A Business Love

chapter 44.1

YOU ARE READING
A   B U S I N E S S   L O V E

As soon as Julian heard the knock, he interrupted the conversation. "Someone knocked. Come in!" he said, still visibly mad.

Jessie opened the door, as instructed by Julian. The room became quiet, and everyone was looking at her. She had no idea what to say or do.

'Someone, shoot me now. Please,' she thought as embarrassment washed over her.

Julian raised his hands. "Oh. That's my girlfriend and she needs me. Yeah, I have a life outside of this work, so..." he said while looking straight into his father's eyes in a confrontational way. "If you'll excuse me."

Julian then got up and left while Mauro turned red. "E che cazzo!" he swore in Italian.

Everybody had heard that, including Jessie and her jaw dropped.

She had never seen Julian like this with his face flushed and a stern expression. He barely acknowledged her, although he was the one who had asked her to come here. He went straight to his office while Jessie hastily followed him.

Once in there, he started pacing back and forth and mumbling words that included a lot of swearing. Jessie was in complete shock seeing him this way.

"Baby, what's happening?" she asked truly concerned. 

"Mauro happened. As always! He gets to decide everything, with no regards to anybody, especially not me!" he lashed out.

Jessie had never seen him this furious. That wasn't his typical behavior, far from it and she hated seeing him so upset, desperate to comfort him in any way she could.

"Is this about Domenico?" she asked.

"We found out Domenico did something wrong, very wrong. I can't tell you, it's confidential. But it was an important breech of information; information he had no business sharing. We all get on a call at 5 in the morning, we discuss strategies and how to facilitate an exit that would ensure a seamless transition and business continuity. The first thing Mauro did coming into the office was go straight to Domenico's office and fire him. That was not the plan, at all. Now, guess who's going to have to pick up the slack? Me. Of course, it's always me."

Jessie listened to him wide-eyed. He paused as his anger grew bigger. 

"You know what," he continued, "like I get it when I was in my twenties, trying to prove myself. He'd dumped anything on me and I would simply accept even if that meant having no life. But I can't do this anymore. I have other plans. I can't do everybody's job just because he chooses to fire people with no backup plan! And you know what bothers me even more? He's a hypocrite. Why the heck call a meeting with everybody, when all along, when he walked into Domenico's office and fired him, he knew in the back of his mind: Julian can do that job. I'm his contingency plan, I'm always his contingency plan. And then he plays pretend in front of everybody. He clearly knows I'm going to be the one that's gonna have to take over. Either that or we'll all have to watch the boat sink."

"Wow, babe, I'm so sorry you're going through this. This is really bad." Jessie had no solutions to offer him.

"Yeah. He just doesn't care. I'm sick and tired of it. I can't keep going like this and spend all my days and night working. I have a life too."

Jessie knew that Julian had plans to decrease his workload as he was currently trying to convince Cyril, a friend of his who lived in France, to move here and become his right hand for anything related to business development.

"Maybe he thought you wouldn't mind since you've always been the one helping him out in crises. You should probably tell him that you'd like to slow down the pace."