Howard didn’t return after lunch, though Andy said that as far as he knew HR hadn’t been able to track him down quite yet. They had immediately scrambled to look up his file for his cell number as soon as Andy had played the first few seconds of the video, but after several attempts either the number was wrong or he was purposefully not picking up. They weren’t going to proceed with talking to me until they found him first, so the only thing for me to do was to just keep working like normal. I didn’t particularly like the idea that they wanted to speak with him first, it felt like they thought that it was remotely possible for this whole thing to be a huge misunderstanding or for him to somehow be the innocent party. I believed in innocence before being proven otherwise just as much as the next person, but there were some situations so black and white that it was a waste of time and in some ways very insulting to entertain the idea at all. Luckily for me I had agreed to take over the top weld for Joey, the constant tingling and exhaustion in my arms was very distracting and I found myself caught up in the zen of trying to distance my mind from the job and discomfort rather than brooding. This worked until about a quarter to three when the sound of a door being violently slammed and glass breaking managed to momentarily overshadow the chaotic sounds of a busy factory floor. Figuring it was probably about to become my drama too, I cut off my welding gun, secured my tools to the lift, and lowered myself to the floor. I was not the only one, my entire team started to follow suit and even the other teams in the same quadrant of the factory were all powering down their tools in preparation for the show.

“Twenty years!” It was the unmistakable whine that Howard adopted when he felt that someone or something was being unfair to him. “Twenty years and you take that whore’s word over mine?!”

There were several sets of footsteps coming down from the stairs descending from the lofted offices where management holed up all day. There was a female voice talking rapidly, but she must have been trying to keep her voice down for an attempt at discretion, though that was obviously not going to happen.

“You don’t give a single shit about the fact I’m being harassed every day!” My eyes rolled back nearly disappeared into the back of my head. “This is discrimination!”

“Oh God,” Andy groaned as he pulled off his welding hood, “I told them they should call security before even talking to him.”

I got my hood and safety restraints off just in time for Howard to get to the bottom of the stairs, turn towards the team, and lock eyes with me. His face was red and his expression dark, he looked like a man backed into a corner with nothing to lose so he wanted to make sure he took everyone else he could down with him. I probably should have been afraid, but his anger over a situation he completely fabricated in his own mind was so ridiculous that I couldn’t help but let out a scoffing laugh before I could stop myself and consider that it might be a bad idea.

“You think this is funny, bitch?!” he screamed, spittle flying from his lips.

He broke into a run, making a beeline straight for me, I didn’t know what his plan was, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I leapt over the safety railings of the platform I had been using and mashed the button to start lifting me up off the floor, cursing the fact that the lift was so slow. I was pretty sure that I could actually take him in a fight, but he would be the type to try to slap me with an assault charge even if it was obvious self defense, I had no interest in giving him any ammunition like that to use against me even if it would have given me immense satisfaction to put him in a choke hold until he cried. There was a small army of HR reps and even a couple members of management in smart suits trailing after him, eyes wide as the realized he was really trying to rush me.

“Mr. Brown, don’t make this worse for you!” Patsy cried as she paused briefly to kick off her smart, business appropriate heels so that she could run faster. “Remember what we talked about!”

Ignoring her plea, he kept coming at me and made a flying leap for the bottom of the platform, barely getting his fingertips on the very bottom of it. He let out an angry grunt as the machine rose lifting his feet off the ground. Realizing he might be stupid enough to hold on while the platform kept rising, I cut the lift system off and Joey threw the welding gun he had been still holding in shock to the ground and marched over to where Howard was now dangling about a foot off the ground.

“It’s not worth it, Joey,” I called down. I really didn’t want someone ending up in trouble or losing their job over me, even though I knew Howard deserved it.

“Yes it is,” he called back.

Joey reached up and grabbed the armpits of Howard’s jumpsuit and forcefully pulled downwards, breaking his grip on the edge of the platform. The structure bounced up and down from the shift in weight and I had to grip tightly to the railing to keep my balance. One of the HR reps gasped loudly and screamed at me to be careful as I assume the monetary value of my potential injury settlement flashed through her mind.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Joey said, voice loud, but controlled, like he was scolding a child who had just done something that could have ended up with them hurting themselves.

“I should have known the boyfriend would come to her rescue!” Howard snarled as he put both his hands on Joey’s chest and shoved him back. “Everyone saw that! You put your hands on me!”

“You were going to attack Christa,” Joey said, keeping distance, but not backing down. “I wouldn’t have touched your otherwise.”

Howard let out a loud, guffawing laugh. “No I wasn’t!”

“So what was your plan then when you were literally dangling off the lift she was using to get away from you?”

“I was just going to talk to her!”

It was like a bad soap opera scene, honestly I had always thought those writers were bottom of the barrel for their weak grasp on reality, but now such a scenario was playing out in front of me. I had always known Howard was a little bit off his rocker, but this was a whole new level of entitlement and insanity, I had managed to flip a switch by merely mentioning he was balding.

“Mr. Brown, come with me!”

Security had finally deemed it an appropriate time to manifest, they were completely out of breath from never having to get out of their cozy security booth. They had still managed to beat the whole HR department though, I guess that really speaks to the hours spent in and under the desks up in those offices.

“I’ve done nothing wrong!” he squealed. “I know my rights!”

“No one is saying you have.” A woman I recognized vaguely as the head of HR looked frantically between security and Howard, desperate to deescalate the situation and have to fill out less paperwork. “We just need you to go with these two fine gentlemen right now so we can talk to Christa alone and get this whole mess sorted out.”

“There’s nothing to sort out!” His face was going even deeper red and his eyes were flitting erratically between Joey and security like a trapped rat. “She needs to be fired and arrested right now for all the harassment and trouble she’s put me through!”

“Mr. Brown,” she pleaded, “you need to calm down, you’re not helping the situation at all. We can’t do anything until we have all sides of the story. You need to leave so we can talk to her.”

“But she’ll just lie and you’ll believe her because you women are all the same, it’s disgusting!”

The HR rep’s face dropped into a look of controlled neutrality and she nodded to security. “Alright Mr. Brown I tried to reason with you, you’re being escorted and trespassed until we call you. You step foot on company property before then and the police will deal with you, along with our lawyers.”

“You can’t do that!”

“I just have. I advise you to allow security to escort you off premises peacefully.”

Howard spun around like he was trying to find someone, anyone willing to stand up and come to his aid against the injustice he thought was occurring and finding none, he instead snapped his head up to me and pulled his lips back into a snarl. “This isn’t over, you’ll pay for this!”

“Oh Mr. Brown…” the head of HR sighed as security forcefully grabbed him by each arm and started dragging him towards the front of the factory.

We listened in stunned silence as he screamed the whole way about all the terrible things that he would make sure would happen to me. Everything from losing my job to making sure I didn’t walk down any dark alleys any time soon.

With tired eyes and a sensible bun that was losing bobby pins rapidly, the head of HR looked up at me and waved me down. “Let’s have a chat, please.”

“Alright,” I agreed, “but I want it done here with my whole team as witness.”

“I think it would be better to have this conversation in private.”

“After all that?” I chuckled. “No, I want as many witnesses as possible.”

“Whatever,” she sighed.

The rest of the HR and manager group had assembled, looking worriedly between themselves, I was guessing this whole thing hadn’t gone at all how they planned. They stood in a crescent formation between my team and the rest of the factory floor like they were trying to shield my privacy, like it mattered at this point. The whole factory would be abuzz about what happened for weeks, this was exactly the kind of exciting gossip we all lived for.

“Alright, Miss Johnson, a lot of this is formalities at this point,” she began as soon as my lift hit the ground, “since everything was on video we pretty much don’t need your perspective on what happened there. Though we do have to follow up on a couple things.”

“I haven’t slept with anyone,” I said with a roll of my eyes.

“Any dates or romantic encounters?”

“No, of course not, I’ve worked here for this long and have never had anything even remotely like this cross your desk before. I know better than to mix my job with my romantic life, that’s would be incredibly stupid.”

“He’s just making it all up,” Joey interjected, “none of us have even ever had contact with Christa after work hours. I think the only time I’ve ever been around her after shift is at the yearly company Christmas party.”

She nodded as if it was exactly what she expected to hear. “Okay, I’m going to need all of you to come up to the office then and write a statement before you leave for the day since I think most of you are in the video at some point. Miss Johnson, once you’re done with your statement we’re giving you tomorrow off with pay. Don’t worry, it’s not because you’re in trouble and it won’t come out of your banked sick or holiday pay, we just want to make sure things have a chance to cool off before you come back to work.”

I raised an eyebrow and my stomach sank, that meant they had reason to believe he might actually come back for some kind of retaliation. I didn’t think he had it in him, but maybe they knew something about him that I didn’t.

“Three day weekend sounds good,” I said with a nervous laugh, “want me to go up and fill it out now?”

“Please,” she said and motioned for me to follow her.