by Eden Myles
The competition for the job had been fierce, and I had only gotten in due to good timing. The last girl had been caught embezzling money and I had just put my resume in, thinking nothing would come of it. At twenty-four, I didn’t think I would actually get it. But suddenly there I was at Lupo & Mayer, crunching numbers. Naturally, that first week I was careful, checking and double checking my work. The last thing I needed was an error on the books. The following Monday, Frank called me into his executive suite office and told me to sit down.
I honestly thought he meant to compliment me, stupid me, but as he sat down and I concentrated on not gaping at him like some lovestruck teenager, he said, “You work too slow, Sadie.”
“I’m…sorry?” Maybe I hadn’t heard him right.
He scooped some papers out of the file folder that I had delivered to him before the weekend. “I appreciate you graduated top of your class, and you obviously have a knack for numbers, but, Redner, you finished two accounts last week. If I had shown these to my partner, he would have canned you before the weekend.” His voice was steady and boomed around his plush, white luxury office. He put off a kind of fission as he slapped the folder down in front of me like some kind of a displeased professor put off by a project of mine.
I felt my face burn with shame and anger—shame that I had let him down, anger at being called Redner, like he was my coach back in high school. His lips pursed together, hiding his big, strong teeth, and his eyes narrowed to laser points. I thought of some big predator stalking a deer deep in the wood and the thought made me hyperaware of my body, the way my hose rubbed between my legs. My fingers pressed nervously into my sweating palms.
He lifted his chin in a gesture I could only call arrogant. “If you want to run with the big dogs someday, Redner, you’re going to need to step it up.”
I wanted to tell him I’d done my best, and I’d made no mistakes. It took me three tries to get the words out. “All right.”
As always, I never got mad fast enough, and I always let everything bother me afterward. I knew what I would do next. I would thank him and then step out of his office, dutifully reprimanded but smiling at all my coworkers as if nothing had happened. Then I would go home and overeat and cry into my pillow as all the loose parts of my self-confidence fell apart. I was the same way in high school and college. I was the same way in all my relationships. That was me, Sadie Redner, human doormat.
At least I had the good grace to not cry when I got back to my desk. But later that day, as I was leaving, Frank called me back into his office. I was shaking and I nearly collapsed to the floor as he let me back in. Had he found an error in my hastily performed work? Or maybe I still wasn’t fast enough, even though I had knocked out a whole account in a day.
“Thanks for staying after, Sadie,” he said as he walked around his desk and picked up the file folder I had just delivered. He flipped it open and I felt my heart as it started banging around my chest. He glanced down at my figures, then up at my face. “Good work. And see, you can work fast and not make any errors.”
I nearly sobbed with relief. He noted my expression and said, “Look...Red…I have to be hard on you. My partner’s a nervous man, and we’ve never taken on someone as young as you are. I don’t want to see you out on the street. It’s nothing personal.”
I swallowed and nodded. He stared at me with an intensity that left me feeling pinned down and a little vulnerable, but at the same time, hopeful. I hated him for being so confident, but at the same time, I envied him. So when he asked to walk me down to the lobby, I scrambled for my coat and satchel like a desperate idiot.
I’d only had two boyfriends, one in high school and one in college that I’d actually slept with. Neither of my relationships had ended well, and after my boyfriend in college left me for my best friend, I had vowed not to fall for a pretty face again.
On the way down in the elevator, Frank asked me how I was liking New York.
“How do you know I don’t come from New York?” I asked.
“You have a Pennsylvania Dutch accent,” Frank noted, and I felt my face flush for the second time that day. “Are you Amish?” he asked. He sounded genuinely interested. “Or were you?”
Oh god. I hated talking about this. It made me feel like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. “No,” I immediately told him. “My grandmother and I just grew up in Lancaster, is all. There’s a large Pennsylvania Dutch settlement there.” I didn’t mention that Gramma was an ex-Amish and that she had largely raised me alone.
I tried not to talk too much the rest of the way down.
When we stepped out into the lobby, I immediately saw a beautiful, sleek woman in a smart suit and swing coat from Saks Fifth Avenue heading our way. She was carrying a Prada clutch purse. I was still about five years away from owning anything Prada. She immediately linked her arm through Frank’s and leaned down to whisper something in his ear, something that made Frank grin in his wolfish way. The two hurried toward a limo waiting for them in the curb outside the building, both their coats flying.
It was the emotional equivalent of having a cold pail of water dumped over my head. Then I wondered what I had been expecting. Frank was so much older than I was, sophisticated. I was a country girl at heart. We had nothing in common.
I hurried out into the street, trying not to gape and look like a tourist. I had only been living in New York a few months and its vastness and speed still took my breath away.
***
Read an excerpt from Snow (50 Shades of Fairy Tales) by Madeline Apple:
“Ship’s log, date: 5513-01-14. En route to extrasolar planet Osiris,” William said clearly into the auto-communicator pinned to the collar of his lab coat. He swiveled in his chair and picked up his medical tablet before getting to his feet in his personal flight quarters. “Dr. William Hunt reporting. We are twenty-seven days out and closing in on jump star 00067. We expect to rendezvous in approximately 72 earth hours. Checking on Subject BL-009-8123 in medical bay 11.”
He navigated the twist of sterling white corridors, passing a few hard-faced guardsman along the way, until he arrived at the proper bay. Normally, medical staff were expected to take a guardsman in with them as escort whenever they performed an exam, just as a precaution, but this far out into space, with so few corporate suits from Home Office to look over their shoulders, the guardsman who worked for Helix Laboratories had a tendency to become lax in their duties.
Not that William minded. He was a large man who had never required any kind of bio-mechanical augmentations. He’d spent a decade in the military medical field. He was more than capable of subduing a subject when he must. And anyway, the clones produced at Helix Labs were programmed to be docile as befitted their purpose.
He punched in his security codes and the door irised open to let him enter. Subject BL-009-8123 lay in a stasis capsule full of amniotic fluid, another reason a guardsman was completely unnecessary. The clear glass of the capsule was indestructible, and the subject easily programmed through her DNA. Right now, the computer had rendered her immobile and the creature watched him approach with a wide, uneasy gaze.
William took a moment to examine the notes on his medical tablet, then went over to the capsule to read the display that hung overtop it. The computer had already begun a full diagnostic of the subject, everything from blood pressure and heart rate, to brain and body scans. Even her DNA was on display, running in sharply defined numbers and figures across the lower half of the display. She was in excellent health and had obviously been well taken care of in whatever Helix nursery she had been developed in.
She was also exquisite, one of the finest specimens he had ever lain eyes on—the obvious product of expensive craftsmanship. She was long and lean and almost perfect white by genetic design, without a normal pink blush to be found anywhere on her body.
Instead, her flesh bore the pale bluish tint of milk as requested by the Helix Lab patron who had commissioned her design. He thought it should make her look cold
and dead. Instead, it made her a creature of extreme contrasts, like a young pin-up girl rendered in black and white, hair so black it looked blue, skin so white it looked ghostly, eyes almost perfectly black, and lips as red as extinct roses. Her eyes were huge and rimmed in thick black lashes that looked like clippings of her amazing hair, and her face was as dear and exquisite as china. As he had the computer drain the tank and the glass folded back for his examination, he admired her naturally pouting lips, smooth-as-ceramic skin, and full rounded breasts, tipped with pale blue nipples that stood at proud attention.
She even smelled good, a light, loamy fragrance mixed with roses. The scent alone aroused him, made him feel slightly drunk, as it was designed to. He ignored the tightening of his trousers and said, “My name is Dr. William Hunt. You were brought out of stasis three days ago. Do you know your name? Do you know how to speak?”
The girl lay there immobile, staring up at him, unaffected by his words or her own nudity. Her eyes flitted over him and her lips parted, but otherwise she was silent.
He knew it was idiotic to talk to a sex toy, but he couldn’t help himself when they were designed to look so human. He much preferred the Bunnygirls, Catgirls and Foxgirls he normally examined, human DNA expertly mixed and combined with whatever animal the patron favored to produce exquisite humanoid women with elongated ears, whiskers, tails. But this toy, like all the rest, had been developed without a prefrontal cortex—the part of the human brain that was involved in planning complex cognitive behaviors, personality expression, and decision making skills. She was a blank personality incapable of higher thinking. He had to remember that. She could not reason, she had no identity, and like a household pet, she could only communicate in the most primitive of ways.
He watched her tremble as her muscles bunched and released as she attempted—unsuccessfully—to move, struggling against her own programming.
“I know you don’t understand what’s happening,” he went on, “but you’ll soon be able to move again and I promise you no one will hurt you…”—he checked his chart—“…Snow.”
The girl made a little moaning sound in response.
Had he spotted recognition of her name in her eyes? But no…that was impossible. She had been manufactured only a few weeks ago according to her patron’s design, and then packaged and suspended for transport to Osiris. Even if the nurses and guardsman who had brought her here today had used her name, she would not have been exposed to it long enough for her to recognize it.
To be sure, though, he checked her brain scan. There was nothing there to indicate that she understood anything at all. But the idea continued to bother him as he went about his physical exam of her. He scanned her DNA to make certain it was sound, then checked her all over for signs of injury or bruising during her transport.
He knew the patron, whoever he or she was, would not appreciate damaged good—or a slipshod exam that failed to discover those damages. And when he bothered to check the patron’s details, he instantly became even more nervous. It would seem Her Majesty Queen Maria Lucretia Grimhilde III, the reigning monarch of Osiris, had commissioned the girl’s design. The woman was a legendary perfectionist. William had spent just one evening dining with the arrogant, overbearing Queen and her entourage on earth, and he was determined to never repeat that nightmare again.
Snow managed to clamp her teeth down on his thumb while he was removing her breathing tubes, and he quickly jerked his hand back. He saw real anger flash briefly across her face, and he wondered if she had been mistreated in some way over the last few days, perhaps by a guardsman with little self-control. “That’s not very nice, Snow. You’ve nothing to fear from me,” he assured her. Unlike the Queen, when she finally gets her careless hands on you.
***
Read an excerpt from The Beauty of the Beast (50 Shades of Fairy Tales) by Alex Crossman:
For as long as I could remember, I’d love animals. As a kid I had collected hundreds of books about them, I had a ton of stuffed animals, and going to the zoo with my dad had been the highlight of my week. I loved the gorillas and the elephants like all the other kids, but the big cats were always my favorite. I used to watch them paw back and forth in their too-small cages, feeling sorry for them, wondering what they were thinking. So it really wasn’t that big of a surprise to my parents when I told them I wanted to be a veterinarian when I grew up—not just a pet vet, but an exotic animal vet.
That was back in my dreamier days. The reality of it was, in a place like Pine Barrens, Texas, (as big as the sky and as empty as all get-out) there wasn’t much of a call for an exotic animal vet, though everyone and his uncle did have a horse. After I graduated college, I got practical, went into equine veterinary medicine and opened up a country practice just outside town with my colleague, college-buddy and lover, Dr. Beau Wilkins.
Our arrangement didn’t last long. We were two young men sharing a business and a bedroom. In a small town like Pine Barrens, that made every tongue wag more than all the dogs at the Westminster Dog Show combined, and Texas wasn’t the best place in the world to be gay in. Eventually Beau found himself a practice down in Houston and a lady friend to act as his beard so his friends and family would feel happier and more secure with his life choices.
For the first time in my life, I felt lonely, isolated, and vaguely ashamed of myself. As a result, I started filling the emptiness in my life with work. I put myself on call 24/7, and even filled in for the other vets in the area when they were indisposed and couldn’t handle an emergency. So I wasn’t terribly surprised when Dr. Fields, the vet one town over, called me early one morning to ask me if I would go out to the Richter place for him and see to the owner’s exotic cats. Fields said he’d wrecked his back while delivering a breached foal the day before and was going to be laid up for a few more days.
“No problem, Dr. Fields,” I said into my cell phone while I stood in a corral beside a colicky mare and slowly pumped the air out of her stomach with a garden hose.
“You just need to pick up a sample for the lab, take a look at the cats, and call me back with your assessment. You don’t need to get any closer than that, Ben.”
“Sounds good,” I said, getting excited about my work for the first time in seemingly forever. I finished up with the mare and turned her back over to her owner. My heart was knocking in my chest something fierce.
The Richter place was up in a very secluded section of Pine Barrens. The owner, Karl Richter, was some retired hotshot Vegas entertainer who’d bought a hundred-acre luxury ranch to house his big cats. The cats, as far as I was aware, were just as retired as their owner, though he had brought a pair of ligers down to the state fair about four years ago. I’d seen the giant, shaggy lion/tiger hybrids from a distance as I walked the fairgrounds to the petting zoo where I was giving away a 4H prize, but when I went back to see them up close, they were gone and the guy in charge of the exhibit had said that the owner had pitched a fit about some reporter from the local newspaper scaring his cats by taking too many pictures.
I drove out to the Richter ranch with butterflies in my stomach. I was finally going to be able to see the cats close up.
When I reached the big wrought iron fence with the call box out front, I stopped, rolled down the window of my pickup, and pushed the CALL button. “This is Dr. Ben Bellerose. I’m here to see Richter’s cats.”
It took almost five minutes for anyone to answer. I looked at my watch. It was well past five o’clock and some angry-looking storm clouds were moving across the prairie. One of the southwest’s infamous summer washouts was hot on my heels and I hoped Richter, or whoever was in charge of the grounds, hurried the hell up.
Then a course, unfriendly voice said, “Where’s Dr. Fields?”
“He threw his back out yesterday and I’m his replacement. Look, we’re getting some serious rains tonight. Can I just collect the samples and go?”
There was a tense pause, then the icy voice said, “Drive down and around to the
enclosures. I’ll be waiting at Building A.”
The gate slid open and I followed a long, paved road through some hilly prairieland until a house that looked a little like a scaled-down version of the Taj Mahal suddenly appeared. It looked eerily like a mausoleum, cupolas and all, and was completely out of place on the Texas prairie, but who am I to judge what rich eccentrics did with their money? We had a number of A-list actors who owned similarly diverse homes not far from Pine Barrens. Hell, Brangelina had a ranch about ten miles east of here.
I followed the road around the house to what looked like a compound made up of several smaller buildings. The entire compound was surrounded by yet another sturdy wrought iron fence and a gate that automatically slid back as I drove up in my old, battered pickup. After I was in, I parked at the nearest building, the one I assumed was Building A (though it bore no indication that it was) and got out.
Wind, smelling bitterly of heavy rains, assaulted my senses and blew my sports coat over my head. Sweat from the lack of air conditioning in my Ford made my tough work jeans stick to my legs and ass. Heat, pressure and rain—I had a feeling it was going to be a bad storm tonight. I picked up my heavy med bag and went over to the door, but before I could knock, someone opened it. “Come in,” said that cold, steely voice I’d heard at the gate.
“Wind’s kicking up,” I said as I slipped inside a dark, professionally-outfitted clinic obviously used to house and care for the big cats. I noted the gigantic stainless steel examination table, the humongous canine scale, and racks and racks of medication and all manner of apparatuses, everything you’d need if you were maintaining the health of a collection of exotic animals.
The lights were dim, but I could tell the man who’d let me in was big, with a fit, geometric body. He wore a dark, plush jacket that I couldn’t help but wonder was a smoking jacket, like in a Sherlock Holmes novel, and his blond hair looked gelled back in a queue. I turned to shake his hand in greeting—because my mama always told me to be cordial, even to rude strangers and city folk—but the man immediately pulled away and glared at me in the dark. He had a severe face and sharp cheekbones, though he kept one side turned away from me as if I were somehow beneath his contempt. I thought he would have been handsome, striking even, were he not scowling so hard or acting like such a dick.