Free The Kissing List by Stephanie Reents Page B

Dom is her boss, she isn’t sure.
    “Hmm,” Dom says. “I don’t know what came over me.”
    This disappoints.
    “I’m just a babe magnet.” She stops, thinks. “Wait, that’s not what I mean.” She giggles nervously. “I mean these lips …” She vaguely knows she is supposed to say “I’m glad you did” or “I feel the same way,” some gesture toward reciprocated affection.
    His thumb finds the knob of her hip and presses. She shivers. Before she can navigate her way to a complete thought, they are kissing again.
    “My place or yours?” he says, just as it’s rumored to be said in the movies, though Vita herself hasn’t ever seen this line delivered without irony.
    “Sure,” she says, as though he has asked her to bring him a cup of coffee or type a letter.
    He laughs—“We’ll go to my place”—hooks a hand around her waist, and reels her out into the street, where a cab waits. (Why is it they’re always there when it would be better if you had to work a little harder?) Vita’s need for fresh air unmet, she is still fuzzy as they head uptown. It’s only when her skirt is pushed up to her knees that she’s really regretting her rule against nylons—not that Dom’s kisses are clumsy. He is smooth, and she is flushed and eager, even greedy, but he is also her boss, and though she has not yet established a rule in this regard since she only joined the “real” world two months ago, she thinks fooling around with bosses is probably risky,unproductive, unprofessional, plus the possibility of being a temp girlfriend seems problematic. She pulls away, sees the fringe of the cabbie’s head, feels embarrassed.
    “Dom, I can’t do this. You’re my boss.”
    “I can fire you.” He yawns, exhaling a hint of green olives and something sharper.
    “I don’t know,” she says.
    Cupping her chin, he whispers, “You’re fired, darling,” and then begins to offer her generous, if not slightly distracted, severance. Still, after the cab draws in front of a brightly lit entrance somewhere on the Upper East Side, and a doorman opens up the door and good-evenings Dom, she blurts out, “I think I need to go home. I’m sorry.”
    “As you wish,” Dom mumbles.
    She thinks she hears him add, “silly young thing.”
    The cab half-circles the block and speeds south. Though the traffic lights of the avenue turn green all the way downtown, she still has to dig out her emergency twenty from behind her license to pay the fare.
    T he next morning Vita’s phone rings at 7:45, and she learns that Dom really has fired her, though her job specialist doesn’t say this. She says, “The temp supervisor mentioned that the VP of HR needs someone with more sophisticated secretarial skills. Did you hit a pothole taking dictation?”
    After exchanging a few pleasantries, her job specialist tells her not to fret, next week is another week, but what Vita hears is that there are no new placements. In light of this, she mustrefigure how much money she will have by the end of the week (minus taxes), since she did not temp every day that week. Then, while Mel is perfectly accessorizing a Calvin Klein suit that she would almost kill for (that she will have to kill for if she doesn’t find gainful employment soon), Vita calculates out how much money she will have by the end of the month (minus rent) if she screws up again—(instead of screwing?)—and only works three or four days a week. “That is totally effed up,” Mel says to her reflection. “You should, like, totally sue.”
    “I know,” Vita says halfheartedly. Afterward she dresses like her normal self (in jeans and a zippered black hoodie), practices typing pages from Cotton Mather sermons, reads her novel, still sheathed in
Built to Last
, and naps.
    That evening, it begins to rain. The street turns a darker shade of gray, and the sidewalks are umbrellaed over. It is five o’clock, that hour when people finish one thing and start another, not quite