To Robin and Kim, who are the two best friends I definitely don’t deserve but am lucky enough to have anyway. Y’all are completely messed up, have weird hobbies, and I’m honestly a little concerned about your obsession with printed planners (and I’m a Virgo!), but you are seriously my favorite people. Thank you for not letting me break up with you when my brain went haywire.
Chapter One
Feelings were things best folded into mental origami and stuffed into the back pocket of a pair of awful, turn-yourself-into-a-pretzel-to-get-them-off leather pants. And Thea Pope would know.
She’d bought a pair during a night spent online shopping while wine drunk on her couch in her Harbor City studio apartment and learned a valuable lesson: when one buys leather pants boozed up, one risks popping a hip out of place peeling them off when sober.
But why did her emotions need to stay shoved in the back of her closet, still in the back pocket of those fully-endorsed-by-Satan leather pants? Because Thea would never, ever, abso-fucking-lutely EVER take them out and put them on again. Therefore, the devil pants would remain forever squashed up in a little ball on the floor of her closet, so she could pretend the pants—and, ergo, her feelings—didn’t exist.
Issues?
She had none, because everything was fine. Totally fine. Without a doubt, perfectly fine—with a dollop of extra fine on top.
Fine.
This was exactly what she’d just told her therapist during their weekly session. Thea still felt grumbly that her best friend Nola had strong-armed Thea and their other best friend Astrid into signing up for private sessions, arguing that if they didn’t all get “therapized” at the same time, they might grow apart.
But Thea didn’t need therapy. She was fine. F.I.N.E. Fine.
“Are you trying to convince me you’re fine, or yourself?” Dr. Kowecki asked, yanking Thea back to the here and now.
Thea glanced up at her therapist. Unlike Thea, Dr. Kowecki didn’t fidget or fight to keep her gaze from melting back to the dark blue floral pattern of the Persian rug between the leather club chair where Dr. Kowecki sat and the leather couch where Thea—who was desperately trying to keep her cool exterior in place—sat clasping her hands tightly together in her lap. Who knew knuckles could turn that white?
“It’s true,” Thea said.
“And so the fact that you were passed over for the promotion at the museum is just ‘fine’?”
Passed over for Perry, the old-money legacy with five years’ less experience than her? She swallowed the automatic frustrated groan and just let that shit go. “I can’t change it, so I’m choosing to move forward.”
Dr. Kowecki lifted an eyebrow in question. “But you aren’t upset that someone with less experience and fewer qualifying credentials than you got the job you applied for?”
“There’s no point in getting upset.” Or at least there was no point in showing it. She would be like a reed and let this epic bullshittery flow through her like the wind. “It’s fine.”
Dr. Kowecki slapped her notebook shut and, with jerky movements, snapped the cap back on her pen, then set both items down on the small table by her chair with an annoyed sigh. “That’s become my most unfavorite word.”
“Really?” Thea asked, her blood pressure skyrocketing as she grasped at any conversational topic that would put them back on an even keel, where she liked it. “Mine’s bollocks. I had a roommate in college who thought cursing with British terms made her sound smarter.” Thea discreetly wiped her suddenly sweaty palms on her jeans. “My roommate even started talking with a fake British accent. She was from Akron.”
“Interesting but not the point.” Dr. Kowecki took off her black-rimmed glasses and chewed on the end of the straight part as she let out a weary sigh.
Thea braced herself. She knew that sigh. It was the sigh of disappointment.
Thea had lots of experience with that sigh—starting with when she was twelve and lost the last bit of adorable-kid-sister look that her mom had parlayed into a minor success as a child actor in commercials. Of course, then Thea had become a gangly, zit-prone teen, and the casting calls—blessedly, for an attention-shy person like her—had stopped coming. Her mom had never forgiven her for that, but at least she’d focused all of her momager energy on Thea’s sister. Jackie’s acting career had gone—and was still going—very well for both of them. That meant that Thea had enough space to do what she really wanted—go to school for her BS and then her master’s and then her PhD, so she could spend the rest of her life with bones. Dinosaur bones, that was.
Dr. Kowecki continued to gnaw on the end of her glasses—it was called the temple tip. Her therapist nibbled on it often enough during their sessions that Thea had looked up diagrams of eyeglasses to identify the technical term for that part.
“You’ve spent your whole life minimizing conflict to your own detriment. Don’t you think it’s time you stop?” Dr. Kowecki asked. “Isn’t it the time in your life when you develop techniques to help you better deal with conflict rather than ignore it?”
That sounded…absolutely hellacious. And the last thing in the world Thea would ever want to do. “I’m fine with conflict.”
There was that sigh again. “Tell me again about your sister’s wedding?”
Thea bit back a groan. “It’s a destination wedding in Wyoming.”
One week of having to hang around Jackie’s Hollywood friends while being followed by cameras for seven days solid, because the wedding and everything leading up to it was part of a reality TV special.
“And you’re excited to be on TV again?”
Even the idea of being on camera had Thea’s gag reflex working on an empty stomach. “No, but the museum gave me approval to work at a dinosaur fossil site nearby, so being at the wedding plus a dig outweighs that part.”
Kinda.
Sorta.
Not really at all, but she was a reed, damn it, and this too would pass her like the wind. Plus, the opportunity to participate in the dig of a newly discovered deinonychus was beyond exciting. According to the museum gossip, the dinosaur wasn’t just one full skeleton of the predatory, big-clawed feathered theropod, but three! This had led the local press to call it a velociraptor find, since the deinonychus was the inspiration for the pack-minded dinosaurs that were Jurassic Park fan favorites. Finding a complete skeleton was amazing, but uncovering three? Yeah, even homebody, never-asks-for-anything Thea would do whatever it took to witness this discovery.
So when the reality TV production team said they’d pay for her plane ticket out to Wyoming, she was able to sweeten her proposal to her higher-ups at the museum by explaining that, in exchange for letting her take a paid leave of absence to participate in the dig for two weeks after the wedding, they wouldn’t have to cover any of her travel costs. It was the fastest—and only—dig approval she’d ever gotten.