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“Gem,” Lincoln cut me off, making me look over to find his lips twitching, reminding me that I was going off on ‘one of my tangents’ as my mother would call it. “So you’re working at Blairtown Chem,” he reminded me.
“Right. I started there a while back. And everything was… alright. You know… it’s a job.” A job I hated, resented, but those were cards that needed to be played close to the vest. “They have a great benefits package. And steady hours.”
“Sometimes you gotta take the job you don’t love because you need the stability.”
“Yeah. Something like that.” Nothing like that, actually. I chanced a look over at him, trying to discern if he could see through me, if he knew there was a heady dose of lies mixed in with the truth.
“What’s your position?”
“I’m the, ah, executive assistant to the CEO.”
“You’re a secretary?” he asked, brows furrowing once again. “You have a fucking degree in like Earth science or some shit…”
“I have my bachelor’s in Environmental Science,” I corrected even though he was close enough.
“Yeah. We were all excited for you. Jules was going on and on about how you were going to be an ecology consultant and that you could make a fair seventy-k doing that. Why are you working as a secretary?”
Here was where the big lie had to come in.
It was funny. I had told the lie at least a dozen times over the past few months. To my friends. To my family. To everyone around me. I–someone who hated lying–had somehow managed to do so without much guilt over it. Yet there was no mistaking the wringing sensation of my stomach.
I was feeling guilty at the idea of telling this lie to Lincoln.
Why, I wasn’t sure. It should have been there when I had told it to my parents, the people who had footed most of the bill for my college degree. Or my sister who had helped me sit and fill out all the paperwork for the loans for the remainder. Or the friends who had kept me sane through those first rough years where I struggled to adjust to college life.
But, no, it hadn’t been there.
Until now.
It made no sense. Except maybe if you factored in that he was trying to help me, protect me. And by lying to him, I was making that job harder. If not impossible.
I had seen it happen too many times to count with the clients in the office. Despite Quin being very clear about needing absolute honesty when they came into his office, no matter how incriminating or humiliating the truth might be. It was the only way for them to be able to do their jobs effectively. To fix whatever their problem was. But, almost without fail, before Nia was around to dig up their deep, dark secrets, they lied. Over and over. Making everyone’s jobs harder. Sometimes making the situation blow up in everyone’s faces.
I knew better.
Yet here I was.
Being one of those idiots I told myself I was too smart to ever be.
There just wasn’t much of a choice this time around, though.
So, gut-wringing or not, I had to tell this lie. I had to keep telling this lie.
“It’s not the best time for my career. It looked promising when I started school. But more and more people are denying that there is even such a thing as climate change. Governments are rolling back regulations about clean air and where you can or can’t spill toxic chemicals. Companies just aren’t hiring ecologists to tell them how to get greener, lower their impact. There isn’t much of an incentive for them to do so.” Despite the earth melting, but saying that wasn’t going to help me here. “There just weren’t as many jobs as I hoped.”
“There are companies that still give a shit.”
“There are,” I agreed. “But they aren’t here.” That was, at least, mostly true.
“You don’t want to move away from your family.”
“Exactly.”
“I get that. So, you took what you could get.”
“I have loans that need to be repaid. Lights that need to stay on. All that fun adult stuff. This job pays well. I mean, only a company as big as Blairtown Chem would require bachelor’s for assistant work.”
“I’m surprised they would hire someone with your degree at all.”
I would have been too.
If human resources even knew that.
Oh, the lies were stacking up.
And up.
And up.
I couldn’t help but wonder when they would get too high, too heavy, sending everything I had carefully constructed toppling to the ground.
And if I would survive the wreckage.
That was a problem for another time, though.
“I don’t think they even really looked that deep. The human resources lady was a bit frazzled. My boss is not the kind of man who could function without an assistant. I mean, I don’t know if he would know how to open his blinds if I wasn’t there the first thing in the morning to do it.”
