Say the Word(7)

Upon our arrival she’d immediately feigned a headache and excused herself, forcing me into an awkward coffee date with a poet named Lucien, who wore exclusively red flannel and donned thick-framed black glasses with nonprescription lenses. He’d read his angst-filled poetry to me for three painful hours, was offended on a fundamental level because I worked for the — and I quote — “materialistic magazine-industry machine,” and didn’t even pay for my chai tea latte afterwards.

Obviously, it was a match made in heaven.

So by the time Desmond asked me out, I figured he was the lesser of two evils and, at the very least, he always paid for coffee. Not to mention he was funny, laid-back, and good-looking – well-built, with dreamy blue eyes, a buzz cut, and a dimpled smile.

I wanted to like him, I really did. My heart just wasn’t in it, I guess.

Not that it was ever fully in it, but I knew I could at least try a little harder to like the poor guy. Especially because, for some unknown reason, he seemed to like me.

“I was just thinking about you,” he said, hurt evident in his voice. “Wondering how your pitch with Jeanine went this morning.”

Face, meet palm. I was such a bitch sometimes.

“I’m sorry, Des,” I said, picking up my pace as I spotted the ArtLust building up ahead. “Jeanine was a total pit-bull as usual and now she has me out delivering lunches to the models at some photo shoot. Which, when you think about it, is pretty ridiculous because it’s not like they’re going to violate their air-diets and actually consume solid food anyway.”

He snorted. “Sorry babe, that sucks. How ‘bout you come over to my place tonight and I make you dinner?”

I knew very well that by dinner he really meant sex.

“Um, maybe, I don’t know,” I evaded, unsure whether I wanted to take things to the next level with him yet – or at all. “Hey can we talk about it later? I’m at the studio now.”

“’Kay babe, let me know. I make a mean macaroni and cheese.”

“Kraft?” I asked, knowing full well that he couldn’t cook anything that didn’t come either frozen or canned.

“Of course,” he said, a smile in his voice. “It tastes better when it’s from a box. Everyone knows that.”

I laughed and hung up, just as I reached the front doors of the looming skyscraper before me. The studio was on the fifteenth floor – I’d only been there once before, more than two years ago when I’d had to have my photo taken for the magazine website. A thumbnail of my washed out portrait from that day accompanied every column I wrote and I still cringed whenever I saw it in print. Hopefully the photographer they’d hired for today’s shoot was more skillful. Then again, how hard could it possibly be to take good pictures of practically naked, anatomically flawless women in lingerie? Unlike some of us, they didn’t have any bad angles.

I crossed the gleaming black marble lobby floor and boarded the elevator, praying that nothing had changed in the months since I’d last been here. I was seriously late and couldn’t afford to waste time wandering the hallways like a lost intern.

Thankfully, the elevator made relatively few stops as it climbed to my floor, and within minutes the doors were sliding open with a low chime. Entering the studio, which was essentially a large open plan with floor to ceiling windows, I saw that the right side of the room was set up for a photo shoot, cordoned off with large shades to block out any unwanted natural light. Numerous spotlights, tripods, reflective umbrellas, softboxes, and strobes surrounded the photographer, whose back was to me as he snapped photo after photo of next month’s cover girl, Cara Stein.

A slender brunette whose plastic surgeries had ensured that she was abnormally well endowed, Cara was posing in a mock kitchen set, nude except for a flimsy red apron. Covered artfully in flour, she gripped a rolling pin suggestively in one hand and a cake-battered spoon in the other. As she slowly licked it clean, her seductive gaze trained on the camera, I averted my eyes so as not to gag and headed for the other side of the room.

There were three long rolling racks of garments for the models – apparently they occasionally wore more than baking ingredients – along with a hair and makeup station, where several beauty technicians hovered among their vast array of brushes and powders. Two models wearing silk bathrobes sat at the vanities, pecking feverishly at the screens of their cellphones. No doubt keeping their Twitter and Instagram followers interested with minute-by-minute updates about their like, totally, like, glamorous lives, while waiting for a turn in front of the camera. In the back corner, I finally spotted what I’d been searching for: a long, empty buffet table upon which I promptly dumped the heavy Gemelli’s bags.

Flexing my hands, I winced as pins and needles shot through my fingertips. I was tempted to slip off my heels and rub feeling back into my arches – feet were not designed to walk ten blocks in stilettos, it’s a scientific fact – but I refrained. I was about to touch people’s food, after all.

When feeling had fully returned to my hands, I reached into the bags and unloaded the boxed salads and sandwiches. I heard Cara’s whiney voice distantly responding to some of the photographer’s directions, and tried to tune her out – she might be gorgeous, but she sounded like a feral cat caught in a rainstorm whenever she opened that million-dollar set of collagen treated lips. The studio was surprisingly quiet, the atmosphere saturated only by the hushed whispers of the makeup artists and the faint yet familiar refrains of classical music drifting through the overhead speakers.