"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.
Ihatedmy job.
Ihated 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 lived those years. You experienced more than a job in that time."
"But—"
"No," he interrupted with a firm squeeze to my ass. We were doing that now. Ass squeezing. "Come on. Over here. Look at this old oak tree."
"The one leaning against that other tree? Isn't it going to fall over? Shouldn't you do something about that?"
"That tree has been here for three hundred years, give or take a few. It was here before most of the others in this woodland too. The settlers chopped down trees like they were getting high on sap. Deforested most of the South Shore and Cape, but that's not the point."
"Am I getting someLord of the Ringswisdom here? Is that what this speech is about?"
"Be quiet and let me teach you something." Another ass squeeze since we were very much doing this now, and doing a substantial amount of it. "That tree grew up with the first colonies. It witnessed wars. It gave life to generations of other oaks in this wood and beyond." He pointed out trees at various stages of growth around us. "And for the past several years, it's been dying."
"Oh mygod, are you comparing my career to this tree?"
"No but it's so fun to see you mad. Real mad, not that fake, forced shit where you're all eyebrows and painful smiles." He pointed to the tree in question, which seemed to be standing only because the branches of another tree gave it a sturdy spot to lean. "For years, that oak has provided a home to nesting robins and chickadees in a hollowed-out knot in the upper trunk. It's hosted lichen, moss, and two species of fungi that live only on decaying trees. Would you say this tree has wasted those years?"
"Obviously not but the next step in my career cannot be collapsing onto the forest floor and turning into mulch. I need something in upper management."
"You're going to figure it out, Jas. There's no penalty for changing directions. You're free to start over at any time."
"Do you have any idea how long it takes to start over? I've spent half my life on this. I can't just—I don't know, how do people find careers? I've been doing this since I was seventeen. This is who I am. This is my plan."
"You know how people do it? They decide to fuck the plan. Seriously.Fuck the plan.Walk in the woods. Reject anyone's definition of success. Abandon expectations. Listen to your heartbeat. Take no one's shit." He brought his hand to my neck, sliding it around to cup my nape. "And steal every kiss you can."
He leaned in, captured my lips, and dropped his other hand to my hip. My spine connected with the bark of a tree as I knotted my hands in his shirt, desperate to steady myself. He pushed his thigh between my legs and there was no denying the solid ridge of him behind his zipper. There was no way to miss that.
