Jim leaves after a few minutes of surprisingly comfortable silence, and Jan keeps on smoking. She isn't drunk, but she also isn't ready for the ride home yet; she supposes she'll have to suck it up and go back in and say goodbye before she leaves, anyway.
On her fifth cigarette the warehouse door opens and Kelly Kapoor stumbles out, teetering on pink high heels with little flowers on the toes. Jan wouldn't be caught dead in them, and she wouldn't really say that they work on Kelly, but it could be worse.
Kelly takes a few tiny steps before she finally notices Jan on the hood of the car, and freezes. She's probably embarrassed that she's been caught drunk in front of her boss' boss at a work-sponsored event, but at this point in time, Jan doesn't really give a shit.
"Oh! Hi, Jan."
Jan blows out a long curl of smoke. "Hello, Kelly."
The proper course of action, Jan thinks, would be for Kelly to hobble off into the night and for both of them to pretend it never happened. Kelly seems to agree for a moment - but after another tiny step, she apparently changes her mind, and plops down onto the car beside Jan.
Jan doesn't want to deal with this right now. So she continues to smoke.
After a few minutes of decidedly uncomfortable silence, Kelly begins to cough a little. Which is one of Jan's pet peeves - no one asked her to sit out here with a smoker, they're in the open air, it's a free country, etcetera etcetera. She could just move away, not sit there and cough passive-aggressively.
But then Jan notices that Kelly isn't coughing to make a point about nicotine addiction - she's coughing to cover up the fact that she's crying.
Now Jan really doesn't want to deal with this.
Just as she is about to politely excuse herself, Kelly bursts out: "I just don't understand, Jan!"
Jan sighs. This conversation was probably inevitable. She leans back a little against the windshield and winces when one of the wipers digs into her back. "What's wrong, Kelly?"
"It's Ryan. You know, the temp? I don't know if you guys at corporate deal with him or whatever because he isn't really an employee. But he's a temp. And we've kind of been dating for like, forever, like, for six months or something, but when I asked him to get me another drink he was taking forever and then he was gone! He just left, he didn't even tell me or tell someone to tell me. And like, I wouldn't really mind, y'know, because I totally know all about how men need their freedom and everything, I mean, I listen to rap songs, but couldn't he just tell me first?" Kelly sniffles and raises her head a little to look at Jan. "Sorry, sometimes I talk a lot when I'm drunk."
Jan snorts at this but manages to pass it off as a cough. "Right."
Kelly points to the half-empty carton of cigarettes resting next to Jan's thigh. "You shouldn't smoke those if they make you cough," she says somberly.
"No, I just - had something in my throat," Jan says. "So, Kelly, I really have to -"
"You understand, right?" Kelly jumps in desperately. "I mean, with Michael? You came all the way down here and he's spending the whole night with some random girl who sold him a house and Jan, you are so much prettier than her. And like I know that she sells houses and you sell paper but don't let that get you down, okay?"
Jan frowns. Not where she expected the conversation to go. "Thank you…Kelly," she says slowly.
"I mean, I couldn't believe it when I found out you had sex with him," Kelly continues. Jan's eyes widen.
"Michael and I did not enga -"
Kelly waves a dismissive hand. "No, Jan, I understand. These men, they just come in with their dark hair and their green eyes and their extension cords and they just, they just suck."
"Extension cords?" Jan repeats before she can stop herself.
Kelly nods gravely. "Extension cords. And highlighters, yeah."
"Okay." Jan drops the butt of her last cigarette to the ground and crushes it with her heel. "On that note, Kelly -"
"I guess all I really want is to be loved, but I don't even expect that. I just want to be like liked." Kelly looks defeated. Even the pink flower in her hair seems to droop. "Is that so hard for them? To just like us enough to say goodbye?"
Jan knew a lot of girls like Kelly in her sorority at PSU. Passably intelligent, cute, chatty, obsessed with boys. None of them got very far in their professional lives, but that wasn't really what those girls wanted in the first place.
Unlike Jan, who never got very far in her personal life.
Jan looks at Kelly, hunched over on the front of the car, the pink flowers on her feet matching the pink flower in her hair. Jan feels very sad all of a sudden.
"I don't know, Kelly," she says quietly. "Maybe it is." Jan smiles at her a little, and Kelly smiles back.
Jan shakes her head and looks down. She clears her throat and tries to put on a businesslike air. "I need to head home now, would you like me to call you a cab?"
Kelly shakes her head. "No, thank you," she says. "I think Angela can take me home. Angela takes everyone home when they're drunk."
Jan nods, and only wonders for a second how often it is that Angela needs to give rides to the inebriated. "Well, good night."
-----
Jan says goodbye to Michael and Carol quickly but politely. She smiles, and wishes them a nice evening, and successfully suppresses her urge to strangle Michael with her bare hands.
She exits the building through a different door, the one closer to her car. When she sees Kelly at an office meeting three weeks later, they exchange polite smiles and nothing else.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Characters, situations, etc. are not mine. The title is from a Franz Ferdinand song.
