30. Emotionally Waterboarded
EMOTIONALLY WATERBOARDED
Dawson
Ihad the urge to pace, but I kept myself rooted in the reception nook by the row of battered wooden chairs.
The waiting room of the admin building was lined with black-and-white photographs of mustached men and intimidating women glaring out from the Gilded Age.
Spring sun spilled through the stained-glass transom and painted the far wall in pale green.
I kept my eyes trained on the office door, listening to the muffled cadence of my mom’s voice and the higher, unfamiliar tone of a guest.
The grandfather clock in the corner—brought west by covered wagon, according to family legend—bellowed the half-hour.
I’d been waiting for fifteen minutes, which was about fourteen and a half minutes longer than my usual tolerance for this kind of anticipation.
I had a plan, or at least the skeleton of a plan: talk to my mom, get her read on the situation, then figure out how to fix what I’d broken with Sadie.
I was a man who liked preparation, who found comfort in routines and contingency plans, but lately every interaction felt like walking blindfolded through a field littered with bear traps.
There was a thud behind me, followed by the low growl of Dean clearing his throat.
The man could sneak up on a coyote, but when he wanted you to know he was around, he made sure you didn’t miss it.
He leaned in the doorway with his arms folded, posture telegraphing both relaxation and the faint threat of violence, which was pretty much his default setting.
“This is a surprise.” He eyed my boots. “Everything okay?”
“I’m here to talk to Mom,” I replied, which was already more than I’d planned to say.
Dean glanced back at the closed door, then at me. “She’s got an interview. New events coordinator to fill in for Lydia. If it goes well, I’ll be meeting with them next.” His head tilted to the side. “You look serious.”
Dean’s comment landed sharp as a thrown horseshoe.
He was the only man I knew who could make “You look serious” sound halfway like an accusation and three-quarters like he actually cared.
I shrugged, which was about as much as I ever gave, but Dean waited me out.
His stillness had a way of extracting answers, something about the way his jaw set.
“I am,” I said finally.
He grunted, as if this was the answer he’d been waiting for. “Sadie?” His tone was softer now.
I nodded, eyes fixed on the grid of ancient floor tiles. “Yeah.”
Before he could comment more, Mom’s office door swung open, and the volume inside the building doubled.
My mother’s voice had a way of filling every available cubic inch, something she claimed to have inherited from her own mother.
Apparently, my abuelita could call cows down from a hilltop and shame men into better behavior in the same breath.
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am,” said a female voice I didn’t recognize, high and bright with nerves. “I didn’t expect…well, any of this, really.”
Mom came through the door first, slight and graceful, wearing her favorite gray cashmere sweater and jeans. She was beaming, which meant something had gone very right, or very wrong in a way that allowed her to fix it.
She was followed by a woman I’d never seen before—she was petite but had an hourglass figure.
Her face was flushed, color rising high on her cheekbones.
She wore a ocean blue wrap dress that matched her eyes exactly, and her hair—long, honey-blonde—fell over her shoulders in a way that looked both accidental and deliberate.
The woman’s hand was locked in my mother’s, their knuckles pressed together with the fierce solidarity of survivors.
I could tell, even before my mother spoke in a tone she reserved for people fresh out of wreckage, that this was another one of Mom’s projects: a wounded bird in need of a soft nest and a hot meal.
She collected people the way some grandmothers collected porcelain figurines—the battered, the mismatched, the ones with stories written in cracks and chips—until the house felt packed to the gills with a revolving cast of beautiful strangers.
Some stuck around and were now employees, some moved on, but every single one left a piece of themselves behind, like stray buttons in a junk drawer.
This one was different, though. There was something about the way she held herself—shoulders squared, chin tilted in permanent defiance—that told me she wasn’t here because she needed saving.
She was here because she’d finally run out of other places to go.
The dress she wore was form-fitting and exuded confidence and grace, but her white-knuckle grip on the leather portfolio said otherwise.
She was jaw-dropping, yeah, but not in the fragile, glass-doll way I’d come to expect from Mom’s parade of strays.
There was a sturdiness to her, a physical presence that demanded you meet her gaze and keep it there.
A curtain of gold-blonde hair tumbled down her back, shimmering like a damn shampoo commercial.
Her face was all cheekbones and full lips, the kind of beauty that made you stare without meaning to.
Her eyes—startlingly blue, almost aquatic—shuttered from my mom to Dean to me and back again, doing a quick threat assessment.
As soon as our eyes met, the comparison hit me so fast it felt like a punch to the gut: she was the living, breathing, doppelganger of Cameron Diaz in her late ’90s prime, only a very petite, five foot two version. The Mask, but with the intensity of Gangs of New York.
I flicked a glance at Dean, whose first crush had been Cameron, he had posters of her on his walls, to see if the resemblance had registered for him.
Dean prided himself on never being rattled by anything, but his posture—normally all loose-jointed confidence—had gone stiff, and his jaw flexed like a guy chewing glass.
“Oh, perfect timing, boys. This is Felicity, she is interviewing for the events coordinator position.” Mom motioned to us. “Felicity, these are two of my sons, Dawson and Dean.”
Felicity’s gaze caught mine for a fraction of a second, her lips twitching like she was fighting the urge to laugh at the introduction. “Nice to meet you,” I said, offering her my hand, which she took with a quick, businesslike shake.
“You too,” she replied, and I could’ve sworn her eyes flicked up and down, measuring me up, not in a flirtatious way, just in a self-protective way, as if to calculate whether or not I was a threat. When her shoulders relaxed, I felt I’d passed the test.
But when her focus slid to Dean, the whole room seemed to shift. Her smile widened, teeth flashing, and a light flickered on behind her eyes, electric and unmistakable. “Oh,” she said, her voice suddenly softer and very familiar, “hello, Sunshine.”
Sunshine? I’d heard my brother called a lot of things, Sunshine was never one of them.
“You two know each other?” Mom asked, eyebrows up.
“Not formally,” Felicity vague-splained, performing a balancing act between truth and misdirection that only the truly interesting could manage.
I liked her immediately.
I shot a look at Dean. He held himself with the slack-jawed vacancy of a man who’d just been hit in the head with a two-by-four. His pupils were dilated to the point of cartoonishness.
That was new. I’d seen him cut deals with millionaires over the phone while simultaneously field-dressing a wounded steer.
I’d watched him drop a full-grown man with a single punch on the Fourth of July, then step over the body to refill an apple juice for a crying toddler without missing a beat.
The man ran at a constant simmer, never boiled over, and if he had feelings, he kept them locked up with the same combination that secured Mom’s stockpile of top-shelf tequila.
“Okay, well, Felicity, if you’d like to take a seat in the conference room?” Mom’s tone was the bright, competent chirp she used when she sensed the danger of an awkward silence. “Dean will be in with you shortly for round two of the interview.”
“Oh.” Felicity’s eyes widened, just a blink, but enough to suggest she hadn’t realized there was more to come. “Okay.”
Mom guided her down the hallway with the gentle authority of a hotel concierge, narrating the route as though the admin wing might at any moment rearrange itself behind their backs.
“Last door on the left, darling, watch the dip in the floor, it always catches people off guard.” Felicity followed, back straight and steps measured, her wrap dress swirling with each stride.
Dean stared after the closed conference room door like a retriever fixated on a duck in flight. I let the silence hang until it started to vibrate with potential energy.
“Real smooth, Romeo,” I teased, grinning.
He blinked twice, like an old television set powering back on after a blackout. “What?”
It was the first time I’d ever witnessed someone be lovestruck. I was glad it was my brother. He was full-blown twitterpated.
“Sorry, should I say, Sunshine?” I corrected.
He blinked once more, finally snapping out of the trance the woman had clearly put him under.
“Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to make up for your rude behavior.” Mom spoke beneath her breath as she joined us. “Now go hire her. I like her.”
“Rude?” Dean questioned.
“You blanked her,” I pointed out.
“I didn’t…I was just…” Dean fumbled over his words, shaking his head.
It was nice to see Dean off balance, on the back foot for once.
He was always in control. Never showing any emotion.
I was actually a little bummed that I was leaving and wouldn’t be able to watch this play out.
I glanced over at my mom, I could see that she was as amused by my brother’s reaction as I was.
Dean stood taller straightening his shoulders. “I’m not going to hire her just because you like her,” he stated firmly before heading down the hall.