Scissor Link, Georgette Kaplan [best 7 inch ereader .TXT] 📗

Janet pried her hand away from her face, eyes suddenly red, and seeing her carefully composed face suddenly all knotted up with emotion was as shocking to Wendy as seeing it covered with war paint. “I’m forty-four, I have no children, I’m divorced, and I’m experimenting with bondage five years after it was cool. It’s fucked up. It’s all fucked up.”

“Listen, Janet—Jan…” Wendy hopped up on the desk on Janet’s side, wishing she had the nerve to take Janet’s hand. “Tell me about it. Talk to me.”

Janet took a deep breath. “Tissue.” She held out her hand. “Please, could you just—hand me—”

Wendy realized there was a box of tissues on a file cabinet adjacent to Janet’s desk, but Janet’s desk was so large that Janet couldn’t reach it. She plucked out a swath and handed them to Janet, who first dabbed at her eyes, then blew her nose. The soiled tissues went into a wastebasket that was already half-full.

Wendy plucked another tissue to offer to Janet, but she was already gone. Face closed off, bricked over, the redness in the orbits of her eyes and the nostrils of her nose now seeming like graffiti on her composed expression.

Yet she couldn’t quite manage it. That wall she’d put up so many times before had cracks in it. Wendy could see it in her eyes—the thing she’d seen more and more of over the past few days, that Janet had let her see more and more of.

Her sadness.

Janet stood abruptly. Like she was ripping free of something. “I can’t have this. I shouldn’t even want it. This is just another reason…”

And she was moving, so fast and yet so controlled that Wendy thought of a machine overheating, going faster and faster until it broke down. Wendy trailed after her, knowing that Janet didn’t want to be followed, hating that she knew Janet well enough to think that, that she couldn’t be ignorant enough to try and comfort her. Maybe she didn’t know Janet at all.

She heard Elizabeth say, “Jan, the Carson meeting?” through the open door, but the pace of Janet’s footfalls never altered as she left the office.

A moment later, Elizabeth appeared in the door of the office. She closed it behind her. Wendy sat at Janet’s desk, not even feeling the warmth of her. Wendy chewed on her thumbnail and thought of all the worries she’d carried that someone would find out who she was. All her self-doubt that she wasn’t proving anything to her family except how pig-headed she could be, and then there were the small pleasures in earning something and having it be hers. Her job, her work, and something of Janet Lace. And now…

Maybe it was all a waste of time. Especially the Janet Lace part.

“Did you hear any of that?” she asked Elizabeth, as if just noticing her. Fuck, it was getting awkward, brooding with Elizabeth standing in the corner like a lifeguard or something.

“Mostly the entertaining bits with Mary getting her ass kicked. I tried not to catch any of the stuff where you and Janet…yeah.”

“So you got the gist of it?”

“That, and we’ve been shooting the shit about her sex life pretty consistently over the course of our friendship. It’s been pretty dull for the last few years, actually.” Then she ventured a question like she’d been called on in school without her hand raised. “Good on you for tapping that?”

“More or less inappropriate,” Wendy said.

“Yeah…Janet’s used to it. So, uhh…you going to go after her? Seems like your…thing. If you’re not, I am.”

Wendy stood, stretched. The few moments she’d been sitting felt like a thousand years. “Should I? I want this relationship, but she told me in Yuma that it wasn’t right. I don’t want to force something on her…I want to be what she wants. Just because I can’t see the appeal of not having sex with me doesn’t mean…”

Elizabeth held up a finger, went to the drink trolley, and fetched a bottle of cognac. One glass. “This is medicinal,” she said, looking around for glass number two. “I mean, what, you thought dating your boss-slash-employee would be easy?”

Wendy pushed her hands together. “Kinda thought the boss and employee things canceled each other out. Not that I am her boss…”

“You own stock in the company?”

“I own a lot of stocks,” Wendy said defensively, then winced as that somehow shockingly failed to make it better.

“So you own the company.”

“Only some of it.”

“You own the company, she works for the company, she works for you.”

“Okay, that’s not even the problem.”

Elizabeth found a clean coffee mug. It did not say ‘World’s Best Boss’.

“The problem isn’t the problem,” Elizabeth told her, suddenly fancying herself a philosopher-bartender as she poured. “It’s this, it’s that, it’s that she had an unhappy childhood and her marriage ended badly and her career isn’t going as well as she thought it would and she thinks her thighs are chubby…”

“Bullshit! Her thighs are great!”

Elizabeth handed her the mug. “And if she realizes that, suddenly all her issues go away and the clouds clear up and the sun is shining and the Justice League movie doesn’t suck? No, because she’s got a million things and she doesn’t want to share them and she struggles with them every day. And then she has a million other things that are great and smart and funny—maybe not funny—but she’ll give me the day off and answer her own phone when I have the flu, she’ll take a cut in her own salary before she lets an employee get laid off, and she…” Elizabeth lowered her voice. “She’s actually a really big fan of the Babysitters Club.”

“Shut up!”

“She has the entire series in this chest she keeps hidden. Have you been to her apartment?” Wendy shook her head. “Keep your eyes open. And make her take you to her apartment, you’ve been her bitch, you deserve to sleep in her bed. Jesus, what’s wrong with you? You’re making us all look bad.”

Wendy laughed and