Working Title

by Holley Trent

  Joey stopped.

  So did Finch.

  She could go around him but risked rubbing her coat sleeves against the trees, and she didn’t want to budget a single dollar more for dry cleaning.

  “I’d tell you you’re in my way, but I suspect you know that,” she said.

  He’d probably been getting in people’s way his whole life. Men were often raised to be like that.

  “I don’t know what you think you heard—”

  “I heard enough to glean that she’s not interested,” Finch interrupted. “Why don’t you move on?”

  “Because I fight for the things I want.”

  “So, she’s a thing?” Finch clucked her tongue. “I’m gathering why she’s so disenchanted with you.”

  “You’re a little bit of a bitch, you know that?”

  Ooh.

  Intrigued, Finch clasped her hands together in front of her heart. She’d never been called that before and didn’t know what was supposed to happen next. Was there supposed to be a sash or a corsage? Who got to pin it on her? Was she supposed to do it or the person who’d given her the title?

  The situation seemed somehow momentous. For once in her life, she’d truly gotten under the skin of someone who truly deserved the aggravation.

  She felt powerful for a change.

  And she had so many questions.

  “You know exactly what I meant,” Joey continued. “And I don’t think I need to justify myself to you. Be decent enough and don’t interfere.”

  “Interfere with what? Your so-called fighting for what you want? Or in her decision to tell you no? Because I can multitask quite beautifully, I assure you. When you grow up in a family like mine and there’s always someone calling your name to ask you something, you learn to divide yourself as necessary.” Turning sideways, she sucked in everything in her body that could be deflated and maneuvered herself between the looming blond and a heavy pine bough. She ensured she’d put a good ten feet of clearance between her and Joey before saying, “What happens on retreat stays on retreat, right, Mr. Novak? That’s what you said when everyone called you an executive snitch last week. Well. Why don’t you leave any insistence you have on harassing her here, too? If she doesn’t want you, leave her alone.”

  “You know what? You are a—”

  Whatever aspersion Joey spoke, Finch didn’t hear it. She’d already entered the auditorium and slammed the door as he called out.

  Looking around the crowded room, she nudged her coat buttons free and tried to spy Lisa. She was under no delusion that Joey would do anything Finch suggested.

  Mindlessly, she returned greetings from some fellow fiction editors and weaved her way through the crowd, finally locating Lisa standing in front of an open door with a woman in a striped apron. She was signing a clipboard and laughing at some unheard joke.

  In “real life,” Finch would have stood there waiting for the discussion to end before getting anywhere near Lisa, but the circumstances called for assertiveness. In truth, she didn’t have much, but she had six loud, bossy siblings who seemed to always get what they wanted. She knew what it was supposed to look like, even if the performance genetics hadn’t shaken out in her favor. She could fake it, though. That’s what working in publishing was twenty percent of the time, anyway—bullshitting, and hoping everything synced up in the end regardless.

  “How do you feel about watching adaptations of Athena’s books during your supper?” Lisa asked her. She handed the clipboard over to the caterer who then hustled into the kitchen.

  “It’s one of ours?” Finch frowned. Unless she’d forgotten a film or two, the movie they were probably about to watch was Buckle Up, Santa. The book it was based on, published in 1967, was a redemption story about a 1940s department store Santa Claus who didn’t deserve redemption.

  In fact, the opinion of most modern thinkers was that the “hero” John Buckle deserved a shovel to the face, not a promotion to a cushy upstairs job and the subsequent return of his estranged wife and son.

  “That’s what Athena suggested,” Lisa said. “They said there was a studio looking at remaking the film. I’ve never seen it. It’s called Buckle—”

  “Fuck, I’d rather eat my shoe.”

  Stifling what was evidently going to be a violent guffaw, Lisa slung an arm around Finch’s back and pivoted them as a unit so she could giggle facing away from the room.

  “I meant it,” Finch said sourly, though managing to feel somewhat validated at the same time that Lisa felt casual enough with her to touch her. “It was one of those infamous films shown in middle school classrooms where I’m from. I’m probably dating myself by confessing the technology we had, but our teachers used to roll televisions into the classrooms the day before holiday break. The first couple of times I saw it, it was fine. I was consuming it on a superficial level like most people do, but as I got older, I learned better. Every year, someone at Athena is forced to name it on their list of holiday must-reads that goes out to the major periodicals. It was supposed to be my turn last year.”

  “And?”

  “I…” Finch grimaced. She wasn’t exactly proud of many of her timid coping strategies, but sometimes they just worked. “I just…didn’t turn in the list. I kind of ghosted on it. By the time they realized I hadn’t turned in the assignment, it was too late to hunt me down, and the lady in charge of the campaign had to make her own.”

  “Get Raleigh to say something about that tradition when you’re all back in the office. I can’t imagine he likes that movie any more than you do, and he’s got a big mouth.”

  “He probably doesn’t, but I…” Finch cringed, hating to admit yet another pitiful thing. “I try not to bother Raleigh? I send him what he needs for Stacia’s books and then generally stay out of his orbit. He’s a little intense.”

  Finch felt like such a fraud for even admitting that. There were people who would walk barefoot across broken glass to get a full-time job in publishing and she was basically clinging to the walls of the business. There was nowhere else she wanted to be more, but she couldn’t thrust herself into the center of it and be functional any more than someone could survive at the molten core of the Earth.

  “Huh,” Lisa intoned. “He is. I guess I’ve been inoculated to him. Doesn’t bother me a bit. He suits Everley so well. If he didn’t, maybe I’d have more to say.”

  The catering crew started to pour out of the kitchen with bread baskets and soup tureens.

  Lisa gestured to the rustic wooden tables, arranged perpendicular to the front of the room so that the seated diners could better see the projector screens. They’d be dining mead hall style, apparently—elbow-to-elbow—instead of in wide rows of chairs facing the screen.

  “Better go squeeze in someplace,” Lisa said. “No shoes on the menu, by the way, but I have it on good authority that the butternut squash soup is amazing, and the main course set Athena back a small fortune. I think I’ll partake.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. I’ll just call it a resort fee for making me put up with your hotheaded publicity staff. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m this-close to burying that guy Charlie in the woodpile.” In a mutter, she added, “What a clown.”

  Lisa hooked an arm around Finch’s and got her moving.

  Finch imagined that her grin at that moment would have been the number one hit for a “smug self-satisfied” gif search, and she pointed it right at Joey…who happened to be strolling by, scowling, because she, the “Little Bit of a Bitch” with no swagger whatsoever, had decided to play by the same rules as everyone else for once in her life.

  Funny how that suited her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “This part is different from the book,” Finch murmured into her half-empty pint glass.

  Setting down her own beer, Lisa leaned forward eagerly to hear her better.

  Finch had been regaling their end of the table with fascinating movie trivia for the better part of ninety minutes, which no one minded
at all.

  No one except Joey, anyway, and Lisa was trying her damnedest to ignore him. She was enjoying her light and therapeutic chatter with Finch. The conversations were low-pressure, but somehow still managed to feel fulfilling. Finch was the sort of rare soul Lisa could stay on the phone with all night telling her entire life story to. She hadn’t even realized she needed that until the caterers brought out dinner. Finch had hesitantly leaned toward Lisa and whispered, “I can’t eat baked potatoes anymore. My parents developed a chowder ten years ago and made all the kids taste-testers.”

  Lisa had wanted to hear that story.

  And she wanted, in turn, to tell Finch all about that time in high school when two feuding octogenarians started hurling mashed potatoes at each other at the senior center.

  Naturally, the fight was over a man. By the time Lisa could break them up, she was splattered from head to toe with the Wednesday night Bingo meal.

  She suspected that they could spin the conversation from one weird thing to the next seamlessly because they were different enough to surprise each other, but their interests probably overlapped a lot more than either of them knew yet.

  There was something comforting about that.

  Enjoying her time with Finch, however, was difficult with Joey sitting immediately across from her. The brazen bozo had “asked” the company’s young legal counsel to swap seats with him. The last seat available had been at the front near the speakers.

  “In the book, he slipped and had a tumble down the stairs,” Finch said, drawing Lisa’s attention back to her, “and everyone in the department store laughed at him. The screenwriters thought that would be too humiliating for the character.”

  “I never read the book,” Lisa confessed. “How did he respond to the fall?”

  “Got up and started tearing the banister apart.”

  “Yikes.”

  “I guess it was supposed to represent a setback in his growth arc,” someone called over from the other row of tables. “But it happens so close to the end that it’s hard to shake, you know?”

  “Have you never made a mistake, Sarah?” a blustery editor of war history books asked. Lisa recognized him from the last Athena event she’d attended with Everley. He could deflate a party vibe in twenty seconds or less. “How would you react if your life was falling apart like this guy’s was?”

  The group groaned.

  Even Lisa had to roll her eyes and throw her head back in disgust.

  She tried to keep her opinions to herself when she was working—after all, she was just the retreat owner. She was supposed to be a background player in her guests’ R&R experiences, but that guy and his buddy were probably going to make her persistent eyelid twitch return. It’d taken her nearly two months to get rid of the last one, and she’d had to cut back on coffee to do it.

  “Come off it, Dan,” Sarah moaned. “The crap that happens to this guy…” She pointed emphatically to the screen. “It’s all small misfortunes that he turns into huge ordeals. It’s the same kind of stuff women gracefully endure nonstop every single day, but you’d have no clue what we’re going through because you think that, surely, it must not be that bad if we don’t complain.”

  “Well, it must not be.”

  “Bullshit,” a gravelly-voiced proofreader said upon return from her smoke break.

  Lisa chuckled. She’d been waiting for someone to break the cuss word seal in that group. How they’d managed to keep their language clean for as long as they had, Lisa couldn’t even speculate.

  “Here it comes,” Finch leaned back to whisper.

  Lisa leaned closer, not only because it was hard to hear Finch with the room’s acoustics being as scattered as they were, but also just because the woman intrigued her.

  She’d shown up to a retreat in the middle of the woods in a woolen skirt and lacey blouse instead of jeans and a T-shirt. A little voice in the back of Lisa’s brain had asked, “Um, why?”

  But the why was obvious.

  The attire suited her. And when Finch stood up straight and clasped her hands in front of her, she reminded Lisa of a certain librarian back in college. She’d always refreshed her lipstick the moment Lisa walked through the door, and Lisa had thought, “Yeah, I am definitely into that.”

  Finch didn’t wear lipstick, but her energy was the same. It was that “it’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for” vibe.

  Apparently, Lisa was watching, and that confused her.

  She was barely on the rebound from Joey because perhaps they weren’t fully broken up.

  She didn’t know.

  But she suspected that a clusterfuck in one area of her life didn’t negate something positive in another.

  “If we complain, you say we’re not tough enough,” the proofreader snapped. She dragged her chair back from the table. The squeals from the legs dragging against the floor sent a collective shudder through the room right as the on-screen Santa crumbled dramatically to his knees and expelled some labored coughs. “If we clam up, you say it must not be so bad, right?” She plopped into the chair and swatted dismissively in Dan’s direction. “You see, that’s why nobody wants to deal with anybody down that swampy hall you nonfiction assholes are on. You’d try to justify revoking women’s right to vote just to play devil’s advocate and then talk about, ‘oh, why are you getting so emotional?’ Fuck you, dude.”

  “Just watch the movie, Elaine.”

  “I said fuck you.” Elaine did turn to face the screen, but only for a moment because she craned her head around quick enough to cause whiplash and glared at Joey. “You gonna report me to HR, go ahead and do it.”

  Joey’s lips pressed into a flat line and breath came out of his nose in a long, steady stream of frustration.

  Lisa almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  He was in love with being at work. Certainly, for him, staff ridicule was the relationship equivalent of a lover’s spat.

  “We’re off the clock,” he said tightly. “And even if we weren’t, why do you assume I care one way or another what I think the higher-ups will feel about your behavior? Your critiques are no skin off my teeth. Also, the head of your department is sitting three seats away. Glare at him, not me.”

  A sort of synchronized scoff rippled through the room.

  Lisa gave him the most consoling look she could manage but suspected her twitching smile dissolved any semblance of gravity she might have otherwise had.

  He got what he deserved.

  “Great,” he muttered and dragged the dessert he’d been neglecting closer.

  She watched him stab at the base of the dense cake for a few seconds, feeling bad in truth that the situation had so quickly turned against him.

  She could say a lot of things about Joey. He had some objectively poor traits, but she’d never suggest that he was a snitch. That wasn’t his style of trouble.

  Pushing her cake to him, she leaned toward Finch, intending to make a query about the movie, but the fragrance Finch was wearing triggered a sensory memory that had long been suppressed. Cherries. Lisa had once been gifted a bottle of luxurious French body lotion that smelled that way. When she’d tried to replace it, she found it cost a fortune.

  Of course a woman who’d arrive in the woods in lace and wool and suede shoes would smell like a fucking fortune.

  “How much longer?” Lisa asked, closing her eyes and leaning away from the scent. She’d start believing the woman was edible soon and in ways beyond the normal ones. “I need to know if I’m going to have to manage chaos.”

  “Five minutes or so until credits, I’d guess.”

  “Awesome.”

  Already, the Athena staff was starting to lose any stamina for arguing they’d had and were mostly fixated on the screen. The climax was nearing.

  Lisa didn’t need to see it.

  She shimmied out of the cramped seating situation, ducked beneath the projector’s beam, and hurried to the back of the room.

  Keely was already there
counting the takeaway bags designated for the evening.

  “How’s the other group doing?” Lisa whispered. She peeked into one of the bags and found a variety of high-end toiletries and relaxation-minded goodies. Muscle rollers, face masks, stress balls, cranberry granola bars. Emitting an appreciative grunt, she nabbed an unlabeled sack and creatively redistributed its contents. The fancy earbuds, she opted to keep for herself. Those little bastards were constantly going missing around the office.

  “Oh, they’re doing great!” Keely trilled. “They got back from their outing in town, did their dessert bar in the ballroom, and are headed to their cabins with full bellies.”

  “Shit, I keep forgetting I have a ballroom.”

  “You should use it more,” Keely said sagely.

  “Pray tell, what am I going to do with a giant, lofty room clad with wood paneling, a decrepit orchestra pit, and a floor from the 1970s?” Lisa held out a stilling hand before the woman could get a word out. “Never mind. Whatever you were going to say would certainly involve me spending the money I haven’t even made yet.”

  “But you’d make it back fast. You’ve got all these cabins here. You could host all sorts of competitions and events. People get tired of hotels.”

  “Huh.” Lisa wasn’t sure, but she almost thought Keely had said something that resembled a good idea.

  Part of her brain dysfunction may have had to do with Joey lumbering up beside her, though.

  She tried to ignore him, not that she’d ever been any good at that.

  “And who are these people you’re talking about?” Lisa asked, genuinely curious.

  Keely thrust a silver-colored bag at Joey and fluffed the bow on it.

  He scowled at it.

  “You know. People who do competitive dance, and especially their parents. Also, cheer squads. Drum and flag corps. Robotics contests. Stuff like that.”

  “Huh.” Lisa suspected she was starting to sound like a broken record, but now she was really thinking. She knew next to nothing about those things. She hadn’t been much of a joiner in high school. The only extracurricular engagements she participated in were volleyball and volunteer work at a local senior center. But she thought she knew an opportunity when she heard it.