“You don’t mean to say…You’re putting me on, Nelly. I simply don’t believe it,” Norma said.
“Believe it,” Nell said.
There was an incredulous silence. Nell turned around. Norma and Monica were grinning at each other like fools.
“Did he ask you out?” Monica tilted Nell’s head back and brandished her mascara wand. “Did he come on to you? Did you kiss?”
The whole heated sequence in the stairwell played through her mind in a timeless instant, and her face went beet red. “As if,” she lied. “I’ve barely met the man.”
“Well?” Norma said bracingly. “Take the bull by the horns, honey!”
“It’s not that simple,” she hedged. “He’s my boss now, and I’m meeting with him after my shift here to discuss the—”
“My goodness, you mean he hired you? Mercy! Things move so quickly in this world for an old lady. And just this morning Kendra told me that she has Epstein-Barr syndrome. But all’s fair in love and war.”
“Norma, you don’t understand.” Nell wiggled as Monica brushed powder on her face. “Monica, that tickles!”
“Hold still, chica. You’re making me smear. Lemme put lipstick on you, and you can look at yourself.”
Nell headed to the bathroom afterward. Her reflection made her gasp. Her eyes looked big, luminous. The lipstick was a deep, sexy red. With her hair fluffed into that luxurious mane of black ringlets, she looked…
Just like her mother. She stared at herself. Swallowed.
“What do you say, chica? Are you stunning, or are you stunning?”
Nell forced herself to smile at her coworker. “Yes. You’re an artist, Monica. Thank you.” She pulled her glasses out of her apron.
“Do you have to?” Monica complained. “It ruins the effect!”
“I’m blind as a bat without them,” Nell said regretfully.
“Oh well. You look better anyway. Strip Steak’s going to have a stroke when he gets a look at you.”
“His name is Duncan Burke, and it’s not going to happen,” Nell said resolutely. “He’s my boss. I wouldn’t compromise a paying job.”
“Oh, excellent! Taboo!” Norma stuck her head in the bathroom door. “The lure of the forbidden! Look at you, good enough to eat. Strip Steak’s jaw will hit the floor. Have you thought about contacts, Nelly?”
Nell swept past them, chin high. They giggled like ninnies.
Three-fifteen came and went, with no Duncan Burke, and the afternoon fell flat. Hanging in her garment bag was the oatmeal-cream sweater dress she’d bought for Nancy’s engagement party, the prettiest thing she had in her closet. She pictured herself walking into his office in that subtly clinging dress, and shivered.
Yikes. Problematic, for sure. He was her boss, after all. And he was rude, arrogant, and presumptuous. And he suffered from a profound lack of imagination, judging from his lunch habits. Plus, he had a weird, fetishistic thing for her chubby knees. So nothing doing.
Uh-huh. So why had she spent all that money she could ill afford on her hair? Why was her face painted? Why had she brought that clinging dress? She’d tarted herself up for exactly what? Get real.
She tried to drug herself into enforced calmness by mentally reciting the first sixteen lines of the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, over and over as she worked. The afternoon passed slowly.
At the end of her shift, she sneaked into the back to change. She needn’t have bothered sneaking, as both Monica and Norma were waiting outside the door when she came out. Monica grabbed Nell’s chin and freshened her lipstick by brute force. “Good luck, chica.”
“Be careful, honey,” Norma said, her eyes misty.
“And don’t forget these.” Monica held up a three-pack of condoms, and stuffed them into Nell’s purse. “Got ’em for you on my cigarette break. Be safe, always, you hear me?”
She was mortified. “You guys! It’s a business meeting!”
She grabbed a cab, despite the warm evening, in deference to the promise to her sisters, and took the elevator to the sixteenth floor. She stood in front of his office, gathering nerve, and reached for the door.
It flew open. She looked up, straight into Duncan’s eyes. Her throat clenched.
His eyes flashed down over her body. “It’s you.”
“You were expecting me, weren’t you?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Come on in.”
She regretted the dress. It didn’t cling provocatively, but the way he looked at her made her feel as if she were reclining naked, draped in silk, like Bathsheba in an old painting. Come and get me. At your peril. Or hers, rather.
“You changed your hair.” His tone was disapproving.
“Why, yes,” she said, confused.
He studied her hair, eyes narrowed, and was about to speak again when a handsome young man strode out into the room. He flashed her a dazzling smile and shook her hand, continuing to hold on to it. “Wow. Duncan told me you were an excellent writer, but he didn’t say you were so pretty,” he said. “Can I call you Nell?”
“No, you can’t,” Duncan cut in. “Let go of her hand. Ms. D’Onofrio, this is my younger brother, Bruce. Please excuse his unprofessional behavior.” He turned and marched past the goggling Derek into the conference room. “Let’s get started.”
They sat in the conference room. Bruce began. “Ms. D’Onofrio—”
“Nell is really okay,” she broke in.
“I prefer that he use ‘Ms. D’Onofrio,’” Duncan said.
There was an uncomfortable pause. “Ah,” Bruce murmured. “As I was saying, Ms. D’Onofrio, Duncan showed me your writing sample. I was impressed. I take it you’ve looked over our outline?”
“Of course,” she said. She’d been too rattled to think about it last night, after that charged stairwell incident, but she’d glanced over it while drinking her morning coffee, and had been pleasantly impressed.
“So?” Duncan prompted impatiently. “What do you think?”
Nell leafed through the folder. “It’s great. The story is involving, and the graphics are beautiful. It’s just that I think the choices the player needs to make seem too, uh…” She hesitated, reluctant to criticize.
“Too what?” Duncan snapped.
“Too logical,” she gasped nervously.
The two men looked at her blankly.
“If you want to appeal to language-oriented, literary types, I think you should play up the romantic, magical elements,” she went on.
Duncan grunted. His chair creaked in protest as he pushed himself away from the table. Nell pressed on. “It would be interesting to develop some plot twists based on leaps of faith, to deepen the feeling of mystery, create a sense of wonder. The game’s title, for instance. ‘The Dagger and the Thorn’ sounds so, um…”
“Pointy?” Bruce grinned. “Phallic?”
“Um, warlike,” Nell temporized demurely. “Masculine. I would recommend something more evocative, more magical. When I read about the sixth-level forest sequence with the lake and the magical swans, I thought of ‘The Golden Egg.’”
“‘The Golden Egg,’” Bruce mused. “That has possibilities.”
“I like it,” Duncan announced.
Bruce whipped his head around, incredulous. “You do? You’ve never liked anything imaginative or evocative in your whole life!”
“No, not that,” he said impatiently. “I mean her hair.”
A shocked silence followed his announcement.
Duncan frowned. “So? What are you gaping about? I didn’t like it at first, but I’ve decided that I like it. Is that so hard to understand?”
Bruce spoke up gallantly, after another half minute of shocked silence. “Ah, Ms. D’Onofrio, I didn’t have the pleasure of seeing how you wore your hair before, so I can’t offer any comparisons, but I can certainly say that it looks lovely now.”
“Uh, thank you,” Nell said. Her face was on fire.
“And if you’ve gotten the approval of anybody as resistant to change as my brother, believe me, it’s a compliment,” he added.