The Love Wars Read Online Free Page B

materials.”
    Everett turns red. “I thought we had until the sixteenth. Your talk’s not until the twenty-third, right?”
    “Well, he needs them now, Everett. Now.”
    He stands uncertainly.
    She waves her hands toward the door. “Go. Do it. All the materials, six copies and the outline.”
    Everett scurries out of the room and Lillian rolls her eyes at me. “Why do boys always need so much direction?” She grabs a fancy-looking olive green bag and a winter white jacket from the coatrack by her door. “I was thinking the Modern.”
    “Okay, great. Let me just get my things.”
    I had been to the Modern my first year for a summer associate event called “Wine, Dine and Refine” that involved a multicourse tasting menu, several rounds of a delicious drink that mixed Pimm’s and apricot liqueur and a tipsy, loopy private tour around the museum and sculpture garden. I round the corner toward my office wondering whether they still have the house-cured salmon on the menu. It had been delicious, delicate and velvety and—
    I walk right into a mass of French blue cotton, my head smacking against someone’s arm. I step back. It’s Henry Bennett, the world’s most unfriendly associate.
    We do that thing where we face each other and, like idiots, step in the same direction and then, trying to remedy that, step in unison in the other direction. Even though the hallway is more than wide enough for us to go around each other, we can’t seem to get unstuck from blocking each other’s path.
    I smile. “Care to dance?”
    He stops and folds his arms over his chest. “Maybe master walking before you take on dance?”
    “I was just joking.”
    He nods, unsmiling. “Funny.”
    “Sorry,” I try again, although he probably doesn’t deserve the effort. “I have a lunch with Lillian—my first.”
    “Ooooooh.” He raises his shoulders and claps his hands, as though I’ve told him that I’m going to skip to the American Girl store over lunch and pick out a new doll best friend. “By all means, after you. I had no idea you were on such important business. Godspeed.”
    He’s jealous. Lillian doesn’t seem to have the same level of camaraderie with Henry that she does with Liz, Hope and Rachel. I don’t blame her; his personality doesn’t exactly encourage interaction.
    __________
    A t the restaurant, Lillian hands her unopened menu to the server and orders a microgreen salad, dressing on the side, and an iced tea. I mimic her order, reluctant to rock the boat by taking the time to review the menu. So much for the salmon.
    Lillian looks at me. “Just a salad? That must be why you’re a toothpick.”
    “Oh, please, Lillian, just look at yourself.”
    She beams at me, reveling in our thinness.
    I am slim, but normally so—I have two lanky parents and, at least before starting at the firm, got regular exercise—not much of a mystery there. When I first started at Bacon Payne, though, I was stunned at the number of women who, upon initially meeting, felt it appropriate to remark on my size instead of, say, inquiring politely how I was finding the city, or asking what made me go into corporate law. A few even went a step further and, having established that I was on the skinny side, asked in effect how I had done it. By the end of the first month, I was tempted to tell them my secret was McDonald’s with a colonic chaser each morning, followed by a public recitation of the poem “Jabberwocky,”just to see if it would elicit a knowing smile. “Ah, the Egg McCarroll Method,” they’d agree.
    Instead, I eventually started pointing out how ridiculous it was for someone with the build of a greyhound to be making such a fuss about my frame. Based on the pleased responses, I knew I had stumbled onto the right reaction.
    “So, tell me, how is everything so far?” Lillian asks.
    “Everything’s great. And everyone’s so help—”
    Her phone rings and she holds up her index finger as she presses it to her