Overtime
Authors: Roxie Noir
Overtime Copyright © 2014 Roxie Noir
All rights reserved.
This book is intended for audiences 18 and over only.
Overtime
Roxie Noir
Valerie’s phone buzzed again. Two quick ones: a text message. She looked around the open-plan office, at the other admins and junior copywriters, all looking intently at their own screens. Half of them were probably on Facebook, but she didn’t care.
The text was not from Ethan. It was from Adrienne, her best friend. Valerie tried not to be disappointed.
Don’t you dare call him. You’ll just feel pathetic. Cut contact. Be strong.
Valerie sighed. She hated it when she knew Adrienne was right. The phone buzzed again in her hand.
Are we still on for for ice cream & True Blood tonight?
Fuck yeah,
Valerie wrote.
Eight?
Sounds good.
“I need you to schedule a lunch meeting with Jason and Amanda for Thursday at the Park Grill,” said a voice behind her.
Valerie’s heart dropped into her stomach. She froze, then tried to act nonchalant, like she’d been using her phone for work, not to text her friend about her stupid breakup, and put it down and casually reached for her mouse.
“You’ve got noon until three free. Do you have a time preference?”
“Make it twelve-thirty to two. Do you have those letters for me to sign?”
“Right here,” she said. The manila envelope was on her right, and she took it and spun in her office chair, meeting his eyes as she handed it to him.
Behind her, on the desk, her phone buzzed again.
“Anything else?” she asked, acting as though she hadn’t heard anything.
“That’s all for now,” he said. Jasper Declan, her boss, walked back into his office and shut the door. Valerie turned around and stuffed her phone in her purse without even looking at the screen.
Three months into her new job, Valerie still had no idea what to make of Jasper. When she told others who she worked for, there was a face they made, a face that said,
I am trying very hard not to make a face
. A face with a hint of surprise, a dash of pity, and a pinch of
you poor thing
. Once she had asked another assistant at Declan & Soames what the deal with Jasper was, and the other girl looked down at the floor and said something about how he made his last assistant cry all the time, but it was no big deal because she was kind of a crier anyway.
“He’s just not the warm fuzzy type,” the girl had said.
Despite the general buzz surrounding Jasper, Valerie didn’t think he was so hard to work for. He told her what he wanted her to do and she did it. If she could do it better than he expected, she did. What was so hard about that?
Besides, his last assistant was on the copywriting staff now. Both the senior copywriters and the head of the art department had started there as his assistant, years and years ago. Being Jasper’s assistant was the way up.
In her purse, her phone buzzed again, insistently. Valerie ignored it and picked up her desk phone to call Amanda’s assistant. She had a lunch to schedule.
Six hours later she wore blue pajama pants with sheep on them, fuzzy slippers, no bra, and her Hudson State sweatshirt. On the ikea coffee table of her studio apartment sat two empty ice cream bowls, a mostly-empty champagne bottle, and a laptop. The champagne had an orange price sticker that said $4.99, and the table also functioned as her desk, her dining table, and her entertainment center. Frankly, she was amazed that she’d found an apartment in her budget big enough for her bed
and
and a couch
and
a coffee table.
On the laptop screen, a man tore his shirt off, transformed into a wolf, and ran off.
“You deserve abs like that,” said Adrienne, sitting next to Valerie. She also wore pajama pants, though hers were blue flannel. “Look at those. Sculpted from goddamn marble.”
Valerie sighed. Onscreen, a slim brunette showered, the camera getting a good ogle at her small, perky breasts, her flat stomach.
“They’re all after those girls,” she said.
“Bullshit,” said Adrienne. “That’s just the media. Men want something they can grab onto.”
Valerie rolled her eyes and took another drink of champagne.
“I’m just saying, you could do better than Ethan.”
Valerie watched the werewolf turn back into a man, now in the shower with the brunette, as they made out frantically.
“We never made out in the shower like that,” Valerie admitted.
“You see?”
“Our sex life wasn’t great,” Valerie said. The champagne was starting to do the talking for her.
“No?”
“I mean, he always wanted to do it. Super eager. Like a labrador puppy. God, he tried so hard.”
“And?”
“And, how often can you lie there and get poked?”
Adrienne burst out laughing, snorted, started laughing again.
“You can do other stuff, you know,” she said.
“I tried, girl,” Valerie said. She poured more champagne into the empty jam jar she used as a glass. “I tried so hard, and he was just not into it. Vibrators, lingerie, handcuffs. Butt sex. I offered him
butt sex
and he wasn’t interested.”
“Inhuman,” said Adrienne. She held her jam jar glass out and Valerie upended the last drops of champagne into it. “That’s it, Ethan’s either an alien or asexual.” She took a long sip. “I mean, look at that ass. I kind of want to do you in the butt, and I’m straight. Who would say no to that?”
Valerie gulped her drink, and then pointed to her ass with one hand. “This thing is phenomenal,” she declared.
“Absolutely.”
“And he wanted nothing to do with it. Lights out, missionary, hump hump hump and
sploosh
.”
“That’s insane,” said Adrienne. She said it with authority, thumping her own jam jar down on the table, as though it were the absolute last word on the matter.
“Guess what else,” said Valerie.
“What else?”
“When he dumped me he said I was
frigid
.”
Adrienne stared and took a sip of champagne. “I don’t even know where to start with that.”
“Right?”
“Do people still say frigid? Did he time travel here from 1950?”
Valerie laughed.
“I’m almost serious,” said Adrienne. “First he humps like fuckin’
Leave it to Beaver
even though you’re totally willing to wear latex and tie him up, and then he calls you
frigid
?”
“Fuck him,” said Valerie. She took a long swig of her champagne and pointed at the laptop screen, where a blond vampire was making sex-eyes at a brunette. “I’m gonna find me a mister-marble-abs, and I’m going to have a hot fling.”
Adrienne picked up her glass and clinked Valerie’s with it.
“Here’s to that,” she said.
The next morning, Valerie woke up on her bed — which was really just a full-size mattress on the floor, she hadn’t been able to find a cheap enough bed frame yet — and Adrienne was curled on her two-person couch, the laptop still open in front of her.
It was one in the afternoon.
“There’s champagne left,” Adrienne mumbled from the couch, one eye partway open.
“How can that be,” said Valerie. “I feel like I drank three bottles myself, not three-quarters of a bottle.”
“Lightweight.”
“The world’s chubbiest lightweight, apparently.”
“Stop it.”
“Want to order in Chinese food?”
Adrienne was quiet for a moment, considering the bottle on the coffee table. “As long as it’s cheap,” she said. “I got a budget.”
“I hear that,” said Valerie, and she grabbed a Chinese menu off the floor without getting out of bed.
On Sunday night, after a weekend-long marathon of wine and Chinese delivery, Adrienne went back to her own little apartment, and Valerie was left, looking around her place, and she thought:
maybe being an adult isn’t so bad. I can do this, and no one can stop me.
The next morning Valerie really did feel better. She woke up earlier than usual, feeling oddly refreshed. She made coffee in her single-serving french press, ate Lucky Charms while checking her email standing at her kitchen counter. Then she washed her mug, her bowl, her spoon and put them in her tiny dish drain, humming to herself. She showered the weekend away, and for work she picked out a bright red pencil skirt and a blouse with vertical black-and-white stripes, then checked herself out in the mirror.
I look like Beetlejuice
, she thought.
She swapped the shirt out for a simple white shell and a black blazer she’d had since high school. She called it the Magic Blazer because it hit her in all the right places, making her waist look tiny, accentuating her hourglass figure. The skirt was tight-ish and made it obvious that she was more bootylicious than svelte. She almost changed out of it into an A-line skirt she also had, but thought the better of it.
I AM bootylicious,
she thought to herself.
Come and get it, boys.
She put black pumps in her bag and tossed on flip-flops for the subway ride, carefully applied one coat of Bombshell Red lipstick, and was out the door.
Up until three, her day went as usual. Schedule meetings, proofread letters, stuff envelopes, pick up lunch from downstairs.
Then, Jasper opened his office door. Valerie turned her head around, fingers still held over the keyboard.
“Valerie,” Jasper said. He stood with one hand still on the inside of the door, as if he was ready to close it at any moment. “Could I see you for a moment?”
Fuck
, she thought. She immediately went to every mistake she could have made: a meeting she forgot to schedule? Had she sent the wrong thing to a big client, used the wrong phrase and gotten them in trouble?
“Of course,” she said. She stood, pulled her pencil skirt down, grabbed a notepad and walked into his office, sat in one of the leather chairs facing his desk. Jasper sat behind the desk, both hands on the table in front of him.
Valerie crossed her legs and folded her hands in her lap, trying her best not to look nervous.
Please don’t fire me,
she thought.