Sang-Froid
an excerpt

She closed the door behind her as Sarah walked out and pulled out her keys. Her secretary Cara noticed the jingling. “It’s not five yet, Jo.”

“No, it’s four fifty-nine. I’m really not in the mood for this today.”

Cara looked down over her horn-rimmed glasses. “You know the rules.”

“Jee-zus!” She gave an exasperated shrug and stomped over to the waiting room, taking the seat right across from Cara’s desk. Crossing her legs, because she was in a skirt, she sat quite rigidly in the chair and made certain to glare harshly at her. Her no-nonsense attitude showed in her cheerless grin, her ice blue eyes seething with disdain.

Cara flipped over a gaudy hourglass on her desk. The game had begun.

“Oh, my God, Lisa went out with Dante again on Wednesday, can you believe she still puts up with that jerk after he tossed all her CDs out the window during a fight? I swear she only clings to him because he knows some second-rate director out in LA. Well, on their date, he was trying to be nice and let her order the most expensive things on the menu, but when she ate the lobster she had an allergic reaction that made her face swell out to here because it turns out she’s allergic to garlic and she had to be rushed out to the hospital so she wouldn’t die! And then, he didn’t even apologize for almost killing her and wouldn’t even help pay for the emergency care! I keep telling her he’s never going to introduce her to the ‘famous’ director so I looked it up and it turns out the guy died like two years ago! And he keeps telling her he’ll introduce her to him!” The hourglass wasn’t even halfway emptied.

“And then he left her in the emergency room! He wouldn’t even pay for a cab ride home! I keep telling her he’s a cheap bastard but she won’t hear anything bad about her Dante, she just tunes it out. So she had to walk out in the street to even hope to be able to get a cab and on her way out the door one of her heels broke so she tripped and fell and got her ass all covered in mud and then the cab she hailed blows by at like a thousand miles an hour and sprays her with the dirtiest and biggest wave of nasty rain water you ever saw-“ Joanna’s poise shattered and she collapsed into a fit of giggles.

Cara eyed the hourglass. “I win!”

“You always win…” Joanna managed to squeak out between snerks.