The Neanderthal Box Set: A Workplace Romance, 2020 Revised and Expanded Edition

by Reid, Penny

  He was watching me in that measured way he’d employed in the elevator after my episode of verbal nonsense. A moment passed as we looked at each other. Then, he tipped his head toward our champagne glasses on the bar. “Are you two celebrating something?”

  I looked to Elizabeth for help, but she was pretending to read the drink menu.

  “No.” When I met his gaze again, I found him watching me with unveiled interest.

  His attention was maddeningly distracting; my unresponsive brain felt covered in molasses. My body, however, felt rigid and aware. I felt every stitch of clothing I was wearing touching me: my backless, strapless bra felt too tight; the caressing silky softness of the dress caused goose bumps to rise over my neck and arms; the friction of my lace undergarments and stockings burned my inner thighs.

  I swallowed with a great deal of effort and forced myself to speak, not really paying attention to my words. “One of Elizabeth’s patients gave her the tickets, and she wanted to take me out because she thinks I need cheering up.”

  “Because of your job?” He prompted, shifting closer to me, resting his hand on the bar between us.

  His new proximity caused my heart to gallop, effectively kicking my brain into overdrive. Words tumbled forth unchecked. “Yeah, that and I just broke up with my boyfriend. Although, I don’t know if broke up is the right term for it. It’s hard to find words and phrases which really accurately reflect actions. I find verbs in the English language to be lacking. What I really like are collective nouns. The nice thing about them is that you can use any word in the English language as a collective noun, which allows you to ascribe both features, as well as character traits to the collection or group. Although, some collective nouns are well established. As an example, do you know what a group of rhinoceroses is called?”

  He shook his head as he tilted it to the side, watching me.

  “It’s called a crash. I like to make up my own collective nouns for things; like, take that group of women over there.” I indicated across his shoulder, and he turned to see where I pointed. “See the plastic-looking ones on the purple lily pad? I would call a group like that a latex of ladies, with the word latex being the collective noun. And those cages, with the monkeys and the couples—I would call them collectively a vulgar of cages, with the word vulgar being the collective noun.”

  He lifted his hand to get the bartender’s attention as he spoke. “I would switch them. I would call the cages a latex of cages and the women a vulgar of women.”

  I considered his comment before responding. “Why is that?”

  He leveled his gaze on me and gifted me with a small smile. “Because that group of women over there are more vulgar than what is happening in the cages, and the couples in the cages are wearing latex.”

  I watched him for a moment, my brow wrinkling, and then I moved my eyes to one of the cages to watch the couple. I chewed on my lip as I studied them. “The women look completely naked, and the men are in monkey suits. Where is the... the—” I sucked in a breath, my wide eyes moving back to his. “Are you saying... they’re, are they...?”

  He laughed and shook his head; a bright, full smile lit his eyes with amusement. “No, no. I guarantee they’re not engaging in any monkey business.” He laughed again as he watched me. “I know for a fact it’s all choreographed. It’s a show.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “It’s a show?”

  His laugh was deep and open, and it was doing strange things to my insides, especially since I suspected he was laughing at me. My stomach fluttered with a mixture of embarrassment and apprehension. I narrowed my eyes at him, trying to ignore my body’s continuing hysterics. “It’s still disconcerting. I mean, would you want one of those cages in your house?”

  He continued to grin at my incredulousness and answered, “Not with the monkey in it.”

  “The man or the primate?” I countered.

  “Neither.” His gaze narrowed, mimicking mine, and he leaned still closer.

  I swallowed unevenly and managed to croak, “But you would want the woman?”

  “Not that woman.” His voice was so low I almost didn’t hear his response. His eyes moved from mine and traveled over my hair, forehead, nose, cheeks, then remained on my lips for longer than I felt was necessary... or appropriate… I wasn’t sure which, but there had to be a word that adequately conveyed my discomfort at that moment.

  “What do you need?” The bartender’s polite query sounded from my left, which, to my dual relief and disappointment, caused Quinn to move his attention from my lips.

  “Hey, David, please put whatever these two are having tonight on my account,” Quinn said.

  David shook his head slowly, his eyes flickering upward then back to Quinn. “I can’t do that, Mr. Sullivan.”

  Quinn frowned. “Why not?”

  “Someone else already volunteered to cover their tab.” The bartender grimaced, his shoulders stiffening.

  “Who?” Quinn asked.

  David’s voice was tinged with uncertainty when he responded. “I can’t tell you that.”

  The bartender’s response surprised Quinn; I could tell by the narrowing of his eyes. I saw the muscle tick at his jaw before he murmured in a low voice, “Yes, you can.”

  I turned to Elizabeth, but she was distracted by her pager. I didn’t notice until that moment, but it must have been going off. I gave her a questioning glance as I listened to Quinn and David’s discussion.

  I heard David sigh. “Alright, listen, I’ll tell you, but don’t look at them, ok? They’ve been really great with the tips.”

  “Who is it?” Quinn didn’t raise his voice, but his tone clearly betrayed impatience.

  “It’s the guys on the second floor—don’t look up there—the ones in the Canopy Room.” David sighed again.

  I sensed rather than saw Quinn step closer to me as I suppressed my urge to look up to the previously unnoticed second floor. I wondered where the Canopy Room was. Before I could give this much thought, I felt a shock as Quinn placed his hand on my arm above the elbow and turned me to face him.

  His gaze was no longer warm and friendly; in fact, it almost looked hostile as he addressed me. “You need to leave.”

  His touch, his closeness, the intensity of his stare all made my insides feel like lava. I couldn’t understand my erratic and completely unintentional reactions to him; it was as if I was someone else, some daft dimwit.

  I resolved to pull myself together, and opened my mouth to respond but, before I could, Elizabeth chimed in from behind me.

  “Yeah, actually, we do need to go.” She waved her pager, stepped to my side, and gave me an apologetic frown. “I just got paged. They need me to go in. I’m sorry, Janie.”

  I looked between Elizabeth and Quinn, a confused frown securely in place. “Wait—why do I need to go?”

  Quinn’s hand moved down my bare arm, causing me to immediately shiver, and engulfed my hand; his fingers linked through mine. He tugged impatiently and began leading me toward the entrance as he spoke.

  “Because your friend is leaving, and it’s not safe to be in a club like this by yourself, looking the way you look.”

  “But…” I sputtered, trying to understand what was happening and the meaning of his words, but my body was still achingly sentient, focusing on where his hand held mine, and my mind was decidedly distracted. Again, I looked to Elizabeth for help, but she was already some distance behind us, and I wasn’t certain she could hear our conversation. He wasn’t moving particularly fast, so we walked side-by-side holding hands.

  Finally, I said, “What’s wrong with how I look? And aren’t I safe with you?” My skipping record of stream-of-consciousness questions seemed to be spinning again.

  He glanced at me from the corner of his eyes and hesitated a moment before speaking, as though he were about to give away a secret reluctantly. “Not necessarily.”

  “Can’t I just stay here?”

  He withdrew his hand from mine a
nd placed it on my back, pressed me forward as he answered, “No. You can’t.” His firm strength at the base of my spine reminded me of how he’d escorted me to the basement on my worst day ever, and I felt aggravated. My annoyance spiked when he added, “Someone like you shouldn’t be in here anyway.”

  I stepped abruptly away from him and stopped walking; we were approximately ten feet from the entrance.

  His words felt like a snowball to the face. “Someone like me?” I asked, squaring my shoulders, even as I felt an irritating blush spread up my neck and over my cheeks. I glanced around at the perfectly formed animated mannequins in the club and knew exactly what he meant.

  I was used to remarks about my strangeness, and I’d long ago resolved to rejoice in the awkwardness of my appearance, but the offhand comment, coming from him, the benighted source of my weeks-long stalkerish fantasies, chaffed against a wound I thought had healed into a concealed scar long ago.

  His attention followed my movements as I pulled away, a mixture of surprise, annoyance, and confusion apparent in his features. He took a step to close the distance between us and reached for my hand, but I crossed my arms over my chest to avoid further contact.

  I wondered at my seesaw of emotions; hot then cold. I didn’t enjoy how unbalanced I felt, especially when he touched me. I didn’t like that I’d given him some strange power over my inner mechanics and chemistry just because he was beautiful. I didn’t like how my body seemed to be intent on sabotaging my brain, especially since my brain was so good at sabotaging itself. The burning in the pit of my stomach was replaced with a cold ache. I felt seasick and truly absurd.

  “I think I can navigate the last few feet just fine without an escort. I do know how to walk.”

  I tried not to notice how very nice he looked in his black suit, and I gave him what I hoped was a withering glare, but I suspected it was merely a stiff stare, and I walked around him and headed straight to the door. I didn’t look back as I exited the club, and welcomed the windy, Chicago city air.

  Elizabeth must have been a significant distance behind me, because she didn’t join me for what seemed like several minutes. This gave me ample time to work myself into a tornado of heated annoyance and embarrassment.

  When she finally arrived, she was on her cell phone, obviously talking to the hospital. She gave me a huge smile, nudged my elbow with hers, and mouthed oh my God. I frowned at her elated expression and shook my head. Elizabeth covered the receiver of her phone to block our conversation from whoever was on the other end; a questioning crease was between her eyebrows, her smile replaced with meditative concern.

  “I thought you’d be over the moon,” she said in a loud whisper, indicating the club with a quick nod of her head. “He was flirting with you!”

  I sighed and turned away from her. “No, he wasn’t.”

  “What, are you crazy? He’s completely into you. Did he…yes…” I listened as Elizabeth turned her attention back to the voice emanating from her cell. “Yes, I’m still here.”

  I ignored the rest of her phone conversation. My thoughts were a black cloud of grumpiness focused on my maladroit personality disorder and gargantuan features. There were very few times in my life I truly wished I looked different, and simply was different from the person I am: the middle child in a family of three girls, and the one who is universally acknowledged as the smart plain Jane of the bunch.

  We were the Morris girls. My older sister, June Morris, was the pretty one; I was the smart one; my youngest sister, Jem Morris, was the crazy one. Jem’s first arrest came when she was nine, shortly after our mother’s death. She stabbed one of her teachers in the hand with a cafeteria knife, then told the police she had a bomb hidden in the school.

  Even from an early age, I was at peace with my family and my place in it. In recent years both June and Jem had become known, collectively, as the criminal ones. June had just been found not guilty in California for her part in running an organized escort service as my dad called it. He was too polite to call it what it was—her prostitution business.

  The last time I heard from Jem, she was calling the shots at a chop shop in Massachusetts just outside of Boston. To their credit, June and Jem were both leaders in their respective fields, masterminds at their craft. I, meanwhile, went to college to become an architect, and the closest I’d come to realizing my dream was securing a job, bought by my at-the-time-boyfriend’s dad, as a staff accountant at a mediocre firm.

  I wasn’t even sure it was my dream anymore.

  Elizabeth pulled me back into the present with a tug on my arm as she led me toward a waiting taxi. “Here.” She shoved cash into my hand. “Just go to the apartment. I’ll take a different cab to the hospital; it’s in the opposite direction.” She gave me a quick hug as I looked from her to the money in my hand. “We’ll talk tomorrow. I won’t be home ‘til the afternoon.”

  I nodded dumbly as she shoved me into the open door, closed it, waved through the window, then turned to hail another taxi.

  The car was moving. I frowned at the pile of bills in my fist. I wondered why my sisters were so fearless. I wondered if I had missed out on that gene along with June’s beauty gene and Jem’s crazy gene. I wondered why everyone—Jon, Elizabeth, and even to a certain extent Sir Quinn McHotpants—felt like I needed oversight: someone to escort me, to take care of me, to tell me what to do and point me in the “right” direction.

  “Where to?” The cabbie’s baritone cut through my dazed preoccupation, and I realized we’d already gone two blocks. “Where are we going?” his voice sounded again from the front.

  I quickly considered my options. I could go back to the apartment, read my new book on the history of viral infections, and embrace my hermit tendencies, or I could ask the driver to turn the cab around, take me back to the club, and—just for one night—live my life unescorted while I tried to unlock my Morris Girl fearless gene.

  “Take me back to Outrageous.”

  Chapter Five

  There are times, after drinking too much alcohol, I wonder if the prohibitionists were on to something when they coined the term “demon liquor.” It felt like I had a demon inside of me who was stabbing my eyes with a corkscrew, scooping out pieces of my brain with a spork, twisting cotton in my throat, and wearing soccer cleats as it jumped up and down on my bladder.

  This was only my third time with a hangover and, like all the other times, I promised myself it would be my last. The first time was not my fault; my younger sister, Jem, diluted my breakfast of orange juice with vodka on the morning of the SATs. She said it was a protein drink, and it would keep my brain alert. I ended up throwing up all over my examination, and the proctor screamed that I’d ruined his perfect test administration record.

  The second time I was with Jon at a tiki bar near his parents’ house in the Hamptons. He ordered me a drink called “The Hurricane,” which didn’t taste like anything but fruit juice. I ordered several, liking the little umbrellas and other accoutrements that donned the rim of the glass, and ended up getting sick on the beach. I passed out on the sand, and Jon, being just my height and of a lean build, wasn’t strong enough to lift me. He had to call two of his friends over to help him pick me up and carry me back to the guesthouse. When I woke up, I wanted to die.

  Now, lying face down on a strange bed with my mouth tasting like whatever the Grim Reaper served at Thanksgiving, I knew three things for certain: I was not in Elizabeth’s apartment; I was wearing only my bra, thigh-high stockings, and underwear; and I wanted to die.

  I squeezed my eyes shut tighter, wanting to postpone my collision with reality for as long as possible, and willed myself back to sleep. I wasn’t certain how much time passed as I lay there hoping that my fairy godmother would appear along with little talking birds and mice, clothe me in jeans and a T-shirt, put me in a pumpkin carriage, and send me to Starbucks for a soy latte. When I finally opened my eyes, all my earlier unpleasant assertions proved true.

  I wasn’t i
n Elizabeth’s apartment. In fact, I had no idea where I was. Swallowing with a great deal of exertion, my mouth free of saliva, I slowly moved my gaze around the room. My eyeballs felt like sandpaper, and I had to blink several times, both in response to the unforgiving brightness of the world and the dryness resulting from sleeping in my contacts.

  When my eyes were appropriately lubricated, I scanned my surroundings from where I lay. It was huge, with walls of exposed red brick, and it was sparsely decorated. The ceiling was tiled tin, rusted in a few places, beige everywhere else. There were no overhead light fixtures; rays of sunlight poured in through tall windows along two adjacent sides of the room. Near the bed was a floor lamp, which was currently off. The floor was sealed cement.

  From my vantage point, I saw only five other pieces of furniture besides the mattress and the floor lamp: a drafting desk, a tall wooden chair for the desk, a bookshelf, a brown leather couch, and a side table. The drafting table was covered in papers, and the bookshelf was littered with what looked like machine parts.

  I was wearing only my bra, stockings, and underwear. I confirmed this belief by peeking under the white sheet pooled at my mid-back. I glanced again around the room and found my dress folded in half over the back of the wooden chair and my shoes neatly settled under the desk.

  I struggled to sit upright and find equilibrium in the vertical world. My hands automatically went to my chest to adjust the strapless bra and ensure it covered my breasts, minimal modesty intact.

  My hair fell to my lower spine in a puffy, untenable tangle of curls; it must have come completely loose sometime during the night. Elizabeth called it my mane of hair; I called it my bane of hair. I kept it long, though, because it looked far worse when it was short, sticking straight up or out at awkward angles. At least when it was long it almost obeyed gravity.

  I wanted to die. Almost as soon as I was in a sitting position on the mattress, but before I was fully able to bring the world and my current misadventure into focus, I perceived the sound of running water, emanating from a door to the right of the bed. A sudden thunderbolt of panic struck my heart and I stiffened, immediately regretting the ungraceful movement and the resulting stab of pain in my temples.