Chapter 7 #2
“He asked me a lot of questions,” I said.
That was different from my meeting at the warehouse store, where the guy had only complained about his former employee, and from the one at the deli where the woman had eaten her lunch and ignored me.
“I think I answered them pretty well. He wanted to see examples of how I dress, so I showed him stuff from our channel and he was also interested in what I did for other people. He nodded a lot, which I think was good?”
“It sounds very promising. I bet you’ll get it!” Heidi said.
I compared it again to my other interview where I’d heard about the former employee getting kidnapped. That had reminded me of when I’d first met Damian, because both of them had made it clear that sex would be part of the job.
“It’s so exciting that you’ll be a stylist. What would you do for me?” Heidi asked. “Would you pick new clothes or change my hair?”
“I think that you already look great,” I said. “You’ll have to get some new stuff to fit over the baby and I could help with that. Or if you wanted to adjust some of your current clothes, like letting out the waist or adding panels, I could do that, too.”
“Thank you!” she said, smiling.
“How did you learn how to sew so well?” Anara asked me.
“I learned from my grandmother and aunt, because they used to make almost everything they wore. Even jeans. My grandma made her satin wedding dress, with boning.” They didn’t know how impressive that was, because they didn’t have any reaction besides nodding.
“I’m nothing compared to her,” I continued.
“They had a stash of fabric, but I liked to thrift and remake.” Although…
Beau Gowan hadn’t been too impressed by my dress today, which really didn’t look like a tablecloth anymore.
He had liked the idea that I had connections to the Woodsmen wives and girlfriends, but I did feel slightly guilty about using them.
I hadn’t felt any guilt about getting as much as I could from Damian, but things had changed a lot. Now, I didn’t like to take the debit card that was attached to Callum’s account and I also didn’t like it when he said to use cash, and left a pile for me.
We talked more about clothes, mostly what Heidi would wear to work when she grew out of her current wardrobe, until the game started.
Then we were all about the action on the field.
It wasn’t going very well, unfortunately, because the quarterback was really struggling.
He was a guy just out of college who was hoping to be the first-choice backup to Everett Ford.
The defense was also struggling and they let three touchdowns get past them in the first half.
George, Heidi’s husband, kicked a massive field goal, though, so she was thrilled and Anara swore that Demitrious had never played so well.
I thought that things would have gone more smoothly for the QB if he’d had better protection, which Callum could have provided.
He just didn’t get in enough to show that—all in all, it was a disappointing game in terms of the score and in terms of his minutes.
But he would be home tonight and that was wonderful.
Hours later, I went to the little airport to pick him up, following along as the Woodsmen fan experts tracked the plane’s route, reported possible turbulence and headwinds, and then finally announced that they were in their final approach.
I watched the lights in the sky and, since there weren’t any other flights coming in, I knew that he was close.
“Hi,” I said happily as Callum finally got into the car.
“Hi,” he sighed. “I’m glad to be back.”
“Was it a hard trip?”
It had been long and then disappointing for him, because he disagreed with my view that he’d played well.
“There aren’t a lot of games in the preseason for me to show what I can do.
I feel like I missed an opportunity,” he explained.
There were some technical things he could point to but mostly, he was just unhappy in general.
“You’ll do better in the next one,” I consoled.
“That will be the last preseason game and I won’t get in during the regular season,” he said.
He knew better than I did, so I didn’t argue that point although I strongly believed that he should have played a whole lot. Who was to say that the guys from the prior season were better than Callum? I didn’t think so at all.
“Buzz signaled you out on the pregame radio broadcast,” I told him. “He said he’d talked to you after practice last week and that he thought you were a cool cat and a scream.”
“I didn’t scream,” he told me, confused. “I don’t think I ever have.”
“It means he thought you were funny,” I explained. I’d looked it up.
“Huh. Yeah, he was laughing when I talked about how you and I had driven up to Michigan and how we were trying to sing together and harmonize. I told him that there was a video and he said he was going to watch it.” He leaned his head back.
“I could fall asleep right now. I want to sleep for a week.” But then he sat up straight.
“Rainey, I didn’t even ask you about the interview. How did it go?”
I told him all of the same things that I had already reported to Anara and Heidi, plus some additional details about the guy who’d asked me the questions.
“Beau Gowan dresses so well,” I mentioned.
“Victoria had told me that and also that he was good-looking, but I thought she would be biased. They weren’t ever a couple, although I think she really did like him.
But it was just sex, at least on his side. ”
“Good-looking,” he repeated. “Big guy?”
“No, not at all. He’s not much taller than I am.” I was a respectable height, five-eight, and now that I was free of Damian, I could wear the highest heels in existence.
“Huh,” he said again. “Do you think you’ll get the job?”
“I’m not sure. He was hard to read,” I answered. “I spent so much time learning Damian and how to handle him. I got good at his friends, too, but this Gowan guy was pretty closed off.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, his expressions—”
“No, I mean what you said about handling Damian and his friends,” Callum explained. “Why’d you have to do that?”
I paused. “Don’t you sometimes manage the guys you work with, to keep them under control? I’ve heard you tell them to shut up or to come closer and repeat themselves, and then they leave you alone. Are they still teasing you about your phone?”
He didn’t answer. In fact, he didn’t say anything else for the rest of our short ride home or on the slow walk from the parking lot to our unit. He did seem so tired. I offered him the dip as a snack, because there was a lot left over, but he shook his head.
“No thanks.” He had picked up something from the stack of stuff that I’d carried in after the interview, lots of papers from his car and mail from the box here that filled up with junk.
But what he held was my new résumé, an extra copy I had brought to my interview. “Rainey Stormer,” he read aloud. “Stormer.”
“I think I may have told you that my last name was Desjardins.”
“You did say that,” he agreed.
I looked at him closely, trying to read him now, too. “That was what I was using at the time. Stormer is what I am, legally. But it’s so dumb. Rainey Stormer? Please. It’s like a kid made it up.”
“A while ago, I caught a glimpse of your name on your driver’s license so I knew that ‘Desjardins’ wasn’t real.” He pointed to the résumé. “Is the rest of this information correct?”
“Yes.” Mostly. I had fudged about my time with Damian, but a prospective boss didn’t need to know about my real experience there. Neither did Callum.
“Because it says that you graduated from high school five years ago. That would make you about twenty-three, which isn’t what you told me when I asked how old you were.”
“I wanted us to be the same age,” I said. It had meant that we were similar and had a link. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
He nodded and put down the résumé. “I’m really tired. Good night.” He went into his bedroom and shut the door and I knew that things had just gone bad. I would have known how to fix it with Damian, the tricks I would have tried that might have succeeded. They had started and ended with his penis.
I didn’t know any tricks that would work with Callum.
This problem had come up so fast—you often didn’t get any warning of when the worst was about to happen.
You might be putting on makeup and doing your hair, and then you’d get a slap across the face.
I put my hand on my cheek, feeling like that had really happened.
Then I went to bed, too, but I was up early the next morning.
“Hi,” I told him when he came out of his bedroom. He had slept in, which was good for him. “I was waiting to make you breakfast.”
“That’s ok. I have to get over to the stadium and I can eat there. You need the car?”
I didn’t, not really, but I nodded. It meant that I’d have to drive him, so we’d be riding together and it was hard to escape from a moving vehicle. I knew that from experience.
But I only wanted to talk to him, not hurt him. “I’m sorry,” I said as we left the condo. “I had forgotten that I’d told you those things about my name and my age. I would have corrected it, if I thought it was important.”
“Your name is important and so is how old you are. Those are basic facts about your identity.”
In the past, I’d always adapted facts to make them what I needed at the time. “I’m sorry,” I repeated.
“You don’t tell me very much,” he answered.
“I know that you lived with your grandma and your aunt because something happened to your parents, but I don’t know what it was.
You got bitten by a dog but you won’t say how it happened.
You went to California and got robbed, but I don’t know what else happened there.
How did you end up with that asshole Damian?
And now I know that you were using an alias. That’s about it.”