The Boss (22 page)

"It's all right, Sophie. Sorry.” India
pinched the bridge of her nose, her dark brows drawing down, her
eyes squeezing shut tight. "It's a new mandate from on high; we're
not to feature products from any company that tests on animals or
uses ingredients manufactured by companies that test on
animals."

Jessica made a kind of strangled noise.
"B-but that means no Esteé Lauder, no Bobbi Brown, Clinique, MAC,
Fekkai..."

"And no one owned by any of the corporations
like Proctor & Gamble, which means your perfume profile is a
bust." India shook her head. "This is going to reduce us to Avon
and Mary Kay. Not exactly high fashion."

"Avon and Mary Kay test on animals," I
supplied unhelpfully.

India forced what was very clearly a "we're
fucked" kind of smile. "Well, I guess it's time to get on the phone
to some nice vegans and see what we can do."

The day was brutal. As far as first days
went, it replaced the time I started working at GAP on Black Friday
as the worst first day of my life. We spent most of the morning
researching. All of the samples we had on hand were from companies
on the no-no list. India decided that we'd spin the month as a
return to natural beauty, in the hopes that someone in management
would see how absurd this all was.

Look, it wasn't that I wanted to think about
bunnies getting lipstick smeared in their eyes, but I also didn't
want my job to go down the tubes. If word got out that the magazine
was going cruelty-free, we were going to lose a lot of ad
revenue.

Jessica and I did most of the running in and
out of the building, to stop by company offices for last minute
samples, or to department stores to buy what we couldn't get
overnighted. I was exhausted, my feet hurt, my hands were covered
in eye shadow swatches in colors named “Kale” and “Brigid’s Flame”,
but I supposed it could have been worse. As I was staggering
through reception at eight o'clock, Deja was still at my old desk.
She looked up and waved at me to come over.

Going into the old office felt completely
weird, and the most bizarre pang of homesickness gripped me. Deja
had the iPad Neil had lent me, and I almost puked up my heart at
the sight of it. Had she looked at it? Had she seen that
picture?

"Mr. Elwood wanted to make sure he returned
this yesterday, but in the chaos with his emergency, he forgot."
She handed it to me with a smile, not one single hint of knowing in
her expression.

Then I felt guilty and paranoid. "Thanks," I
said, gesturing to the door. "I'm going to head home, I'm
beat.”

"I heard about the bad timing." She grimaced
to convey her sympathetic horror. "Get some rest."

On the train on the way home, I opened the
iPad. I was hoping to find a message or something there to tide me
over until I saw Neil again, even though I realized how silly that
hope was. I'm sure flirting with me wasn't high priority when his
poor mother was lying in a hospital bed.

Still, I was delighted when checked the notes
app.

Sophie

I'm so sorry I can't be there for your first
week in the beauty department. Be assured I am lending my support
from afar. Since I don't have your personal email address, have
mine. I'd love to hear from you, I find myself missing you
already.

P.S. Deja is under the impression that this
iPad belonged to you, so don’t try to return it at the office.

He signed it with his name and an email
address I'd never seen before. But what I focused on was the
"missing you" bit of the message. Missing me? He would have left
this note while he was still in the office. I have to admit, that
made me feel pretty warm and fuzzy.

When I got home, Holli was out. I pulled my
laptop from its usual place under the couch and flipped open the
screen. Then I logged into Gmail, typed in his address, and stared
at the blank message field.

Of course I wanted to tell him what a huge
mistake it was for the magazine to go cruelty-free. I wanted to
tell him about all the extra work it caused for us, and all the
people he was pissing off, people he needed to run
Porteras
.
I wanted to warn him that these changes were too sweeping and
sudden, but I recognized that now, when he was across the Atlantic
tending to his mother's medical crisis, was definitely not the
time.

I was questioning my loyalties, too. Did I
want to tell him all of this because I was looking out for him, or
the magazine? The fact that I couldn't decide - and without knowing
if this were an issue he cared passionately about - was a little
too confusing for me.

On top of all that, I didn't know how much of
our relationship was just sexy fun times, and how much was
friendship. Was he the kind of friend I could be honest with, or
were we still in the "be nice, and make sure you don't fuck it up"
stage?

He wasn't the only one having difficulties
separating the person in his mind for six years from the actual
person in the new relationship.

Since I wasn't going to broach the subject in
an email anyway, I tried to let go of the hectic workday and
focused instead on what I really wanted to say to him. I settled
on:

Neil, I hope everything is okay. Don't miss
me. I'll be here when you come back.

Call me if you want. If not, that's okay.

I paused, my fingers tapping gently on the
keys without actually typing anything. Clearly, text was not my
medium when it came to men. He'd been pretty emotionally blunt with
the "I miss you" talk. Was it okay to say something like that
back?

I settled on,
I'll be thinking about
you
, and hit send. I forced myself to go to bed without waiting
for a reply.

Chapter Twelve

In the week that
followed, my contact with Neil was confined to short email
messages, and that was fine by me. With as busy as things were at
the office, I wouldn't have had time for much else.

India, Jessica, and I worked into the wee
hours on the weekend, then came in early and stayed late all the
way through Thursday. I'd forgotten all about the party Holli had
wanted to throw for me until I was leaving on Friday morning.

"We pushed it back to nine so you'll only be
an hour late," she quipped as I headed out the door. I really hoped
I could make it at all. I'd known that the beauty department was a
busy area of the magazine, but I'd no idea how much planning and
effort went into selecting how the products would be featured. I'd
just been in the meetings where they'd shown Gabriella the page
proofs and she had given a yes or a no.

By the time I got home - to an apartment full
of people at ten o' clock, as Holli had predicted - I was mentally
and physically exhausted, but mostly caught up. At least, caught up
enough that we were taking the weekend off. Which was its own kind
of bummer; I was supposed to have spent the weekend with Neil. Work
would have been a convenient distraction.

After a quick round of greetings and
congratulations on my new position, I excused myself to change from
work clothes to party attire. Then I rejoined everyone to get my
socialization on.

The party was like most parties attended on
Friday nights by exhausted working twenty-somethings. Music, booze,
and talking. At the risk of making myself and all my friends sound
old before our time, the days of pushing couches off fire escapes
were way, way behind us. In fact, everyone had mostly cleared out
by one o'clock, except for Deja. She and Holli were kind of
semi-flirting on the couch, and I had started to feel like a bit of
a third wheel. So when Holli suggested we all go out and grab
something to eat, I turned them down.

"You guys go, I'll stay here and clean some
of this up," I said, exaggerating my yawn. "Then I'm off to
bed."

"Don't clean it all up," Holli warned me.
"I'll be here tomorrow to help."

After they left, I took a trash bag and
started collecting red Solo cups. I was pouring out an unfinished
drink in the sink when my phone rang, and Neil's number was
displayed on the screen.

Until I saw that number, I'd had no clue how
much I'd been missing him. I scrambled to answer, breathless and
drunk, praying I wouldn’t say something stupid, and blurted a loud
"Hi!" into the phone.

"Oh, uh, hello. I wasn't expecting you to
sound quite so awake." He, on the other hand, did not sound awake
at all.

It was probably the exhaustion and the booze,
but I almost burst into tears of relief at finally talking to him
again. I kept it cool, thank god. "Holli had that party for me
tonight, to celebrate my promotion," I reminded him.

"Yes, of course. I'm sorry, I'd completely
forgotten. Am I interrupting it?" he asked.

"No, not at all," I assured him. "Everyone's
gone already. How about you, is everything okay?"

"Fine, everything is fine. I'm actually back
in town. My flight just got in and I’m sitting outside the airport
now." There was a bit of a pause, as though he didn't know what
else to say, and then he asked, "I hate to bother you, but would
you mind if I came by?"

I chewed my lip as I surveyed my apartment.
It looked like twenty people had been crammed in the small space,
drinking and hanging out.

"At your own risk," I warned him. "We did
just have a party."

"I understand completely. I'll see you in
about an hour then? If it isn’t too late?”

I hadn't heard him so hopeful and flustered
since the night he had come to my apartment drunk and looking for a
booty call. It was adorable. "No, that isn't too late." It would
put me at twenty-two hours awake, but I could sleep when I was
dead. I just wanted to see him. As I puttered around the house for
an hour, constantly checking the clock, I refused to examine the
anxiety that had my stomach all twisted up in knots. I missed him,
so what? I was allowed to miss him, right?

At some point, I stopped pouring out
half-empty cups and sat down with a drink of my own. I don't know
when it was that I'd nodded off, but the intercom startled me
awake. I sloshed rum and Coke from the cup onto my sequined, white
tank top and groaned. "Hang on, I'll be right there!"

What was I doing? He couldn’t hear me all the
way down on the street. I hit the call button and gasped, “Sorry,
sorry! I’m buzzing you up right now.”

I dabbed frantically at the stain with a
crumpled napkin, until he knocked. When I opened the door, Neil
stepped immediately inside, sweeping me into a crushing
embrace.

"I missed you so much," he mumbled against my
neck, and I staggered backward, my hands coming up between us to
give myself a little space.

"Whoa there, cowboy!" I disentangled myself,
laughing. "Did you happen to be drinking on the flight?"

He laughed sheepishly and stepped back. "I'm
sorry, it appears the Klonopin isn't entirely out of my
system."

"You take Klonopin to fly?" I laughed with
him and rose on my tiptoes to kiss his cheek, one hand against the
front of his sweater to retain my admittedly wobbly balance. "Most
people just get hammered."

"Yes, and it seems that all those people were
in your apartment tonight." His eyes widened as he took in the
wasteland of cups and paper plates before him. "Your living room
smells like a still."

"No, that... might be me." I looked down and
brushed at the stain on my shirt. "Let me go change out of this...
unless I'm not going to be wearing it for long?"

He grinned at me and shut the door behind
him. I held out my hand to him to lead him to my bedroom.

It's strange when you're showing someone the
place where you live for the first time. Neil had been in the
apartment before, but never my bedroom. When I flipped on the
light, I saw it the way I assumed he saw it. The white plaster
walls, the green shantung duvet cover and what suddenly seemed to
be far too many beaded throw pillows. Way too much stuffed crammed
into one small space.

He gestured to the dress form beside my
sewing machine. "Do you design clothing?"

"No, but I do tailor mine." I shrugged. "I
get a lot of free stuff, not all of it fits. You can hang your coat
on that, if you want."

My closet wasn't really a closet as much as
it was a water pipe I wasn't supposed to hang stuff on, and a lot
of my bedroom window was blocked by an enormous mirror in a
chipping gilt frame. I felt kind of embarrassed. My place looked
like a hostel compared to his room at the W, and I could only
imagine what his apartment was like.

His eyes followed the movements of my hands
as I pulled the shirt over my head. I smiled to myself and made a
beeline to the bathroom. "Hang on, I need to rinse this before it
sets."

My hands were trembling as I ran cold water
over the stain. Why was I so nervous? Just because Neil was in my
apartment? It wasn't like he was going to judge me unworthy because
I wasn’t rich; he'd never once given me that impression. And if he
did find my room lacking, so fucking what? I wasn't trying out to
be his interior decorator. I was doing a friends-with-benefits kind
of thing with him. He probably wasn't going to turn down sex
because my fuzzy socks were on the floor by my bed.

I heard music start playing softly in my
bedroom, and I grinned, shaking my head at my own silliness. He
felt at home enough to fiddle with my iPod. I could calm down about
the worthiness of my place.

I walked back into my bedroom, my arms
crossed over my chest. Neil was standing beside my bed, holding the
framed picture of me and my mom that I kept on my bedside table. He
looked up guiltily and replaced it next to my alarm clock. "I'm
sorry; I'm touching all of your things."

"It's okay. You're drugged." I suppressed my
laughter and leaned against the doorframe. It was awkward to bring
up the subject while I was standing there in my bra, but I had to
ask, “So... how’s your mom doing?”