She hadn't heard from Liam yesterday, which could mean he was busy, or that he didn't want to keep seeing her, or that he only intended to see her for sex when he was feeling the urge. It could mean anything, really, and so it was useless to try and determine all of the possibilities. She'd had a lovely evening with Ally, and it was friends she should be focusing her energy on, anyway.
She was meeting her father and stepmother for lunch and it was already getting late, she'd taken a cab home from the bar because she'd had a few too many and had slept until 10:45 this morning, which was pathetic. She was a grown woman; grown women did not drink excessively and sleep until 10:45, waking up with raging headaches: At least... not on weekdays. Luckily, she did not have classes today. She showered, watched the water flow over the mounds of her breasts for awhile before snapping out of it and turning the water off, wrapping herself in a towel and blotting the excess moisture out of her hair with another towel before finally hanging them both up and pulling out her hair dryer.
She combed the tangles out of her thick blond hair. It tangled so easily, because of the bleach treatments. She'd have liked to have long lustrous locks, the kind men love to run their hands through, but she could not for two reasons—the chemicals made her hair on the fragile side, and past a certain length she had dual problems, brittleness and dryness. The other was that her face, while the coveted oval shape, was a touch on the long side, and having hair anywhere past her shoulders gave her face the effect of being even longer than it was. Or maybe gave the effect of her face being as long as it really was.
She moisturized her face, then her body, choosing a lotion scented with bergamot before she started blow-drying, working her wavy hair smooth with an oversized round brush while focusing most over her attention on her breasts, which were, quite frankly, spectacular. Sure, on many occasions she regretted her implant decision, or perhaps regretted what it said about her, but at the same time she had to admit that even after four years they were holding up amazingly. They were not so large that she looked disproportionate, and she finally filled a shirt out nicely.
Hair dry and mostly smoothed, she moved on to putting on her makeup. She was still naked, not wanting to get powder on her clothes. She layered concealer over eye cream, trying to hide the dark circles that plagued her this morning, then applied bronzer in an effort to mask the paleness in her face, spending extra time on her eye shadow to draw attention away from what she assumed must be a very obvious haggard appearance.
When she made it to her dad's building, wearing jeans, Uggs and hiding underneath an oversized ivory Irish fisherman's sweater, she met her stepmother, already waiting. She was only a few minutes late, despite having had to wait for a cab to arrive to take her to collect her car at the bar.
"Hi Helen!" Carly smiled, waving excitedly as she approached. Helen turned and, spotting Carly, smiled infectiously; throwing her arms wide for a hug Carly was happy to run into.
"Oh, my darling, how are you?" Helen asked, pulling away and cupping a cheek in her hand.
Carly shrugged noncommittally and stepped back, readjusting the strap to her oversized shoulder-bag and sighing. "Things are okayish, I guess."
Helen nodded, "We can talk more at lunch, or later if you want."
"Is dad on his way down?"
"He's finishing up a quick email and will be down after that."
"Carly?"
Carly's heart slammed against her chest and she felt a jolt of something—nerves? excitement?—rush through her body. She turned her head to see Liam and Jack approaching, each of them carrying deli to-go bags and coffees. She could see small streams of steam rising into the crisp air through the holes in the cup lids. She could feel Helen's eyes on her and she waved as casually as she could and said, "Hello Jack. Hi Liam."
"I got stuck with the uptalker once you left," Jack told her.
"I heard, I'm sorry."
"That's okay, I'm getting used to it. I can almost tell whether or not she's really asking a question and when she's making a statement I don't need to answer."
"Jack, Liam, you've met Helen, haven't you?" They agreed they had, and the conversation died off. Jack excused them, and she found Liam looking at her questioningly, as if she should say something else, or ask him to say, before he snapped out of it and said goodbye, following after Jack, who was by that time ten feet away. As Liam left a corner of Helen's mouth curved upwards in a smile. "Well isn't he a tall drink of water?"
Carly felt herself blush furiously, hoped the extra make up she'd applied in an effort to look like a living and breathing person hid the flush in her cheeks. "Yes," she whispered. "Yes he's very handsome." She forced herself to look at Helen, realized she was still under scrutiny, and tilted her chin up. Helen nodded, and closed the door on the topic.
"Your father asked me via a text message where I bought my new fragrance. I answered back 'Ulta' and the auto-correct on my phone changed it to 'Ukraine'. Now, I find myself wanting to go fragrance shopping in the Ukraine."
Carly giggled, smiling gratefully at her stepmother. Her dad saved them from further efforts to avoid the subject of Carly's reaction to Liam, which by that time she was embarrassed to realize had been clear as day.
**
Liam caught up with Jack, who slowed down to hold the door open for someone walking into the building behind him. Jack was grinning triumphantly as the gentleman rushed through the door, nodding in thanks. Liam's hear sank, fearing that Jack's expression was because he had seen what a bumbling idiot he'd just been and pieced together the puzzle. "What's so funny?" he asked, trying not to sound defensive.
Jack cocked his head back toward the person who'd entered the building before them. He was halfway to the elevator banks. "The passive-aggressive door game," Jack said. "It's my new thing."
"The what's that now?"
"The rules are, you open and hold the door for a man at least ten feet away. If they speed up as a response, and scurry into the door at an accelerated pace, you win. If they have the testicular fortitude to not speed up, and maintain their pace up to and through the doorway, you lose."
Liam laughed, both in relief and true enjoyment for Jack's newest way of interacting with the general public. "So you've turned the perfectly polite practice of holding a door open for someone and turned it into a way to emasculate strangers through a game they don't know they're playing?" He paused, and then nodded at Jack. "Yeah, not all that surprised." Liam took a sip of coffee, winced as the heat of it burned his tongue. "Fun game, though."
"Hell yeah, it is." They entered the elevator with the man in the doorway and as such dropped that conversation. Jack transitioned seamlessly onto an alternate topic. "Dugan wants to throw an engagement party for Ally and I, which I thought was nice but Ally thought was weird. Plus she doesn't want to go because he's planning on inviting the whole firm, and 'isn't it bad enough that she's marrying a lawyer?' I don't know though, Dugan seems really excited about it, and I don't want to disappoint the old man, mostly because the son of a bitch scares the shit out of me." He reached out, pressed the button for their floor. "This morning he came into the office and asked me a question I should have had the answer to, and I blurted out 'I'm engaged' like a fucking mental patient. That was at six this morning and by ten he'd secured the Chinese Room as a venue for the engagement party I never knew I wanted. So what the fuck, man? I have to figure out how to get Ally to go."
