by Pratt, Lulu
POPPY
AS MY PLANE touched down at JFK airport, I was immediately overwhelmed with the sense that I was just a little girl in a very vast, vast world. This was a pretty foreign thought, because given my size – I’m a big, beautiful woman with emphasis on the big – I rarely considered myself ‘little.’
But that’s what I was out here. Forget my curves – New York didn’t give a damn about me, not until I made a name in her boroughs. Sure, I was a social media success, but three million followers here is a pittance. Your next-door neighbor has at least five million. I’d never been to the city before, though, so I forced myself to keep an open mind, to not make snap judgments. It wouldn’t be very Christian of me.
I raised my phone camera in the selfie setting and checked my make-up. I’d avoided dryness on the flight through a sheet mask and lots of water, but I’d need to touch up my serum in the car. Yuck, face-touching in a cab? I thought with dismay. Not hygienic.
Turned out, I didn’t need to get my panties in a twist – BeYou had sent me a driver, who was waving a neatly printed sign with my name at the mouth of the arrivals terminal.
BeYou is many things. Primarily, they’re a fashion company. If I’m getting my history right, they started out selling socks at the turn of the last century, somewhere near Albany. Since then, they’ve gotten their fingers in every piece of fashionable pie. They have magazines, a talk show, brand partnerships with fashion lines, the list goes on and on. They’re not so much a company as a behemoth.
And they wanted to work with me. Me!
I’d gotten a call a few weeks back from one of the BeYou bookers, saying that they’d seen my YouTube channel and would be interested in me doing a feature in their BeYouGirl magazine. An offshoot of their original BeYou Magazine, BeYouGirl was the company’s more youthful publication, with its eye on what young adults and teens were wearing, clicking on and liking. They’d asked me to come in and do a magazine feature on how young women can buy all-natural, cruelty-free make-up without breaking the bank. You can imagine how fast I said ‘heck yeah.’
The feature alone made my heart sing, reminding me of when I was a kid, reading BeYouGirl under the covers and hoping someday to see a girl who looked like me striding confidently across those glossy pages. But, on top of the feature, they’d invited me to come on their newly launched talk show. To do what, I had yet to learn, but I was game for just about anything I could participate in fully clothed. Plus, I relished the chance to get all gussied up for my big TV debut.
As I piled into the black sedan with tinted windows, my hands involuntarily brushing on the leather of the seats, I sighed happily. I’m the luckiest woman in the world, I thought to myself. We sped out of the airport, and I rolled down the window to take in my first glimpse of the New York skyline.
After a forty-five minute ride which seemed to pass in the blink of an eye, the driver deposited me on the steps of Fifth Avenue, with promises to drop my bag off at the hotel. He sped off before I could so much as raise a finger in protest, but I didn’t mind. To be honest, it’d probably do me a lick of good to get more suspicious. Given my Southern disposition, I always assume people have the finest of intentions, that a man veering off with my swollen suitcase was just being helpful. ‘One day,’ April had said to me recently, ‘you’re gonna get burned.’
But I couldn’t suspect anyone of doing bad – not today, when my world was so good. I looked up at the black and metal skyscraper, towering over my head like a set of modern Jenga blocks stacked high. On the front, around the thirtieth story and written in steel script, were the words ‘BeYou.’
I’d arrived, in every sense of the word.
Clutching my travel purse, I walked into the building, stopping only briefly to give security my name and get directions to the elevator. Before long, I was in front of the BeYouGirl offices. Around me, like a sea of beautiful fish, flashed editors, photographers, stylists, on and on. They were every color of the rainbow, and wore every color of the rainbow. In my outfit, I felt wholly uncool, like the dowdy aunt at a fabulous Thanksgiving dinner.
“Um, ‘scuse me, miss,” I called out to one of the passing fish, one with rose-pink hair and gold glasses on the bridge of her nose, who was stepping behind the gleaming white front desk. “Do you know where I can find Lauren Totelle?”
The girl stopped and looked at me. “You mean the editor in chief?”
I nodded.
She snorted, and gave me a once-over. “Do you have some kind of appointment? Ms. Totelle doesn’t exactly take walk-ins. This isn’t a tattoo parlor.”
“I’m Poppy… Poppy Reeve.”
Her eyebrows, tinted pink to match her hair, shot up and she immediately moved from behind the desk, her entire demeanor changing.
“Oh, Ms. Reeve,” she stuttered out, her hands waving wildly, arms stacked with glittering noisy bangles. “So sorry, my bad. We’ve been waiting for you, right this way.”
She gestured that I should follow her, and I kicked my ass into gear, trying to keep up with her lithe legs that were almost as long as I was tall. We rounded one corner, another, another, passing by walls plastered with the covers of past BeYouGirl Magazines, rows and rows of perfect teeth shining out from unwrinkled faces.
We came to a halt in front of the largest set of doors I’d ever seen, and my guide rapped three times at the door with such precision that I almost wondered if it was a code.
“Ms. Totelle, I have a Ms. Reeve here to see you,” she called out, her voice loud enough to pass through any density of surface.
“Send her in,” came the muffled reply.
The girl opened the door and waved me in. I turned to thank her for her help, but she’d already skittered off on those stilt-like legs.
The room she’d dropped me off in was impossibly chic, and stood in stark contrast to the modernity of the outer offices. This was deep-hued, Diana Vreeland-esque with green velvet, leopard-print throws, crystal-cut glassware on a nearby bar cart.
In the middle of it sat a middle-aged woman with hair wrapped in a multi-colored turban. Her red lips met in a thin line, which grew thinner as she examined me. It was Lauren Totelle, the world-famous editor-in-chief of BeYouGirl.
“So you’re Poppy?” she asked, the words drawling.
“Yes’m.”
She held my gaze, and must have accepted the earnestness in my blue eyes because she finally responded, “We liked the first draft you turned in on the feature. You’ll work with one of our designers later to discuss layout of the piece, as well as coordinating beauty shoots. In the meantime, I’m sending you down to the studio on the fifth floor to record the talk show.”
I nodded along with all of her words – none of this was foreign to me, though I did wonder why such a simple message needed to be relayed by one of the most powerful women in fashion.
“Do you have any questions?” she asked, in a tone that informed me I’d better not.
“No, ma’am.”
“Good.” Ms. Totelle looked over my outfit again and inquired, “Do you have a change of clothes?”
I looked down at what I was wearing. It was my church dress, just about the nicest thing I owned that wasn’t my debutante gown. It was simple, sure, but so was I. Besides, while I might have had my hooks in the make-up world, I didn’t know diddly-squat about dressing myself.
“Err, no,” I replied, my face coloring. “I just came from the airport.”
She clicked her tongue. “Go see our people on nineteen, ask them for something TV-ready. They might have a thing or two in, ahem, your size.”
Hmph. Some etiquette. This woman talked to me like I oughta be ashamed of my body, when in fact I couldn’t have loved it any more.
“You’re dismissed,” she said, with a wave of her bejeweled hand, her gaze already directed at the huge monitor on her desk.
Almost as soon as I’d entered the room, I was exiting, my head steaming with her disapproval. Nobody, not even Lauren Totelle, could make me feel lesser than.
But I did have a job to do, so as per instructions, I took the elevator to the nineteenth floor, and was deposited in the clothing room, where a helpful team of interns brought me a scant selection of clothes with such efficiency I wondered if they’d been warned far in advance.
“Sorry it’s not much,” one of them whispered, a fellow big girl with flowing hips and a gorgeous ‘fro. “But you’re gonna look gorgeous.”
I smiled at her, touched by these words. “Thanks, sweetie.”
She nodded and ran off to find her co-workers, probably already behind on the next assignment. I went back to the elevators, and took them down to the fifth floor. According to my phone, I had about half an hour ‘til shoot time. Dang, I was already running behind.
An assistant must have recognized me from some call sheet, because she flagged me down and escorted me to a changing room, where she promised she’d grab me when we were a couple minutes before air. I thanked her, and the door slammed shut as she exited.
I looked at the pile of clothes in my hands, which I hadn’t had a chance to do until that moment. I sifted through them quickly – wrap dress, shapeless tunic, athleisure. It was all stretchy and devoid of any personality.
Until, that is, I reached the bottom of the stack and found a pink, tea-length dress in chiffon, with cap sleeves and pearl buttons. It looked like the sort of dress you’d wear to meet Meghan Markle. That is to say, it was perfect. I smiled to myself, feeling fairly certain that the curvy intern had picked it out for me.
“Thanks,” I whispered to her, wherever she was.
I quickly touched up my make-up, wanting to get it all set before I put on the dress so that I wouldn’t have any staining mishaps. Once that was finished, I looked around, then carefully began to disrobe. I know, I know, it was a private changing room, but even so, I’m a modest girl.
I’d stripped down to my white lingerie set. I’d gotten a matching one, just for this occasion. It was a balconette bra, trimmed in airy lace, and white panties with that rode up around my hips, emphasizing the goddess-like swivel of my curves.
I glanced in the mirror, allowing myself a moment of true vanity. The white, on top of my tanned skin, mixed in with the peachy hue at my cheeks and the bright blue of my eyes… I was a Monet painting of summertime. I was fat, and I was fabulous.
And then the door opened.
I shrieked, and reached for my dress, for a towel, for anything that could cover me. But it was too late – a man had already stepped into the room, and the sight of him stopped me dead in my tracks. He was just over six feet, lanky and stretched out, limbs dangling akimbo, dressed all in black with black curls flowing down around his face, grazing the black stubble on his cheeks, silver jewelry peeping out from behind the wall of black.
He was hot. Majorly hot. Almost-make-me-use-a-swear-word hot.
And he was grinning at me, his eyes running hungrily over my body, drinking it in like I was the last drop of water in the middle of the Sahara.
***
Thank you for reading the first five chapters of Take Me. Want more? Go to Amazon.com to read the full book. Thank you!
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