Qt: Aisling's Antics (ch. 9)

Part Nine - "Worse Than Mean"

December 14

th

, 2020

Fiona looked out the window at the snow-covered streets of New York City, watching cars slowly slog their way between the skyscrapers. The streets had been plowed, but because the traffic wasn't constant, there was still some slush on the streets, and the sidewalks were only somewhat shoveled. Her watch said it was just past 9 a.m., and she was, as far as she could tell, the only one awake, everyone else still trying to sleep through their jetlag. They had gotten a connected suite, two large bedrooms with one centralized common area that Fiona was now hanging out in.

She'd never really liked New York City, but not for the reasons most people had. She didn't find it that much dirtier than any other major metropolitan area. She didn't find that its homeless population was any larger or more aggressive than they were elsewhere. No, she hated it because the streets were never,

ever

silent.

Any time, day or night, the streets of NYC were like a living, breathing organism, never quiet, always giving off some noise or another, a constant reminder that someone or something lurked around every corner, under every rock and bush. At least in D.C., for a few hours every night, the streets fell deathly still, and Fi could hear herself think without too much effort.

Unlike San Francisco, NYC at least had a little life on its streets, with a handful of cars traversing through streets that were normally backed end-to-end with iron denizens. If SF had been resisting coming out of its shell, New Yorkers were already completely

over

the idea of the pandemic, regardless of how many people it had killed.

She lifted her camera's viewfinder to her eyes, pointing the lens down towards the street before she pushed the button to make the camera's shutter snap closed, imprinting the image digitally for all eternity.

"Couldn't stay asleep either?" Ash's voice said to her, as the redhead slipped into the common area, pulling the door quietly closed behind her. "Lack of Andy next to you?"

"Well, I've got Moira with me, which helps," Fi said, "but I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss Andy's warmth being within arm's reach. Things between him and Em even out a little?"

"I think he's forgiven her, but he's not going to forget, if you take my meaning," Ash told her. "He understands why she did it, but understanding isn't acceptance, and he made it clear that if she keeps putting herself in front of the family, there's going to be problems long term. But I think it's mostly settled, and that she just is taking a little bit longer than most to prioritize thinking about the group as a whole."

"Think she'll overcome it?"

"She will," Ash said. "I think she's most of the way there right now, anyway. The next step is to just internalize it, to make it so it's natural and it hops into your brain without you having to consciously reach for it."

"This trip'll help," Fiona told her. "We were just talking about needing a fiancées' trip, and here we are, the lot of us on tour together with Andy. Was she this guarded when she arrived?"

Aisling nodded. "Guarded is a wise choice of words," she said. "The two of them were sort of inseparable, and I think maybe Emily was a little taken aback about how strongly Sarah felt for Andy before she'd even met him."

"Typically, it

does

take quite some time to fall in love."

Ash grinned, giving a little shrug. "Not for me, but I suspect you'll try and tell me my love for Andy is at least a little chemical."

Fiona smiled, trying to be as polite as possible. "I think it figured into it a bit at the start, but you've had more time with him than pretty much anyone else, so if it was

just

the chemicals, I think you'd have moved past that by now, don't you?"

"I think I'd have moved past it within days if not weeks, but I can't speak specifically to how the chemicals have affected me," Ash admitted. "That's a Phil question far more than it is one for me." Fi lifted her camera up, focusing on Ash for a moment before snapping a shot. "What's that for?"

"I wanted to capture the moment when I saw Aisling Blake admit she was wrong."

Ash laughed, shaking her head. "Don't be a cunt, Fi," she teased back. "One of us has to be cautious on Andy's behalf."

"I'm just giving you shit, babe," Fi giggled. "It's the same thing for all of us. None of us know how much the drugs are affecting us, but it all feels pretty damn real to me."

"It's real for all of us," Ash said. "Natural chemicals, added chemicals - it's all real all the time, so who the hell cares about anything else?"

"I just worry that for Emily it's all about hanging on to Sarah, and not thinking about Andy for the sake of Andy," Fiona told the Irishwoman. "That sort of false enthusiasm is hard to maintain in the long haul."

"It might've been, right at the start," Ash agreed. "But Em came around quickly, especially as she found out more and more about Andy. The early days were pretty telling, and when Andy wasn't around, I sort of did a bit of work with Emily, convincing her that I thought Sarah's opinion of Andy was an accurate one, and that even if she didn't feel an immediate connection, she'd come around."

"You want me to get us some coffee, some breakfast, and we can keep talking on the record?" Fiona asked. "I know I'm not posing, but it's just the two of us, and I want to get the rest of your thoughts down before we get sidetracked by Christmas and the wedding. I figure one or two more sessions should do it, because we're not too far from me and Moira entering the picture, are we?"

"There's a couple more key events we should probably talk about, yeah," Ash said, glancing around. "Hmmm. Yeah, I suppose I'm okay with doing it here if you brought your tape recorder with you. If either of them wakes up, though, maybe we stop talking about them."

"Are you going to say mean things about them?"

"

Mean?

No. But I'm going to be

honest

and sometimes that's worse than mean," Ash said as Fiona moved over to pick up the phone.

"Yeah, can you send up two pots of coffee, some orange juice, some pineapple juice, some milk, and three breakfast sampler plates? Right, toast, eggs and bacon," Fiona told room service. "Yes, just add it to the room's tab. Thank you." She found her purse, grabbed her digital recorder, switched it on, set it on the table between them. "Shall we?"

* * * * * * * *

Emily and Sarah had barely been in the house a couple of days when I and Niko got engaged to Andy, and while Sarah was initially caught up in reading the advance reader copy of "High Noon at Stonehenge" that Andy had given to her, a few days later, basically everyone in the house was consumed with a new project - Project: Pitch Partners.

When Hannah had shown up, she'd asked if Andy could possibly request someone to join our family. It was brazen and bold, but that's Hannah for you. As it turned out, it hadn't even occurred to any of us in the house that Andy could

request

partners until Hannah mentioned it, and as soon as she did, it was like it was open season, with everyone wanting to bring their friends into the fold.

Well,

almost

everyone.

I didn't really have anyone I wanted to pitch, and Niko and I had both found out that we were pregnant, so we decided to tell Andy about that during Niko's pitch slot and have that be a little distraction to liven up his day. Niko didn't really have anyone she wanted to pitch anyway, and, well, the look on his face when we told him was better than anything we could've possibly imagined. He'd long ago abandoned the idea of being married, having kids, and now that all of that was coming true at lightspeed, he was a little caught off guard.

During the two days while the girls were preparing their pitches, however, I had plenty of time to get to know all the new faces in the house, of which we had a lot. Piper and I got along like we'd been old friends for years, which was good, because that girl needed an ear to talk off, and the fact that she'd been trying to figure out her place in the family just meant that she wanted to fit in, so I let her hang with me and Niko a bit during the earliest part of the pitch planning.

See, there were a handful of rules that I laid down for everyone who wanted to pitch Andy, but I didn't think any of them were particularly unreasonable. I told them all that Andy had the right to ask or not ask anyone he wanted to, no matter how we felt about it. Nobody should

expect

Andy to pick their suggestion - that was why we were having the pitch process in the first place. I knew Andy was going to have his reasons, and I knew that some of those reasons might seem silly to the rest of us.

Andy had decided since there were five remaining seats at the dinner table, he could take on an additional five women before he thought his balls would give way. Oh, how gloriously naïve he was back then, at the beginning of last month. He was going to let the girls all pitch their friends to him, and he would choose five from them, but when he told me that, I stepped in and made him change a little more.

I told him that he had to request one person, just

one person

entirely for himself. He didn't need to run it by me or anyone else in the family. He needed to think about this opportunity he had in front of him, and he needed to at least

ask

somebody he thought would be a good match, which, y'know, is what resulted in

you

getting an invite here. And, true to form, he didn't tell me about you in advance of sending you an invite, mostly because he knew I wouldn't object to whoever he wanted to bring in, whether it was someone from his own personal life or some celebrity he'd always had a longstanding crush on, although I felt like that one was sorted when Sarah showed up.

Which sort of leads into me going and talking with Emily and Sarah on their own, one on one, as they were each doing their planning for the group pitches. Sarah pitched Larissa Cotton, another of Sarah's favorite writers and one whom Andy knew at least socially, and Andy did put her on the list of people he would ask, simply because they did get along. It turned out she was already married, as Andy had thought she was. I suspect Andy put her on the list

specifically

because he was

certain

she was married, and it would mean he could keep the house a little bit smaller, although to be fair he did have one alternate on that list.

I suppose he probably should've had two or three, considering Larissa wasn't the only one to decline an invitation. The woman who had started it all, Hannah's pitch - her former cheerleading/gym teacher Tabitha Jefferson - had already hooked up with some people she'd already been in a relationship with prior, and they were all holed up in quarantine together. But Jade was the one person on that alternate list, and she's found a home here very quickly.

Emily's pitch was for Maya, who's obviously joined the family and you know for yourself, so I don't really need to tell you much about her, which is good, because that's not the focus for the story I want to tell you.

While everyone was developing their pitches, I spent a bit of time chatting with each of them, getting to know them better, helping them understand Andy better, and figuring out how I was going to prevent this gaggle of gorgeous women from all killing one another at some point.

It had helped that I'd already gotten a handle on a good number of them early on. I'd had months to iron out me, Niko and Lauren, which had been easy enough. Adding Taylor in had mostly just been making sure that Lauren and Taylor had enough time together to work through their grievances, and that nobody was going to remain pissed at anyone else longer then necessary.

I'd also got the staff's number very early on, not that they made it all that hard for either me or Andy to understand what their wants and needs were. Katie and Jenny were partners first, employees second and Andy's lovers third, and they didn't ever want to be with Andy without each other present. And Nicolette just liked stoking the more aggressive and dominant side of Andy's personality that he usually keeps quite well tucked away, so as long as she got her regular streak of Master Andrew, she'd be perfectly fine.

Piper was easy to suss out as well, since she and Andy clicked immediately. She had the advantage of having gotten that nice letter from him, which she still carries with her to this day, the one he'd written for her to find up when she awoke, so she'd understand what happened to her, and how, if she wanted him to, he would spend his entire life trying to fix it for her. We didn't know that we'd have a reassignment option available within just a month or so, but Piper's never said a single word about having an interest in being reassigned away from us. In fact, she was adamant that she be included in the group of us getting married in a way that surprised even me, but I guess she and Andy keep on growing closer every chance they get.

Hannah and Asha are the youngest members of the family, so I knew I wanted to save them for last, because, well, their opinions change faster than the weather. We'll get to them later, because I laid down the law for them on the day I also gave Katie Couric a warning she'll never forget.

But we're talking about Sarah and Emily here. Normally, you can find the two of them joined at the hip almost as much as Lauren and Taylor, but today, they were each doing their own personal homework for their presentations, which meant I could take them on separately, and I decided to go for Sarah first, because us gingers understand one another, and I knew she might take me making sure she and Andy were compatible as challenging her authenticity.

She was in one of the ground floor living rooms, and was working intently on her laptop, trying to make sure she was putting together a good pitch deck for Larissa, and she'd apparently tried reaching out to Larissa, but hadn't been able to get ahold of her.

"Hey Sarah," I said to her as I walked into the room. "How goes the prep?"

Sarah rolled her eyes as she pushed some of that amazing mane of red hair out of her face. (I swear to you, I'm gonna get her to give me the secret of how easily she gets it to have so much damn body.) "I'm still struggling to have a fucking answer to the argument that too many writers under one roof is going to result in a lot of damn arguing."

"How much arguing have you seen Andy really do since you got here?" I asked her.

"Well... not much," she agreed. "But I know creative people tend to get protective of their creations and can go a little crazy about it."

"Andy's not like that," I told her. "He's gotten a lot done on the next Druid Gunslinger book, and he's had me look at it and he's taken constructive criticism very well."

Sarah pouted at me, and I suddenly realized my mistake. "He's got another one done and he's not letting me read it?"

"He hasn't got the ending yet," I told her, "And he wants you to be the first to read it when he's got the full thing in one solid draft. He doesn't want to contaminate your first read through with an early draft, since he knows you're such a big fan of his. Speaking of which, when did that start?"

"Can you believe it was all because of a boy?" she giggled. "I was playing Maria in a racially flipped version of West Side Story where the Jets were all Chinese actors and the Sharks were all Irish-looking actors in an off-Broadway production back in 2016, as a break in between films. I mean, it was pretty

close

to Broadway, but wasn't right

on

Broadway, so I have to fucking say it—"

"Sarah, I don't care," I said with a grin.

"Right. Right. Anyway, I was the lead in this show, but it seemed like everyone else was having a lot more trouble picking up the choreography for the big dance numbers than I was. So the director told me to take a load off and the guy who I'd been crushing on had a library book atop his things. Since I was bored and I didn't have anything else to do, I picked it up and started reading. It was a copy of 'The Dragon's Last Offer,' which had only come out a month or so prior. When it came time for me to get back on stage, the director had to call my name

four times

before it pulled me away from the book. As soon as I left the rehearsal, I swung by a Barnes & Noble and bought every book by Blake Conrad they had, so I could start the series from the beginning. I'd forgotten all about the guy and had just gotten totally wrapped up in the books. He actually even tried asking me out towards the end of the musical's run, but I'd moved on, and I wasn't interested in him anymore."

"Had your heart set on Andy, huh?"

"Not yet. Not entirely," Sarah said. "I mean, at that point, I was still dating people in Hollywood, mostly. About a year or so later, I'd meet Dennis Jacobson and he'd cast me in the first 'Ballerina Badasses' movie. We started dating mid-way through the shoot - I know, I know, it's totally fucking unprofessional to date your boss, but we agreed to keep it on the downlow. Some fucking good

that

did. Before the movie was even out, the paparazzi had picked up on it, and by the time we came back to film the second and third ones back-to-back, I'd broken up with him and was stuck taking direction from my fucking asshole of an ex-boyfriend for a whole year. I was going out of my fucking mind that whole goddamn time."

"Oof. That sounds rough," I said to her. "When did you start thinking about Andy as someone you might have feelings for?"

"Shit, around the time I broke up with Dennis?" she sighed. "I read an interview with Andy - well,

Blake

- and he was talking about why Dale never seems to end up with any of the various women he hooks up with over the course of the books, and he said it was because none of the women Dale slept with were any good for him, and Dale knew that. Or, at least that's how it had gone for the first few books. He said that Dale wanted a partner who valued him, who cared about his opinions and cared what he had to say and wasn't just using him for her own personal gain. He said that maybe Dale would get there sooner or later, but it wouldn't be any time soon, because learning by making mistakes was very much 'the Druid Gunslinger way.' It was such a weirdly refreshing philosophy, hearing that it was okay to fail, that it was

good

to fail, that failure was a

learning

experience, and that while it might have stung, it was doing what it was supposed to, and improving you as a person. The interviewer asked if that was why

he

, y'know, Andy, was single, and he said maybe he'd learned from the lessons a little

too

well. I think

that

was when I started thinking I might be interested in learning a

lot

more about Blake Conrad, so I started doing my homework."

"How much did you learn?"

"A ton, and yet, not that much at all?" she said with a giggle. "I found out he lived in the Bay Area, but he didn't own the place he was living in, so I couldn't get an address for him. His phone number was unlisted. And I wasn't sure if calling up his agent to see if I could ask him out on a date would be a smart idea, or if it would come across as too stalkerish. But I told my agent to look into seeing if the rights for any of the books were up for optioning, and what it would take to get the rights to one of them."

"When was this?"

"Lemme think," Sarah told me, rolling her eyes back into her head to think. "That would've been fall of 2018, because I hooked up with Emily in February of last year."

"How'd

that

happen?"