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Liza Morris
“Girl, where the hell have you been? Do you know I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for like, a million years? What the hell gives, sister?”
Liza, who knew before doing it that answering her phone was a mistake, cringed. Her initial instinct was to hold the phone far from her ear to lessen the impact of her friend Melony's screeching voice. As soon as she did so, however, every one of the small handfuls of people in the waiting room with her turned to stare. Apparently, Melony was loud enough that all of them could hear her each and every word. A few of them shot her disapproving looks, and even the receptionist looked like she was less than impressed.
“Shoot,” Liza murmured, turning beet red, “I’m sorry, everyone. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how loud it was.”
“Perhaps you should turn down the volume on your phone, young lady,” an older woman sitting across from her said crossly. Liza blanched, opened her mouth to apologize, and then promptly shut it again. The disapproving woman didn’t appear interested in anything she had to say.
“Hello? Hello?” Melony continued to bark, either unaware of the trouble she was causing or too riled up to care. Liza pulled the phone back to her ear so quickly that she almost dropped it. After a moment of fumbling in which she was sure she was going to drop and subsequently shatter her phone, she sighed heavily and did her best to regain her composure.
“Melony, do you think you could hold it down a little?” she asked, aware that what she was asking for was probably too good to be true. Melony took less than thirty seconds to prove her right.
“I’m sorry, but have you met me?” she screeched, her tone one of defiance peppered with a little bit of indignation for good measure.
"I have, plenty of times," Liza said, biting the inside of her cheek. It was an unfortunate way of reminding herself to keep her cool, but it was a habit she couldn't seem to break. She had little sore spots on the inside of her mouth to prove it.
“Yeah, you have,” Melony answered, rather self-importantly in Liza’s humble opinion, “so then you know that I’m not likely to hold it down. Not now, not ever.”
“Okay, but it would be great if you could make an exception this time. It’s kind of important.”
“Okay, so important enough to keep you from answering my texts?”
"Yes, Melony, important enough even for that," Liza retorted. As a general rule, she was a patient girl, but even she had her limits. Add to those the fact that she was running on next to no sleep and pure adrenaline? It wasn't a good time for her limits to be tested.
“Okay, okay,” Melony said, placating now instead of accusing, “I hear ya. So tell me what you’re doing, then.”
Liza sighed heavily. It was an easy question, or at least it should have been. If a person couldn't answer what she was doing, she was probably up to no good. That was something her mother had been fond of saying and always with the same knowing expression on her face. That had been in the days when Mom had still been healthy, and life had been much, much less complicated. Still, the wisdom persisted against all of the odds. It made Liza feel even more tired and a little bit ashamed of herself, although she couldn't quite say why. It wasn't like she was doing anything wrong. Far from it, actually. Nobody could blame a girl for wanting to carve out a better position for herself in the world. Still, she wasn't quite sure what she was supposed to say.
"Um, hello? Earth to Liza? I swear to God if you hung up on me-"
“No, I didn’t hang up. I’m just thinking.”
“Thinking? You need to think to answer a simple question like that?” Melony scoffed, unaware that she was verbalizing the very thing that Liza had just been worrying over, “Sounds like you’re into some trouble.”
"No, of course, I'm not. I'm waiting to see about a job," she said indignantly. She waited anxiously when there was no immediate answer.
"But that's awesome, sugar! That's like, totally great!" Melony exploded over the phone. The noise got Liza the second round of disapproving looks, but this time she hardly cared. Melony could be a major handful, but she was nothing short of awesome in times like these. Liza had never had a friend who was a better cheerleader for her successes. It was everything she needed at the moment, and she loved Mel for it. That surge of love might just be what she needed to make it through the next hour or so, too.
“Hold on, don’t get too excited. I didn’t say I had anything. I’m just waiting to see-”
“Bullshit,” Melony cut her off decisively, as was her habit, “you’re amazing and whoever you’re waiting on will see that in a millisecond. If they don’t, they don’t deserve you.”
“You have to say that. You’re my friend,” Liza laughed softly.
“Your best friend,” Melony corrected.
“That’s right, my best friend,” Liza agreed.
“Which means you should know I would never talk you up if I didn’t think it was true. I’m nothing if not honest, right?” Melony went on.
“That’s right, too. Now, if it’s okay, I really think I should go. They could call me any minute,” Liza offered up carefully.
“Of course! I don’t know why you’re even talking to me right now! Go! And don’t take no shit, okay? Remember I said it, too. Don’t take no shit from anybody.”
Liza agreed that she most certainly would not and hung up the phone with an immense sense of relief. She tucked it into her purse, looking around to see if anyone was watching. The purse was a knockoff of a designer Liza had admired for as long as she had been old enough to care about that sort of thing. Even when things had been good and everyone healthy it wasn't the kind of thing she could ever afford. When Mel had come back from her big trip to New York City with the knockoff in tow, Liza had been over the moon. She didn't believe in love at first sight, but if she did, she would apply it to this purse. Now that she was in the office of the Foodies network, though, those good feelings were all but gone. She was sure that anyone who gave her bag half a glance would know immediately that it was a fake. Her face burned with shame and anger at the fact that she should feel shame over something so insignificant in the first place. Coming here was a mistake. She wasn't exactly qualified for the position she was applying for, and the person she interviewed with would certainly see that. She was wasting her time and even worse, wasting gas she couldn't afford to replace. She was about to get up and skulk out of the building, go home and console herself with a pint of the good stuff, maybe, when the sound of her name being called stopped her dead in her tracks.
“Liza?” The perfectly pretty receptionist called in a business-like, only slightly bored voice, “Is there a Liza Morris in here?”
"Me!" Liza squeaked. Her voice was hardly above a whisper and sounded woefully close to a croak. Her blush deepened, and she cleared her throat, counting to three before she tried to speak again. "Sorry, I'm here. I'm right here."
“Wonderful. Follow me, please,” the receptionist said tonelessly. She motioned with one perfectly manicured hand and walked through the open, waiting door without pausing to see if Liza would follow. Liza did, of course, hurrying as best she could and smoothing her pencil skirt down primly. She tried not to look at her own nails, which had never before seen the inside of a nail salon. Maybe she should have sprung for one this time. You were supposed to dress for the success you wanted for yourself. That was another saying her mom had been fond of, but it was one Liza hadn’t ever been able to make total sense of. She wasn’t sure how you were supposed to dress for a level of success you didn’t have with money you hadn’t yet earned. What it amounted to was that she had done her own nails, sitting on her small loveseat and drying them in front of her apartment’s one dinky window unit. If she wasn’t in the position to afford central air, she probably wasn’t in the position to have somebody else working on her nails. Besides, maybe nobody would bother to look at them; the same way they wouldn’t notice her bogus purse, either, she thought grimly.
“It’s right through here, miss,” the receptionist interrupted Liza’s self-deprecating train of thought.
“Right, thank you,” Liza answered, surprising herself a little with how calm she sounded.
"Just have a seat. He's on the phone, but he'll be done in a minute."
“Oh,” Liza stuttered, unsure of who exactly ‘he’ was supposed to be, “I can stay in the waiting room for a little longer.”
“No, he wants you to be in his office. Like I said, he’ll be with you soon.”
The receptionist indicated the barely open door with her platinum blonde-coiffed head before sauntering past Liza and back down the hallway towards her desk. Liza hovered in place for a moment, completely at a loss for what she was supposed to do. She knew she needed to go in if she wanted a chance at the job, that was, but so far the interview wasn't going anywhere close to as planned. It wasn't going anything like the way normal job interviews went, either, and it only solidified her idea that she was trying to get a job for which she was woefully underqualified. She had never been anything close to an office manager. She had been an honorary manager of a little wine bar, but the almost-title hadn't meant much. She had basically been a server who'd had to pick up the slack for a boss with a not-so-secret drug addiction. That didn't exactly transfer to on-the-job experience for the position of office manager for a large television network. She wasn't going to get the job. Suddenly she was one-hundred-percent sure of the fact, and she knew that she was probably looking at her last opportunity to make a graceful exit. Instead, she sighed deeply and let herself into the anonymous office before her.
"Right, I couldn't agree more," a male voice said smoothly. Liza scurried forward, not looking up from the carpet until she was seated on the edge of one of the leather club chairs in front of a large mahogany desk. She worried that avoiding eye contact with the man on the phone would only be one more knock against her but in the end, it turned out to be a good thing. Later, once she had time to start to process the odd events of her day, she would be relatively certain that a glimpse at her interviewer would have resulted in a total deconstruction of her composure.
“Hold on just a second,” the man whispered to Liza loudly, holding one hand over his phone’s receiver. Liza nodded, dumbstruck. Even if an answer had been required, she wouldn’t have trusted herself to provide one. Because the man pacing back and forth in front of her wasn’t just any man. He was the man; the one and only Wesley Baker, the host of the most popular show on the Foodies network. It was the man Liza and Melony watched on most Monday nights, for God’s sake, splitting an inexpensive bottle of red and sometimes going for two. Here he was, standing in front of her, looking at her apologetically and making a “yap, yap, yap” gesture with one tanned hand.
"Take your time" Liza mouthed silently. It was a totally lame thing to do, she was sure Melony would have said exactly that, but it was all she could think of. For the moment she was too busy checking out her first celebrity to use her brain power for much of anything else. The first thing her starstruck mind latched onto was Wesley Baker's height. He had always looked tall to her, or at least tallish, but now that she was seeing him in person she judged that he had to be close to six foot five. He was in impeccable shape, too. Liza could see that clearly even through his expensive-looking white button-up. She could actually see the way his muscles moved beneath the crisp material and all of the sudden she was badly in need of a glass of water. Every inch of his exposed skin was tanned, and before she could stop herself, Liza was wondering about the color of the skin she couldn't see. Her eyes traced down the length of his body as if they had a mind all their own. She forced them up again, but that did little good. They only landed on his sandy blond hair, smoothed down in an expensive haircut. Despite the expensive cut, Liza thought she detected a slight wave. That only made her wonder what he looked like when he first woke up in the morning and she had to avert her eyes completely. For the time being, there was not a place she could think of that was safe upon which to let her eyes rest.
"Please, forgive me for that. Not exactly the most professional way to start something like this off," Wesley's smooth voice cut through her more and more panicked thoughts. Hearing him talk to her was totally surreal, so much so that she was almost ready to write the whole thing off as a dream. This was the man who helped usher her into the first part of every week, the man who had inspired her too long fiercely to make travel a priority when she was finally able to afford things like that. Now, he was looking directly at her with an expression in his eyes that told her he was waiting for something. After another moment or two of stupid disbelief, Liza realized what that something was.
"Oh! Please, don't worry about it. I'm sure it was an important call," she said lamely. Not the most incendiary line she had ever delivered, but it would do in a pinch. It was better than just looking at him like a dope, anyway.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Baker sighed, lowering himself into his expensive looking office chair, “you know how this stuff goes.”
“Um, of course,” Liza answered noncommittally. She didn’t know, actually, didn’t have the first clue, but instinct told her it was best not to admit to as much.
“I have a question for you, miss...”
“Morris. Liza Morris,” she offered her name eagerly, almost desperately.
"Liza. That's a pretty name," he mused. It was a generic compliment, but that didn't stop Liza from blushing furiously.
“Thank you, sir.”
"Oh God, don't call me sir. If we're going to be working together, you can't call me sir."
“Working together?” Liza asked uncertainty. She knew what she thought that meant, but she didn't want to get her hopes up. There was no kind of disappointment worse than the kind that came after a girl got her stupid hopes up and if she let them hers would soar high. Even if she wanted to, she couldn't fool herself into thinking that this was a job she had earned.
"That's right," Wesley grinned sheepishly, "unless you've already decided you're not interested. I hate to say it, but I don't guess I would blame you if that were the case. Things are sort of a mess today, aren't they?"
"No, not at all. I mean, I didn't mean to say that. I just wasn't clear that I already had the job," she said hurriedly. She was practically tripping all over herself to offer explanations and part of her was sort of disgusted by it. The smartest thing to do was to nod, tell him she'd see him tomorrow, and flee the scene before the one and only Wesley Baker could change his mind. Come to his senses, was more like it, she thought grimly to herself. Instead, she just sat there, feeling like a deer in the headlights.
"Well, good. That's good to hear; I have to say. Then I'll see you here in the office tomorrow morning, right?" Wesley smiled. Miraculously, he didn't seem annoyed with her for her slow-to-understand demeanor and Liza could have kissed him for it. A quick once over of his fine physique reminded her that she could have kissed him for several other reasons, too, and she shook her head quickly in a lackluster attempt to clear her mind. Wesley noticed the movement and smiled again, this one with a little air of confusion behind it. It was most definitely time to go, that was more than clear. She stood, smoothed her skirt compulsively, and stuck out a hand in Wesley's direction. She glanced down at it, afraid of what she might see, and was pleased to see that it wasn't shaking. Or if it was, it wasn't bad enough for Wesley to notice and she was thankful for that.
“Right,” she answered confidently, “definitely. Bright and early tomorrow morning, sir.”
"Not sir, remember? Wesley. If the two of us are going to be working together, I want you to call me Wesley."
“Wesley,” she echoed. When she turned and let herself out of his office, Liza was grinning from ear to ear. Whether or not it was professional, she was absolutely helpless to keep herself in check.
