Mallory ignores her and fixes her gaze on Aubrey. “We’re here, together, in one piece. One step at a time. Okay?”
Aubrey. The weak link. Always.
She starts to nod, then says, suddenly, “Someone’s got to take the dog. I think I might be allergic, and Ilena—” She gestures to Ilena’s belly. “So, Mallory. Mallory’s got to take the dog.”
It’s the first decision Aubrey’s made without hesitating in a long time.
Aubrey cannot believe she’s here. At AIM. Their AIM, but not. The office seems real, everything seems real, the slight rock of her desk chair, the smell of microwave popcorn wafting from the communal kitchen, the wave from the receptionist she doesn’t know, the people looking at her like she belongs. But she doesn’t. Does she?
Outside Grayson’s building, they confirmed AIM’s location was in the same spot and called up a rideshare app on Mallory’s phone. “Hitch,” apparently, short forhitchhike, which is either totally cute or totally creepy. Aubrey can’t decide.
On the ride to AIM, Aubrey nearly stuck her head out the window like Harley to take it all in.
Starbucks, stifling humidity, summer tourists sightseeing via the lens of their phones. Brick sidewalks, ritzy shops on Newbury Street, traffic clogging every route out of Boston and into Cambridge. Everything seemed the same.
But there’s also a grocery store called Eat Me and the Charles River looks clean enough to drink from and the contact list in Aubrey’s phone is twice its normal size.
At her desk, she hides behind the three huge monitors. One more than usual. Is she more talented here or less? Does an extra monitor help her do more work efficiently or does she need the extra monitor just to keep up?
Like everything else, the office here is slightly off. Desks of wood not white, coworker faces she recognizes, names she knows, ones she forgets—though that’s the same as in her world. “Her world” is how she’s come to think of the place she was before she woke up here.
Woke up here and helped hide a dead body and kidnap a dog. That’s what they did, isn’t it? They strolled through the art deco lobby with the jittery pup on a leash, Mallory breezily giving the doorman a friendly wave and the explanation of “watching the dog while Mr. Fields goes on an unexpected trip.” Aubrey speed-walked ahead of Ilena and Mallory so as to not ruin everything by vomiting right there on the black-and-white geometric tile. She ran out the door with her head down, nearly colliding with a set of legs in white linen whose owner quickly leaped out of harm’s way.
They have Mallory’s rules, easily followed behind the closed door of Grayson’s penthouse, but here, with people who will assume things and ask things and need things, with people who don’t know she just touched... a body, Aubrey’s not sure she can remember the rules, let alone follow them.
A chill settles in. Aubrey tugs at the jacket draped over the back of her chair. White denim. This Aubrey not only has a white couch but also a white coat? Is she a wild risk-taker or does she never eat blueberries or avocados? Does she only drink clear liquids? Or maybe this Aubrey is just especially hygienic?
Aubrey wipes her hands on her pants and carefully slips herarms through the jacket. She then opens her calendar app to see what she’s supposed to do today. Mallory insisted they act normal until they figure out what’s going on, but how is she supposed to act normal when they’re in, what? An alternate reality? She’s going to spill. She’s going to say the wrong thing. She says the wrong thing in their world all the time, “Aubreyisms,” Ethan had called them. Usually, Aubreyisms resulted in a brief moment of social awkwardness, but here, she’s going to get them all arrested or taken for psychiatric evaluation or locked away for revealing some secret government experiment they’re all a part of, which honestly seems like the most rational explanation of all.
Focus, Aubrey, just focus.
She spins away from her open office door, an unfamiliar feeling. She almost always sits at a station amid her team in her world. It makes her feel less like their manager, a title that always hung heavy on her. But here, she’s grateful not to find a space carved out for her among them. She needs the privacy. She’s not Mallory. One look and they’ll all know she doesn’t belong.
With any luck her Aubreyisms are alive and well and she can chalk up any missteps and mis-speaks, like forever mixing up the difference between 180 and 360 degrees, to Aubrey being Aubrey. Especially when it comes to Kai. She hasn’t seen him yet. When she snuck out of her apartment to meet Ilena, he was still asleep.
Aubrey flicks on all three monitors and loses herself in the nitty-gritty of what makes AIM one of the most stellar examples of a mobile app in the marketplace. Based on a prioritized to-do list this other version of herself has on the desk, Aubrey begins by trying to figure out why some users’ apps crash when they select the new meditation guided by Matthew McConaughey, which her world also has and which was working just finethere, when the familiar smell of eucalyptus wafts over her. Either an affinity for the same shampoo is what bonded them here or Kai must have used her shower. It’s strangely intimate, the idea of him standing naked looking at her razor and scalp mask.
“Sorry I’m late,” he says, entering her office wearing a grin that makes Aubrey’s cheeks flush and ignites an arousal like some sort of muscle memory. His jet-black, eucalyptus-smelling hair is pulled to a knot at the back of his head and he looks even younger than she remembers.
“No worries. I mean, the outing and all,” she says before it occurs to her that the outing from her world might not have happened here.
“And all,” he says, flirtatiously.
She takes him not cocking his head or furrowing his brows as confirmation that the outing happened. Disaster averted, but many, many more live on the tip of her tongue.
“Which includes those lit strawberry mules and this.” Kai slips a hand into his pocket and sets a small glass figurine on her desk.
“An octopus?” she says.
“Theoctopus.” He raises an eyebrow, expecting her to understand.
“Yes, well...” Aubrey pauses, doing as Mallory said and letting Kai guide the conversation. Except he just keeps staring at her. “I really should get back.” She vaguely gestures to her three monitors, but before she spins back to them, she sees Kai’s face fall.
“Oh, I thought... the octopus and the succulent, I thought we were...” He moves to put the octopus back in his pocket and changes his mind, pushing it toward her. “It’s okay, I know how busy you are, boss.”
Boss. Super, just super. On top of having no idea what thisprivate joke is all about, she is indeed his boss. Part of her was hoping she wasn’t his manager here and didn’t have to add sexual harassment to her growing list of offenses. “About that, all that, are you okay with that or do you need to talk to someone or maybe you don’t feel comfortable admitting to me that you need to talk to someone, so should I have you talk to someone else to see if there’s something you need to talk to someone about?”
“Wow, that was awesome. Your mind’s like a bullet train.”
