Overnight Wife(13)
As for her, she doesn’t seem to have noticed anything. If she recognizes me, at least she’s too professional to let it show right now, something for which I’m deeply grateful. “Did I hear someone shouting help?” she asks.
I point my thumb at the guy, who ducks his head and introduces himself as Daniel. “I was using the machine wrong. She was just about to show me the proper way.”
“Mara,” I add, sticking my hand out to shake first Daniel’s and then this new girl’s hand.
“Bianca,” she answers. “Do you need any help?” Her eyes skitter around the room and then land on the disaster that used to be my carefully sculpted antlers. It’s half a pile of unfinished mushy clay and half a pile of shattered antler ends that will be melted down and remolded after I’m finished helping Daniel. “Maybe I could clean up a bit.”
“That’d be great, thanks,” I tell her. She sets off to clean up my area while I instruct Daniel on the proper usage of this tool. To his credit, after that initial mishap at least, he seems to be paying very close attention to every single thing I say. He even takes out a notepad to jot down some of the more important steps. By the time I finish explaining it to him, I’m at the very least not worried that he’s going to accidentally take his fingers off.
It’s still to be determined whether he can work the thing well enough to get some decent designs out of it, especially the kind of delicately shaped ones we’ll need for this particular set, which is half a hunting lodge (hence my antler designs) and half an outdoor scene, which will need not only trees and branches and a forest, but also stars and the moon overhead. It’ll be a tricky set to pull off without crossing over into cheesy territory. The last thing we want is to look like some high schooler’s play with second-rate set designs. I’m pretty sure none of us would last more than a couple weeks on the job if we turned out something like that—no matter how much of an in we might have with the boss.
The thought of that makes my stomach flip again, and I can’t help but steal another glance over at Bianca, who’s moved on to tidying the rest of the room after she finished sweeping up my antler mess. Does she know what she saw? Did she figure out it was me?
As if my situation couldn’t get any more awkward or embarrassing.
Bianca catches me staring at her and smiles, heading over to my side like I summoned her. Maybe I did. I’m still not really sure how this whole setup works. I know I’m supposed to have a couple of assistants on my team reporting to my same manager, to help out with tasks I set them. But I’m not sure if Bianca is one of them, or if she’s just so eager to prove herself on day one that she doesn’t care who’s giving her jobs as long as she can complete them.
“What should I do next? Anything more you need?” she asks, and I bite the inside of my lip, considering.
“Not sure. Er… do you have the time to help? I don’t want to keep you, if you have other duties…”
She shrugs and spreads her hands wide with a what can you do sort of laugh. “I’m not sure yet. Mr. Walloway is supposed to be giving me an assignment, but he told me he wouldn’t have anything put together until tomorrow, so he just said to help out for now…”
The sound of John’s last name makes my heart skitter in my chest all over again. How could I be this stupid? I’d googled John Walloway a thousand times before now, obviously. But I only ever read his work profiles, interviews about how he started this company and why. Those interviews, in magazines like the New Yorker and Economist almost never included photos—or if they did, they were moody Steve Jobs-esque photos in profile, where you could hardly make out John’s face, let alone any identifying features. It never even occurred to me to google pictures of the guy himself. Why would I? I figured he’d be some higher up I’d see but never actually speak to around the office.
Someone I’d eventually want to get to know, to have know me, but not… Not in the way you did, you idiot. My inner critic hasn’t stopped lambasting me all day. Of all the guys I could choose for a random Vegas hook up—let alone marriage….
But I force those thoughts from my head, hoping that Bianca won’t read too much into the extremely pregnant pause hovering in the air between us now. “Hmm, well, I don’t have too many more jobs around here, unless you want to help me melt down that clay and start reshaping a new set of antler designs—”
“Sure!” Bianca perks up right away, which makes my eyebrows rise.
“You really don’t have to.”
“Don’t be silly.” She elbows me. “I’d love to help. Sounds more fun than all the desk work I’ll be doing soon anyway, right?” Her smile is so open and earnest, I can’t bring myself to question it.
So together we cross over to the ovens and set about putting together some new clay molds that I can shape into the huge antler sets we’ll need. As we work, we chat about our backgrounds and how we got started at Pitfire. Unlike me, Bianca comes from a marketing background, so she’s not interested in the actual set design part of what we’re doing here. But she talks a lot about how much she admires “Mr. Walloway”’s business strategies, and how she really wanted the assistant job so she could learn from him about getting ahead at work.
“If there’s anyone who can teach a girl how to rise up through the world with the cards stacked against us ladies, it’s him, right?”