Reluctantly Charmed (6 page)

I sat on my hands, trying hard not to stare at his profile.

He swirled the ice in his whiskey and turned his shoulders into me. “How are you, Kate?”

“Good,” I squeaked.

“Mad stuff going on, hey?” He fished into the pocket of his tight dark denim jeans and pulled out some printed pages, which he laid flat on the bar counter. It was the letter.

“Yeah, sorry about that. I didn’t think anyone was on that site. Look, I can take it down, put it up somewhere else. It has to be published, but it doesn’t matter where.” I could feel an apologetic ramble taking over.

He stopped me. “Don’t take it down. Actually, I wanted to know if I could put it on the Red Horizon site as well? This is good stuff. There’s a buzz.”

“You think fairies and a potentially mad self-proclaimed witch is a good buzz?” I eyed him in disbelief.

“Hey, look, if it gets people talking, sends them to our site, you bet I think it’s a good buzz. I’m all over this—fairies, witches, whatever.” He winked at me. “Look, I’m sorry. I thought I’d have more time, but there’s a thing I’ve gotta go to. Kind of last minute.” He glanced at the adoring groupies who had reapplied lipsticks and readjusted hemlines and looked about ready to pop in his direction. He drained his drink. “So, it’s cool if I put it up on our site?”

I nodded, stunned. And he disappeared into a mist of groupie hairspray.

Work the next day was . . . infuriatingly confusing. First, I received an e-mail I wasn’t expecting.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

I’ve got an interview with a journo at lunch tomorrow, we’re going to AlJo’s. Could I buy you a coffee after? Say 1:30?

J x

Was it a date? It sounded like a date. Was it a friend date? We’d never been friends.

And, secondly, I met the porn client, and he left me reeling. He was as hateful as Marjorie had described. I didn’t know who he was, initially. Dudley had called me down to dispatch to pick up a set of advertising-award DVDs sent for me. By rights he should have delivered them, but, as he’d told me on the phone, he “just couldn’t be arsed.” So there I was, slipping into the empty lift, when a deep gravelly shout bounced in my direction, causing the hairs on my arms to stand up like soldiers.

“Hold the lift.”

A “please” would be nice
, I thought as I scrambled around, looking for the Open button.

The man startled me. It wasn’t the sheer size or handsome presence of him—because he was handsome and he was huge, six foot plus something or other, with shoulders that grazed opposing walls—or his dirty blond hair that looked unkempt and unstylishly spiked on top of his head. No, it was his eyes. Gray and stormy like the Atlantic Ocean. He held me in his gaze for several long seconds, knowing, probing, penetrating. And then he seemed to shrug it off with a blink and a long stride, as he heaved himself into the lift, looking anywhere but at me. In one movement he stretched his arm across, and I saw how his gray knit sweater pulled against his muscles. I also saw that his light denim jeans were dirty but nowhere near as filthy as his boots,
which were positively caked in mud. He hit the Open button again.

“I’m . . .” I could feel myself blushing because (A) he was so handsome, and (B) I was talking in the lift, which is something that never ever happens. “. . . going to the basement.” I pushed the B button, in spite of the fact that his finger was still firmly positioned on the Open button.

“One minute,” he mumbled softly into his neck.

“What?”

“Hold.” And looking anywhere but at me, he gestured outside, as though he was waiting for someone to arrive. And so we stood, and stillness filled the lift, and silence bounced between us, and I listened to his breathing (hard and fast), reviewed his profile (chiseled), complexion (pale with pink cheeks), smell (he smelled of the sea), and prayed for some elevator music to relieve the tension.

“Maybe they’re not coming,” I braved, an eternity later.

“He’s coming.” And he finally looked at me—sternly.

“Okay. It’s just that I’ve got to get to the basement, and I’ve a meeting . . .”

His look stopped me from talking anymore. It was cross and determined. “He’s coming. You don’t need to be in such a rush,” he responded with a warm and singing west-of-Ireland accent.

“Well, I do. I’ve work to do,” I said, suddenly affronted.

“I’m guessing the world won’t end if you’re a minute behind schedule.”

“You don’t even know what I do. Maybe it would end.” I crossed my arms belligerently. He might have been tall and handsome, but he didn’t know me to judge the uselessness of my job.

“This is an advertising agency, not the UN.”

“That doesn’t mean that what I do isn’t important.”

“I never said it wasn’t.” He smirked slightly, and a dimple imploded on his left cheek.

“Christ, you’re condescending,” I said in an uncharacteristic burst of aggression.

“I’m not. I just—” He furrowed his brow and his voice grew softer. “Here he is.”

And then a small gray horse, a small smelly horse in the shape of a dog so tall it skimmed my waist, bounded into the lift.

“Good boy, Setanta.” He crouched down to the dog, an Irish wolfhound, and rubbed his head affectionately. “I wouldn’t leave without you.” He threw me a smile, teasing.

Setanta’s brown eyes looked up sadly at me from beneath his gray bushy eyebrows.

“Sorry,” I said to the dog. I’m a sucker for sad eyes.

As the lift started to descend, a penny in my brain proceeded to drop. The porn client! Marjorie had said he had a dog. But he wasn’t “repulsive.” He was knee-shakingly handsome. Even if Marjorie and I had differing parameters of what was attractive, I was pretty sure that this guy was undeniably handsome. Even if you didn’t fancy him, you would still have to recognize his attractiveness. Why had Marjorie said he was repulsive? Maybe it was the porn thing—
that
was repulsive. Eugh. How gross. Porn. Images of blow-up dolls, greased bodies, and filthy old men playing with themselves flashed before me. And there I was in an enclosed space with him. Eugh.

He cleared his throat and, in a heavy country accent, said softly, “I didn’t mean that the work here isn’t important . . .”

My moral compass was pointing straight toward fire and brimstone and the path of the righteous Jesus. “It’s a lot more important than your work,” I muttered very quietly to myself.

“Sorry?” He looked at me, confused. “I didn’t catch that.”

“Nothing.” I pursed my mouth and shook my head disapprovingly, in the manner of a disgruntled fifties housewife seeing Elvis dancing with swinging hips for the first time.

Ding. The doors opened, and I marched out with my head held high, shaking my hair free, victoriously. Porn nil, Kate one.

I was meeting the girls that night for sushi. We regularly met on a Friday night to let off steam. We were all on diets and sushi practically burned the calories off the bottle of wine we’d drink with it.

On this particular occasion I needed their advice. I trusted them—Fiona the practical and Lily the romantic. The three of us had met in college, accidentally walking into the wrong lecture in the first week of first year. Lost on campus, we found the bar and crashed a freshers’ week free-drinks reception. Within forty minutes we’d formed our own relay team for a beer and crisps race. We came in last, but we did it with a lot of laughs and a lot of spills. Nothing cements a friendship like freshers’ week. Over the years we’d done what really true friends do for each other: held hair back, wiped up the tears, borrowed and lost each other’s clothes, laughed, agreed that no men were worth it, lied for each other, and held disastrous dinner parties.

That night, we never got to talk about Jim. Fiona stormed in, her pale skin red with anger and her dark hair flapping behind her like a cloak. She was raging. She had a work drama of high importance.

Fiona worked for an investment banker. She’d started on the phones part-time through college and in the past eighteen months had made it onto the trading floor. This was all she’d ever wanted. She put in long hours, sacrificing her family and
social life. “I’ll fall in love when I’m forty,” she’d say. “I don’t have time for it now. Now I work.”

A few months earlier her team had been restructured and she got a new boss, a woman whose main agenda was to save money and make cuts. The rumor on the trading floor was that Ireland was ripe for a recession, and it was only a matter of time before the whole country fell. The banks would be the first to be hit and needed to make a preemptive strike. The boss was looking for slipups as an excuse to fire people.

That day Fiona had slipped up. It was minor. She’d misfiled a docket. But she knew what it might mean for her career, and she was angry at the injustice of it all.

Lily and I swooped in supportively and ordered more wine to help her figure out a plan of action.

“I’ve worked all through Christmas for the last two years, for God’s sake, and they’re going to fire me over this.”

“You don’t know that yet. Nothing has been decided.”

“Pass the wine,” she said, looking exhausted.

We talked well into the night and left the restaurant when the stools were upside down on tables. We hugged good-bye at the corner of Georges Street, and Fiona marched off, feeling slightly more prepared for her counterattack the next day.

I, on the other hand, felt completely unequipped for my meeting with Jim. I spent half the night willing myself to sleep, and the other half obsessing over conversation possibilities. I regretted that I was only a third of the way into
Calm from the Inside Out: A Self-help Mantra for All.
I got up at four a.m. and tried on three different outfits, settled on one, and then, overcome with exhaustion, fell asleep in it.

5

I
felt completely exposed and unprepared as I pushed open the door of AlJo’s in my second-best outfit—skinny jeans tucked into brown knee-high boots, a blue cowl-necked satin shirt, and heavy gold hooped earrings.
Relax
, I told my leaping stomach,
it’s just coffee
.

AlJo’s was particularly greasy that day. You had to chew the air on arrival to get it into your lungs. Jim and a blond woman were in deep conversation, leaning against a wall under a picture of Pope John Paul. Ratzinger hadn’t made it into AlJo’s good books just yet.

Jim looked up and waved, and I felt that familiar pull toward him. He had a black leather jacket on and a streak of stubble across his jaw that I wanted to reach out and touch. He introduced me to Maura Ni Ghaora. He used her full Irish name. I thought only TV weathermen and people opening pubs in New York used their Irish name. All Irish people have them. Mine is Cáit, which you need a lot of spit in your mouth and sandpaper in the back of your throat to say correctly, when it sounds like “Cwatch.” Catchy, isn’t it? I didn’t see the point in using Irish names. They are impossible to spell and they made getting through customs difficult.

By using her Irish name, Maura Ni Ghaora was advertising that she was a fluent Irish speaker and could hold her own in ringlets and green velvet at a set dancing competition. The thing is, we can all speak some Irish; we learn it the whole way through school and graduate bilingual in swear words. We put it to great use when we’re traveling—talking about foreigners with impunity is probably our only in-joke. Same goes for Irish dancing. It’s drummed into us at school, and with a bit of arm twisting most Irish people can pound out a jig. Most of us keep our Irishness to ourselves, though. You never know when a fluent Irish speaker will upstage your pidgin Irish, or a River Dancer will emerge from the wings to step on your toes. Advertising it puts you in a whole other league of Irish—the Supersized Irish.

I smiled hello. Maura Ni Ghaora had a white-blond razor-sharp bob that shimmered in the fluorescent light of AlJo’s. Her face was so tightly pulled that any remnants of what she might originally have looked like had long since disappeared under the plastic surgeon’s knife. Her makeup was cemented on, except for her eyelashes, which were glued into an alert curl. It was impossible to put an age to her. Fifty? Thirty? Seventy? She was dressed immaculately in an Armani or some other tailored navy pinstripe designer suit way out of my league that screamed money. Her shoulders balanced out a neat waist and pencil skirt, and it was all anchored by a pair of black heels to drool over—Prada, Louboutins—I didn’t know, but I knew I was not in the company of Marks & Sparks sale items.