"You don't belong here." Four words. Four words were all it took to crumble the illusion. She could see the pieces shatter around her like broken porcelain knocked carelessly from a kitchen table, lying on the ground with an air of minor irritation. Suddenly, she could see the farce of the thin women teetering on thinner heels in sparking dresses that made them, look like cardboard cut-outs. She took in the unsatisfying canapés parading handsome art students and out of work actors with plastic smiles around the room.
"What did you say," she began to garble to the woman who had shattered her little universe, but as Lucy looked up she had gone and all that remained of her was the strangely familiar green eyes and flame red hair imprinted in Lucy's mind.
Lucy's stunned reverie was barely punctured by the voice of the presenter demanding the assembled masses congratulate themselves on the role of women in the legal industry. Lucy laughed appropriately when her nearest neighbour suggested that role was right underneath men with a double entendre laden wink, but did not take it in.
Stupid woman, she thought, who was she to question Lucy's place? She did belong here, hell she was getting an award congratulating her on belonging to the exclusive fraternity of overachieving female lawyers (exchanging their love lives for billables). She stood up to accept her award and smiled glowingly (liar), and said she could not have achieved her success without wonderful female role models and hoped she could be one for the next generation of women (the scrambling cut throat graduates who wouldn't blink at thrusting her from her precarious throne, knife lodged firmly between her ribs).
She drank champagne, and exchanged contract clauses and confidentiality breaching smiles. She read the unhappiness in the lines, (and plastic filled lack of) in the over moisturised faces of her colleagues, the sacrifices they'd (she'd) made, the emptiness they (she) felt, the years of 11pm cab rides home from the city, the meals they (she) inhaled carefully above shareholder agreements and circulating resolutions.
It started to close in on her and she felt the too familiar shortness of breath, the swimming sensation in her head, the tears threatening to run her make up in rivulets down her cheeks. With a practiced calm (liar) she excused herself from the conversation and through a set of doors into the cooling evening air.
Lucy knew she wanted to be a lawyer before she finished school. She had pushed her way through law school like an impatient baby insisting to be born, she'd battled as a junior lawyer, against the competition, stabbing and being stabbed as required, and was now reaping the rewards, young corporate lawyer of year, a senior associate position dangling in her near future and decent sized diamond (and boyfriend attached) sitting on her finger. Yet all of a sudden, a set of piercing green eyes and soft lips the colour of fire and pain and accusation and temptation and passion had made her see her stark dissatisfaction. She lent against a stair rail and inhaled, she hated her job and its insistent consumption of her. She hated her pale wood panelled office; she hated her superficial friends, her boring, appropriate fiancé, but mostly herself, her boundless ambition, her boring topics of conversation, her manicured nails, the furious anxiety that gripped at her throat over the years, her stick thin heels.
She took off her shoes, the concrete pressed into her stockinged feet as she ran away from it all. The image of her unidentified attacker was foremost in her mind, those eyes. She sat on a stone bench overlooking a river, ladders climbing up her stockings, giggling children flowing around her, and tried to think, but she could not clear her mind. All she could see was the eyes, the lips, the hair, the rose coloured cheeks that had stopped her in her tracks.
"Are you ok", the burning red lips feigned concern, the green eyes sparkled in front of her,
"No, why did you do that to me?"
