Scissor Link Georgette Kaplan (best self help books to read .TXT) 📖

“Willingness?” Wendy asked, not giving an inch. “I think I proved how willing I was when I came into your office and let you fuck me.”

“I didn’t lay a finger—”

“I didn’t say you touched me, I said you fucked me.” Wendy’s lips curled around the word, relishing the slight emphasis she put into it, the quiver she saw go through Janet. Not much—the radio mast on a skyscraper in a high wind—but she saw it. “You asked me into your office and you. Fucked. Me.”

Janet stood up slowly, like a rattlesnake uncoiling its head, and Wendy thought maybe this hadn’t been exactly the best tack to take. “You should leave this office right now.”

“Or what?” Wendy asked, marshaling her willpower. It didn’t hurt that Janet with her arms steepled on her desk, glaring at Wendy with all kinds of power, inspiring the kind of awemost people only got from religion, was actually kinda hot. “You’ll spank me?”

“I ought to,” Janet snapped. “I should bend you over this desk and paddle your ass until you’re begging me to stop.” The very tip of the left side of Janet’s lip hooked upward. “Or to keep going. As long as you beg.”

God, she could be a smug bitch. “Is that supposed to scare me? Do it. You have my permission or safe word or whatever. Get on with it. Punish me already.”

And as Janet stared at her, her lips looking as dry as Wendy’s felt, her gaze raking over Wendy’s body like fingernails down her back, like warm water over her skin, Wendy realized something.

Janet was into her. She was attracted to her. Janet Lace had a big fucking girl-crush—scratch that, regular crush, sexy crush—on her. Wendy Cedar. After all, Janet had seen her go-sign and she’d taken it. What was that? Target of opportunity? No, Janet Lace could have any woman she wanted. It was just that she wanted Wendy. Nothing else to it. After all, it wasn’t like this was Jane Austen and she was trying to marry into a well-to-do family… Well, Wendy was from a well-to-do family, but it still wasn’t Jane Austen!

And then, just like that, Janet snapped shut. Wendy saw a flicker of doubt in her eyes, some inner decision-making tilting to one side, and then the mask was back up. Janet regarded Wendy like something on the side of the road. She rose to her full height, her fingers tapering off the desk.

“I believe I asked you to leave,” Janet said. “Please return to your office and resume your work.”

Wendy bit the inside of her cheek, weighting her options, whether to press Janet, whether it was unthinkably insane to try to press Janet, then realizing that her best bet was to sweat Janet a little and she’d already done that enough, insouciantly lingering in her presence. “All right,” she said. “And I won’t even make you promise not to watch my ass as I go.”

And as she went—feeling like she had more sway than her iPod—Wendy wondered if she’d actually been cool for a moment there.

Janet thought of starting up the Kee Bird like playing a symphony, note by note, every key struck lingering in the air as pregnant as a thunderhead. There’d be the quadruplets of the control panel, one for each of the Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone engines: Polly, Ida, Norma, and Pat.

She’d start with Norma; her first cat had been named Norman. The battery switch would set voltage meters flickering, the needles moving like the twitching finger in a zombie movie. Then the rest would follow in satisfying sequence, each a little crescendo: the auxiliary power unit and the mixture levels and the throttle and the booster pumps; the circuit breakers and booster coil; the start and prime switches.

That would do it: there’d be a metal scream from the starter, the propeller jerking like a body hit by a bullet, the slow spin that followed, and then the magneto, like a flick of a horse’s reins sending it into motion once it’d been saddled. The deeply held breath of the exhaust would finally exhale, hacking up flame wrapped in smoke, and the prop would twirl faster, faster, oil pressure rising, oil temperature rising, reaching for the green…

Janet imagined that the smoke didn’t stop with the engine clearing its throat, but continued: a never-ending purge of oily black that surrounded the cockpit in a sheath of night. The rattle of the engines growing jarring, hard, unfriendly; shaking the ship that held them like a hound with its prey. The smoke seeping into the cabin, the gauges malfunctioning. The fire now: heat pushing into the cockpit, flame following, pushed by the smoke or pulling it along, some terrible symbiosis devouring the plane between the two of them. The metal groaning as it was rent. As it blistered, bubbling, the entire plane the surface of a skillet, the air filled with the hazy distortion of the heat, stinging the eyes even before the smoke hit, the fire struck. If you were lucky, maybe there was enough fuel left to explode and rip you out of the plane the only way that you could get loose…

“Mrs. Lace?” Mary Borchardt called.

Janet snapped to attention to see that the room’s gaze had turned to her. She was in the middle of a meeting—a meeting scheduled for two hours, which meant it was now at three and a half hours. And she had spaced out. She never spaced out.

She stood, adjusting her jacket for a beat as she reoriented herself, noticing a sheen of schadenfreude as those present enjoyed her being caught in an unprofessionalism. Very well. Let them have their fun. They wouldn’t get another laugh at her expense.

She moved to the head of the table to begin her presentation.

The sun set, the lights switched off, and Janet’s workday ended about an hour after Elizabeth had left. She decided she needed a better time management system. There was