Aries: Tread lightly, and treat those around you with extra consideration and care. Difficult circumstances may hold unexpected rewards.
I’m running late for work the next morning, and as I hurry down the narrow staircase of our old building, I almost bump straight into Lucinda, my downstairs neighbor. She’s a semi-retired actress in her sixties with bright red hair and a real fondness for leopard print—and extravagant stories about her glory days on Broadway. Today, she’s standing in her open doorway saying goodbye to a handsome stranger I assume is a younger relative, or delivery guy of some kind—that is, until she grabs him by the lapels and drags him in for a long, wet kiss.
Not a relative.
Damn, Lucinda. I blush at the sight of the guy’s wandering hands—and eager tongue. Way to go! She winks at me over Hottie McHothot’s shoulder. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I could use some of whatever she’s got.
“See you tonight,” she tells him, sending him off with a slap on the ass. “Natalie, darling, how are you?”
“Not as good as you, clearly,” I tell her, smiling.
She laughs. “I met him in acting class.”
“You’re teaching?” I ask.
She laughs. “Heavens, no. A student, my dear. One needs to keep the skills sharp. You never know when a new opportunity might present himself. Besides, orgasms keep you young. Better than any skin cream, I tell you.”
She swans inside with a wink, leaving me to pat my face in worry. I need some new moisturizer. Or orgasms. But I’m guessing only one of them is available at Sephora.
I head out, stopping by the coffee shop around the corner from the Gazette offices to grab Justin his usual latte—and, OK, maybe a chocolate croissant for myself. The line is nearly out the door, and I cringe, glancing at my watch. Punctuality or carbs? Dammit. Then I realize Justin himself is making his way up to the registers.
“Hey!” he calls, face breaking into a grin when he sees me. It’s so different from the worried scowl I’m used to seeing on his face that I actually glance over my shoulder to see if there’s someone else he’s talking to.
Nope, all me. I spot my chance, and skip the line to scoot in next to him—ignoring the scowl from the dude behind us in line.
Sorry, all’s fair in love and croissants.
“You’re in a good mood this morning,” I note.
“I guess I am.” Justin tucks away the newspaper he’s holding—but not before I notice it’s open at Madame LeFarge’s column. He pulls out his wallet. “Here, allow me. What are you having?”
“Oh, thanks!” I place my order, then look at him more closely. Could his sudden good humor have anything to do with his horoscope? Part of me thinks that’s totally ridiculous—but then again, a free croissant doesn’t lie.
Curiouser and curiouser.
“So, how’s your week going?” Justin asks as we head back toward the office, coffees in hand. “I mean, aside from your workplace descending into anarchy, obviously.”
I laugh, I can’t help it. “Aside from that, no complaints. My friend is a florist who volunteers at an animal shelter, so I spent last night helping her make flower crowns for a bunch of pit bulls so they could take glamour shots and get adopted faster.”
“That’s awesome,” Justin says with a smile. “My grandma had a mutt when I was growing up that she adopted from a shelter. She was a total sweetheart, but never quite learned not to pee on the floor.”
“The dog or your grandma?” I ask, before I can stop myself.
I’m afraid he’ll get offended, but Justin laughs out loud. “I mean, she always blamed the dog,” he deadpans.
Justin is surprisingly easy to joke around with for a gajillionaire CEO who’s probably going to destroy my career, and we keep up a light, easy banter as we make our way across the lobby. Then we step into the elevator. Alone.
I swallow. “So . . .” I wrack my brain for something to say that doesn’t involve the elephant in the room.
The hot, sexy, mind-bending elephant.
And how great it felt for him to kiss me. With that mouth . . . that tongue . . .
“Do you like muffins?” I blurt.
Justin looks confused, and I don’t blame him. “Muffins?” he repeats slowly.
“There are two types of people in the world,” I continue, babbling. “Muffin people and croissant people.”
“Spongey or flakey?” Justin asks, his lips twitching with amusement.
“Exactly! Muffin people like to pretend they’re being healthy. But really, muffins are just socially-acceptable ways to eat cake for breakfast. A croissant at least knows what it is. Butter. Just a whole pack of butter, folded up thinly. Have you ever seen one getting made? Your arteries will clog just at the sight of it.”
Oh for the love of God, just stop me now.
Maybe I should have written a better horoscope for myself: Not all thoughts are outside thoughts. Silence is golden.
I shove my croissant in my mouth to shut myself up, and thankfully, we arrive on our floor. I’m just about to bolt for my desk to avoid any further embarrassment, when I spy two expensive, entitled-looking suits standing outside his office.
“Brock!” Justin greets the taller of the two, holding his hand out. “Parker. Good to see you guys. Natalie, these are two junior VPs at the Rockford Group. Guys, this is my assistant Natalie.”
“Soy latte,” Brock barks immediately, barely sparing me a glance. “No foam.”
“I’ll take an extra-hot Italian roast,” the other chimes in.
I look back at Justin, but he just offers me an embarrassed, apologetic smile. “Would you mind?” he asks.
So much for skipping the coffee line, I guess. I turn around wordlessly and head back toward the elevator.
This time, funnily enough, I don’t fantasize about Justin on the way down.
Justin stays cloistered away in the conference room with the VPs for the rest of the day. And yes, they send me out for lunch, and snacks, and a 4 p.m. pick-me-up caffeine hit, too. I should have a FitBit with all these steps I’m getting in. And a coffee shop loyalty card.
Still, it gives me time to polish up some pitches. Because yes, I’m technically a PA right now (not to mention secret astrologer), but that doesn’t mean I can’t keep hustling for some bylines. I have a great story about an old Italian guy in Brooklyn who is stymieing a group of high-powered developers by refusing to sell them his old apartment building. They’ve bought out his neighbors for some big apartment complex and are doing everything they can to drive him out, including playing Taylor Swift at full volume day and night. My dad was over there fixing the pipes and convinced him to talk to me. I just know it’s the kind of story that will get eyeballs, and the city desk editor agrees . . .
If I can get Justin to let me write it.
By the time the newsroom empties out, I’m ready to go home and collapse, but the light is still on in Justin’s office. I figure I might as well go see if his cheery mood from this morning survived the work day, enough to take a chance on my pitch, anyway. I take a deep breath, then smooth my hair and head across the bullpen.
I catch sight of him at his desk through the barely cracked door, raising my hand to knock and then abruptly dropping it when I realize he’s on speakerphone. “Dad—” he’s saying, looking pained. But the voice on the other end of the line cuts him off.
“Enough, Justin. We’re not playing around here. I’m not about to let you screw our shareholders for the sake of following some ridiculous whim—”
“It’s not a whim, Dad. Did you even look at the reports I sent over? I can get this paper back into the black. All you have to do is give me a chance.”
“That may be,” his father says calmly, “but we’re not in the newspaper business, Justin. We’re in the moneymaking business, and that means a third of the staff needs to go. I want the list of the employees you’re laying off on my desk first thing tomorrow, and then I want them out of the building by noon. Understand?”
Holy crap.
I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but I’m rooted to my spot, hanging back in the shadows so Justin won’t notice me lurking. For a moment it looks like he’s going to tell his father where to shove it, but in the end he just kind of sags. “Sure, Dad,” he says, rubbing a hand over his face. “Whatever you say.”
Is he serious?
I stand there for a moment once he hangs up, shock and impotent rage flooding through me. A third of the staff! Then I straighten my spine. Enough. What was it that Pearl said about not waiting around for the axe to fall?
Let Justin go ahead and fire me, if that’s what he and his evil troll of a father are so set on doing. But there’s no way I’m letting them take everyone else down without a fight.
“All right, listen,” I announce, barging into Justin’s office without bothering to knock. “I know that as far as you’re concerned I’m just some assistant who’s hanging onto her job by her fingernails, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know right from wrong. And what you’re about to do here? It’s completely and totally unforgiveable.”
Justin looks at me across his office, startled. “I—” he begins, but I cut him off.
“I mean, this isn’t just some two-bit media startup you’re talking about,” I tell him. “The Gazette has been around over a hundred years. It’s a New York City institution. We’ve broken stories about corruption at the highest levels. Gone undercover in prisons. This newsroom won a freakin’ Pulitzer not five years ago!”
“Natalie—” Justin holds up a hand to try and stop me, but I’m on a roll now.
“What would have happened if the Boston Globe had shut down the Spotlight team?” I demand, my hands on my hips. “We’d still be eating ground-up horsemeat for dinner if Upton Sinclair never wrote The Jungle! And frankly I didn’t spend my entire childhood forcing my brother to play Woodward and Bernstein so that I could lose my dream job to some guy in a fancy suit who only cares about prof—”
“Enough!” Justin roars. This time, he’s loud enough to get my attention. “Can you stop?”
“What?”
“Just— just stop for a second.” Justin shakes his head, looking utterly exhausted. “We’re on the same side.”
“Um.” I blink, my brain taking a moment to process this new information. “We are?”
“Yes, Natalie.” He lets out a sigh. “Ever since the first moment my dad put me in charge of this place, I’ve spent twenty-four hours a day doing literally everything I can think of to keep him from bulldozing it. I’m a New Yorker, OK? I grew up reading this paper, and I’m dying to save it. You think I want to go around handing out a bunch of pink slips? Like, have you ever actually fired anyone?” When I don’t answer, he raises his eyebrows. “Seriously, have you?”
I shake my head.
“Well, I have.” Justin shudders. “And it’s horrible. I hate it. I want this to work—I’m up all night, every night, trying to think of ways to make it happen—but it’s like nobody here even wants to give me a chance.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t expecting that. I look at him for a moment. For the first time it occurs to me that I might have misjudged him. “OK. I’m . . .” I trail off, embarrassed at myself—for jumping to conclusions, for not giving him the benefit of the doubt. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” he says, sitting back in his chair and rubbing his hands over his face. He looks totally ravaged, like he hasn’t slept a full night in weeks—and from the sound of things, he hasn’t. “I mean, I get it. I know what it looks like, me waltzing in here. And the truth is I don’t know what I’m doing a hundred percent of the time. But I’m trying. And that’s more than anyone else my father sent here would do.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing, either,” I confess, leaning against the doorjamb and thinking of the horoscope column—I wrote another one this afternoon, crossing my fingers and praying to the stars for guidance. And for me not to get totally busted as a celestial imposter. “A lot of time it feels like I’m just faking it.”
Justin shakes his head. “Don’t say that. I’ve read your clips, you know.”
That surprises me. “You have?”
He nods. “Of course I have. You’re really talented.”
“I’m tenacious,” I allow, though in fact I’m glowing like a hot stone with the compliment. I can’t deny the fact that I like the idea of it—him taking in the words I strung together so carefully, finding value there. And I can’t deny the pull I still feel in his direction, even though I know nothing can ever happen between us.
“I see that,” he says with a smile. “Did you really used to make your brother play Woodward and Bernstein?”
“I did,” I recall, a little sheepishly. “My mom was Deep Throat.”
That makes him laugh, his dark head tipped back to expose the long column of his neck, and I do my best not to imagine my mouth there, my tongue slicking over his pulse point.
“You should take off,” he says finally, righting himself again. “It’s late.”
“You should too,” I point out, glancing at my watch. “Or are you going to hang out here, burn the midnight oil?”
Justin shakes his head. “I’ve actually got to get going,” he tells me, glancing down at his watch with a grimace. “I’ve got tickets to a charity gala at the Met.”
“Oh!” Right, of course, a charity gala at the Met. Just a low-key Tuesday night. “Well, have fun.”
Justin considers me for a minute. “Actually,” he says, “I’ve got an extra ticket, if you’re interested.”
For a second I’m one hundred percent sure I’ve misheard him, but Justin just looks at me curiously, dark eyebrows slightly raised like he’s waiting for an answer. “I’m sorry,” I say finally. “What?”
He shrugs, like he’s offering me an extra pass to a movie at the second-run theater and not a black-tie fundraiser. “My date canceled,” he says easily. “Come on, it’ll be fun. Well, that’s a lie, it’ll probably be stuffy and sort of endless, but I can promise you champagne and all the crab puffs you can eat.”
A night out with Justin Rockford at my very favorite museum—even a stuffy, sort of endless night out—is achingly tempting. Still, I shake my head. “I don’t have anything to wear.”
Justin isn’t buying it. “You look great to me.”
He keeps his gaze on mine as he says it, and I can’t deny that the words send a flush all the way down my body. Then I look down at my jeans and plaid shirt and let out an incredulous laugh. “Thank you,” I say, and I mean it, “but there’s no way I’m going to a gala at the Met dressed as a lumberjack.”
Justin shrugs again, unruffled. “So we’ll pick something up on the way,” he says, shutting his computer down and stuffing some papers into his messenger bag. “Come on, go grab your bag.”
I gaze at him for a moment, mentally cataloguing all the reasons why this is a truly terrible idea—why I should go home to Brooklyn and put on my coziest sweatpants, maybe queue up the episodes of Chopped I’ve been saving for a special occasion.
Then all at once I remember the horoscope I wrote for myself this morning, back when I thought the biggest chance I was going to take today was going to be pitching my real estate article:
Be bold, Gemini! Step out of your comfort zone, take the leap. The universe will catch you if you fall.
Who knows? Maybe there’s something to this astrology stuff after all.
“Meet you by the elevators in five minutes?” I ask him. Justin grins.
“See you there.”