“Come on, Katie,” Ari urged. I felt like I was being recruited by the Cult of the Red Shoes.
“No, not this time,” I insisted. “I need clothing, and I need to buy it soon so I’ll have time to get ready. Gemma, we’d better get down to moderate dresses.” She sighed and put the sample shoe down. “I’ll see you two on Monday,” I added very pointedly to Trix and Ari as I began walking toward the escalators, with or without my roommate.
“They seemed like fun,” Gemma said when she caught up with me. “I can’t believe you haven’t talked more about your co-workers. You only talk about that one cute guy. Whatever happened with him, anyway?”
“Nothing. He’s just a friend. Besides, with the gossip mill in that place, dating a co-worker would be suicide.” Ethan fell in the gray area between co-worker and non-co-worker, since he was contracting his services to MSI and didn’t have an office in the building. Also, I hadn’t yet told my roommates that he was working for the same company, since I’d met him through them and explaining why he’d ended up working with me would have been more than complicated. To change the subject, I said, “So, what look should I go for—casual, sexy, trendy, sophisticated?”
With the opportunity to dress me, Gemma quickly forgot about discussing my co-workers. She picked out a simple black dress with an embroidered cardigan that fell within my budget. But she hadn’t had the last word. “Those red shoes would go with this outfit,” she said as we left the cash register.
“I swear, what is it with you and those shoes? You’d think they had you mesmerized. I’ve spent enough on this outfit as it is, and the black shoes I already own will do fine. Now home!”
Several hours later, I was dressed in my new outfit, my hair and makeup were done, and my roommates were getting on my nerves. “You don’t have to wait around, you know,” I told them. “You’ve already met Ethan, and I don’t need anyone to help pin on my corsage and take our picture together.”
“I wonder if there’s any film in my camera,” Gemma mused.
“No! Geeze, you act like me going on a date is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
“With you, it almost is,” Marcia, my other roommate, said from her position on the couch.
“I’ve been on dates recently,” I protested.
“Yeah, but this is the first time I can remember in a very long time that you’ve been on a second date with the same guy,” Marcia replied.
She was right. After I went out with a guy once, he seldom wanted to see me again. Most of the time, it was because I was too normal, too boring, too girl-next-door, too much like a sister. That had changed lately, though. Now they were more likely to think I was too weird, and they’d be right. Take my last blind date, where a strange man appeared in the restaurant and serenaded me during dinner while claiming that I’d saved him from a lifetime as a frog. Really, all I’d done was rescue him from an illusion that made him think he was a frog. When he wasn’t stalking me, he was an okay guy, and now he was dating Marcia. Gemma’s boyfriend, Philip, was the one who really used to be a frog, but I had nothing to do with disenchanting him. I was only there when it happened.
Most of that crazy stuff wasn’t my fault at all, since I can’t actually do magic, but my job means I’m around a lot of weird things that I can’t explain to normal people without them thinking I need to be medicated. It was tough living a double life where I couldn’t talk to my closest friends about the things I saw or what happened at the office. It was kind of like being a spy, I guess, only a lot less glamorous.
Then there was Ethan. On our last date I’d discovered his magical immunity, then a couple of guys from work had shown up to test him by making increasingly outlandish stuff happen in the middle of the restaurant until he was forced to admit that he was seeing things, and that had dragged him into my crazy world when MSI recruited him. He’d asked me out again, anyway, even after he’d been involved in an all-out magical battle. It was the first step toward having a real boyfriend. But that would be more likely if he didn’t have to run the roommate gauntlet when he came to pick me up.
“I don’t suppose you two could find somewhere you have to be, oh, right about now,” I said.
“You’re trying to get rid of us?” Gemma asked.
“That, or you hide in the bedroom when he gets here.”
“You’re no fun.”
“I don’t want to make him feel awkward, and since he and Marcia were set up that time and didn’t hit it off…” I let my voice trail off with the hint.