“Thanks” she said to my back, but distantly. She was moving on.

I moved on too, only glancing at her marking on the papers in that folder before I closed the door to her office and moved to mine.

It had been weeks so it felt weird being there. Especially right then, with the unexpected but definitely not unwanted news that my job description had changed. Changed to something I greatly preferred doing. Something safer. Something that maybe in doing it, I might get an hour or two’s sleep at night, having a clear head and feeling moderately (but not completely, never that) clean.

It was something that should make me smile.

Hell, it was something that should make me twirl with glee.

I did not twirl with glee.

Because it was unexpected. And it was swift. There had been nearly zero discussion about it with me, and my sister could be decisive, but she wasn’t stupid, she knew I had the most level head of all of us and she talked things through.

She hadn’t talked it through about the labs before she put them in operation either.

Not with me.

Not with our father.

Something was changing and as much as I wanted it to feel right, it felt wrong and it did nothing to make me feel any less like the world as I knew it was shifting under my feet.

And, even more than usual, I was powerless to stop the results of that shift.

Even if it meant the earth opened up and swallowed the whole of me.

* * * * * *

10:42 – That Evening

“Hey.”

My eyes moved from their contemplation of Nick’s super-cool reddish-pink glow light to his face.

He was curled up, head and shoulders to a pile of pillows in his bed at his headboard, his chest on display, his lower body partially tangled in sheets.

Somehow, between orgasm and post-orgasm cuddling-esque maneuvers (as we did them, Nick didn’t cuddle, I didn’t either—we both still did) to now, I’d shifted position.

I had some of his sheets tangled around my legs, partially around my ass, but my back was exposed, including my scar, and I had my arm on his gut, my chin to my arm, and my attention to the doom I sensed hovering in my world.

When he got that attention, I decided first things first and shifted the sheet so it covered my ass and the scars.

I watched his eyes shaft that way briefly, his mouth tightening in what appeared to be mild frustration. This was something he did whenever I showed any indication of embarrassment about my scar. Though, I had to admit, me doing that was happening on a rarer occasion. It was just that I felt vulnerable right then for some reason.

It was also something he wiped clean from his expression when he looked back to me.

“You’re a million miles away,” he noted.