Blow Me: Chapter 7 Excerpt

           By the end of the week, Skye understood why Howard had hired the Hefner Twins. She had often expressed to him how overburdened she was by her job, and he finally listened. The new girls would infuse more life into the office, something she had been trying to do since Day One. It had been a losing battle with nobody on her side, but now she had allies. And since they were new, they would be kissing her ass while they learned the ropes. She would be able to take all sorts of liberties. Extended lunches for a quick polish change or brow tweeze. The possibilities were endless. Maybe she could arrange to have Fridays off. Why not! She had been there a decade. She had seniority. She should get a gold watch, for Christ’s sake. With the new girls on board, it was the perfect time to cash in on some vacation days, so Skye put in a request for a weeklong vacation in March and IMed Dawn:

            How was lunch with the Architect?

            Pretty good.

            2^nd date???

            Dawn waited a few minutes, took a phone call, and checked her e-mail before responding. She knew the suspense would kill Skye.

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Blow Me: Chapter 5 Excerpt

            “Those fucking bitches.  Who do they think they are, coming into the office all pretty and young and looking like Victoria’s Secret models?” Skye raged as she squinted over the steering wheel and sped through the rain-splattered streets of West Hollywood. “How could Howard hire them? What could they possibly have that I don’t?”

            Work ethic, Dawn thought but didn’t say. She was amazed Skye had kept her job this long and was at a loss on how to console her friend, who was driving way too fast, considering she had yet to figure out how to turn on the wipers.

            “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Dawn said, even though she believed the opposite. “He’s probably just looking for a little fresh eye candy.”

            “But I'm the eye candy,” Skye whimpered, unable to enjoy showing off her new car. “That’s been my job for ten years.”

            Dawn bit her lip.  Ten years was a long time to hold anyone’s attention, even with Botox and a boob job.

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Blow Me: Chapter 3 Excerpt

            With her bottle-blonde hair freshly blown and makeup done to perfection, Ina Short appeared to have been born into an upper-class lifestyle. She wore a cashmere sweater, designer jeans, and Chanel ballet flats and fit right in with the ladies who lunched at Barney Greengrass, but Dawn knew her mother’s graciousness was pure facade. Underneath, she was a Holocaust survivor who moved to the United States from Poland as a young child. Growing up in the Melrose/Fairfax district, Ina learned Russian and Yiddish as first languages and rarely ventured outside her insular Orthodox community.  Initially, she struggled with English, often misusing words, phrasing things incorrectly, and demanding rather than asking.  Her rudeness was inadvertent, due to ignorance of intonation and inflection and a limited vocabulary. Over the years she lost her accent and learned proper grammar and Western etiquette, but somehow that didn’t stop her from criticizing instead of commenting. Dawn’s therapist once suggested that her mother’s criticism was a way of showing love. If that was the case, Dawn deduced, her mother must love her a lot.

          Ina placed three capers atop a tiny piece of fish perched on a microscopic schmear of low-fat cream cheese on the scooped-out bagel that she had the waitress rescoop, as it had not been sufficiently scooped to her liking the first time, and she studied her daughter from across the table.

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Blow Me: Chapter 1 Excerpt

Skylar Rose Cumming signed the last of the lease documents for her new Mercedes C300 Coupe and was reminded once again of her unfortunate name. The jokes commenced in the fifth grade when some prepubescent schoolboy dusted off his father’s old Playboy magazine collection in the basement and discovered the word cum. The abuse and ridicule of having a pornographic surname haunted her well into adulthood, so she only used her full name on legal documents and introduced herself as Skylar Rose or simply Skye. As she drove off the Mercedes-Benz of Beverly Hills lot and inhaled that new car smell, Skye knew she had finally arrived. Not in Los Angeles, that happened fifteen years earlier after attending a nine-month program at the National Academy of Beauty Arts in St. Louis.

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