Page 34 of Base Block

“I didn’t scream,” he told me, confused. “I don’t think I ever have.”

“It means he thought you were funny,” I explained. I’d looked it up.

“Huh. Yeah, he was laughing when I talked about how you and I had driven up to Michigan and how we were trying to sing together and harmonize. I told him that there was a video and he said he was going to watch it.” He leaned his head back. “I could fall asleep right now. I want to sleep for a week.” But then he sat up straight. “Rainey, I didn’t even ask you about the interview. How did it go?”

I told him all of the same things that I had already reported to Anara and Heidi, plus some additional details about the guy who’d asked me the questions. “Beau Gowan dresses so well,” I mentioned. “Victoria had told me that and also that he was good-looking, but I thought she would be biased. They weren’t ever a couple, although I think she really did like him. But it was just sex, at least on his side.”

“Good-looking,” he repeated. “Big guy?”

“No, not at all. He’s not much taller than I am.” I was a respectable height, five-eight, and now that I was free of Damian, I could wear the highest heels in existence.

“Huh,” he said again. “Do you think you’ll get the job?”

“I’m not sure. He was hard to read,” I answered. “I spent so much time learning Damian and how to handle him. I got good at his friends, too, but this Gowan guy was pretty closed off.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, his expressions—”

“No, I mean what you said about handling Damian and his friends,” Callum explained. “Why’d you have to do that?”

I paused. “Don’t you sometimes manage the guys you work with, to keep them under control? I’ve heard you tell them to shut up or to come closer and repeat themselves, and then they leave you alone. Are they still teasing you about your phone?”

He didn’t answer. In fact, he didn’t say anything else for the rest of our short ride home or on the slow walk from the parking lot to our unit. He did seem so tired. I offered him the dip as a snack, because there was a lot left over, but he shook his head.

“No thanks.” He had picked up something from the stack of stuff that I’d carried in after the interview, lots of papers from his car and mail from the box here that filled up with junk.

But what he held was my new résumé, an extra copy I had brought to my interview. “Rainey Stormer,” he read aloud. “Stormer.”

“I think I may have told you that my last name was Desjardins.”

“You did say that,” he agreed.

I looked at him closely, trying to read him now, too. “That was what I was using at the time. Stormer is what I am, legally. But it’s so dumb. Rainey Stormer? Please. It’s like a kid made it up.”

“A while ago, I caught a glimpse of your name on your driver’s license so I knew that ‘Desjardins’ wasn’t real.” He pointed to the résumé. “Is the rest of this information correct?”

“Yes.” Mostly. I had fudged about my time with Damian, but a prospective boss didn’t need to know about my real experience there. Neither did Callum.

“Because it says that you graduated from high school five years ago. That would make you about twenty-three, which isn’t what you told me when I asked how old you were.”

“I wanted us to be the same age,” I said. It had meant that we were similar and had a link. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

He nodded and put down the résumé. “I’m really tired. Good night.” He went into his bedroom and shut the door and I knew that things had just gone bad. I would have known how to fix it with Damian, the tricks I would have tried that might have succeeded. They had started and ended with his penis.

I didn’t know any tricks that would work with Callum. This problem had come up so fast—you often didn’t get any warning of when the worst was about to happen. You might be putting on makeup and doing your hair, and then you’d get a slap across the face. I put my hand on my cheek, feeling like that had really happened. Then I went to bed, too, but I was up early the next morning.

“Hi,” I told him when he came out of his bedroom. He had slept in, which was good for him. “I was waiting to make you breakfast.”

“That’s ok. I have to get over to the stadium and I can eat there. You need the car?”

I didn’t, not really, but I nodded. It meant that I’d have to drive him, so we’d be riding together and it was hard to escape from a moving vehicle. I knew that from experience.

But I only wanted to talk to him, not hurt him. “I’m sorry,” I said as we left the condo. “I had forgotten that I’d told you those things about my name and my age. I would have corrected it, if I thought it was important.”

“Your name is important and so is how old you are. Those are basic facts about your identity.”

In the past, I’d always adapted facts to make them what I needed at the time. “I’m sorry,” I repeated.