Dream Job
Dream Job
Mickey J. Corrigan
Breathless Press
Calgary, Alberta
www.breathlesspress.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Dream Job
Copyright© 2012 Mickey J. Corrigan
ISBN: 978-1-77101-082-5
Cover Artist: LFD Designs
Editor: Kristie L McKinley
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in reviews.
Breathless Press
www.breathlesspress.com
Dream Job
Mickey J. Corrigan
Chapter One
He hired me on a Wednesday in June at ten in the morning. That night, we made love. Yes, I was grateful to be employed. But not that grateful.
In fact, I had been surprised that he’d hired me in the first place. I wasn’t expecting success. When I got out of my car in front of the high-rise where the headquarters for DreamCorp International towered overhead, sweat dripped between my breasts. I wore a creamy blouse with long, billowy sleeves and a black silk skirt that fell below my knees. I was attempting to look professional, but the heat made me look sloppy. A haze hung in the sky, and the temperature hovered around ninety degrees.
When I entered the marble building, I kept perspiring. As I rode the elevator and listened to the smarmy songs of Majik 108, my body continued dripping. So I was pretty damp when I walked into the glass-walled conference room where I met with my future employer.
He sat at the far end of a long, sleek table. The air-conditioning blew frosty air between us.
“Your resume is impressive, Ms. O’Baniff,” he stated as soon as I seated myself in a soft green leather chair. “I like your solid background in editorial, but we need someone who knows how to read between the lines and come up with punchy descriptions.”
I too was impressed. I liked his solid-looking body, all six feet of him. I liked the nicely browned and toned torso that peeked out from under his white polo shirt. I liked the timbre of his voice and the way his long blond hair fell softly on his neck. Reading between the lines was one of my specialties, but I didn’t catch him looking at me with anything but professional appraisal.
“I’ve been dreaming about a job like this for years, Mr. Hamm,” I told him. “I’m a hard worker, I have no family to distract me, and I’m loyal. You can rely on me. I’ll be your dream girl.”
Corny, but the kind of punch line he liked, I guess. He hired me on the spot and sent me out to consult with his secretary. Matta recited a list of things I would need to bring with me on my first day of work, which would begin the next morning.
It turns out Hamm liked me wet.
“Bathing suit, casual, not too sexy; goggles with antifog lenses. Also, you’ll need a smartphone and an mp3 player; a blow dryer and flip-flops. I always advise the girls to bring a beach cover of some kind because the AC in this building is set so low during the summer, some of us get chills.”
I must have looked shocked as I transcribed her list on a piece of scrap paper, because Matta laughed and slapped me playfully on the arm. A big woman with a messy head of unruly curls, Matta had the kind of relaxed, friendly personality that made me feel like I could say anything.
“What the hell have I gotten myself into here?” I asked, and Matta laughed again.
She was dressed in bleached jeans and a colorful peasant blouse. I smiled to myself as I realized I wouldn’t have to dress up for this job.
“All employees are required to test-drive the new products,” Matta explained. “We have a rooftop test area. There’s a heated pool. You’ll love it,” she reassured me.
Test-drive software in a swimming pool? This seemed totally strange, but intriguing.
Matta grinned at me. She was as tan as her boss, healthy-looking. I pointed to the pale, freckled skin of my fine Irish neck. Bone-china white; that was my color. I have the kind of skin that flourishes in Dublin or Boston and bakes to a crisp in South Florida.
“What about sunscreen?”
“It’s an indoor pool,” Matta said before turning back to a pile of paperwork stacked neatly on her desk. “Your PR work will be public, but all the testing work you do will remain private. When you come in tomorrow, Adrianna, I’ll have you fill out the required nondisclosure forms.”
I nodded and left for the mall.
***
By nightfall, I lay on my bed, a cooked goose, plucked and overheated. The temperature was defying the rules and refusing to drop below eighty-five. Outside my studio apartment, not even a shadow of a breeze rustled the ficus hedges. All along the beach that stretched itself out behind my building, the hot air lay still on the white sand. Even the coconut palms drooped.
Exhausted from mall shopping, but keyed up from the job interview, I stared at the bamboo ceiling fan and listened to it whirr. The beer I’d opened when I got home kept sweating until the sides of the bottle were slick, the soft pine nightstand beside me ringed and wet.
It was on that steamy night, when sleep came hard, slow, and in snatches, that Hamm and I first coupled. Over and over again.
His wide hands were soft, damp, and as juicy as any kiss. His lips were wet too, and they tasted of the sea. At first he simply held me close, exuding warmth and an almost feminine sensuality, a nurturing type of pleasure. Soon enough he had me panting like a marathoner, my panties around my ankles and his pulsing erection sliding in and out in just the right way. He knew how to nudge me to the edge, then pause until I begged. As if he’d made love to me many, many times before. He teased something out of me, something real and deep, so I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to.
Of course I fell wildly in love with him. Who wouldn’t? He’s drop-dead gorgeous with the kind of lean but powerful body I crave. He reminded me of a fair version of George Clooney: a smoldering American boy-next-door. He didn’t say much, but he looked at me in a way that made me feel beautiful, sexy, and lusted-after. He acted hungry for me, like it had been months since he’d last had a woman.
In my case, it had been a really long time between lovers. But my own hunger was tinged with amazement and self-doubt. Charlton Hamm is an icon, a successful mover and shaker in the corporate world. What did this multimillionaire genius see in me? I’m one of those working-class chicks, the kind of ruddy Irish girl you see in the local bars, funny and sharp but lost, victim to a strong taste for beer and emotionally unavailable men.
We must have had sex four, maybe five times. That’s a lot of sex for one night when you’re both over the age of twenty. I felt so alive in his hands. When he stared into my eyes, both of us finally spent from the last shuddering climax, I could see a tiny reflection of myself. I was there, inside him, floating in the clear blue pools of his eyes. It was as if he could look directly into my heart, or perhaps it was my mind. Wherever it was, I felt something touch me there sweetly in the depths of my innermost self. I’m not a religious person, but I felt blessed by his passion for me.
***
On Thursday morning, my new boss ignored me at the office. When his gaze swept the room, I felt an icy gust pass over me. Whenever I asked him a question he looked directly at me, polite and attentive, but I saw nothing at all in his eyes. Nothing registered. I was nothing to him.
Was I disappointed? Yes. Was my heart crushed? Oh yes. But was I surprised? No. His behavior toward me at company headquarters was to be
expected. He was the CEO, and I was a new hire. We were on the job, professionals in a corporate setting. We would behave properly and keep our private lives private.
Besides, when we’d had sex the previous night, it had been in a dream.
I don’t mean it was dreamy. I’m not saying it was like a dream. What I mean is this: we made love in a dream. My dream.
Dreaming of making love to my new boss was a normal reaction to getting hired by a handsome new employer.
Except that this was not the case. Because the dream I had the night after Hamm hired me was so unusual. The crazy way my heart pounded when he swept his cool palms across my bare skin; the way we stared into each other’s souls with the kind of knowing reserved for those who have shared a lifetime. There was something indescribable about the dream. Something familiar, yet strange.
Here’s the thing: the dream didn’t feel dreamlike. It felt too real. Way too real. Hyperreal.
Yet I knew it was a dream when I awoke at six for my first day of work at DCI. I knew right away that I had been dreaming, and that my long, lusty dream had been about Charlton Hamm; Mr. Cool, the superman inventor, the corporate founder of a multimillion-dollar software company. The man behind the curtain at DreamCorp International, where I would be sitting in a corner cubicle correcting spelling errors in a mountain of press releases.
As I lay there on my rumpled, sweat-soaked, threadbare sheets, the dream feelings lingered. I languished in the remnants of the night before. I could taste the salt and tang of hours of hard sex. I could smell him, the woody scent of his skin, the lemon in his shampoo. When I replayed the lovemaking in my head, I could still feel the overwhelming heat of our connection, the way our bodies locked and unlocked, the animal rhythm we had created together, slow at first, then faster and faster until we were both crying out, loud, then louder.
When I finally got out of bed to head for the shower, my legs shook.
As I stood there in the hot, steamy water, I reminded myself over and over that it had only been a dream. I didn’t really have to convince myself. I knew the night of lovemaking with that awesome god of a man had been a dream. I knew it had occurred in a place between my life and my imagination, in that unreachable interior space I occupied alone.
I was no fool. I was mature. I could handle it, I told myself as I toweled off.
By the time I slipped into my white jeans and sleeveless gray cashmere sweater, my body no longer trembled, and I had convinced myself that the feelings from the dream were fleeting. It was only a dream of making love to a stranger. A dream like any dream, soon to be forgotten.
***
As it turns out, I was partly right. The lovemaking had been a dream. But a dream unlike other dreams. A dream that would never be forgotten. One that would dramatically change who I was.
Soon enough, I would have more dreams that would never be forgotten. Dreams that threaten my life and would lead to my undoing. I know what you’re thinking. Those are some dreams. Oh yeah. And you don’t know the half of it yet.
Chapter Two
Before I tell you about the dreams and where they’ve taken me, I’ve got to introduce you to Davis. Although he’s dull when you meet him, after that, he’s bizarre. When you get to know him, Davis is a trip. A long and scary trip.
I guess you could say the guy’s my ex. I made the mistake of befriending this sad sack when we were both lonely and underemployed while trying to scrape by in Woolcox, Florida. Where, you might ask? Nowhere. Woolcox is so far away from what’s happening that, really, it just doesn’t matter.
Picture yourself in the heart of the Everglades, then imagine the most remote town out in the middle of the tall, sharp grass and sun-beaten, overgrown wilderness. Imagine a post office the size of a toolshed and a rundown strip mall with five or six little stores: liquor store, food mart, pizza joint, Laundromat, an empty space that once housed the town newspaper, and an unpopular video rental outlet.
That’s Woolcox.
I had a job as the newspaper editor of what was left of The Woolcox Crier. I felt like crying every day myself. There was little to report and the paper, which I put together in my trailer home and took to the printer in Tampa, only came out once a week. I had a lot of time on my hands. I’m a fast writer and a slow drinker, and I kept myself occupied with those two things.
Davis had a part-time gig at Marty’s Liquors, where I was a regular customer. “I’ll have the usual, Davis,” I would say, and he’d ring up a six-pack of imported beer and a bottle of something red and cheap.
Speaking of red and cheap, I wore a lot of bright lipstick in those days, carefully selected to match my hair from a bottle, and a battered pair of ruby slippers, knockoff stilettos I wore for five years. Every time I stopped into Marty’s, poor, geeky Davis couldn’t stop staring. He’s one of those broomstick guys, too tall and way too thin. He had a dark brown mop of hair and a goatee with wisps of gray in it, but he had a nice smile, a genuine hip cat’s grin. And after I’d been around for a while, I discovered that Davis was funny, bright, and as horny as I was. Plus, he was just about the only person my age in that godforsaken town.
He was okay, old Davis. I needed a friend, and he could have been one. But I screwed things up between us, or maybe he did. I’m not sure. I only know I needed to be touched. Something was missing in my life. Actually, everything was missing. I wanted a distraction from writing nonsense and drinking too much discount Cabernet all by myself while sitting in a metal box in the middle of nowhere.
So I poured it on, flirting with him, wearing sports bras and cutoff jeans, flaunting my belly button ring and my lanky limbs. It didn’t take much time to get him into bed.
***
One night I dropped by Marty’s after drinking a few glasses of wine. I wasn’t falling-down drunk, but I was feeling pretty good in some places that could have felt a lot better if someone else got hold of them.
“Hey, Davis,” I said, and he grinned at me. His eyes were dark green, like two perfect olives in a clear glass of vodka. “What time do you get off?”
“About five minutes after you touch me,” he said.
And that was it. We went back to his apartment, and I made all his dreams come true.
Or at least he acted like I did.
That first night, we walked to Davis’s place in the steamy darkness, our hands occasionally brushing. The garage apartment was cluttered with a medley of weird-looking computers and piles of old magazines with geeky titles. Everything smelled of cat litter and stale pizza. His unmade bed was as small as a child’s and our feet hung over the end.
“Next time, I promise I’ll make it last,” he told me while I pulled up my shorts.
Yeah, sure.
“I mean it, Adrianna. You sort of took me by surprise,” Davis told me as I slipped on my shoes. “Wait until next time. I’ll make you love it.”
I was trying not to laugh. Poor Davis. He had no clue.
He got up and reached for me, but I pretended not to notice and scuttled away. He kept on talking as I opened the front door to let myself out.
“I can be good to women. I can give you what you want. You’ll see.”
I didn’t believe him, and I was right not to. Davis was hopeless as a lover, and yet, he thought he loved me. The situation was pathetic, but not particularly unique. I’d had other lovers who didn’t turn me on but who thought they made me feel something. He felt for me; therefore, that should be enough for me. Some guys think like this.
***
That’s most of what you need to know about Davis. Think of him this way: Ichabod Crane meets a girl and comes alive for a few months, then returns to his sleepy existence. I was just a dream in Davis’s sleeping mind, a hot, sexy, recurring dream that he got off on but couldn’t hang on to. Like most dreams, I was fleeting.
***
After a year and a half in Woolcox, I applied online for freelance work in Fort Lauderdale. Some rich people were looking for someone to write a memoir for an
elderly diplomat. When I got the job, I resigned from The Crier with one quick phone call. I immediately packed my stuff and rolled out of town that same day.
A normal person with normal feelings would be ashamed to admit this now, but I didn’t stop to say good-bye to Davis. In truth, I totally forgot about him. I stuffed my duffle bag with my books and pencils, coffee mugs and jeans. I packed a few cardboard boxes, tucked my laptop into a backpack, and piled the empties in the recycling bin. Then I got in my sad little excuse for a car and drove east.
Since I’m not a normal person with normal feelings, it wasn’t until I was a good hour from Woolcox that I remembered Davis. I didn’t feel bad about ditching the guy. We’d only been together a handful of times, none of them memorable. I shrugged and kept driving toward the sunlit beach, the sparkling sand, the turquoise ocean, the wild parties and crowded bars full of young people looking for excitement. The life I was meant to live.
Or so I thought.
***
The ghosting gig lasted almost a year, until the diplomat died. The family paid me a kill fee and took the project to a major publisher, and I looked for new work in the area. Month after month, I made ends meet with brief freelance copywriting jobs while I applied for a permanent position. I liked South Florida; the cool ocean breezes, the pink and yellow pastel buildings with bright orange tile roofs, the bursts of purple bougainvillea and spiky palms, the easy laid-back attitude. Sun, fun, money. That was about all anybody cared about, so I was able to just surf along without much trouble.