Scissor Link by Georgette Kaplan (novels to improve english .txt) 📗

“I’ve never been attracted to a married person in my life.”

“Okay, it’s just me, I’m sick. But now—now you are divorced. So what are your options for replacing the stick in your ass with—”

“Are you endeavoring to outdo the pedophilia comment?”

Elizabeth groaned as the iPod went over to the next song, a slow ballad. She jumped down, stomped over to it, and skipped to a bop. “Show a little gratitude, I’m trying to get you laid here. So what are your options? There’re hookers…”

Janet shook her head in quite involuntary amusement. “Oh, that’s my first option?”

“Hey, they’re sex workers, let them go first for once. The problem being, most of them are straight. Have you ever been eaten out by a straight woman?”

“By definition, no.”

“It’s like your pussy is the cockroaches on an episode of Fear Factor. Very bad for your self-esteem.”

Janet took off her glasses and kneaded her sinuses. “Well, you have thoroughly shot down my plan to debase myself with lesbian prostitutes. How should I repay your words of wisdom?”

“Wear tighter skirts,” Elizabeth replied without missing a beat. “Then there’s dating—”

“Sure you don’t want to go arranged marriage first? Mail-order bride?”

“Not in this economy. Now, I assume you’ve absorbed enough of me talking about my dating life to know you wouldn’t stand a chance. You’d be like a seal on Shark Week. At best, you manage to jump through the air in HD slow-motion before a Great White jumps after you and bites you out of the air. Because, I love you, but you are not as good a date as me.”

“So I don’t put out?”

“Exactly.” Elizabeth wound her hands together. “Which leaves this young, impressionable, eager-to-please girl with a huge crush on you that just wants to have a clandestine office affair before Donald Trump starts World War 3.”

“Office romances never work out.”

Elizabeth flailed her hands by her ears. “I’m not saying you have to introduce her to your father—I don’t hate her or anything—I’m saying she so clearly wants to eat you. Just let her. Lie back and think of spreadsheets or whatever. Let your skin clear up and your pores open and your hair get that bounce in it again.”

“So she’s taking me to a spa at some point?”

“Excess sarcasm is a symptom of chastity.” Elizabeth waved a finger at her. “You’d be doing her a favor! She’ll be able to tell her grandkids about how when she was their age, she had a great fuck with a hot older woman, they’ll discover the love letters the two of you wrote, back and forth, they’ll turn it into a book, and then into a movie, older women will become sexy, by then I’ll be old, but then there’ll be all these new hot twentysomethings who want to have their own May/December romance.”

“I hardly think I’m a December.”

“August?” Elizabeth bargained.

“I’ll take it.”

“Where was I?”

“You were shutting up and letting me work.”

“I’m just saying, you remember what a big deal it was when Bound came out? She grew up on Bound! That’s her starting point.”

“I’m actually going through her e-mails and, believe it or not, there’s nothing in here about her being in treatment for nymphomania, so I think this obsession you’ve assigned her about me is sexualizing something entirely innocent—OH GOD!”

“What?” Elizabeth demanded, the smell of gossip propelling her next to Janet almost in a single bound. Janet was too stunned to close the window before Elizabeth could see.

Elizabeth saw. And laughed. “Ho, shit!”

Wendy’s phone rang. She stopped, staring at her computer screen, wondering whether to finish her thought or silence the most incessantly Pavlovian sound in the world, but then she realized she’d completely lost her train of thought and the e-mail was ruined anyway. And the phone was on its third ring. She picked it up. “Wendy Cedar.”

“Wendy. Smile.”

Wendy thought don’t tell me what to do before realizing it was Elizabeth introducing herself. “Yeah?”

“Janet wants to see you.”

“She really pays you just to make phone calls for her?”

“If you had the money, wouldn’t you?” Then Elizabeth hung up.

Wendy stared at her screen, trying to summon up however she’d been hoping to end the e-mail, but it was hopeless. She saved the draft and resolved to think on it over lunch. Or maybe the come-to-Jesus with Janet would jog something loose.

After a brisk walk from her end of the hall to Janet’s, she came to Elizabeth’s little cubby, was waved in, and finally arrived in Janet’s presence.

“Ms. Lace, hi,” Wendy opened. “Finally getting that Tupperware back to me, huh? I was totally okay with you keeping it, but yeah, super-considerate to be giving it back.”

Janet steamrolled over her attempts at sociability. “Do you recall subsection B, paragraph twelve, of your employment contract?”

“Hold on, I know this one, was just thinking of it five minutes ago—” Wendy didn’t know why she made lame jokes around Janet. She never laughed…well, sometimes she smiled.

“The contract that you signed, in the wake of the Patriot Act, designates this company as a defense contractor and you as a government employee with a corresponding security clearance. That being the case, in the event of a credible breach of corporate secrecy, we retain the right to go through private communications.”

“Excuse me?”

“We can read your e-mails,” Janet said, barely mustering a sigh over Wendy once more driving outside the fast lane.

“Read my—I have never, not once—I wouldn’t leak information, Janet, you know me. Who would I even leak it to?”

“Foreign powers. Corporate rivals. Stephen Colbert. How am I supposed to know?”

“Are you calling me a traitor? Are you sending me to Guantanamo Bay?” This seemed like the worst possible way to combine Janet and bondage. She was tempted to throw off a ‘do you know who my father is?’ as if that wouldn’t make her the bad guy in every eighties movie.

Janet picked up a file from her inbox, looking it over while Wendy’s outburst wrapped up. “No. Of course not. Honestly, Ms. Cedar, show some decorum.”

“You’re the one talking about…the Patriot