Lighthearted and Quirky; Life with L&Q

It was 2016 and I working at a bank as an accounting assistant. I was casually browsing accounting jobs in the Seattle area and stumbled across a job posting for a tech company where the perk that drew me in was the ability to bring dogs to work. I have always had golden retrievers growing up and my dream was to one day have a golden puppy of my own. I scored a phone screen with said company, but I quite honestly did little to no research beforehand (I was convinced I was not qualified anyway). I had a fun time with the interview and somehow, they asked me to come in for a full round of in person interviews! I was shocked and still not convinced I would get it. Long story short, I landed the job! This program was for new grads freshly out of college and the purpose of the program was to rotate teams within the accounting organization every 6 months to get a feel for the different spaces and content. As an accounting cohort, we went through 2 weeks of onboarding and one of the accounting systems onboarding training was led by Mr. Stephen (“Steve”) Callahan. Right away I picked up on his sarcastic nature and his direct report happened to be my best friend in the program. He used her as one of the use case examples and showed the room how to log into an accounting system on her computer for everyone to follow along. I was quickly drawn to his witty humor and quickness.

Since Steve was the accounting systems administrator, there were plenty of opportunities to meet up with him for “training purposes”. In February 2017, I moved into an apartment with his direct report and started seeing him more and more at work and coworker happy hours. I had always known I liked being in his presence, but I thought it was platonic at the time. What I liked about him was his strong exterior, but once you I got to know him, he had a soft kind heart and truly wanted to help others. He was constantly making me laugh with his sarcasm and borderline inappropriate humor.

In July 2017, my roommate and I hosted a 4th of July party at our apartment complex and invited friends from college and friends from work. One of my roommate’s friends from college was there, a woman I had not met before, and started commenting about how she had just met Steve and was going to try to get him to ask her out on a date. Keep in mind, Steve was 100% single at the time (as was I), and I had no claim to him. I was furious. I was also very confused. It seems my heart and my mind were not aligned. My mind thought of us as friends and my heart had a different agenda. I tried to play it cool that day and casually brought it up to him at work the next day. I was “joking” about how he was going on a date with the woman from the party and he looked at me in a way I had not seen before. He cooly played it off to get a reaction out of me because it was obvious I was trying to get information from him. He said yes, he had gotten a phone number from a woman at the party but had already politely noted he was not interested in a relationship (with her). I was so relieved.

In August of 2017, I had rotated to an internal audit role at work which was still at the same company, but in a different building from where Steve worked. Since he was the manager of my roommate, we still saw each other quite often at happy hours and get togethers. At some point we had exchanged phone numbers and would occasionally text each other just to see where/when the next group get together was. One Friday afternoon, I was out at a bar in Seattle with my friends from college. At some point they had all left and I was walking back to my apartment, and decided to text Steve to see what he was up to. It was still only around 7pm so the night was very young. It just so happened that he didn’t have any plans and we decided to meet up. This was big. It was the first time we had hung out just the two of us. Steve pretended to give me a hard time because I didn’t invite him to the happy hour I was at previously, but it was only my girlfriends from college meeting up, so I told him it would not have been his scene. He jokingly disagreed but was happy I texted him.

That night was so fun just sitting, eating, drinking, and talking together. It was the start of something real.

At some point after that we decided that we didn’t want to be only friends. Steve explained to me that he had been courting me since the day we met. I had no idea! He was hesitant to make any moves because we did work so closely together, but when I moved to the role in a separate building, it was more HR friendly.

At that point, Steve traveled a lot for work, and I ended up staying at his apartment while he was away because it was “closer to the office” but when he got back, I really never left. I had unofficially moved in which turned into officially moving in. I had my golden retriever, Duncan, with me and we decided to get another golden retriever together, Odie. We were slowly but surely building a family together.