“Uh, Ms. Sanada, that’s company—”
“For fuck’s sake, Will. They can’t reuse it. It’s got my name on it.” She glared at him from behind watery, red-rimmed eyes.
Will’s gaze wavered, then dropped. “I guess it’s okay.”
She rolled her eyes. “Gimme a break. And what’s with the ‘Ms. Sanada’ crap? Haven’t I been ‘Lin’ long enough?”
Will hunched. “New policy. Everybody above you gets referred to with the mister or mizz title.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s not gonna fly in this place.” EvoWorld had started out as informal as a bar brawl. Even Will had started out when the company still had rooftop barbecues on the second Friday of the month and Wig Wednesdays and Casual Fridays and its own Science Fair for the kids of the employees in June. “Can you help me with the box, at least?”
Will shoved his hands in his pockets. “No can do, ma’am. If I dropped it, you might sue the company.”
Lin rolled her eyes again and hefted the box. In her heels, she staggered back under the weight of fifteen years’ worth of memories stuffed into a box that formerly held one ream of copy paper. “Fine. At least hold the doors, then. Those still belong to the company.”
Will was decent enough to hold the doors for her as she made the most humiliating walk of shame in her life, down the main hallway of the “executive floor” then down a crowded elevator full of people she no longer knew, and through the first floor cubicle maze where heads popped up from five-foot walls like gophers as she passed. Her face burned bright pink and she was sure her pantyhose were about to catch fire.
Will led her towards the main lobby. “Has to be the front doors. I’m sorry.”
Great. Her car was parked around the side. Her feet throbbed. Her thighs were sweaty. Her ass was sweaty, and she wanted nothing more than to fall into the drainage pond across the parking lot and let the freezing winter water cool her off. And going through the front lobby meant she’d have to see—and hear—
“Hi Lin!” The receptionist—Terri—waved to her with a wide smile. “I love your hair!”
Lin shot her a glare. That was what Roger had taken up with after they split? You’re welcome to him, honey. “And I love not working here anymore.” She hoped that one day she’d believe it.
Terri’s perky face clouded over in confusion. Don’t break your brain trying to parse it, toots, Lin thought.
“Well, come back soon and visit!”
Not on your life. Will hastily slapped the handicapped open plate as she swept towards the double doors, fully prepared to barrel right into them—right through them—if he couldn’t get his shit together enough to open them. It’s not like I have to maintain a good corporate image anymore.
She stalked out into the winter day, Will trailing behind like a nervous puppy. The wind kicked up her skirt, cooling her burning thighs. Her cheeks stung as well, and the click-click of her heels became grating to her ears as well as her feet long before she reached her car.
She finally reached the little Honda and set the box down on the hood while she fished for her keys in the bottom of her purse. “Well, that’s that,” she said, pulling them up and out of the Bag of Interdimensional Holding.
She unlocked the door and loaded the box into the backseat on top of too much paper and an old laptop to be scavenged for parts, shoving aside the dry-cleaning she’d picked up this morning. Not much need for that anymore. “See you around, Will. Have a good life.” Don’t get too comfortable here.
“Uh, I have to see you all the way off company property.”
She stopped, keys in her fist, contemplating the potential lawsuit if she just swung them around and smashed Will’s face in. “Are you shitting me?”
He shook his head. “You could drive your car through the front doors.”
She sent him a glare. “And you being out here would somehow stop me if I decided to do just that?” The thought was tempting. Maybe she’d take out that twit Terri in the process. She slid into the front seat and started the car.
His features shifted into distress. “Will—will you be okay?”
She sighed. “Go back inside. I’m not going to do anything crazy.” Not yet, anyway.
“Good luck, Ms. Sanada. You can use me as a reference.”
She slammed the door and rolled down the window. Don’t count on it. In two years, if he hadn’t moved on already, he’d be dumber than she gave him credit for. “Keep your luck, kiddo. I have a feeling you’ll need it more than me.”
~*~
Lin found a tiny bit of satisfaction in squealing her tires out of the parking lot. As she pulled onto the highway, she slid the Tori Amos CD into the stereo and let Tori angst it out for her. There were a hundred different worries ready to descend down on her, but if she stomped on the accelerator enough, she might be able to outrun them for a bit.
At the stoplight, she thumbed her best friend’s quickdial. Starla picked up on the first ring.
“I’m out.” She didn’t bother with a hello. Her voice might have cracked.
“I’m so sorry, hon.” Starla’s voice softened with genuine sympathy.
Sympathy she didn’t deserve. A hot flush of shame crept up her neck. “I’m the one that should be sorry. If I’d left with the rest of the founders, we’d all have moved on with our lives long before now.”
“We built the company together. You had just as much right to stay as we did to leave.”
She swallowed back a deluge of fifteen years’ worth of memories, from college-kid dreamers to a bunch of wide-eyed geeks faced with a meteoric rise none of them had been ready for. “You’re kind to say it, but—” The first trickle of sweat tickled her spine under her suit jacket.
“I’m no such thing. The text you sent last night gave me some time to arrange a lawyer.”
“I just had a feeling. Will Terkels started acting weird at the end of the day yesterday.”
“You mean weirder than usual.” The amusement in her best friend’s voice loosened the band around her chest a little. She and Starla used to do this every day, dealing dish about coworkers, matchmaking and speculating for the pure fun of it. She sighed. That had been over five years ago, before Starla left to have the twins. Starla had been one of the first to go, even if she had a good reason. But not the very first to give up on the dream. That was a special spot reserved for—Don’t even think his name.
“He’ll be at the house at eight tonight.”
Her gut involuntarily tightened. “Who? Not—” Not him.
“The lawyer, space-case.” Starla’s voice gentled. “If we can all sign the papers tonight, we’ll have a chance of getting our checks before the new year.”
She didn’t need to hear the end of that sentence. And we’ll be able to afford our mortgage payments. Starla’s husband Bailey had been politely forced out a month ago. Besides herself, Bailey was the last holdout of the thirty original founders. Once she signed the papers, they were all free to cash in their company shares for current market value. For her best friend’s family, she would be there tonight, freshly coated in humiliation. And she’d wear a smile. “I’ll be there.”
“I’ve gotta start making calls, then. See you tonight, hon.”
Lin rang off and made the left onto the freeway on-ramp. She’d have to start making some calls herself. As she merged, she flicked the heater over to cold and punched the A/C button. Then cracked the window, letting in the chill winter air. Just let me get home before I lose it altogether.
She gambled with her speed on the noontime-deserted highway. The overcast sky sent the occasional spatter of rain across her windshield, but as it had been for the entire month, the rains were intermittent, over too quick, and did little to relieve the humidity. For all the weather knew, it could have been Florida rather than Ohio. She fished around in her purse and found a water bottle. Chugging it barely helped ease the ripe-grape stretch of her skin under her clothes. Her shirt stuck to her chest.
Bl
ustery winds, the look of what should be snow, delivered nothing but fitful squallings of rain. She rolled the window down further, hoping the wet breeze might cool her burning skin. If she didn’t know better, she’d say the whole city was trapped under some sort of bizarre weather curse.
That’d be more Starla’s league. Starla was the earth mother type, full of fairy stories for her kids and quirky, harmless superstitions. As opposed to Lin’s mother’s superstitions, which were anything but quirky or harmless, but thankfully confined to her mother’s home and current location, which made her Japan’s problem, not Lin’s.
She exited the highway at her inner-suburb neighborhood and navigated surface streets until she came to her building. She killed the engine—and Tori—then hefted the box full of her life out of the backseat and carried it inside, setting it on her kitchen table. She barely bothered to set it down before she was flailing out of her suit jacket. She scrabbled at the buttons on her petal-pink blouse and flung it onto the floor along with the navy blazer. She made it halfway down the short hallway before her pencil skirt zipper got stuck.
Her breath was coming in pants by the time she undid the kink and slid the skirt down over her hips. Her pantyhose stuck to her thighs. A bead of sweat ran down the side of her face as she tore the gossamer stretch fabric from her hips and shoved the hose down to her ankles. More sweat prickled her scalp as she shimmied out of bra and panties just as she hit the bathroom’s tile floor.
Her slick fingers slipped on the bathtub faucet handle, but after the second try, she got the cold water running. She crawled into the tub and let out a sigh of relief as icy needles of water stung her naked body. As the cold water pooled around her, she curled to her side, waiting for the hot flash to pass. After six months of tests, three different prescriptions, and specialists, she was no closer to figuring out what the hot flashes meant, except that she’d been able to firmly rule out menopause.
The episodes were getting worse—longer, hotter, and more exhausting. Without a job—or the health insurance that went with it—she was no closer to an answer. And running out of time.
~*~
Jack glanced up at the moon. The night was mostly clear, but still held that heavy, wet feeling. It would have meant snow if the entire city hadn’t been trapped under what the weather channel kept calling a “heat dome.” Like some giant snow-globe, only the snow was being kept out, instead of in.
He squinted up at the house, made of white-painted brick and garnished with holly-red shutters. Knee-high, mushroom-domed landscape lights shone liquid pools of gold over the brick-patterned sidewalk leading up to a double-wide front door. Random spots in the yard shot light through the bare branches of a river birch, or up-lit a whimsical birdbath with a winged Tinkerbell-clone perched on the edge. He peered to the side and grinned at the cleverness of a Loch Ness monster made out of patina’d circular saw blades swimming through a patch of low-growing evergreen ground cover, its rearing head made of the end of a toothy garden tool.
He hadn’t been up here since the twins were babies. The thought of holding either of the two fragile little creatures in his freezing hands filled him with the sort of deep dread that froze his guts solid. And it reminded him to check that the woven scarf under his jacket covered his neck under his shirt. He tugged the cuffs of kidskin gloves down over the exposed skin of his wrists and straightened the knit half-gloves over top of the kidskin, then smoothed a cashmere scarf over the collar of his corduroy blazer.
Under the golden light of the front door, he hesitated. This is why I don’t go out to the suburbs. “Keeping in contact” wasn’t the same as seeing his friends every day or every week, or even once a month. Once he and Nancy stopped sleeping in the same bedroom, it had been far too easy to let that, his mother’s illness, his job, all become excuses to avoid the people who knew him best. The people who could see through assurances motivated more by pride than truth. The people who might see he was keeping a secret.
Safely insulated behind layers of clothing, he rang the bell of his best friend’s home.
Jack waited, tense, a million different scenarios—most of them awkward—superimposing themselves over the blank door panel.
The door swung open and all but the core layers of Jack’s tension evaporated the instant Starla’s face appeared. Nobody could be mad at Starla McMorrissey for more than five minutes, and her warm embrace—cut short by him before she could feel the unnatural chill of his body—began to melt something inside him.
“Jack Winters! Just look at you!” Starla fluttered her hands up to his hair, overcome with emotion. Not an unusual state for her, but Jack hadn’t been around it in awhile and his immunity to it had weakened considerably. “You’re a silver fox!”
“Way to remind the man he’s hit the Big One, Starla.” Her husband Bailey, Jack’s best friend since age twelve, enveloped him in a bro-hug worthy of a bear-wrestling tournament. “Happy birthday, man.”
“Don’t remind me.” Jack couldn’t do anything besides hug his old best friend right back. And enjoy the involuntary chiropractic adjustment. “But thanks.”
“Dude, you’re frozen. How long you been standing out there?” Bailey didn’t wait for an answer, and Jack didn’t volunteer one.
Bailey led him into the kitchen and Starla held out a steaming mug. “Bailey calls it a Snowplow. It’ll get you warmed up and lit up in no time flat.” She held out the footed glass mug, and tipped up a can of Redi-Whip to top the murky chocolate-aroma’d concoction. Jack caught a hint of Kahlua and something like black cherries.
Starla held out her hand. “Can I take your gloves and scarf?”
Jack froze. The kidskin gloves protected his fingertips and the knit half-gloves protected everybody else’s. He shook his head. “I…um…still cold.” He offered a weak smile.
Starla’s eyebrows rose. He ducked his head and made a show of blowing off the steam rising from the melting whipped cream. His fingers started to tingle from the heat of the drink and a spot of condensation appeared on the glass.
Jack’s gaze slid away to take in the room. “The last time I was here was for the housewarming party.” He neglected to mention Nancy’s presence at that housewarming party. She’d insisted on leaving early and they’d fought about it on the way home in the car, because the fight was really about money, and how the McMorrisseys’ had gone into a nice house while theirs had gone into hospice care for his mother.
“The lawyer’s in the study. We have everyone’s papers separated out.”
Jack followed her across the kitchen and edged into the great room, past the ten-foot high Christmas tree decorated with handprint reindeer, glittery paper snowflakes, and strings of popcorn and cranberries. He shook his head. “I can’t believe how Martha Stewart you’ve gone.”
“Shut up. Do you even have a tree?”
Jack shook his head. “No. First year Nan left, I put one up and didn’t take it down until April. After that—” He trailed off, because after that, the Oddlings had appeared, and when you weren’t sure you weren’t hallucinating crazy, you didn’t really prioritize holiday decorating.
She led him inside and closed out the noise from the main area of the house. In contrast to the bright lights and warmth, the study was dark and cool, lit by the desk lamp and two recessed ceiling spots that shone down over the desk, but left the rest of the room in enough shadow that he could see through the second set of windowed French doors leading out to the deck with little problem.
Beyond the doors, he caught glimpses of a copper fire kettle holding blazing logs as people moved around it. Just at the edge of his peripheral vision, he spotted a streak of something too silvery-bright to be natural. A cold spike shot through him as his awareness shot up past eleven.
He fished in his pocket for a pair of half-moon reading glasses.
“Not you, too?” Starla elbowed him and gestured to the glasses.
He shot her a look from over the tops of the glasses. “You say that, married to a
man whose contact lenses are the thickness of the bottom of a Coke bottle?”
She chuckled. “I guess we’re all feeling it some way or another. At least they’re more fashionable than mine.”
He wouldn’t tell her the reason the lenses were tinted blue for all the money in the world. He peered out the French doors towards the deck. The glasses allowed him to look directly at the strange creatures he called Oddlings without attracting their attention. If he turned his attention on the little gremlins without the glasses, they noticed and wanted to interact. The last thing he needed was to be seen talking to nothing by his friends.
The sparkling flash that caught his attention didn’t carry with it a telltale haze that indicated Oddlings were present. In fact, through the glasses, he couldn’t even see a Chillsprite, and the little buggers were everywhere. Instead, it turned out to be the floofy skirt of a woman’s dress. Topping the dress was a hairstyle of ebony curls, shot through with sparkling, electric blue strands that caught the light of the fire.
The woman’s face was hidden by the shoulder of the man she stood next to. Her wrap framed a stretch of bare skin that caught the glow and something long asleep in the back of his brain shifted, and lifted its head. No woman had grabbed his attention in eighteen months. Kind of hard to cut through the distractions of supposedly-imaginary gremlins that seemed to appear wherever you looked.
“Winters?”
Jack dragged his attention away from the woman on the deck. An elderly man in a tan suit sat behind the desk. The lawyer selected one manila folder from a line of file folders laid out in cascading columns. “John O.?”
Jack nodded, his mind still on the curve of the woman’s back and what it might be like to be a normal guy who could pursue an interesting woman. He knew her—he knew everyone at the house, so once he saw her face, he could place the name…but how well did he know her? And would it be possible, given his situation, to get close to her or anyone he once knew?
WinterJacked: Book One: Rude Awakening Page 2
