Fast Women

by Jennifer Crusie

  “Thank you,” Nell said, taken aback.

  “You’re fun to look at,” he said and grinned at her as he lifted his wineglass. “Thank you for brightening my day.”

  He drank, and Nell thought, He’s still a weasel.

  “So nine at my office tomorrow, then,” Jack said, putting his glass down. “And that’s it for business.”

  The waitress brought their food, and Nell sprinkled vinegar on her fries and waited for Jack’s next move.

  “I would never have pegged you as the Reuben type,” Jack said, starting on his Caesar salad.

  “I’m not a type,” Nell said and bit into her corned beef.

  “I’m beginning to see that,” Jack said, his voice warm. “You know, I’ve been dumb.”

  No kidding.

  “I have to stop chasing these younger women. Start concentrating on the smart, sassy women my own age.” He smiled at her over his wine again, and Nell thought, I’m twelve years younger than you are, you asshole, but she smiled back at him to keep him going.

  “Yeah, there’s a lot to be said for seasoning,” she said, popping a vinegar-soaked fry in her mouth.

  “And you do look spicy today,” he said. “You sure you don’t want wine with your lunch?”

  Yeah, what wine goes with a Reuben and fries? “Diet Coke’s my drink,” she said. And Glenlivet.

  The waitress had cleared off a table next to the wall and now she motioned two people to it. That looks like Lu, Nell thought and then choked on her fry.

  “Are you all right?” Jack said.

  Nell nodded, grabbing her Diet Coke to wash down the rest of the fry as Gabe stopped at their table.

  “Jack,” Gabe said, and Jack jerked a little and then turned around. “We don’t see you down this way much.”

  Jack stood up to shake his hand. “I just came down to steal Nell from you. She’s working for us now.”

  “Is she?” Gabe said, and Nell braced herself for the storm, but there wasn’t one. “She’s a terrific secretary.” Gabe said, and nodded at Nell. “Best of luck,” he said and went over and sat down across from Lu, which put him right in her sight line.

  “He took that pretty well,” Jack said, sitting down again.

  “I don’t think he wants me back,” Nell said, feeling sick. “We had some conflicts.”

  “I heard that wasn’t all you had,” Jack said. “Suze said you and Gabe were an item.”

  “Well, we got deleted,” Nell said, and then, since Gabe was watching, she forced a smile and said, “So that’s two positions in my life I have to fill, boss and lover.”

  “Only one,” Jack said, meeting her eyes. “I’m your new boss.”

  “Then I’m halfway there.”

  Across the room, Gabe shook his head and turned his attention back to Lu.

  “I have a court date this afternoon,” Jack was saying, “or I’d take the time to show you around the firm myself.”

  “We’ll have plenty of time,” Nell said, still smiling like a maniac. “I’m sure there are lots of things for me to do at O&D.”

  “And I’ll make sure you enjoy all of them,” Jack said.

  I’m going to throw up now. Nell looked over at Gabe, talking seriously with Lu, and thought, I should be over there. She leaned forward and flirted with Jack for the rest of lunch and didn’t look at Gabe again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Suze braced herself when Gabe got back, praying he’d keep right on going into his office, but Riley, the big schmuck, said, “How was lunch?” from the couch he was sharing with Marlene. Suze glared at him over her mu shu pork, and he stared calmly back at her over his General Tso.

  “Interesting,” Gabe said. “Jack and Nell were there.”

  “Really?” Riley said, and Suze thought, I’m going to put vinegar in your coffee tomorrow.

  “He hired her,” Gabe said, watching Suze.

  Riley sat up, not kidding around anymore, annoying Marlene, who’d been doing her abused dog routine in hopes of some chicken. “To work at O&D? And you had to go and piss her off. You couldn’t be nice so she’d tell us things.”

  Gabe looked at him with contempt. “Of course she’s going to tell us things. Why do you think she took the job? What I want to know is why did they hire her? Trevor said he’d tried to get her out of here before because of the diamonds. What if there’s something else here?”

  Riley shook his head. “You know, your faith in yourself as the center of her universe is touching. She took the job because she needed the money. I just hope to hell she doesn’t decide she needs the boss, too.”

  Gabe’s face darkened and Suze said, fast, “You have a phone message. Somebody named Gina Taggart wants you to meet her at the Long Shot at eight tonight. I told her you’d call her back.”

  She held the message slip out to him and he took it. He started to say something to Riley, and then he shook his head and went into his office.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Suze said.

  “No.” Riley sat back and gave Marlene a piece of chicken. “He’s too damn sure of her.”

  “You know, she probably did take that job to look around,” Suze said.

  “I know,” Riley said.

  “Then why—”

  “Because he needs to worry about her,” Riley said. “Otherwise he’ll just sit in that damn office and wait for her to come back, the way his dad always did with his mom. He’s following a tradition here. Remember how long they both waited to move on each other?”

  Suze nodded.

  “You want to watch that mess again?”

  Suze shook her head.

  “Well?” Riley said and stabbed his fork into the garlic chicken. Marlene moved closer and fluttered her eyelashes.

  “I don’t want him yelling at me the way he yelled at Nell,” Suze said. “I want him happy.”

  “He’s not going to yell at you,” Riley said. “You’re not screwing up his life.”

  “No, he’s doing that,” Suze said and Riley grinned at her.

  “I see you’re developing a keen understanding of the McKennas,” he said.

  “Only one of them. You are still a mystery to me.”

  “Part of my charm.”

  “A seventeen-year-old mind in a thirty-five-year-old body. How do you keep that working for you?”

  “Thirty-four,” Riley said. “And I’m good, sweetheart, I’m very, very good.” Marlene moaned, and he added, “See?”

  “Yeah, you’re hell with dachshunds,” Suze said. “But will she still want you when the chicken’s gone?”

  “So young to be so bitter,” Riley said and went back to his office, Marlene trailing him in her trenchcoat.

  * * *

  Jack had, not surprisingly, overstated O&D’s recognition of Nell’s skills. He’d also evidently not tipped his assistant, Elizabeth, that he had ulterior motives in hiring her, because once he’d introduced them, smiled warmly at Nell, kissed her on the cheek with an extensive grasp on the shoulder, and then left, Elizabeth looked at her with loathing and said, “We’ve found the perfect job for you.”

  Whoops, Nell thought and considered clueing Elizabeth in to the fact that Jack’s interest was part of some plan. The fanatical light in Elizabeth’s eyes stopped her. Elizabeth would tell Jack immediately. So all Nell said was, “Wonderful,” and followed Elizabeth to a windowless room filled with mismatched filing cabinets and overflowing cardboard boxes and a battered desk with a computer on it from the early nineties.

  “This is the newsletter room,” Elizabeth said triumphantly under the one working fluorescent light. “We need it organized. I understand you’re wonderful at organization. So we’d like you to file these and then index them.”

  “Index them,” Nell said.

  “Go through and make a list of names with issues and page numbers,” Elizabeth said. “Not difficult.”

  A reasonably bright third grader could do this, Nell thought, but she smiled and said, “Wonderful. I love to org
anize. Uh, could we get these lights fixed?”

  “I’ll get right on it,” Elizabeth said.

  An hour later, Nell had scoped out the situation. Nobody wanted the newsletters indexed because nobody in his or her right mind would ever want to read anything in the newsletters. They were full of badly written puff pieces and badly lit photos of people standing stiffly with smiles pasted on their faces. All her dreams of tiptoeing through O&D files to find good stuff were buried under sixty years of good service award announcements and retirement dinner pictures. Given the futility of her task, there was only one reason Trevor had hired her: to make sure she didn’t go back to the McKennas.

  And the light still flickered.

  “About the light,” Nell said, when she found Elizabeth again.

  Elizabeth stopped making whatever highly important decision she was making and looked at Nell with impatient contempt. “I’ve called them, Nell,” she said. “Now I have work to do.”

  I’m going to be here two weeks, tops, Nell thought, I don’t need her. “I need the light fixed before I can do any kind of real work.”

  Elizabeth drew herself up. “I said I called it in.”

  “And I appreciate it,” Nell said. “But they’re obviously not listening to you.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes flared open, and Nell walked around her and knocked on Jack’s door.

  “You can’t go in there,” Elizabeth said, but Nell opened it and stuck her head in anyway.

  “Jack, I don’t have a light in my office,” she said, as Jack looked up startled from his conversation with somebody in a suit. “Could you—”

  “Elizabeth handles that,” Jack said, clearly trying to keep his temper.

  “Yes, but she’s not,” Nell said. “I’m going blind. They had light at the McKennas.”

  “Elizabeth,” Jack said, and fifteen minutes later Nell had light and Elizabeth’s undying hatred.

  And for the rest of the week, she also had the newsletters, sorting them, filing them, setting up the indexing system, and typing in one meaningless name after another. She had found the files from 1978 immediately, but the only thing of semi-interest was a full-page obituary of Helena that must have taxed the writer’s imagination: Helena really hadn’t lived enough to fill a full page. Nell looked in 1993, too, to see if Stewart Dysart had gotten a mention for lifting company funds and deserting the senior partner’s daughter, but there was nothing. Only the good news got into the O&D News & Notes. And she was going to get to read all of them.

  Maybe Gabe could learn to compromise, she thought as she started with the latest newsletter, prepared to work her way back through to the beginning of time. Maybe I’ll go surrender to Gabe and live with the old business cards. The surrendering part sounded wonderful, right there on his desk would be good, but she kept typing anyway.

  * * *

  The Monday after Nell went to work for O&D, the new business cards came. Suze opened one of the boxes and looked at them, and then she took both boxes into Gabe’s office where he was conferring with Riley.

  “Okay,” she said. “Your new business cards are here and they’re good. Very quiet, very classy, and frankly, a huge improvement on your old cards, which looked amateurish.”

  “Look,” Gabe said. “We don’t need—”

  “You haven’t even seen them,” Suze said. “Nell is gone, so this isn’t about who’s in charge. It’s about the business cards, period, and these are better than your old ones. So keep an open mind.”

  “Let’s see ’em,” Riley said, and she handed him the box with his name on it. He opened it, took out a card, looked at it for a minute, and said, “She’s right.”

  Suze put the other box on Gabe’s desk and left, figuring Riley could take it from there. When he came out, she said, “Well?”

  “He’s coping,” Riley said. “It helps that they’re not geeky, and it helps a lot more that they really are better.”

  “But mostly it helps that Nell’s not here,” Suze said. “He was just blocking her.”

  “No,” Riley said. “The last cards were a nightmare. This is the first thing she’s done that’s shown any indication that she understands what this place is about.”

  “She means well.”

  “Which is about the worst thing you can say about anybody,” Riley said and went into his office.

  An hour later, Suze was finishing a phone check on a reference when Jack walked in. Every nerve in her body froze, but she nodded to him and held up a finger to say, Just a minute, and he sat down on the couch and waited, looking inscrutable.

  Which meant he wasn’t. The calmer Jack looked, the more intense he was about something. That couldn’t be good, but then the fact that he was sitting in front of her wasn’t good, either.

  She finished with the check, thanked the guy she’d been talking to, hung up, and made a notation on the file. Then she looked at Jack and said, “Hi.”

  “You sound just like a professional,” he said, smiling at her.

  “I am a professional,” she said. “What’s up?”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute, just gazed into her eyes, and she thought, Fat chance, buddy, and wondered why that had always worked before. Probably because she’d loved him. I don’t love him anymore, she thought and wondered when that had happened. Not when she’d found out about Olivia. Before. Everything after that had been letting go of illusions. Like Nell had said, she should have left while she loved him.

  “I’ve been expecting a call from your divorce lawyer,” he said, finally.

  “Jean?” Suze blinked at him. He was right. She still hadn’t told Jean to file.

  “Suze,” he said, leaning forward. “You don’t want this divorce any more than I do.”

  “Well, yes, actually, I do,” Suze said. “You slept with another woman. That pretty much did it for me.” That and fourteen years of being a child bride.

  “Suze, that’s not fair,” Jack said. “We were having problems, admit it.”

  “Jack,” Suze said. “I stopped letting you tell me what was fair weeks ago. You knew I was unhappy and you had sex with another woman so you wouldn’t have to admit that I had a right to a life, too. So fine, now I have the life I wanted and you have the other woman. I’m sure you’ll learn to enjoy ’N Sync as much as the Righteous Brothers, you’ve always been good at adapting to new wives.”

  “This is the life you want?” Jack said, looking around the office. “Honey, this life won’t get you diamonds.”

  “Jack, I don’t like diamonds. I like this.”

  “This?” Jack said incredulous. “Oh, that’s great. And what are you going to do if Nell comes back? I can’t keep her on forever. It’s been a week and she’s already driving Elizabeth crazy.”

  “Nell says Elizabeth thinks she owns you when you’re in the office,” Suze said. “Elizabeth’s just jealous.”

  “You always did listen to Nell before you’d listen to me,” Jack said, an edge to his voice. “Maybe if you’d listened to me—”

  “—you’d still have me entombed in that house,” Suze finished for him.

  “I notice you haven’t left that house,” Jack said.

  “Put it on the market,” Suze said. “I’ll be out by the weekend.”

  Jack shook his head. “I don’t want you out. Look, I was trying to be nice, but I’ve had it with Nell. She’s not only bothering Elizabeth, she keeps coming on to me.” Suze tried not to let her skepticism show on her face, but it must have because he added, “Yeah, I knew you wouldn’t believe it, but she’s not much of a friend, Suze, putting the make on your husband. I’m going to let her go, and then she’ll come back here and take this job away from you and then where’ll you be? Stay in the house and let’s give this another chance.”

  “I have plans for when Nell comes back,” Suze said.

  “Really?” Jack said. “But none of those plans involves filing for divorce.”

  Suze got her Palm V out of her purse. She keyed in Jean’
s name and got her number, while Jack said, “Cute. A Palm Pilot just like the big girls.”

  She dialed Jean’s office, and when she got the secretary she said, “Hi, this is Susannah Campbell,” and watched Jack jerk back a little at the sound of her maiden name. “Right. Would you tell Jean to go ahead and file my divorce papers? I should have called sooner but I forgot. Thanks.”

  She hung up and looked at Jack. “Anything else?”

  “You had it all,” Jack said. “I gave you everything.”

  “Thank you,” Suze said. “Now you can give it to Olivia. I’d send her my best, but I need it, so I’m just sending her you. Have a nice life.”

  Jack stood up, his face set and Suze thought, I may have gone too far on that last one. Then he left, and Suze flopped back in Nell’s ergonomic desk chair and breathed again. Well, that was the past, this was the future. She was pretty sure she had a future. She definitely had plans, she was just afraid to get started on them.

  It’s time, she thought and stood up, straightening her skirt. Then she went to Riley’s door, which was slightly ajar, knocked, went in, and sat down across from him.

  “You know, most places, people wait for somebody to say, ‘Come in,’ before they come in,” Riley said. He was leaning back in his desk chair with a stapled report in his hand, and he appeared to be on about the third page. “Appeared,” Suze thought, was probably the right word. There was no way he’d missed anything in the outer office. The guy had ears like a bat.

  “Maybe they wait most places,” Suze said, “but not here.”

  “Picked that up, did you?” Riley tossed the papers on his desk.

  Suze took a deep breath, opened her eyes wide, and smiled at him. “Riley, I—”

  He sat up and pointed his finger at her. “Don’t do that.”

  “What?” she said, mystified.

  “That little-old-me look. I’m not Jack. Just tell me what you want and we’ll talk about it.”

  “Okay. I want to work here.”

  Riley looked cautious. “You do.”

  “No,” Suze said. “I’m filling in for Nell, and I can’t wait until she comes back. This office stuff bores me to tears. But I like what you do. I like researching and talking to people and figuring out things. And you have a lot of work here, too much, you’re turning down some people. You could train me to do this and I’d be good at it. I want to work here as an investigator when Nell comes back.”