I Love the 80s (7 page)

‘Are you planning on answering that?’ Ken’s disem-bodied voice demanded through the intercom, sounding
even more elfin through a machine, but also authoritative.

‘Of course, of course,’ Jenna muttered, then had to repeat it in a much more chipper voice into the intercom. She snatched up the phone, thinking,
seriously? I have to
work?
As a
secretary?
In my own dream?
Her usually much-maligned job in Accounts was looking better and better by the second.

‘Ken Dollimore’s office,’ she said into the mouthpiece, in an approximation of the way her own boss’s assistant answered the phone. It was a far cry from the belligerent way she barked out her own name when her office phone rang, but then, no one ever called her unless there was a problem, or she’d forgotten to remove her old takeout containers from the communal fridge.

Jenna took notes as someone named Gigi got increasingly hysterical on the other end of the phone – about some installation of something Jenna didn’t quite catch or care about – and she was replacing the phone into its cradle and wondering how she planned to explain that call to Ken, having not understood it herself, when the door to her office was thrown open.

Duncan Paradis walked inside, his solid barrel body moving low to the ground and his face arranged in a completely fake smile. It made her spine chill along its whole length to look at it.

‘There’s the hero of the hour,’ he said, the smile deepening. Jenna’s temperature dropped in direct response. ‘That was a great idea. How’d you come up with it?’

‘I’m so glad it worked out,’ she demurred, suddenly not at all interested in being perceived as a visionary. Or, for that matter, noticed by Duncan Paradis in any way. ‘It could have been a disaster.’

Duncan, she thought then, with a sudden flash of insight, had wanted it to be a disaster. She remembered the look on his face when she’d suggested the band act out their videos. He’d started to laugh, but then that considering gleam had taken over his gaze, and he’d stopped himself. Jenna had watched him. And she couldn’t help thinking that he’d wanted the band to look ridiculous.

But that didn’t make any sense at all.

‘Is the big man in?’ Duncan asked, through his teeth, with calculation in his cold eyes. ‘I have a proposition for him.’

‘He’s on a call,’ Jenna lied, and smiled fakely back at him. She indicated the couch against the wall with one hand. ‘If you’ll just take a seat … ?’

Jenna did not have to be told that Duncan Paradis was not used to being kept waiting. A muscle bunched in his jaw, even as he kept that smile beaming right at her. Once again, she had to restrain herself from checking for lacerations.

She leaned over and announced Duncan into the intercom, and then had to attempt to look busy and untroubled while Duncan Paradis prowled around the room, alternately glaring at the pictures on the wall and the side of her head. This was not easy for her to do, especially when confronted with the dinosaur of a computer in front of
her, one that most assuredly was not running the latest Windows operating system. In point of fact, it was not even running in
colour.
Not that Jenna had time to mourn the loss of her workplace Internet access – the widely accessible Internet being off in the future, if she recalled it all correctly – because Duncan Paradis was roaming malevolently in her peripheral vision.

When Ken finally opened the door, what seemed like years later, Jenna was ready to weep with gratitude. Duncan Paradis, for all that he was such an expert talent spotter, scared her on a fundamental, animal level. Plus, he was an entitled asshole.

She sighed in relief when Ken’s office door closed behind him.

But she’d barely taken another breath before her office door opened again. And she went right ahead and held that breath, because, this time, it was Tommy Seer who walked inside.

It was like time froze around him. He’d stepped through the door and looked towards Ken’s door, but she saw it all in such tiny, spread-out increments. She saw the way the unflattering fluorescent lights cast a shadow across his face, highlighting his high cheekbones and the masculine thrust of his jaw. She saw the fine, long muscles in his arms, and the way his silly vest emphasized the width of his shoulders and the narrow span of his hips, with so much of his smooth golden skin on display.

And she felt him, just the sight of him like a physical
caress, sizzle through her skin, settle into her veins, and heat his way through her body.

‘Duncan’s in there?’ Tommy asked, jerking Jenna out of her daze.

‘Yes,’ she said. She meant,
yes, love me
and
yes, yes, yes
, but he didn’t seem to notice the undercurrents.

‘I don’t know how long he’ll be in there,’ Tommy said in a low voice, his American accent back. Along with that frown between his eyes. He stepped closer to the desk. ‘But I know what he’s going to do.’

‘You do?’ Jenna asked, far too dreamily. Tommy’s eyes narrowed – God, he was beautiful – and she coughed slightly. ‘What’s he going to do?’ she asked, aiming for a businesslike tone.

‘He’s going to hire you, borrow you, whatever,’ Tommy said matter-of-factly. ‘He’s going to sic you on me, in fact. I have no doubt.’

‘I already have a job,’ Jenna said. Stupidly. Besottedly.

Tommy smiled a thin sort of smile.

‘That won’t matter. Duncan always gets what Duncan wants.’ His voice was bitter, and his gaze had gone cold.

‘I don’t mean to argue,’ Jenna said, frowning. ‘But so does Ken.’

Tommy let out a laugh. A short, bitter sort of laugh.

‘Are you kidding? What Ken Dollimore wants is to keep Duncan happy, and away from MTV.’ He looked towards Ken’s door, and when he looked back at Jenna his mouth had tightened. ‘You think he likes you, his little protégée? He likes this company more.’

‘Wow,’ Jenna said, stung by his tone. And by the way he was looking at her – like she was an insignificant little ant or something, desperate to do Ken’s bidding. ‘That was a bit aggressive.’

Why, she wondered, did she find this man so attractive, even when he wasn’t being nice to her? Was Aimee right that this was all unhealthy? Was it a form of mental illness? Some Adam-related mental breakdown? Surely a sane person would be angry with the man, Eighties idol or no, and wouldn’t simultaneously notice that his butt looked particularly tasty in those scandalously tight leather pants, right?

Jenna was beginning to feel she wasn’t at all sane. And then she reminded herself that this was her
dream
, and felt that much crazier.

‘I want to hire you first,’ Tommy said impatiently. Jenna jerked her attention away from his ass.

‘Hire me to do what?’ she asked, and got caught up in his beautiful eyes once more. They were hypnotic. They were gor—

‘I want you to agree to do whatever it is Duncan asks,’ Tommy said in that low voice. He looked towards Ken’s door, and then back towards Jenna, the line between his brows deepening. ‘But before you do anything, talk to me, and we’ll figure out how you’ll play it. Do you understand?’ When Jenna only stared back at him, still mesmerized, he made an impatient noise. His mouth flattened out. ‘I’ll pay you, obviously. Whatever he offers, I’ll double.’

Jenna blinked. This was all getting extremely complicated, and they hadn’t even begun kissing. Yet.

‘What makes you think Duncan Paradis is going to offer me anything?’ she asked, her scepticism showing. ‘He looked at me like he’d prefer to choke me, if you want to know the truth. I really don’t think he’s looking to hire me.’

‘Trust me,’ Tommy Seer said.

And, sure, he said it in that bleak sort of way, but Jenna’s heart had been waiting to hear him say those words for twenty years – or any reasonable variation thereof. It wasn’t as if Tommy Seer had to
convince
her to do as he asked. It was a given.

‘Okay,’ Jenna said with a happy sigh. ‘I’ll do whatever you want.’

He looked at her for a moment, and his famously perfect mouth shifted to the left in what Jenna could only describe as a smirk.

‘Great,’ he said, in a tone that completely belied the sentiment.

‘Great,’ Jenna echoed. Was this when the kissing would start? Was this when he would declare that he could wait no longer, that his feelings could not be denied, that he
wanted her—

But, no, he was shaking his head. If that was an expression of sexual longing, Jenna had never seen anything like it before.

‘I have a feeling I’ll see you soon,’ Tommy said. Not, Jenna noticed, in a yearning or smoky sort of way that
would lead to some kind of cinematic romantic clinch. More in a resigned and dry kind of way that was anything but romantic.

‘Um, if you say so,’ Jenna said, not bothering to hide her confusion. Why was he looking at her like she was some combination of crazy and pathetic? Because she was familiar with the look in his eyes, having seen it so many times in Adam’s. It wasn’t any more pleasant coming from him, no matter how green his were.

She expected him to break then, to confess his over-powering feelings for her in ringing tones à la Mr Darcy, or to simply toss the desk aside like King Leonidas might have in
300
, had there been desks in ancient Sparta. She wouldn’t mind a satisfyingly over-the-top moment of passion. In fact, she thought one was sadly overdue.

Instead, Tommy Seer, who should have looked ridiculous in his Eighties Pop Star ensemble, turned on his heel and sauntered out of Jenna’s office as if he were some kind of great big jungle cat, all rolling gait and confidence. With nary a backward glance her way, to top off the indignity of it all.

Jenna didn’t believe he’d really left, for good, until several moments had passed and she was still gazing expectantly at the door.

She shifted in her seat, and tapped her fingers against the blotter on her desk. So far, this dream had involved work, inappropriate touching from Ken Dollimore, bullying from Duncan Paradis, and only the strangest and
least-satisfying Tommy Seer interactions imaginable – and this from someone who had imagined just about every Tommy Seer interaction there was, more than once.

And worst of all, there was still no freaking kissing.

The only thing worse than an extended dream about Tommy Seer in which a) he found her annoying, b) was kind of mean about it, and c) there was no kissing, was, Jenna discovered, being trapped in the back of a smelly New York taxi with Duncan Paradis.

Jenna wasn’t even sure how it had happened.

One moment she’d been sitting at her desk – or Jennifer Jenkins’s desk, whoever
she
was, and Jenna didn’t quite want to think about that – staring at the place where Tommy Seer had been standing as if the force of her will could make him reappear. The next moment Ken’s door had been tossed open, Ken and Duncan Paradis had come strolling out wreathed in fake bonhomie and cigar smoke, and Jenna had found herself summarily dispatched into Duncan Paradis’s keeping.

‘Just for a few days,’ Ken said, waving away Jenna’s high-pitched protest with a languid wave of his hand. ‘What a great experience for you, to have this kind of exposure to
such a big band. Someday, who knows, you can write a book about it, ha ha ha.’

When Duncan turned his back and headed for the door, Ken made a telephone with his right hand and mouthed the words: CALL ME TOMORROW. Then he shooed Jenna out of the office.

Cut to Jenna in the back of a retro chequered taxicab, scrunched in the furthest corner to avoid even a casual brush against Duncan’s pant leg, surrounded by the pervasive smell of long-saturated body odour, with a strange woman’s purse perched on her knees. It had been second nature to reach down into the desk drawer and pull out the bag sitting there – so much so that Jenna had been halfway down the hall in Duncan’s wake before she’d realized that the purse was not hers. Given that it was big, poufy, and neon baby blue, Jenna really ought to have noticed. Instead, she’d been so flustered by the triple punch of Tommy Seer, Duncan Paradis, and Ken Dollimore’s willingness to throw her to the lions that she’d run off with another woman’s bag. Something women tended not to take lightly, no matter how ugly the bag in question. Just one more thing to blame Duncan Paradis for, she thought sourly.

Not that the mighty Duncan Paradis was paying Jenna the slightest bit of attention. He was far too busy barking orders into a gigantic cellphone that looked as if it required two hands to lift. It was bigger, Jenna thought, than the portable house phone she used in her apartment. It was the size of a book, or one of the small dogs starlets toted
about. She was more worried than he seemed to be that it might adhere to his ruthlessly slicked-back hair. Nor could she imagine that the reception was all that great, with the huge antenna sticking out of the top, so long it almost brushed the ceiling of the cab.

Trying to ignore him, Jenna returned her attention to the bright blue bag in front of her. Worrying her lower lip with her teeth, she cracked open the top and peered inside. There was a comb the size of a dinner plate, a selection of mascaras and other cosmetics, a sheaf of papers, the usual pocketbook detritus including a collection of gum wrappers – which made her feel better at once, since
she
did not chew gum and this therefore definitely was not her own life – and, last but not least, a wallet. Gingerly, Jenna fished the wallet out, took a bracing sort of breath, and flipped it open.

She almost screamed.

Almost.

Jenna kept herself from shrieking out her horror by biting down hard on her own lower lip. And between that and the picture on the licence, she was scarred for life. The sudden, shooting pain in her lower lip, though it made her eyes water, did nothing to dispel the horrific sight of a person who looked entirely too much like Jenna, sporting painstakingly sculpted bangs and what amounted to a mullet.
A mullet
, Jenna thought as a dull tide of horror swept through her. A
hairsprayed
mullet with height as well as lustrous frizz on the end.
Hideous, hideous, hideous
. If Jenna had been asked to describe what her worst nightmare
bad-hair day would entail, it was the hair she saw on the driver’s licence in her hand – hair that might as well have been on her own head, that was how much she and Jennifer Jenkins resembled one another.