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He wasn’t just in our department’s calendar—he was on the cover. Picture-perfect Hernandez, the last guy on earth I would ever think of as anything other than a health-food-eating, CrossFit-training ladies’ man,
You’ll fit right in. Oh, and if you can be a guy, be a guy. That’s definitely an advantage. I was not a guy.
I looked the sheet over. “So, to succeed in my new job, I basically need to be an asexual, androgynous, human robot that’s dead to all physical and emotional sensation.” She sat back in her chair and nodded, like, Yep. Simple. I nodded. “Just be a machine,” she said. “A machine that eats fire.”
“Choosing to love—despite all the ways that people let you down, and disappear, and break your heart. Knowing everything we know about how hard life is and choosing to love anyway … That’s not weakness. That’s courage.”
“Then it’s about accepting that the person who hurt you is flawed, like all people are, and letting that guide you to a better, more nuanced understanding of what happened. Flawed, I thought. Okay. Check. “And then there’s a third part,” she went on, “probably the hardest, that involves trying to look at the aftermath of what happened and find ways that you benefited, not just ways you were harmed.”
I would have given anything for the rookie to put his arms around me right then and wrap me up and let me stay like that till morning. I wanted him to. I wanted it so bad, my whole body ached for it to happen. So, of course, the only response I could muster was to take a step away.
It’s important to note that this was not a makeover moment like some teen movie where the homely girl becomes a swan. I wasn’t homely before this moment, and I wouldn’t be homely later, when I clamped myself back into my oxen-harness sports bra and Dickies utility pants. This wasn’t a better version of me I was seeing in the mirror—just a different one. It was like I was meeting an unknown part of myself for the first time.
It was too many opposites. I wanted to go just as badly as I wished I’d never offered. I wanted the rookie to hurry up and get here just as badly as I wanted him to never show up at all. I wanted to wear a little flouncy dress for once in my life, but at the exact same time, I wanted to put on my sports bra and a sweat suit—with hood.
He let out a good sigh. “It’s Owen. My first name is Owen.”
“He saw me holding a sexy drunk girl who was all legs and hair.” “I’m not drunk!” I blinked. “Or sexy!” Did he just call me sexy? “That’s my point. That girl out there was the opposite of you.” Guess not. “Thanks.”
It seemed impossibly rude that he hadn’t bothered to trim his nose hairs before delivering information like that—as if it were just some ordinary moment in some ordinary day.
What must it have felt like to give up her husband and child for a man she knew she would also have to lose?
I’m sorry, but I do struggle with this. Her position is not sympathetic imo.
Only a few things were clear: DeStasio had blamed me for everything he did—and everyone who mattered believed him. I was suspended from my job. And I was going to need a lawyer. My mother was dying. My dad was three thousand miles away. And Owen, my Owen, the one guy who was always on my side, was on a ventilator. In a medically induced coma. With a fifty-fifty shot at survival.
Oof.
“But you are,” she said, closing her eyes. “And it’s a girl. And you will love her more than you love yourself. And you’ll disappoint her, too—and never live up to the standards you set for yourself. But don’t worry. She’ll be okay.”
I guess it really proves the old saying: “The best revenge is marrying a kindhearted guy with a washboard stomach who brings you coffee in bed every morning.” Wait—is that the saying?
Maybe it’s “The best revenge is spending your life in a cottage by the ocean with a world-champion kisser who takes the phrase ‘with my body, I thee worship’ literally.” That might not be it either.
