The click of ivory fingertips pound swiftly over the keys, punctuated regularly by a brief exhale of smoke at every slam of the roller. Click, pound, slam. Such was the heartbeat of a secretary named Eva. She led a mundane and tedious career in life, and death did nothing but change the scenery. She could almost call it her afterlife's greatest irony, if she hadn't shed all those extra pounds along with her skin and finally fit into a single digit dress size. The powers that be must have a twisted sense of humor.
The elevator dings, pausing the monotony only briefly, and Eva knows without having to look that it's no other than Manuel Calavera by the tap of his wingtip oxfords. Always the first to show up at the office and the last to leave, he's become the rising star of the D.O.D over the past couple of years. And it shows, she notes as she finally spares him a glance when he leans against her desk at her side. Reaping the most premium clients came with the perks of a premium office and premium suits, and yet despite all this, she's surprisingly found that the one redeeming feature of his success is the fact he isn't an insufferable ass about it. Sadly, so few people have that quality.
"Buenos días, belleza," he says smoothly, and she imagines that if he had lips, he'd grace her with a roguish smile. "How's my favorite secretary this morning?"
"Worried about your short term memory," she supplies, pausing only briefly in her typing to nudge his hip away from her desk before he all but perches on it, a habit of his whenever he decides to linger. "I swear we go through this every day, Manny. I am not your secretary."
Not one so easily brushed off, he scoots a bit further out of reach and leans against her desk once more, legs crossed at the ankle. It's sweet how he humors her by flirting every chance he gets and she can't deny the way it's sometimes hard to ignore, but she's far too wise to fall for that game. He may act like he wants a secretary, but most of the time men in his position are really looking for someone to stroke their ego every time they step out of the office with an adoring smile and a fresh cup of coffee. In the end, all men ever really want is a mother on payroll and a glorified waitress. In life, she might have been one or both of those things at one time or another, but in death, not even Manny's charms are going to fool her twice.
"Ah, but you could be," he fishes out a small silver case from his suit jacket and flicks it open. "In fact..." he stalls by tapping out a cigarette, clearly savoring the build up to his next few words and her fingers slow down, interested despite herself. "... you might be very soon. I hear Barrera's finally retiring and that gold door has my name all over it."
Eva slams the roller at a new paragraph, feigning her ignorance on the subject. Barrera is the type of man that plays his cards close to the chest and only a handful of souls in the department know about the upcoming changes in management due to his one way trip on the Double N. Frankly, she's surprised Manny's one of them considering that he and the boss had never been bosom buddies. Eva herself only recently found this out since she had to file some of his paperwork. Lots and lots of thankless paperwork.
"There's a saying about counting your chickens before they hatch..." Eva warns and prods her ashtray forward just in time for the first tap of ash from his cigarette as a silent invitation to stay for as long as the gossip is good.
He only shrugs as the smoke curls out from every fissure of bone and silk around his collar. Back when the afterlife was still new to her, watching the smokey tendrils whisper out of his skull was quite an intimidating sight. Now, she only vaguely wonders why they bother to keep up with the habit since she's always felt that the appeal of addiction was in killing yourself slowly by inches and not caring the least bit about it. She remembers telling him just that when he lit her first postmortem cigarette, and he laughed. I guess it kills time now instead, he admitted as the smoke drifted out through her bones like a sieve. And he was right, she thinks as she snubs out the fag end into the tray. They're all still waiting around for permission to truly die and get out of here.
"Oh, they've hatched and flown the coop, baby," he deadpans, unfazed. "I'm the best there is and everyone knows it."
"Everyone but Copal." Eva gives up at trying to stay busy and fishes a nail file from the pencil cup. "He's been in and out of the boss' office all week and something tells me they aren't just swapping recipes."
"Ay, that blowhard?" Manny waves a hand dismissively. "Barrera would rather use his skull as a soup bowl than leave the company in Copal's hands." He pauses for a long pull before ashing his cigarette, sockets trained on the golden door to upper management. "I'm not worried, muñeca. I got this promotion in the bag and soon you'll be taking my messages."
"Oh joy," she snorts dryly, file hard at work.
"Well enough about me," he continues, apparently sensing her internal clock counting down the conversation. Unlike Manny, she's just not one for socializing when there's work to be done. How he manages to make the top sales while chatting her up so often is beyond her. "When are you going to let me take you out sometime?"
If he notices the way her filing hesitates, he hides it well. He's asked before so it doesn't quite come as a surprise. Just twice since she died; once a few weeks into getting this job, and at the last Christmas party when he drunkenly insisted she wouldn't regret it. If she had to admit it to herself, she'd hazard a guess that she wouldn't. She could do much worse than Manny. But then she remembers why she's still stuck in this poor imitation of life and decides that regrets or no regrets, such things just aren't worth the trouble.
"Manny –"
"Just think about it. Some dinner, a few drinks… nothing has to happen," he cuts off her rejection, all the cockiness gone from his voice. It's addictive and smooth like the fist draw of smoke, and she wonders briefly if his voice matched his face in life. "I want to know you, Eva. I see you every day and you're still a mystery."
Eva could give him that. She's been here for going on two years now and she's done her best to limit their conversations around smoke breaks devoted to office gossip and casually avoided any topic about herself. If he caught on, he never said a word except subtly give away small pieces of himself instead. Through what he's said in passing, she's learned something about the life he lead before he died. Not much, just small things that said little about the kind of man he was and always centered around work, as if he somehow knew that anything too personal about him would violate some unspoken rule between them.
I was a door to door salesman through the Depression for a few years, he had mentioned long ago when she asked how he managed to reel in so many premium sales considering his somewhat lazy work ethic. When you sell junk you'd never buy to lonely housewives for awhile, you learn that embellishment and flattery goes a long way. Later on, she learned he became a semi-successful car salesman and managed to keep himself afloat until his untimely death. It brought her a small comfort to know she wasn't the only one stuck with the same position she had in life. He's always had something to peddle, and she's always had someone's coffee to fetch - a dead-end job in the morbidly literal sense.
Eva sighs and abandons her file in exchange for another cigarette. She might not owe him dinner, but she owes him something at least. "There's just not much to me, Manny. I've always been a secretary," she says at last, lighting up. "No kids, no husband. Just a telephone and typewriter to get me through the day; nothing glamorous."
"With teeth like that, I'd guess at a dentist's office?" He's prodding for more and they both know it, but she still can't help but laugh. "Alright – law firm. Getting warmer?"
"Arctic. In Paramount Pictures, actually," she corrects and that caught his attention. "I worked directly under a film producer for most of my career until..." ...until she died like she lived, surrounded by the assholes she answered phones for. Sometimes when she thinks back on her final moments, she likes to believe her death came at a huge inconvenience to her boss just as much as it was for her. She hated every minute of her job, but she was damned good at it and simply irreplaceable.
Manny cocks his head to the side, possibly surprised or impressed or both. Bone obviously doesn't lend itself well to examination and she's had to adapt to his mannerisms. "'Nothing glamorous'!" he quotes, his cigarette all but burned down to the filter. "You've been holding out on me, Eva."
"Really, it wasn't," she admits, and that much was true. Secretaries don't get a spot in the credits and they don't get invited to rub shoulders with starlets at the grand premieres. It was nothing but backbreaking, thankless work trying to appease spoiled rotten actors on a daily basis. "I did exactly what I do here: babysit and do all the work no one wants to do."
He takes one last drag before stubbing out his cigarette on the floor, something she's nagged at him before countless times. "So why didn't you just quit? A woman as resourceful as you could've went anywhere."
For a moment, she's caught off guard by the question. Usually, everyone always wants to know what actors she's seen and what they're really like in person. All the juicy and scandalous gossip about anything that happened between the scenes or if they can get them an autograph. Trivial things that at first didn't bother her, but she eventually grew to resent since the interesting part of her job was never about her, just what she was never given the chance to do: act.
"I have my secrets," Eva says at last. Sharing the sob story of her failures is something she'd avoid and besides, her memories are all she has left of her life. Even when you're stripped down to the bone, some things are hard to let go of.
"You are one puzzle of a woman, Eva," he says, and she replies with a sardonic shrug. "Good thing I like puzzles. So how about it? Can I give you a crack this Friday over dinner?"
She's sorely tempted, she'll give him that. And it so happens that flattery does indeed happen to pay off because she's surprised to find she's actually giving it some thought. Manny's... not bad, all things considered. It's far too late to imagine how things could have been different if they had met when they were still alive, but she likes to think having a guy like him around the studio would've made it bearable.
"Alright, if you get promoted... we'll go out somewhere," she says after a moment's thought. "And it's not a date. Just two friends celebrating," she adds as a safety net. Last thing she wants is to dive into this with romantic notions that ultimately go nowhere and face him again on Monday.
"Done," he nods, clearly more confident than she is about the whole thing, date or no date. "So this Friday it is then."
"You plan and god laughs, Manny," she sighs and he just chuckles, cocky as ever.
"Yeah, I'm a regular comedian."