“I worship at Our Lady of Extremely Late Brunch,” he quipped, bending his head to kiss me, and I lost myself in him as he wrapped his arms around me again. When he raised his head once more, he asked, “So, two Saturdays from now, is it?”
"Yeah, I think that would be great." It would also be about a month into our "relationship" at that point. I supposed one month wasn't unreasonable for a first overnight. And it would be like a little vacation for me, just in the same city I lived in.
Oh, who the fuck was I kidding? I wanted to spend more time with him because I had a crush on him. No matter how casual I might want to keep things, I really liked this guy. That didn’t mean I had to hang my hat on some romantic ideal. But I did like being with him.
Neil called me a car, and on the ride home I leaned my forehead against the tinted window and closed my eyes. Another night without enough sleep, but it was worth it. I felt energized, and weirdly renewed. I guess I'd never had enough mind blowing sex to realize what a great stress buster it could be.
* * * *
The next afternoon, I was squirming in my office chair, trying make my sore ass more comfortable, when Rudy came in and stood expectantly in front of my desk.
"You just missed him," I said, gesturing toward Neil's office. "He went down to the seventh floor to check out the stilettos shoot."
"I know." Rudy's perfectly plucked and filled eyebrows raised a fraction. "I came here to talk to you. And where is little miss..."
"Deja?" I supplied for him, bristling at his "little miss" comment. "He took her with him."
They had left me behind to start cleaning out my desk. I was glad for the time alone, because it was definitely bittersweet to be moving to the beauty department. I'd been with Porteras for two years, all of them in this very office. I was just going across the floor, but it might as well have been Mars.
"Good." Rudy thumped the desk with the side of his fist. "I needed to talk to you and not have the busy-body blabbing it all over the office."
"Busy-body?" I remembered my conversation in bed with Neil. Had he mentioned it to Rudy? "Why would you say -”
I don't think I've ever been the focus of so withering a stare. "We can cut the bullshit, Sophie. I know you're sleeping with Neil. He's my best friend, he tells me everything. And apparently, Deja knows you're sleeping with him too?"
"She suspected," I said quietly. "Will you lower your voice? Deja is a professional. More professional than I am, because she's not sleeping with her boss. She just picked up on the vibe."
"I didn't come in here to talk about her, anyway. Tell me what you can about Jake Kirchner."
"Jake?" I frowned. "Not a lot. He's got a girlfriend, he does some freelancing on the side, lit crit essays, mostly - ”
"No, no, no. Tell me something useful. Does he still talk to your old boss?" As he spoke, Rudy's eyes narrowed, slowly punctuating his sentence.
"Ah. As in, is he someone to worry about?" That wasn't a question I could really answer. I liked Jake a lot, and he'd never done anything to openly sabotage anyone, but he wasn't happy with the changes being made to Porteras, and he had always been at Gabriella's beck and call. If he had a chance to put her back on the throne, I knew which side of the revolution he would be on, without a doubt.
Still, I wasn't about to tell that to Rudy. Jake hadn't done anything to breach my trust, and Rudy hadn't done anything to earn it, yet. "I really couldn't tell you. I'm not in contact with Gabriella these days."
"But you are in contact with Jake." Rudy wasn't going to let me off the hook that easily. "Look, you may not realize exactly how much work it took to pull off the sale and restructuring of Porteras, but I have been working on this with Neil and Valerie for over a year."
Valerie? Who the hell is Valerie? I guess I really didn't have any clue as to what was going on behind the scenes. "I know you guys did a lot of hard work. I promise, I'm not being purposefully reticent. I just don't know. But I care about this magazine. And I care about Neil. If I were privy to any information that could hurt him, I would tell him immediately."
Rudy looked surprised at that, and uncomfortable. I put that down to him not experiencing surprise all that often. He momentarily pursed his lips then said, "Fine. We'll leave it at that. Thank you for your honesty."
He was nearly to the door when I said, "By the way, I saw Giulio Cesar last season. Your costumes were amazing."
"I know. Thank you." But he couldn't hide his smug little smile behind the glass door.
Alone in the office, I continued my slow removal of my stuff from what would be Deja's desk, and considered my options. I didn't want to purposefully wheedle information out of Jake for Rudy. That was completely off the table. But the fact that Jake had become a concern - or a liability - was something I should keep an eye on. I liked Jake, but I didn't want my association with him to put my new job in jeopardy. I also didn't like to think that Gabriella was trying to infiltrate the magazine through her former employees.
One thing was for sure, though. Jake had helped me out for two years, and it would be shitty of me to know that he was under scrutiny and not give him a heads up. As much as I truly did care about Neil, my friends - even just work friends - were more important than a guy I just started a casual relationship with.
I had to tell Jake, and live with the consequences if Rudy found out.
Chapter Eleven
I didn't get a chance to talk to Jake until Thursday. He'd been swamped fighting to keep all the lush photos that accompanied his Versailles story in the January issue. By Thursday morning, Neil and Rudy would have made their decisions, so I figured that either way, it was the right time to tell Jake about Rudy's weirdness.
I found Jake in the conference room, looking down at glossy photos, their printed surfaces reflecting the light from the fluorescents. I couldn't tell if he was thinking, or grieving.
"Hey... you." I wasn't great with telling people news I thought they didn't want to hear. "How did it go?"
"I lost four pages." He looked up with a humorless laugh. "Rudy Ainsworth thought they were redundant."
I pretended to consider the four panels he had spread out in front of him. He'd brought up Rudy. That gave me enough of an opening. "Are you and Rudy not getting along?"
"Who can get along with that guy? He's so jumped up his own ass and self-important." Jake raked his hand through his hair.
I tried a different approach. "I can't wait until I get into the beauty department. He hardly ever goes in there. Maybe that's something you could do."
"What, work in beauty?" he snorted derisively. "I think lip gloss and eye shadow are a little beneath me at this point."
Wow, tell me what you really think, dick. I was beginning to wonder why I wanted to help him save his job. "Oh, but a lady mime in black leather and a powdered wig, that's totally important journalism."
Whatever point I'd been trying to make hadn't penetrated even a little bit. My sentence was barely finished before he abruptly declared, "Neil Elwood is going to burn this place up like a dying star." Jake snapped his fingers. "Poof, just like that, it'll be gone."
"I think stars take a lot longer to die than ‘poof’.” I had never seen him so petulant, so utterly unlikeable. He would have never dreamed of acting this way when Gabriella was running the show.
A good friend would have told him exactly why the photos should have been cut. They really were too similar, in that each one had some kind of fur accessory featured, and would speak to a modern perception of Soviet Russia rather than harkening back to French nobility. But I had a feeling he'd already been told this, and wouldn't see my criticism as helpful. Instead, I told him, "Well, I think I'm going to just keep my head down. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and I would really like to avoid a grease stain."
He smiled at that, but reluctantly. "You know, I shouldn't be telling you this." He picked up a photo and dropped it. "Don't get too comfy. There are some... things in the works. I'm trusting you not to pass that
along."
Pass what along? Some vague pronouncements that were grandiose in their pretentiousness? I nodded solemnly. "Absolutely, I understand."
Then I got the hell out of the conference room. Jake had always had his little oddities, like his sometimes embarrassingly passionate feelings about his own work, but it was the kind of stuff I had been able to overlook to remain friendly with him. Now, with Gabriella gone, he was behaving like a toddler throwing a tantrum. It was like... like Dr. Jakell and Mr. Hyde.
Oh, how I wished Holli were with me so we could high five over that
pun.
I walked through reception, feeling all itchy and weird. I guess I had expected the entire meeting to go differently. I’d tried to be helpful, and instead I’d gotten insulted. The new job I’d start tomorrow was apparently beneath Jake. I was some lowly joke he deigned to speak to. Had our “friendship” always been like that?
Or was it because I was going from “assistant” to “assistant editor” that he suddenly had a problem with me? Maybe I wasn’t a threat if he thought of me as the chick who got coffee and dry cleaning. Now, I was moving into editing actual content for the magazine. Maybe he couldn’t handle the thought of being supportive of someone unless they weren’t competition.
You’re no longer tied to Gabriella’s hip. He can’t use you for anything, I reminded myself. Maybe my proximity to Gabriella had been the point of our friendship all along.
Distracted by my disappointment, I almost walked right through reception without spotting Deja sitting on the long, white sofa, her arm on the back, smiling brightly at... Holli?
"Hey!" I greeted her, trying to cover my surprise. Holli never just showed up at my work - Gabriella had expressly forbidden personal visits, and Holli had been very careful about that rule. On the rare occasion she’d had to come up to the main office for job-related reasons, she’d never said hello.
"Hey! I was in the neighborhood and thought it might be safe to stop by and ask you to lunch. Safer than it used to be." Holli slid her hands into the back pockets of her painted-on jeans and rocked on the balls of her feet, her lower lip caught between her teeth. "And then I ran into Deja here."
Ah and ha. I hid my smile as much as I reasonably could.
"Do you two know each other?" For a city of eight million people, New York could be an incredibly small world.
Deja stood, giggling awkwardly as she looked to Holli for permission or confirmation. I got the feeling there was a conspiracy there. "Holli worked an event at RM a few years back."
"I was a human sushi platter." Holli beamed with pride. "It was one of my first modeling jobs. I got to meet Aerosmith."
I laughed with them, the way you laugh when you’re the third wheel in a conversation. It wasn’t that they were intentionally excluding me from their in-joke; obviously there was a vibe between them. I shrugged and smiled. "How can you forget a naked sushi girl, right?"
"So, do you want to go to lunch? I can cover things here," Deja offered.
"Great, thanks." That would give me a chance to grill Holli about her naked sushi times. I would never pass up a chance to hear about rock stars eating sushi off my best friend.
“So,” Deja said, her eyes wide, her smile carefully neutral as she looked from me to Holli. “I’ll see you around some time?”
“Next Friday, right?” Holli made intentionally cheesy finger guns at Deja, who laughed and nodded.
“Definitely. Definitely,” she agreed, backing away in the direction of the office doors.
Holli turned away first, and I followed suit, not looking back to see if Deja was still watching her.
Holli is totally open about her sexuality – which I’m not sure fits into any easy classification. She's been with both guys and girls, and for a while, in college, she'd had this three-way relationship going with a married couple. For about six months in 2010, she was in an unrequited love affair with the George Washington Bridge. She's pretty delightful that way. I know that any time I talk to her about sex stuff, she's going to either have tried it, or at least have an opinion on it.
I didn't know how open Deja was about herself, though, and I am so not in the market to out people. I kept the conversation safe on the ride down.
"It's cool that she remembered you," I commented as the doors closed.
"Yeah, she's really nice!" Holli hit the lobby button. "I invited her to the party."
"I gathered that.” I raised an eyebrow. “What happened to ‘no work people’?”
"I figured this one exception would be okay." Her eyes widened. "Why, did I do something wrong? You didn’t invite him, did you?"
“I don’t think it’s really his scene.” I felt a little bad for being relieved by that. I wanted to keep him as separate from the rest of my life as possible. We weren’t a couple, and it was weird enough working in the same place as the person I was fucking. I’d decided I would draw the line at casual recreation with my friends.
"You start in Beauty tomorrow, right?" Holli asked as we stepped off the elevator and into the lobby. “Why on a Friday?”
“Because I’m driving Mr. Elwood insane.” I preemptively grinned at her. “Not in the way you’re thinking. Deja is there to ‘train’ and she doesn’t really need any training. There isn’t much for me to do in the office but clean. Apparently, he finds my cleaning style ‘obsessive’ and ‘pathological’.”
“You’re going to do so good at this job, Sophie,” Holli said, and the pride in her voice warmed me like a cup of really good hot chocolate.
A frisson of excitement tingled all the way down my arms. "Actual assistant editor job. It's going to be a huge change.”
Just as we reached the doors, my phone chirped. It was Neil. "Hang on, I have to take this."
We stepped outside- because unbelievably, the traffic on Broadway in lower Manhattan is quieter than the building's super echo-y lobby- and I answered the call.
"Yes, Sir?" I assumed he could hear my coy little smirk through the phone. But when he spoke, I could tell it wasn't time for flirting. He sounded utterly overwhelmed, his words clipped. "I've been called away. I'll be leaving within the hour."
"Do you need me to come back?" I held up one finger to Holli, Jake's cryptic remarks floating through my mind. Had something gone wrong with the deal? Was it even possible at this point? I knew absolutely nothing about how the company had changed hands or why.
"No, it's nothing work related." The tension in his voice was apparent. "I'm going home to London. My mother has been hospitalized; they think she had a stroke."
"I'm so sorry." I couldn't imagine what I would be going through if my mother were in the hospital an ocean away. "Do you need me to do anything for you?"
"As of tomorrow morning, you're not my assistant anymore, Sophie," he reminded me. "I wasn't calling you for a favor. I wanted to let you know before I left, so you didn't think..."
"So I didn't think you were breezing out of my life again?" Uncomfortably, I had to acknowledge that the thought would have occurred to me.
"Yes, exactly." He sounded sheepish at my quick reply.
While we were keeping things as no-strings as possible, if he ran off on me again the way he had after LAX, I wouldn't just be pissed. I would take an emotional bruising. I hoped that when our relationship ended, it would happen with mutual respect, but I couldn’t entirely trust that yet.
He cleared his throat. "I was going to ask you if you wanted to go out and celebrate your promotion with me tomorrow night. Now I'm afraid I can't, and I'm not sure I'll be back in time for our weekend, either."
"This is way more important, obviously. Don’t worry about things with me, okay? Things are fine." I hesitated before I added, "Look, if there's anything you need, call me."
"I will. Thank you." The keen edge of emotion in those four simple words made my heart ache. "I'll call you when I get back."
I hung up with him, feeling oddly empty that I wouldn’t see him again before he left. Then I fel
t shitty and selfish. He was obviously in crisis mode, and I was worried about myself.
"Is everything cool?" Holli asked, frowning at me.
I shook my head. "No, he has to go to London." I omitted the part about "going home" to London. That bothered me, and I didn’t want to admit it. "His mom had a stroke."
"Holy shit, his mom is still alive?" Holli grimaced, and I knew she was imagining the Crypt Keeper or something.
I ignored her. "He'll be gone for a while, I guess, but he didn't want me to think he's taking off permanently, like last time. That's a good thing, right?"
"I guess." She shrugged. "I thought it wouldn't really matter, anyway. You're just in it for the sex."
I opened my mouth to protest, but found it strangely difficult. I stammered a little bit. "I- Yeah. Right, but I would miss the sex."
She raised an eyebrow at me.
"What?" I demanded, and she just shrugged and smiled. I shook my head and walked past her. "I thought we were going to get some food."
She just laughed as she followed me down the steps.
* * * *
It was totally bizarre to return to work the next day and not go to my
old desk. It felt even weirder not to see Neil. I'd gone home the night before and immediately called my mom, like bad mom health was catching or something. We’d chatted about work and friends, but I’d deftly avoided her wheedling inquiries about my love life. She would not be okay with hearing about my casual D/s relationship with a guy older than she was.
After that, I'd lain awake half the night, trying to calculate the length of a flight from New York to London, wondering where Neil was. He'd left the office while I'd been out to lunch, but I had no idea how long it took to get through security or whatever he’d had to do. Deja had mentioned that he'd taken a private jet, so I supposed he wouldn't be standing in some TSA line with his shoes off, worrying about his poor ailing mother.
It amazed me when I walked into the building and everything hadn't ground to a halt. To the contrary, when Rudy had taken over running all of Neil's meetings and appointments the day before, it had felt a little like Gabriella was with us again. Caught up in everything that had been going on with regards to my job, I hadn't noticed how terrified everyone was of Rudy.
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