Chapter Seven #2
Kerry looks at Van, her eyes running up and down her body the same way she’d evaluated Alice.
“And you’re Nolan’s…sister?” The slight pause before sister makes Alice’s hackles rise.
Kerry didn’t say it in an affirming way, like she was checking in about Van’s pronouns.
No, she meant it as an insult, like Van’s handsomeness is a bad thing, that her masculinity is something to be judged instead of drooled over.
Alice opens her mouth, unsure what she’s going to say but positive it won’t be nice, but Van talks first. “Listen, Cherry.”
“Kerry,” Kerry corrects. She’s still looking at Van in that way that straight girls sometimes do when they see a butch—critical and low-key homophobic even while they pretend to be friendly.
Alice feels herself straightening up and moving between them in a vain attempt to shield Van’s tall, broad body with her own.
Even butch superheroes deserve protection.
Van’s voice is harder now, even as her hand comes up to Alice’s elbow and closes over it with exquisite tenderness. “Can you show us to his office, please, Cherry? We don’t have a lot of time.”
“Of course,” Cherry Kerry says, clearly deciding against pushing it in front of Nolan’s mom and his girlfriend, who is either very magnanimous or unbelievably oblivious. She pulls a key out of a drawer and starts to walk down the hallway. “Follow me.”
They all do, and Cherry unlocks an office at the end of the long corridor.
She opens the door and leads them inside, and Alice almost trips over her feet.
One wall is entirely windows, and Alice has never seen Portland from this high up before.
It’s beautiful, even in the last dregs of winter daylight.
The rain is more of a heavy mist right now, so it feels like she’s standing inside of a cloud.
The city looks gray and cold in the kind of way that makes Alice want to curl up in the corner with a mug of tea and a romance novel, Frank on her lap and Van next to her, steady and solid and warm.
“Thanks, Cherry,” Van says, and Alice chokes at her dedication to the bit. “We’ve got it from here.”
Cherry looks pained, but she nods and backs out of the office. “Let me know if you need anything,” she says, but her eyes linger on Alice before she closes the door after herself.
Babs and Aunt Sheila are already poking around, touching everything on Nolan’s bookshelves—mostly technical manuals and unlabeled three-ring binders—and leaving fingerprints on his massive glass desk.
Alice steps farther into the room, taking it all in and pretending she’s seen his belongings before, like she’s not desperately searching the office for clues that will help her pull off this ridiculous charade.
But she’s pretty sure, as she swivels her head around, that she’s shit out of luck.
It’s a minimalist office, all glass and steel.
It’s decidedly impersonal—the only thing Alice gets from it is that Nolan is rich and wants people to know it.
He doesn’t have any photographs or notes from satisfied clients, and all of the clothes and knickknacks scattered around are pretty generic: a mug from the company, a Portland Timbers bobblehead, a black raincoat hung up on a hook on the back of the door.
Alice walks over to a wall with two framed diplomas, glancing up at them out of the corner of her eye. The smaller one is from the University of Southern California, awarding a bachelor of science to Nolan H. Altman in the area of finance.
Alice files that away in her very meager mental folder called Nolan Facts. Nolan went to USC. Nolan’s middle name starts with an H. So does Alice’s; two weeks ago she’d have thought that made them soulmates.
The bigger diploma is from USC too, this one commemorating him for his master’s in business administration.
That’s an MBA, right? Okay. Two different finance degrees from California. No wonder he has a rich-person office and a rich-person desk and a never-ending series of rich-person suits.
No wonder he fucked Cherry.
No wonder his dad wants Marie to major in business too.
No wonder Van doesn’t.
“Alice,” Babs says, holding up a mug from next to his enormous Mac desktop. “This reminds me. Have you been in touch with any of his brothers?”
Alice blinks. Brothers? What the hell! How many fucking children does this family have? What the actual shit is going on right now?
“B-brothers?” she stutters.
The mug says what looks like Ex in a weird font, and has a white cross inside a blue shield.
It’s absolutely incoherent to Alice. Ex what?
Ex-brothers? Alice feels like reality is tilting out from underneath her, her mind spinning like a hamster trying to outrun a predator using only its squeaky, utterly useless wheel.
What the hell is an ex-brother in a family of only sisters?
“She means his fraternity brothers,” Van says into the awkward silence. She gestures at the mug. “From Sigma Chi.”
“Oh,” Alice says, forcing out an extremely unconvincing fake laugh, her brain plopping sideways off the hamster wheel. “Right. Of course. Sorry, brain fart. Yes. His brothers. From the, uh, fraternity. Of brothers.”
Alice doesn’t know shit about fraternities except what she’s seen in movies.
Everything is always exaggerated, of course, but it’s never seemed like those dudes are, like, super great.
She files the words fraternity, sigma, and chi away in her brain, noticing the way they slide without her permission from Nolan Facts into a subfolder simply labeled Unfortunate.
“No, I, um, I haven’t been in touch with them.” Definitely not a lie.
“Okay,” Babs says, placing the mug down reverently. “I’ll see if I can reach Iron Allan.”
Alice decides not to worry about what in the world an Iron Allan is.
The enormous windows start to feel threatening, like Alice is about to tip out of the building and careen down fourteen stories to splat on the cement below.
“I’m going to, um, check on something with Cherry,” she says, backpedaling quickly out of what has become a very claustrophobic room. “Be, uh. Be right back.”
Alice tries not to think about how every new fact she learns about Nolan makes her like him less and less, how foolish she feels for spending 751 days pining over someone who probably wouldn’t have ever given her the time of day, and who she might have hated even if he had.
She’s feeling more and more idiotic for attaching herself to him, even by evasion and omission.
What do they think of her, these strong, badass Altman women, for hitching her wagon to a guy like him?
What will they think of her—how will their faces fall, their arms cross over their chests, their jaws hang open—when they learn it was all a lie?
She quickly walks down the hallway, breathing fast, but in her panic she forgets that the only way out of this suite is right past Cherry.
“Hey, Alice,” Cherry says, stopping Alice from her attempt to blow past the front desk. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure,” Alice says, not bothering to hide her grimace. What today definitely needs is a one-on-one conversation with the tall, flawless goddess who very recently fucked her fake-boyfriend, and is maybe his actual girlfriend.
“Listen,” Cherry says, tucking a strand of blond hair back. “I, um, I didn’t know he had a girlfriend.”
She doesn’t say out loud she slept with him, probably in case Alice really is the most oblivious person in the universe and hasn’t figured it out yet.
But they both know what Cherry means—she didn’t know he had a girlfriend when she hooked up with him—and she looks so horribly guilty and torn up about it that Alice sighs.
None of this is Cherry’s fault. Not her perfect hair or her skill at being femme or the fact that Alice’s enormous lie of omission is making Cherry feel like shit.
“It’s okay,” Alice says softly. “I don’t—I’m sure it was before anything, um, happened between us. ”
Because, of course, everything that has ever happened in human history happened before her and Nolan, seeing as there is no her and Nolan.
Cherry opens her mouth like she’s going to protest, but Alice shakes her head. “Seriously. Don’t worry about it, okay? I’m not…it’s not a problem, Cherry.”
“O…kay,” Cherry says. “And it’s Ker—”
“Alice.” Van’s voice comes through the hallway, sharp and clear, and Alice both hates and loves the way everything in her chest suddenly loosens, letting her fully exhale for the first time in what feels like half an hour. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Alice says, turning quickly. “I’m good.”
Van is glaring at Cherry now, who mutters something about going to the bathroom and positively scurries away, her towering heels clicking hurriedly on the floor as she flees Van’s scrutiny.
“I’m sorry,” Van says, her eyes softening as soon as they land back on Alice. “You shouldn’t have had to—Nolan shouldn’t have…”
“Hey.” Alice holds up a hand, surprised by how close together they’re standing. She could so easily lay her hand on Van’s chest. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not.” It comes out of Van with more force than Alice expected. Alice’s eyes drop to Van’s hands, still opening and closing.
Van takes a step to the side and sinks down, half sitting on the corner of Cherry’s desk, gripping the edges of the wood with her long, strong fingers.
“It is, though.” Alice moves even closer, letting herself talk softly, at eye level with Van for the very first time. “Like, I get it. She’s…” She sighs. “I mean, you saw her. She’s hot. There’s not…I don’t think there’s a single person in the world who would turn her down for me.”
It’s quiet for a long moment, and Alice immediately regrets her words.
Would Nolan’s real girlfriend, someone serious enough to be hanging out with his mom while he’s in a coma, really be cool with him fucking Cherry on the side?
Likely not, but Alice simply can’t muster the effort to pretend to be mad right now.
Cherry and Nolan haven’t done anything wrong.
The only liar here is Alice H. Rue, and all said liar wants to do right now is curl up on Van’s strong chest and fall asleep to the comforting thump of her heartbeat.
Something in Van’s perfect face settles, like she’s made a decision. “Yes,” she says softly. “There is.”
After a few beats of Alice trying not to fling herself at Van, swallowing down everything she shouldn’t be feeling and definitely shouldn’t be saying, Van moves off Cherry’s desk.
She drops heavily into a chair tucked over to the side for waiting clients, and Alice sinks into the one next to her.
Babs and Aunt Sheila must be checking Nolan’s desk for secret compartments or something, with how long they’re taking in a room that clearly has nothing personal in it.
Van looks over at Alice. It feels a little like she’s trying to distract Alice from what she’s just admitted when she says, “Do you like working here?”
Alice takes the bait, silently agreeing to the vibe change. “The night shift was awful. I hated that. So today, being on the day shift—that was much better,” she says, shrugging. “But it’s still…you know. Not thrilling or anything.”
Van nods. “If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?”
“Like, if I could go back in time and change my whole life, or starting from right now, with who I am?” Alice is almost positive you can’t become a whale scientist with no degree, a C+ in ninth-grade biology, and never having actually been on a boat.
“Starting from now.”
Alice considers for a moment. It’s been a while since she’s thought about anything more than making it through to her next paycheck.
“I used to work at this pediatric dentist’s office, before they closed the practice,” she says slowly.
“I really liked that. There was always something different to do: filing, scheduling, inventory, cleaning, lots of kids to talk to. I mean, most of them were miserable, because who likes the dentist.” Van laughs.
“But, yeah, that was the best job I’ve ever had.
I’d love to do something like that again.
Somewhere busy, with people, where I feel like my contributions matter. ”
Van hums a little, like what Alice said is important enough for Van to let it sink in. Like Alice said something meaningful, not some babble about a job she hasn’t had in years.
“Do you like your job?” Alice asks.
Van smiles, and Jesus fuck, she’s so pretty. “Yeah,” she says softly, and Alice wants to crawl into her lap. “Honestly, I only got into the field because it was respectable, you know, one of the only things I thought my parents would approve of and I wouldn’t hate, but it turns out I love it.”
Alice can picture it perfectly. Van’s strong hands, her calm voice, her steady presence helping people work back from knee surgery or broken hips or stiff necks.
“Good,” Alice says, looking deeply into her eyes for way longer than she should. “I want you to be happy.”
“You too,” Van says, and it looks like she means it.