by Crane, Megan
‘Play or die, huh?’ Ken said, rocking back and forth on his heels. He let out a sort of whoop of triumph. ‘This is a good day, Jen. This is a really fucking good day. I can feel it. I think we just kicked MTV’s ass.’
Jenna knew that they had. The Wild Boys had received almost as much press as when Letterman went head-to-head with Leno years later.
‘I don’t know why,’ she told Ken with a sort of chuckle, as if she was making it up as she went along, ‘but I have a feeling that we skyrocketed past them in the ratings. By an enormous margin.’
‘I like that feeling,’ Ken said, grinning. ‘From your lips to God’s ears, babe.’
The elevator doors swished open, and Jenna found herself on the very posh top floor of Video TV. The intense poshness of it was perhaps what kept her from pointing out to Ken that ‘babe’ was not an appropriate way to address a co-worker. She was far too impressed with all the gleaming wood and the quiet. As this was where the executives spent their days, there were no cubicles, no tiny rabbit warrens of depressing workspaces. The carpet was far more plush, and everything felt hushed and moneyed. The receptionist smiled as if personally delighted that Jenna and Ken had arrived in front of her. It was a far cry from Jenna’s own floor, where workers scurried about with their heads down, trying to avoid attracting any attention.
Ken raised a hand in the direction of the receptionist, but didn’t slow his pace.
‘She’s a nice gal,’ he told Jenna out of the corner of his mouth, ‘but I wish she wouldn’t smile like that. It’s like one of those puppets in that Genesis video. It creeps me out.’
Not as much as his casual use of the word gal creeped Jenna out, but she didn’t have time to comment on that or even the reference to the disturbing ‘Land of Confusion’ video, because Ken was charging down the quiet, very fancy hallway, and only stopped when he arrived at its furthest corner. He threw open the door and stepped into what Jenna quickly realized was an outer office, complete with a couch for visitors, framed movie posters on the walls, and a large, aggressively healthy ficus plant beneath the window. Ken kept moving, and wrenched open the interior door.
‘Make him wait,’ he said, with a grin over his shoulder, and disappeared inside, closing the door behind him.
Jenna blinked, and made her way across the room to the desk. The brass nameplate read JENNIFER JENKINS, but she didn’t have time to absorb the shock of that, because she’d already noticed the pictures. Her stomach dropped all the way to her feet, and she heard herself make a sound that was close to a whimper.
There were photographs everywhere – clipped to the bulletin board behind the desk and displayed proudly in frames. Jenna was in every picture. Her hair was different, sure, and she was wearing clothes she’d never laid eyes on before, but it was Jenna. But a dislocated version of Jenna, because she couldn’t identify a single other person in any of the pictures. Not the blonde girl next to her on a roller coaster, screaming in joy with her hands in the air. Not the group of laughing girls in atrocious ballgowns. Not even the adorable mutt she hugged, in front of a Tudor-style house she’d never laid eyes on.
It wasn’t just weird. It was full-on spooky. Jenna closed her eyes for a moment, and then took a closer look.
Okay. She blew out a breath. Maybe that wasn’t her. It was just someone who looked a whole lot like her. As in, enough like her to pass as her, though Jenna thought that their noses were a bit of a different shape. And she thought her teeth were straighter – as they should have been after years of painful orthodontics. But if she wasn’t this mysterious Jennifer Jenkins, who was? And where was she now? Had she woken up to find herself in the Video TV supply closet twenty years from now? Was she even now navigating Jenna’s actual life, such as it was?
Of course she wasn’t, Jenna told herself sharply, because none of this was happening. It was just a dream. There was no Jennifer Jenkins, and no time travel, for the love of all that was holy. And that was a good thing, because if it was real, she was completely incapable of figuring out the physics of the whole thing, which, if she recalled the movies she’d seen on this subject, was a prerequisite for the inevitable conclusion when she catapulted herself back to the future, pun intended. What she knew about physics was pretty much nil. She’d watched What the Bleep Do We Know? with Aimee and Ben one night, if that counted, though she couldn’t remember much about it besides the word quark and some vague impressions of hippy dancing. She somehow doubted that would prove to be helpful in some kind of time/space/physics emergency.
Jenna sank down behind the desk, and got another shock – she’d never been in this office before, and yet the calendar in front of her was filled with notations in her own unmistakable handwriting. Or handwriting that looked enough like hers to pass for it at a glance, much like the photographs. Everything was almost Jenna, but not quite. The almost part, she figured, was what was giving her the uncanny sense of familiarity – as if she should have recognized something, but hadn’t.
She thought she should have been getting used to the weirdness by this point, but it was all making her feel a little bit dizzy instead.
Rubbing at her temples, Jenna looked around for several more minutes, until she realized that the gigantic machine taking over most of the desktop was a computer. A very old, very out-of-date computer, with an actual floppy-disk drive. There was an intercom box next to a very old-looking phone. There were actual in-and-out wire boxes, stacked. There was a typewriter on the desk’s perpendicular return, and Jenna wondered if it was considered cutting-edge in 1987 even though, to her eye, it looked ancient.
She also wondered if Jennifer Jenkins knew how to type, because she certainly did not. She could hunt and peck, and IM and text at the speed of light, but that did not translate into secretarial skills. Somehow, she suspected that Ken Dollimore was not the sort of executive to type out his own various documents, and, clearly, she was his secretary as well as his protégée, which was somewhat less of a promotion than she’d originally thought. Hooray.
The phone rang then, startling Jenna, and her heart jumped into high gear. It was almost as if Tommy Seer had walked into the room – but no, it was only the telephone. Jenna stared at it, until the intercom buzzed.
‘Are you planning on answering that?’ Ken’s disem-bodied voice demanded through the intercom, sounding even more elfin through a machine, but also authoritative.
‘Of course, of course,’ Jenna muttered, then had to repeat it in a much more chipper voice into the intercom. She snatched up the phone, thinking, seriously? I have to work? As a secretary? In my own dream? Her usually much-maligned job in Accounts was looking better and better by the second.
‘Ken Dollimore’s office,’ she said into the mouthpiece, in an approximation of the way her own boss’s assistant answered the phone. It was a far cry from the belligerent way she barked out her own name when her office phone rang, but then, no one ever called her unless there was a problem, or she’d forgotten to remove her old takeout containers from the communal fridge.
Jenna took notes as someone named Gigi got increasingly hysterical on the other end of the phone – about some installation of something Jenna didn’t quite catch or care about – and she was replacing the phone into its cradle and wondering how she planned to explain that call to Ken, having not understood it herself, when the door to her office was thrown open.
Duncan Paradis walked inside, his solid barrel body moving low to the ground and his face arranged in a completely fake smile. It made her spine chill along its whole length to look at it.
‘There’s the hero of the hour,’ he said, the smile deepening. Jenna’s temperature dropped in direct response. ‘That was a great idea. How’d you come up with it?’
‘I’m so glad it worked out,’ she demurred, suddenly not at all interested in being perceived as a visionary. Or, for that matter, noticed by Duncan Paradis in any way. ‘It could have been a disaster.’
Duncan, she thought then, with a sudden flash o
f insight, had wanted it to be a disaster. She remembered the look on his face when she’d suggested the band act out their videos. He’d started to laugh, but then that considering gleam had taken over his gaze, and he’d stopped himself. Jenna had watched him. And she couldn’t help thinking that he’d wanted the band to look ridiculous.
But that didn’t make any sense at all.
‘Is the big man in?’ Duncan asked, through his teeth, with calculation in his cold eyes. ‘I have a proposition for him.’
‘He’s on a call,’ Jenna lied, and smiled fakely back at him. She indicated the couch against the wall with one hand. ‘If you’ll just take a seat … ?’
Jenna did not have to be told that Duncan Paradis was not used to being kept waiting. A muscle bunched in his jaw, even as he kept that smile beaming right at her. Once again, she had to restrain herself from checking for lacerations.
She leaned over and announced Duncan into the intercom, and then had to attempt to look busy and untroubled while Duncan Paradis prowled around the room, alternately glaring at the pictures on the wall and the side of her head. This was not easy for her to do, especially when confronted with the dinosaur of a computer in front of her, one that most assuredly was not running the latest Windows operating system. In point of fact, it was not even running in colour. Not that Jenna had time to mourn the loss of her workplace Internet access – the widely accessible Internet being off in the future, if she recalled it all correctly – because Duncan Paradis was roaming malevolently in her peripheral vision.
When Ken finally opened the door, what seemed like years later, Jenna was ready to weep with gratitude. Duncan Paradis, for all that he was such an expert talent spotter, scared her on a fundamental, animal level. Plus, he was an entitled asshole.
She sighed in relief when Ken’s office door closed behind him.
But she’d barely taken another breath before her office door opened again. And she went right ahead and held that breath, because, this time, it was Tommy Seer who walked inside.
It was like time froze around him. He’d stepped through the door and looked towards Ken’s door, but she saw it all in such tiny, spread-out increments. She saw the way the unflattering fluorescent lights cast a shadow across his face, highlighting his high cheekbones and the masculine thrust of his jaw. She saw the fine, long muscles in his arms, and the way his silly vest emphasized the width of his shoulders and the narrow span of his hips, with so much of his smooth golden skin on display.
And she felt him, just the sight of him like a physical caress, sizzle through her skin, settle into her veins, and heat his way through her body.
‘Duncan’s in there?’ Tommy asked, jerking Jenna out of her daze.
‘Yes,’ she said. She meant, yes, love me and yes, yes, yes, but he didn’t seem to notice the undercurrents.
‘I don’t know how long he’ll be in there,’ Tommy said in a low voice, his American accent back. Along with that frown between his eyes. He stepped closer to the desk. ‘But I know what he’s going to do.’
‘You do?’ Jenna asked, far too dreamily. Tommy’s eyes narrowed – God, he was beautiful – and she coughed slightly. ‘What’s he going to do?’ she asked, aiming for a businesslike tone.
‘He’s going to hire you, borrow you, whatever,’ Tommy said matter-of-factly. ‘He’s going to sic you on me, in fact. I have no doubt.’
‘I already have a job,’ Jenna said. Stupidly. Besottedly.
Tommy smiled a thin sort of smile.
‘That won’t matter. Duncan always gets what Duncan wants.’ His voice was bitter, and his gaze had gone cold.
‘I don’t mean to argue,’ Jenna said, frowning. ‘But so does Ken.’
Tommy let out a laugh. A short, bitter sort of laugh.
‘Are you kidding? What Ken Dollimore wants is to keep Duncan happy, and away from MTV.’ He looked towards Ken’s door, and when he looked back at Jenna his mouth had tightened. ‘You think he likes you, his little protégée? He likes this company more.’
‘Wow,’ Jenna said, stung by his tone. And by the way he was looking at her – like she was an insignificant little ant or something, desperate to do Ken’s bidding. ‘That was a bit aggressive.’
Why, she wondered, did she find this man so attractive, even when he wasn’t being nice to her? Was Aimee right that this was all unhealthy? Was it a form of mental illness? Some Adam-related mental breakdown? Surely a sane person would be angry with the man, Eighties idol or no, and wouldn’t simultaneously notice that his butt looked particularly tasty in those scandalously tight leather pants, right?
Jenna was beginning to feel she wasn’t at all sane. And then she reminded herself that this was her dream, and felt that much crazier.
‘I want to hire you first,’ Tommy said impatiently. Jenna jerked her attention away from his ass.
‘Hire me to do what?’ she asked, and got caught up in his beautiful eyes once more. They were hypnotic. They were gor—
‘I want you to agree to do whatever it is Duncan asks,’ Tommy said in that low voice. He looked towards Ken’s door, and then back towards Jenna, the line between his brows deepening. ‘But before you do anything, talk to me, and we’ll figure out how you’ll play it. Do you understand?’ When Jenna only stared back at him, still mesmerized, he made an impatient noise. His mouth flattened out. ‘I’ll pay you, obviously. Whatever he offers, I’ll double.’
Jenna blinked. This was all getting extremely complicated, and they hadn’t even begun kissing. Yet.
‘What makes you think Duncan Paradis is going to offer me anything?’ she asked, her scepticism showing. ‘He looked at me like he’d prefer to choke me, if you want to know the truth. I really don’t think he’s looking to hire me.’
‘Trust me,’ Tommy Seer said.
And, sure, he said it in that bleak sort of way, but Jenna’s heart had been waiting to hear him say those words for twenty years – or any reasonable variation thereof. It wasn’t as if Tommy Seer had to convince her to do as he asked. It was a given.
‘Okay,’ Jenna said with a happy sigh. ‘I’ll do whatever you want.’
He looked at her for a moment, and his famously perfect mouth shifted to the left in what Jenna could only describe as a smirk.
‘Great,’ he said, in a tone that completely belied the sentiment.
‘Great,’ Jenna echoed. Was this when the kissing would start? Was this when he would declare that he could wait no longer, that his feelings could not be denied, that he wanted her—
But, no, he was shaking his head. If that was an expression of sexual longing, Jenna had never seen anything like it before.
‘I have a feeling I’ll see you soon,’ Tommy said. Not, Jenna noticed, in a yearning or smoky sort of way that would lead to some kind of cinematic romantic clinch. More in a resigned and dry kind of way that was anything but romantic.
‘Um, if you say so,’ Jenna said, not bothering to hide her confusion. Why was he looking at her like she was some combination of crazy and pathetic? Because she was familiar with the look in his eyes, having seen it so many times in Adam’s. It wasn’t any more pleasant coming from him, no matter how green his were.
She expected him to break then, to confess his over-powering feelings for her in ringing tones à la Mr Darcy, or to simply toss the desk aside like King Leonidas might have in 300, had there been desks in ancient Sparta. She wouldn’t mind a satisfyingly over-the-top moment of passion. In fact, she thought one was sadly overdue.
Instead, Tommy Seer, who should have looked ridiculous in his Eighties Pop Star ensemble, turned on his heel and sauntered out of Jenna’s office as if he were some kind of great big jungle cat, all rolling gait and confidence. With nary a backward glance her way, to top off the indignity of it all.
Jenna didn’t believe he’d really left, for good, until several moments had passed and she was still gazing expectantly at the door.
She shifted in her seat, and tapped her fingers against the blotter o
n her desk. So far, this dream had involved work, inappropriate touching from Ken Dollimore, bullying from Duncan Paradis, and only the strangest and least-satisfying Tommy Seer interactions imaginable – and this from someone who had imagined just about every Tommy Seer interaction there was, more than once.
And worst of all, there was still no freaking kissing.
6
The only thing worse than an extended dream about Tommy Seer in which a) he found her annoying, b) was kind of mean about it, and c) there was no kissing, was, Jenna discovered, being trapped in the back of a smelly New York taxi with Duncan Paradis.
Jenna wasn’t even sure how it had happened.
One moment she’d been sitting at her desk – or Jennifer Jenkins’s desk, whoever she was, and Jenna didn’t quite want to think about that – staring at the place where Tommy Seer had been standing as if the force of her will could make him reappear. The next moment Ken’s door had been tossed open, Ken and Duncan Paradis had come strolling out wreathed in fake bonhomie and cigar smoke, and Jenna had found herself summarily dispatched into Duncan Paradis’s keeping.
‘Just for a few days,’ Ken said, waving away Jenna’s high-pitched protest with a languid wave of his hand. ‘What a great experience for you, to have this kind of exposure to such a big band. Someday, who knows, you can write a book about it, ha ha ha.’
When Duncan turned his back and headed for the door, Ken made a telephone with his right hand and mouthed the words: CALL ME TOMORROW. Then he shooed Jenna out of the office.
Cut to Jenna in the back of a retro chequered taxicab, scrunched in the furthest corner to avoid even a casual brush against Duncan’s pant leg, surrounded by the pervasive smell of long-saturated body odour, with a strange woman’s purse perched on her knees. It had been second nature to reach down into the desk drawer and pull out the bag sitting there – so much so that Jenna had been halfway down the hall in Duncan’s wake before she’d realized that the purse was not hers. Given that it was big, poufy, and neon baby blue, Jenna really ought to have noticed. Instead, she’d been so flustered by the triple punch of Tommy Seer, Duncan Paradis, and Ken Dollimore’s willingness to throw her to the lions that she’d run off with another woman’s bag. Something women tended not to take lightly, no matter how ugly the bag in question. Just one more thing to blame Duncan Paradis for, she thought sourly.
