The Kissing Game by Marie Turner

Author:Marie Turner [Turner, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-01-29T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

“Donde las dan, las toman.”

What goes around, comes around.

The following morning, Robert and I sit side by side in the Chairman’s office, each in our own chairs, the man across from us holding our lives in his hands. By the time I arrived at the office, I had only enough time to put my bag down before the Chairman summoned us over the phone.

As he sits next to me, Robert seems to suspect nothing other than a standard meeting during which the Chairman will give us a new case. Standard procedure. Nothing out of the ordinary. Robert’s expression suggests he’s as interested in this meeting as he is in standing in line at the DMV. He doesn’t know what’s about to happen, obviously. He turns his bored eyes at me, and for a second they brighten with some sentiment. I wonder what he’s thinking and what he thinks I’m thinking. And the thoughts swirl like a horde from hell inside my brain, yammering and screeching and clothed in smoke.

“Bacon avocado on toasted white,” the Chairman says into the phone.

Robert then glances down at my empty hands and scowls slightly, no doubt thinking I should’ve brought a notepad. But who needs a notepad now? Bringing one along would’ve been just a unfitting formality. It would be like bringing a parachute on a sinking ship, a clarinet to a shootout, a snakebite kit to a blazing inferno. Utterly useless. I know what’s going to happen, and I won’t need a notepad for it. The whole event will unravel while I sit here, motionless, my capillaries exploding. Looking at the books on the shelves, I notice one entitled Morality of Law, and think about how the word morality is so close to mortality.

Around us, the Chairman’s office looks the size of three of Robert’s. I’ve never seen the inside of it before, only walked past it the way commoners walk outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. The room is an explosion of glossy wood and books and smells like rare things. I suspect the wood comes from rare trees in a rainforest in some exotic corner of the world, where no doubt several species of insects and animals became extinct so that the Chairman’s office could look nice.

I’m hoping that he spends all day on the phone specifying what kind of salad he wants on the side of his bacon avocado sandwich because I haven’t quite figured out how to hold onto the massive cliff I’m about to fall off.

Morality, mortality.

The partner hangs up the phone. He leans over his desk and puckers his lips but then returns them their natural state. I wonder what irrevocable things are about to spout from his face. He’s wearing a burgundy colored suit that gives him the appearance of rust. Parted as far on the side as gravity will allow, his grey hair forms a thin frail carpet over his shiny bald head, where freckles try to hide on his scalp.

“It pains me to have this conversation with you two,” the Chairman begins.

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