“Positive. I’d probably get a lot more action if I was, but sadly no.”
Satisfied, Emily pranced into my bedroom. “Do you have another pair of man pajamas for me to wear?” she asked, and then stopped in her tracks. “What the hell is that?” She pointed, horrified, at the rain bubble hanging down from the ceiling. “It looks like a tit.” She jumped up on my bed and poked at the bubble with her pinky.
“Please don’t touch it,” I said.
“Look, it’s even got a little nipple. We should stick it with a pin and milk it.”
“I said don’t touch it!”
I tossed a clean pair of pajamas at her and went to the kitchen to let her get dressed in private.
This was so not the tightwad bitch I knew from the office. I couldn’t get over the fact that she’d actually used the word tit. I returned to the bedroom carrying the Jameson and two souvenir shot glasses.
Emily tilted her head at me and frowned. When she blinked, her blond bangs caught onto the tips of her eyelashes. “How old are you?” she asked. “Are we on spring break in Fort Lauderdale? Don’t you have any rocks glasses?”
I dashed back to the kitchen and returned with the only other glassware I owned besides coffee mugs—old jam jars with the labels torn off.
“That’ll do,” Emily said, unscrewing the cap from the whiskey.
I also brought out my coveted box of Thin Mints from the freezer, a sure way to impress any houseguest—not that I was trying to impress Emily Johnson, but still.
“Want one?” I asked, holding an icy-cold cookie out toward Emily.
She shook her head no, but I noticed her smile.
“You live here alone?” Emily scanned my cramped yet sparsely furnished space. “I figured,” she added, before I could answer. She pulled her golden hair back into a ponytail. “You seem like the loner type. It’s probably because you have low self-esteem.”
Why exactly had I let this girl in from the rain? She was a textbook example of why I never invited anyone over.
As Emily got drunk, her eyelids grew heavy and her speech pattern slowed, but she didn’t get any friendlier, as some people do. “You shouldn’t feel self-conscious about being a thirty-year-old assistant,” she said. “At least you’re good at it. Not everyone could handle how demeaning it is.”
Thanks, I thought. This was the Emily Johnson version of a compliment.
“So what’s your deal?” I asked, once I sensed she was inebriated enough. (I’d been waiting for her to become inebriated enough to ask.) “If you’re as broke as you say you are, then what’s with all the fancy clothes and jewelry? How do you pay for it all?”
Emily brought her Connecticut lockjaw back into play for her response. “I live by the kindness of others,” she said. “The kindness of men.”
Pure Hollywood. I countered with my best Blanche DuBois impression. “Whoever you are,” I drawled with a Southern accent, brandishing my whiskey like a prop, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Emily lifted her eyebrows, bleary-eyed. “I don’t know what the hell that was, but please don’t ever do it again.”
“Sorry.” I set my glass back onto the nightstand.
I was finding Emily’s sense of humor difficult to pin down. I’d heard she’d gone to Harvard, but that couldn’t have been true. No one familiar with the Harvard Lampoon would have scoffed at a literary reference that way. Not to mention the fact that Emily was basically a professional con woman.
“Where did you go to college again?” I asked, with a bit too much nonchalance.
“When a man’s kindness comes up short,” Emily said, irrespective of my question, “and I don’t have it in me to drive all the way to my parents’ house, I sleep in the back of the Range Rover. Even that was a gift.”
“Some dude gave you a car?”
“Do you understand that a Range Rover isn’t just a car? It’s a one-hundred-K full-size luxury SUV.” Emily reached over me to refill her glass. “The guy who gave it to me was a famous plastic surgeon. After we broke up I tried to sell it, but it turned out to be a lease, so it’s mine for another year.”
“Can’t you just get one of these dumb guys to pay off your debt,” I asked, “so we don’t have to resort to grand larceny?”
“It doesn’t work that way.” Emily finally gave in and reached for a Thin Mint.