“Hardly. You're drunk,” he pointed out. “I shouldn't even have let it get this far. I'm just lucky you didn't just throw up on me.”
I wasn't feeling that great, actually. “Come back. There's still time.”
He laughed a bit awkwardly. “It's okay, Min. Really. No harm done.” He touched my cheek and watched me for a few seconds, and then went off to the bathroom.
Once I heard the water running, I started the long process of trying to convince myself to do up my bra and dress and put my stockings back on. By the time Henry was done, I was dressed and I’d set myself up on the dining table to have another go at a test piece for the project. Henry couldn’t see, of course, so I had the screen angled away from him and had to sit so he couldn’t see what I was doing on the tablet.
“Work?” he asked as he wandered into the living room, buffing his wet hair with a towel.
I nodded. “You can’t see, though.”
He made a short, non-committal noise to acknowledge what I’d said, and then went to throw out the evil flowers and put the roses in their vase. My brain still a bit foggy, I watched him over the kitchen counter as he unceremoniously dumped their corpses in the kitchen bin. Bree would have been mortified. She’d probably have wanted to give them some sort of funeral; I chuckled at the thought.
After Henry had spread the roses out nicely and turned the vase to hide a big brown patch in the foliage on one side, he admired his work for a second and then started opening the plastic bags from the takeaway he’d bought. “Feeling sober enough to eat?”
I shrugged, and he put some salad on a plate for me anyway and then walked past me into the living room. As he sat down on the couch, he picked up the Playstation controller. “I’m going to beat all your high scores while you do that,” he informed me with a grin.
I scoffed. “In your dreams,” I told him, looking back at my tablet as he settled on the couch and put his legs up on the coffee table.
My canvas stayed blank for a couple of minutes. The last few times I’d painted, Bree had been hanging over me practically salivating all over my tablet. I had a lot more elbow room today. It was also kind of quiet, even with Henry here.
Henry was already scrolling through menus and changing settings on in the game, absently humming the title song that was playing in the background. Every now and then he’d pause the game, lean over his plate to eat some of his salad, and then keep going. I’d seen him do it a hundred times over the last three or four years, and it was as if today had never even happened. As if we hadn’t just had really disastrous sex that was so bad he needed to go and jerk off in the shower, and as if I’d never told him about Friday night.
Henry noticed me watching him, and guessed what it was about. “Min, it’s fine. These things happen.” He smiled.
I managed to smile back, but I wasn’t feeling it. Looking back at my tablet, I scribbled a few lines. I was glad Henry was still here with me, but it shouldn't have been so 'fine'.
SIXTEEN
There was no such thing as too hung-over to sneak out of bed at the crack of dawn to avoid an awkward morning after with Henry. I slipped out from under the doona, had the world's quietest shower and then did a spectacular job of getting dressed in the dark all the way up until I stubbed my toe on the foot of the bed. Then I stood in place, clutching my crunched toe and howling silently until I'd recovered enough to hobble out the door. As if my headache wasn't bad enough.
I didn't have any good painkillers left, either, so I ended up ducking into the chemist before work to grab a couple of bottles.
While I was waiting for the pharmacist to run my name on the computer system, I checked my phone. Henry set his alarm for 6:45, and since it was nearly seven he'd probably be getting dressed right now. He wouldn't be too bothered that I'd left, he'd probably assume I had an early meeting I'd forgotten to mention or that I had work I needed to—shit. Getting dressed? His spare suit was in my wardrobe, probably hanging right over the guy clothes I was trying to hide from him.
Shit, shit... Maybe it was too dark to see anything? I'd tried to push the clothes underneath my winter stuff, so maybe they wouldn't show anyway and I was just—
“Min Lee?” the pharmacist addressed me, reminding me I was in the middle of something. I probably looked completely out of it. “Sign here.” He pointed to my account and then handed me my painkillers while I scribbled on it. “Hope you're feeling better,” he said as I left. I stared at him for a moment, and then walked out of the shop. Did I look that bad, or was he just being polite?
On the way across the road to Frost and then whole trip upstairs and into Oslo, I worried about those clothes. Then, when I was finally convinced he probably wouldn't have noticed them, I remembered the terrible, awkward, awful sex we'd had yesterday evening and cringed.
Dr. Henry would probably put two and two together at some point, I just knew it. He wouldn't confront me, either. That wasn't his style. He wasn't Bree, and he wasn't Sarah, he'd wait for me to bring it up with him. I had an alarming thought: what if he'd already figured it out and he'd known all along?
As I hooked up my tablet to my work computer, I thought about that. I wouldn't put already knowing past him, actually. I wondered if maybe that's why he'd been so calm yesterday? Even Sarah had guessed something was up, and not only wasn't she a psychologist, but she wasn't my boyfriend.
Speaking of the devil, the door opened. It was Sarah, of course, and she dumped her handbag and gave me a very smug look. She had her hair down again and was wearing a lot more clothes than she had been on Friday night. She also looked like she'd had a much more restful weekend than I had had.
“I knew it!” she announced. Then, sitting on her office chair rolling it across the carpet to mine, she placed a Red Bull innocently in front of my keyboard. “I knew you were hiding something!”
I gave her a dirty look as I was waiting for Photoshop to open. “If you think buying me that makes up for anything, you're mistaken.”
She snorted, opening her own Red Bull and completely ignoring the fact I was glaring at her. “You’re right, only an evil bitch would point out when her friend’s settling for a guy she’s not into.”
I had to look over her shoulder towards the door to make sure there was definitely no one anywhere. “You've got it the wrong way around. He's settling for me,” I said quietly when I was sure we were alone. Then I cringed again as I opened my landscape file, remembering yesterday's failed sex.
Sarah gave me a really tired look. “Yeah, yeah, woe is you. So, anyway, do you think he knows about you?”
“Probably, given that I told him.”
She leant forward. “You told him?”
I nodded. “Yesterday. About Gemma.” I started working on the picture. “Not about the other stuff.”
Sarah gave me the once-over. “Hence the I-haven't-slept look you're rocking this morning,” she said. “Was it a big fight?” She tapped a fingernail against my Red Bull. “Should I go buy some vodka for this?”
I shook my head and I was about to reply when my phone buzzed. I checked it; Henry had sent me a picture message. It was a photo of his computer screen with 384 unread emails and the annotation, “Some idiot approved four weeks of annual leave for his assistant manager. Serves him right.”
I showed it to Sarah and she squinted at the screen. “That's not something you say to someone you're not talking to.” For a second, she gave me a hard stare. “Are you messing with me? Did you not tell him after all?”
“No, I did, and he's actually fine with it,” I told her while I was figuring out how to reply. Since a couple of my reference pictures for the water were beach-related, I took a photo of one of them and sent him the message back, “I'm painting your assistant manager laughing at you from a beach right now.”
Sarah watched me put my phone away. “Well, if he starts introducing you to random girls and making comments about how the bed's so big it can fit more than two people in it...” I groaned at her and she
put her hands up in a yield motion. “I'm just suggesting it's one possibility.”
Henry had joked about threesomes before, but I really doubted that had anything to do with why he said everything was fine. I didn't know, though, and worrying about it was exhausting. “Maybe,” I said a bit dismissively.
Sarah probably wanted to push the point, but she didn't. She just watched me paint for a minute or two while she was thinking.
It seemed like a good moment to explain what I was up to. “Bree actually had a really good idea on Saturday,” I said. Sarah smirked at me when I said her name, but I ignored it. “Instead of spending a million hours looking for the perfect photo for the materials and the slides, I can just spend a few hours painting exactly what I want. That way I can get the dimensions and the colours on point, too, and if there's text I can make sure the composition of the photo doesn't look unbalanced by it.”
I zoomed out to show her the landscape; it was only half-finished but it was clear what I was aiming for.
She still looked a bit distracted. “I was wondering why you had your tablet here,” she said, “and I know we're at work and we've got this super urgent project and about two weeks left to get signed, but I'm really having trouble getting past everything that happened on the weekend and, well...” She gestured at my dress.
I sighed. “Can we play a game where we pretend Friday didn't happen and I'm just a normal, boring project manager?”
She laughed at how I put that. “If you knew how much I sucked at games, you wouldn't ask,” she told me, and then continued to stare intently at me in my dress while she drank. “You know how when I met Schoolgirl, she said, 'You look weird' about your work clothes?” I nodded. “Well, I don't know what she's on, because you look like your garden variety office chick to me. No one would ever guess you’d rather be a guy.”
“Good,” I said, reflecting on how much effort it took to achieve that each morning. The jury was still out on the 'rather be a guy' stuff, though. I knew how I'd rather look, but when it came to what I'd rather be? I had thought 'guy', but it seemed to depend on who I was with. On Friday, I had felt like one.
Something occurred to me, and I looked up from my painting. “You’re completely sure Gemma and Liz won’t say anything to anyone at Frost about Friday? Not just about me and Gemma, but about how I looked?”
She stopped drinking and nodded. “Uh, yeah,” she said. “You should hear some of the wild stuff we’ve done over the years. But you’re not going to, because...” She made a zipping motion across her lips.
She unzipped it after watching me thoughtfully for a few minutes, though. “I get your thing about that other painting now,” she said smugly. “If the photo doesn't look right, just paint what you want to see, yeah? Anyway.” She slapped her knees. “I did actually come in stupidly early for a reason. There's a truck load of analytics I'm supposed to have ready for my meeting with the other project team this morning which I haven't done. I'm going to try and get them together now and pretend I was a good little Frost marketer and did them all on the weekend when I was supposed to.”
She went back onto the main floor to use the networked computers to do that, leaving me alone with my tablet and not doing anything at all that resembled working on the painting. Sarah hadn't meant this painting, she'd meant the painting I'd done of myself. I couldn't focus, so I thought I'd just have another quick look at it.
I hadn't opened it for a while, so of course the first thing I noticed was that I'd fucked up the lighting on one of the legs of the table. I managed to resist the urge to fix it.
Looking at this painting now, I understood why Sarah had recognised me on Friday night. I did look like this when I was dressed up like a guy, minus the suave suit and funky hairdo. Even how I was holding myself. I looked so fucking cool in it, it was a huge compliment that someone thought I looked like this in real life. She couldn't really be lying about it to make me feel better, either, because then she wouldn't have recognised me. It made me smile. I felt a bit cool, for a second or two.
Then I looked down my front towards the tablet to keep painting, saw my breasts and remembered that I wasn't cool. Cool was the last thing I was. The guy-me in the painting probably looked so relaxed because he didn't have twelve feet of elastic bandages wrapped tightly around his ribs to achieve that perfectly flat chest.
Since I'd been meaning to and since I had a few minutes, I decided I'd Google the right way to wrap them so they weren't so uncomfortable. I hoped there was a right way; not that I hadn't managed heels eventually, but it would be great if I didn't have to suffer for months while I was getting used to having my chest bound, too.
I'd typed 'how do I use bandages to bind my breasts' into Google, expecting to be greeted with friendly diagrams and how-tos, but what I actually got were a whole series of dire warnings about health complications ranging from discomfort to broken ribs. A link down the bottom of one of the more militant sites—complete with alarming pictures of technicolour bruises and rants about 'internalised transphobia'—lead to an online store where I could purchase chest binders that were allegedly so comfortable I'd never even know I was wearing them.
“Sold,” I told my phone, and then went to buy a couple. The site itself was located in Taiwan and had some really serious Chinglish happening, so when it announced to me that 'with 2 binder bought you have receiving free gift packer for all', I assumed that was something to do with postage and handling so naturally I selected it. When I got to the checkout screen, though, I ended up paying for postage. I bought them anyway because I was curious about whether or not it was possible to actually be comfortable with flat breasts, and then put my phone away. I sat back over my tablet, wondering about that wording and imagining the package showing up in festive gift-wrapping with ribbons and bows. I chuckled at the thought.
I was midway through adding reflections to the water when my team started to trickle in.
Ian was first. “Oh, you're doing graphics?” he asked as soon as he saw my tablet. He wandered over to have a look, and then ended up standing and watching over my shoulder. “Wow,” he said after a minute or two. “I've heard people say you're good for graphics and layout, but that's pretty impressive.”
I smiled. John and Carlos weren't that far after him, and before long I had an audience of people behind me watching me paint.
“Is it distracting?” Ian asked. “Having us looking over your shoulder while you do it?”
I shook my head. If I wasn't distracted by Bree buzzing around me and leaning all over me, I wasn't going to be distracted by three men being silently impressed a polite distance behind my chair.
“Well,” Ian said after I'd told the three of them what I was planning to do, “if you're going to put that on a five by seven projector, it's going to look amazing,” he said. “I reckon do it.” There were murmurs of agreement from the other two.
“Now I just have to sell it to Jason,” I said, adding some of the finishing touches and then flipping the canvas horizontally to check it wasn't a horrible mess. It wasn't.
“Now might actually be a great time to do that,” Sarah's voice commented behind me. It was a bit of a surprise, I hadn't noticed her come back. She hadn't announced herself, either, which was a bit unlike her. “One of the investment teams got signed and he's still high on his prospective bonus from that.”
While I hustled the rest of the team back to their desks to work on researching some of the companies Vladivostok had suggested, I saved the image onto a USB and went looking for my boss.
I had thought I would at least need to explain to Jason why I'd decided to paint the images instead of using true photos, but he didn't seem to care. “Looks good,” he said, giving it all of a five-second glance in between hunting around for his celebratory cigars. “Make sure you choose a single theme or it's going to look pretty fragmented. Whatever you think is best.” With Jason, that was generally code for, 'I don't care now but later I will call you at 3 am and tell you to cha
nge everything'.
Still, it was heartening that he didn't hate the idea, and Bree was going to be totally rapt that her suggestion was popular. I texted her about it before lunch.
The reply was a bit strange. “haha thats great!!!!! :) :) :) ” it read. Nothing else. That wasn't very 'Bree', but I left it. Maybe she was in class and couldn't talk properly. She’d probably send another one later. I put my phone in my pocket so I’d feel it vibrate when she did.
Before I went to go grab something to eat, Ian asked me if I was feeling okay and since he was the third person to basically tell me I looked terrible, it was a cue for me to go and check out how bad I actually looked in the bathroom mirror.
Sarah was in the Women's doing her eyeliner when I walked in there. “Are you lost?” she asked me with a grin as I came and stood next to her at the basin.
I looked down at my dress and then at the symbol on the door, which was a figure in a dress. I then looked pointedly at Sarah's legs. She was wearing pants. “Apparently you're lost,” I told her, returning her grin and checking to make sure there was no one in the stalls before I leant up to the glass to examine the bags under my eyes.
Sarah kept going on her eyeliner. “Like I said before, you don't look that great,” she told me, and at my expression, she clarified, “I mean you look sick, not anything else. Although, I'm still totally tripping out over Friday. Talk about not judging a book by its Stepford Wives cover.” She blinked a few times and then examined her work. “Can I have your girly work clothes when you throw them out? Some of those dresses you have are great.”
“If you don't mind that they'll come down to your ankles.” I said, fixing my pearls so the catch was at the back of my neck again. “But I think I'll be wearing them for some time yet, so I hope you're patient.”
She made a face as she took out her mascara. “Yeah, while we wait for Frost to join us in the twenty-first century.”
Under My Skin Page 34