“Dream on, pervert.” I type in my password. The previous one expired. Now it’s DIE-JOSH-DIE! “It’s my job, not yours.”
“So who’s your date with?”
“A guy.” I’ll find one between now and the end of the workday. I’ll hire a guy if I have to. I’ll call a modeling agency and ask for the catch of the day. He’ll pick me up in a limo out front of B&G and Joshua will have egg on his face.
“What time is your date?”
“Seven,” I hazard.
“What location is your date?” He slowly makes a pencil mark. An X? A slash? I can’t tell.
“You’re very interested; why is that?”
“Studies have shown that if managers feign interest in their employees’ personal lives it increases their morale and makes them feel valued. I’m getting the practice in, before I’m your boss.” His professional spiel is contradicted by the weird intensity in his eyes. He’s truly captivated by all of this.
I give him my best withering look. “I’m meeting him for drinks at the sports bar on Federal Avenue. And: You’re never going to be my boss.”
“What a total coincidence. I’m going there to watch the game tonight. At seven.”
My clever fib was a tactical error. I study him but can’t tell where his face ends and the lie begins.
“Maybe I’ll see you there,” he continues. He is diabolical.
“Sure, maybe,” I make my voice bored so he can’t tell I’m simultaneously fuming and panicking.
“So this dream—a man was in it, right?”
“Oh, yes indeed.” My eyes travel across Joshua without my permission. I think I can see the shape of his collarbone. “It was highly erotic.”
“I should compose an email to Jeanette,” he says faintly after a pause and a throat-clearing rasp. He does a poor imitation of typing on his keyboard without even looking at the screen.
“Did I say erotic? I meant esoteric. I get those mixed up.”
He narrows one eye. “Your dream was . . . mysterious?”
Here goes nothing. It’s time to take my chances with the human lie detector.
“It was full of symbols and hidden meaning. I was lost in a garden, and there was a man there. Someone I spend a lot of time with, but this time he seemed like a stranger.”
“Continue,” Joshua says. It’s so strange to talk to him when his face isn’t a mask of boredom.
I cross my legs as elegantly as I can manage and his eyes flash under my desk, then back to my face.
“I was wearing nothing but bedsheets,” I say in a confiding tone, then pause.
“This is strictly between us, right?”
He nods, spellbound, and I mentally high-five myself for winning Word Tennis.
I need to prolong this moment; it’s not often I gain the upper hand. I put on lipstick using the wall as a mirror. The color is called Flamethrower and it’s my trademark. Vicious, violent, poisonous red. Slit-wrists red. The color of the devil’s underpants, according to Dad. I have so many tubes that I always have a tube within a three-foot radius. I am black and white, but thanks to Flamethrower, I can be Technicolor. I live in terror of it being discontinued by the manufacturer, hence my hoarding.
“So I’m walking through this garden and the man is right behind me.” Today I am a pathological liar. This is what Joshua Templeman does to me.
“He’s right behind me. Like, up against me. Pressed up against my ass.” I stand and slap my own butt loud enough to make my point. The words ring so true, because mostly it is true. Joshua nods slowly, his throat constricting in a swallow as his eyes trail down my dress.
“I seem to recognize his voice.” I pause for thirty seconds, blotting my lips, holding it up to admire the little red heart-shaped mark on the tissue before scrunching it and putting it in the wastebasket near my toes. I start reapplying.
“Do you always have to do that twice?” Joshua is growing irritated by this stilted storytelling. He taps his fingertips impatiently on the desk.