Who knew so much time could fit into one little week?

It was simultaneously too little time to get everything done, and too much time to have to spend trying not to think about Hunter and Paige. I tried to avoid the pair of them while still getting work done by burying myself in hours-long conversations with Sandra back in D.C., choosing color palettes, editing photos for perfect composition, and, of course, setting up conference calls with the director of our sizzle reel to make sure that everything was going smoothly.

Between my workload and Paige’s—having to put together a party for two hundred and fifty people, filling in all the details like tablecloths and bunting and engraved placeholders that Hunter had left out when he sketched the broad outlines—avoidance was pretty easy.

Avoiding constant phone updates from my mom—“Paige says they held hands! Paige says Hunter mentioned an island he would love to take her to! Paige says Hunter complimented her on her eye for color and detail!”—was a bit more difficult.

So when my phone rang, I paused for a second, pondering if it might be worth it to endure a storm of you didn’t pick up your phone, you had me so worried, I thought you were dead, you don’t care about your mother disappointment, in exchange for not having to hear her urgent update on what sickeningly cutesy nicknames Paige and Hunter had come up with for each other, or what they were planning on naming the children.

On the other hand, those disappointment storms were a terror to behold, let alone experience. I sighed and picked up the phone.

And saw that its caller ID was showing not my mother’s number, but my boss’s.

What the heck? My status update wasn’t due until tomorrow.

I answered with trepidation. “Allison here, sir, hello?”

“How are you doing, Ally?” he asked jovially.

“Just fine. And yourself?” I returned, unable to break the rules of Southern politeness even as my stomach tossed and turned in anticipation of bad news. What other reason could there be for an early call, praising me? Not freaking likely.

“Oh, I can’t complain,” he said. “After all, if they let me start complaining I might never stop, har har.”

I decided to bend the rules of Southern politeness slightly, and if not exactly cut to the chase, at least sidle around in its general direction.

“Sorry to hear that, sir. Is there anything I can help with? Is that why you called?”

“Oh, not at all, not at all. Just calling to check in, see how things are going. I know how overwhelming it can all be, your first time out.”

My first time out on something that wasn’t swathed in pink and coded girly so many ways that a seasoned cryptologist would give up and cry, he meant, but I let it slide in the interest of not getting fired.

“I’m doing just fine,” I said. “Busy, but you’ve seen how I can juggle multiple tasks. I know my status update is scheduled for tomorrow, but I can give you a preliminary one if you—”

“Great, great, great,” he interrupted, clearly having not listened to a word I’d said. “That’s great, Ally, I’m glad. There’s just one little thing—”

Of course there was.

“It’s that Chuck—you know Chuck, great head on his shoulders, member of the old frat, knows how we do business here—Chuck has expressed some concerns.”

Of course he had.

I managed to restrain myself from saying that I’d like to express some concerns to Chuck myself, preferably with a paintball gun, and instead asked, as pointedly as I could without my boss feeling like I was ‘giving him lip,’ “Do you have any concerns, sir?”

He huffed into his mustache, annoyed that I’d even somewhat called him out on his passive-aggressive bullshit. “You know it isn’t like that, Ally.”

Oh, wasn’t it?

I bit my lip to keep from blurting out my mental catalogue of all the humiliating crap he’d thrown at me in the past with a hangdog look and an insistence that his sexist outlook was just company policy. Giving me every single feminine hygiene client, like their product was radioactive or something. Denying me the Lockheed guns contract, even though I’d been out at the shooting range since I was six and the guy he did give it to wouldn’t know a stock from a barrel. Laughing off my sexual harassment claims when the guys from accounting made comments about my legs, telling me to just ‘appreciate the compliments before you’re too old to get them.’

I concentrated on the important thing. He had, technically, said that he wasn’t concerned about me. “I’m glad to hear that. So you agree with me that I won’t be needing any oversight.”

‘Oversight’ being our polite term for ‘sending in a guy at the last second to hog all the credit.’

He sighed a deeply regretful sigh that made me want to strangle him. “Consumer confidence is our game, Ally. I can’t change the way we do business just because it hurts your feelings.”

Typical. Running around at Chuck’s beck and call whenever he threw a little hissy fit was just the way we did business but when I calmly stated my dislike for it, it was just ‘hurt feelings.’

“Of course,” I said, gritting my teeth. “And how are we planning on mollifying Chuck’s concerns?”

“Knew you’d be on board,” he said placidly, even though I hadn’t quite climbed onto said board just yet. Like most people at the company, he liked to assume reality was the way he wanted it to be, and just wait for it to conform. “I’d like Chad and his colleagues to come by and lend a hand,” he continued. “That group has some real unity of vision, you know, and they’ve been chomping at the bit to really prove their stuff.”

I’d been chomping at the bit for years, and all it had ever gotten me was patronizing lectures about how overly ambitious women came off as bitches and lost contracts.

“Sandra and Hunter and I have all the vision we can handle right now,” I said, going for a light and breezy tone that didn’t communicate, and I will let the Douchebros’ vision come to light only over my dead body.

“Sounds like you could use a little help corralling it, then.”

“I assure you, sir, we’ve got everything under control.”

“Now, now, missy,” he said, in what I had to assume was the same voice he used when his granddaughter wanted another scoop on her ice cream cone. “The client comes first, remember? We have to make him feel secure.”

“Hunter feels so secure in this he’s been calling in favors to get us the best sizzle reel possible,” I pointed out. “And last time I checked, he was the client, not Chuck.”

This was venturing dangerously close to sass territory that normally would have earned me a reprimand, but today I just got an indulgent chuckle of the ‘I’m about to impart some wisdom to this innocent naïve sweet summer child’ variety.

“That he is. For now.”

I felt my hackles rise. “What are you saying?”

“Read the changes in the sky, Ally,” he said, sounding especially pleased with himself for the touch of metaphor. “Stormy weather’s coming, and if we want to keep this contract we can’t afford to back the wrong horse.”

I resisted pointing out that he’d changed metaphors mid-race. “Sir, with all due respect, the direction they want to take this in is completely antithetical to—”

“Allison, I’ve made my decision and that’s final.”

His voice had lost all its fake cheerfulness, and was grim and final and set in stone. And there was nothing I could do.

“At least talk to them,” he went on, his voice going back to its normal tone as he returned to pretending that I had a choice in the matter. “They’ll all be at that liquor industry event in the city, you know, the awards one?”

Message received. Fine. I would play nice as long as they did. Which meant that science would probably need to invent a new, shorter unit of time.

Especially since my temper was already going to be on a hair-trigger—Hunter was bringing Paige to that event. I’d planned to skip it for precisely that reason, but now it seemed I had no choice.

“All right, sir.” I tried not to sound as sour as a lemon. “I’ll chat them up for sure.”

“Glad to hear you’re still a team player,” he said, and after a few more minutes of polite chit-chat—essential both to politeness and to maintaining the fiction that he hadn’t just railroaded me—we said our goodbyes.

I stared at the phone, the full implications just starting to sink in.

Fuck.

* * *

“Martha!”

Martha jumped, and tried to hide the book she was reading under a pillow, though not before I got a good look at the cover: some kind of steamy sci-fi romance, with muscular Amazonians in space-suits surrounded by lithe, oiled, barely-clad men.

Well, that was one fetish.

“Ally Bo-Bally!” Martha said, trying to hide her flush. “What can a lady of the world such as myself do for you?”

“A huge favor,” I admitted. “My boss just steam-rollered me into attending this big social function—”

“And you need to check a boy-toy out of my man-harem to accompany you? Good thing for you I keep a Rolodex for these very occasions.”

It was actually kind of tempting. That was certainly one way to make Hunter jealous—but no, no, I wasn’t going to be that petty. I was going to rise above such things.

Well, a little way above such things.

No harm in making him see what he was missing, after all.

“Actually, I need a different Rolodex,” I said. “Got any recommendations for a place to get a nice outfit and hairdo, short notice?”

Martha’s eyes lit up. “Do I ever!” She stood, grabbing my arm. “Come on, let’s go snag the Rolls!”

“You said that was for emergencies,” I pointed out as she pulled me along like a fish on the line.

Martha cast a look back at me and my ensemble and shook her head with a pitying grin. “Ally, by any definition, this is an emergency.”

* * *

It was an hour since we’d pulled into the swanky store parking lot with a screech of tires that would have made an action hero envious, and we were only now all the way to the dressing room stage of the proceedings.

“Show me what you got!” Martha’s impatient voice called out from the other side of the doors.

“Give me a sec!” I pulled the hem to straighten it and stepped out.

“Oh, honey, no, no, no,” Martha said immediately.

My face fell.

“The A-line is a good cut for you!” she added quickly. “Really emphasizes your good points. And the silk? Thailand-sourced, top notch, points for that. It’s just the color. Saffron yellow? Who do you think you are, Viola Davis?”

I looked in the mirror again and conceded that she had a point. The yellow made my skin look like I was a jaundice victim.

“How do you know all this stuff?” I asked, retreating back into the changing room.

Martha snorted. “What, I can’t know things?”

“Of course you can,” I said, slightly muffled as I pulled the dress over my head. “I just expect you to know, like, car stuff, and secret tips for getting a few dozen guys mooning over you.”

“Oh, I got that too.” I could hear the grin in her voice. “But just ‘cause I go with the comfortable and sexually intimidating wardrobe of tank tops, dungarees, and combat boots these days doesn’t mean I didn’t have a fashionista past.”

“Did you?” I asked, trying for the life of me to picture it.

“No,” she admitted. “But hey, you don’t have to eat a pie to know how to roll the crust.”

I pulled on Dress #2, one I’d picked for the ethereal ruffles cascading down the skirt.

“So how come there’s all this big fire for a new dress?” Martha asked. “I mean, don’t you have any nice outfits you could ship from home?” Her voice turned teasing. “Or has Hunter seen those already?”

Hunter had seen a lot more of me than my dresses, but I wasn’t in the mood for Hunter-related banter. “I can actually make decisions without thinking about Hunter’s reaction, thanks.”

I slammed the door open harder than it probably warranted.

Martha considered my outfit for a few seconds, then shook her head regretfully. “The color’s better, and you almost make those ruffles work, but damn girl, we need to leave the mermaids back in the eighties with all the other mistakes of that decade.”

I snorted. “If there’s any room.”

I clomped back into the dressing room and pulled the bolt, before mournfully contemplating my remaining options. There were a lot of them, and I wasn’t sure I had the energy to keep getting shot down. Maybe this had been a bad idea.

“Hey, though,” Martha said in a voice that was clearly meant to be cheering me up. “At least the bimbo he’s dating now looks like you. Shows how hung-up on you he is.”

“That bimbo is my sister,” I said.

There was an awkward silence, and then Martha cleared her throat. “Oh.”

I halfway expected her to jump into an impassioned defense of her hero, but she stayed silent. I guess she knew there were some things you just couldn’t defend.

I was weirdly…disappointed?...about it, though. Like I had maybe thought that Martha would have some perfect excuse for Hunter, and then I could stop being so angry at him and maybe even stop yearning for him and maybe, finally, have a normal client-advertiser relationship without all this Romeo and Juliet bullshit.

Yeah, and pigs would fly over the moon.

I made some last minute adjustments to the criss-crossing shoulder-straps of Dress #3 and braced myself for another round of fashion scorn.

I came out, and Martha’s mouth fell open.

“That bad?” I said, wincing.

Martha shook her head, eyes as wide as a goldfish. “Girl, I am seriously considering switching teams.”

“That good?”

“Daaaay-um. First of all, classic black. Second of all, construction: look at that plunging neckline that still manages to keep you covered, and the way the back hugs your ass without being trashy. Third of all, have you seen that hand-stitching? No, you have not, because it is perfect and not calling attention to itself.”

I spun slowly, admiring myself in the mirror, running my hands over the smooth ebony satin, watching the way the cloth rippled in an artistically asymmetrical line around my knees. “You’re sure it works?”

“Any guy would be lucky to have your fine self,” Martha asserted.

I looked at myself in the mirror, my curls falling on my bare shoulders, my calves caressed by soft fabric. My eyes glowing with delight in myself.

She was damn right.