Explicit Page 2

  “Mags, these are gorgeous,” I exclaimed. “How much are they going for?”

  “Around $800,” she said, sipping her drink to cover the flush in her cheeks.

  “Really?” I said, my heart sinking a little. That was way out of my price range and I’d never think of asking her for a discount, even though she’d give it to me in a heartbeat, because I know how much time she spends on each piece.

  “Well, this is a custom-made item,” she said with gentle pride. “Each heel is unique. And it’s all leather, hand-stitched leather sole, stacked heel, blah blah blah.” She rolled her eyes at herself. “Sorry, guys. Shop talk.”

  “Mags, don’t apologize. You should be selling a billion of these,” said Bianca.

  “Let’s put it this way,” she mused. “I’d sell a lot more if some celebrity were wearing them in InStyle magazine.”

  “Maybe Ellie can wear them at a book signing with the fabulous Jackson Ford,” said Bianca. “The paparazzi can’t resist him.”

  Maggie looked at me expectantly. “What do you think, El? Can you get photographed with your foxy new writer on your arm and my boots on your feet?”

  “I’m not even sure I still have that foxy new jackass, I mean writer,” I admitted, glancing down at my still-silent phone again.

  “Oh no. What happened?” asked B.

  I reached into my bag and brought out the emails, silently laying them on the table. Bianca picked them up and Maggie scooted close so they could read simultaneously. There was no doubt when they reached his email.

  “Holy shit,” Maggie whispered.

  “Wow,” said Bianca, still reading. “Wow.”

  “What a dick!” Maggie exclaimed. Then playfully, “El, you’re kind of like an asshole magnet.”

  I tried to object. “What? That’s not true—”

  “Luke was an asshole too,” she said. “Hate to say it, but you know I’m right.”

  I rolled my eyes. My ex-boyfriend Luke Palmer, who’s also an editor at Denton Rifkin, specializes in celebrity tell-alls and lifestyle books about how not to be fat. Two years of living together had recently ended, bringing great joy to the hearts of my best friends.

  “Maybe you just struck a nerve,” B said thoughtfully. “It’s a remarkable email, actually. He starts out saying, ‘Go away, I like my work the way it is,’ and then he ends by saying, ‘Come closer, I want to fuck you.’”

  Maggie shrugged. “Or he’s just fucking with her.”

  “No, Maggie,” said Bianca. “Men are not that complicated. He’s fantasized about you, El. How does he behave in person?”

  “Well, we only met briefly a couple of times at DR events, when Sol introduced me. Book launches, that kind of thing. I doubt he even remembers me.”

  I was just being realistic. I’m not a blonde cover girl like Bianca, but I’m fit and I can turn a few heads with my dark brown hair and light green eyes. It’s just that I’m not some cleavage-baring bombshell, especially at work.

  “So you guys have never talked?” Bianca prodded.

  “Well, not really. We haven’t had our sit-down yet. And now I’m not sure we ever will.”

  “Asshole,” fumed Maggie. “He’s threatened by her. She’s just trying to do her job.”

  “He’s not an asshole, though,” said Bianca. “You know, I met him once.”

  My eyes widened as I gulped my drink. “No, you never mentioned that.”

  B nodded. “Years and years ago. When I was modeling. It was a spread for British Vogue, I think.”

  “Did you sleep with him?” I asked.

  “No, no,” she laughed. “He was in a committed relationship. He was a real gentleman, actually. It’s hard to imagine this email was written by the same man.”

  “Whoa, he’s hot!” Maggie crowed. She’d pulled up some google images on her phone and handed it to Bianca. I peered over. There were lots of pictures of him rocking a suit, one gorgeous portrait of his face and hands from a Rolex ad he’d done some years before. His intelligent eyes, wide masculine wrist, the sprinkling of grey in his beard made my traitorous heart race. Bianca scrolled down, pausing at a photo of him in a heather grey T-shirt, his well-defined chest and arms rippling beneath.

  “Yeah, he’s hot,” I said, “and he’s also fucking brilliant.” Suddenly I was super pissed and emotional. “I’m so disappointed,” I admitted. “All week, I had such high hopes. For real collaboration, you know? He’s so talented. And now. . . clearly, he has no interest in my input. He doesn’t even respect me enough to treat me like a professional.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mags, squeezing my shoulder.

  “All week I just couldn’t believe my luck. I mean, they assigned me. He’s Jackson fucking Ford. I was actually thinking I might be good at my job.”

  “You know what, Ellie?” Bianca said. “You’re not good at your job. You’re great at it. I love the way you replied to his email. You didn’t back down. You challenged him. I love that! Maybe that’s just what he needs.”

  “Or maybe not,” I said, dejected. “He hasn’t emailed me back.”

  “What if he complains?” asked Maggie. “Could you lose your job?”

  I traced the rim of my wine glass, thinking it over. “I guess he could throw his weight around and try to get me fired. But I don’t really think he’d do that.”

  “That seems like the worst-case scenario,” said B. “What’s the more likely outcome?”

  “They assign someone else to Ford and I don’t get another chance at a high-priority client for a long time.” I tried to shrug it off, but the idea of this jerk actually derailing my career was upsetting me a lot more than I wanted to admit.

  “That’s fucked,” said Mags, draining her beer.

  “Or,” said Bianca, optimistically, “he realizes you’re no pushover. And he’s curious about what you have to say. And he takes the meeting.”

  Maggie went up to order another while Bianca and I sipped our wine in silence. My phone buzzed on the seat and I jumped, grabbing it with a pounding heart only to find that the vibration was just a calendar notification that it was “Happy Hour with M & B <3.” Damn. I sighed and tucked the phone under my thigh.

  “Still no email?” B asked.

  I shrugged and tried to push away my nerves. I’d had enough of talking about myself. “So have you heard from that journalist guy?” I asked Bianca, needing a change of subject.

  “Nahh. He travels too much,” she replied. “He was cute though.”

  Maggie had just returned with her Sam Adams when suddenly the door opened and a street violinist entered the restaurant, playing a haunting rendition of Wild as the Wind. The busy bistro hushed in the presence of his talent and memories of David Bowie. When he finished, everyone erupted in applause. The violinist took a little bow and left.

  Then, just as we were closing out our tabs, my phone beeped with the telltale ping of an incoming email. I set it on the table and the three of us stared at it, riveted. I froze in place, my pulse skyrocketing. Maggie picked the phone up first and swiped at the screen. Then she smiled and turned the phone toward Bianca and me.

  It was an email from Ford:

  Monday at 9:00 a.m. I’ll call you.

  “Well,” said Bianca. “I think you’ve got your answer.”

  3

  When Carolyn arrived on Monday morning, I told her I’d be receiving a call from Jackson Ford around 9:00 a.m. and to patch him right through. “Oh, great,” she said. “Remember: be nice.” I thought it best to hold off on telling her about the email exchange. There just wasn’t time. Plus, I didn’t want to think about the looks (or advice) I’d get once she found out what Ford had said to me.

  A couple of minutes later I heard the phone ring and Carolyn’s professional voice saying, “Ellie Parker’s office. May I— oh, good morning, Mr. Ford. Hold one moment, please.” Then she poked her head in my doorway and said somewhat gleefully, “It’s him, El.”

  I thanked her and asked her to close t
he door. My heart was about ready to pound out of my chest, so I took a deep breath, counted to three, and exhaled. Then I picked up the receiver.

  “Good morning, Jackson,” I said kindly. “I’m really glad you called. I hope you didn’t take offense at—”

  “Let’s stop right there.” His voice was firm, almost cold. “And I’ll tell you how this is going to go. I’ll be asking the questions and you’ll be answering them.”

  “What—” I sputtered.

  “Just think of it as a job interview.”

  “And for what job am I interviewing?” I asked.

  “For the job of my editor.”

  Oh no, I thought. Is this how it’s going to be? “Excuse me, Jackson, but whether you like it or not, I am your editor.”

  “Excuse me, Eleanor,” he replied. “But if I call Louise Hayden and tell her I can’t work with you, do you think you’ll still be my editor?”

  I forcibly unclenched my jaw and cleared my throat. “I guess not.”

  “Okay then. You might want to close your office door.”

  I looked up and, indeed, the door was still open a crack.

  “Good guess,” I said. Then I got up and shut the door. “Okay,” I reported. “It’s closed.”

  “Why did it take you fifty-five minutes to reply to my email Friday night?” he asked.

  He wasn’t letting it go. Best to deal with this head on. So I answered honestly. What did I have to lose?

  “That email caught me off guard,” I admitted. “Frankly, I had a lot of different reactions, and I wasn’t sure how to respond.”

  “Hmm. Did you write any other responses before the one you sent?”

  “No.”

  “Are you in a relationship?”

  “Excuse me?” I objected, more startled than angry. “What difference does—”

  “Ellie, don’t waste my time,” he said, almost weary. “Just answer the damn question. Are you in a relationship?”

  “No,” I said, gritting my teeth at the intrusion. “Not anymore.”

  “Who broke it off?”

  “I did,” I snapped.

  “Why?”

  I thought about giving the standard response. “We just weren’t right for each other,” that kind of thing. But instinctively I knew that wasn’t really an option, not with Ford as my interrogator. So I gave it some thought.

  “You’re assuming I know the answer to that question,” I mused. “I don’t know, maybe I finally realized he was never going to respect me.” Now that I’d said it out loud, I knew it was the truth.

  “Are your parents divorced?”

  “No. They were married forty-seven years. She was holding his hand when he passed.”

  There was a pause, and then something in Ford’s voice changed. “What happened?”

  “Cancer.” The interrogation had made me defensive so far, but for some reason I was also starting to feel. . . lighter. As if these confessions were unburdening some part of me. I wondered if that meant I’d be passing Jackson’s test.

  “I see,” he said. “I’m sorry.” And he really seemed to mean it. “When?”

  “Uh, about eight years ago. It happened so fast. When we found out he was sick, it was too late for them to do much.” I blinked back a few tears that had gathered in my eyes, trying to keep my voice from wavering.

  “He must have been quite young,” Ford went on, his tone soothing.

  “He was seventy. My parents were older when they had me.”

  He was quiet for a moment. My computer pinged with an incoming email, and the sound snapped me out of my trance.

  I rubbed my eyes with one hand and said, “Can we talk about something else now?”

  “What do you think worked about Lions and Lambs?” he asked, suddenly switching gears back to business, referencing his first and most well-received book.

  “Oh, so much,” I replied, eager to leave the subject of my dad’s death but also happy to talk about a novel I love. “It works on so many levels. I remember the first time I read it I was so engrossed because I really didn’t know where it was going. I didn’t know if Garrett Addison was going to live or die. There was that element of unpredictability that isn’t present in the rest of the series because we know you’re not going to kill off your hero. And it got richer upon repeated readings because the story meant something. The metaphor, whether someone is knowable, really resonated with me. And the writing itself—I don’t know what your process was but it seemed to be inspired by something. The prose is elegant, but also efficient, like Addison himself.”

  “Not the worst review,” he replied. “What didn’t work?”

  “Ah, I’m not sure,” I exclaimed, a little stumped. “That’s probably the hardest thing you’ve asked me. It’s a near-perfect book.”

  “Near-perfect?” There was that arrogance again.

  “Well,” I replied, “I did note one glaringly obvious missed opportunity.”

  Ford just laughed at my fiery response. “And what might that be?”

  “I’ve always thought it was a shame that Addison is already so good at what he does when we meet him. He’s already this genius spy machine. And I wonder how he got that way. Has he ever failed? Does he have flaws? And how is he able to be so emotionally removed from what he does? I guess I wonder if he was ever vulnerable.”

  “I see,” was his only reply. And then he was quiet for some time.

  “Are you still there?” I asked softly, wondering if I’d mis-stepped.

  “Did you think about me when you masturbated Friday night?”

  My pause was, I thought, imperceptible. “No.”

  “That’s not true,” he said with sudden venom. “How do you expect me to entrust my work to you when you lie to me about the simplest—”

  “I wasn’t—”

  He didn’t give me a chance to finish. “This conversation is over. I’m hanging up.”

  And then he hung up.

  My jaw literally dropped. I sat there with the receiver in my hand thinking, “This man is un-fucking-believable! He is the most”—and then my mind was like a thesaurus entry—“frustrating, exasperating, infuriating human being I have ever met.” And I slammed the receiver down on the cradle. Which brought Carolyn rushing to my door.

  “What happened?” she asked, stricken. “Are we fired? Are the pink slips on their way down from HR?”

  “We lost the connection,” I replied, stretching the truth.

  “Oh, thank god,” she breathed, fanning herself with relief. “You don’t have to punish the phone, though. I’ll get him right back on the line.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We were almost done. I’ll just email him,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, hesitating at the door.

  “Yeah, yeah. I really need my tea, please,” I prompted.

  “I’m on it.”

  When she left I got onto my computer. “Jackson,” I wrote. “Whether or not I masturbated is none of your fucking business. That said, and despite your reservations, I believe we can work well together. Let’s try again.”

  4

  The rest of that morning, from the moment I slammed down the receiver, work was impossible. At lunchtime, admitting crushing defeat against my growing to-do List, I took a walk towards the park hoping the crisp air would clear my head. I phoned B and told her what had happened.

  “Why didn’t you tell Carolyn?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” was my frustrated response as I power-walked along the perimeter of the duck pond. “She’s a little stressed about the whole thing, and I didn’t want to make it worse. I’m just going with my instincts here.”

  “Okay,” she said soothingly. “But she’s right outside your door. She’s going to hear something sooner or later. Just think about it.”

  “I will,” I said, sinking onto a park bench and wriggling out of my high heels.

  “At least you got to talk to him about his book a little,” she said, trying for the
bright side as usual.

  “Yes,” I conceded. “And he was listening.”

  “He’ll call back.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, tracing circles in the grass with my toes.

  “Because he cares about what you think. Ellie, the guy’s into you.”

  I shook my head. “But this is a business relationship.”

  “Is that really all it is?” Bianca persisted.

  “What do you mean?” I slipped my shoes back on and headed back down the path, side-stepping a group of toddlers having an imaginary tea party.

  “What if it’s more?” she asked. “What if it’s business and pleasure? How do you feel about the sex talk?”

  “It infuriates me.” I bit my tongue, then decided to spill the full truth. “But at the same time, he totally turns me on, which infuriates me even more,” I confessed in a rush, sinking onto the grass to sit and hide my eyes. “Is that crazy?”

  “Of course it’s not crazy,” she laughed. “You know, it’s funny, he’s asking you to expose your fantasies to him, and on some level, you’re asking him the same thing.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Your fantasies and his writing process are both intimate acts. Maybe he wants you to risk as much as he’s risking.” She let that sink in. “When was the last time you visited Emma Rose?”

  “Oh, it’s been almost two weeks,” I admitted.

  “Time for a trip to New Jersey,” she advised. “Put things back in perspective.”

  “Yeah,” I answered with renewed energy. “You’re right. I love you, B.”

  “I love you, E.”

  I hit the “end call” button and lay back in the grass, watching the autumn sunlight shift through the branches. Why did life always have to be so complicated?

  The afternoon passed without a response from Jackson. When Carolyn said good night I packed up my things and headed towards Penn Station, trying not to feel rejected. I stopped at my favorite Korean grocer on Ninth, even though it was a bit out of the way. “I need four mixed bouquets,” I told the elderly woman at the register. “Some with roses.”