“We have beautiful nature here!” Sandy argued as they walked along the trail. Krysta exchanged a relieved look with her. Lydia let out a deep breath. Whew. The worst was over.
“How do you go from administrative assistant to director?” her dad muttered.
“Back in my day, you had to sleep with someone powerful,” Sandy joked.
Krysta started to choke.
“Mom!” Lydia shouted. “That’s sexist!” Her face burned and her skin crawled. It wasn't from the mosquitoes.
“Too much Mad Men, honey,” Pete explained, chuckling softly as the group made their way home.
Chapter Five
It wasn’t until Lydia was buckled into her seat on the plane and the Icelandair attendant began reciting all of the FAA regulation statements that they were required by law to make, that the butterflies in her stomach began to flap in earnest and that it dawned on her what she had done. Then again, she figured, she’d have moments like this over the next few weeks and months as she adjusted to the fact that she had just been promoted, taken a salary three times her normal one, had broken it to her parents that she was leaving and had uprooted her entire life all for the sake of…of what?
That was the problem. She wasn’t sure why she was doing this.
Tears filled her eyes suddenly as she thought of Matt—no, Michael. Mike. Of the intensity of their last conversation, how drained and filled she felt all at once, the darkness of betrayal overshadowed for tiny, brief shining moments of hope—which were dashed almost instantly when she realized what he had done to her. She hadn’t had time to mourn the death of expectation, to really grieve for losing the imagined future, the imagined self that she had seen with Matt, who it turned out was Michael Bournham of all people. It made her feel stupid. It made her feel small and insignificant and shamed to have been duped so badly.
She and Krysta had been so suspicious in the beginning that Matt Jones looked just a little too much like Michael Bournham for it to have been a coincidence. When she’d asked him or insinuated that he might be related, he had brushed it off. And now she wanted to smack herself, bang her head against a desk, do something—but she knew that if she smashed her forehead against the serving tray over and over again she would just get reprimanded by the flight attendant because the trays needed to be in their upright position for takeoff. So, instead, she beat herself up inside.
The whirlwind of the last week came crashing down on her, her body filled with concrete, her heart an abyss with a hole in the bottom of it that everything just drained out of. Miles had seen the video. She didn’t know about Adam and Dan, but by the time she landed in Iceland, in Reykjavik—she still struggled to pronounce it properly and probably mangled it anyhow—they would know. They were tech savvy and tuned in to the matrix of social media, of hours spent combing the internet for insight and amusement and entertainment, and it wouldn’t take much to put two and two together, in spite of that harpy’s claim that it was her. Diane had given her an excuse—though Miles hadn't bought it for one second.
And Mike’s explanation for that one? That of all people Diane Powell would go public and claim it was her? She could guess why. The woman was all over the socialite papers in the Globe and online and looked like a very, very tight version of a woman, overly primped like a human poodle, a little too perfect and a little too puffed to be quite right. Claiming that she’d been the one in that sex tape—the words “sex tape” made Lydia’s stomach drop even further, and it wasn’t from the physics of takeoff as the plane entered the sky—that that woman would claim to be on that sex tape was mind-boggling.
Krysta had been her filter these past couple days, going online, reading the gossip sites, checking out Facebook. Lydia had popped into her own Facebook account once, and only once, and every single person, it seemed, in her hundreds of friends from high school and college and grad school kept sharing that damn video over and over and laughing and laughing.
A few had commented on her page, “Hey Lydia, isn’t that where you work, ha ha ha?” And then, when one of the major gossip sites had somehow thrown her name out as a possible contender, all of the sharing had come to a great big halt, her page filled now only with LOLCats and outraged political posts. She knew that people were setting up their own filters and the fact that they didn’t include her was judge, jury, and verdict enough—until Diane had come along. Miraculously, the shares had started up again, people believing what they wanted to believe. The heat had been taken off of Lydia. What had replaced the heat was a stone-cold sadness, an introspection she had never asked for and a scandal that had spun off from what she had thought was passion.
She grabbed her little cocktail napkin and began wiping her eyes, dabbing at them, trying to stop the tears before they pooled over her lower lids. It wasn’t going to work, so she fruitlessly turned her head toward the window and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She was leaving everything—everything—that she knew. Not just Maine; she had left that behind when she had moved to Boston, but she had come into the arms of Grandma, had met Krysta, developed friendships and networks. They weren’t big—she wasn’t the type to go out and party and have hundreds of friends—but she had her core group, her core life, and if she were being pulled to this new opportunity it would have been different.
For a few hours that day that the promotion was offered to her, she had that choice, she had the choice to take this. It all came crashing down when that video was released, when she learned the truth. When she discovered that this man who was so wildly attractive, who made her do things that she couldn’t fathom herself doing, who made her feel like becoming a better part of herself—that he’d been a lie? It suddenly became a push to go to Iceland. Pushed out of her sense of dignity. Pushed out of her life in Boston. Pushed out of anonymity, out of privacy, out of respect.
If Michael Bournham had taken his hand and placed it splayed and rough on the center of her back and shoved her until she spun around the Earth twice, he couldn’t have pushed any harder than he had with the creation of Matt Jones, with the stolen kisses in the supply closet, with the stolen panties in the elevator—and with a very much given desire and culmination of that desire in one hot, torrid, intense moment in his office that night.
He had told her that he’d forgotten about the cameras, but really? How does the CEO of a major company forget about the fact that he is on a reality TV show? And when she’d asked him that, when she’d screamed it at him, he’d had no answer. He’d turned into some kind of robot, his eyes growing cold, his body rigid, and that’s when she lost. Lost him, lost her heart, lost herself—because at that exact moment she decided she would obey his final order. And his final order had been her promotion.
And so, just as systems fall apart when the workers aren’t able to be creative and make their own decisions based on analysis, gut feelings, instinct, and experience, in this case Lydia simply maliciously obeyed.
What she hadn’t expected when the plane landed was that Iceland wouldn’t be covered in ice. She knew from doing some quick research before making a gigantic, intercontinental overseas move that it wasn’t really covered in ice, but the desert-like quality of the ground was what threw her off. It was as if someone had thrown her in tundra-covered desert with occasional jutting, black volcanic rocks poking out here and there. It was a bit like riding a bus on the moon at times, and she found herself surprised by how desert-like a country could be that had water. It wasn’t a dry desert, it was hard to describe, and she found herself wishing she had a travel companion to talk it through with.
But instead, she settled in and just decided to observe. A gentleman next to her, who appeared to be in his sixties, somewhere around her dad’s age, was traveling alone as well. She gathered it was on business, he was wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase and constantly tapping something out onto a BlackBerry.
“You going to the Blue Lagoon?” he asked her when he noticed her watching him.
“The Blue Lagoon? Oh, yeah…yeah, I forgot about that,” she said, smiling. He suddenly took more interest in her and she had to turn on those sensors that she had developed over the past few years. The ones that detected whether he was being friendly and father-like or a lecher. His eyes combed down her body, taking in the swell of her br**sts, her nipped waist, her wide hips, and even in yoga pants and a nice knit top, she knew where to categorize him.
Lech.
“You know,” he added, “you can rent bathing suits there. They’re quite”—he paused, his voice going low, his head leaning in conspiratorially—“nice.”
“Oh,” she said, tightening her body, pulling away, knowing the drill on this one. It wasn’t that she considered herself particularly attractive or that she had men drooling all over her constantly, but she was a woman in her twenties, reasonably attractive, and apparently to this guy, some piece of meat that he thought he could taste at his leisure.
“Thank you, I have my own bathing suit.” She turned away, wishing that she had taken her iPod so she could put the earbuds in and turn him off and turn something far better to listen to on.
He nudged her, either not getting the message or choosing to bulldoze through it. “What’s your bathing suit look like, honey?”
Oh, not this. Anything but this.
She turned and gave him her most withering look and said, “My bathing suit looks like a knee to the balls.”
And then she narrowed her eyes and willed herself to stare him down. The whites of his eyes had that rheumy look of a liver slowly going downhill, that yellowish, watery appearance that she’d seen in homeless guys on the streets of Cambridge, especially in Central Square. His irises were such a pale blue it reminded her of washed-out sheets, of clamshells gone and faded from deep purple to a pale, grayish blue etched over and over by the tides. His skin had a distribution of burst blood vessels, the nose big and pored, and as he leaned away his mouth went into a pursed, pinched look.
She just shook her head, and as she stood and gave him a complete and lovely view of her ass in all its yoga-panted glory as she twisted and contorted to pull her bag out from under the seat, he stopped her. Not with his touch, because that would have got him a knee to the balls or under his chin or worse. She was so lit up with outrage, really, that on top of everything else in her life she was being hit on by a man old enough to be her father on a plane ride to a future she wasn’t even sure she wanted anymore.
“Miss, I’m sorry,” he said.
She tensed, her shoulders pulling up, the headache starting in the back of her skull.
“I’m really sorry,” he said, his voice changing. She turned and looked at him to assess whether it was genuine, and it seemed to be. “I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable, and if anyone should move, it’s me.” His voice had gone from something animal to something contrite, and she found herself drawn to it even as she was repulsed by the way he had just treated her.