Sip of Assistance

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

“Can I help you?” came the southern draw of an attractive blonde from behind the desk in front of me.

“Yes, I have an appointment with Mr. Cordova. My name is Holly Preston,” I replied politely.

“Go ahead and have a seat, sweetie, I’ll let you know when he’s ready for you.”

She flashed a perfect smile at me, the kind meant for Crest toothpaste commercials. She looked much more like a model than a secretary. Even sitting in the small gray swivel chair, I could tell she was very tall and runway slender. That’s the thing about living in this region. I can spot a model, a fake tan, silicone breasts, and veneers in mere seconds. Fairly often I bear witness to the quadruple whammy.

On the surface, at first glance, this town has the most beautiful people you could ever see. But when you look deeper, they are often the ugliest people you'll ever meet; manipulating, conniving, ladder climbing, money-grubbing, lying, egocentric, and elitist. There are very few people you can trust. That is, in part, why I worry that my indiscretion will hurt me in the future. I was not sleeping my way to the top. However, there are enough people willing to dirty their knees for fame that someone like me, who just made a mistake, could be written off as merely another floozy.

Without wanting to, I pictured myself the day Jonathon Roberts hired me.

You see, the day I graduated from college, I packed up all of my belongings and moved to California. 

My father, sick for years, had died when I was twenty.  After that I had transferred from the local city college to the university, moving away from our small town of Fort Dodge to the marginally larger Iowa city.  In 2 years I'd gotten my degree, bought a one way ticket and didn't look back.  All I thought about was a more exciting life in a real city, Los Angeles. 

I had no real experience as a personal assistant, no high-up connections, and as far as education goes, my bachelor’s in philosophy didn’t qualify me for the job. Luckily  it seemed fate didn't care about my qualifications.

That day I had already been in LA for nearly three weeks and had been lucky enough to finally land a job interview for a secretarial position to a well-known agent named Joan Whittaker, that I at the time, had never heard of.  Since it was the only lead I had and the type of position I had never imagined taking, I decided to go for it.  This was my chance to have a different identity, learn another skill set, and leave the blue collar life of my past behind.

It was a nine a.m. interview and I was there twenty minutes early on the fourteenth floor of a large coldly designed building sitting with my legs crossed, watching the seconds tick by on a large modern clock when life decided I deserved a fascinating fork in an otherwise bleak road.  I remember that I was in my most professional gray pantsuit- which I hated.  If it would have been allowed I would have worn my favorite pair of faded ripped jeans and a black tank top.  I was all about comfort and the stuffy corporate world was not exactly my playground.  Still, I tried to sit tall and look like a worldly confident woman that held within her a great many valuable assets.

It was only moments later that a door to my right burst open and a tall, thin frame of a man came barging clumsily out.  He slammed the door behind him and looked down right pissed off.  He looked at me menacingly and in turn my eyes found interest in everything in the room save him, which seemed to be his intention. 

It was then that I realized I was completely alone with him in the brightly lit waiting room.  Even the desk behind me where a very petite bird-like woman had been answering phones was empty.

The stranger began walking forward towards the elevators, but before he could get far he tripped on his untied shoe lace and came tumbling down towards my stiff form.  I was relieved that he didn’t land on top of me, but my respite was short-lived when I registered that his head had struck the arm of my chair pretty hard in the fall. He was on the floor at my feet holding a cut in his forehead.  The dark hateful eyes he had only just used to glower towards me were now gone and replaced with the wide incredibly vulnerable eyes you see on the faces of freshly injured children as the recognition of their accidents begin to color their features.