Chapter 10 Jasper
Jasper
"I do not hate my job!"
"You're positive? Because this whole time you've been talking, you made it sound like a day at the gallows."
That was inaccurate. It simply was not accurate.
"I always thought I'd get Timbrooks into the gig—whether that was a cabinet post or maybe a vice presidential pick—and then I'd peel off for something else. Something higher profile, you know, something that felt less like duct tape and bubblegum to keep the train rolling along."
"But that didn't happen. The gig didn't come along," Linden said.
I shook my head. "I figured it would after this election." Then, "I do not hate my job," I repeated.
"Uh-huh," Linden muttered as he plucked a small, leatherbound notebook from his back pocket.
He flipped through the pages while I stared at him, waiting for more than "Uh-huh."
When it didn't come, I presented my case. "I had a sweet setup with the Timbrooks campaign. I had the last word on—on everything. The senator offloaded the majority of his priorities and projects to me. How many people can say they have the ear of a sitting senator?"
"Not many," he mused, still busy with that notebook.
"Exactly. How many people know what really goes down behind closed doors at the Capitol?"
"Just a select few."
"I was the person they called to make things happen."
"I bet you were damn good at it too." He shoved a pencil behind his ear and gazed up at the tree. "Being good at something doesn't make it good for you."
"And what do you know about what's good for me?" I exploded.
"Only what you've told me, Jas." He glanced at me then, his cool stare skating over every furious inch of me.
"Are you upset about this because I'm wrong and that wounds your pride worse than getting fired on TV—don't get me started on that, by the way—or are you upset because it's possible I'm right? "
I stared down at my shoes. I didn't want to talk about myself anymore.
The whole mess of it was depressing. Fired, divorced, displaced, and without the use of a toaster oven.
I could handle those things on their own but the snowball of it made me want to crawl into a corner.
A small, narrow place to slide down the wall and press my forehead to my knees where I could disappear for a moment.
Where I could be very, very quiet and hear myself think without all the noise of my family, my work, this world for one minute.
Sometimes it seemed like I could hear those thoughts far off in the distance but they never made sense.
They couldn't make sense, not when they only came to me as pings in my heart, twists in my belly that seemed to say, It's not supposed to be like this.
I'd always drowned them in antacids and went on with my day.
But now, with Linden watching me and only the sound of the woods around us, I couldn't drown any of it.
"Let me just say this." He stepped closer, swung his arm around my shoulder. "People who love their jobs don't sabotage themselves in such irreversibly brutal ways."
"But the mic wasn't supposed to be—"
"Is that really the nail you want to hang this on?
" He dragged a hand down my back and brought me in for a loose hug.
"You don't have to answer that but what they did to you was bullshit.
There's a right way to let people go, especially people who've been around from the start, and that wasn't it. I'm sorry you went through that."
I turned my face to his bicep and closed my eyes for a moment because I was not crying again. It was one thing to cry over the oven, the one that made the most perfect, even toast, but it was another to cry over termination by tweet.
It was then, with Linden all around me and that long overdue apology releasing some of the tension in my shoulders, it struck me that he was right.
Holy shit. I hated my job.
I hated my job.
I hated my job.
I turned that sudden, choking truth over and over in my head as Linden stroked my back.
All my exasperations and frustrations, the disappointments over never being promoted to chief of staff and always lingering on the pick-me fringes as special advisor—I'd swallowed all of it down, gulp after gulp, year after year, and now I couldn't swallow any more. Not another bit.
Except it was the only job I'd ever had and it was the primary source of my identity. "I don't know how to do anything else," I whispered.
"That's not true," he said, his lips pressed against my hair. "Not true at all."
"I don't know what to do if I'm not working on a campaign."
"It will come to you."
"I don't know who I am without a candidate to manage," I said.
"You will figure it out."
I tipped my head back, away from Linden's glorious warmth.
"Where is this optimism coming from? Why aren't you telling me that I wasted almost half of my life on a job I hated and I needed you, the burly neighbor man, to explain it to me like you explained bats and water heaters and sticky doors and everything else? "
"Because years are not wasted. You were alive. You lived those years. You experienced more than a job in that time."
"But—"
"No," he interrupted with a firm squeeze to my ass. We were doing that now. Ass squeezing. "Come on. Over here. Look at this old oak tree."
"The one leaning against that other tree? Isn't it going to fall over? Shouldn't you do something about that?"
"That tree has been here for three hundred years, give or take a few. It was here before most of the others in this woodland too. The settlers chopped down trees like they were getting high on sap. Deforested most of the South Shore and Cape, but that's not the point."
"Am I getting some Lord of the Rings wisdom here? Is that what this speech is about?"
"Be quiet and let me teach you something.
" Another ass squeeze since we were very much doing this now, and doing a substantial amount of it.
"That tree grew up with the first colonies.
It witnessed wars. It gave life to generations of other oaks in this wood and beyond.
" He pointed out trees at various stages of growth around us.
"And for the past several years, it's been dying. "
"Oh my god, are you comparing my career to this tree?"
"No but it's so fun to see you mad. Real mad, not that fake, forced shit where you're all eyebrows and painful smiles.
" He pointed to the tree in question, which seemed to be standing only because the branches of another tree gave it a sturdy spot to lean.
"For years, that oak has provided a home to nesting robins and chickadees in a hollowed-out knot in the upper trunk.
It's hosted lichen, moss, and two species of fungi that live only on decaying trees.
Would you say this tree has wasted those years? "
"Obviously not but the next step in my career cannot be collapsing onto the forest floor and turning into mulch. I need something in upper management."
"You're going to figure it out, Jas. There's no penalty for changing directions. You're free to start over at any time."
"Do you have any idea how long it takes to start over? I've spent half my life on this. I can't just—I don't know, how do people find careers? I've been doing this since I was seventeen. This is who I am. This is my plan."
"You know how people do it? They decide to fuck the plan.
Seriously. Fuck the plan. Walk in the woods.
Reject anyone's definition of success. Abandon expectations.
Listen to your heartbeat. Take no one's shit.
" He brought his hand to my neck, sliding it around to cup my nape. "And steal every kiss you can."
He leaned in, captured my lips, and dropped his other hand to my hip.
My spine connected with the bark of a tree as I knotted my hands in his shirt, desperate to steady myself.
He pushed his thigh between my legs and there was no denying the solid ridge of him behind his zipper. There was no way to miss that.
He groaned against my lips as he pressed into me. "Jasper."
The thing about these leggings was they hid nothing. Absolutely nothing. When he wedged himself up against me, that erection was right there. And we were in the middle of a forest, in the middle of the day, in the middle of my total life collapse.
And I arched against him because I didn't want to stop.
"Say something," he ordered as he moved his lips down my jaw, my neck.
That beard of his. My god. I didn't know how it could be soft and rough at the same time. Which was why I asked, "Do you use beard oil?"
He let out a quiet chuckle on my shoulder. "Jesus Christ, Jasper."
"I'm just wondering," I said as I looped my arms around his neck.
"You're wondering about beard oil," he murmured. "I must be doing this wrong if you can think about anything."
Linden hooked my leg around his waist and raked his hand up from my knee to my backside.
It was profane, really, the way he touched me.
Like he was making it clear how he'd touch me if we weren't out in the open where anyone could see us.
Like he wanted to be extremely profane with me and he didn't mind me knowing that.
"You do, right? You have a whole beard oil system," I said.
He glanced down at our bodies, his brows pinched. He tipped his chin toward the place where the ridge in his jeans notched against my barely covered center. "If I ever come across this husband of yours, I'm going to have some words with him."
"Could you not talk about my ex while you're"—I cleared my throat—"you know, doing that?"
"I wasn't sure you'd noticed. With your concern about beard oil and all." He rubbed his hand along the small of my back, then under my shirt and beneath the waistband of my leggings. He didn't delve any deeper. "Let's not talk about your ex at all, okay?"
I bobbed my head in agreement. "That would be—"