He noticed how beautiful she was as soon as she got into the elevator. Her blonde hair was pulled back with a few strands escaping to dangle in front of her face. She brushed them back behind her ear as she stepped into the car.
“Fourteen please,” she asked. It took him a few seconds to realize it was the same floor he was heading to.
“Going the same way it would seem.”
“So it would seem.”
“You work for them?” She was digging in her purse and looked up at him as he asked.
“Oh no. Just have a meeting with them.” His heart skipped a beat. Now if he was able to get up the courage to ask her out he wouldn’t feel guilty. He was on his way up to talk to his publisher. For some reason people thought he put words together fantastically and this company paid him a lot of money to keep doing it. He had written six bestsellers. The seventh already had the movie rights bought and he was only half way through it.
“I’m John.” The woman looked up again from her purse.
“Alexandria. Nice to meet you. So why are you going to up to Shrech and Bolston? You a writer?” John smiled. He wasn’t the most modest person in the world when it came to his work but he also knew when it came to dating he would rather someone like him for who he was instead of the name slapped on the cover of his books.
“Eh, I do some freelance stuff for them.” Alexandria smiled at him and playfully pushed her hair back behind her ear again. John knew he had to ask her out but doing it in the elevator might not be the best place. If she said no then the walk into the office was going to be an awkward one. Hopefully he could just catch her before she left the office and if he was lucky get her phone number.
“This elevator is taking forever.” Alexandria looked up at the numbers as they slowly ticked by.
“Yeah. The hamsters running in the wheels at the top must be tired today.” As soon as the sentence was out of his mouth he wished he could force it back down his throat. John looked over and Alexandria gave a smile as if to let him know that it was okay. Bad jokes happen. Finally the elevator let out a ding and the doors opened revealing a decent sized lobby area. The secretary sat behind her desk with a headset on. John put his arm out indicating that Alexandria should go first.
“Thanks,” she said. As she stepped out she looked back and him a sly smile crawled across her face. He knew at that moment that if he asked her to dinner tonight that they would be rolling around in his bed at the end of the night. But he knew he had to play it cool so he would try to catch her before she left and make it seem like he was just casually asking her to dinner because he didn’t have anything better to do that night.
“Hey John,” the secretary said.
“Hello Pam. How are you doing?”
“Oh same old same old. I’ll let Michael know you’re here.” John smiled and took a seat. Alexandria told Pam whom she was there to see and then came and sat next to John.
“So what is it that you do for them?” Alexandria asked. Again not wanting to play his full hand quite yet John gave a light smile.
“Just some stuff here and there. Nothing major. What are you here for?” Just as she was about to answer Michael Newman came out to meet John.
“John. How’s it going?” John stood up and greeted him.
“Not bad.” He looked back at Alexandria. “Guess I’ll have to find out later. Do me a favor and don’t leave till I get done.”
“Okay. I’ll wait for you out here when my meeting is over.” John went with Michael back into the inner hallways of the office of Shrech and Bolston. They eventually made their way to Michael’s office.
“Have a seat John.” Michael instructed. “So the reason I called you down here is because we love what we’ve seen from the new book so far.” John nodded along. “Now as you are aware of by the nice addition to your bank account is that the movie rights have already been sold.”
“Yeah I noticed all that extra money. Nice negotiating by the way.”
“Heh. Less me more our lawyers. Anyway what we are concerned with is that damn critic over at the Post. Mahlin or whatever. He’s trashed every single one of your books. Unfortunately his words carry weight. Even though you did make it onto the top ten list our research department did some work and think that you could have placed higher if that one book review had been more favorable. The Post is a big paper. Lots of readers.”
“Trust me. I’ve been wanting to meet up with Mahlin for awhile. Just seems like all he has time to do is trash all my work. Called for a boycott of the last one.”
“Yeah and that’s why we think it didn’t sell as high as we expected. We need good word of mouth for this one so that the movie won’t have a negative stigma even before they shoot anything. So Steve was supposed to have a meeting with Mahlin today to see if maybe we could work out some sort of deal. Keep him from trashing it so harshly.”
“Think it will work? Mahlin seems to have a vendetta against me. If I wrote down the cure for cancer he’d still give me a thrashing.”
“Let’s find out.” Michael picked up his phone and dialed. “Hey John is here. Did you have your meeting with Mahlin yet? Mahlin’s here now? Yeah come on over. Maybe the four of us could hammer this thing out.” He put the phone back into its cradle. “Mahlin’s here. So you’re going to get your wish of meeting him in person.” John shifted in his chair. It was hard to meet someone whom you knew already hated you.
There was a knock at the door and Steve Shaw came peeked in. John turned just in time to see that following Steve was Alexandria. She made her way into the room and sat in the chair next to John. She had a smirk on her face.
“This is Mahlin,” Steve said. John looked over in surprise.
“Wait. You’re Alex Mahlin.” She nodded.
“And of course that must make you J.A. Krugen.” John shook his head. Of all the women in the world he of course fell for the one person who seemed to hate everything he did. “Why didn’t you tell me in the lobby?”
“I didn’t think it was worth noting at the time. Obviously I was wrong.”
“Right. So trying to pick me up wasn’t part of your scheme to get me to go easy on the next piece of trash you throw out?”
“I honestly had no idea.”
“About as believable as the book you wrote about the cloned Presidents. Can’t believe you’re sinking this low.”
“I’m not. I didn’t.”
“Alright now. Let’s get back to business.” Michael said.
“No. I’ll have no part of this lame trap you tried to put me in.” Alexandria got up and walked out of the office. Steve followed after her. Just as John relaxed she stuck her head back in the door. “And now that I’ve met you in person I would like to say that everything you write is trash and a waste of trees. Do the world a favor and take a leap out the window.” She left once again just as John got out of his seat.
“Now wait just a minute you dumb b***h.” By the time he got to the door she had just made her way into the lobby and was on her way to the elevator. “God damn it.”
John steamed about his newly unmasked adversary the whole way home. The more he played it over and over in his head the madder he got. He had planned on a nice dinner, a little too much wine for both of them so they would have an excuse in the morning, and then a long and pleasurable evening. What he got was a horrible evening and even if he had company he would be miserable company.
When he got home he poured himself a glass of scotch. He tried to watch TV but nothing interested him. After an hour or so of channel surfing he went into his office. He flipped on his computer. The urge to do what he was about to do had been in his mind since he left the office. He hated doing it but if he was going to make sure the book succeeded then he needed to do it.
What Alexandria didn’t know was his special ability. He could turn it off so no one got hurt. But if he concentrated enough when he was writing he could make some seriously bad things happen. Like the fire that had killed Scott Furlow. The kid who bullied him in high school. Or the time the head of Mystery Magazine just jumped in front of a subway train after they turned down one of his stories when he was nineteen. Or the editor that had fired him as a staff writer on Horror Movie Monthly Magazine. He had fallen in the shower and broken his neck. All of them just as he had written them. Of course they had never been seen by anyone. He had a drawer in his filing cabinet for that. Now he put the glass of scotch down and began typing. Poor Miss Alex Mahlin was about to have a serious accident.
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