by Nikky Kaye
That made sense.
“But you guys will have to work out your responses a bit more in advance, so you’re prepared for each other’s column. You don’t want to be giving the same advice, after all.”
A chuckle escaped me. “Yeah, that’s not likely.”
“Oh, and they want to bump it up from once weekly to every day.”
Lizzie snorted. “Yeah, that’s not likely,” she mimicked me, then looked at our straight faces. Hers fell. “Seriously? Every day?”
“You have enough emails to provide material.”
“But that means we’ll be—” She waved a hand between us.
“You’d better get along, Miss Behave,” Mooney warned her. “Or you can forget about the news desk someday.”
“Do Ass and I have to share a cubicle, too?”
“Ash,” I corrected. She was hilarious, in a rabid squirrel kind of way.
Blink. Blink. “That’s what I said.”
Oooookay.
“No. You can use the conference room for meeting every morning, either here or at Static, and then just use email for the rest.”
“I’m not good with mornings,” I said. “I start at ten, sometimes eleven.” A man needed his beauty sleep.
“Fine, you can meet at lunchtime! Eat together!”
I looked at the expression on Lizzie’s face and made a note to Google symptoms for arsenic poisoning.
Robert Mooney looked like he was about to tear out what was left of his hair. We were acting like preschoolers. I leaned back against the wall. If she wanted to have a tantrum that cost her the job, it was no skin off my nose. I was happy to keep doing this job for both of us.
I loved having an advice column. It was like bro speak for money. And because so many of my columns revolved around dating and social situations, I had to place myself in many… social situations. It was research, right?
Okay, so maybe some of my advice to married couples weren’t totally on the money—I wasn’t big on commitment. I worked on the Internet, for god’s sakes.
Then again, what goes online never really goes offline…
“We’ll be fine.” I looked at Lizzie. “Won’t we?”
Somehow she twisted her pout into a bright smile for her boss. “Sure. It’ll be… fu…” She couldn’t even complete the fake sentiment.
“Fucking amazing,” I finished for her.
“I was going to say fun.”
“Whatever.” Mooney shooed us out of his tiny office, and we traipsed back toward Lizzie’s cubicle. When we passed the fishbowl conference room, our gazes both went to the glass wall.
I didn’t mind being on display. Though I was used to working at home, I had nothing to hide. But as Lizzie stumbled a little, I had wondered if she did. Was she as prim and shy as her column would suggest? It would be fun to ruffle her feathers. I could already tell that teasing her could become my new favorite hobby.
Her shoulders hunched up as she moved, as though the tension in her was climbing up her body. Did I make her nervous? Was she angry? I didn’t know, but I couldn’t wait to figure her out.
As we walked past people in the hallway, my hand naturally went to the small of Lizzie’s back. Our arms brushed against each other as we moved to the side for someone with arms full of printer paper.
Dammit, she smelled good. Like fresh strawberries in the summertime.
I shook my head and fell a few steps behind her. Not wanting to get too close.
And wanting to check out her ass, again.
It was as cute as the rest of her. And, I was guessing, untapped.
She had to be a virgin to give out advice as naïvely as she did. As odd as it might be for a woman in her mid-twenties—which was what she looked like—to still have her V-card, it was even stranger to think that she’d done the nasty and still thought men should bring cards and candy when they showed up for dates.
Did anybody do that anymore? Did anybody even expect it?
If she did, she was not only naïve but delusional, too.
I followed her into the cubicle area where the dark-haired girl with the heavy bangs and the college kid popped their heads up like gophers. Everyone else just ignored us, lost in their headphones or computer screens.
“What was that about?”
“I can’t tell you the details, Dara, but suffice to say, you’ll be seeing more of this guy.” She flicked her fingers toward me.
I extended my hand over the top of the wall. “Nice to meet you, Dara. Ash Garrison.” I gave Lizzie a pointed look, as if to say, “See, I have manners.”
The college kid waved his hand. “I’m Pete.”
I nodded. “You’re Pete.” Then I turned to Lizzie and pressed my palms together. “So, should we get started?”
She sat down, a resigned expression on her face. “Okay, what’s your email address?”
We arranged to download emails that came in and put them in a shared drive, so we could each see what kind of questions the other person got. We set up some folders based on topic areas: sex, relationships, school, self, stuff like that.
“What if we get the same questions?” she asked.
It was hard not to laugh. “I highly doubt that there’s much overlap between us.”
“What about questions that are on multiple topics?”
I leaned over her shoulder, bracing my hand against the desk by her keyboard. “I guess it depends on what they lead with. Their first question is usually the one they really want to ask.”
“Or their last question.” She raised an eyebrow.
True. “Fair enough. Find me a… multidisciplinary email.”
She searched, opening and closing emails faster than I could read them. Clearly she’d already read them, and was just looking for one to jog her memory.
“Ah, here we go.”
Dear Miss Behave: My husband wants to try anal sex, but I’m not sure I want to send the message that it’s okay. On the other hand, I will confess to reading some fanfic with that in it, and getting off on it. Should I say yes to my husband, or stick to my guns?’”
Stuck-Up
I chortled. “Just say yes.”
“No!” Lizzie spun in her chair, a little to frown at me. “She shouldn’t be doing anything she’s uncomfortable with, especially that.”
“You can say it, you know. Anal. Ay-nahl.” I sounded it out once more, just to see the expression on her face. It was priceless.
She blushed furiously and turned back to the screen. “So you’d say go for it?”
“Sure.” I shrugged. “With lube and a lot of TLC, of course. What would you advise, Miss Behave?”
Lizzie hummed thoughtfully before typing a draft response. I read it over her shoulder.
“Dear Stuck Up: Not all property is meant to be shared in marriage. Your ass is one of them. Stick to your buns. If you truly desire to try it, you’ll initiate it—and your husband will be all that much more delighted.”
Miss Behave
On some level, I couldn’t argue with that advice. It was solid. God knows I’d like it if a chick asked me for anal. On the other hand, I’d wonder why she wanted it so bad, and how many other guys had gotten there first. But if they were married…
Ultimately, though, Lizzie Bell had just given me an in-person demonstration of how she handled Miss Behave. It was a little disappointing. She was a decent writer and hot as well; I guess I’d hoped she’d be a more laid back person.
I huffed at the process of vetting all these questions. “You know, it would just be easier if they recoded the site so that the posting would go to both of us, instead of having this extra step.”
She leaned back in her chair. “If you want to go talk to IT about it, be my guest.”
“What crawled up your ass?” I asked. Not a goddamn thing, likely.
She rolled her eyes. “Ash, you can’t have it both ways. Either I have a stick up my ass or I’m a cock tease. Make up your mind which insult to throw at me, so I know how to re
spond.”
I stared at her. She said my name and ‘cock’ in the same breath. Maybe she wasn’t as uptight as I thought. My brain was going into spasms, frizzling like an electrical panel splashed with water.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her hands flying into air quotes. “I'm a ‘prude’ who doesn’t put out, right? You know, I’m pretty sure that constitutes sexual harassment in the workplace.”
“Lizzie, you work for a web magazine called Hot Mess. I’m sure there have been plenty of instances that qualify as harassment.”
“Well, now that I’m working with you, apparently there will be.”
It would be easy enough to test that theory. “Do you feel harassed?” I leaned over her, my hands going to brace myself against her desk on either side of where she sat.
She crossed her arms, her gaze mutinous. “I’ll let you know when you get to something considered sexual.”
Was that a challenge? I cocked my head, kind of loving the fire in her eyes. “You never answered my earlier question, you know. What qualifies you to be an advice columnist?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Life. Years of giving it to friends. The fact that they pay me to do it. What qualifies you?”
“The same. The difference is that I like doing it, whereas I get the feeling you’re just killing time before you move on. To the news desk, maybe?”
She looked vaguely uncomfortable.
“Ah,” I said, leaning closer. “You want to be a ‘real’ journalist. Let me guess—you spent a shitload of money going to J-school and then discovered there are no jobs. So you plan to work your way up.”
Then she looked really uncomfortable. I’d hit the nail on the head.
“Let me give you a tip, Lizzie, as one journalist to another. Treat every job like it’s the job you really want, otherwise you’ll be miserable.”
She sniffed. I wondered if maybe I was too close to her, and she was sniffing me.
I stood up, stretching my arms out. “Look at me. I do this gig with gusto.”
“I bet you do.”
“I’m proud of my work, and I think I help people.”
“And I don’t?”
“I didn’t say that.” Although I might have thought it. “But arguing isn’t really going to help us. So, either work with me or get out of my way, because I don’t plan on losing my job, even if you want to self-sabotage.”
3
Lizzie
A week later Ash Garrison—the “Guy’s Guy”—and I were prepping for our first lunch conference. At least, I was prepping. God only knew what he was doing.
We’d figured out a shared spreadsheet with questions on it, dates they came in, email addresses, all that kind of stuff. We could both edit it, so we just transferred all the requests for advice over to it as a master version. His questions were in blue font; mine were in pink. Original, huh?
When I read over what he was adding from his email, I began to wonder if he was cherry-picking all the ridiculous questions about sex just to irritate me.
“Dear Guy: My girlfriend doesn’t want to have sex during shark week, but I’d kind of like to try eating her out then to see how it tastes. How can I tell her that without grossing her out?”
“Dear Guy: If you’re in a threesome, who is supposed to come first? Does it depend on if it’s guy-girl-guy or girl-guy-girl?”
Granted, these were surely important philosophical questions for the survival of mankind, but it sure wasn’t the kind of topics that Miss Behave usually got.
I knew that I had built a reputation for being a “good girl” online, but I hadn’t realized just how much until Ash Garrison stormed into my cubicle and my life.
Now I wasn’t sure if I needed to keep up the act or climb him like a tree to prove him wrong.
The morning of our meeting, I found myself carefully picking my clothes. I put on a plain black pencil skirt that stopped at my knees, and a pink sweater that clung to all the right places. My hair went up in a messy bun. In most ways it was an ordinary outfit, except for the shoes.
The shoes were extraordinary.
My retro pink and black spectator pumps made me three inches taller, but also made me feel like a million bucks.
Pete blatantly checked me out when I arrived at work, and even Dara lifted her eyebrows at me from under her heavy bangs.
“Big date later?”
I blushed and dropped into my chair. “No.”
My friend waited for an explanation. I busied myself with signing in to my computer.
“Isn’t today your first working session with Ash?” she asked me, folding her arms on the top of the cubicle wall.
“Maybe.”
“Ah.”
She disappeared for a moment. I checked my email. When I looked up, she was holding a freshly sharpened #2 pencil over the wall.
“Shove this in your hair. Better hot librarian effect.”
I took it.
The morning dragged, and at quarter to twelve I found myself fidgeting. Gah, what was wrong with me?
Yeah, Ash was an attractive guy, but he was also cocky, irreverent, and had “dude” written all over him. He was a guy’s guy—not just for advice, which was usually the kind of guy that you didn’t date for long.
Not that I planned to date him.
But it still irked me that he assumed my Miss Behave persona was my true personality. Maybe I was a closet party girl and he wasn’t giving me the benefit of the doubt.
Okay, I really wasn’t. But I hadn’t really become Miss Behave in the last couple of years, had I? I wasn’t a Puritan, but I did believe in manners and people being honest and considerate—something that didn’t usually show up in Tinder profiles.
I just wanted to believe that true love could still exist. That two people could meet each other, hit it off, find things in common, and like each other first. Maybe I was a little archaic that way. I talked about those things in my blog, and my following was growing, so I knew I wasn’t the only person who thought that way.
Just because I wanted to believe in love, didn’t mean that I didn’t also appreciate the allure of lust. I simply kept it just beyond arm’s reach most of the time.
“Lizzie?”
Ash stood just outside my cubicle looking like he’d just showered. Smelling like he’d just showered. For a brief moment I imagined the privileged life of his shower gel, rubbed between his hands and his body. The bubbles on his chest, his fingers trailing over his six-pack, down, down…
“Hello? Lizzie?”
I blinked. Must stop fantasizing. “I’m sorry, was noon too early for you?” I snarked. My inner bitch tended to come out when I was feeling embarrassed—which was more often than I wanted to admit.
“Not at all. I’m raring to go.” He lifted his laptop bag. “Did you eat yet?”
“No.”
“Okay, I’ll leave my bag here and go get us some lunch. Falafel or sushi?”
“Are those my only two options?”
He grinned. “They’re the two closest I scouted out that would be fast and probably won’t get shut down by the Health Department.”
“Sushi, I guess?” He sauntered off, leaving me staring at the lunch bag and thermos in the tote bag under my desk.
And eyeing his computer bag. It was plain, black, and easily snoopable. No, Lizzie. Don’t go there…
“Pete!”
“Yeah?”
“Can you take Ash’s bag and my laptop to the conference room for me while Dara and I have a mini-conference first?”
“Uh… okay?” floated his voice over the wall.
Dara popped up, her head appearing. “I heard my name. What’s up, Buttercup?”
“Roof?”
She nodded.
The roof unlocked, it was the place where staffers often went for a breath of fresh air, to shoot the shit, or contemplate the shitty reality of modern journalism. When we got up there, I pulled her to a corner away from the lunchtime smokers.
I crossed my arms
over my chest. “I have a problem.”
“Is he six foot two and has shoulders you could build a hockey rink on?”
“I hadn’t noticed.” I’d been too busy looking at the way his t-shirt clung to his chest, showing off some impressive abs. “But yes.”
I looked off into the distance at the nearby buildings. The heat of Indian summer shimmered in the air, but soon enough it would turn cool. Just like me. Maybe I was just going crazy from lack of companionship. Clearly I’d gone too long without a date.
“What’s the problem?”
I swiveled back to her, frowning. “He thinks he’s God’s gift to women, and I feel compelled to be the first recipient to return him.”
She laughed. “Nobody is saying you have to date him, just work with him.”
“He rubs me the wrong way.”
The wind blew her bangs, revealing a raised eyebrow. “You want him to rub you the right way.”
“Maybe. But he already thinks I’m a…”
“Cock tease?”
I flushed.
“Then why can’t you just flirt with him?” she asked.
“I’m terrible at flirting! I don’t even know how!”
“Usually sexy clothes and witty banter does the trick. You didn’t dress up like that today for Pete or Rob,” she pointed out and gave me a knowing look.
“Shit. I’m already doing it, aren’t I?”
Dara shrugged. “If it walks like a duck…”
Even if I had been subconsciously flirting, I didn’t want Ash to think that I knew I was doing it. As mixed up as it sounded, I wanted him to think that I could flirt but chose not to.
Or rather, Miss Behave wasn’t as behaved as he thought.
“What do I do?” I asked Dara. “If I want to de-flirt myself right now?”
She looked me up and down. Down and up. Then took the pencil out of my bun. “Best I can do,” she said with a shrug.
