, Eric and Austin, none of whom decided to take advantage of the four-day work week, were saying their goodnights and Bella realized she had just another half hour before quitting time herself. Putting the finishing touches on a few last minute previews she'd been assigned that afternoon, Bella shut down her computer with a smile and waved goodnight to Garrett before leaving.
Emmett and Rosalie were waiting for Bella at Olive Garden. Both finish their work day earlier than Bella so they had time to spare. As she approached the couple, Bella was soon engulfed in a crushing bear hug. The move was classic Emmett. The former college football player still found time to work out and still didn't know his own strength. He was also a gregarious, loving and over-protective big brother. After weaseling her way out of Emmett's embrace, Bella gave her sister-in-law a quick hug, wondering for the million and twelfth time how Emmett got so lucky. He met Rosie on his first day at the Ford dealership. One of the perks to Emmett's job was a company car, and while Emmett may be crunching numbers at a car dealership, he doesn't know a remote start from a television remote. At the end of the day he was went out to his new Escape and noticed the check engine light flash on as he was about to drive out of the lot. Immediately reversing, Emmett took the car to the service department where he insulted Rosalie, the service manager, thinking that she was the cashier. Rosie promptly put Emmett in his place and made him wait two hours to get a simple oil change, even though she should have left about the same time Emmett was originally trying to.
For the next month, Emmett showed up at work every day with an apology gift. He tried flowers, candy, desserts, car magazines, stuffed animals, etc… Rosie, who admits now that she was charmed by his persistence, finally caved when he asked her to teach him a few simple things to help him maintenance a car. The pair spent the next eight weekends working on one of Rosie's old Mustangs before she agreed to go on her first date with Emmett. Rosie never had the heart to tell Emmett that the work she'd let him do those eight weeks had hurt more than it helped her restoration of the car, causing her to put in more hours when he wasn't around, but she did give him the car as a wedding present since it was a big part in their getting together. The couple married two years ago and lived about a half hour drive from Bella and she couldn't be happier about it, Rosalie was one of her closest friends and she had always idolized her big brother.
Once they'd been seated and ordered, Bella shared her work news with the table, which was met with heartfelt congratulations from Rosalie and brotherly pride and admiration from Emmett. He had always admired his sister for her work ethic and couldn't be happier that she was getting a chance to show off her skills.
Dinner was served and the trio shared a number of laughs over stories about their family, friends and work, but before she knew it Bella was driving back to her house and that feeling of loneliness and foreboding that had plagued her the night before returned. Things were looking up for her on the job front and she was happy about that, but she still couldn't help but wonder what else she was supposed to be doing with her life. She went to work, went to work some more at her part-time job, visited with family and the few friends she still had living in the area, but with many of them married or engaged, she was seeing less and less of her old friends. She'd worked hard and accomplished all of the big goals on her list, wasn't she supposed to feel satisfied? Successful? Happy? And she did feel these things sometimes, but something was still missing. She just wished she knew what it was.
Thanks so much for reading. All criticism, positive or negative, is welcome. I don't have a strict outline for this story so I'd love to have some readers who want to bounce ideas with me. I will say that Edward and the rest of the core Twilight gang are coming soon. I wanted to build up my characters a little before diving into the story. I promise not every chapter will be a day in the life type thing. The story will start progressing once I have the characters established. Thanks again for reading my drabbles!
