Moreover, she was careful not to talk about Monica even to me. Once in a while, I would forget and say her name, and Cassie would bristle. I was grateful for the reminder and would make a point of trying not to slip up again.

She was a brick, all right. Take the way she handled the social situation.

I'd had to stop going to J/J/G parties because of Monica. I wasn't about to take a date--much less a female date--to those affairs. Accordingly, I'd been missing a couple of social occasions a week for a while, and some people were starting to take it personally. After all, I'd never been picky before; I'd even gone to a party at Randy Harris' house once. One day, Walt cornered me after a meeting and demanded to know why I wouldn't be at his party that night.

Cassie didn't miss a beat. "She just got a cat."

"A cat?" Walt asked, not following--which made two of us.

"A big black cat, with a very bad temper. It's had lots of surgery."

I started to protest, but Cassie stared me into silence.

"So?" Walt asked her.

"It doesn't like to be left alone at night. Or so I hear."

"Hell, Dev, you can bring the cat," Walt said. "Sparky might chase it a little, but..."

"It's for your own protection. This is a vicious animal. It bites."

He looked me over thoughtfully. "Oh. Well, then, that would explain it."

There was no need to ask what it explained. I'd been using a lot of Bactine lately.

"Besides," Cassie added, "you wouldn't like her. The cat, I mean. I think Devvy's afraid of her. Did I tell you she sleeps on the bed?"

"Sounds a little kinky to me."

"You have no idea," she said wearily.

Walt laughed. "You're awfully quiet, Dev. Cat got your tongue?"

He found this question trés amusant, and Cassie pretended to, just to spite me. There being no point in taking offense, I simply walked away. Why fight the inevitable? There'd be cat jokes the rest of the day now, no matter what.

Shortly after I got back to my office, e-mail came through:

Just CATastrophic that you CAn'T make the party. Hope your little beastie will be FELINE better soon. CATch you next time? Sure would be MICE to see you.

I trashed it and got back to work.

If I could only keep going the way I'd always done before, maybe it would all work out. With luck, I could have Monica, my job, and my secret too.

Hope never hurt anyone, right?

Jack liked to say that my team would be in jail in any decent, civilized country, but he was just smart enough to let my writers go only so far. That day, however, he was giving Kurt way too much leash. Kurt was in a mood, and he wanted raw sex on the screen. Failing that, he wanted busty models in micro-minis and spike heels, bending over. If at all possible, he also wanted the models.

We all had tried in various ways to rein him in--all of us except Jack, who was playing Buddha, saying nothing. Finally, when Kurt proposed cleavage cam, Heather lost it.

"You stupid jerkoff pig, you don't even know what you're talking about."

"I know my cleavage," Kurt said, with dignity.

"The client, you ass. You don't know Thing One about the client. Didn't you read the research? What's the market? Who's the audience?"

"What's it matter? This is a proven..."

"Women, Kurt. Look." She waved a research report in his face. "Right here. See? Says that 87 percent of the client's customers are women."

"So?"

Heather, baffled, looked to me for help. Of course, I had none to offer.

"OK, so we'll target the girlies a little too. We'll pose a couple of guys in the background and take their shirts off," Kurt said. "Give 'em scissors. Make 'em look like hairdressers."

Heather frowned. "What does that mean?"

"On second thought, make 'em look straight."

"You really are a pig. Are all male hairdressers gay?"

"Aren't all male models?"

Now Troy was upset, too. Jack just beamed at me. He was basking in the nasty vibe in the room and clearly wasn't going to intervene.

All right, fine--up to me again. I gave Kurt a very bad look. "I half-expected you to say we should shoot the thing on a Thursday and have the male models wear green. Are you still in junior high, boy? Get a grip. This isn't about sexual orientation."

"Says you," he shot back. "Who wrote 'Tempted?', boss?"

Bull's-eye. I withdrew from the field, bloodied, bowed, and guilty as charged.

Jack laughed--the first sound he'd made since he called the meeting to order. "I live for meets with this team. You people ought to be in rehab. Let's just play with this idea and see what comes up. What's your last shot, Wheeler?"

Kurt drew rapidly on his notepad and pushed it across the table. "I'm no artist..."

"No shit," grumbled Troy, leaning over to see.

"...but this pretty much blocks it out for you."

I took a look too, unfortunately. The sketch was a tight shot of a seated stick-figure man, with very large breasts appearing to grow out of his ears.

"Don't know, Wheeler," Jack mused. "Public'll think the hooters come with the haircuts."

"Exactly," Kurt said.

Heather and Troy protested, to little avail. I closed my eyes and hoped Monica would put me out of my misery for good that night.

"You look a little peaked, Dev. Want to go to lunch? Get some fresh air?"

"No Kurt?"

"Positively no Kurt. We want to talk about him, don't we?"

I agreed, on condition that everything we said about him would be bad. That, she said, was the whole idea. We decided to walk the few blocks to the restaurant, to make the talk last longer.

Heather was right about the benefits of fresh air and invective. By the time we were a block down Virginia, my spirits were rising.

"I don't understand why you won't ever let me kill him," Heather was saying.

"Peg has first right. By marriage."

"I can't imagine why she married him."

"Can't be because of his charm."

"You don't suppose...?" She considered. "Naaah. I'll bet he still wears little boys' underpants. With Power Rangers on them."

"There's a theory. I don't like to picture it, but it's a theory." I smiled at her. "So you're saying that all this talk of his is just overcompensation?"

"Well, why not? You know about Henry VIII's codpiece, don't you?"

I'd seen the pictures. She had a point. "Every man would have a codpiece like that if men still wore armor. They're all as vain as show dogs. But Kurt would even overdo that. He'd have a codpiece that'd make Henry's look like an anchovy."

"Well, there's a saying about that. There's a Spanish proverb: 'If you can't fight, wear a big hat.' "

I had to stop and lean against a lamppost to laugh.

"Seriously," Heather assured me.

"Maybe we should get him a sombrero."

"Of course, I notice that you wear a hat sometimes," she said slyly.

"It goes with my raincoat." True. I had a fabulous long black raincoat and a black fedora to match. The first time I'd worn them together, Cassie had said, "No, don't tell me; let me guess. Boris Badenov?" Ever since, to spite her, I often wore both coat and hat whenever it even just might rain.

Heather just smiled.

"Don't start," I told her.

"I'm not starting. I'm just noticing. I think it looks perfectly adorable on you, if you like that sort of..." She broke off, squinting across the street. "Hey, isn't that Jenner? With the Hardware City girl?"

It was indeed Jenner, preparing to go into a restaurant with a very young woman in a dress of a type that really wasn't designed to be worn before 5. When I last saw her, she was fondling a snowblower on a billboard, wearing only fur and enough lip gloss to choke a pig. A rival agency handled the account, which was fine with me.

I wondered whether Heather knew that the Hardware City girl was also sleeping with Jack, with Stu Bennett at Ad House, and with a long list of other married middle-aged admen. But maybe she didn't have to know that just yet. She was still young, and she still thought this business was fun.

"Sleeping with the enemy," I remarked, nodding at the scene across the street.

"Don't we all?"

Some of us more than others, I thought.

"I mean, those of us who sleep with people," Heather amended.

"Well, that leaves out Peg."

Heather laughed, as though it were a joke.

She was curled up in my chair, completely at home--and apparently unharmed by sunlight, which was flooding that end of the office. So much for that theory.

"What are you doing here?" I whispered. "You promised not to..."

"You had a hard morning, my love," Monica said. "I thought I'd come cheer you up."

"Not at the office, you won't. Did anyone see you?"

"No one saw me. Your secret is safe. For now."

"For now?" I turned that over a few times, and then frowned. "Wait a minute. Cassie can see you. Always has seen you. How do I know you're not lying about..."

"You need a haircut. I hear that they come with breasts at some salons."

"You hear wrong. Don't try to throw me off track here, Monica. This is important. What do you mean by 'for now'?"

Monica left my chair. "Sit."

It wasn't a request; it was an order, complete with fangs. So I sat. She crossed behind it and pressed up against me, all the way--exactly like Kurt's sketch, in fact. "What are you doing?"

"Research. I want to see whether that shot will work. What do you think?"

"What if someone comes in?"

"You're about to find out," she said calmly, as the door opened.

Kurt. I felt all the blood drain out of my face. Of all the people to catch me in a compromising position...

"What's wrong, boss? You look like you've seen a ghost."

Monica pressed even closer--and I realized then that he didn't see her. She'd told the truth. For now. The relief wasn't as great as it might have been, though.

"You're fired the next time you don't knock first," I warned him. "What do you want?"

"Just wanted to give you the first draft on Hairport."

"In box."

He looked curiously at me and dropped the script in the box. "You sure you're OK?"

"Fine."

"I took out that shot."

"Fine. If that's all, get out."

"That's all." Reluctantly, he made for the door, and then turned back at the threshold. "I really advise you to get laid, boss. This can't be worth it."

Monica laughed--and as soon as the door closed behind Kurt, I started to order her out, too. But I was ordering empty air. She was gone.

This couldn't be good. J/J/G probably wasn't going to be big enough for all of us--and her. We already had enough devils. We didn't need a demon.

(c) 1999, ROCFanKat

Continued - Part 13