He lowers down onto his haunches next to me and his big hand lands on my shoulder. “Hey…” he starts, but I cut him off.
“You saw it.”
I can’t see his face, but I know he’s trying not to smile. And I can smell him. He smells too good and somehow it makes my embarrassment that much worse. It’s the scent of the unattainable man who is so far out of my league I should just crabwalk backwards through the desert and out of his life.
But maybe he didn’t see it?
“Did you see it?” my muffled squeak comes from behind my hands.
“See what?” There’s definitely a smile in his gravelly voice, the turd.
"Don’t make me say it. Did you see it?” I ask again, this time with a little sriracha in my tone.
“Do you mean the photo of you posing in your underwear by a swimming pool?” He squeezes my shoulder. “Yeah. It was the first image that popped up on my Google search.”
“You did an image search, Creep-o?”
“Uh,no. The images came up automatically when I searched your name.” His tone is all matter-of-fact innocence. “You pose in your undergarments in a public setting, Creep-o?” His tone turns teasing, but it sparks something.
My hackles are up and his hand is still on my shoulder. I yank away. "First of all, I wasn't in a public setting. I was in my parents' backyard, completely alone. And I was doing yoga, not posing." Oh no. I'm about to cry. The sickening feeling of violation is still fresh. I gulp down the knot in my throat and blink rapidly to clear the tears from my eyes. "Second of all, I wasn't in my 'undergarments,' Grandma. It was a bikini, and a pretty covering one, at that. I still don't know who took that photo or how it ended up online." I sniff. He’s right. The bikini absolutelylooked underwear-esque, but there’s no way in heck I’m admitting that now.It was a swimsuit, it was a swimsuit, it was a swimsuit.These words will be on my tombstone.
Joe drops to sit beside me, pulling his sunglasses off and shooting his intense gaze straight into my eyes. There is a deep crease in his brow and storm clouds in his eyes. "Someone took that… and you didn't know?" His tone has an edge that wasn't there before.
"Yeah. Can you believe that? No one was there but me. Sometimes I swim in my parents backyard and do yoga when I'm alone. It's relaxing. I thought I was alone, anyway." I shudder.
He shoots to his feet and paces away.
“What’s being done about it? This can’t be legal.” His voice is all thunder and lightning bolts, which I appreciate. That had been missing from my parents’ reaction.
“My mom is looking into it. She handles things like this. She’s a pro at this stuff and we have a good lawyer, but it'll be hard to undo this damage either way. All of my credibility comes from my brandbeing liked and respected by a large number of people online. Because part of my brand is beauty and fitness, when that photo came out, my numbers immediately went down. My credibility tanked." Wow, that hurt. Saying it out loud is a point-blank bullet to my self-esteem. I am not pretty or fit enough to be credible.
“Why?” He pauses his pacing. “Don’t people share pictures of themselves like that a lot?”
“Oh, definitely, but usually it’s only posted after…” I can’t bring myself to say it, and I don’t know why. Everyone does it. Everyone knows everyone does it. Either way, a tiny dust devil of shame whirls around in my stomach. “They’re usually touched up.” There. Let him fill in the blanks. I mean, he’s already seeing it first hand. He’s seen I-slept-in-a-van-last-night Indie. If he saw any of my other photos online he knows that the smooth, glowing fairy goddess that my filters and touch ups create are exactly that. Mythical. I don’t need to mention that my mother’s team has digitally removed ten pounds from my frame since the beginning of time.
I bury my face in my hands again as I think about how my life has turned into a huge, hypocritical mess. I am a beauty guru who is remarkably unbeautiful without filters. I am well aware of every inch of dimpled skin, every mole, every freckle, and my hip dip. My facial expression in the photo didn’t help matters. It landed somewhere between “I just did a firewalk and I’m in immense pain” and “I need a laxative, stat.” I had been attempting a tripod headstand and every bit of my concentration was centered on silly things likenotlanding on my head and breaking my neck. It was a rare life moment when I wasnotthinking about my dimpled backside because I thought no one was watching.
What really frosted my cake about the Undie-gate photo was that it looked intentional. Someone hacked in and posted it to my social media. They made it look like one of my usual weekly yoga photo shoots, except the sheer horribleness of my facial expressions and flabby body parts at odd angles, juxtaposed with my usualglowing images, made it seem like I was on the verge of a mental breakdown. Think Britney Spears’ buzz cut, circa 2007. It looked like a public meltdown, but it also hinted that something deeper and more disturbing was happening in my life.
Angry tears and sad tears are both flowing freely now. It’s easy to pin down why I’m angry, between the feeling of violation and the repercussions to my business, but the sadness is confusing. That dust devil of shame is circling an empty-pit feeling in my stomach. Embarrassing, hiccuping sobs erupt from behind my hands and I pray that Joe had walked away somewhere in the middle of my breakdown. I can feel him standing next to me, though, the same way I sense that the mountains around us haven’t gone anywhere either.
When my bubbering dies down to a trickle I’m brave enough to pull my hands away from my eyes.
Joe is standing above me, watching me with a suspiciously neutral expression. He stretches out a hand to pull me up. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 6
After Joe drags me down from the mountain—I say drags because the dude has long hiking legs and he doesn’t drop my hand until he opens the passenger door of his Bronco for me—we drive for maybe fifteen minutes until we stop in front of a sage green, white-trimmed, two-story house that is surrounded by nothing but desert. There’s a circular drive in front where Joe wrangles the gear shift into park.
It is worth mentioning that I would pay decent money to watch Joe shifting gears on that Bronco. Between his corded, muscular forearms and capable hands, I would’ve taken out a loan to pay for that short drive. Who knew I am such a forearm girl? And Joe’s are distracting even when my life is a disaster. I have to crank down the window to get some air and remind myself that Joe is more than a piece of man meat.Joe is more than man meat, Indie,I repeat several times as my tears dry up.
I peer up at the large house through the window and a joke from my favorite Tina Fey show crosses my mind, something about how a person should never go with a hippie to a second location. But I don’t feel any danger. This isn’t saying much, given I recently completed a cross-country drive in The Hulk without thinking twice.
“Ready?” his voice rumbles from the seat next to me.
The only response I can summon is a nervous chuckle. I’m feeling wrung out from all my crying and I’m not sure what else I can handle. I don’t reach for the door.
His hand goes to my shoulder. “This will be good. Trust me. You’ll like my mom.” With that, he jumps out and slams his door, leaving me to panic alone.
