Underneath It All (The Walsh Series #1) (20 page)

LAUREN

I
decided a
long time ago that I was finished with diets, and I was going to eat what I wanted by keeping my treats in balance and doing it without guilt. The birthing hips I inherited from my mother meant I tried on at least thirty pairs of jeans before I found a decent one, but they were me, and I was going to love my shape regardless of whether I had to search high and low for the perfect fit.

The decision came after Amanda, Steph, and I all agreed to a pact one semester. We got fired up about bikini season and went low carb—slightly psychotic, by-the-book low carb—and it fell apart one morning before finals when Amanda slapped Steph over her secret cache of English muffins. There was some hair pulling and screaming involved, and when it was over, we sat on the floor of our college apartment, nursing our split lips and scratches.

Unhappy didn’t even begin to describe that semester. My hip measurements didn’t budge, and any pounds lost came from my boobs, and that was terribly unfair. I never reached that healthy Zen place where I didn’t feel starved and awful, and at a certain point I not only hated the existence of bread, I started hating people who ate bread.

I learned two essential things that semester. First, my friends were much too disciplined and competitive for any shared activity. Second, everything was acceptable in moderation. Eliminating any one thing—carbs, sweets, alcohol, meat, diet soda, whatever the fads demanded—wasn’t the answer. It would lead to unhinged deprivation and a small slap-fight over English muffins.

I didn’t know what surfaced that memory, but gazing at the blank page on my screen, I released the breath I didn’t know I was holding. Everything felt wrong—more wrong than carb deprivation—and nothing was making it right. Each day was like swimming through pudding, slow and tedious, and I couldn’t snap out of it. Shoes, clothes, cakes—none of it helped, and I couldn’t sit here pretending I was all right any longer when everything had been so wrong for the past two weeks.

I bolted from my seat in the back corner of the classroom and tried to collect my bag and laptop without causing a major disruption. As with all things requiring me to be graceful under pressure, I knocked over two diminutive chairs and every child turned to watch me exit the classroom. I mouthed “sorry” to the teacher as I charged for the door.

Initially, I had attributed my restlessness to all the travel.

Living out of a suitcase, sleeping in different cities every few days, eating most of my meals at Starbucks: not for me. I never wanted to see another yogurt, fruit, and granola cup again, and it wasn’t looking good for the frosted lemon loaf, either.

I also made the mistake of streaming the entire first season of
American Horror Story
from Netflix on my first night in California because I napped through the six-hour flight and couldn’t get to sleep. Now every creak and noise was keeping me awake, and I kept expecting someone in a latex bodysuit to jump out of the closet.

Then I realized I was completely overwhelmed from the conferences and school visits, and while my meetings were incredibly helpful, they served to highlight the demanding work ahead. I spent most nights trudging through my action plan to keep my head above water.

My flats were soundless in the hallway filled with children’s artwork and large class photos, and I was happy to simply escape for a moment. I dropped my things in the small meeting space the school designated for the day’s visitors and absently picked at a smashed Lärabar I discovered in the bottom of my tote bag while scanning my messages.

As I thought about the unopened texts from Matthew glaring back at me, I couldn’t help but wonder whether putting him in the Off Limits column was at least part of the reason for my misery. I glanced at my phone as pouty, self-centered tears rolled down my face. His texts were funny and sometimes suggestive, and though I wanted to delete them automatically, I read every single one. And then I read them again.

06:52 Matthew:
good morning.

06:55 Matthew:
im sure you have a busy day. call me whenever.

08:04 Matthew:
the original stables/garage situation at Trench is coming down today. I’ll send you a pic after demo.

10:29 Matthew:
how’s your morning?

11:10 Matthew:
are you a pumpkin spice latte fan?

11:11 Matthew:
random question, I know.

11:13 Matthew:
Shan lost her shit this morning when she saw that they’re back at starbucks.

11:16 Matthew:
she’s sent her boy toy, I mean Tom, to get refills three times already.

11:17 Matthew:
she’s prob going to be rocking in a corner soon and awake until next wednesday

13:47 Matthew:
what’s your evening looking like? Call me when you’re in for the night. preferably when you’re in bed.

13:50 Matthew:
I don’t care what time. I’m around.

14:13 Matthew:
btw, Sam’s insisting there’s no actual pumpkin in those lattes.

14:17 Matthew:
and this is how I spend my days: mediating debates about coffee flavoring.

I thought about the unread emails, the missed calls, the to-do lists, the calendar reminders, and the scrumptious man asking for some of my attention, and I wanted to scream. There was enough work on my plate for me and my three clones, my friends were moving on to shiny, new lives with their husbands and babies, and I couldn’t schedule time to have sex with my architect even if I wanted to.

Everyone else was marinating in a special blend of late twenty-something wisdom while I tried on every size and style of hot mess. I wanted to hold it all together, but most days I was barely holding myself together.

It was so much easier when I was crying in stairwells over closed offices, so much easier before I knew what I was missing, before I truly understood the sacrifices I was making for my work. I let the tears fall, and tapped out a quick message to Matthew, not caring that I was breaking all my own stupid rules.

15:35 Lauren:
I’m sorry I haven’t been around to talk or respond much. I’m really stressed right now and haven’t been getting a ton of sleep. Strange story, I’ll tell you later.

15:36 Lauren:
I do want to hear how it’s going at the site. Let me know when you can talk.

MATTHEW

P
enance. That’s what
I was doing.

Penance for the Back Bay brownstones running more than three months behind schedule and six figures over budget. Penance for letting Riley take a crack at Angus’s Bunker Hill properties when I should have been the one jumping in front of those bullets.

Angus pushed the designs across the table and sneered. “That’s pathetic.”

And penance for minding my own fucking business. I should have yanked Riley out of Patrick’s office sooner. He was young and green and needed miles of direction, and Patrick expected everyone to be as brilliant as him. He could barely speak to people unless they existed at his level of architectural genius.

Unlike Patrick, Shannon, Sam and me, Riley never worked in the office as a kid. We used to go there after school, and we could read and write bluelines by the time we were seven or eight. That’s where we made our mistakes and learned the basics, but Riley never had that experience, and it showed. By the time he was old enough, Patrick and Shannon were already out of the house, and Angus’s projects were limited to small restorations requiring little more than basic designs. He also gave up on being instructive right after my mother died and he elected to view the world from the inside of a scotch bottle.

I tightened the arm across my stomach and pressed my fist to my mouth for a moment, biting into my finger to channel my aggravation. The numbers in my head weren’t helping. “Would you like the build on that? Perhaps tell Riley what you don’t like?”

Angus folded his hands over his belly with a scowl. “I hope you didn’t pay much for that education, because if this is all you got from it”—he gestured to the designs—“it’s not worth the paper it was written on. That gutter rat mother of yours didn’t pass along too much intelligence, did she?”

Whichever mechanism in my brain that once allowed me to ignore him, the element that switched on while he tore us down and allowed me to sit there, emotionless and detached, was malfunctioning. Angus’s comments used to roll right off my back, but today they stuck, and the fury was suffocating.

“Yeah, that’s gotta be the most constructive feedback I’ve ever heard,” Riley muttered. “If you have nothing else, I’ll just—”

“There are a couple of crews that need laborers. You’d be good at that,” Angus said, his chin jutting toward Riley. “Come on now, this work isn’t for turnips like you. You barely graduated high school. I always knew you were slow as shit. Just like your cunty sister.”

“Do not talk about Shannon that way,” I said, my jaw tight and my teeth grinding together. “You can go. I’ll take this from here.”

Angus huffed and murmured about my mother being a dumb drunk, Riley being a brain-dead turnip, and me thinking I knew everything there was to know about anything, and eventually clattered his way out. He kept his tirade going as he rotated through each of the offices, and on a different day I would have intervened. I would have talked him down and pushed him in the direction of the nearest pub, but I didn’t have it in me right now.

We sat side-by-side at the conference table in my office, listening as he berated Sam for being short and queer, hurled a few ethnic slurs at Patrick’s assistant, and suggested Shannon wasn’t in her office because she was sucking dicks at City Hall.

Seething with aggravation, I tried to refocus on the ancient bluelines dredged from the depths of the city inspector’s office, comparing them to Riley’s new designs. The lines on the weathered paper blurred together and my mind wandered to Lauren again. I pitched my triangular scale at the drafting table and stalked to the window, shoving my hands in my pockets to prevent myself from throwing anything else. I didn’t want to become the kind of asshole who threw things to express anger. That one trended too close to Angus and his supremely fucked up methods for handling the world around him.

“My guess is that you won’t be able to blow up my designs like Alderaan, and they aren’t worth starting that kind of war,” Riley said, his voice ripe with sarcasm. “Go sit in a corner and call your girl. I’m ordering lunch. What do you want?”

“She’s busy.”

“Yeah,” Riley said. “I think texting might have been invented for that reason. Or making doorbells obsolete.”

Her unresponsiveness confounded me, and within days of her departure, that confusion had edged into fury. My siblings gave me a wide berth after several irrational outbursts about version control on project plans and the shortage of lead for my particular brand of mechanical pencils and the tribe’s wholesale inability to draft stable structures. I
was
being a dick, but it felt beyond my control.

Lauren would have had some comment handy about cavemen, and she would have been right.

I stared at the cobblestone streets below without seeing. In the two weeks since her departure, we never once managed to talk. Her texts came in random bursts, responding to my updates about her building and firing back questions, though she completely ignored my inquiries about her.

The last time I touched her was at the airport—two hundred and seventy-three hours ago—and every second without her reminded me that I was a sad, sad fool for not realizing this trip was another disappearance.

“Dude, I can’t get my ass beaten and then watch your moping. Chicks like to be chased. Like, ‘rehab the house where you popped her cherry and wait for her to leave her fiancé then tell her stories about your love when she loses her mind’ chased. Get on that. At least sac up and
call
her, but stop your fuckin’ moping.”

I pivoted, gazing at Riley where he leaned back with his feet outstretched on an adjoining chair. “Did you just paraphrase the plot of
The Notebook
?”

“You should watch it and take notes. Ryan Gosling gets them panties dropping every time, and he does some fuckin’ beautiful work on that old house.”

I released a tight, slightly manic laugh and dropped into a seat across from Riley, my phone skating to the center of the table.

“I don’t think she wants to be chased.” I propped my arms on the table and rested my head against my clasped fingers. “I think she’s over it now.”

Riley’s feet hit the floor and he leaned forward. “Unlikely. Miss Honey was totally in your pocket, and I should know. Almost saw some babies made.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that really helped. She’s probably dodging my calls now to avoid pervy little shits like you.” I looked up and pinned Riley with a glare. “Miss Honey?”

“Yeah,” he said. He spoke without tearing his eyes from the phone. “Didn’t you read
Matilda
? That sweet little teacher?”

I stared at the table and frowned. “I don’t think so.”

“Anyway. Your pussyboy mood is bringing down my college football buzz, and that’s a problem. How can you go through life like this? All moody and shit? She’s out of your league by a couple of pegs. It shouldn’t be a surprise to an old man like you that you gotta work for that ass.”

“Are you sure you can’t bother Sam right now? This seems like a conversation he’d be thrilled to have with you, and if it helps, I’ll pick up the tab for lunch. Just leave me the hell alone.”

I went back to the design I was sketching in my graphing notebook, the one that had been stuck in my head for weeks. I didn’t have time for passion projects—this whole operation was a passion project—but this design was demanding my attention. It kept me up at night, preoccupied my thoughts through traffic, and sent me searching for innovative techniques.