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Author's Note:
I don't own anyone else's characters or make any money from them. This little story is in homage to all the other fantastic DWP family of writers who continue to inspire, amuse and entertain with their fabulous stories. Thank you all!
The Touch.
Chapter One
Nigel Kipling, Art Director at Runway Magazine in the great metropolis of New York City, realised the Universe had spun slightly off its axis just after 3pm on one of the last days of November. It was just a touch which caused it, as light and as unobtrusive as a swan's feather wafting in a breeze across the Central Park lake, a small, hidden thing, a nothingness.
He saw Miranda's hand reach up and smooth the tangled locks which fell over her assistant's collar, tucking them back from her face as she leant over the desk. Andrea's hair had a will of its own. It was always slipping out of pony tails, falling adrift from chignons and buns. It was headstrong, energetic and naturally prone to waving. It was actually like its owner in that way.
Nigel had swung through the door of the Editor's office, his arms full of proofs which he knew were bound to depress Miranda with their failings, but this touch from her, so unconscious she probably did not even know she'd done it, profoundly altered their own relationship and his understanding of her.
Andrea was standing next to the editor's desk, passing Miranda papers to sign or inspect, like the good little assistant she was supposed to be, an acolyte to the high priestess of fashion. He thought her stance was just fractionally more at ease than normal, and when Miranda smoothed her hair back, she neither flinched nor jumped in embarrassment.
She simply turned her head slightly towards the window and completed the movement herself, pushing her own hair back so Miranda could look directly up into her eyes. It was a second caught in time, but told him things from now on might just be rather different.
Neither women had noticed that he had seen anything untoward. Andrea hastily gathered up her papers on his entrance, gave him her usual shy but friendly grin, and slipped past him out of the office, back to her own space and desk festooned under post it notes and burdened with paper files. Miranda stared after her with an unreadable, impassive gaze, but somehow lacking her usual default expression of barely contained fury and frustration at all the idiocies of her world.
Something had definitely happened, something huge, something bigger than all the dynamics in their twenty years' friendship and working relationship. Miranda never touched a member of staff.
She barely acknowledged the humanity of her assistants, ignoring their blistered feet in four inch heels, their need to eat even occasionally, their need to pee more than once every twelve hours. She could have been served by robots for all she seemed to care.
Nigel's extreme curiosity about this change of behaviour completely outbid his reluctance to provoke the boss into what could easily become tight-lipped anger, and cutting sarcasm.
"What was that about?" he asked, his voice higher than normal, and Miranda immediately knew what he meant. She looked up, immaculate, beautiful, unknowable, and then her porcelain face turned a decided pink. Her features immediately dropped their frozen passivity and she sighed from deep within her elegant breast.
Some internal battle for control was being fought. He could see she was almost about to snap at his comment and raised eyebrow. But then she groaned.
"The oldest, saddest cliché in the world. Just like I'd expect my useless excuses for a husband to behave. A middle-aged boss chasing some illusion of youth by lusting over an assistant, a girl of twenty-four, female and straight, with a boyfriend, who is simply too polite to tell me to fuck off. I'm sinking here, Nigel. I really am. "
He had never, ever seen her be so open, so vulnerable, so obviously needing to confide in him, even ask his opinion on the matter. This was drama! This was like the opening of a new Broadway play!
He was entranced, and his natural affection for her paved his way deeper into the conversation. He guessed he must be the first person Miranda had confided in on this, and that like everyone in love or lust, she probably needed to talk about it to someone.
"So when did this, um, "thing" start?" He really wanted to know how far it had got, whether they had. . . " (Oh hell, the mind boggled at that idea.)
Miranda's answer surprised him. "Do you remember the first day she applied for the job? The dreadful clothes, the clumpy shoes, not to mention the fact she had never even heard of me, or had the faintest idea what we did here? "
"Surely not as far back as that?"
"Maybe. I made Emily run after her, didn't I, and offer her a job she had not even really wanted in reality? She just needed something to pay the rent. She even told me she might as easily have applied to Auto-Universe! But there was something about her even then. Her hair, her eyes, her mouth . . . "
"So it's definitely been a slow burn then. And you've kept it deep. I would never have guessed." He paused, enjoying the moment. "But you know of course you're not the only one in the soup. Andy has been worshipping you for nearly as long. "
"No. Oh for God's sake. Don't be ridiculous! She feared me, then she hated me, and now she kindly tolerates me. She said she would only return until she could find me a new "efficient" assistant. "
"Whatever you think, Miranda. You're never wrong after all, as you've told me on countless occasions. But the truth is Andy has been carrying a torch for you for months. Certainly from the time you first made her cry; when you bawled her out for not finding you a flight through a hurricane. She came to me in tears that day. I put her in thigh length boots and sent her back to do battle. I have been the Cupid to your Venus my dear. She has been quietly in love ever since, so you have only yourself to blame. She obviously thrives on sadism. "
"Watch it, Kipling!"
But Miranda looked a little less defeated, slightly encouraged even.
Nigel pressed on. "So what exactly has happened to then melt your tundra? I saw the body language just now. And you've just confirmed it."
He was keen to hear any details. She obliged, as if telling him some of it at least might ease the pain.
"It really started in Paris. It was all my own fault. I was so conflicted. I have been obsessed with her, but hating myself for it. I took it out on her for weeks, tried to drive her away by showing just how bitchy I could be, how false and pathetic our beloved industry actually is. You know only too well our own debacle over the James Martin/Jacqueline showdown? If I am brutally honest, the wild card in all that game play was my desire to crush what I felt about Andrea. I whirled up the whole blizzard around her, until I could almost have predicted she would jump out of the car, and run for it."
Nigel responded. "But she came back. She found out in the end that you and I had recovered our balance, and made up our differences. She came back to you within a few weeks. The only casualty was her cell phone tossed in the fountain in Paris! Though I have to say, that took some guts."
"The real casualty was my pride and all the rocky foundations of my public image. I never told you but I went round to her office at the Mirror, even after I had written her a snappish reference for the job there.
"I sat on her desk in her grubby little cubby-hole and refused to leave until she came back to me. Nigel, I nearly cried! Can you imagine that? I behaved ridiculously, and now yes, she has come back.
"She lets me believe I am in charge. She lets me take her hand crossing a road, occasionally smooth her hair back; she no longer flinches whenever she looks at me. But I know nothing can come of it.
"I am falling deeper and deeper into it, and there is no hope. I feel physically completely weird. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. It feels like a stomach ulcer"
"Dear Miranda, this feeling you describe as "weird" is the most basic human emotion. I suspect despite all your marriages you may never have fallen before. You're in love!
"Yes, I know it definitely feels like agony at times. God knows I have suffered through it. But it is also life-giving, it gives energy and a fire inside! It can toss aside walls as if they don't exist. It is irrational, inconvenient and sometimes really scary. But it is a thing everyone should go through at least once in their life!"
"But we are both straight, - aren't we? I've never wanted to do with anyone, what I want to do with Andrea. Not to mention, I am probably older than her own mother. I have two daughters I love and who must be my priority. Andrea could have me up for sexual harassment if I take it any further. I am been behaving like a moron, I know, but I just can't cure myself!"
Miranda looked as if she was suffering from acute indigestion. Nigel stared her straight in the eye.
"You forgot what I just said. You don't need to cure yourself or be cured. I would bet $10,000 Andrea loves you back, just as physically, just as totally as you do her. Can't you see it in her eyes? Why do you think you were able to persuade her to return to Runway, to this crazy regime? And it's high time you acknowledged you hidden Gay. I've seen it in you for years. You're a natural diva.
"For fuck's sake Miranda, grow a pair and talk to her about how you feel. Let her fight you off if she wants, but give her the chance. And by the way," he paused. "I don't think there is a boyfriend on the scene anymore. He moved out while she was in Paris. She is now virtually sleeping on the floor in an abandoned apartment she can no longer afford. If you offered to move her in with you she would probably say yes before you finished the sentence"
Miranda looked past him through the heavy glass doors into the outer office. She could see Andrea's head bent over some paperwork. She had wondered why there had been an almost lonely look in her eye recently, a weariness.
"Just think of the prize, if you succeed. Those chestnut curls across your pillow, those lips. "
"Nigel! I warn you! My intentions are pure. Well, no, maybe not, if I'm honest."
"Just ask her out on a date. You don't have to buy the ring just yet.
"I truly just want you to be happy. Both of you. I know this isn't a silly thing, not a foolish whim. I think it could change both your lives immeasurably for the better. Go for it girl."
Miranda straightened her back, shook her head slightly so that her hair fell over her eyes and looking away from him, reached out her beautifully manicured fingers for the proofs.
"Hmm, well, yes, I'll think about it. If you do have any evidence to help me believe that she might possibly reciprocate. . . But don't you dare breathe a word to another soul. I need to work this out for myself. Now then, let's get back to the business in hand."
Nigel grinned, and straightened his tie. "Well, just don't leave it for too long." They turned to the proofs. Miranda's blush faded, and she put her reading glasses back on her nose.
The Universe was still about to tilt, but it had settled for now. He would wait to find out how long the status quo would last, but maybe, in the meantime, it would not do any harm to have a few words with Andrea.
An hour later Andrea was scurrying about within the various departments of Runway, scurrying if not actually scuttling, which was her usual frenzied pace. She had finished a set of memos regarding an upcoming photo-shoot and had put a pile of photos complete with Miranda's red ink post-it note comments in an assistant editor's in-tray. Emily, newly promoted to Assistant Art Director from First Assistant to the Editor, and so Andy's line manager, beckoned her into her new office. This was now a good forty metres away and round several corners from Miranda's normal flight path. Emily was clearly suffering from withdrawal symptoms from the frenzy within the EIC suite, and the magnetic icy glares and sarcastic whispers of its main inhabitant.
"Come over here!" she hissed when she saw Andrea pass her door. "How are you coping on your own? If you needed my advice. . . I would have thought you'd have been bothering me by now. You haven't asked me anything yet! How are the interviews going for a new second assistant? How is . . . ?"
The unspoken name hung in the air between them.
Andrea half-smiled; she sometimes felt she liked and disliked Emily in equal measure, but they were almost family in a way. She recognised she was wearing one of the dresses she had brought home from the Paris catwalks and then given to Emily. It hadn't needed taking in a size, she noted, despite Emily's constant protestations and digs about how fat Andrea was.
"Yes, fine, I am settling back in. Miranda has forgiven me, perhaps, for ducking out in Paris. She doesn't say much. You know she never did, unless it was to tear a strip off one of us." She shifted the emphasis of her reply. "How are you getting on working for Nigel?"
Emily relaxed a little as she revealed she did actually love her new position, and felt physically better now she wasn't in a state of controlled terror for ten hours each day. Her anorexia, the elephant always in the room with her, had settled slightly. "I am warming to this job. It is stuff I can do, and want to do. I can focus. Which is good. But I still don't know why you returned to Runway! ", and then she added after a few seconds, "or why she let you crawl back! "
Andrea chose her reply very carefully. She hardly knew the answer to that mystery herself. "Well, I guess Miranda knew you deserved to be promoted. She knew I understood the office system so I could at least induct a new girl and keep the show on the road. I am sure it's only temporary. I behaved so badly in Paris. I misunderstood so much, and felt stupid afterwards. It was strange of her to forgive me, but I expect it is only temporary."
Emily was mollified. "Well, let's do a drink sometime, shall we? Now that I get home before midnight some nights a week. If she lets you off for an evening of waiting for the book, give me a call."
Andrea was surprised. Emily being nice was like the sun coming out in December.
"Sure, I will."
She looked at the clock and then ruefully ran very quickly back to her office. The phone could never be allowed to ring unanswered, and she had left it for more than ten minutes. Pavlovian responses prevailed.
But by the time she arrived, the inner larger office was vacant. Miranda had gone, seemingly swooping up her own coat and bag and disappearing into the gathering dusk. There was a very short handwritten note on Andrea's desk, scribbled on her own pad, with her pen, which advertised the Ohio state fair. "Where are you? Bring the book by 9. Tell them it needs to be ready by 8. Roy will wait for you. M."
Just the sight of that one initial crystallised Andrea into a shivering piece of melting ice. She was so affected by it, so overwhelmed.
She sat herself at the desk and tried to think, to process. The intensity of her feelings really frightened her. Those ridiculous feelings had for some time. Loving so deeply, so hopelessly. Being so attracted to someone so unreachable, and so inappropriate was like a curse put on her by a wicked godmother.
Somehow since Paris it had worsened into a tighter knot of impossibility. Miranda was being kind these days, even gentle. She could have no idea. That very afternoon, she had actually smoothed Andrea's hair and brushed it away from her eyes.
When she had burst through the doors of the New York Mirror a few weeks previously, she had overwhelmed her completely, literally sitting on her desk so she could no longer write anything on the keyboard. She had told Andrea just how impossibly bad her office administration was without her. She's almost been shaking with fury at the mess Andrea had left her with. Did Andrea want any more inadequate substitutes sacked? Miranda had hardly been able to get the words out, and she'd seemed close to tears of frustration.
So of course Andrea had quietly given in her notice for her dream job as a reporter, and had returned immediately. She was like a flower turning back to the sun. The sun had actually been surprisingly benign since then, which had made all this unrequited love just about bearable.
Andrea's nerves were almost in shreds. Nate had departed from her life, taking his revenge in material terms by moving out half of her possessions as well as all of his. He had even taken their not-quite- marital bed while she was in Paris, so she was sleeping on the lumpy sofa in a sleeping bag. Life sucked on so many levels, but nothing, nothing came close to the misery of loving Miranda without hope of it being returned, or ever being able to be released from it.
She relayed Miranda's message on the desk about the Book to the evening editorial guys, and then rummaged in her desk for a half-eaten chocolate bar, a small contraband consolation in time of trouble. She had hardly eaten all day. "At this rate, I'll end up like Emily," she thought.
Nigel bounced through the door sometime after eight o clock, while she was still hanging on for the Book to be delivered to her so she could do the last job of the day and take it across the city to Miranda's house, in the fancy Upper East District beyond Fifth Avenue.
This was a nightly trek to an address which weighed down on Andy every time she called there. There wasn't a house in the street worth less than $10 million. She wasn't just not in Miranda's league, she wasn't even on the same planet.
Nigel came with a half-formed plan. It had taken him quite a few hours to work out a strategy, for even his agile brain had fumbled about how to achieve the necessary push to make Miranda and Andy collide on the same wavelength and stop all this unhelpful misery. He could see they were so close, but that both imagined the gulf between them was unbridgeable.
So Nigel, their colleague, their mutual friend, Nigel the campy, humorous Art Director, the closet gay with the kind heart and huge Closet, only he could sort things out. He just needed a little lever.
"Hey Six! " He used his old nickname for her as he entered her office, wrapped up in his winter overcoat, wearing his hat ready to face the icy streets. "How are you getting on? Found a new room-mate for the apartment yet?"
Andrea threw her candy wrapper in the waste-bin and shook her head. "No, and I know I can't afford the rent on my own, but it's such a crappy apartment, no one will be interested. I only have one bedroom, and not even one bed." I will be homeless by next month, when I have to give up my lease. Maybe then you'll find me camping out on a pile of coats in the Closet here!"
"No need for that. You could stay with me, or hey, why not with Miranda? She has four floors and about six bedrooms."
Andrea snorted. "Oh sure! I can imagine how that would go down. "Hi Miranda, here I am with my sleeping bag. You don't mind me just chilling out in your guest room for a few weeks do you?" No, when these next weeks are over, I will be heading back to oblivion in the mid-west."
"Nursing your broken heart?"
"What? No, Nate and I split up, but he did not break my heart, just made off with my furniture."
"I'm not talking about Nate. I know where your heart lies. In the care of someone beginning with M, maybe?"
Andrea jumped, and looked round nervously as if to check if anyone else could have heard. The building was mercifully nearly empty, and the surrounding offices were deserted.
"How do you know that, really? Is it so obvious? I am so shafted. I should never have returned. I must leave. It is too mortifying. Supposing she finds out." Andy's sentences came out spaced between large sighs. Nigel was enjoying watching her dramatic monologue.
"Andy, I know you left her in Paris partly out of loyalty to me, and I appreciate it, but don't even think of leaving again. Miranda would not function at all well without you, and then we'd really suffer. You may not believe me, but I know she would offer you a room if you were to ask. She does care about you, more than you realise."
Andrea looked doubtful. "But even if what you say is true, which I can't see at all, the way she cares would not be in that way, the only way I want. She is straight as a canal. She would scream at me if I tried anything physical, either that, or laugh me into the Hudson. I know there is no hope. Being in the same street, let alone the same house would make it a thousand times worse."
"Andy, If Miranda offers you a place to stay, will you promise me you'll take it. I think you will be surprised by her willingness to do that. In fact I am going to call her this evening and ask her. I have already mentioned your accommodation problems."
Andrea looked at him in complete stupefaction. His take on her hopeless crush and Miranda's likely response to any request to put her up was so different from her reality, she could think of nothing to say in response. Her mouth simply opened, and shut again. She felt like a fish trapped in a deep bowl.
"Well then, go get out your scarf and mittens, and prepare to leave this place for the night. I can hear Marcus coming up with the Book as we speak. Call Roy the driver to get round to the front, and let's all make it out of here before midnight."
A little later, Andrea sat in the back of the company town car and clutched the editorial Book of Runway's next issue. It would take thirty minutes up to Miranda's home address, and then another forty minutes home by subway and traffic-choked streets to her shabby apartment across town. Her hands and feet were already frozen. Her bones ached and her eyes were tired from nights which were generally too short and too broken by long hours of pining, inter-spiked by unhappy dreams.
Tonight she felt old for her years, cold and unloved. If this was what romantic infatuation did for you, you could keep it. The very idea of Miranda offering to take her in was one of Nigel's more fatuous fantasies. She really, really hoped he had not been so foolish as to actually call Miranda and ask her. In fact it was so crazy, she put it out of her mind, and by the time Roy pulled up to the Editor's house, her subconscious brain had allowed her to forget it.
She went up the flight of steps, in her high heels which hurt her feet with every step, and put the key in the lock. As usual she carried the Book, and also a couple of hangers full of dry-cleaning. The front door then swung inwards and she went out of the cold, into the warmth of Miranda's front hall.
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