Her Song

2 - A Stand Up Guy

**Kim**

Prison time was a risk I was almost willing to take.

I'd seen Prisoner Cell Block H. I was pretty sure I could hold my own in the prison laundry. If Raquel didn't stop telling her new part-time girl how close she and Lucy had been when she'd worked here I was almost certain that I was going to bash the side of her head in with the heavy crystal tester of 'Blackman Legacy' prominently displayed on her counter.

Raquel thought she was something special because our former workmate, and my best friend Lucy Connelly also known as Hero Lucinda Connelly-Clarke, was the face of Blackman Cosmetics' latest fragrance. To hear Raquel talk you'd think they'd been childhood friends who'd shared their secrets over ice-cream and pint glasses of sweet white wine.

For a start Lucy hated Raquel, as much as Lucy could hate anyone which was probably more extreme dislike, even for her knob head ex-boyfriends who'd trash talked her to the tabloids. That was okay though I hated them, and Raquel, enough to make up for her lack of commitment to the hating cause.

Secondly although Lucy was a big fan of wine, for pity's sake the woman had a wine cellar, she had never in her life drunk sweet white out of a pint glass. Her fiancé Bas had just bought her Riedel glasses specifically for all her favourite wine varietals. No. The person in our squad most likely to drink wine from a pint glass, but never sweet wine Keanu forbid, was me. Just ask any of my family and they'd tell you that's the type of girl I am. My older brothers, their mother, my mother, my step-mother, my father and maybe even my younger sister; they'd all tell you that I am the kind of family disappointment that would drink wine from a pint glass. It was pretty much the only thing they agreed upon, my status as the family failure. Even as the black sheep of my family I wouldn't be saying prost with Rachel any time soon.

"Oh my goodness Kim!" Millie the part-timer called, "Can you believe that Raquel and Hero Connelly-Clarke are so close?" Poor Millie was ridiculously excited. Who could blame her? She was fresh out of beauty college and filled with dreams of magazine editorials and Instagram fame. Somehow she'd managed to land herself here. In our little cosmetics department. It's not like we didn't have the major brands or even some of the more niche ones but let's face it, we weren't Harrods or Harvey Nichols or Selfridges, nor were we one of the other big stores on Oxford or Regent Streets.

"It's hard to imagine." I snarked and Raquel sent an evil glare in my direction. God this place was dire since Georgie had thrown a fit and walked out into the fairly cushy life of a celebrity assistant. Clearly I realise that for most celebrity assistants it's not a cushy life but bloody Georgie had managed to land on her feet with a job working for Bas.

I stalked around my counter and began to viciously polish the glass. If it were possible to rub a hole clean through a pane of glass I'd have done so. I was slamming testers into place with maybe a tiny bit too much force when Lorna, the cosmetics department supervisor, clacked her way over to Raquel's counter. How Lorna's feet weren't worn to bloody stumps by now was a mystery. She was tiny but made up for her lack of height with the height of her heels. I wasn't the tallest of girls, some basketball player sized guy I'd met at a party once had asked me how I felt about stand up blow jobs, but I was not about to destroy my feet on a daily basis with the kind of spike heels that Lorna favoured.

"Ladies," Lorna cast an eagle eye from Raquel and Millie over to me. I polished and slammed harder. "Busy I see?" Yes, it was a question and there was no correct answer. If you said yes she'd find some way to comment on how you didn't seem to be and ask about your figures, if you said no she'd tell you that surely there was something you could be doing rather than chatting.

Poor Millie. She hadn't been around long enough to know that Lorna had zero interest in idle conversation so she leaped right in. I could have stopped her but I think we've already established that I'm not that nice a person.