Poseur #2: The Good, the Fab and the Ugly by Rachel Maude Read Free Book Online Page A

happen to know where I could find a classical pianist, do you?”
    “
I’m
a pianist!” she blurted, unable to restrain her excitement. If she’d needed a sign, then this was it. She imagined meeting him at his recording studio, musician to musician — they would be professional at first, but gradually consumed by a simmering sexual tension. She would win him over with the Beethoven. No!
Prokofiev.
But wait, she was getting ahead of herself. All she
really
wanted was a small opportunity to get to know him outside her office, adult to adult . . . and after she’d applied some Lip Smackers.
    “You’re a pianist,” Seedy repeated, amazed at his luck. “You’re not free this Saturday morning, are you?”
    A perfectly timed burst of sun shimmered through the willow leaves at her window and sparkled like champagne. “I’m free.” She beamed.
    “Would you be down to come by my house and play for us? Vivien — sorry, that’s my fiancée. She thinks it’s important for us to hold some kind of audition first, so . . .”
    “I . . . I’m sorry,” Miss Paletsky stammered, attempting to hide her disappointment.
Of course, he had a fiancée!
She chastized herself.
Life is not Cinderella.
“What is this for, please?”
    “Oh yeah.” Seedy covered his eyes and briskly shook his head. “Didn’t I say? It’s for my engagement party. It’s not until December, but we’re trying to get everything set early, you know.”
    “Mm!” Miss Paletsky replied, plastering her face with her best flight-attendant smile. All at once the sparkling sunlight reminded her less of champagne than of a sudden blow to the head. “It is good to prepare,” she murmured, thinking of the festivities involved for her potential engagement to Yuri. Probably Yuri’s mother would throw a chicken bone at her head and call it a day.
    “I know what you’re thinking,” Seedy invaded her thoughts with a knowing smile. “What’s a rap artist playing classical music at his engagement party for, right? Well, believe me, this is all Vee, not me. Woman calls
all
the shots.”
    “Well, I look forward to it,” Miss Paletsky the Russian Robot Flight Attendant assured him, ushering him toward the door. “And in the meantime I will think up some solutions for your daughter.”
    “Hey, that’s great,” a somewhat confused Seedy replied, obligingly exiting her office and stepping into the breezy corridor. He turned around with another dazzling smile. “Talk about killing two birds with one stone, right?”
    “Exactly,”
she agreed, and politely waved before retreating into her office and closing the door. She slumped into her swivel desk chair, staring with bewilderment at the gray computer screen, which revealed the cruel state of her plastic clip-on skeleton earring: tangled in her hair like a trapped, semi-crazed bug. Had it
really
looked like that for their
entire
conversation?
    Of course it had.
    Willing herself to focus, Miss Paletsky slid open her top desk drawer and extracted a floppy, pocket-sized book: her English Idiom Dictionary. She thumbed the onionskin-thin pages until she found the desired entry.
    When you kill two birds with one stone, you resolve two difficulties or matters with a single action.
    She sighed, tracing and retracing the phrase with her finger. After a moment, the phone rang, jarring her from her trance.
Ch’ello.
It was Yuri. He wanted her to know just
one more thing.
She stopped him mid-sentence, stunning him into a rare silence. All it took was a single word. It fell from her mouth like a stone.
    “Yes.”
    “Alright, that’s twelve fifty,” Melissa announced, her coffee-black eyes eschewing that lame-ass classroom wall clock for her
far
more glamorous diamond-and-stainless-steel, pink crocodile-strap Gucci watch. Raising her pint-sized silver Tiffany gavel, she rapped her desk four times — one tap for each girl. There was languid Petra, lying on her stomach by the blue plastic recycling bin; delicate