Under My Skin

by A. E. Dooland

  That didn't answer the question about what she was doing in my bed, though.

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Good morning,” she said sleepily.

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “You're not where I left you,” I observed.

  She scrunched up her nose. “The couch was hurting my neck,” she said. “And then I came in here, and you had this whole ginormous bed and you were only using, like, the very edge of it.”

  “So, naturally, that was a sign you needed to hop in.”

  “I was very careful when I climbed over you,” she told me. “And then even though I was really cold I slept all the way over here so I didn't wake you up.” She adjusted the doona while she was speaking, and I could see the blue of my hoodie above it, which further explained why I was so cold. I must have given it to her at some point, because I was just in a t-shirt and jeans.

  I looked back across the pillow at her in my bed, wearing my clothes. I didn't know why I was so surprised, though. Of course she was randomly in my bed: this was Bree we were talking about. Personal space was completely optional to her. I started to laugh but I just ended up in a long, pained groan with my hands over my face.

  “Fuck, Bree...” I said, rubbing my sore eyes. At least she was happy again, though, and that was what counted. Remembering those red, puffy eyes and that tragic little voice... “Well, better in here than on the streets of Sydney, I guess.”

  She snorted. “And way more fun. And don't try and pretend you didn't have fun last night, because, look...”

  She half-sat up and felt around inside the doona, rescuing her phone. After a few seconds of waiting for something to open on it, she held the screen towards me. I could hear the tinny buzzing of bad speakers and someone laughing quietly. When I squinted at the screen, it was me. A video of me. I'd obviously tripped and fallen on the rug because I was on all fours, laughing forever about it instead of actually getting up. Bree was giggling so hysterically from behind the camera you could hear her struggling to breathe.

  At least my face wasn't really in the video. I would have deleted it anyway, but before I could touch the trash can icon on the screen, Bree snatched it out of my reach.

  “You'd better delete that,” I told her.

  She gave me a pixie grin. “No way,” she said, and then played it again to herself.

  I gave up, rolling onto my back and yawning, half-watching her beside me.

  There were obviously some missing parts of last night; I didn't remember her taking that video at all. I strained to remember what we'd done before we'd watched that TV show; I think I'd spent about twenty minutes or so trying to do some work. Bree had come up behind me and had proceeded to tell me that it was stupid to call pink diamonds pink when they weren't. I'd Google-imaged some 1P-category pink diamonds to prove they were pink, but then we'd ended up having a brief argument over whether her school tie was pink or coral. It was obviously coral and the fact she vehemently declared it wasn't drove me crazy to the point of wanting to strangle her, because who was the schoolgirl and who did professional design work for the marketing department of a Fortune 500 company here? Obviously I knew what I was doing which was probably partially why Jason and Diane had chosen me for... Wait, didn't Jason say something about...

  I sat upright again. Shit! I had that meeting before work this morning with Diane and Jason!

  “Oh my God!” I checked the clock on my phone and then clambered off the mattress, head pounding. “I have a meeting this morning I forgot about!”

  I staggered into the bathroom to wash my face, wrestling some hardcore nausea. This was one serious hangover; I felt like I really needed the whole day to sleep it off. However, taking sick days at Frost was code for 'never promote me', and, on top of that, I really couldn't waste a single day on this project. I didn't have the time. Speaking of time, fuck, I was going to be late for this meeting!

  Bree was only just getting out of bed when I rushed back in there. As soon as she stepped out of the doona, all I saw beneath the hoodie was skin. I stopped. Was she serious? “Bree, are you not wearing pants?” I asked her with the wardrobe open almost as far as my jaw was. “Were you in bed beside me and not wearing pants?”

  She shrugged. “I'm wearing undies,” she said, like that made it perfectly fine. “And your jumper is kind of long anyway.”

  I put my palm to my forehead and groaned as she shut the bathroom door behind her.

  Despite the fact I was in a huge hurry, I still struggled to get my dress on. I kept telling myself it was ridiculous of me to be this hung up on fabric, and it was the same fabric that people made men's suits out of. No matter how much I deconstructed it, though, it didn't make it any easier. And actually, the only thing that ended up getting me into it was hearing Bree turn off the water in the shower and worrying that she'd see my breasts in this godawful lacy bra if I didn't put the damn thing on.

  I rushed putting on my makeup and I rushed my hair and in the end I had us out of the door at a reasonable hour. I didn't have time to take her to the train station, though, so I parted ways with her under the George Street overpass, pushing my Opal card and a few small notes into her hand.

  She was laughing as she stuffed them into the front pocket of her bag. “Min, you look so hung-over,” she said. “I bet you have a terrible headache.”

  I wondered if the heavy sunglasses I was wearing gave it away. “Not at all,” I said flatly. “I feel fantastic.”

  “Oh, yeah?” She grabbed my hand and pulled me downwards, trying to say really loudly next to my ear, “Then I guess you won't mind if I do this!”

  She was lucky I'd taken some serious painkillers, because even on them I felt like blood was going to start pouring out of my ear after she'd shouted in it. I shook her off. “I hate you.”

  She looked delighted, still giggling. “No you don't, you're smiling.”

  I tried to do something about my smile. “I do. I actually hate you. It's why I watched that terrible TV show with you for hours last night and why I bought you that bracelet.” My smile had crept back by the time I'd finished that sentence, but Bree's had dropped right off her face as soon as I'd said 'bracelet'.

  I glanced down at her wrist; it was bare. “You're not wearing it,” I noted. Maybe she didn't like it?

  Bree made a face. “I can't wear jewellery with my school uniform,” she said, glossing over the fact her uniform skirt was so short it could cameo in a B-grade porno. “So I left it at home.”

  Well, that made sense: she wasn't wearing any other jewellery, either. My old high school had been just as strict and randomly hypocritical. And, speaking of school, I checked my phone—shit. I had ten minutes to be in the office and she was going to miss her train.

  “Okay.” I looked her up and down. “Well, as much as I'd love to have my ears shouted in all day, I have to run. Are you staying over tonight, too?” My weather app said it was going to be a really nice night, so I figured that maybe we could watch more of that terrible show of hers out on the balcony over some dinner.

  She looked down at her feet and shook her head. “Nah, Mum doesn't work nights on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday.”

  “Oh,” I said. No dinner and TV on the balcony, then. “Well maybe Saturday?” She nodded, still looking at the ground. I didn't want to make her sad again, but... I couldn't help but ask. “Are you going to be okay until then?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

  I winced. I wanted more assurance than that, but I also really, really needed to not be any later for this meeting than I already was. “I hope that's true, Bree,” I said, and then cupped her cheek for a second. “Okay, I really have to go.”

  She nodded, and then smiled a half-hearted goodbye at me, turning and walking towards the pedestrian crossing. I waited until she waved at me from the other side of the road before I spun and rushed uphill towards Frost, trying as hard as possible not to think about how much my head hurt or how sick I felt.

  It was 8:30 when I got into the
office, and Jason was waiting for me by the door of Oslo with his arms crossed. He did not look pleased.

  “I'm sorry, I'm sorry!” I said, jogging past him into the office and dropping my bag into my bottom drawer. “I'm not feeling that great, but I'm ready.”

  “The one day that you're not here before six...” he said, shaking his head at me. “Well, at least you look sick. Maybe we won't both get caned.”

  I wasn't sure what hurt more: my head or being told off by my boss, but the strong painkillers I'd taken weren't touching either of those things. I was starting to worry that I was going to get in trouble again, but Diane's assistant was only just handing her a jumbo latte as we went into her office, and her computer hadn't even finished booting up.

  “Thanks,” Diane told her assistant, and then sat down and gestured hospitably towards the chairs opposite her desk. “Good morning, take a seat.”

  Jason sat down easily, and I slowly lowered myself into the chair beside him, my head throbbing so much from running that my vision was pulsing in sync with it. And my stomach... I had a horrible image of myself just throwing up all over Diane's desk. Oh, god, there wasn't anything worse I could do. Why did I drink so much last night when it was Bree who really needed the distraction? Why? Why did I do this to myself?

  “Min.” I looked up at Diane as she spoke to me. It must have been apparent how bad I felt, because she frowned. “Are you not feeling too well?”

  “I'm fine,” I lied, palms sweating. “Probably just a virus. I'll get over it.”

  She watched me for a moment. “Hmm,” she said, giving me the smallest possible smile. “Good thing you're all the way over there, then. Anyway, if you could provide with me an update on the project, that would be fantastic. Jason's given me some details, but he is in charge of 14 other teams, so I'd rather hear it from you.”

  Thinking straight enough to relay our progress was actually a bit of a challenge, but I thought I sounded coherent and professional enough just to pass as someone who was a bit sick. I went over the project so far, explaining the decisions we'd made at each point and what was still left to be done.

  She nodded slowly as she listened to me, occasionally asking me questions. Eventually, she said, “Well, that all sounds on track. Russia is an excellent choice, and if you're selling to Vladivostok, it's quite likely we'll get some demand out of Beijing, too.”

  I hadn't even thought about future expansions, but I obviously wasn't going to tell Diane that. I pretended it had been part of the decision all along. “Strategically, it's a good place to position ourselves.”

  Diane looked satisfied by that. “A solid plan,” she said. “How's information security?”

  “Terrible,” Jason butted in, abandoning his professional vocabulary again. “Mini has that Arab kid in her team, and he doesn't understand the meaning of 'encryption'.”

  I flinched as he said that, and I think Diane noticed. She didn't say as much though, focusing on the rest of his complaint as she directed me with a frown. “Why aren't you dealing with this?”

  “I spoke to John yesterday and I haven't received any unencrypted emails since,” I assured her, sounding far more confident than I felt. “But yes, he needed to be told several times.”

  She didn't look pleased. “Watch him,” she said. “There will be trouble if my brother finds out where we're planning on setting up in Western Australia.”

  “Understood,” I told her.

  “And,” she said, remembering something and pointing at me. “I saw you two together last week. Why was that?”

  My eyebrows went up. “I've bumped into him a few times,” I said. “We talked a bit, but it was purely small talk.”

  Jason scoffed. “It's never small talk with that man,” he said coarsely. “Excuse my language, Diane. But Mini, he's a fucking asshole.”

  Diane didn't look shocked or angry, and she didn't ask him to watch his language, either.

  It was the strangest fucking conversation. I was listening to the guy who was joking around with Sean at every possible opportunity—and maybe doing more than that with him—calling him a 'fucking asshole'. Suspect choice of wording aside, it didn't really seem like the way you'd expect someone to describe a person they got along that well with. And, Diane? Diane was Sean's sister, the very essence of decorum, and still she was happy for her employees to call him derogatory names. I was beginning to think that maybe Henry and Alice were the only balanced siblings on the planet. What the hell was going on in people's families? I just couldn't imagine how siblings could end up so much at odds. Like, Mum and I didn't get along at all and sometimes it felt like ten thousand kilometres wasn't enough, but she was still my mother.

  It was all incredibly screwed up, and I wondered if Sean knew the way they were talking about him. Hell, I wondered if Diane knew how close Sean and Jason appeared to be and that they might even be involved with each other.

  “I'll be careful with what I say to Sean,” I promised them, and apparently that marked the end of the meeting.

  Family feud aside I thought it went quite well, and while I was congratulating myself for not throwing up on Diane's table as we left, Diane stopped me as soon as Jason was gone.

  “Min,” she said, briefly closing the door beside us. “Mind if we have a word?”

  That wasn't actually a question, so of course I nodded.

  She was watching me with a very measured gaze. It unsettled me even though she was so much shorter. “How do you like working in marketing, Min?”

  “I love my job,” I said with practised ease.

  She nodded, and then appeared to very carefully choose her words. “Marketing is a bit of an anomaly in most large companies,” she began, somewhat cryptically. “The skillset required to excel in it generally differs from that of other departments. Take Aaron, for example,” she said, referring to one of the older 'fatherly' leads I'd previously had. I'd hated working with him; he'd spoken down to me and treated me like a secretary. “He's a fantastic networker. We'd lose a huge web of contacts if he were to leave us. And Gerard, he's another fantastic member of our team.” I didn't like working with that man, either. He had the tendency to freely laugh at other people's expense.

  She reeled off a whole list of names, and I began to see a pattern; all the people she was naming and complimenting were fucks. Actual fucks, there wasn't a name on the list that I'd want to be put in a team with. “And, of course, Jason is the best closer this department's ever had. He's a real asset to Frost International.”

  She paused, letting that sink in. “When I'm hiring for this department, I'm often presented with the difficult choice of hiring the type of employee I might choose for another area of the business, and someone who's going to shake hands and seal the deal, so to speak. This can make marketing teams operate a little less smoothly at times. However, what matters is that we get signatures on those dotted lines. If we can't sell our products, we don't have a business.”

  I nodded, not following her completely.

  “So,” she said. “Occasionally I'm required to overlook certain behaviours I see in order to ensure that I still get those signatures and we still have a very healthy, very profitable business. Working closely with very strong marketers like Jason, I imagine you've discovered you have to do the same. I trust this hasn't been a problem for you?”

  I finally understood what she meant, and it left a really bad taste in my mouth. It must have been triggered by that 'Arab' comment she'd seen me react to earlier.

  She was asking me a trick question, though. Of course Jason's complete lack of regard for people was a problem—he was a manager for Christ’s Sake—but I knew actually saying as much would give my career the kiss of death. So I looked right back at her and forced a calm smile. “I have no trouble working with Jason,” I said through my teeth. “I've been working in marketing for five years, after all.”

  She smiled faintly and nodded. “That is a very good point,” she said, visibly relaxing. “And good t
o hear, too: you're doing some great work on this project. It would be a shame if you decided to transfer out for something minor. Anyway,” she opened the door again and stood aside politely so I had room to step through it, “thanks for your work. I look forward to attending functions in Russia and seeing women wearing our merchandise.”

  She showed me out and I stood by the door for a second.

  Under all the compliments and explanations of how marketing departments functioned, there was something sinister in there. I didn't think she was threatening me exactly, but I didn't like it. It was one thing to just kind of know I needed to put up with Jason, and quite another to be told my career in marketing was over if I didn't.

  That, on top of the Sean-Diane stuff, the Sean-Jason stuff and the fact happy families seemed to be a fictional construct in Australia was just making my terrible headache even worse. Ugh. I sighed, and started to walk around the corner to Oslo. I'd need to ask Henry what he thought about all of that.

  I walked back in the office to find Sarah already seated at her desk.

  “You are here,” she said, and had started to say something else, but she cut it short and laughed. “Whoa, someone didn't get any sleep last night. Did Henry stay over?”

  “Nope,” I told her. “I was out fighting evil.”

  I did not want to tell her that it was Bree who had stayed and that it was because of Bree that I looked like this, because knowing her, she'd take it the wrong way. It was difficult to take it the right way, actually, especially given that we'd ended up in bed together. I didn't want to have to explain to her that Bree needed to be held to different behavioural standards than normal people.

  She laughed. “Looks like evil won,” she said, and handed me a Red Bull. “I have Panadol if you want some, too.”

  I shook my head, and then winced as the movement made it throb. “Diane says our project is going well and she congratulates us,” I told her instead, changing the subject.