“You weren't afraid of him?”
“I know his type. All bitch and no bite.”
Liam snorted and put his hand on the guy's shoulder. He had to be a foot shorter than Liam but didn't cower like some of the employees did, and he liked that. “He's bitch and bite, I'm afraid. But thanks for telling me. Next time you see him, tell him I made you show me what you were working on and insisted you do it your way.”
Wayne beamed. “Excellent.”
“All right.” Liam made a run for it before the guy thought they were friends now or something. He couldn't afford to be anybody's friend at Fite.
He went downstairs to the second floor conference room and stopped outside the door to give them every possible minute. He could hear the frantic, sniping conversation, chairs rolling around the table, the clatter of design boards and samples being hung on the metal-gridded walls. In spite of his foul mood, he drank in the familiar thrill from the creative process and reminded himself to try to go easy on them. Losing Mr. Roche had been a shock for everybody. And at some point, each one of them had gone into this business with enthusiasm, optimism, even love. And though reality had crushed most of the youthful fantasies within the first six weeks on the job, every once in a while he saw a hint of glee in somebody’s face that she hadn’t listened to her parents.
He walked in. “Hello, everyone.”
All movement stopped for a split second while they glanced his way to measure his mood. None look reassured.
The product development conference room was like a going-out-of-business sale at a department store. Racks of clothes clogged the doorway. Boxes of sample buttons and other trim sprawled over a long, white table that filled the middle of the room. Old design boards hung by pant hangers on the floor-to-ceiling metal grids covering each wall. More metal rolling racks on wheels blocked the windows.
Darrin Kipper, the men's designer, sat at the opposite end of the table wearing an orange—salmon, Darrin would say—Armani suit, trying hide his indignation with presenting his line two hours earlier than he'd expected. Mr. Roche never would have moved up a meeting, his eyes said.
Liam looked around the room at the insecure, resentful faces. “There’s no reason to be revising everything at the last minute,” he said quietly. “For years we’ve worked right up until the deadline as though finishing early implied you didn't know what you were doing. Well, not any more. If you aren't able to show me our line a little earlier than you expected, there's something wrong with your ideas. You should have been done yesterday. The day before yesterday. Last week. Nothing has changed, only the bad habits in this building that have everyone running around with their heads cut off for the maximum amount of time possible. As though that were a virtue.”
With that, he sat down, the creak of the office chair the only sound in the room. “All right,” he said finally, leaning back and crossing his arms. “Show me what you've got.”
The ten men and women around the table broke out of their paralysis. The designers mouthed furiously to their assistants to finish putting up the boards, and the assistants—all female—jumped up with their scissors and glue sticks and swatches and tear sheets and tried to look fashionably invincible while everyone stared at their thin, athletic backsides in action.
Darrin, angling for Liam's job like he always did, pretended not to care; he licked a skinny finger and flipped through the pages in Men’s Fitness.
Jennifer, the designer for women’s, stood up and straightened one of the boards. She spent most of her days defending herself from Ellen’s critical oversight, and the strain had begun to make her look closer to forty than the thirty she probably was.
“Green!” She said suddenly, slapping her hand on the board dangling behind her. Everyone jumped. “American native plants, mostly from California. The color story is gold and lupine blue, with lots of small embroideries throughout evoking wildflowers and the natural earth—”
Jennifer continued to rattle on about environmental populism while Liam scanned her presentation board for the new sketches he'd asked for. Satisfied, he tuned out the rest of her speech.
He felt old. It wasn't his body. He was fitter, stronger, faster than he'd ever been—well, maybe not ever, but he was in damn good shape for thirty-three, and didn’t stay up late partying anymore. He was disciplined, but his runs and his lifts were accomplishments of sheer will; he had to drag himself out of bed in the morning and push himself outside in the evenings, as though it just wasn't fun anymore.
“Liam?” Jennifer sounded terrified, and he realized he was scowling again.
He looked down at his hands to rewind the small part of his brain that had been listening to her. “Green is getting old. But it doesn't matter. I've never believed these themes do anything for our bottom line. I know Ed loved the marketing sociology but I don't. From now on, cut the bullshit. Show me the bodies you're cutting and the fabric you're buying and tell me why some woman at Macy's is going to pull Fite off the rack and hand over her plastic.”
Jennifer sat down and propped her hands on the table in front of her, biting her lip. “Because they want something fresh, because they love the idea—”
“To hell with the idea,” Liam said. “People can't afford just an idea anymore. What will we actually give them that they want? The only idea they like right now is not being separated from their money.”
“I think we should rework the fit,” Wendi said, and Jennifer’s lip curled.
“The fit is perfect,” Jennifer said to Liam. “I can’t wear anything else.”
Liam raised an eyebrow. Jennifer looked like she could crush ice between the cheeks of her ass. An undoctored picture of her abs was on the Fite webpage. Her shapely arms could lift Liam over her pretty head and throw him across the San Francisco Bay.
“There have been some complaints—” Wendi began, then drew back when Jennifer snorted. It was good Wendi didn’t work with her anymore.
“From her mother.” Jennifer threw up her hands and shared a smirk with a merchandising assistant. “Wendi’s idea of market research is to take her sixty-year old mom to Target.”
“She's fifty,” Wendi said, “and what's that got to do with anything?”
“She’s not our customer,” Jennifer said.
“She’d like to be.”
Jennifer glanced at the ceiling and sighed. “She’s fat.”
All eyes were on Wendi’s face, now flooded with color and looking dangerously close to saying something fatal in reply. Liam had already saved her job once today; he couldn’t rescue her again without sticking a bull’s-eye on her ass. He held up a hand. “Stop. You’re wasting our time.” He pointed at Darrin. “You’re turn.”
Unusually relaxed, and not just in his typically affected way, Darrin smiled and slowly got to his feet. “Personally, I like ideas. Ed and I were always on the same page on that one.”
Liam didn't let his surprise show on his face. Darrin didn't usually contradict him directly, preferring to skulk about in secret with his many complaints. For him to suddenly claim kinship with the late Ed Roche, whom he loathed with a passion, could only mean one thing.
He thought Liam wasn't worth sucking up to anymore.
“Bring a board, Darrin?” Liam asked. “Or are your ideas too brilliant to actually move into the third dimension?”
“You know what I'm wondering?” Darrin traced his finger along the stack of overlapping boards hanging on the wall. “If Ed wanted Liam to take over, why didn't he go ahead and leave the company to him outright?” And then he smiled at everyone sitting around the table like he was their best friend. A phony, back-stabbing friend with perfect teeth.
The only sound in the room was the rattle of the furnace vent.
Liam cultivated a tired look on his face and crossed his legs. “Didn't finish the board in time again, Darrin?”
Darrin continued to smirk.
“That wasn't a rhetorical question,” Liam said. “Have you got it ready or not?”
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Shrugging, Darrin sat down. “You can see it in two hours as planned.”
All eyes darted back and forth between the two of them at either end of the table, waiting to see what Liam would do, which pissed him off more than he was already. He slowly got to his feet. It was past time to make an example of the troublesome prick. And it might make Liam feel better. “Just as well. It'll be easier to look at without you around.”
Darrin's smile got tight. “Without me around?”
“You'll be on your way to New York. Remember?”
Now off-balance, Darrin tried to share a snotty grin with Jennifer without losing control of the conversation. “Remind me.”
“Your choice,” Liam said. “You were missing Manhattan so much you decided to accept a transfer to the showroom.”
“The showroom? With the sales guys?”
“It was hard to accept at first,” Liam said, “but then you realized any job was better than none. Especially in this economy.”
“But—but—you can't do that,” Darrin said. “Mr. Roche never would have—I'm a designer—”
“You're a human being, just like everybody else. At least, I'm pretty sure.”
“But you can't.”
“Of course I can, dude,” Liam said. “I'm the executive vice president and I’m your boss. And you're wasting my time.”
He could have just fired the asshole, but Darrin was a relatively harmless, useful asshole, the kind with a degree from FIT and a portfolio and old friends working as buyers in New York he could call up any time. He just needed to have a whip cracked every once in a while to remind him to reign in his bad manners.
One of the problems with Darrin and the other regular garmentos everywhere: they looked down on Liam for his non-fashion background. Unlike Darrin, Liam’s oldest friends coached summer swim team and spent every free dime at REI, not MAC. He knew all their important buyers, of course, but he wasn't anyone's shopping buddy. He didn't have a fashion—or any—degree, and now that Ed was gone, the snide comments that he was just the over-promoted adopted son of a lonely old man would grow, and whoever bought Fite out from the family would be looking for any excuse to shove him out.
Ed had promised him it wouldn't happen. He'd been a cranky old man, but he'd never hurt him. At least until the end, when he’d grinned at Liam and told him it was all up to him now, him and his pretty face. Then gave him a picture of his granddaughter, a woman who looked just like Ellen, a woman he despised.
All the years of giving Fite everything he had were coming to an end, and he would have nothing to show for it.
Nothing.
“So, Darrin.” He was eager to get far away from all of them before he made an example of someone who didn’t deserve it as much as Darrin. “If you've changed your mind about the move to New York, ask your guy Wayne in Engineering how to save your job. He's got a great new short body that’s just what we need and you should tell him that, or you'll be telling it to the Bloomingdale's buyer this fall. Jennifer, call up Wendi’s mom and ask her why she doesn't like the fit. Be nice about it. Take her to lunch or something—without commenting on her physique.” Then he got up, shoved his chair under the table, and strode out of the room.
There was only one way he was going to get what he deserved out of this nightmare, and she was playing around with fingerpaint in some Disneyland nursery school.
Taking the stairs two at a time, Liam ran to his office, his phone out of his pocket and his thumb hovering over Ed’s lawyer’s number. He’d stopped Bev once. He could do it again, and not by using his goddamn good looks. With an incentive to hold on to her ownership indefinitely, he could maintain his control. Improve it. From the looks of her—and he tried not to remember how disturbing that had been, to be attracted to an Ellen clone, just like Ed had wanted—she was in serious need of money.
And unlike the sharks he knew were already circling, she would be easy to manage.
Chapter 3
The boy wore a princess tiara and Batman cape.
“Cover your sneeze, please,” Bev told him. “And then what are you going to do?”
“Wash my hands.” He stuck a finger in his nose and galloped into the sandbox.
Cathy, the other teacher working that morning at the preschool, came by with a mug of tea. “Year went by fast, huh?” She handed it to Bev. “How’re you doing?”
Bev smiled. “I’m fine, thanks. I never knew my grandfather.” A boy ran past with a ball of yarn, one end tied to the tree, and she went over to untangle him. “Couldn’t miss today, could I?” The second Tuesday in June, worst day of the year.
“Hilda asked me to check up on you. You always take graduation so hard.”
“She did?” Bev swallowed her irritation. The director of the preschool liked to spy on her through her colleagues. “Well, tell her I’m fine.”
“At least this year you can say it was the death in your family that upset you. You know, extenuating circumstances.”
Bev kept her eyes on the sandbox. The handful of children outside with them were completely occupied with a garden hose, enjoying a school policy of child-directed play and obliviousness to water conservation. Kennedy, a freckled five-year-old girl with curly brown hair, stood off to the side, drawing on a rock with a black marker.
“The worst part is, I won’t miss all of them.”
Cathy smiled. “I know.”
“But some of them, I miss so much—”
“Not now, Bev. I shouldn’t have come over. You were fine before I came over. Hey, did you hear about the afternoon program?”
Bev looked up at her.
“You did,” Cathy said, lighting up.
“Oh, yeah.” The school’s waiting list had grown to triple digits, and rumor was Hilda needed an experienced teacher to direct an afternoon class in the fall, largely independent of Hilda. Bev was going to make her an even better offer and buy into the school itself, finally giving Hilda the chance to retire in a few years—and gain Bev some independence.
Cathy checked over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “I bet she’ll give it to you.”
Bev bit back a grin. She thought so too. She was the most senior teacher and got along with everyone, kids and adults. “It’s not that I mind working in a team. But I’d love to be in charge of my own program. Hilda is so . . . ”
“Anal?”
They rolled their eyes in unison. Cathy glanced over her shoulder again. “I can’t believe how hard she came down on you for that Valentine’s Day project.”
“The girls begged me. They really, really wanted hearts. I don’t think it’s fair to deny them their fun just because Hallmark gets out of hand.” Hilda was passionately opposed to the commercialization of childhood.
“Maybe if you hadn’t cut the hearts out for them.”
“They begged me! It’s hard for little fingers and round scissors to make that corner, there at the top where the heart dips in the middle. They were crying and pleading, and I mean really, what’s the big deal? It’s not like I shoved them out of the way and took over. I was following their direction.” Bev gulped her tea. “She made it sound like I was trying to be Santa and they were my elves.”
Cathy giggled. “Shhh.”
Bev sucked in a deep breath, set down her tea on a windowsill next to the bubble machine, gazed at her kids. In less than an hour they wouldn’t be hers anymore, and she was too grieved at the thought of never seeing them again to enjoy the anticipated changes she would make.
“Bef?” Kennedy, the rock-drawing girl, tugged on her jeans. Her cheeks were smeared with black marker, freckles, and dried yogurt, and Bev knew if she kneeled down to give her the usual hug she would lose it completely.
“Hey, friend.” Bev rumpled her hair. “What are you up to today?”
“Feeling sad,” Kennedy said. “Very, very sad.”
Validate her feelings. “You feel sad.”
“I lost Big Blue.” Kennedy didn’t just have pet rocks. She had friend
rocks. “In the sandbox.”
“Oh, it’ll turn—” But it was Kennedy’s last day, and if it turned up, she would be gone. Off to kindergarten, where they took away your rocks and gave you worksheets to drill for standardized tests. “I’ll look for it.”
“Don’t bother. It’s gone forever.” Kennedy had an Eeyore streak they’d been working on narrowing, to no effect. She bit her little lip.
“Come on, let’s look.”
“Too late,” Kennedy said. “It’s circle time, see?”
Sure enough, Hilda was ringing the bell. Bev led the group today and couldn’t be late; Hilda had just published an article in Parenting about the importance of routine in preschool-aged children’s development.
“I’ll look for it after circle,” Bev said.
“It’s okay.” Kennedy’s eyes filled with tears. “It likes the sandbox. It didn’t want to go to kindergarten.”
“Oh, honey.” Bev dropped to her knees and opened her arms for a hug. “I know you’re sad, and that’s okay, but it will get better. Kindergarten is awesome.”
But Kennedy jumped into her arms and began to cry. Not a temper-tantrum I-want-it cry, but the deep, mournful cry of an old soul staring into the abyss. Now I’m done for, Bev thought. She would have been fine with any of the other kids, one who cried every day, one who didn’t name her rocks and give them rides on the tire swing, but not with Kennedy. Kennedy had only cried once, when Ethan had punctured her index finger with a staple right through the nail and then yanked it out with his teeth.
So Bev held on to her and let her sob, and kept most of her own tears from spilling over. Most.
“Kennedy.” Hilda stood over them, wiping paint off her hands with a checkered dish towel. “Circle time!”
Kennedy drew back and looked into Bev’s face with wide, anguished eyes. “Are you coming?”
“Ms. Cathy is doing circle today,” Hilda said. “She needs you to pick out the story. It’s your job today, Kennedy!”
Love Handles (A Romantic Comedy) Page 3
