Fuck. I really didn’t want to go. There were just so many reasons why I didn’t. I opened Oslo—I had to use my key, which meant that everyone had taken my absence as a great reason to go home—trying to figure out how I could possibly get out of it.
As I sat down at my laptop again, stuck on that thought, I noticed a post-it on my screen. I plucked it off and held it steady to read. 'See you at 7ish. You promised!’ I sighed at it, and then scrunched it up and threw it in my bin.
I hadn't even been away from my laptop for long enough for it to go to sleep, so I just gazed at the lock screen. I should start doing some slides, I thought. Which meant picking a colour palette and a design, which meant researching the company we're pitching to, which meant I need to start sorting through those catalogues and then looking at the websites and materials from other companies they purchase prestige stock from...
I tried to focus on all the work I needed to do, but my brain kept cycling back to that whole thing with Gemma in the lift, and I kept looking down at my white blouse, seeing my breasts, and worrying about Sarah’s movie night. And the more I looked down, the more I just wanted to run home and take these stupid clothes off as fast as possible so I didn’t have to feel this way.
It was only after I'd been staring at an empty palette for ten minutes that I realised working tonight was a completely lost cause. Fuck it, I thought resolutely, I've had it with today. I'm going to go home, take this crap off and put on something huge and baggy.
I stood up, switched everything off and collected all the materials I'd need to work at home. I'd been opening the door as I fished around in my handbag for the key, when I looked up and saw Sean Frost. His fist was raised where the door had been, mid-knock. He knocked in the air anyway. “Perfect timing,” he said, and held out a USB towards me with a big smile.
Fuck... In the space of 15 minutes, I'd completely forgotten he was doing that for me. I'd nearly walked out on the co-CEO doing me a huge favour. God, I could only imagine how that would have looked if I’d disappeared, on top of the thing in the lift and how shaken he said I looked afterward. I accepted the USB but was still completely horrified with myself. I was losing the fucking plot. “Thank you.”
He looked surprised by my expression. “You're most welcome, but why the face?” he asked. “Didn't you think I would actually do it?”
I closed my jaw and shook my head as I tucked the USB into my handbag. “No, no, it's not that. I'm really sorry,” I told him. “I'm just—” I thought better of actually telling him anything; instead, I just forced a smile. “Thank you very much for this,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
He watched my whole struggle and jabbed his finger at me. It was more collegial than authoritative. “Burnout,” he said, “Google it. And after you've Googled it, both you and your workaholic boyfriend need to use your annual leave days, okay?” After I nodded reluctantly at him, he nodded once back, and then shifted his weight. “Now,” he said. “Because hypocrisy has always been a strong point of mine, I'm going to go downstairs and get a coffee to keep myself awake for the next eight hours.” He glanced at my handbag. “Would you like to keep me company in the lift again? I gather we’re not likely to have a repeat of earlier.”
I cringed. Well, I guessed nothing could be worse than what he'd seen between Gemma and I, could it? “Sure.”
There were no more embarrassing incidents on the way downstairs, though, unless you counted me being too intimidated by the fact he was the co-CEO and too horrified about how emotionally unstable he probably thought I was to make any useful conversation with him. He didn't seem to mind. In fact, he was happy to fill the space with easy, casual chatter.
Before we parted ways in the foyer, he smiled at me. “Thanks for the company,” he said. “And I’m glad you’re going home earlier than you expected. Don’t work too hard, no matter what my sister says. It's not worth it.”
I patted my handbag where I'd put the USB. “Thank you for doing this for me. As I said, I appreciate it.”
He nodded, and was about to say goodbye, I thought, when something caught his eye. He looked past me, his brow dipping momentarily. “Another friend of yours?”
I didn’t like the sound of that. It could only be one person. Oh, god, no. No… I turned to face the rotating doors, and saw a familiar mop of blonde curls and a big, open smile. “Min!” Bree called out, waving at me and rushing towards us.
She must have gone back to my place before coming to wait for me, because she was holding a Tupperware container and not wearing a school uniform for once. Instead, she was wearing a light blue cotton dress which I was delighted to see actually covered everything. At least, I was delighted until she came rushing over to us and with every bounce I realised how thin the fabric was. God, was she even wearing a bra with it? She looked like, well, like something you’d download off the internet. Fuck.
I glanced hurriedly back at Sean, and he raised his eyebrows at me. There wasn’t even anything I could say about Bree that would justify her.
“Hi!” Bree said as she got to me. Instead of hugging me though—thank god, Sean was right there—she presented me with the container. “Dinner!” she announced. “I made a wrap so if you were really hungry you could walk and eat on the way home!”
Not ‘on the way to your house’, but ‘on the way home’. Fuck, how all of this must have sounded to him. I was sure I’d gone from pale to bright red in the space of 30 seconds, and it only got worse.
She was looking up at Sean. “Hi, who are you? Do you work with Min?” she asked him cheerfully, extending her hand for him to shake. “I’m Bree.”
Instead of looking insulted that Bree didn’t know who he was, he just seemed very entertained and let her shake his hand. “Sean,” he said. “And I don’t really work with Min. I was just helping her do something today.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Bree said, and then looked him up and down. “That tie is amazing.”
To his credit, he actually appeared to have taken it as a compliment. “Thank you, my wife bought it for me. It’s one of my favourites, too. Now,” he said, straightening a little, “if you’ll excuse me, I won’t hold you up any longer. I’m sure you two have big plans for this evening.”
Was he… implying what I thought he was? He had a completely neutral expression, so I couldn’t tell if he just meant the plans I’d mentioned before, or something else. Was I being paranoid again?
“Pleasure to meet you, Bree,” he said, remembering her name. To me, he said with a hint of amusement, “Bye, Min.” I think he might have been chuckling to himself as he headed over to the café in the lobby.
I watched him go, wondering helplessly if there was any other possible way I could be more of a joke to him than I already was. I groaned, and would have put my head in my hands if they hadn’t been full of the Tupperware container Bree had given me a minute ago. The only consolation was that he had seemed genuinely okay about everything. That, and he wasn’t actually my direct boss. Maybe I was just worrying too much again.
I sighed at her as we headed out. “Why do you have to be the way you are...?”
She looked indignant. “I was really nice to him,” she said. “Besides, Min, I just made you dinner and waited out here for you for nearly an hour.” She motioned at the Tupperware container I was carrying. “Go on, have a look!”
At her request, I opened the container and peeked inside. The wrap had completely fallen apart. I closed the lid quickly before she could see. “Looks delicious,” I said anyway. I didn’t really want to tell her I’d just had a very stressful day and the sight of food was making my stomach turn, so I changed the subject a little. “How did you get all the ingredients?”
She scoffed. “You left me a twenty. There's food for the whole weekend in your fridge. Probably like five or six meals.”
I gave her a sceptical look as we walked out onto the street. Twenty had never bought me more than a single meal in the city. Then again, I wasn't exactly a regu
lar in supermarkets. “How did you buy five or six meals with twenty dollars?”
She looked very pleased with herself. “I know all the tricks,” she boasted with a smile. “All the ways you get great food for really cheap.” She didn't let me ask why that was, though, because she kept talking about how she’d done it all the way back to my place.
When we got there, I waited until Bree was in my en suite to take the mangled wrap out of the container and put it on my plate. I wasn’t hungry at all, but I couldn’t very well not eat it after she’d put so much effort into making it. She looked disappointed when she came back out and saw the jumble of food it had become, though. “You wrecked it,” she accused me.
I shrugged, my mouth half-full. “I've never been great with food. Henry's always the one who cooks if either of us does, and we normally get takeaway, anyway.”
The ex-wrap wasn't terrible. It wasn't fantastic, either, but it was definitely edible and probably better for me than what I would have had instead: takeaway and red wine. Bree rested her chin on her forearms at the table and watched me eat it, looking delighted. Afterward, she insisted she was going to wash my dishes while I had a shower.
I didn't get up from the table straight away, though, because after I’d had that shower I'd need to get dressed, and after I'd gotten dressed we'd need to leave, and then after we'd arrived I'd be sharing a room with Gemma again. Not to mention a whole truckload of other people I didn't know and who didn't know what was going on with me. I grimaced. I wasn’t sure which was worse; at least with Gemma I had a shot at trying to avoid her all evening. But a room full of people wondering why I looked the way I did…?
Bree saw my expression and lifted her head off the table. “What's wrong?”
“I don't suppose I can convince you to stay in and watch movies with me here, can I?”
I must have looked more stressed out than usual, because she didn’t even turn those puppy eyes on me. She was serious. “It's going to be fine, I promise. I asked Sarah like five times if it was definitely going to be okay, and she said everyone's cool.”
“Maybe I should just dress up as a girl...” I wondered aloud. Gemma knew the truth now, and other than her, there was only Liz who'd never seen me as a woman. “Because even 'cool' people are still going to be thinking, 'what are you?' and get really shocked if they see me in my work clothes later.”
Bree made a face. “It’s not shocking seeing you dressed like a girl,” she said. “It’s just kind of like… ‘nope’.”
Yeah, I thought as I listened to her, but you didn’t get it on with one version of me, not knowing about the other one. That must have been a bit of a shock to Gemma. Fuck, and I still hadn't told Bree what had happened last Friday, had I? I didn't really want to yet, to be honest. I'd rather she kept assuming I was into Henry for now. It just made everything a lot less complicated.
“You look way more comfortable and you make way more sense as a guy.” Bree told me, and then paused to reconsider her wording. “Or when you’re like a guy. Or whatever it ends up you are.”
“You see? You don’t even know what to say, and you know me.”
Bree put her hands on my shoulders and shook me a little. “Min,” she said. “People aren't going to be thinking it like that, in that tone of voice.”
I slumped back in my chair. “You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, well, neither do you,” she said, taking my arm. “You’re just being a stress ball again.” I let her pull me up out of the chair and drag me all the way to the bathroom. “It’s going to be fine,” she told me sternly, and then closed the door and went back into the kitchen, presumably to wash up after me. While I was in the shower, I kept waiting to hear the sound of her breaking my crockery. It didn’t happen, but I still decided I should invest in plastic tableware.
After I was done in the bathroom and had managed to get myself to a point where I realised I was going to have to go to Sarah’s movie thing, I decided that at least it gave me the opportunity to road test my new binders.
I took one of them out of the packaging, reading, ‘So comfortable you won’t remember you’re wearing one!’, and then examined what essentially felt like slab of thick elastic mesh in a tank top. I wasn't sure it would fit, because it was kind of small. Contrary to expectation, though, with a great amount of struggling I did finally manage to get into it. And, when I'd twisted it so it sat right on my chest and on my stomach, the result was fucking impressive.
I was flat. I stood side on to the mirror, and apart from the fact I was wearing women's undies and there was nothing filling them, you'd never have known I was a girl. I quickly pulled my jeans on to hide that. I was going to need to buy some boxers or something.
I didn't realise how long I'd been admiring my completely smooth chest from various angles until Bree pounded on the door. “Miiiiiiin,” she said, giving my name about four syllables, “you're taking ages.”
I looked at myself in the mirror. Well, I guessed technically a binder was underwear, but you couldn't really see anything. “Come in, then.”
She opened the door, probably beginning to detail her adventures in breaking my crockery, but stopped when she saw me.
“What do you think?” I said, with a smile on my face.
She looked me up and down. “Wow,” she said. “I mean you weren't that big anyway, but wow. Does it hurt?”
I circled my shoulders. It was definitely false advertising because there was no way I could forget I was wearing this. However, it was way more comfortable than the bandages were, and with the tank top part over it, it looked better, too. It looked real. “Well, it's tight,” I said. “But it doesn't really hurt.” I walked over to the wardrobe and opened it again. “So. Should I wear that shirt you like?”
Bree had other ideas about what I was going to wear, though, and through a systematic process of begging and actual physical force, she got me into one of Henry’s shirts. I felt weird about wearing them when he didn’t know about my gender stuff, but, really, I didn’t see what the harm was. I wore a whole lot of his other clothes. I stopped short of wearing his ties, though, and that was fine with Bree because she had some serious anti-Paisley prejudice. “Here,” she told me, retrieving her school tie from somewhere on my floor and threading it through my collar. Somewhat embarrassingly, she needed to teach me how to knot it, too.
When she was done, I stood back and closed my wardrobe door so I could scrutinise myself in the mirror on it. “Not too dressy?” I asked, holding my arms out as she shook her head. Henry was wider than me in general, and the shirt was much baggier than my other ones. It didn't look bad, though, and, most importantly, I felt fucking great. It was a huge relief. I wished I could wear this stuff to work.
“So,” Bree said somewhat coyly while I was still checking myself out. “Are you going to wear the packer?”
I watched my eyebrows go up in my reflection. “Nope,” I said quickly. She looked disappointed. That was interesting, and it made me want to mess with her. “Why?” I asked, fixing her with a grin and saying at the lowest register of my voice, “Would you like me to wear it, Bree?”
She went bright red. “Oh my god, stop it, I was just asking!”
“So was I,” I said, enjoying her reaction.
She recovered, giving me a cheeky little smile in the reflection. “If I said yes, would you?”
I watched her for a moment, and during the course of that moment, that smile faded right off her face and she went even deeper red. This was so much fun, this blushing thing girls did. “Sure, if you told me exactly why you want me to.”
She was the first one to look away. “Oh my god,” she said, fanning her face with her hands. “Oh my god. Okay, that dry-sarcastic-jokey thing you always do works a lot differently when you’re dressed like that. Like, a lot differently. Whoa!” She was trying not to look at me. Unlike what had happened in the lift, this type of trying-not-to-look-at-me was something I actually enjoyed. Probably a little too much, actu
ally.
I was still grinning as I filed that thought away somewhere and presented myself to her. “So I'm wearing this, then?”
She gestured pointedly at our reflection in the mirror, like it spoke for itself. “Uh, yeah.” Then, she looked down at her own body. “And you haven't even commented on my dress. I spent ages digging through my clothes looking for something that covered everything and you didn't even notice!”
“I did notice,” I told her, nodding appreciatively at it while I took my sneakers out and sat down on the bed to put them on. “It's nice, it suits you.”
“Then why didn't you say anything?” she asked me, sitting down next to me on the mattress and crossing her arms.
I stopped threading my laces and looked down at her. “Say what? 'Thank you for not advertising your wares?'”
She looked at me for a second and then burst out laughing while I was finishing with my sneakers. When I was done, I stood there over her and pretended to wait impatiently while she got her act together, but that just made her laugh harder.
She did manage to stop for a second, rasping, “'My wares', I'm totally using that. 'Hey, do you like my wares in this shirt? If you're interested in my wares I have a nice pair of jugs you could inspect,'” She could hardly breathe. “Oh my god, are you, like, 70? Because—”
I rolled my eyes, silencing her by pushing her back on the mattress and grabbing a pillow which I held jokingly over her face. “How do I shut you up?” I asked the pillow. In between fits of giggles she was shrieking at me and one of her fists was loosely drumming my side. She did say something back, but it was muffled by a mouthful of fabric. “Sorry,” I yelled, leaning down. “I can't hear you. What was that?"
I didn't want to actually suffocate her, so after a little while I tossed the pillow aside and stood up, grinning back at her as I walked out of the bedroom. I did throw a glance over my shoulder to check I hadn't gone too far, but she was just lying flat on her back, laughing. It made me smile.
Under My Skin Page 40