I’d never met siblings so different from one another before.
Jules was driven, grounded, organized, a little cool at times, icy when she was mad at you.
Gemma was all things light and airy. I swear to Christ, she brought sunshine into the office with her when she showed up to work. She floated around, offering twinkling laughs and easy smiles. She was decidedly disorganized. And Jules had worried all through her senior year in high school that she would never get serious and pick a stable career. She was warmth, through and through. I’d never even seen her angry. I couldn’t picture it. But I sincerely doubted it could ever be called icy. She just didn’t seem like she could manage that.
Maybe that was why I couldn’t sleep.
Because when she was telling me her situation, there was a dimming of that lightness in her eyes. There were no smiles or laughter. Her soul was heavy with it, weighing her down.
It was a fucking crime.
And it had me on edge.
A part of me wanted to get up, get dressed, get in my car, drive over to David’s house, and threaten the shit out of him.
The other part, though, knew from hard-earned experience that most–if not all–people tended to see their situations through a very narrow, incredibly biased scope.
David-the-evil-suspicious-CFO might not have been so formidable after all, but rather just a keen-eyed man who happened not to appreciate Gemma’s breezy way of life.
Her feeling of being watched may have been her own guilty conscience for snooping around when she knew she wasn’t supposed to.
There were three sides to every story.
If things didn’t resolve themselves in the very near future, it would be my job to figure out that middle ground where most reality existed.
Until then, all I could do was offer her a safe place and a sounding board. I could keep an eye on her and the situation.
I would have to get used to the uneasy sensation in my stomach.
Sometime around six, I gave up on getting any more than a few snippets of sleep. Wondering how I was supposed to get through endless files once again, I showered then made my way downstairs to start the coffee and rummage around for any tea there might possibly be tucked in a cupboard somewhere.
Lucking on some plain oolong tea–whatever the fuck that was–I put on a pot of water to boil as I started making some breakfast, overthinking the whole process because I knew Gemma to be a somewhat particular eater. Not vegetarian, yet only ate meat sparingly. Loved fruits and vegetables, but liked to eat organic.
To be honest, I rarely did my own food shopping, either adding the task to Jules’ never-ending to-do list, or, more often, leaving it to whoever I was seeing at the time.
It had been a bit since anyone was in my house. Which meant that Jules had set it up so that strangers walked in my open front door to load up my fridge and pantry when I was not home.
That ended up working in my favor since Jules’ was a bit of a healthy eater as well, so most of the shit in the fridge was stuff I figured Gemma would eat.
It was almost eight when I finally heard movement from the floor above, signs of life as she changed, got ready for her day.
Unlike many–if not most–of the women I knew, it was a short process. Gemma wasn’t huge on makeup, and her hair just kind of did its own natural wavy thing that worked on her.
It was ten minutes tops between when I heard her get out of the bed (and I had to admit Miller was right about the orgy comment) to when she was coming down the stairs.
Only, it wasn’t the Gemma I was familiar with. The Gemma with the wild hair and loose, bright clothing.
No.
This was Corporate Gemma.
Her usual wardrobe was replaced with severe black slacks, clunky clogs, and a hideously mundane white button-up shirt that she had tucked in and buttoned all the way up. Her hair was slicked back, pulled and pinned into spot-on imitation of some severe schoolmarm from times gone by.
The whole thing was off-putting, to say the least.
There was this swirling sensation of wrongness inside me as I watched her tug at her sleeve, clearly objecting to the tight, buttoned cuff, likely longing for one of those floral sundresses I had gotten so used to seeing her in.
“That’s a new look,” I remembered to say after realizing I had been staring at her for too long. And that my face likely showed at least a small bit of my displeasure.
“God, I hate it. I feel like my skin can’t breathe. Do you ever feel like that? Like when you have to put a stuffy suit on?”
“I kind of like putting a stuffy suit on.”