The Belle and the Beard by Kate Canterbary (carter reed TXT) 📗

anyone he loans me out to—ever since. The titles have changed but it's all the same. Make the problems go away. Even better if they're gone before anyone notices them. Invent ways to avoid problems—or pass them off to someone else. Do whatever it takes."

I stopped in front of the maple I'd come here to see. Studying the stressed-out tree was a good diversion from the stressed-out woman beside me and the cold hollowness of her words. It was that fake smile all over again. Did she even know she did it?

Perhaps the tree wasn't a distraction at all, seeing as I could only focus on Jasper and the discontent radiating out from her. "And how long have you hated your job?"

10

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