Page 27 of Little Secrets
“All good.” But he’s not smiling, and Kenzie doesn’t know if it’s because of his phone, or because of her. She won’t ask; they don’t do that. They don’t check in on each other emotionally. They don’t godeep. That’s never been part of their MO, even though she’s tried. Instead, he looks at the food in front of him and frowns. He opens the box for his burger, and his scowl deepens. “I said Quarter Pounder.”
“You said Big Mac.” She knows he said Big Mac. She knows he said Big Mac because she remembers that when he said it, she thought to herself,But you normally get a Quarter Pounder. She is confident in her correctness, and she can see from the shifting look in his eyes that he’s wondering if thatisactually what he said. But Derek hates to be wrong, and he’s the king of doubling down, and so he’s going to deny he said Big Mac until it ruins their night together.
“When have I ever eaten a Big Mac?” he says, but his conviction is wavering. He’s staring at Kenzie like she’s supposed to know the answer. She gets that he’s tired from driving back from Portland all afternoon, but she offered to drive to the hotel when he picked her up, and he insisted he was fine. What they both know is that he doesn’t want her driving his precious Maserati. If he won’t let herput her (clean) socked feet up on his dashboard, he’s sure as shit not going to let her behind the wheel of his obnoxiously expensive sports car. Derek thinks the Maserati excites her, and it did at first. But it also makes him look like a douche.
And guess what? He’s not the only one who’s tired. She was on her feet all morning serving customers at the Green Bean until Marin Machado walked in, looking like she wanted to rip Kenzie’s throat open with her perfect teeth, all the while still managing to look classy and completely fabulous.
Kenzie knows who Derek’s wife is. Of course she does.
It had taken everything in her not to react, to pretend her lover’s wife was just another customer, and she credits her performance to the drama elective she took during undergrad in Idaho. If there were an award for Best Coffee Shop Actress, Kenzie would have won it. It was excruciating wondering if Marin was going to reach over the counter and strangle her, or start screaming obscenities and threats in front of her coworkers and a shop packed with customers. Kenzie even approached her later with a coffee refill to give her the chance to do just that—figuring they could get it over with, and at least she’d be somewhat prepared—but Marin had said nothing. She’d simply sat in the corner and watched her work, staring at Kenzie like she was a bug she wanted to squash under her Jimmy Choos.
Kenzie’s seen Marin in photos. They’re all over the web, in magazines, on charity event pages, in beauty articles, and Derek’s wife keeps active Facebook and Instagram pages for both work and her personal life. But Marin Machado, in person, is on a whole different level. For one, she looks like Salma Hayek (whose hair she’s worked on before, according toInStyle). She has bedroom eyes, all tits and ass and a tiny waist, designer clothes clinging to her in all the right spots. When Marin stood facing her at the counter, Kenzie felt gangly and awkward, like a tween who hasn’t filled out yet, too tall and too skinny, and in desperate need of a makeover. Marin Machado issoft and full where Kenzie is angles and flat, and they could not be more physically different if they tried.
It’s why she sent Derek the nude selfie. She needed reassurance.
Marin Machado is smart. Successful. She runs her own business with those three salons and her team of women who all seem to adore her. She’s self-made and she gives back to the community and her hashtags are always #girlboss and #womanowned and #empowerwomen and she’s pretty much everything Kenzie would want to be when she grows up.
She can’t imagine what the woman’s deal is. Marin obviously knows who Kenzie is. But there was no confrontation, and she clearly hasn’t said anything to Derek, because if she had, no way would Kenzie be here with him right now.
Derek still isn’t speaking, so she continues to think about Marin as she eats her French fries. Seeing his wife in person explains a lot. Everybody looks good in their Instagram photos, thanks to filters and Facetune. Seeing someone in real life, however, is different. Derek must think Kenzie is a hot mess most of the time, compared to his put-together wife. She’d rushed home after work to take a quick shower, and Derek had grimaced when he saw her.
“It can’t take that long to dry your hair,” he said.
“I air-dry most days.”
He reached into the back seat for his gym bag, rifling through it until he found a microfiber towel. “Lean forward,” he said, and when she did, he draped it over the leather seat.
“My hair is cleaner than your towel,” she said.
“My seats are worth more than your hair.”
She had no response for that. She’s betting a woman like Marin would never leave the house with wet hair, or with anything less than five cosmetic products on her face.
Derek doesn’t even come upstairs to the apartment when he picks her up. If she’s not at the curb when he arrives, he texts. He doesn’teven get out of the goddamned car to use the buzzer in the lobby. He once snapped, “I’m not a goddamned Uber driver,” which tells her that he’s never taken an Uber. Those guys don’t get out of the car, either.
They then sat beside each other in his uncomfortable, flashy car for a half hour until Kenzie suggested stopping for McDonald’s. As bougie as Derek can be, he grew up on fast food like she did, and she knows he never minds a mass-produced burger and fries. Also, he was in a terrible mood, and she thought the food might chill him out a bit. Instead, it’s having the opposite effect, since all they’re doing is sitting here in this sticky booth while he complains about the burger she bought him with her emergency money.
She notices his Big Mac is still untouched. “Derek, if it’s that big a deal, I can go ask them to change it.” She puts her chicken burger down and heaves a big, overly dramatic sigh.
Ladies and gentlemen, they’ve now reached theWho Can Be the Bigger Person?stage of the verbal sparring competition, where points are tallied mentally and passive aggressively until somebody wins. Who will it be? She wants it to be herself, because she likes to win as much as he does, but if they won’t replace the burger for free, that means she’ll have to buy another one with the only five bucks she has left to her name until she gets paid at the end of the week. Which means, in the end, she loses.
“It’s fine,” Derek says. Now they both have points on the board.
He takes a big bite of the burger he insists he didn’t order, which means another point for him for eating something he doesn’t want to eat. Then he grimaces to show he doesn’t like Big Macs, which means a point for her, because he said he was fine with it. But then he finishes chewing and swallows, which, shit, means another point for him because he’s actually going to digest the thing.
“Do you want my chicken burger? I can eat the Big Mac, I don’t mind.”Ding ding ding. She can hear the bell chiming in her head,tallying the score. An offer to switch burgers is surely worth three points, and just like that, Kenzie takes the lead. See, she’s good at this game, too.
“I said it was fine.”
Either she loses a point or he gains a point, she doesn’t know. They eat in moody silence, and nobody wins. Nobody ever wins. She doesn’t know why they play this game. She doesn’t know why he even wanted to see her tonight. If he really didn’t want to go home, he could have stayed in Portland.
Ten minutes later they’re back in the car. He jacks up the music, something he always does when he’s not in the mood to talk, which is more and more lately. Derek used to talk to her all the time. It’s how they started, after all. Conversation was their jam for those first couple of months, until they started having sex and discovered how much they enjoyed that even more.
His playlist hasn’t changed in the six months she’s known him, and his musical tastes mainly comprise Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Nirvana. Great Seattle bands, sure, but they’re all before her time, and they remind her of her dad, who used to play those albums loud until the summer he moved out. They also remind Kenzie that Derek is older, and while at first those differences were a turn-on, it’s a loose thread that they both keep yanking on, and their relationship is starting to unravel.
It can’t unravel. Kenzie’s invested too much into this.
The Cedarbrook Lodge is a hotel thirty minutes outside Seattle, right by Sea-Tac. When Derek first told her about it, she assumed it was going to be one of those generic airport hotels. But it’s surprisingly nice. It has a fancyish restaurant and a luxury spa, and the suite Derek books is nearly as large as the apartment Kenzie shares with her roommate Tyler, but with a fireplace. The property surrounding the hotel is well tended and lush, and it’s rather romantic. But that isn’t why Derek likes it. They come here because he isn’t likely to runinto anyone who knows him, and if he does, he can always say he’s got an early flight the next morning.
