In keeping with our usual late night gatherings, Gunnar and I surrounded ourselves with chips, cheap wine, and gossip. But that night, I'd tripped into a well of honesty when I told her about the worst sunburn of my life. I was fourteen and I'd tried to develop a base tan on my torso before debuting a new summer bikini. But I'd missed the mark and scorched my skin far past the point of an average sunburn. There were blisters and cracks and an alarming amount of peeling skin—it was gross. It hurt like nothing I'd experienced before and my body treated the entire incident as if it was suffering from the flu. But the real victory, the success of this experience was my ability to conceal it from my parents. I'd slathered myself in creams, kept a cool, damp cloth layered under my clothes, and popped painkillers around the clock until I could exist in my skin without crying. And they never suspected a thing.
I hadn't expected the words to flow as freely as they had and I knew I'd said too much when Gunnar blinked at me, the wine bottle frozen on its way to her lips and pity scrawled over her face. She'd wanted to know why I hid the burn, why I hadn't asked my parents to bring me to a doctor, why hadn't they helped. Parents were supposed to care for their children, even when those children did boneheaded things like frying their skin off in the name of beachwear. Then she'd wanted to know everything else about my home life.
She'd informed me it was curious that I'd spent most of my high school years staying with an assortment of friends and only visiting my home once every few weeks. It wasn't okay for my mom to drink to excess every day and say cruel things to me. And leaving me to figure out how I'd get to and from school as a kid wasn't a practical experience in self-reliance or independence. It was abuse—all of it was abuse—even if it didn't leave cuts or bruises.
I hadn't mentioned the sister-mother piece. I didn't tell anyone about that.
Gunnar was the first person who told me it shouldn't have been that way and it didn't have to continue being that way, and I could change it. I hadn't realized how detrimental it was until she'd shown me, just as I hadn't known my life in Denver had simmered down to the same type of scorched terrible until Leesa Bruno, the owner of the spirituality shop, started pulling tarot cards one uneventful afternoon. She asked about grad school and I was forced to tell her I'd put a hold on my studies. Like any good witch, she wanted to know why.
Explaining a flawed, fractured relationship to someone unaware and uninvolved had a way of pulling apart the scar tissue of shame until the whole thing broke in my hands. Shame was the root of it all, of course. It wasn't the shame that followed an awkward moment or saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. This was the shame that accompanied me everywhere, a parasitic passenger determined to weigh me down until I stopped moving altogether.
Leesa had listened, just as Gunnar had. She'd pointed out the problems, the fallacies, the unacceptable behaviors too. She'd tapped her finger on the cards and told me it was time for me to go into the world and find my way again.
Then she'd fired me.
Ash propped himself against his doorway to his office, his back pressed to the jamb while he crossed his arms over his chest. He did this exact thing several times each day. He'd leave his desk, walk to the door, and say nothing while he settled into the Hot Boss pose.
I couldn't determine whether this was a performance for me or an innate mannerism not unlike a jaguar perching in a tree to study its prey in the most comfortable pose possible. Either way, I'd learned to pay this behavior little attention. I didn't spin my chair around to watch anymore. I didn't prompt him to speak. I stayed focused on my work until the last moment because the Hot Boss pose was the best and worst type of power play.
It was both best and worst because Ash was already in control here. There was no dispute in that matter and he didn't have to roll up his shirtsleeves or pace