Free Lovers by Judith Krantz

ways to minimize these problems. Have I lost you already, Gigi?
Gigi!
You may not know it, but two other creative teams, Kerry and Joan and John and Lew, have also been put on the Indigo Seas pitch. We’ve got heavy internal competition here. They’re sitting in their cubbyholes as we speak, trying to come up with something so good that they’re going to make us look sick. Will you, for Christ’s sake, pay attention?”
    “I’m sorry, Davy, I’m in another place,” Gigi said without any hint of repentance. “I was just trying to decide if I’m ready to reveal the details of how I lost my virginity, and I discover I am.”
    He ignored her, his heart pounding. Had he really been naive enough to hope she was still a virgin? “Indigo Seasspecializes in suits that give the large woman a shot at looking okay. We’ve got a clearly defined target customer—the latest Lou Harris poll shows that fifty-eight percent of Americans are overweight—”
    “So they claim.” Gigi shrugged indifferently. “My sign is Aries, by the way.”
    “Why the hell did they hire you? That’s what I want to know.” David took off his glasses, slammed them on the desk, and glared at her. Aries, his fatal love sign. He’d been in love twice in his twenty-eight years, each time with an Aries. Even the cosmos was against him.
    “What’s that supposed to mean? Do you hate me because I rejected your sinister organic apple?”
    “Don’t make everything so damn personal, for crying out loud! Victoria spent weeks just getting us invited to make this pitch, and so far you’ve been one hundred percent negative about the prospective client. But you were hired to manufacture
yearning
, Gigi, you have to make a woman yearn to buy an Indigo Seas suit.”
    “No woman in her right mind yearns to buy anybody’s swimsuit, not Cole, not Gottex, not Sandcastle, and a large woman yearns less than any other,” Gigi said stubbornly.
    She really wasn’t ready to get down to work yet, Gigi thought rebelliously. Archie and Byron still hadn’t found the time to introduce her around the office, there were no Indigo Seas suits around to give her an idea of what they looked like, and trying to think copy in a vacuum was something she wasn’t used to; she had always written from the inspiration of merchandise, or at least photographs.
    “We have to
force them to yearn,”
David insisted.
    “That’s not logical. You can’t force yearning, my boy. Yearning is involuntary, look it up in the dictionary.”
    “Not at FRB, Gigi. That’s the crucial difference between thinking catalog and thinking advertising. Here we invent yearning. Better get with the program, Gigi. Let’s see a little enthusiasm, damn it!”
    Irritated, Gigi stood up and threw him a snappy salute. “But I am enthusiastic, sir! Show me that target again, I’mready to take off at dawn. Bombs away,
sir!”
He wanted enthusiasm, he’d get enthusiasm.
    “Stop kidding around.”
    “Yes,
sir.”
She saluted again.
    “I mean it. We have work to do.”
    “Certainly,
sir.”
    “If you salute again, I’ll tear your arm off.”
    “Yes,
sir!”
    “Sit the fuck down!”
    “Yes,
sir!”
    “If you call me ‘sir’ again, I’ll rip your head off.”
    “Whatever you say, Davy, my pretty one, my lovely lad,” Gigi said, sitting down and feeling more like herself. A touch of rebellion, even purely symbolic, refreshed her as it always did.
    “It’s such a kick having a teammate … I’ve never had one before … perhaps I’ve been carried away by your seniority.” Gigi flitted her eyelashes at him and, just for the hell of it, favored him with a shamelessly flirtatious smile, the one she secretly thought of as “old three eyes,” irretrievably, irrevocably inescapable. Was David aware that when he took his glasses off he had the most amazingly huge and interesting light brown speckled eyes? Like the girls in the old movies, nearsighted men always had an edge when they took their