Under My Skin

by A. E. Dooland

  I did actually see one, but she wasn't Asian or the person I was looking for and her hair was naturally brown. It was good to see this one, though.

  Sarah walked up to me with a big smile on her face. “Okay, I'm getting more of Bree's 'whoa, weird' vibe about you in chick clothes,” she said, glancing around us before she did.

  My eyes kept darting over towards the lifts, and she noticed. “You waiting for someone?” she asked, turning around to look where I was. “Henry?”

  I winced as she said his name, but shook my head and looked around us again to make sure no one was in earshot. “Bree accidentally outed me to someone at the hotel, so I’m waiting for her,” I said in a low voice. “Cecilia someone, a new consultant who—”

  Sarah's eyebrows went up and she interrupted me. “Cecilia Yeo? That new Business Development person?” I nodded, surprised Sarah knew her. She explained why. “We got an email about her. She's going to be working with all the departments on streamlining procedures. Mainly with the managers, though.”

  I sat up. They had her details in an email? I hadn't checked my generic Frost email account for at least a week. “Did the email mention where her office is going to be?” I asked Sarah, thinking maybe I could go straight to her office and speak privately with her there. My heart lifted.

  Sarah frowned. “Maybe,” she said, and we both took out our phones and started flipping through our emails.

  “Yes!” Sarah announced, sounding triumphant as she showed me her screen. “Here: level five, in the temporary suites, and it has her mobile number, too. I'll forward it to you so it's easy to find.”

  “Thanks, Sarah,” I told her, sculling the last of my coffee as I stood up. “You're a life-saver. I'll head up there right now.”

  I expected Sarah to be supportive of that idea, but she looked hesitant. “We've got that 8am meeting Jason told us about last night, though,” she said. “In like...” She checked her phone. “Six minutes.”

  I hadn't read my project emails last night because I was too busy worrying about what had happened. I was still worrying about that, but the real question was if I was worried about Jason's wrath at me being late more than I was worried he would find out about my gender stuff. My indecision must have shown on my face.

  Sarah put a hand on my arm. “Min, you can't be late to this. You should have heard the stuff Jason was already saying about you.”

  Fuck. But what if Cecilia had a meeting with Henry this morning? Or a meeting with Jason after ours? I looked over Sarah's shoulder towards the crowd of people waiting to go upstairs.

  “Come on,” Sarah said, taking my arm and leading me towards the lifts. “You'll probably have a couple of seconds to email her before the meeting starts.”

  I grabbed my handbag and let her lead me into the crowd, and all I could think of was what each and every one of these people would think of me if they knew about me. I could almost feel them looking at me now.

  Sarah leant up towards me as we got into the lift. “It'll be fine, it probably won't even come up,” she whispered. “She's new. Most people don't randomly gossip with strangers.”

  “Yeah,” I said glumly, remembering high school. “'Most'.”

  The lift emptied before we got to 36, which gave Sarah the opportunity to ask me, “So what happened, anyway?” I told her briefly, watching her look more and more concerned. “She actually hit on you when she read you as a guy? Whoops.” She exhaled. “Well, that must be serious déjà vu for you. Was she angry when she found out you're not the kind of guy she expected?”

  I shrugged. “Bree had dragged me away by that point.”

  Sarah pressed her lips into a thin line for a second. “Mmm, okay,” she said. “I get why you're worried.”

  That wasn't very comforting. “Yeah.”

  The lift doors opened, and we walked out into Marketing. Thankfully there weren't very many people in yet, and even though we had an 8 am meeting, the rest of my team weren't in, either.

  Well, at least it gave me the opportunity to write a quick email to Cecilia. While Sarah ran back to the lift to grab a couple of Red Bulls for us, I decided to compose it on my phone so that no one could look over my shoulder if they came in. I was just in the middle of trying to figure out how to make the email as benign as possible in case someone else read it, when Ian and Carlos arrived with matching coffees, distracting me.

  “Oh, you're here today. That's a nice surprise,” Ian said passive-aggressively as he walked casually past me. Carlos didn't say anything, but he didn't greet me, either.

  “Good morning,” I said neutrally to them both anyway, and didn't engage Ian in whatever argument he was trying to start with me. “How are you going with populating content into the templates?” He gave me a tired look and didn't answer, and that made my blood rise. “I was just asking. It's my job to ask.”

  He put his coffee on his desk and then turned back to me. “If we're talking about what your job is as lead, it's not to call in sick when things go wrong,” he said. “I missed my daughter's birthday party because of this stupid project, and I'm not even lead of it.” He turned to sit at his desk.

  I did not have the energy for office politics right now. Especially right now. “No, you're not. They put me on lead, and—”

  The door burst open and Jason came thundering in. “—And then 'they' realised their huge fucking mistake and took you straight off lead,” he told me loudly. “You forfeit when you fucked up and then didn't show up. I'm taking over before you fuck anything else up and putting you back doing the things you're good at.”

  Across the room, Ian gave me a pointed look.

  Jason wasn't done with me yet, either. He picked up the complimentary Frost notepads and a pen, and walked over to hand them to me. He was my boss, so I couldn't do anything but accept them. When I did he said in a very sarcastic Playschool voice, “Why don't you just sit there and draw a nice picture, Mini? Wouldn't that be fun?”

  I took a deep breath, jaw set.

  He straightened, swore and shook his head. “I'm sick of this bullshit,” he said. “I lost my quarterly bonus because of you, Mini. Nineteen thousand fucking dollars because when Diane asked, 'Tell me about Min Lee', I said, 'reliable employee who keeps her trap shut and basically lives at work' instead of 'neurotic woman who crumbles disastrously under stress'. You can imagine the level of respect Diane has for me at the moment.” He put his hands on his hips and shook his head with disgust as he looked down at me. “Anyway, like I said, I'm taking over from here. At least maybe I can reclaim some of that if I can fix up your mess and get this project signed.”

  I sat there looking at the floor at his feet. The Sasha Burov pitch wasn't in a mess, I wanted to say. It was right on target and it looked great. I couldn't say anything, though. I couldn't talk back to him.

  Sarah returned with the Red Bulls, and stopped for a second when she saw Jason towering over me. He almost paid no attention to her as she came around him and passed one of the cans to me. I was scared to open it in case the hiss of the can set Jason off again, so I just put it quietly on the table beside me.

  “Sit around here,” Jason said, leaving me and walking over to the central meeting table which he slapped with a hand, making my heart jump. “We've got some business to attend to.”

  It wasn't until he started going over the templates that I recovered from what had just happened and realised I hadn't actually emailed Cecilia yet.

  My phone was face down just beside my hand on the table. It would only take me a few seconds to flip it over, type out the perfectly vague wording I'd decided on and send it. Jason turned his back a couple of times, first to grab some of Vladivostok materials to tell us what not to do, and second to write a couple of things on the floating whiteboard. Each time, my hand hovered over my phone.

  Ian gave me a sharp look, though, and I ended up feeling guilty and not doing it.

  Jason had just been going over security measures—Sarah and I glanced at each other, r
emembering the Frost v Frost listing—when the door opened and Diane walked coolly in. We'd all been slouching until that point. Not anymore.

  “Good morning, Pink,” Diane said, remarkably authoritative despite her impassive tone. We all smiled in greeting. At least, everyone else smiled. I just felt sick, especially as she glanced at me. “We need to have a little refresher about information security, it seems.”

  She stood in front of us and reminded us of all the things I'd initially told the team — docs saved only on password-protected USBs, not leaving laptops unlocked and lying around, not speaking about the project to anyone other than people on the team, and, “Most importantly,” she finished. “Most importantly, do not speak to my brother. There are legal proceedings in place. Do not speak to him, irrespective of the reason.” She was looking directly at me as she said that. I swallowed. “Is that crystal clear? There will be severe consequences for anyone who is not able to adhere to that.”

  We all nodded. I did, too.

  “Good,” she said as she left. “I have another meeting to head off to, so I'll hand you back to Jason.”

  She did, and then Jason went on, and on, and on, and on about timelines, attention to detail, and periodically inserted thinly veiled jabs at me for the poor quality of the Vladivostok materials. I knew they weren't my best work, but I'd done then in three days, what did he expect?

  As the clock kept ticking and the likelihood that Cecilia would have an opportunity to tell someone about me kept getting greater and greater, I must have looked very distracted because at one point Jason put his hands on his hips and said impatiently, “Sorry, Mini, are we keeping you from something?” I shook my head mutely.

  When finally the meeting was over and Jason left us to check on another team, the first thing I did was flip over my phone to write that email. Before I'd finished it, though, Sarah put a gentle hand on my arm and scared the fucking life out of me. I jumped, startled everyone in the room, and then felt like an idiot.

  Once the boys had gone back to what they were doing, Sarah passed me her phone. I looked quizzically at her, and she just nodded at the screen. On it, there was the room-booking calendar for level five, and the board room was booked out for 'Business Development Consultation' for an hour from nine until ten. I checked my watch: 9:52am.

  “You could probably use some real coffee from downstairs after that, right?” she said cryptically and then turned away. “That was pretty awful.”

  That was clear enough for me. I cast a glance over at Ian and Carlos, and then put my phone in the side pocket of my skirt and exited Oslo. Marketing had filled up while we were in that long meeting with Jason, and as I walked across the floor towards the lifts, various people called out to me. I ignored them.

  While I was waiting for a lift, though, one of them came to grab an energy drink from the machine. However, despite that ruse, he was obviously coming here for the sole purpose of talking to me, and because he was smirking, that was really, really concerning.

  Did people already know?

  “Hey, Mini,” he said conversationally as he took his can out of the dispenser tray. “How was jail?”

  Oh, that. I would have sighed with relief if I wasn't alarmed at how quickly that rumour had spread, and how much it had escalated out of a simple phone call from Constable Garrett in that time. How many work days had I been away, one and a half? Two? I gave him a look and just hammered on the lift call button. At least he didn't hang around to ask more questions. He just opened his drink and wandered back out onto the floor as I got into the lift.

  As soon as the doors closed, I forgot about that rumour and remembered the one I was trying to prevent, and how I was going to prevent it: I was about to go and tell my most private secrets to a complete fucking stranger and beg her not to tell anyone. My heart began to pound again and the request I'd been practising started circling around my head. It was surreal rehearsing coming out to someone as transgender while I stared at my ultra-feminine reflection.

  I'd never been on level five before, so when I stepped out into it I felt like I'd walked into another dimension. The temporary and consulting suites were mainly used for boring stuff like auditing, so there'd never been any call for a marketing clerk to be down here. The only way I could figure out where to find the boardroom was by referring to the Fire Exit map by the lift.

  I did eventually find the room, and went to wait up the other end of the corridor. I checked my watch: 10:01am. I was probably just in time, and it gave me a few minutes to stress a bit more about how I was going to actually do this.

  I didn't know how I was going to get Cecilia by herself—I decided I could be direct about that, couldn't I? 'Cecilia, mind if I have a word with you for a second?', that would work, if I didn't 'crumble disastrously under stress' or whatever Jason had said, anyway. It should be fine, she had seemed like the type of person who'd be polite and not make a scene. I'd just have to wait for the meeting to end.

  And I did wait, and I kept waiting. The time ticked past: 10:10am, 10:13am, 10:21am... Fuck, I was going to have to go back upstairs soon, or people were going to notice I was missing for longer than coffee, and Jason was going to literally kill me with his bare hands.

  While I was fidgeting and trying to decide how much longer I could stay down here, the door to the conference room opened, and Diane walked out, phone in hand.

  I swung around the corner, inhaling sharply.

  She hadn't seen me. But if she did see me hanging around down here where I shouldn't be, I'd get in a lot of trouble for not being upstairs and hard at work on the project instead. I jogged back up the corridor and waited in the staff kitchen on the other side of the lifts for her to leave.

  I could hear footsteps and the hum of several simultaneous conversations, which meant the meeting was over and everyone was leaving, and while I kept checking around the corner and waiting for Diane to get into the lift, I finally saw Cecilia.

  ...and she walked right up beside Diane at the lifts and they made polite small talk.

  You had to be fucking kidding me. Diane was right here, right now? Just when I needed to speak to Cecilia?

  While I was watching them and mentally willing Diane to get in the lift without her, a group of other senior execs started to arrive and mill around the lift.

  Then, everything took a whole further detour into terrible. Another manager who I didn't recognise had asked Cecilia a question and she was answering it, and then a tall man wandered over to congratulate Cecilia on something, butting into the conversation. From the back of his head and his shoulders I knew exactly who he was the second I laid eyes on him: Henry. Fuck.

  God, why? No, I thought, don't talk to her!

  I felt around in my pocket for my phone and took it out, turning it over in my hands for a second. Then, on impulse, I called him. Answer it, I thought, walk away from her and answer the phone.

  I saw him reach up and pat his breast pocket, slipping his phone out and casually glancing at it while he was still talking to her. When he saw it was me, he double-took and actually paused mid-sentence to concentrate on it for a few seconds. Then, I saw him exhale, reject the call and put it back into his pocket.

  The execs standing around him had actually been waiting for him to continue what he'd been saying, and I realised at that point that I'd made a grave error. Someone asked him who it was, and Henry shook his head dismissively, but he looked veiled. Cecilia noticed.

  She wants to ask him about that phone call, I thought. Fuck, why did I do that? I just gave them both an actual reason to talk about me. God, everyone, just stop talking, get in the lift and go all your separate ways!

  That didn't happen, of course. The lift arrived and everyone got into it without me, and as the doors closed, it began to settle just how very fucked I was. I'd been down here for half an hour waiting to beg someone not to out me. She was in the lift with my partner who had no idea about my gender issues, and from how friendly everyone was being I just knew they'
d all have lunch together. Even if that phone call didn't come up, all the usual questions would: 'Are you from Sydney?', 'Are you married?'. I swallowed. I could imagine how that conversation would go. If Cecilia showed any sort of hesitation when it came to me, Henry would notice, and he'd get the truth out of her.

  “Fuck!” I said aloud, and went to go and get a lift, myself.

  Well, that was it, wasn't it? It was about to be all over. There was no way out of this, would there even be any point in emailing her now? I didn't know if consultants could get email on their phones like regular employees could, but even if she could, would she check them before Henry got the truth out of her?

  While I was in the lift I wrote her one anyway, just in case.

  The wording was important, not only because our emails were monitored from time to time, but also because I didn't want her to be able to show it to someone and have them guess the matter was personal. It had to sound like business. “Hi Cecilia, Great to meet you yesterday but please make sure you don't share any of the contents of our meeting with any other employees as it is highly sensitive information. Come and see me with any questions. Regards, Min Lee.” I read it a few times, decided it was impersonal enough, and then sent it.

  As soon as it had gone, though, I went to the sent box and re-read it a few times, second-guessing myself. I hoped it wouldn't be too cryptic for her to have no idea what I was on about.

  I arrived in Marketing again and walked briskly across the floor to avoid as many felon and jail jokes as I could. Once I was safe in Oslo, the team had clearly noticed I was gone, but none of them commented on it. Ian just greased me off as I sat down at my desk and turned my laptop on. I was too busy focusing on this being-outed crisis to pay any attention to him.

  If Henry managed to tease the full story out of Cecilia, he was going to be so upset I hadn't told him, even if he understood. I imagined the expression on his gentle face and my chest tightened. He was so lovely, and he'd been so good to me. Fuck, and all those things he'd done for my Mum in Korea, not to mention for me... he'd been patient, and generous, and kind, even though he knew something was up with me and Bree. There were so many ways he could have hurt me over that, and he didn't. It wouldn't have even occurred to him.