Chapter 13 In Which Jeff and I Discuss Marketing Tactics
In Which Jeff and I Discuss Marketing Tactics
I dressed with care in the morning, choosing clothes with less cat hair on them, and swiped mascara on my lashes before I left the room. Not for the Gray Knight, obviously. For me. I knocked on Lene’s door, but she didn’t answer, so I went to the dining hall by myself.
There were a few groups clustered around the tables.
I went to the serving area, where my erstwhile poisoner Kamare had been replaced by a short man with wide cheeks and bulging eyes.
He didn’t look invested in my existence one way or another and put a bowl of porridge on my tray with a nodded greeting.
The second faerie, as ever, said nothing.
Milo dropped a fruit cup on my tray, grabbed a second one, and followed me to the nearest table.
I sat down, resigned to his presence.
“Hi,” he said, sitting across from me. “How are you?”
Having now taught greetings in human class several times, I couldn’t help but see the absurdity in the ritual. It was a nicety, a shared tradition, and a little bit inane.
“Still kidnapped,” I said, intending to snap my mouth shut. But decades of lectures on politeness from my mother forced my tongue: “Otherwise, I’m fine. How are you?”
He nodded, spearing a vivid green melon ball with a two-pronged wooden fork. “I thought you might say that,” he said. He waved at someone over my shoulder. I turned to look and saw another human-type person walking toward us.
“You thought I might say that I’m kidnapped?” I asked, my tone more baffled than I’d intended.
He rolled his eyes. “No, that you’re fine, since that’s what you keep telling us to do in class.”
He popped the melon ball into his mouth and chewed openmouthed. His eyes were somehow… less shattered than usual today. The darker blue and gray veins that sometimes divaricated his irises had shrunk into themselves, leaving more pale blue.
I’d almost asked him once about the Princeling’s claim.
Had he wandered into Faerie a madman? Had he just wandered in, period?
But his mental health wasn’t my business, nor was his treatment plan relevant information for me.
If some people did psychoanalysis and some people decided to live in pocket dimensions, I certainly wasn’t qualified to determine which was more effective.
Milo finally swallowed his very well-chewed mouthful of fruit. If he’d waited much longer, a will-o’-the-wisp might’ve swept down from the ceiling like a baby bird and—
Eugh. I cut off that train of thought.
He cleared his throat. “Do you think you’re going to go to the press?”
I hadn’t even considered trying to draw media attention since the first days in Faerie. Once I’d made my deal with the Princeling, any other actions felt underhanded.
So I picked up my own fork and bit into a similar green melon. “No.” The melon tasted closer to raspberry than honeydew. “I don’t want to make people even more prejudiced toward faeries,” I told Milo, who probably didn’t care.
The person he’d waved at stopped next to our table. I looked up.
“Hi, Chad,” Milo said, nodding at the new guy. “Do you want to sit with us?”
Chad sat next to Milo and picked up his own fork. Milo looked back at me. “I heard you were one of those Faerie-lovers.” He plucked a disc of blue fibrous plant matter from his bowl and bit into it.
I glanced at Chad, wondering whether I should be cautious. But I needed to talk to Milo. “That raises a lot of questions, Milo. Like who you heard that from, or what it means. But more importantly”—it wasn’t more important to anything except my wounded pride—“why didn’t you tell me you were human?”
It had been almost a month since his aborted tour of the Court, and I still felt embarrassed and confused when I saw him. I put the fork down and picked up the spoon, looking at the porridge now.
“I honestly didn’t realize you didn’t know,” he said. “I mean, I know I’m human.”
“Well, of course you know,” I said.
He only looked at me, an expression of slight bemusement on his very handsome, very modern, very American quarterback face.
“Milo, how am I supposed to know something that you know without you telling me?”
Chad looked up at this, grunted in what might have been assent, and attacked his porridge with ferocity. Chad had even broader shoulders than Milo, and the most adorable snub nose I’d ever seen.
Milo shrugged. “I thought the faeries said you could read minds, or something. Don’t they call you Lady of the Mind Reading?”
I put my spoon down. “Lady of the True Dreams,” I corrected automatically. Then winced, even more embarrassed. “But Milo, I can’t know something if you don’t tell me.”
“Well, now I know that!” he said cheerfully. “Honestly, what good is a true dream? Mind reading would be much more useful.”
He wasn’t wrong but he was definitely irking me.
He added as an afterthought, “Chad is human, too.”
I looked at Chad. “Okay, then,” I said. So apparently there were at least a few of us.
Sahir had intimated that Milo knew something about my imprisonment. Maybe Milo knew a way for me to get out.
Gritting my teeth, I tried to decide what to do: Should I let it be, trusting the Princeling to uphold our bargain (and Jeff not to fire me)? Or should I ask Milo what he knew?
As if my mother were reading my mind, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and glanced at her text. Any progress on coming home?
We sat awkwardly at the table, Milo’s sun-faded blue eyes on my face. Chad had finished eating and looked at me, too, his eyes even madder than Milo’s: so blue they were almost white, and irises shattered by those darker veins, like panes of leaded glass held together by iron filaments.
“Do you want some of my food?” I asked him because he kept looking at me.
He started, and then blinked. “Did you just offer me your food? Off your plate?” He had a surprisingly sweet voice, like the aftertaste from a Double-Stuffed Creme cookie. “You must be the nicest woman I’ve ever met.”
I couldn’t tell if this was a bit. I opened my mouth, but he kept talking.
“You must be an angel.”
I shrugged and shoved the tray toward Chad, who pulled it to himself with fervor.
“This might be because I haven’t seen a human woman in five years,” Chad began—an auspicious start—
At this, Milo seemed to remember himself. “Chad,” he said, putting a hand on the other guy’s shoulder to cut him off, “stop while you’re ahead.”
Milo met my eye, as if to say See? I helped.
“Do you know how to get me out of Faerie?” I asked, having given up on conversational segues.
Milo shrugged. “Once you eat faerie food, you’re stuck,” he said. “Unless you want to be rearranged into nothingness.”
“Have you ever tried the portal?” I asked.
Chad and Milo exchanged a look. “No—” Chad started.
“Is that a threat—” Milo said simultaneously.
“Are you so keen to leave our realm?” the Gray Knight asked, sliding into the seat next to me.
She wore loose pants and a low-cut blouse today and had silver flowers threaded through her hair.
A small, silly part of me wondered if she’d dressed up for me.
“But things were just getting interesting here.”
Milo looked from her to me. “Gray Knight,” he said.
Chad, having said everything he’d needed to, looked back down at my erstwhile tray of food.
She smiled and took my hand, on the table, where anybody could see. I pulled away, not wanting the attention. “Hello, Milo,” she said. “Your conversation sounded intriguing, so I wanted to join.”
“I cannot take credit for that,” he demurred.
I felt something on my knee and jerked away. It was the Gray Knight’s hand. I frowned at her but didn’t want to call attention to it.
“Milo was just telling me how a human can get out of Faerie,” I said brightly. “Do you happen to know if there is another way?”
“I know that the Princeling has need of you, and so do I,” she said.
I was done being polite. Something about Chad—who’d gone absolutely still and locked his eyes on my face—had beaten my obeisance out of me. “Even if that’s a euphemism, my lady, I am not interested.”
“It is a euphemism,” she said, “as I’ve said one thing in place of another.”
I sighed. “Please, for the love of god, let’s not do this right now. I’m very tired and grumpy, and I want to go home.”
The Gray Knight stood up, her jaw setting with the solemn finality of the tomb. “Then let me escort you back to your room,” she said. “As that is your home.”
I kicked the stool away and got up, too, my eyes still on Chad, who finally had the good grace to look down at the remains of my porridge. The Gray Knight and I left the room together, the doors of the hall swinging behind us.
She reached for my hand again as we started down the hallway, but I pulled away.
All of the faeries were touchy—Sahir held my hand or arm all the time, and Lene curled into me whenever I sat nearby.
Gaheris often sat at my feet while I worked, leaning against my knee while tearing tiny holes into the wall beneath my desk with the assurance that a portal there would be:
unnoticeable to the room’s inhabitant (i.e., me);
unlikely to expel hungry tentacles, grasping hands, an animated mouth full of gaping shark teeth hungry for human toes, or anything else harmful; and
super fun for Doctor Kitten, once Gaheris got the magic right and stopped conjuring swamps by accident.
I had at this point determined never to try my luck escaping through a portal Gaheris created.
This to say, I often leaned on or cuddled my new friends. The Gray Knight may not have meant anything by the touch. But none of my friends had kissed me, or taken me on a romantic date, or fed me cheese.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I need time to sort myself out before I start, um, anything.”
She trailed a hand along the wall. “I do not take your meaning.”
“I don’t want to be your girlfriend right now,” I blurted, feeling mortified that I might have misread the signals.
“Girlfriend?” she asked.
I would not say the word lover out loud.
“Partner?” I suggested.
And, of course, she looked at me, her gray eyes sparking. “I did not ask you to be.”
I felt myself flush. I was a moron. Of course a faerie woman didn’t want me to be her girlfriend.
Later that afternoon, distressed and demoralized, I logged into a two-hour meeting block on my calendar to review the presentation.
Jeff was in a foul mood. Levi was on but not talking.
“What is it, Miri?” Jeff asked, even though he’d sent the calendar invite.
“Oh, can we review the PowerPoint?” I asked, because it wasn’t worth mentioning.
“Page three,” Jeff said. “The footnotes are off. This stuff isn’t hard, Miri.”
I went to page three, where the footnotes were actually not off.
“Some of these mistakes are actually improbable,” he added. “Like, you must have messed them up on purpose. How did you get every single color slightly wrong on page seven?”
The colors were completely right on page seven. “Jeff, did you check the saturation settings on your laptop?” I asked, trying to keep my tone neutral.
Neither of us had our videos on. I was sharing my screen, trying to keep up with the speed of his commentary.
“My saturation is perfect,” he scoffed. “I might as well have just given this to the new girl. I would have, if she wasn’t even more useless than you.”
Jeff was a man of many talents, one of them being motivational speaking.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered, feeling less sorry and more deeply enraged.
I stared out the window, at the sunless blue sky and the revel on the lawn below me.
Doctor Kitten was enthralled, his tail twitching as he watched the figures below us dance.
The window seemed to sense that I’d lost interest in my meeting, and suddenly music drifted up, where it hadn’t previously.
“Page eight,” Jeff said. I listened with half an ear to the sweep and swell of the song outside. It sounded like a strings rendition of a Backstreet Boys song. I clicked over to page eight. “Miri, you aren’t using any shortcuts.”
Levi cut in. “You don’t even have any shortcuts on the quick access toolbar. No wonder you’re so slow.”
I was certainly relieved to know that Levi had been paying attention.
“Change the header,” Jeff said. “This isn’t a marketing pitch; we don’t need to say anything nice about the company or the client.”
I had been under the impression that it was a marketing pitch, and in fact that we probably should be saying nice things about the company and client to our potential investors.
“Okay,” I said, selecting the header and deleting it.
“No, why did you do that?” Jeff snapped. “Undo. I still want to look at it for reference.”
I hit CTRL+Z, my eyes drifting back over to the window. Why did any of the faeries want to leave what was essentially a paradise for them? Was the sun really worth that much?
“Those boxes aren’t left-aligned,” Jeff said. I selected the relevant boxes and hit ALT+H+G+A+L. The boxes were, in fact, left-aligned.
“Well, they look weird,” he amended.
“I think it’s the drop shadow,” I said.
“We always use drop shadows.” Jeff sounded irate. “They don’t usually look weird. You did something to them.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, instead of arguing. Maybe I had done something to them. God knew I didn’t have immense levels of expertise in the specifics of drop shadows on a PowerPoint presentation.
I double-checked, but the shadows were lower-right, as always.
We’d made it through most of the deck when Jeff started commentating again. “Miri, this shouldn’t have taken this long to review,” he started.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Is this a broader pattern?”
I gritted my teeth. “What do you mean?”
“It feels like things always take longer with you, Miri.”
My eyes flicked over to my second screen, where Levi’s initials indicated he was still online.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You need to do better work and do it faster.”
“I’m sorry.”
Jeff sighed. “Just do better. Don’t apologize.”
“Okay.”
“Clean this up, PDF it, and send it to the client.”
He logged off. Levi followed a moment later. I stared at my screen, feeling frustrated and useless.
This was my job. I was literally hired to edit documents and put together slides and models. I had no right to feel so… angry.
I did as Jeff bade me and sent the document to the Princeling and the Gray Knight in PDF and PowerPoint formats with a quick note.
Then I stood up and went to the window, staring outside at the dancers still spinning in wild widening gyres below.
They tossed their heads up and let the blue illumination of daytime hit their cheeks—but, as ever, there was no sunlight to warm their skin.