The Kiss Test Read Online Free

Park served as a warm-up for our daily run, dodging New York citizens and tourists to hone our reflexes. The incessant noise was comforting in its sameness, in its constancy.
    Unlike my employment.
    Damn.
    I picked up my pace.
    “Margo. Honey.” Adair panted beside me. “You know I can’t fan in these crowds. Can’t you go slower until we get in the open?”
    Katya, his roommate and conscience, growled at him from behind me, and I could imagine the look on her face. It would speak volumes—“Don’t say anything to upset Margo. She’s just been fired.” Okay, I was exaggerating. I hadn’t been fired. I’d been downsized, laid off, phased out. Whatever.
    Adair remained silent all the way to the park. I was feeling too mean to care whether he sweated up his designer tank or not. Don’t take this wrong. I liked Adair a lot. He’s a great friend, aside from having had to almost compete with him for men a time or two. But his vanity and freakish paranoia about sweating while running—and thus possibly staining—his trendy duds, was highly annoying. Adair would pull out a pocket fan—to prevent wetness from forming anywhere on his body—as soon as we hit the “openness” of Central Park and there was no chance of someone bumping into him and getting the blades tangled up in his chest hair.
    I’d insert an eye roll here if I had the mental energy to actually roll my eyes.
    I dodged people and cabs, barely stopping for lights in my desperation to run. Adair and Katya, ever the faithful friends, kept up their suicide watch. We entered the park and took off like taxis through an intersection. As we moved onto the road that threaded through the park—used by runners, bicyclists, rollerbladers and any other souls brave enough to risk being stampeded by the health-conscious—the elm trees closed in, and the traffic and horns were silenced, or at least muffled. Central Park was like a completely separate world from the rest of Manhattan. A bit of nature persistent in its survival amidst the stone and steel of the city. Something to be cherished, a respite from rushing, even while running.
    As predicted, Adair pulled out his fan the minute the coast was clear, and every few minutes he’d aim it at an armpit or down the front of his racer-back tank, ensuring any droplets of sweat that dared to appear were instantly blown into submission.
    “Do you want to talk about it, Margo?” Katya asked tentatively, keeping pace with me on my left while Adair brought up the right. “It might make you feel better.”
    Adair agreed. “Talking always makes things better. Kat and I talk all the time and look how healthy and well-adjusted we are.”
    I shot a glance at the man running beside me, chin thrust in the air, pointing a whirling pink pocket fan at his neck. “I’m not sure I could stand to be as healthy and well-adjusted as you, Adair. It might just make me sick.”
    Katya chuckled nervously. “Did they say anything about who else might be, you know, let go?”
    “Everyone on-air,” I said. “I didn’t hear anything about anyone else.” I didn’t voice my concern that it might be just a matter of time before many of the other English-only-speaking employees were let go in favor of Korean-speaking employees. No need to scare my friends half to death. The very idea of them both losing their jobs at the same time was frightening. The two of them had shared an apartment for five years and were almost like an old married couple—minus the sex, given they both had a preference for sleeping with men. They pooled their money and their support. Take that away and they’d be in trouble.
    “That’s just wrong,” Adair professed, craning his neck to follow the assets of a cute guy who sped past us on roller blades.
    “His ass?”
    “Don’t be perverse. I can carry on a conversation while admiring the view. It’s wrong that you were fired.”
    “She wasn’t fired!” Kat protested. “She was laid off. There’s a