They look at me like detectives in an SVU episode. I feel like I’m in an interrogation room with the nondescript character actor whose name you can’t recall, but you remember her face from those irritable bowel syndrome commercials.
“Who, exactly, did you kiss last night?” Carol asks.
“She kissed Andrew McCormick,” announces a voice that is, in timbre, just a few shades off from Carol’s.
“Shannon!” Josh squeals, dropping me like he’s Ben Affleck and I’m Jennifer Garner. “What are you doing here?”
“Damage control,” she gasps as Josh squeezes her like she’s a Koosh ball.
Her eyes meet mine.
And narrow.
Uh oh.
She knows.
“What were you talking about?” she asks as she looks around the office with an expression that says, I can’t believe I ever worked in this crap hole.
“Amanda’s date! She kissed him.” Josh is so breathless he sounds like he’s having an asthma attack.
“You never told us you kissed your fake date,” Shannon says calmly, eyes a mixture of calculated cool and determined interrogator.
“That’s because I didn’t.”
“You really kissed Andrew? Andrew McCormick?” Carol asks in a low voice. “Again?”
“Again again,” Shannon says.
Carol frowns. “You mean you’ve kissed him three times?” The woman can’t balance a checkbook but she can decode complex inferences to kissing in closets. Sex math has its own logic, apparently.
“Yes.”
“Why?” Carol asks.
“Have you looked at the man?” Josh says in a disturbingly low voice that sounds exactly like Carol’s a moment ago. “He’s a delicious god.”
“He is not,” I say weakly. “He’s hot, for sure, but god might be taking it a bit far.”
All three of them snort. Even Greg snorts from the safety of his office. If Spritzy were here, he’d snort, too.
“How about demigod?” Josh challenges.
“Fine. He is,” I concede. “But that’s not why I kissed him.”
“Technically, you didn’t kiss him. He kissed you. It was like something out of a 1940s Bette Davis film,” Shannon explains to Josh and Carol, who pay rapt attention to her words like the good little employees they are. Why do your actual work when you’re on the clock if you can gossip about your coworkers instead?
“The Bette Davis movie where she feeds the rat to her invalid sister?” Josh asks, his face screwed tight in confusion.
“Yes,” I deadpan. “Exactly like that.”
“Did he express the rat’s anal glands first?” Carol asks.
“I’ve heard rat is a delicacy in some parts of southeast Asia,” Greg shouts from the other room.
“How did we get from talking about Andrew McCormick to rats?” Josh marvels.
“It’s a natural progression.” My words hang in the air, hovering like Marie watching Shannon and Declan on their first date.
Minus the wine glass and the dinging and the references to head lice.
My bitterness is leaking out of me like government servers in the hands of Anonymous. I can’t stop being hacked by the outside world. Little by little, my sense that I can fix anything is being whittled away by the mystifying reality that everything I’ve assumed about myself is a lie.
A lie revealed by a kiss.
Or three.
“I thought you liked Andrew,” Shannon says, concern creasing her brow. She glows now, like someone ground LED lights and injected them into her bloodstream. Bridal Botox. She is luminescent with love.
I, on the other hand, am bitter with betrayal. Yet how can I be betrayed by a man who has zero attachment or obligation to me?
I inhale slowly, buying time, as I look her over. She’s full figured, like me. Her wardrobe has changed along with her income. Everything she wears fits better. The shift is small but noticeable. It’s subtle and yet distinct. Somewhere, in the blink of an eye, Shannon has become more herself, a person who is still the old Shannon and yet...more. More present. More aware.
Just...more.
Her hands move with the fluid elegance of someone who gestures for emphasis and not out of nervousness. Her eyes gleam with the calculated awareness of someone taking in and observing rather than nervously cataloguing and adjusting. Her smile is more genuine, less anxious. She is a rough diamond, chiseled out of a mine, then cut to near perfection.
Love is the jeweler.
My bitterness fades, replaced by a feeling I can only describe as envy, but that’s not right. I don’t want to take away what Shannon has with Declan. And I don’t even want what she has, because wanting what another person has means settling for less than what is best for you. My own needs differ from Shannon’s. My life isn’t hers, so why would I want to co-opt the billionaire fiancé and the fabulous marketing job at a Fortune 500 company?
Wait a minute.
Let me pause there.
More money. Better clothes. Financial security. Luxury beyond your wildest dreams. A hot man in her bed—
Forget what I just said.
I want what Shannon has. Bad.
“So,” Carol says, sipping her coffee, “the bottom line is that Andrew McCormick sniped you from a guy who fondles dog butts for fun and you’re not happy?”
I frown. “When you put it that way...”
“Honey, when I put it any way, you’re not making sense. He has spent most of the past two years sending you mixed signals and you keep picking up what he’s putting down, but the two of you are maddening.”