Page 72 of Sublimate
“I don’t need anything,” I said. “You’ve already given me so much!”
“The bare minimum. I gave you a warm place to live with enough to eat, where you don’t have to be afraid when you hear someone at the door. You should have a lot more than that.” He let go but stayed close to me. “Open it.”
I took off the lid of the box and found another one inside. That was a little leather case which I flipped open. “What is this?” I asked, awed.
“They’re earrings. The green stones are emeralds. You had told me about a green ring you used to have and I hoped these might remind you of that.”
I tried not to whistle. “No, these are much, much more! They’re beautiful!”
“I thought they would be pretty with your hair, especially when you wear your braids.”
My hands shook as I put them on. “I love them. Thank you, Nolan.”
“You’re welcome. I wanted you to enjoy this day.”
“That’s what I wanted for you, too. I want you to enjoy every day,” I told him. Then I posed a question that we had asked each other a few months ago. “Would you say that you’re happy?” Before, he had answered that he was working on it. I had been doing that, too, although I hadn’t realized it.
“I would say that I’m very happy,” he answered. “This is the first time in my life that I’ve looked at the future as something I’m excited about. I would also say, thank you.”
“And I would say—”
But what I would have said got lost, because he was holding me so tightly. I would have said that I was like Cadence, but not that I wanted sex (not only sex). I wanted more.
Chapter 15
“Thank you for calling Whitaker Automotive.” I smiled as I hung up the phone. It was actually satisfying to be able to help someone, and that guy had been nice. Not everybody was—you were often calling a car dealership when something went very wrong and was going to be expensive to fix, and that upset-ness could get directed at the receptionist who answered the phone there. We all had bad days.
Well…I didn’t have that many. It was the contrast that always got me: a year before, I had been sitting in a cold house, trapped by my life, miserable but not even knowing it. I’d had no idea how awful everything had been, because I hadn’t had any comparison. If everything is crapola, all the time, then it makes sense that you’d roll with it and expect more. And now? I sat behind my half-circle desk and smiled at the stapler. Things were different.
“See you later, Vivi,” one of the salesmen called to me and I waved back. I had only been on the job for a few weeks buteveryone had been nice and I did feel like I was getting the hang of it. I had been very nervous before I’d started and I’d had so many questions.
“How do I know if I’m picking the right clothes?” I had asked Cadence. “Nobody cared what I wore when I cleaned, but I remember how Nolan’s mom reacted the first time she saw me.” Her eyes had moved over me and then she’d looked ill.
Cadence had taken that and all my other issues very seriously. “You can always send me a picture of your outfit before you go in. Just make sure not to wear shirts with writing on them,” she had recommended. “Especially not the ‘I’ll Shit on Your Grave’ one. That’s not nice.” I assured her that I’d already cut that up to use for rags in the secret cleaning I did before Nolan’s actual cleaning people showed up. Cadence had lots of good advice, like about what to pack in my new lunch cooler and how to talk to coworkers, and she was happy to hear that it had all worked for me.
She was getting to be happier in general. Christmas had been, unfortunately, a mess for her due to the situation with her mother. It had been truly awful for a few weeks—like, “call the police” kind of awful, because that was what she’d ended up having to do. Her mom had gone crazy, which happened sometimes to people who were used to having control and then lost it. Mrs. Norris couldn’t act out physically against her daughter, so she’d done other stuff, like taking money, threatening self-harm, and finally, trying to set the house on fire.
Buildings could go up fast. I had seen that before with my sister, when she’d been playing with a lighter, although there was noproof that she’d acted intentionally. But there was in this case, because Cadence had been smart. When she had returned home on Christmas, they had argued a lot and she’d said that her mom had to move out, which hadn’t gone over well. Like, Mrs. Norris had said no, she wasn’t going anywhere. It was gearing up to be a war and Cadence had thought strategically: she’d had hidden cameras installed while her mom was getting a manicure. That meant there was video evidence of her mom ditching the canes she used due to her ingrown toenail and weak ankle issues and dousing the curtains with the stuff you used for a barbecue grill. It sounded like the woman had jumped into the deep end of nuttiness, but it turned out that she’d been paddling that way for a while. There had been hidden signals of things to come and some of them had recently been exposed.
Cadence’s garden over the summer, the one that had never grown? Her mom had admitted to treating it with weed killer—well, not so much admitted, but screamed out in anger at her daughter. She’d thought it was ugly and she didn’t like peppers.
There had been other stuff that was just as crazy, and some of it had affected me.
“I’m so sorry, Vivi,” Cadence had sobbed. “I didn’t know that she was able to access my documents.”
I hadn’t been mad, because it hadn’t been her fault. Who would have guessed that her mom had hated me enough to try to sabotage my prospects? It was because Cadence and I were friends and Mrs. Norris didn’t want me taking away attention and love. That was why she’d messed with me by going into the spreadsheets that Cadence had set up, the ones that hadorganized my cleaning jobs and also kept track of my search for new employment. She had gotten numbers and email addresses and then anonymously informed on me to my clients, letting them know that I was either an addict who would steal from them or a person already on probation for something terrible. She had done the same thing when I’d submitted applications, poisoning my chances. When Cadence told me what had happened, my job problems of the last few months made more sense.
“I don’t know why you’re not more mad about this, or why you don’t think it’s as utterly insane as I do,” Nolan had said when I’d explained it to him. “Why are you so calm?”
“I guess I’ve seen things happen before, stuff that’s a lot worse,” I’d answered. “I’m upset and I think that was a total crapola thing to do, but I can’t complain about how things have turned out for me. If I was a person whose feelings got hurt, then it would have been worse. I could have thought that I was getting fired and I wasn’t getting hired for personal reasons, like that I wasn’t good enough.”
“Your feelings don’t get hurt?” he had asked skeptically and I had been about to answer no, they didn’t.
But I realized that wasn’t exactly the truth. “I guess that never paid attention if they did,” I told him instead. “What did feelings matter?” They mattered to him and he was very, very angry at Cadence’s mom.
I worried about how my friend was dealing with everything, and now I was going over to check on her again. She was living alonefor the first time, since her mom had been forcibly removed after her arson attempt and was out on bond but living with one of her sisters. That woman had opened her home (although they’d been estranged) and I had to think she would soon regret it.
Despite the short, dark, January day, Cadence’s house looked bright and cheerful, much more than it had in the long, sunny afternoons of the northern summer. It was because the lights were all on, the one on the porch and also everything inside. It meant that when she let me in, I could see well when I walked through the rooms. That was also easier because she had already taken out a lot of the furniture, picking the nicest things to keep. She’d had help with that.
