Page 33 of Weather Girl

Another pair of hands joins Sage’s. “Wow. A lot of stress?”

I nod miserably into the face hole. I hear the sound of Torrance’s muffled laugh.

“Sorry,” she says. “That might be my fault.”

“No,” I rush to say as my masseuse attacks a knot beneath my left shoulder blade. “Work’s been fine. It’s just... been a rough couple months outside of it.”

“Too much talking,” Seth murmurs from Torrance’s other side.

“If you fall asleep, you won’t be able to enjoy it,” Torrance says in this mocking singsong, but she’s wrong. I’d give anything to fall asleep right now, especially as Russell’s masseuse hits a spot that he seems to really, really enjoy.

When I think I’m finally about to relax, my masseuse pats my back. “All done.”

Oh. Okay then.

There’s some awkwardness as we navigate how to leave in our varying states of undress, and I decide to keep my head down as long as possible. The masseuses encourage us to use the sauna so the heat can melt away the toxins in our systems. There’s one in the women’s locker room and one in the men’s, so we split up. Here it is, my chance to talk to Torrance one-on-one.

I wrap myself in a towel, not relaxed enough to show my boss my boobs. And yet there’s Torrance, letting it all hang loose. Actually, loose is the wrong word because Torrance Hale has a phenomenal body. If I looked like that at fifty-five, I’d be prancing around in the nude, too. She must notice my comfort level isn’t quite where hers is, though, so she grabs a towel and cinches it around herself before we make our way to the sauna.

I sink down onto the wooden bench, idly wondering if my crush on Russell is a toxin the sauna can whisk away.

“Breakup, right?” Torrance says. Her blond hair is piled on top of her head, and this might be the first time I’ve seen her without makeup.

“Sorry, what?”

“The source of your stress. I’m guessing part of it was your breakup?”

Torrance knows only the basics, not the ugly details. If I open up to her, like with Seth, maybe she’ll be more likely to open up to me. So even though Garrison isn’t a source of stress for me, not right now, I make a feast of ugly details for her.

I nod. “My fiancé ended things in October. It wasn’t the most cordial breakup.” Not entirely a lie.

“I remember when you got engaged,” she says. “That was a beautiful rock.”

That’s surprising—not that she remembered, but that she isn’t quick to denounce marriage, tell me I dodged a bullet.

“It was a surprise, but in retrospect, it was for the best.” I’m nowhere near ready to tell my boss the real reasons for the breakup, so I go with a vague, “We weren’t a good fit.”

“Better to know as soon as possible,” Torrance says. “Reminds me of my first husband.”

I have to fight to keep my jaw from dropping. “You were married? Before Seth?”

“Only for a short time. We got it annulled after three months. It was a Vegas wedding—we’d gone there for some friends’ joint bachelor-bachelorette party and drank a bit too much. This was back when I was still an intern. Anyway, when we got back, we thought, ‘why not try to make it work?’ But he didn’t like that I was so buried in the station.” A wicked smile. “Sometimes I think of him seeing my face all around the city and on TV as my revenge. He can’t get away from me.”

I have to laugh at that. “I had no idea.”

“I don’t talk about it because, well, there’s not much to talk about.” She curls and uncurls the edge of her towel, staring down at her French-pedicured toes. “Seth and I were friends when I was with my ex. Nothing happened between us, but we were close, and it wasn’t long after my annulment that Seth and I started seeing each other.”

There’s something in her tone that I’m stunned to realize might be nostalgia. This love for Seth, this thing I’ve been told used to exist but I haven’t been able to wrap my mind around.

Summoning all my journalism instincts, I stay quiet, letting her speak. What someone says after a long pause is often the juiciest information. That probably goes double when the person’s just had an aromatherapy massage, loose limbed and hopefully loose-lipped. I focus on the heat in the sauna, trying to relax as much as my brain will allow.

Sure enough, Torrance keeps talking. “Seth was my favorite thing about work, and after a while, I realized I was looking forward more to coming in to work and seeing him than going home to my ex. But. You know. Then that ended too, and I realized the only person I could ever truly rely on is myself. Other people only let me down.”

“How did he let you down?”

She snorts, a very un-Torrance-like sound. “Oh god, how didn’t he? You don’t really want all my dirty laundry, do you?” She doesn’t even wait for a response, clearly eager now to spill. “We were interns at a medium-sized station in Olympia. We were both interested in the weather, and we had similar backgrounds. And, well, I got called up to fill in first when their regular meteorologist was sick. I’ve never been so fucking nervous in my life.”

I can’t imagine Torrance Hale being nervous. Even though it happened years ago, it humanizes her—a little.

---