Want more JD? Check out the first chapter of his last book, Unprofessional!
Chapter One
Owen
The elevator doors open and for a second it feels like a theatre curtain unveiling. It’s three PM, and the TrendBlend offices are buzzing with the kind of vibrant, frenetic energy you only get when you put some of the West Coast’s most creative people in one place. The kind of energy you get when those people are allowed to create work that they love, then put it out to millions of fans. Our website is as likely to release a viral video about sex as it is to start a national discussion about ethics. It’s a site that’s got the first scoop on the latest trends and the last word on the zeitgeist. And it all originates in an office with as many fashion bloggers as there are political reporters; where feminist activists rub shoulders with movie critics.
Christ, I love my job.
I step out of the elevator clutching my remedy for the mid-afternoon slump: a tall cup of cappuccino (I usually maintain enough coffee in my system to wake the dead) for me and Margo’s cinnamon latte in the other. Back into the bustle of the bullpen.
“Hey Owen,” Davina, the site’s resident make-up expert calls from a three-way conversation she’s having.
I turn in her direction without breaking stride. “What’s up, D?”
“Wanna do a video with me and Sara tomorrow?” she says through purple-colored pouted lips, angling her mini-skirt-clad hips the way she always does when she talks to me. “‘Hot guys try make-up for the first time.’ We’re looking for volunteers.”
I sip my cappuccino to hide my wincing at the idea.
“Uh…”
She moves away from the others to get a little too close, tongue tracing her lips as she says, “Just tell me what it’ll take for me to get my hands on you…” and as her gaze drops below my belt I’m not sure she’s even talking about the video anymore.
Davina’s got the body of the ballerina, walks like she wants to seduce everybody in the room, and dresses like she’s at the beach half the time. She’s hot as hell and knows it, and even though she’s got a few million followers online who agree, she’s been chasing me since I started at TrendBlend. The more I say no, the more her mascara’d eyes flutter at me from across the office. Another place, another time, and I’d let the spark between us flare up, but when you’re surrounded by journalists, gossip columnists, and a couple dozen other women trying to jump your skin, you need the diplomacy of a hostage negotiator just to keep your job.
“Lemme check my schedule. I’ll get back to you,” I say, nodding as I step past.
“I’ll be waiting,” she purrs.
The office layout is simple—but it works. A vast bullpen of shared desk spaces cover the center of the office. Tables with four or five stations to them, all decorated with random personal effects, coffee cups, art books, and photos. The desks are cramped enough that you’re never more than three feet away from being hooked into something or overhearing another idea you can help out on. Half the time nobody’s at their desks though, as they run between the studios downstairs and the bullpen.
Down one side of the office the windows look out onto the city of L.A., and from up here on the fifth floor you can almost catch sight of the beach on a clear day. On the other side are the offices of the higher-ups. The decision-makers and puppet-masters who guide the whole thing from behind closed doors.
“It would be really great if you could!” Sara, Davina’s curvy, redheaded desk mate (and frequent partner in crime), calls out behind me as I shuffle past a couple of co-workers carrying cardboard cutouts of the Kardashians. “You’d look so good in lipstick!”
I raise my cappuccino and kiss the air in their direction before walking a bit quicker to my desk.
In a funny kind of way this place saved my life. Before my college friend Margo helped me get this job just over a year ago, I was partying like crazy. All I did was drink and dance, fuck and fight. All I cared about was the next crowd, the next hot girl, the next thrill. I’m not gonna lie and say it wasn’t fun, but even fun can be dangerous when you’re as insatiable as I am.
So here I am, putting Margo’s cinnamon latte beside her on our shared desk (without a hello, since she’s hunched over her cell phone with her back to me), and dropping myself into my chair. I wake up my laptop to reveal the half-written article I’ve been pecking at today, all about hot beach dates. My inner bad boy not so much tamed now, as focused. Enjoying life as much as I ever did, but with the addition of a steady paycheck and a 401(k). The best of both worlds.
Six seconds later I hear a quiet, stifled half-sob beside me. The kind of helpless, feminine sound that cuts through ten thousand years of civilization and makes me want to club whatever caused it. I look toward Margo and see her staring down at her keyboard, one hand still holding the phone to her ear, the other buried in her hair. She’s so distressed she hasn’t even noticed the coffee I brought her yet.
If there’s one con to working in the offices, it’s that there’s not much privacy, and right now it looks like Margo’s desperate for it.
“Why do you have to be such an asshole about this?” she whispers harshly into the phone. “No. I never said that…whatever, Carl…you’re my—you were my boyfriend, not my father, don’t talk to me like I’m five… Look, I only called to ask when I can pick up the rest of my stuff… Yes, actually, it is over! Oh god…just forget it!”
My eyes on my screen, I hear Margo toss her phone clumsily onto her desk—the modern equivalent of slamming a receiver down. When I glance at her again she’s hunched toward her screen determinedly, as if about to try and climb through it, rattling away on the keyboard like she’s playing a Bach variation on it. She still hasn’t noticed the coffee.
I open my mouth and then close it, weighing her possible need for words of comfort against her possible need for space. She’d been tight-lipped and tense all morning, and now it appears that things have gone full nuclear status with her and that film school douchebag Carl. Good riddance. She deserves better.
Margo and I go way back. We met our first year at college. More specifically, we met at three AM outside the girl’s dormitory when she was coming home late from a party, and I was in the process of trying to get back into the dorm after sneaking out through a window to avoid my date’s judgmental roommate. Being naked at the time was a hell of a conversation starter.
It was friendship at first sight—for her, anyway. I spent the first six months I knew her trying to find out what her tight body would look like on all fours, but she kept me at bay just about long enough for me to realize that she had a lot more going on than just legs I wanted to wear like a belt and tits like a three-star dessert.
Turned out Margo was a party animal just like me. Drinking, dancing, and fucking with an appetite almost as big as mine. We started hitting places up together, the rest of our friends only holding us back. Having a wingman can help you lay hot women, but turning up at a bar or party with the hottest girl there made it almost too easy.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve thought about fucking Margo plenty of times, and how could I not? She’s fucking gorgeous, with those thick-rimmed glasses and that artfully messy dark hair that she lets cover most of her face. A thigh length, oversized yellow sweater, her slender legs going down all the way to a pair of motorcycle boots. She’s got a body that it would take a month to explore, a sway in her walk that could make you dizzy, lips so juicy they could probably qualify as one of your five a day. So the truth is, as much as I think of her as just a great friend—intelligent, talented, and funny; someone who deserves to be thought of as more than just a body—it ain’t always easy with a body like hers. Still, I manage.
“You ok?” I finally say.
It takes her a second to snap away from her screen and realize I’m talking to her.
“Huh? Oh… Yeah. I’m fine,” she says, flashing a forced smile before quickly turning back to her computer.
I watch her for a few more seconds, peering at her screen like it’s ten feet away, and consider just leaving her alone. Margo might be as hot as she was in college (hotter, probably) but that’s about the only thing that hasn’t changed. Somewhere along the line she gave up the parties, the drinking, the reckless fun. Now the only thing that’s wild about her is her career ambitions. I suppose I should be grateful, since she’s the one who got me the job here. But it’s been pretty shitty watching her stop screwing and start dating guys long enough to recognize how many douchebags there are out there.
“Hey Margo,” I say, and she turns around to me. “Do you have any idea why there’s a bar set up in the studio downstairs?”
“No idea.” She refocuses on her work, but I persist.
“Why don’t you come down there with me and find out.”
Margo smiles slightly and brushes her hair aside, exposing strong cheekbones for a second before her hair falls over them again.
“I’d love to. But I should really finish this piece.”
I shrug. “Hey, we should all really be finishing something. But this is a bar at work. Maybe it’s tequila day and nobody told us.” She chuckles lightly and I can see a little of her bad mood breaking. I keep it going, leaning in a little as I lower my voice. “Come on, you know I’m not used to drinking without a good-looking girl beside me.”
Margo leans back in her chair, smiling pearly teeth through thick lips at me. She crosses those bare legs and for a second I almost break eye contact.
“I know what you’re doing…you heard me on the phone, right?” she says, still smiling, but I can tell she’s at least a little self-conscious about it.
“I sit less than two feet away from you, you know.”
“Then you know I’m not in the mood for tequila and fun,” she says, but she’s looking at me with those doe eyes and I see a challenge instead of a refusal.
“Come on,” I say, looking at her closely. “What happened to the old Margo? She must be in there somewhere.”
“She grew up and got a job—got you one, too.”
“And I’m good at it,” I say, pointing at her, “precisely because I know when to take a break. Which is what you need.”
I take her hand from her thigh and stand up, tightening my grip a little instinctively at the brush of her soft skin. I tug her hand gently.
Margo looks between me and the computer screen like she’s deciding which of us is the angel and which the devil, before throwing her palms up and getting out of her chair. We smile at each other conspiratorially for a second before moving back through the desks toward the elevators.
“Hey Owen,” Margo says, once I press the button. I look at her. “Thanks,” she says with a soft smile, her big green eyes looking down a little shyly. “I could use a friend right now.”
“Come on,” I say, as the elevator arrives, opens, and empties. “You’re a gorgeous woman with a big, sexy brain and kick-ass fashion sense. Being single again is one of the best things that can happen to you. The hell are you doing getting into these long-term relationships for anyway? You’ve got too much hotness for just one guy.”
“Thanks for the pep talk.” She looks away, nodding a little, and lets out a sigh. “But it’s not so much the being single part that annoys me,” she says, enigmatically.
“What is it then?”
Margo stares at the closing elevator doors for a moment like she’s lost and then says, “I don’t know… I’m just…frustrated. And overwhelmed. With a lot of stuff. And Carl was very good at articulating all the ways in which I’m failing. Now that we’re broken up, I feel like everything shitty he said about me was right.”
“Assholes are good at making people feel like that.”
“He said I wasn’t ‘fulfilling my potential.’ ‘Stagnating,’ he called it. He thinks I should be writing for some upmarket New York magazine instead of here. Like I’m hiding out at this fluff job because I’m secretly afraid I’m not good enough to go someplace better.”
“That’s bullshit,” I say as I watch the floor numbers go down. “Your stuff is fantastic. That review you did on the last Christopher West movie? It’s the best fucking movie review I’ve ever read.”
I see Margo’s eyes glint with surprise at me behind her glasses. “You liked it?”
“I fucking loved it. And the piece about the Los Angeles aqueduct. You’re an amazing writer. I could feel your passion on the page.”
Margo shuffles a little, looking away so I can’t see how uncomfortable she is with being praised. “I’m surprised anybody actually read that.”
“Hey, I told you I loved it at the time.”
“I thought you were just being polite.”
“I’m rarely polite.”
Margo laughs a little, but it falls away quickly, replaced by that tense, concerned expression that’s been her default since the phone call.
“Anyway, the thing is…he’s right,” Margo says, as the doors open and we step through. “I am underachieving. I do want to write stuff that’s more important than…a movie review, or some preview for an art show.”
I wrap my arm comfortingly around her shoulder and she leans her head against my shoulder as I lead her into the studio, my eyes going a little hard, daring the crew setting things up to ask if we should actually be here uninvited. It’s the second time I’ve touched her today, and I’m starting to realize how nice it feels. And how dangerous.
“Listen.” I pull back and turn her to face me, silently reminding myself that we’ve stayed in the friend zone all these years for lots of good reasons, that I’d be a terrible person to even fantasize about taking advantage of her while she’s on the rebound. “I don’t like this ‘you,’” I say, mock-sternly. “Vulnerable, self-conscious, uncertain. Leave all that for the girls without awesome hair. The Margo I know is a feisty bitch with a smart mouth and even smarter articles. You could write a piece about pin cushions and have me quoting it for weeks.”
Margo laughs, and I have to hold myself back from moving on to how tight her ass is and how fuckable her lips are.
“This flattery is doing wonders for my ego,” she says. “But let’s investigate that bar quick before someone tells us we’re not allowed to be here.”
That’s the Margo I know.
So far there’s no one else in sight besides the people we saw setting up, so I take advantage of the fact that we’re early for whatever the hell this is and pull a few of the already-poured shots off the bar, handing one to Margo. She downs it quickly, barely wincing, still lost in her own thoughts.
“We had this plan,” she says, picking up some thread I thought we’d dropped half a conversation ago, a little more fire in her voice now, grabbing another shot, “well, Carl had this plan. See, he’s a director—or wants to be, anyway. He hasn’t done anything since his film school thesis made it into Cannes a few years ago, but nothing ever came of it.” She downs the shot with ease, slamming the empty glass down. “I was supposed to get this amazing job in New York—he was obsessed with New York City, ugh—and find some cool loft apartment where he could stay and work on his ‘art,’” Margo puts over-elaborate air-quotes on the word before sticking her tongue out.
“Sounds like he was just looking for a free ride,” I say, about to take my own first shot as a crowd starts to trickle into the studio and form around the bar.
“Right? Oh, I’ll take that,” Margo says, grabbing the little glass right out of my hand.
“Is that your third already? Maybe you should slow it down a li—”
Ignoring me, Margo downs the tequila and continues, “I mean, do you know how many people would kill to write for those New York magazines? It’s not like you can just walk into their offices and say “hey, I’m awesome, give me the features page.” She slams the empty glass onto the bar, gasping deeply before casting those now-fierce eyes at me again, finger pressing every point of hers home. “It’s not like TrendBlend is some dark corner of the internet. If anything we get way more readers than all those pretentious, hi-falutin’, stuck-up-their-own-asses, pseudo-intellectual sites.”
“Hear, hear,” a co-worker in the crowd around us says, before handing Margo another shot.
“Hold on—she’s already had three,” I say quickly, but Margo’s already downed it before I reach the end of the sentence. I know from past experience that Margo can hold her liquor, but the problem is that I also know how crazy she can get when she’s holding it.
“And another thing…“ Margo says, her face a little red now, her finger-pointing slightly inaccurate.
Thirty-five minutes later Margo’s holding my arm to keep herself steady and waving another empty shot glass around the studio as she continues to eviscerate her boyfriend. There’s a bigger crowd around us now, some offering Margo words of encouragement or just nodding sympathetically, and I still have no idea why the bar got set up down here in the first place. I decided the best course of action was to stay sober, not tell Margo she’d been sipping from a shot glass I filled with melted ice, and just let her tire herself out.
“…And his films suck! I mean really suck! I figured I was just too close to him to be objective but—hic!—but it’s like… I… What was I saying?”
“Ok everybody!” comes a call from the center of the studio. “Who’s intoxicated and camera ready? Send me the first victim.”
Before I can stop anything from happening, several people are pointing out Margo, who finally realizes her glass is mostly empty, grabs a full one, and downs her fifth or sixth tequila shot just before a production assistant ushers her away into the next studio. I follow close behind and pull Tom—our resident lighting guy—aside, just as Margo’s compelled to take a seat in front of several cameras.
“Hey, Tom? What’s going on? What are you filming?”
“Oh hey Owen,” he says, turning toward me. “It’s called ’drunk women get surprised with kittens.’ It was Sara’s pitch so she’s directing.”
I’m about to ask for a little more detail when the wail of a crying woman splits the air and I turn to find all the detail I need. Margo’s bursting into tears at the table as a tiny ginger tabby is brought to her and set in her lap.
“Oh my god!” she squeals. “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life…” she coos through already-brimming tears as I try not to laugh loud enough to be heard on the audio. “It’s so cute I’m going to have an aneurysm!”
More kittens are brought to her one at a time and Margo finds a whole new octave of happy-crying.
“No no no! It’s too cute! Is this real? Oh my god, look at the paws! The tiny little paws! Am I dreaming this? Is this really happening? This is too good to be true. Like, I’m too happy right now to be awake. Can this one’s name be Mister Whiskers?”
I watch, laughing with the rest of the filming crew as Margo expresses through streaming tears how much she’s in love with these mewling kittens. Eventually Sara steps forward and, with a big smile, says, “Ok, I think we’ve got enough. Send in the next—”
“No! Don’t take them from me!” Margo wails, her voice muffled by the fluffy face of a calico she’s nuzzling. She pulls back from the kitten, half-seriously staring into the camera with tequila-glazed eyes. “I wish I was a kitten. I’m not even joking. Can I be a kitten?”
Ten minutes later the cats are gone and Margo’s standing outside the studio doors rubbing what can only be an oncoming headache.
“She going to be alright?” the production assistant asks.
“Yeah, I’ll drive her home,” I say. “It’s almost five anyway.”
“No,” Margo slurs, waving a finger in the air like she’s stirring an upside-down bowl. “I’ve got…something? To do?”
“Yeah. You drive her home,” the PA nods emphatically.
After a lot of cajoling I get Margo to my car, and then, after buckling her in safely, get us going down the freeway toward her apartment in the Valley. I drive as smoothly as I can while she sits, head lolling, giggling at her own mumbled speech in the passenger seat. When I pull into the parking lot at her apartment I’m just glad that it’s a two-floor complex.
“My hero,” she grins as I help her out of the car.
“Nobody’s ever called me that before—how many tequilas did you have?”
“Just one.”
“Must have been a pretty big one then.” I scoop her up in my arms and carry her in as appropriate a manner as I can manage across the lot to the doors, though Margo seems intent on draping herself around me like a flag at a parade.
“Thank god you live on the ground floor,” I say, as I rummage for her keys in her bag with one hand while keeping her from falling with the other. It’s not that I haven’t been to Margo’s place before, but when we hang out it’s usually at work functions or the occasional bar, and at the moment I can’t shake the feeling that I’m intruding a little.
“You know, you’re really fucking hot,” she slurs, giggling. My cock stirs at the brush of her lips so close to my neck, her warm breath against my skin. I have to shake it off.
“And you’re really fucking drunk,” I reply with a forced laugh, as the key finally catches and I kick the door open.
“No…I mean it,” she says as I step into her apartment, still holding her in my arms. “You’re like…the most beautiful man.”
“That’s very sweet of you,” I say, as I open a few wrong doors (closet, bathroom) until I find her bedroom. I walk in and lay her down on the bed, then pull away, setting her bag on the night table. “You should probably just rest a bit, let it pass.” I unlace her boots and ease them off gently, setting them on the floor before straightening up to go. This feels familiar, although I haven’t carried a too-drunk Margo home from a party and put her to bed since our undergrad years. “You need anything? Water, or—”
“Yeah.” Margo smiles.
“What?”
Instead of answering, she mischievously beckons me closer. I look at her, dress rolling up around her thighs, twisting her body up in the sheets, my imagination starting to whirl a little.
“Come here!” she yelps impatiently.
This could mean trouble—the problem is, I like trouble. I groan and go nearer to the bed.
“Closer,” she giggles, and I’m taken with the smile, the way she grinds into the bed…
“What?”
Her hand pulls on my shirt, her smile goes and instead her mouth is open now, weakened like she’s preparing to kiss me. I could so easily fall into her here, so easily bring my mouth onto hers, put my own hands under her clothes. I can almost taste her, appetite stirring…
Except being a real man doesn’t just mean knowing when to make a move, it also means knowing when you shouldn’t.
“Nice try,” I say, pulling back.
Margo laughs and pounds her fists onto the bed with disappointment.
“But I need to see what’s under your shirt. You still got those Grand Canyon abs, I bet.”
“Ok. That’s my cue to go,” I say, half-out the door. “See you tomorrow.”
“No! Come on! Please! I remember the view was fucking amazing. Just a little peek. A tiny little peek for old time’s sake. Come on, Owen! Don’t be an asshole. You know you want to show it off.”
I look back at her, hand on the doorknob, and find myself laughing.
“Happy now?” I say, pulling up my shirt a little way.
Margo screams and falls back onto her pillows laughing.
“I knew it! Just as perfect as that night you got locked out of the girl’s dorm,” she says, as I close the door and leave.
When I get back to my car, I’m still smiling.
* * *