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Is this what life did to you? Beat you down each year until you were slumped and groaning in your thirties? Gertrude was twenty-two and already felt exhausted by it all. Things had to work outonce in a while, right? Fighting the good fight had to result in victory every so often.
She must’ve seemed unsympathetic, sitting next to her boss/friend/mentor. Because she did not pat Olivia on the back. Did not embrace her or murmur reassurance. She sat, her leg jiggling with impatient anxiety, chewing a nail thoughtfully. Her eyes could not leave the not entirely unattractive face of Woodrow Barret.
“It might work,” Gertrude said.
“What?”
“The divorce thing. We need to tweak it, of course. I’m not marrying him but—”
Olivia sat up, blinking against the intoxication to listen. “You mean… lead him on?”
Gertrude shrugged. “I heard a girl in class bragging about her boyfriend buying her a husky after a month together. And that guy definitely wasn’t a billionaire. I think he sold drugs, actually.”
“I love a man who provides,” Olivia said dryly. “What’s your point?”
“What if—and I’ll need help because I am not good at this—I text him. I… date him. We—" Gertrude gestured around the break room, “We get him to fall in love with me. Whatever it takes. And in doing so, I convince him to pay off the bookstore debt for us. Or at least leave us alone until we can get business going."
Olivia nodded with each sentence, keeping in time with her pauses. “If you pitch it to him as this is the place you come to have silly, girly fun, like it’s your dollhouse or something, that it isn’t a threat to him, it’s his precious girlfriend’s little job…"
Gertrude fluttered her eyelashes. “I’m just a sweetie pie who loves books, dontcha know? Head empty, no thoughts. Just romance books and flowers, and I just need my big dick billionaire boyfriend to pay everything off so I can drink lattes with the girlies.”
“Oh, you’re good at this,” Olivia said. Her sadness evaporated; she was upright now, tying her hair back. The joke murder/heist bulletin board was suddenly valuable. “Are you serious?”
Gertrude tipped back on the hind legs of her chair as the two of them examined the board like detectives on a case. “I didn’t have many friends until the bookstore,” she said slowly. “I’m not a reach-out-and-connect type of person. This has been really good for me. Now some guy wants to throw around money to shut us down, so what? He can have more money? Fuck that.”
“I understand. I just don’t want you doing anything you’re uncomfortable with.”
“You’ve seen the books I read, Olivia. I have no trigger warnings.”
“For that joke, you’re fired.”
“Watch out, I’ll get my rich boyfriend to run you out of town.”
“Oh he’s your boyfriend now?”
“Sent me flowers, didn’t he?”
***
The DNF sold two dozen books the day after the Going Out of Business party. There were several customers, plus another offer by a different, competing investor to buy the business outright.
The staff took no notice of such things.
All day long they cooked up different ways to text Woodrow Barret.
Ariana favored the nuclear approach. “Send him a picture.”
“I’m not sending him nudes you psycho—"
“Not nudes, just a picture. A little skin. Maybe don’t wear a bra, maybe do wear shorts that show off your thighs. Find a mirror, tongue out, hit him with heyyyyyy with lots of Ys.” She shrugged, smirking. “Always works for me.”
“Yeah, I’ve met your ex-boyfriends,” Gertrude said. “They were like fish, attracted to shiny objects.”
Arianna flipped her hair. “So I do a little catch and release, what of it?”
“We’re trying to get him devoted enough to buy me a store.”
“Wrap your thighs around his head, make him devoted to that pussy.”
