My Lady Lipstick

by Karin Kallmaker

  Go to the meeting: yes or no? It was a binary choice, really. Only two options. “If I hadn’t sent in that damned photo they might not be bothering me. But I did and they are.”

  She blew out air so hard Hobbit paused in mid-crunch to scowl at her. “Next life I want to be a lesbian’s cat. In Cat World it’s possible that thin, yellow-haired creatures aren’t the be-all and end-all.”

  Yeah, you can blame other people’s prejudices, she thought, but you leveraged it. You picked thin and blond and so, so white. She knew exactly what her mother would have called that: complicit. Now she was hoisted on her own lack of ethics.

  “Is that the bed you made all by yourself?” Her mother’s deceptively quiet voice played in her mind. “If you get in and pull up the covers, don’t blame the bed if you can’t sleep.”

  She reheated coffee in the microwave and took the steaming mug to the sofa. Hobbit immediately joined her, burrowing into her thigh while lightly batting her arm with a paw until she obediently stroked his side. After a few quiet minutes with her mind whirring while Hobbit purred, she felt able to pick at the problem again.

  Though not a valid excuse, the photograph had been armor that she’d felt she’d needed at the time. Her terror of being found had been real, and she’d had real evils to fear. But—a new thought entered the situation analysis. She was stronger now than she had been five years ago.

  She scritched lightly under Hobbit’s chin, enjoying the thrum of his purrs against her fingertips. “It’s like I’ve been on a long, fun but really safe quest and built up supplies and experience. All of a sudden the quest is harder and scarier. But there are good rewards at the end. A movie deal is a dream come true, isn’t it? A game winner after I had to start over from scratch.”

  At the sound of her voice Hobbit had opened one eye, but quickly closed it again.

  “How can I complete this quest without losing any of the lives I have left? What are the rules and are there any exploits?” All the questions of Gaming 101. Practice helped. Ignorance hurt. Experience mattered. She definitely had more hit points than five years ago. A movie deal? That was a lot of Experience Points and gold for future questing.

  Her fear was that if she played the Anita Topaz Famous Writer avatar too publicly, the pack of ravening jackals who’d ganged up on Paris Ellison could decide to play with Anita Topaz the same way. The day they’d doxxed her home address on Deep Dungeon had taught her that those assholes really did mean to do her harm. They really hoped someone would rape her to death. They really wanted someone to take pictures of her dismembered body. She was nothing more than a woman-shaped toy like the ones they so enjoyed brutalizing in their games. The panic attack had been the worst of her life.

  Her mistake had been talking in public about how uncomfortable it made her to see even pretend women treated that way. After her blog post there had been two hours of “Attagirl! Great post! We need to talk about this.” Then the mob had arrived, like the endless stream of orcs at Helm’s Deep. No Gandalf rescue at the last minute. No Galadriel with magic gifts. Every ally had been overwhelmed and drained until it was only her and so many of them.

  “Ow! Stop that or I’ll put you out.” Hobbit’s whack of claws to her hand reminded her to keep petting. “Spoiled rotten, that’s what you are. And you probably think I should have stayed. After two months of it, I was all out of hit points and on my last life. Kerry told me to fight. She thought I just simply wouldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t have another panic attack like that.” The loss of control, the feeling of strangling and drowning, the inability to hear or talk, coming out of it in an emergency room, terrifying minutes of not being able to speak enough to explain to strangers that it wasn’t a drug overdose or anaphylaxis—never again.

  The life she’d created by fleeing to the opposite coast had torn out her heart in more ways than one. She’d lost Kerry. She’d learned to play the game of life by going around the battle with Boss Anxiety. Anything that could be a trigger was off limits. Whatever it took to feel safe was Winning.

  And she’d been winning, damn it.

  Now Reynard House was imposing new rules, like a game designer who decided the play wasn’t hard enough.

  New rules meant new strategies for winning—wasn’t that what a game designer would say?

  Thinking about it that way was a comforting framework. If at some point she no longer felt safe, she could freeze the game and leave it, couldn’t she? If they continued to change the rules, then Finn and Lisa were right, other publishers would play the game with her. She would not lose her livelihood a second time and that reality meant she had resources she could use.

  “Is there some part of their game I can play safely? What do you think, Hobbit?” A flick of the cat’s ears was all the answer she got. “I’m five years older and stronger. I have bank and I’ve proved I can make someone money in the mainstream world. That is a new kind of armor. I didn’t have that before.”

  Inexplicably she pictured Diana smiling at her.

  Well, that was a pretty enough picture, but Diana, or Fiona, or whatever her name was, she wasn’t real. The quiet calm of her touch had been a fluke, and wishing that they’d met under different circumstances didn’t change a thing.

  “Can I go to their stupid meeting, let them get a good look at the real me, and tell them to their face that I’m not going to be their dancing bear? And say yes, they can make a movie based on one of my books? Anita Topaz gets a big level up—if I don’t pass out or drool on myself.”

  She pushed Hobbit off her leg and carried her coffee into the bedroom. Bouncing on her toes in front of her desk, she reached a state of hard-won calm. Lisa, for all her high-handed interfering advice, was right.

  “And if they say no, sorry, no beautiful femme blonde means no deal, I go play the game with someone else who’ll play the way I want. I’ll listen to Finn about getting an agent finally.”

  She could deal with those choices, she abruptly realized. They were clear. What she had to believe was that she could physically handle the stress of the meeting.

  Diana was in her mind again, sapphire dress and emeralds and fur. Skin as smooth as rose petals. A walk that said “Look but don’t touch.”

  Ignoring the tingles in her stomach and elsewhere, she shook the delectable image from her mind by reminding herself that Diana liked using multiple names and pretended to be people she wasn’t on and off stage. If Lisa was right, the jewelry was the only thing about Diana that was real.

  Well, other parts of Paris speculated, there were definitely a couple of items that had seemed very real. Small and firm and…

  Wrenching her mind away from the image of the emerald pendant and where it had delicately rested on Diana’s chest, Paris worked on strengthening her resolve. There was no way in hell she could carry off thigh-high boots and a fur coat the way Diana had. But a couple of couture suits, silk ties, designer cuff links—that she could manage. Clothes were a kind of armor, and she could be a sharp-dressed butch with no apologies. Anita Topaz didn’t have to worry much about money. Time to make a big withdrawal.

  She could take the train, even, and pay cash. Reynard House was making the hotel reservations for “Anita”—they never called her anything else. The electronic payment of royalties to Paris Ellison had been set up with the previous publisher. Now that she thought about it, Paris wondered if the gaggle of marketing interns even knew she had another name. Fine, so she’d be “Anita” from the moment she left home. All in all, the trip wouldn’t generate much for one of her former stalkers to find, even if they still had bots out there sniffing cyberspace for her name in play somewhere.

  She really didn’t want to do this, but she could. She knew the difference. Her mother would be proud of her.

  The memory of her mother’s hugs brought up tension-relieving tears and she gave in, flooded with relief to know what she was going to do. Hobbit decided her sniffling around the house for the next quarter-hour was the final straw and ask
ed to be let out. She locked the door and blew her nose.

  Heck, she’d get to see Hamilton.

  Chapter Twelve

  Once she’d made up her mind, Paris resumed her daily life. At the keyboard, Susannah discovered the identity of her nemesis and left Tuscany for the Riviera to search for an old flame. The outline for the novel continued to unfold as she’d planned. Best of all, words flowed easily and on schedule. At this pace she’d be ready for a break about the time she left for New York.

  Her landladies’ occasional interruptions to discuss attire and corsages for the wedding were welcome. They were delighted to hear she was going on a short trip. She’d warned them that Hobbit might come calling while she was gone, but really, there was no way that cat would ever starve.

  She also set aside time to go shopping in Back Bay where a women’s tailor measured every inch of her. She returned the following week to pick up the results: three suits, a sports jacket, an array of trousers and button-up shirts, plus a bewildering assortment of suggested ties. She tried everything on, taking in the color pairing recommendations as best she could. It was all in service of the quest she’d assigned herself, which she now dubbed “Storming the Office Building.”

  The tailor, after demonstrating all the fussiness that befit someone in her profession, had finally knelt at Paris’s feet to tweak the legs of the power suit pants. “In loafers or dress shoes these will fall perfectly.”

  Paris eyed her Doc Martens in the mirror. Much as she loved them, they weren’t right for the steel-gray power suit. “I’ll be sure to pick up a pair.” She tightened the knot at her collar slightly, liking how the wide red silk shone against the royal blue of the shirt. Sharp-Dressed Butch—achievement unlocked, she thought.

  Unbidden she wondered if Diana would approve, then kicked herself for thinking about her at all.

  On the way home, laden with a zippered garment carrier and a heavy shopping bag, she chastised herself again for dwelling on Diana. The whole crazy proposal had been a chance intrusion into her life. Diana/Fiona/Anita, she reminded herself, had probably not told her the truth about anything. Yet thoughts of her intruded at odd moments throughout the day and especially in that fleeting-flying moment before falling asleep. The junk drawer where she’d dropped Diana’s phone number sometimes caught the light like it never had before.

  If her life really were a video game of course she’d open the drawer and find the phone number glowing with magic. But she had no clue as to which kind. More Gaming 101: You never knew about random objects given to you by mysterious characters. And Diana was all that. Mystery and risks and outlandish plans. Improbable, and impossible to forget completely.

  The Friday morning she left for New York she was glad to have practiced the tailor’s recommended Windsor knot several more times. Her hands refused to stop shaking. The mirror said the steel-gray suit looked just as intimidating as it had in the tailor’s shop, but it also revealed her ashen face. A new haircut, sleek on the sides and longer on the top for bravado, wasn’t quite long enough in the front to hide the fear in her eyes.

  The cab she’d reserved came on time and everything at the Amtrak station went smoothly. But the train was held outside New Haven for reasons unknown and Paris thought she was going to sweat through her shirt. Instead of arriving at the crowded underground of Penn Station at one o’clock, it was well past two. She’d hoped for a quiet thirty minutes in her hotel room to gather her wits. Instead she dashed in the hotel’s front door, asked the bellman to hold her suitcase, and dashed back out to the waiting cab.

  The next gauntlet was the security screening at the Reynard Media Group home office. Paris gave the meeting details to a guard who looked up something on his computer screen, then waved her through the scanning gate. Her pulse rate rose nevertheless. It was the building itself—cold, steel, echoing. It didn’t help that she was now several minutes late.

  Helpfully, the elevator was an express that only stopped at the top four floors. It opened directly into the reception area where a petite brunette in a tailored navy blue jacket and skirt immediately greeted her.

  “You’re here for the meeting?”

  “Yes. Anita Topaz,” Paris said. It was as cold in the office suite as the lobby downstairs. The air was sterile. Glass and chrome walls were the backdrop to framed posters featuring personalities from Reynard News who were also Reynard House top selling authors. They were either silver-haired mature men in dark suits or yellow-haired younger women in sleeveless blue dresses. The men had the same steely-eyed gaze while all the women smiled in the same cheerful degree. They struck Paris as media cookie cutters, remarkable only in their conformity to a bland corporate type.

  If the receptionist found Paris out of the ordinary she gave no sign. She tapped at her paper-thin tablet and gestured for Paris to follow her. “Right this way.”

  The thick gray carpet underfoot quickly muffled all sounds from the reception area. The hallway was very long and ended at massive double doors. Nearby office doors were closed and blinds drawn over hallway-facing windows. It was the perfect game tableau, Paris realized. There could be a different quest battle behind every door. The floor could turn to lava at any moment.

  Such thoughts were not helping her heart rate. Cold sweat dripped down her back. There was no stopping now, but her throat had tightened and she wasn’t entirely sure she could speak. I will not have a panic attack.

  “Go right in,” the receptionist said, with a gesture at the double doors.

  Paris nodded her thanks, squared her shoulders, and opened the right-hand door into an expansive conference room. I will not have a panic attack…

  The eastern wall was all glass and faced a stunning view of Midtown skyscrapers and the East River. Being able to see outside immediately made it easier to breathe. Fighting to stay focused, she skirted the long wooden table that gleamed with varnish and looked as if it had never been used. The only occupants were clustered at the far end near a buffet table and bar. A glance at her watch said she was five minutes late and they appeared to have begun some aspect of the meeting without her. Deep rumbles of mirth from several men twined with a woman’s sharp laugh.

  She had no choice but to go forward. So you’re a little late, she told herself. It was fashionable, wasn’t it?

  The length of the room gave her the chance to take a couple deep breaths. As she approached the group she reviewed her plan. Introduce herself. State her intentions. If it started to go badly, she could leave whenever she wanted and call Finn. This encounter would be draining, but it wouldn’t kill her. She would not have another panic attack.

  One of the men finally noticed Paris’s approach. He was probably on the other side of sixty and his wide-set eyes were dark. She recognized him by his bald head and the massive bulk of his shoulders. Somewhere in his past he had supposedly played football, but the athlete was long gone. What remained was the bull of American media: Ronald Reynard, entertainment czar, CEO of Reynard Media Group, and the corporate overlord of Anita Topaz’s publisher. Though the letters had been signed by him, she hadn’t really expected him to personally show up.

  His expression was not welcoming. The other men were completely focused on the woman, whose back was to Paris. A long French braid hung down her spine, shining like a rope of gold against a pale neck and a sleeveless dress the color of an American Beauty rose.

  Paris opened her mouth to apologize for her tardiness, but her gaze fixed on a heavy emerald earring that swayed from a delicate earlobe. From there she took notice of the woman’s left shoulder where the flawless toned line of muscle and bone was broken by a bump—and Diana turned her head to see what Ronald Reynard was looking at.

  Their gazes met. Diana froze, but only for a moment. Then her expression eased into careless lines as she turned to Reynard. “Excuse me. My driver must have a message for me.”

  She met Paris while there were still a few steps to go. “Ellis,” she said, just loudly enough, “is something wrong
?”

  There was so much wrong. So very much wrong. Paris couldn’t find any words.

  Under her breath, Diana said, “Don’t hate me. I have them eating out of the palm of my hand.”

  “I—I—”

  “Ronald, I’m so sorry. Can you excuse me for a minute? This won’t take long.” Diana tucked her hand ever so casually under Paris’s arm but her fingers curled around it like iron.

  She was being marched toward the end of the room. Every second that ticked by was another one where she didn’t tell Ronald Reynard the truth, didn’t expose Diana as a fake. She should detach herself, go back, explain.

  How could she possibly explain?

  They were in the hallway, all doors near them closed, before Paris found her voice.

  “You walked in here and told them you were me?” she asked in a furious whisper.

  “I didn’t tell them anything. Nobody even asked me for an ID. They assumed I was you. The receptionist announced me and Ronald Reynard is calling me Anita like I was at school with his daughter.”

  She was right, Paris thought. Nobody had asked her to prove she was Anita either. Which had nothing to do with anything—Diana was not Anita Topaz.

  “This is ridiculous,” she hissed. It was simply not fair that Diana, in her high-necked cocktail sheath and tantalizing high-heeled patent leather pumps, looked like the Anita Topaz Reynard Media Group wanted. She was not as outrageously sexy as she had been in the thigh-high leather boots and the dress cut down to her navel that she’d worn at Mona Lisa’s. Instead, this rendition of Anita shimmered like a flawless gemstone against the gray-and-glass backdrop, not so different from the women whose pictures hung in the lobby. “We’re going to get caught.”

  “Only if you let on,” Diana whispered loudly. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

  “I told you no to this—this—madness.” How was this turning into her fault? “Was I supposed to call you up and say ‘By the way I’m going so don’t you show up to the thing I told you already not to show up at’?”