Two Weeks Notice Read online

  Two Weeks Notice

  A Broken Resolutions Book

  Shay Violet

  shayviolet.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Shay Violet

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Shay Violet’s Books

  1

  I’ll never forget the day I shared my definitive New Year’s resolution — the one I didn’t intend on breaking. No matter what.

  “By the end of this year I’m leaving my job with the Brannigans,” I told my Lady Leopard sisters over lunch at Sadie’s. Every year in mid-December we get together in Charleston, South Carolina to have lunch and share our New Year’s resolutions for the year. We even put a little wager on it. This year it’s $200 each. Whoever ends the year having not broken their New Year’s promise, gets the whole pot.

  And this year it’s definitely going to be me.

  There are five of us; me, Ameerah, Paris, Savannah, and K.K. We all met as freshmen at Palmetto Women’s College in the infamous Charlotta Bass dorm. We’ve been tight ever since. Post-college life has scattered us across the country and the world, but twice a year we make time for each other.

  “But why?” Ameerah asked as I bit into the best barbecue sandwich this side of heaven. “I knew your job was tough, but I’ve never heard of you quitting a thing in your life, and besides, didn’t you get some big raise?”

  “Well, she can’t stay there forever.” That was Savannah, my ex-roommate and the one who knows me the best out of the Ladies. “Even with all the money in the world, sometimes it’s just time. Time for new challenges or new adventures, whatever. She’s reached a ceiling. If she can’t smash through it, it’s time to find a new house.”

  “I agree,” Paris said. “Sweet, you’ve been burnt out on the Brannigans for a long time. If you’re going to progress, you’ve gotta exit. Stage left!”

  My friends call me Sweet, short for Sweet-T. That was my nickname back in DC. But professionally, I go by Tyesha.

  And that’s what my momma calls me too.

  “Yeah, but you ain’t gonna do it.” K.K. chimed in.

  “What do you mean?” I said, giving her the side-eye.

  “You say this every year and then you see Mr. Hot Daddy Brannigan who we all know you want to bang, and you prolong the torture for another year. Mark my words — you ain’t quittin’ shit.”

  She was so smug that it made me want to throw a sweet potato fry at her pretty little head.

  “You’re wrong,” I said.

  “About which part?” Ameerah smiled from across the table at me. “The wanting to fornicate with your sexy boss part or the not quitting part?”

  “Or both?” Paris laughed and this time I did throw a fry at her which she happily caught and immediately devoured.

  “Of course, both,” I retorted. “I don’t want to have sex with Ezra Brannigan. And I’m definitely quitting. You’ll see. Hope you’re ready to lose a couple of Benjamins!”

  They all collectively rolled their eyes at me as Miss Sadie herself came around to our table to refill our sweet teas.

  I guess I couldn’t blame them. I’d been complaining about Ezra Brannigan for years now, and they were right — I never quit. He was always able to convince me to stay.

  But I’d hit my limit.

  There was nothing he could say this time to convince me not to leave him.

  I was on the cusp of my thirties. I had big plans for my life, and none of them involved running around doing the bidding of the one percent of the one percent. I wasn’t born for that.

  Sweet-T was destined for bigger things.

  And today was the big day.

  I’d worked for Ezra Brannigan and his oil tycoon family for five years now. I’d lived in Dallas, Texas that entire time, away from my family and friends. It was time.

  And it had been five very long and semi-awful years if I’m being perfectly honest.

  I’d started as additional administrative help for Ezra’s last personal assistant. That’s how much work he unloads on his staff — even his assistants have assistants.

  She lasted a year before giving up. I was immediately promoted. That sounds like great news, right?

  Wrong. It’s been four years of straight-up HELL.

  Actually, I take that back. The first three years were awful, but nothing I couldn’t manage.

  It’s the last year that’s been agony.

  Ezra has had me mostly playing babysitter and surrogate mother figure to his trouble-making son, Winston Brannigan who — at last count — has been kicked out of three boarding schools and was on his way to flunking out of his first semester at Vanderbilt.

  Not that Winston had any business getting into Vanderbilt in the first place, but I guess when your old money family is a school’s largest donor, and the two newest buildings on campus carry your surname, they tend to overlook even the most nightmarish of high school transcripts.

  Winston had called me a week ago, begging me to “take care of it” just like I’d taken care of all of his screw-ups in the past. But this time, I couldn’t.

  Also, I wouldn’t. I was tired of bailing out a privileged-ass kid like Winston Brannigan.

  Every time he got a pass, I would think of the kids I grew up with back home in inner-city DC who never got even one chance to screw up.

  I was tired of it.

  So, yes. Today was the big day.

  I was finally quitting my job.

  2

  I will say this — as far as bosses go, I could do a lot worse than Ezra Brannigan.

  He’s never been anything but kind to me. He’s a billionaire, yes. And he definitely asks a lot from the people who work for him. He acknowledges that by paying us well and providing us with incredible benefits. Financially, I have never had to worry about anything while working for the Brannigans.

  He’s still a massive pain in my ass though.

  For one thing, he really is ridiculously sexy. Ezra is forty-two years old with dark hair and a body forged by the sports of his youth — those being soccer and track.

  He’s lean and muscular. I love watching him walk out of a room. He’s got some hitch in his giddy-up as my momma would say.

  The man has an actual square jaw — like something out of an Old Hollywood movie. If you were to Google “hot man in an expensive suit” chances are, his photo would come up — for pages and pages of results.

  He’s got the lightest sprinkling of gray hair at his temples, which just makes him more attractive. He hates to shave, so he has perpetual five-o’clock shadow happening.

  I mean, the Lady Leopards weren’t totally off base when they teased me about him.

  I wouldn’t have sex with him, but I won’t lie — I’ve imagined it a time or two. Just like every straight woman and gay man who’s ever laid eyes on him. He’s Ezra Brannigan.

  The man is personal friends with the Gates, the Bezos, and the Buffets. He has any and every Senator, Governor, and Congressman on speed-dial and when he calls, they’re not sending his ass to voicemail.

  Ezra Brannigan is someone that doesn’t have to wait for anybody.

  It’s why I’ve stuck around so long. Working for him has connected me to so ma
ny people I could never have met otherwise.

  People who can help me with my own ambitions.

  I went to college to study international relations and political science. I’m a verbal prodigy — I pick up languages quickly. It’s been a gift my entire life. I discovered it when I was very young, playing with the Latino kids who lived in my neighborhood. All their families spoke Spanish, so I picked it up. I was fluent in grade school.

  In middle school I took French, but I learned it so quickly and by the time I was in high school, I focused on Mandarin.

  By the time I reached Palmetto Women’s College I was fluent in Spanish, French, Italian, and Mandarin. The local paper did a story on me and everything.

  Once I was in college, I achieved passable fluency in Arabic.

  My brother was great at sports. But I was the language kid.

  It’s a cool “superpower” to have, especially when you spring it on somebody who has no idea you speak their native language.

  Once in high school I was visiting the Smithsonian with my friend Shay. She did her undergrad at Howard and Georgetown for medical school. She’s finishing up her residency at Sibley Memorial. Nobody is more brilliant, or more D.C. than Shay.

  Anyway, Shay and I were in the air and space museum, reading a bio of Ronald McNair, one of the astronauts who died in the Challenger disaster. He grew up in Lake City, South Carolina, and when he was nine years old, he was denied a book at his local library. Yeah, it was 1959, and it was the South, but they wouldn’t let him check out books at the library.

  As two African American girls who both would have been very happy to live in our local library, and I mean that literally–to move our beds right into the stacks and wake up and fall asleep reading, it was unfathomable to us.

  They threatened young Ronald McNair, first that they’d call his mother, then that they’d call the police. And what did he do? He politely replied, “I’ll wait.”

  Wait he did, and he got his books. And that library is now named after him.

  “We’re going to that library one day,” Dr. Shay said, wiping a tear from her cheek. “He deserves it. Every person of color who’s ever escaped their circumstance by visiting a library should make a pilgrimage to Lake City.”

  I nodded and hugged her, trying not to cry myself.

  That’s when I heard it.

  Not that I could have missed it, they didn’t make any effort to speak quietly. They just assumed nobody around would know what they were saying.

  I guess they hadn’t heard about Black Girl Magic over there in Beijing or Shanghai or wherever they were visiting from.

  They sure know about it now.

  I turned my head over Shay’s shoulder to see two Asian men standing behind us, arms laden with pamphlets and maps and cameras and all the trappings of tourism. Off to the right were two women in their age range who I suspected were their wives.

  One man had said to the other crystal clear in Mandarin I had no trouble deciphering, “These American blacks have such big asses. Look at that one in green. Two handfuls. Each cheek.” That was Shay they were talking about. And she does have a great ass. But we were seventeen, and we were in the Smithsonian, not some club. And these guys were just a few feet away from their oblivious wives.

  “Too much ass for me,” the other one replied, and followed that up with the coup de grace. “But her friend’s juicy lips would feel good on my-”

  That was it. Sweet-T turned salty.

  “Hold up!” I said, turning away from Shay and glaring at them.

  Their wives turned to look at us, along with several other people nearby.

  “What did you say?” I bellowed.

  The two men looked at me with bewilderment and then at each other and turned to shuffle off to rejoin their wives.

  “Tingzhi!” I shouted. “Halt!” is what they heard.

  They turned slowly, the blood draining from their faces.

  I proceeded to dress them down in Mandarin while their jaws hit the floor and their wives cowered behind them. Turns out I spoke their native language far better than they spoke mine. By the end of the incident, Smithsonian security had arrived, their wives were scolding them using Mandarin profanity even I didn’t know, and Shay was beaming at me like I had just performed a miracle.

  “That. Was. Amazing.” She said breathlessly once the dust had settled. “But I have no idea what just happened!”

  “I’ve been studying Mandarin. My momma got some tapes at the Goodwill store and I’ve been studying it online, too. I overheard them being very rude about your ass and my lips and what they’d like to… Anyway, that’s the first time I’ve ever used it in a ‘conversation’, so to speak,” I confessed. “I don’t think my pronunciation would win any awards, but they seemed to get my meaning.”

  “Oh. My. God.” Shay said, shaking her head slowly. She gave me a huge hug. “You have got to come to Howard with me, girl. Please, please, please!”

  I hadn’t picked my college yet, but I knew for certain I wanted to get out of D.C. There was more to the world than the small slice I’d visited. I’d never been north of Philadelphia or farther south than Petersburg, VA, visiting distant cousins. The entire family went to Columbus, Ohio, once when my older brother Tyvon’s high school football team played a game there, but otherwise, it was all D.C. all the time.

  All of which probably fueled my travel bug and quest to learn new things and languages that would facilitate it. The career path I landed on in high school, and which I’ve stuck with ever since, was to work as a translator for the United Nations. I’d eventually like to work for an embassy. My long-reach dream is to get into politics myself, so I can help people like the ones I grew up with — people who are in another universe from the Brannigans, people who have been forgotten in many ways.

  My biggest goal in life is to help out my community, to make it easier for the next Tyesha growing up in a tough neighborhood, being raised by a single mom who has to work three jobs just to give her kids the life that comes so easy to people like Winston Brannigan.

  I’m not going to get there if I work for Ezra Brannigan the rest of my life, and as nice as the travel has been working for him, believe it or not, even private jets lose their charm after a while.

  I sent the email at four o’clock Friday afternoon.

  It was my notice, and I’d done it through email because I knew it would be easier for me to say what I needed to say through my keyboard than in person.

  I get tongue-tied around my boss. It’s a problem — one that I think he takes advantage of.

  It was short and to the point:

  To Mr. Brannigan—

  I have very much enjoyed my time working for Brannigan Oil and Petroleum these last five years. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to work for such a prestigious company and feel very fortunate to have learned many things that will allow me to succeed in my future endeavors. I owe so much to you, but it’s time I move on in my journey. This email serves as my two-weeks’ notice of resignation. If you have questions, I will be here until such time is up. Thank you.

  Sincerely,

  Tyesha Baker

  Not even thirty seconds after hitting send, the phone on my desk — Ezra Brannigan's direct line — was lighting up like the Fourth of July.

  I sighed and picked up the receiver.

  “Yes, Mr. Brannigan?” I said. “How can I help you?”

  “You emailed me your resignation?” he asked. “You never do that. Isn’t this something that should be done in person?”

  “You’re out of town,” I replied. Which was true. He was in Seattle this week.

  “I’m back Monday,” he pointed out, as if this mattered. “Anyway, you can’t leave. We need you, Tyesha. If it’s money, you know that’s not a problem. Let me know what you require to stay, and it’s done.”

  I shook my head, not that he could see me. “It’s not about money, Mr. Brannigan. You’ve compensated me very well. I’ve explained t
hat to you before. I’m just ready to move in a new direction.”

  “If it’s Winston, I can solve that too,” Ezra continued. “He’s a young adult now and you shouldn’t have to deal with his problems, anyway. Even though you’ve dealt with them so well. He’s gotten this far only because of you.”

  I closed my eyes. He was never going to make this easy.

  I was probably one of the few people in his life that ever told him no.

  “It’s not Winston. It’s not you. It’s not anything that you could do. I have my own plans, Mr. Brannigan. And it’s time for me to act on them.”

  He was quiet then, which was unusual. Had I left one of the most powerful men in the world speechless?

  I wasn't irreplaceable. I knew I was good at my job — no, GREAT at my job — but there were plenty of others who could do it just as well?

  “Monday morning,” he finally said. “I’ll be there, and we’ll discuss this further.”

  He hung up, and I sighed.

  There was nothing to discuss.

  This time, he wouldn't convince me to stay. No matter what he said or did.

  So why was I suddenly very nervous?

  3

  I spent that weekend boxing up my stuff. I figured I might as well get ahead of things. That was one of the many things my time with the Brannigans had taught me — to always stay ahead of what I knew was coming.

  I’ve lived in the same condo for five years. I started out renting it. After a year of living in Dallas, when I knew I’d be staying a while, I bought it. It had been Ezra’s advice — renting was like throwing away money.

  The first time I’d put in my notice, he’d paid my mortgage off for me. He did this without my permission, because I would never have allowed it.