Sleeping With The CEO
Chapter 85: This Time Hurts

In fact, there was absolutely nothing from Haven Group’s end regarding her resignation. It was suspicious. Were they trying to rob her of her benefits?

She’d heard of other big companies doing that. But under Derek’s rule she had never seen, nor heard of it. What if he was the one standing in the way, withholding her benefits as a way of punishing her for daring to leave?

Even just thinking that Emily knew it was impossible. Derek Haven was many things, but he was not petty. Besides, who was she to him anyway. All that she had been was just a personal assistant. She probably did not even register in his personal radar, just a blip off in the distance. In fact he had probably already forgotten her name.

If they ever happened to walk past each other in the street, he would probably just walk on by, not even looking at her like he vaguely remembered her from somewhere. Which was highly unlikely, they barely breathed the same air, rich folk were on a whole other level, there was no way that they would ever bump into each other. They would never bump into each other, so he would have no reason to make sure that she did not get what was due to her. Which meant that it was just regular company stuff, slowing down the processing of her information.

She would give them a bit of time. And then she would reach out. First by mail, and then if they still did not respond she would go there in person. But before she went there in person, Emily wanted to make sure that she looked and felt her best.

She had quit her job at one of the top companies in the world. Having them think that she had gone on to bigger, better things, was a whole lot more preferable than them thinking that she had quit just to suffer.

What those, bigger, better things would be, Emily had no idea, but she certainly hoped that they were somewhere in the near future. It she had not achieved them by the time she went to see Haven Group’s HR then she would do her best to fake it until it looked like she had.

But in her current state, Emily was barely able to pull of a mask good enough to fool her mother. She did not like her chances of being able to keep up the act of someone happy and successful in front of a large group of people.

Without work, without Derek, Emily was really struggling.

Before, when she had been at Haven, she’d had a routine. Get up in the morning, get ready for work. Walk to the bus stop, take bus. Get off the bus, walk the last few blocks to work. D whatever Derek required of her that day, while pushing her own self assigned projects along, have lunch-mostly in the nearby park with Derek whenever they were both free. Go back to work after lunch and do her work while Derek did his. Then at the end of the day she would say good bye to Derek and go home, where she was sure of around two hours of sleep.

Quite a lot of her time had revolved around Derek, but Emily chose to ignore that. It was not important in the moment. What was important was that without the familiar routine, sleep no longer came as easy as it used to, and it was also now plagued by some of the most vivid nightmares that she’d ever had. Each night she suffocated in very imaginative ways. And as she sat up in bed, her embroidery project in her hands, Emily felt cheated.

She had spent hours lost in the streets of social media. People often talked about how great it was quitting their jobs, and how much they had benefited:

’I quit my job and I was almost instantly stress free’

’I left my old job and I instantly felt way better about myself’

’Quitting was the best thing I ever did for myself. Thanks to that I was able ro focus more on myself. My physical and mental well being has gotten way better,’

Those were the comments that were circulating. Comments from people who had managed to find the positives of being voluntarily jobless and stick to them. Emily very much wished that she was one of those people, but she was not.

In the past, when she had quit her other jobs, she had not minded as much, and had rebounded quickly. But this time was different.

She had been at that job for a long time, and against her better judgement, she had gotten attached. Emily had come to love being Derek Haven’s PA, and without that title she felt...empty.

It might have sounded cliché, or like she was being too dramatic. But Emily was genuinely struggling to find a way to define herself now that she no longer had her job as a personal assistant. The few ways that she did find to describe herself were not flattering in the least bit, but they were true.

She was Emily Molson, just Emily Molson now. Not Emily Molson, PA to the most powerful man in the city. Just Emily Molson, the woman who had quit her job without a back up plan. Emily Molson, the woman who was lying to her mother about still being employed.

That was who she had become in her own eyes and she did not like it one bit. Something had to change, or something was going to give, and most likely, it would be her.