Suspension: An Opposites Attract Romance Audiobook

They say I have no chill.

Just because I iron my underwear and check people’s math for a living doesn’t mean I’m a monster. I’m particular.

I’m definitely not prepared for Maddie Parker, the writer my family’s business hires for a marketing project. She keeps candy in her pockets and asks uncomfortable questions.

She pushes all my buttons, and I suspect she’s doing it on purpose. I wish I could stop thinking about her red lips or the way her breath smells so sweet after she eats licorice. But does she have to eat it in my car?

I finally lose my composure when an unexpected storm makes a mess of things, and for the first time in my life, I don’t have a plan for how to proceed.

No. No, no, no, no. This isn’t happening. 

“You’ve been such an asset to our team the past few years, Madison. Truly.” My boss looks like he’s going to cry as he slides the letter across the desk to me. Or maybe he’s hoping I don’t cry? It’s hard for me to pay attention to him above the sound of my heart pounding in my ears. 

“…severance. And, well, I know you’ll have questions about COBRA for health insurance.” He swallows. I swallow. Of course I have questions about my god damned health insurance. I spend $500 a month on diabetes supplies with health insurance. 

“Maddie? Madison?” He looks like he wants to squeeze my hand. I pull my hands back from the desk into my lap and start shaking my head. When we had the company meeting last week announcing a round of impending layoffs, I really thought I was going to be safe. 

I’ve worked at the Post since college—I started with my friend Emma doing grunt work and covering town hall meetings. Now, eight years later, I’ve got my own beat as a healthcare reporter and have taught myself how to use the back end systems to help with the paper’s online content. Hell, people come to me for help putting their stories online. 

Phil called me in to his office and I should have known. I should have known when he used a nice voice. This crotchety old blow-hard is always yelling. 

“Maddie, honey, you’re really sweating. Can I get you anything?” He looks at me with concern and I notice I’m hella thirsty. 

“Shit,” I say, reaching for his glass of water. I hear my glucose monitor beep a warning at me. My sugars are high. “I’m stressed and I’m hyper. I need to get out of here.” I’m yelling, but I also can’t seem to control the volume of my voice. This is not good. None of this is good. I vaguely hear my boss—former boss I guess—shouting after me, but I need to move my body. 

I barge out the front door of the newspaper office and start circling the building. Laid off. Unemployed. I take some deep breaths, trying to ignore the beeping sounds coming from my glucose monitor. Being unemployed is shitty for everyone, but being unemployed and losing health insurance for a type one diabetic? 

I plunk down on the grass beside a garbage can, panicking. With shaking hands, I pull my phone out of my bra and start texting Emma. Only I pull up the wrong message thread and text both her and our other friend, Nicole.

Got fired. Going to die. Help.

My phone rings in my hand almost as soon as I hit send. I squint at the screen, but my high blood sugar makes it sort of hard to see. I really need my insulin pump to get cranking here so I can calm down. 

I press the green circle to accept the call, but it’s a group video call, so both Emma and Nicole are squinting back at me as I rest my head on the trash can. 

“Madison Parker, you tell me what’s going on. Do I need to walk over there and get you?” Emma can’t drive because she’s epileptic. She and I bonded immediately over our glitchy organs way back in college. We’ve been glitchy gals for years. I laugh at that idea. “Glitchy gals.” I’m about to tell her not to strap her babies in the stroller on my account when Nicole shakes her head. 

“Nobody is walking anywhere. I’m coming to get you.”

“What about me?” Emma looks insulted that she’s somehow getting left out of the pity party I guess they’re throwing for me this afternoon. 

Nicole rolls her eyes. At least I think she does. My sugars are normalizing a little bit; I can feel it. But the screen is awfully small for a three-way video chat. “Look,” she says. “I’m going to make sure Madison is not in a coma and I will bring her to your house. Do you think you can have alcohol ready when we get there, Ems?”

Emma bites a fingernail, pondering. She doesn’t drink alcohol, either. See also: epilepsy medication.

“Scratch that. Maddie, can you have alcohol when you’re freaking out? I don’t know all the rules. Anyway, Emma, we’re tapping into your medical weed.”

* * *

I’m not sure how long I sit on the grass by the garbage. Eventually, someone hands me a dollar bill as I’m sitting there, and I realize I need to pull myself together and at least start emptying out my desk. Nicole screeches into the parking lot, parking sideways behind my editor’s car so he’s blocked in. I smile for the first time since I got to work this morning. 

“Jesus, look at you,” she says, hands on her hips, tapping her stylish shoe. I look down at myself. I’m a little rumpled, it’s true. Most days, I wear leggings and a compression tank to hold all my gadgets in place and I top it all off with tunic dresses or long sweaters. 

And a fanny pack. I wear one everywhere. I’ve got a dozen of them. They’re just the perfect size to hold all my snacks, and my reporter’s notebook, plus my phone and backup insulin cartridges. 

Nicole gestures at my dress, all bunched up and draping strangely. My tank is untucked because I was fiddling with my insulin pump. I see now why that passerby thought I was homeless. I sigh. 

Nicole starts pulling reusable cloth bags from her purse. “Do you have a lot of stuff to clear out,” she asks, raising a brow at me. “We’re not waiting for security to clean out your desk or whatever the fuck. I’m getting you out of here.” She drapes an arm over my shoulder and escorts me back inside. 

She tells me to sit down and pull any personal files off my laptop, handing me an external hard drive that she also has in her purse for some reason. I look at her, wide-eyed with surprise, as she starts pulling my photos off my cubicle walls. As Nicole opens my desk drawers, she starts shaking her head and laughing. 

“Seriously, Maddie? All you have in here is snacks and batteries.”

“That’s not entirely true,” I tell her, grabbing my crackers, leaving the batteries for the paper’s voice recorder in the drawer and tugging open another. “I’ve also got my fanny packs.”

We share a laugh, my first today, and empty my stash of colorful pouches into one of Nicole’s bags. If I’m going to be the weird girl in the black tunics with a fanny pack, I figure the packs should at least be cute.

But really, apart from a few photos and two bags of fannypacks and some food, there’s not much physical evidence of me here at work. I start to cry for the first time, looking at the empty walls of my cubicle, realizing how much more I’m losing than just my health insurance. My worst fear has been that I’ll become a drain on society. I’ve spent a lot of time in hospitals. I’ve put my parents through a lot. I worked really, really hard to make it through college and I thought I was on a really strong path here. Damn it, I like writing about healthcare! I have a really unique experience with healthcare and I think it’s made me good at what I do.

“What the hell am I going to do, Nik?” I ask her. 

She scoops me up into a hug and just holds me for a bit. “We’re going to figure it out,” she says. “But for now, you’re going to Emma’s house to get high.”