It’s really an ad for a coffee shop. The brown, roasted coffee bean on top wasn’t supposed to look like a giant turd, but it does.
The coffee shop’s slogan, Coffee Gets Everything Moving, doesn’t help.
And yet, it’s all a postmodern marketing campaign. None of the companies we advertise is real. We drive around and test whether people will go to the websites advertised on the cars. So far, response has been great. We get the cars for one more year. I sold my junker and have diligently saved a car payment every month so I’ll have enough to buy something new if this account goes down the toilet.
To the dogs.
You know—belly up.
Speaking of bellies up, I look over as I walk into the building and see my coworker Josh’s car, with Marie’s face plastered across the side of it, advertising erectile dysfunction medication. Turns out he’s picked up more men with this quirky ad wrap than he ever did driving his nicer car, so he’s sticking with what he calls the PickUpMobile.
Get it?
I trudge up the concrete steps. Our office building looks like Leningrad and the Boston Government Service Center building got married and had a baby.
Before I even sling my overloaded purse onto my desktop Josh is standing in my doorway like a sweaty, half-bald vampire living off the blood of the damned.
The DoggieDate Damned.
“How was your date?” he asks, handing me a latte. Ah. There we go. He knows me so well. Almost too well. There are long dry spells in my romantic life where I wish he and I weren’t attracted to the same sex. He’d be the perfect boyfriend. He cooks nice meals, he cleans, he gives a good back rub and he’s remarkably tolerant of character-disordered people.
Don’t discount that last trait. The older I get the more I realize how crucial it is.
“Anal glands,” I say, fishing through my purse for my receipts from yesterday’s mystery shops.
“You touched his anal glands?” Josh says, his voice going through four octaves. “Isn’t that more like a third date phenomenon?”
“No.” I’m distracted by a pink plastic box in my purse. Why is my diaphragm in there? Not that I need it these days. At this point, I should just use it as a flexible shot glass. “Wait. Do humans have anal glands?”
He just frowns.
I clear my throat and look at him pointedly. “This really is your territory. I can’t believe you don’t know the answer.”
“I was a comp sci major. I never took anatomy and physiology.”
I just cross my arms over my boobs and stare him down.
He finally flinches and points to the latte. “C’mon. I brought you coffee. Espresso-based coffee.”
I take a sip. It tastes like pumpkin-mint. I wince.
“This was a freebie from a mystery shop, wasn’t it?”
He goes shifty-eyed.
“Joooooossssshhhhh!” I whine.
“What? Carol made me do two of them. The pumpkin-mint taste isn’t so bad if you plug your nose while you drink.”
He demonstrates for me, pinching his nostrils and tipping his head back.
This is not a ringing endorsement for a new product.
“That coffee tastes like pumpkin mint gland.”
“What’s with the anal gland jokes?” he asks.
“The guy DoggieDate matched me to spent most of the date describing how he saved twenty bucks by learning how to express his dog’s anal glands via YouTube videos.”
Josh drops his coffee in shock, the top loosening. Half the liquid pours out, covering the brown, industrial carpet. Remarkably, you can’t tell. You literally cannot tell that eight ounces of whole milk flavored with espresso, BenGay, and rotten pumpkin just seeped into the carpeting here at Consolidated Evalu-Shop.
The room instantly fills with the scent of Lifesavers sacrificed to an angry Pumpkin King.
“Did you kiss him? Sleep with him?” Josh’s non sequitur throws me for a loop.
“Nothing like changing the subject,” I mutter as I fire up my computer. Why did Andrew McCormick’s face flash through my mind when he asked me that question? Certainly not Ron’s.
“Nothing says romance like spreading your dog’s butt cheeks,” Josh says cheerfully.
Greg picks that exact moment to walk in. He looks at Josh, frowning.
“Son,” he says, placing a hand on Josh’s shoulder. “I’m worried about you.”
Josh’s smile falters.
“Maybe you need a little time off.” He gives Josh a sympathetic look. “Unpaid, of course,” he quickly adds.
“I wasn’t—” Josh sputters. “It’s not what—I’m not—we were talking about dating!”
Greg’s frown deepens.
“Quit talking. You’re not helping yourself,” Carol hisses, walking in with a coffee tray filled with what I presume are more coffee disasters. “It smells like an air freshener from a T station bathroom had sex with a pumpkin pie in here,” she complains.
Greg’s phone rings. He answers it, gives Josh a quick squeeze on the neck, and turns away, muttering about compliance and QA into the phone.
Josh turns to me, eyes filled with a strange mix of shame, fury, confusion and impotence.
“This is all your fault!” he cries.
“My fault? How is it my fault you were waxing rhapsodic about dog butts?”
“Hmm, there’s a new motto,” Carol murmurs. “DoggieDate: For people who really love dogs.”
“GROSS!” Josh and I snap at her. The apple didn’t fall very far from the Marie Tree, did it?
“You were telling us all about your date!”
“And....?”
“And what?”
“Did you sleep with him?”
“No.” I shudder.
“Any kisses?”
Any kisses. Any kisses? My microscopic pause as I attempt to figure out how to answer that question in the most honest way possible makes Carol and Josh exchange a look so lecherous I feel like I need a pimp to protect me from whatever they’re planning for me.
“You kissed him!”
“Who?”
“Anal Gland Hands Man!” Carol exclaims.
Josh’s eyebrows go down like The Very Confused Caterpillar. “No, she didn’t,” he says slowly. “She said so earlier.”
They look at me like detectives in an SVU episode. I feel like I’m in an interrogation room with the nondescript character actor whose name you can’t recall, but you remember her face from those irritable bowel syndrome commercials.
“Who, exactly, did you kiss last night?” Carol asks.
“She kissed Andrew McCormick,” announces a voice that is, in timbre, just a few shades off from Carol’s.
“Shannon!” Josh squeals, dropping me like he’s Ben Affleck and I’m Jennifer Garner. “What are you doing here?”
“Damage control,” she gasps as Josh squeezes her like she’s a Koosh ball.
Her eyes meet mine.
And narrow.
Uh oh.
She knows.
“What were you talking about?” she asks as she looks around the office with an expression that says, I can’t believe I ever worked in this crap hole.
“Amanda’s date! She kissed him.” Josh is so breathless he sounds like he’s having an asthma attack.
“You never told us you kissed your fake date,” Shannon says calmly, eyes a mixture of calculated cool and determined interrogator.
“That’s because I didn’t.”
“You really kissed Andrew? Andrew McCormick?” Carol asks in a low voice. “Again?”
“Again again,” Shannon says.
Carol frowns. “You mean you’ve kissed him three times?” The woman can’t balance a checkbook but she can decode complex inferences to kissing in closets. Sex math has its own logic, apparently.
“Yes.”
“Why?” Carol asks.
“Have you looked at the man?” Josh says in a disturbingly low voice that sounds exactly like Carol’s a moment ago. “He’s a
delicious god.”
“He is not,” I say weakly. “He’s hot, for sure, but god might be taking it a bit far.”
All three of them snort. Even Greg snorts from the safety of his office. If Spritzy were here, he’d snort, too.
“How about demigod?” Josh challenges.
“Fine. He is,” I concede. “But that’s not why I kissed him.”
“Technically, you didn’t kiss him. He kissed you. It was like something out of a 1940s Bette Davis film,” Shannon explains to Josh and Carol, who pay rapt attention to her words like the good little employees they are. Why do your actual work when you’re on the clock if you can gossip about your coworkers instead?
“The Bette Davis movie where she feeds the rat to her invalid sister?” Josh asks, his face screwed tight in confusion.
“Yes,” I deadpan. “Exactly like that.”
“Did he express the rat’s anal glands first?” Carol asks.
“I’ve heard rat is a delicacy in some parts of Southeast Asia,” Greg shouts from the other room.
“How did we get from talking about Andrew McCormick to rats?” Josh marvels.
“It’s a natural progression.” My words hang in the air, hovering like Marie watching Shannon and Declan on their first date.
Minus the wine glass and the dinging and the references to head lice.
My bitterness is leaking out of me like government servers in the hands of Anonymous. I can’t stop being hacked by the outside world. Little by little, my sense that I can fix anything is being whittled away by the mystifying reality that everything I’ve assumed about myself is a lie.
A lie revealed by a kiss.
Or three.
“I thought you liked Andrew,” Shannon says, concern creasing her brow. She glows now, like someone ground LED lights and injected them into her bloodstream. Bridal Botox. She is luminescent with love.
I, on the other hand, am bitter with betrayal. Yet how can I be betrayed by a man who has zero attachment or obligation to me?
I inhale slowly, buying time, as I look her over. She’s full-figured, like me. Her wardrobe has changed along with her income. Everything she wears fits better. The shift is small but noticeable. It’s subtle and yet distinct. Somewhere, in the blink of an eye, Shannon has become more herself, a person who is still the old Shannon and yet...more. More present. More aware.
Just...more.
Her hands move with the fluid elegance of someone who gestures for emphasis and not out of nervousness. Her eyes gleam with the calculated awareness of someone taking in and observing rather than nervously cataloguing and adjusting. Her smile is more genuine, less anxious. She is a rough diamond, chiseled out of a mine, then cut to near perfection.
Love is the jeweler.
My bitterness fades, replaced by a feeling I can only describe as envy, but that’s not right. I don’t want to take away what Shannon has with Declan. And I don’t even want what she has, because wanting what another person has means settling for less than what is best for you. My own needs differ from Shannon’s. My life isn’t hers, so why would I want to co-opt the billionaire fiancé and the fabulous marketing job at a Fortune 500 company?
Wait a minute.
Let me pause there.
More money. Better clothes. Financial security. Luxury beyond your wildest dreams. A hot man in her bed—
Forget what I just said.
I want what Shannon has. Bad.
“So,” Carol says, sipping her coffee, “the bottom line is that Andrew McCormick sniped you from a guy who fondles dog butts for fun and you’re not happy?”
I frown. “When you put it that way...”
“Honey, when I put it any way, you’re not making sense. He has spent most of the past two years sending you mixed signals and you keep picking up what he’s putting down, but the two of you are maddening.”
“Maddening?” I ask, genuinely confused.
Shannon and Carol move closer to me. It’s like having slightly changed, younger versions of Marie and Jason love-bombing me.
“He wouldn’t kiss you if he didn’t like you,” Shannon says under her breath.
“I’m still heee—eeerrrre,” Josh sings. “I haven’t left the room. You don’t get to do the chick thing.”
“Chick thing?”
“Where you discriminate against me because of my penis.”
“When did we start talking about your penis?” I squeak.
“Can we go back to dog butts? I’m less grossed out by that topic,” Shannon whispers.
“You are crowding me out of this girl talk because I don’t have the right equipment, and I don’t appreciate the exclusion.” Josh is serious. Oh, boy. He doesn’t get like this very often. Normally, the only time he draws this line is when we steal all the massage mystery shops.
“No one’s excluding you because of what you have in your pants,” Carols says with an eye roll. “We’re excluding you because it’s really obvious you have a thing for Andrew, too.”
That thought never, ever occurred to me.
“I do not!” Josh argues. But his scalp turns red. It’s bad enough to be a blusher when all that can turn red are your cheeks and neck, but the poor man is balding. He looks like Hellboy when he’s worked up.
A nerdy Hipster Hellboy.
“You came to the mall when Declan was playing Santa last year just so you could sit on his lap!” Shannon’s accusation has more bite than I would have expected.
“I did not...okay, I did,” Josh admits. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t gossip about Amanda’s sex life!”
“Is that what we’re doing?” I ask, incredulous.
“Duh,” they all say in unison.
“The only one of us with a sex life is Shannon, and she’s all settled and happy with her perfect billionaire and her wedding planning, so it’s not like there’s anything juicy there,” Josh explains.
“Other than what they did last night with a stick of butter,” I joke.
Oh. Looks like Shannon can blush and look just like Hellboy, too.
“I’m not having sex with anything that doesn’t have a battery tech-support hotline,” Carol adds. “We have to talk about someone’s sex life. And Josh is a hopeless cause since his last boyfriend dumped him.”
Josh is nodding along to everything Carol says until that last bit.
“Hopeless?” He looks like he’s about to cry. “You really think I’m hopeless?”
“You use a car that advertises erectile dysfunction meds to find dates.”
“Better than dog asses.”
“Touché.”
Something in the back of my mind won’t let go. I feel a thin string unravel, as if a thread were caught from the hem of my skirt, except instead of a skirt, it’s my mind. I’ve forgotten something. It’s important.
“What time is it?” Carol finally asks.
“Time for Amanda to come with me to Anterdec for a meeting.” Shannon declares. “Eleven-thirty.”
Meeting. What is she talking about—
“Oh, my God! Andrew’s text. I have a meeting with him,” I gasp.
“You do?” All three of them raise their eyebrows.
“Yes. Eleven.”
Shannon frowns. “He told me to meet him at eleven-thirty. With Declan. Why would he want to meet with you earlier?”
This is one of those moments where I have to decide what kind of person I am. Do I lie to my best friend to save face for the man who won’t stop turning me into his own little county fair kissing booth, or does loyalty prevail?
“Oh, you know,” I say, trying to appear casual. “Maid of honor and best man stuff.”
I, apparently, am the kind of person who throws my best friend under a bus.
Shannon smiles, but the grin doesn’t meet her eyes. “That’s cute. Will you talk about that kiss, too?”
“That’s up to him,” I huff. “He’s never talked to me before about the other kisses.”
“Because he’s an asshole
,” Carol says flatly.
“A hot asshole,” Josh says.
“You struggling with that, too?” Greg says from the hall as he walks by. “Just lay off the spicy curry. Takes a day or so to go away.”
We all wince.
“Is Anterdec hiring?” all three of us ask Shannon at the same time.
She just shakes her head slowly, like she knows something she can’t say.
Funny.
Same here.
6
“I’ll drive,” Shannon says as I grab my purse and pointedly ignore Greg. Josh or Carol will tell him I have a meeting at Anterdec. He won’t care that it’s really about Andrew becoming CEO. He’ll think I’m drumming up more business for Consolidated Evalu-Shop.
We get outside and walk down the crumbling concrete steps. There is a limo in front of us.
“Is Declan here?” I ask. He and Andrew travel in the city by limo. The only time I’ve ever seen Declan drive a car is his SUV, and that almost seems like it’s for show. The guy claims he gets more work done when someone else is driving, but then why not let Shannon drive?
As Shannon looks embarrassed but determined, she opens the door and I look in.
No wonder she likes this limo thing. It’s the size of her entire old apartment in there.
“Why does it smell like chocolate?” I ask as I bend and settle in.
I look to my left.
“Is that a cake bar?”
She pinkens. “Declan just had a new customer come by.” She names a celebrity chef you’d gasp to hear mentioned. I do.
“She brought an assortment of desserts from her new line that Anterdec will be using in all their properties in North America. Elite member guests will come in to their hotel rooms with a tray of these, a bottle of sparkling water and chocolate-covered strawberries.”
“Any tiramisu?” I joke.
“Only in petit fours form, and no rings attached.” She taps on the glass between us and the driver and off we go, headed for the Financial District. As I look back at my office building, it feels like walking out of a Brazilian favela.
“Seriously. Any job openings at Anterdec? Because I would jump ship like the rat that I am,” I say, then stuff a little square of cake perfection in my mouth.
She smiles, serene and composed. She’s like a Shannonbot.
Vote Then Read: Volume III Page 174