Лорел Гамильтон - Incubus Dreams

Bert’s office was now a warm yellow with orange undertones. It was cozier than the pale blue cubicle it had once been, but not by much.

The entire office had gotten a face-lift, along with buying out the offices next door, so that most of the animators at Animator’s Inc. no longer had to share their office space. Since most of our time was spent out in the field, or cemetery as it were, I thought the new offices were a waste of money, but I’d been outvoted. Charles, Jamison, and Manny had wanted bigger offices, Larry and I had been fine sharing, but Bert voted with the other three, so they’d taken out a wall and voilа, we were suddenly twice as big. The reason that most of the offices had gone to warmer tones, earth tones, comforting tones of yellows, browns, tans, ecru, was that Bert was dating an interior designer. Her name was Lana, and, though I thought she was far too good for him, she irritated me. She constantly went around talking about the science of color and how with a business like ours we needed to make people feel loved and cared for.

I’d told her that it wasn’t my job to love my clients. That I wasn’t in that business. She’d taken it wrong and hadn’t really liked me since. That was fine, as long as she stayed the hell away from my office.

Mary, our daytime secretary, had asked me to wait in Mr. Vaughn’s office as soon as I hit the door. Not a good sign. To my knowledge I hadn’t done anything wrong at work, so I had no clue what the meeting was about. Once it would have bugged me, but not now; I was used to not knowing things.

Bert came in, and shut the door behind him. Shutting the door was not a good sign either. Bert is 6’4”, and played football in college.

He’d started to gain that past-forty, nearing-fifty extra around the middle, but Lana had put him on a diet and an exercise program. He looked better than he had for most of the time I’d known him. She’d even persuaded him that tanning cocoa brown every summer was not healthy for anyone. So he looked pale, but healthy. It also meant that his hair hadn’t gone that white-blond that it used to in the summer.

His hair was actually a pale yellow, with a little white creeping in, but the white was so close to the way his hair used to look with his tan, that it had taken me days to figure out it was his way of going gray.

I was sitting in one of the two dark brown, nicely upholstered client chairs that had been another of Lana’s ideas. They were more comfortable than the straight-backs he’d had before. My legs were politely crossed, my hands folded in my lap. I was the epitome of ladylike.

“That skirt is too short for business hours, Anita,” he said as he rounded his big desk and eased into a chair even bigger and browner and more leathery than the one I was sitting in.

I slumped down in the chair and put my boots up on his desk, with my ankles crossed. The movement raised my skirt up high enough to flash every last inch of the lace tops of my thigh-high hose. I was a little short for the movement to be comfortable, but I doubted Bert could tell I was uncomfortable. I looked at him around the heels of my knee-high black boots.

“The skirt is also black. We all agreed that we don’t wear black to work. It’s too depressing.”

“No, you think it’s too depressing. Besides the skirt has flowers embroidered on the side by the slit. Blue, green, and turquoise, which matches exactly the shade of turquoise of the jacket, and the blue of the top, it’s like an outfit,” I said. I was also wearing a gold chain with an antique locket on the end of it. It had two tiny paintings, one in either side of it. They were tiny oil paintings of Jean-Claude and Asher. The locket had once belonged to Julianna, and was more than three hundred years old. It was handwrought gold, heavy and solid, and very antique-looking. Tiny sapphires traced its edges, with one larger one in the middle. I’d thought it looked great with the outfit.

Apparently not.

The short little turquoise jacket also covered the black shoulder holster and the Browning Hi-Power under my left arm. I’d have put on the wrist sheaths, but with the jacket off, the knives showed under the thin material of the top. I could just take off the gun if it got hot enough in the office, but to remove the wrist sheaths, I’d have to strip off the shirt. It didn’t seem worth it. They were in the car, just in case I started to feel insecure.

Bert didn’t have any weapons under his rich, chocolate brown suit, which had been tailored to fit his body. As he’d lost weight, the athletic cut to his suits had emphasized his broad shoulders, which had sort of appeared as his waistline had decreased. His shirt was pale yellow, and his tie was a paler brown, with tiny gold and blue figures on it. All the colors suited him, they even brought a little warmth into his gray eyes.

I slumped down further into the chair, using the padded corner to brace my back and head. The skirt had scooted up far enough that the black silk of my underwear was peeking out, though it probably couldn’t be seen from where Bert was sitting.

“If I tell you the skirt is too short, you’ll wear something even shorter tomorrow, won’t you?”

“Yep.”

“And if I complain about the black…”

“I’ve got black dresses,” I said, “I’ve even got short black dresses.”

“Why do I even bother?”

“Arguing with me,” I said.

He nodded.

“I have no idea.”

“At least you’re wearing makeup, I appreciate that.”

“I’ve got a date after work,” I said.

“That brings me to another problem,” he said. He leaned forward and folded his hands on his desk. He was trying for fatherly, but he never quite made it. It came off more as pretentious.

I did straighten up in my chair, because I simply wasn’t comfortable. I straightened the skirt as I sat up. There was enough skirt to smooth down the back of my thighs. My rule for skirts was that it was too short if there was no skirt to smooth over your ass.

This skirt passed the test, so I was glad Bert had given up. I really wasn’t comfortable in skirts much shorter than this one. Wearing them just to spite Bert wouldn’t have been as fun as it once would have been.

“And what problem would that be, Bert?”

“Mary tells me that the young man in our waiting room is your boyfriend.”

I nodded. “He is.” Strangely, theardeur hadn’t risen today at all, not a quiver, not a shake. But we’d all been a little concerned about what might happen if it suddenly sprang to life at work. There was nobody at work that I wanted to have sex with, so that meant I needed someone nearby, just in case. Nathaniel was sitting outside in the warm sienna orange waiting room, looking very decorative in one of the brown leather chairs. He was wearing street clothes-black slacks, a violet business shirt that was almost a match to the one he’d worn to the wedding, and black over-the-ankle boots. He’d braided his hair so it looked as professional as ankle-length hair can, and he was reading back issues of some music magazine that he had a subscription to and had fallen behind on reading. He’d brought a messenger bag full of magazines from home and was prepared to wait until I dropped him off at work, or until he was needed, whichever came first.

“Why is your boyfriend out in our waiting room, when you’re supposed to be working?”

“I’m dropping him at work later,” I said, and my voice was much more neutral than his had managed to be.

“Doesn’t he have a car?”

“We only have two cars at the house, and Micah may need the other one if he gets called into work.”

Bert did the slow blink, and what little warmth he’d managed to get into his gray eyes faded. “I thought the one in the other room was your boyfriend.”