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CHAPTER
4
Lucy checked social media on the way to her car, knowing there would be a barrage of birthday posts. She smiled at the old photos friends tagged her in and the well-wishes. She was pleasantly surprised to see that Leo Ash, the bane of her professional existence, posted a picture of them together behind the scenes at an event, Lucy with a lanyard press pass around her neck and Leo looking like the tousled, tatted-up rock star he was, with a caption quite bluntly thanking her for putting up with his shit.
When she inherited Leo, she initially thought it was a form of playful hazing but had since realized it was a test that she’d passed with flying colors. It was sink or swim with a client whose romantic flings, wardrobe-as-political-statement stunts, late-night talk show confessions, leaked nudes, and arrest record landed him all over the internet in the worst way possible. But he never started a fire Lucy couldn’t put out with her quick maneuvering before anyone got too badly burned. She deftly recast his eccentricities as endearing and made sure everyone kept loving him. Like that time she framed his Vegas drive-thru chapel wedding and subsequent annulment to a supermodel he’d known for two weeks as the soul-searching inspiration for his fourth and arguably best studio album. And that time he had demanded to have a live lion in a music video, and she researched a reputable rescue sanctuary to find one and wove a heartwarming story around Leo and his new five-hundred-pound feline friend. She topped it off by directing fans to a website in the video’s credits where they could donate to protecting endangered and vulnerable species. She personally cut him a little slack considering fame had rerouted his life at a young age and left him living in a near-alternate reality. Despite his flaws and extremely high-maintenance nature, she’d grown a soft spot for him over the years. It also didn’t hurt that his voice sounded like black velvet wrapped in barbed wire and he had the brooding-bad-boy thing locked down well enough to give lessons.
She took a moment to reply to his post with a kiss emoji blowing a little heart.
And then she prayed he wouldn’t cause any drama on her big day.
Her phone chimed several times with happy birthday texts as she climbed into her car. Her commute to work was only three miles but it took thirty minutes in the faithful gridlock. Traffic crawled slowly enough for her to pull up the texts on her dash console. She noted the one from Caleb: Happy birthday! with a heart emoji. The other messages were from cousins, old friends who texted her precisely once per year on her birthday, and her dad.
By the time she parked in the cool concrete tomb beneath her office building, she had her game face on and was ready to conquer her day, despite the morning’s mishaps. She touched her fingertips to her nose to make extra sure it was done bleeding before she crowded into the garage elevator with a handful of anonymous building coworkers. Though she knew no one by name, they’d all seen each other in passing enough to recognize one another, and she couldn’t ignore the curious eyes on her outfit, the fleeting glances at her mostly bare face. The confidence she felt in her bedroom, the certainty she could pull off her appearance, slowly slipped away with each floor they climbed.
She arrived on the sixth floor and entered the lobby of her own office suite. J&J Public’s creamy white-and-teal lobby with its rounded reception desk, fresh flowers, and black leather furniture perfectly combined Joanna’s and Jonathan’s feminine and masculine energies. Lucy caught two of her junior coworkers chatting.
Mikayla sat behind the reception desk, manning her workstation, and Annie, the newest in a long line of young, leggy assistants to serve Jonathan Jenkins, casually leaned over, balancing on the balls of her skyscraper heels, which hurt Lucy’s feet just to look at. They paused their conversation and stared at Lucy with a mix of emotion clouding their heavily made-up faces: confusion, mainly, but also an ingrained and reflexive judgment, followed by a hint of fear that maybe turning thirty dashed your beauty standards overnight.
“Lucy! Happy birthday?” Mikayla greeted her, probably not intending it to come out as a question but unable to shield her confusion over Lucy’s appearance. Annie eyed her from head to toe.
“Good morning,” Lucy said, ready to get to the safety of her own office. “And thank you for the birthday wish.”
“Of course.” Mikayla, who usually beamed at everyone who walked in J&J’s door, gave her a wary smile. “Is everything all right this morning?”
Lucy flushed. They were used to seeing her in the same heels and tight dresses that they wore every day. A sundress and minimal makeup had to mean something went wrong. That her electricity went out, or she was wallowing in despair after breaking up with her boyfriend, or maybe it was even some bizarre walk-of-shame scenario. They couldn’t fathom that it was her choice to leave home looking like she did.
She realized she couldn’t blame them for their concern because, like her, they had been trained from a very young age to equate a woman’s appearance with her competence, intelligence, kindness, status—her value as a person.
The list made Lucy angry, so she stopped making it in her head. The point was, they didn’t know any better, and it wasn’t their fault.
“I just felt like changing things up today,” she assured her younger colleagues.
They blinked at her like two glass-eyed does, and Lucy knew defending her appearance all day would be an uphill battle.
Annie pushed up off her elbow and drummed her nails on the desktop. “Jonathan wants to meet with you today, Lucy. Just a heads-up.”
That gorgeous bagel sandwich she had for breakfast did a backflip in her belly.
She did not want a private meeting with Jonathan for a multitude of reasons, but she especially didn’t want one on her big day. Not at all.
“I don’t want to meet with Jonathan,” she blurted. “He makes me uncomfortable.”
The words slipped out of her mouth and shocked all three of them. Mikayla gaped, Annie flinched, and Lucy felt her face fill with a hot rush.
“Um, oh... okay,” Annie said, like Lucy had spoken a language she didn’t understand. “I can tell him—”
“No!” Lucy shouted, making them both flinch this time. “I mean, no; please don’t tell him that.”
She couldn’t understand what possessed her to confess. She had tolerated the light touching, the discreet advances, the inappropriate comments for years, but she’d never said anything on record because she liked her job too much to risk losing it. There were only two people on the planet who knew how she felt about Jonathan, and neither of them were currently staring at her like she’d gone senile. Of all the people she could have confessed to, she opened her mouth to Mikayla, the all-seeing front-desk eye, and Annie, Jonathan’s personal assistant.
She wanted to melt through the floor.
“I have to go,” she said, and whisked off, leaving them stunned.
She walked down the hall, past the gridwork of cubicles in the office belly, and toward her office, three down from Joanna’s corner suite. Jonathan’s office anchored the floor’s other corner, behind wooden doors Lucy didn’t care to visit.
She made it into her office, a neatly appointed cubby with a view of West L.A. Like her apartment, she kept it clean and decorated with succulents and colorful art. As a junior publicist, she had room only for a desk, her computer, a bookshelf, and a chair for a visitor. Joanna’s office had a couch, a palm, a sideboard with fresh flowers, and a TV. She wasn’t gunning for all that just yet, but the senior publicists had room for two chairs, maybe a fern.
