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“You want peameal, strip bacon, or ham on yours?” I ask.
“Whatever is fine with me. Want me to throw a fruit salad together?” she asks.
“You don’t need to do that.” But she makes a killer fruit salad. She puts things like fresh mango and lime rind into it.
“I don’t mind.” Her fingers glide across my low back as she scoots past me and picks fruit from the bowl. I grab her a cutting board, and she hops up on a stool across from me.
“How’s your new job?” I ask, trying something new. Other than taking shots at each other and exchanging filthy words during sex, Bea and I don’t do a lot of talking. I like this with her. The peace and comfort of doing something normal is foreign, but appealing.
“Good. Better than my last job, for sure. I don’t think it’s my passion, but it pays the bills, which is more important, anyway.” She slices the top and bottom off an orange and carefully uses a paring knife to remove the peel.
I add slices of peameal bacon to the frying pan. “Is that why you got an accounting degree? So you’d have a stable job?” It seems like something Bea would do. Rage-quitting her job was out of character. She normally has a long fuse, except with me. I know how to push her buttons. She’s the only person I can do that with.
“Pretty much, yeah. There’s room for movement and growth, too.”
I put four English muffins into the toaster and crack eggs into the frying pan. “But you don’t love it?”
She shrugs. “I like it well enough. And I won’t waste four years of university education because it isn’t my dream job.”
Flip and Bea grew up in a tiny house. I spent a lot of time there as a kid. Mostly, it was an escape from the fighting before my mom left. But their fridge was always half bare, and they drank powdered milk and ate a lot of Kraft Dinner and cut-up hot dogs. It must have been hard when I came for dinner. They had to make double to feed me and Flip. But they always treated me like family. After my mom left, I had to help out with my brothers a lot, so Flip came to my place more often. Always having to be responsible for other people could get tiresome. But my brothers needed someone to take care of them, and it wasn’t their fault our mom bailed.
“If you could do anything, have any job, what would it be?” I ask.
“It’s not as lofty as being a pro hockey player, but I’d be a dietician—plan and prep meals for people. It’s a pretty linear job, though. Sports nutrition has more room for growth, but that might mean using Flip’s success to further my career, and I don’t want that. Also, it would definitely mean more school.”
Memories pop up from over a decade ago. I remember Bea as a kid, maybe six or seven years old at the most, in the kitchen with her mom, helping pack lunches and snacks for hockey practice. They rarely had fresh vegetables. Mostly they ate frozen. Except in the summer—they had a tiny garden with cherry tomatoes and carrots. Bea would cut the carrots into circles and put the ranch dip in a Tupperware container for Flip because it was the only vegetable he would eat without complaining.
“Why wouldn’t you want to use every advantage available to you?” I ask.
“Flip already helped pay for my degree. And I’m freeloading off of him and you right now. It’s not his fault he’s extraordinarily talented and I’m average.”
“You’re not average, Bea.” Since she’s been here, our place has been organized and spotless. We’re eating better than we ever have. The fridge is always stocked, and I’ve seen what she’s done with Flip’s financial portfolio. His investments are already up thanks to her tweaks. I’m tempted to hand over mine. Plus, she has a full-time job and still stays on top of everything else. And the sex is amazing.
She drops her gaze. “You know what I mean. His career pays him assloads of money while mine is stable and respectable.”
I want to brush her hair behind her ear, but I don’t. “His career will only last a decade, though, or two, if he’s lucky.” The toaster pops, and I arrange the English muffins on our plates.
“He’ll still make more in the next five years than I will in a lifetime, no matter what job I choose. So for now, I want the one that offers me more opportunities for growth.”
“I don’t know that you should discount using Flip’s career to your advantage. You had to give up a lot for him to get where he is,” I say. Maybe more than I realized, actually.
