“Do I dare ask?”
“I don’t know, do you?”
The corner of his lips twitched. “I might, if you were to dare to answer.”
I laughed a little. “Making kids stand outside in the winter with only a shirt and shorts on. One woman used to make kids who pissed her off dig holes in the blazing heat, only letting them in when they passed out.”
“I see,” he said, his expression dark. “Not to point out the obvious, but you’re clearly speaking ofothersgoing through that, rather than yourself. Is that...saying you were spared, or are you avoiding talking about what you went through because it’s painful?”
I stared, setting my cup on the table and leaning close to squint at him. “Hmmm.”
He leaned back, looking wary. “What?”
“I feel you’re the one who should be the Guide here, not me,” I said slowly, wrinkling my nose. “For someone who gives off ‘I do not care about other people’s feelings,’ you’re very good at poking in people’s heads.”
He stared back at me before snorting. “You would be amazed at how useful it is to have a basic understanding of how people function in my line of work.”
“Auditing,” I said, cocking my head. “I’ve never really asked about your work before, like what company and if you’re even good at it.”
“Probably for the best, it’s not terribly interesting.”
“You seem to find it interesting. Why else do it?”
He paused to take a sip of his coffee. “I find the obsession with ‘enjoying your job’ to be one of the biggest issues for people’s happiness.”
“Why’s that?”
“One does not need to be happy with a job to do it, and aspiring for happiness with a job is never guaranteed. I have seen many people who turned what they loved into a career and, within a few years, grew to hate it. But do you know what sort of people I’ve seen who are happy with their work?”
“You tell me.”
“People who find satisfaction in what they do.”
“Ah, okay, there is a difference. So that’s what you get from your job, satisfaction?”
“It may not be glamorous, and it may not be someone’s first or twentieth pick for a career, but yes. Even if people turn their noses up at helping corporations run better, it’s still a necessary role, and I am, in fact, quite good at it. So I do my job because I am good at it, and because I garner satisfaction from it.”
“Hmm,” I leaned back, took a sip of coffee, and thought for a minute. It wasn’t the first time I was unable to argue with his logic. Most of what he did seemed to use logic before anything else...except sex. In fact, that seemed to be the one thing he felt first, and then worked his mind around; everything else seemed to be filtered through logic, and then he figured out how he felt.
As someone who was supposed to figure out what brought him to Arete and what he needed to work on...was that the problem? Was he intellectualizing rather than dealing with his feelings? Or was he just one of those people who had learned totake a more measured approach to life? The first was a problem because it meant he would never truly feel anything, but the latter was just personality, and I wasn’t here to change who he was.
He was watching me, though, and I turned to show him the back of my head. My hair was short enough that the jagged scar that ran from the back of my ear into my scalp could be seen. “Did you notice this?”
“I did not,” he admitted, and I snorted at his irritation.
“You don’t like missing details,” I said with a laugh as I sat back in my seat. “The hole-digging woman? Yeah, that was from that.”
He frowned. “How?”
“Another boy and I were playing; we knocked a picture off a table and broke the glass. She put us both out to start digging. We were out there for a couple of hours before the other boy, Trey, got dizzy. His shovel swing went wide, and the edge caught me in the head. He didn’t mean to, he just...it was so hot, and we were so out of it. Split my head open. That woman, I can’t even remember her name?—”
“Nor should you have to.”
“True. She didn’t want to take me anywhere, said I just needed to lie down. I was bleeding from this massive head wound, and she was worried what the neighborhood would think,” I explained with a roll of my eyes. “I would have died in that bed if Trey hadn’t waited until she ran to the store and helped me. What a sight we must have been, two twelve-year-old boys stumbling down the road. One was dragging the other, who was bleeding all over the place. Someone passing by saw us and took us to the hospital. I was so out of it, I never thought to lie. I don’t know what would have happened if the social worker who showed up hadn’t believed me and acted when she did. I probably would have gone back to that house. I don’t know whathappened to her, or to Trey, for that matter. So I got a neat scar and a fucked-up story for my troubles.”
Rowan stared just long enough that I started feeling uncomfortable. Then he snorted softly and turned to look away, speaking softly. “It was a drunk driver that ruined my back.”
Oh, well, shit. I’d told him my story, and now he was going to tell me his? I guess it worked.
