Fancy Love

Fancy Love: Part 1

“You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”  - Oscar Wilde

“Ailec?”

Ailec looked up, surprised to see her colleague, Jess, in her office, sitting in her visitor’s chair, and peering at her with an interesting mix of concern and amusement. “Hi... where’d you come from?”

“Through your door, which I’d knocked on first and said your name twice before you noticed,” Jess said, “Are you alright?”

“Sorry, and yeah, I’m fine. Just looking over the finances.”

Ailec was living her dream, kind of. She had started a left-slanted political online magazine almost a year ago, and she was proud it was still running and steadily increasing its reader base. They’d started turning a profit, albeit a small one, a month ago, and Ailec had taken Jess out to dinner to celebrate. It’d been her first time out to dinner in months. It was a struggle, she still had debt incurred by start-up costs, and the salary she was paying herself was well below minimum wage.

“How’s it looking?”

“It’s definitely improving,” Ailec said. She’d never directly told Jess how dire things were. She paid Jess what she thought was fair for a staff writer at an up and coming online publication, and Jess seemed happy with it. It was an awful lot more than she paid herself, but PolitiRag was her baby, and she was determined to make it work.

“Well... good,” Jess said, still looking at her searchingly. Her boss hadn’t turned up in a new piece of clothing for the ten plus months they’d worked together. Right now she had on an old band t-shirt, faded jeans and a pair of cons that were admirable in their effort to hold themselves together, if relatively unsuccessful. “Is that... electrical tape?” she asked, as she spotted the shoes from her side of the desk.

“Maybe...” Ailec said, withdrawing her legs until her feet were tucked up well under her chair, her shoes out of sight. Pushing a stray strand of dark red hair behind her ear, she felt a touch self-conscious. She knew Jess had picked up enough over the months to know she was scraping by at home.

“How’s your roommate?”

Ailec shook her head, “Still as moronic as ever. I’ve started to give up hope that he’ll ever improve.”

“You really should find something else,” Jess said, frowning again at her boss. She couldn’t quite work out how Ailec was getting by on what she must be paying herself. Of course, she didn’t know exactly what that was, but she had a good idea of what advertising deals they were currently running and what their readership had grown to.

“All in good time,” Ailec agreed. Her ‘roommate’, Mark, was, to put it mildly, difficult to live with. When he’d swept her off her feet more than five years ago, she’s married him in a whirlwind event followed only months later by an equally whirlwind divorce. She’d lived with him for the last 12 months out of pure desperation.

He was currently unemployed, which meant he had a lot of time on his hands. The most serious problem with the set up, however, was the fact that he just would not take “I’m not interested” as an answer from Ailec. And she really wasn’t interested in revisiting their particular brand of relationship again. “I do keep an eye on rental prices, Jess. There’s nothing out there that’s this cheap.”

“Yeah, I wonder why?” Jess said, rolling her eyes.

Ailec had a pretty good idea why. The one bedroom flat was owned by Mark’s parents and she had a feeling that not only did they not charge Mark rent, but they also had no idea she lived there or that he charged her rent. A corner of the living area had been curtained off and made into a ‘second bedroom’. Needless to say, she didn’t have friends over a lot, but as they say beggars can’t be choosers. “No idea,” she said, lips quirking into a grin.