Free The Interview (short romance story) by V T Turner

The Interview
     
    V T Turner
     
     
    Copyright © V T Turner 2013
     
    [email protected]
     
     
    Also by V T Turner
     
    My Paid Angel
    5 Days a Week
    Sinister Touch
    Good, Bad, Girl
    Betrayed
    Voyeur
    Forbidden
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    1
     
    Shirley was nervous. She showered, tried on half a dozen outfits and then, when the nerves kick started a flood of sweat, she showered again and sprayed herself with an atmosphere-clogging amount of antiperspirant. She redid her hair and her makeup, taking anther hour to set herself before she changed again.
     
    She settled on a casual suit. It fit her perfectly, curved neatly around her ample bust, hugged tight to her slim waist. The short skirt showed off her small bum and her long legs.
     
    She adjusted her appearance in the mirror with trembling hands, looked this way and that; bent this way and that, seeing herself from every angle. She sprayed herself with a subtle amount of perfume, not enough to overpower, but enough for them to smell as she neared.
     
    She retouched her lipstick, plucked a stray eyebrow and gave herself a hardened, stern stare in the mirror. You can do this , she told herself. You’ve got this. She breathed in deeply, closed her eyes and when she opened them she was set, ready to go to her job interview.
     
    It wasn’t her first and it wasn’t a particularly hard one. She was thirty-two, had worked for much of her adult life and had changed jobs as much as she’d changed outfits, but interviews, regardless of the job or how much it paid, always terrified her. There was something so innately horrifying about sitting in front of a panel of men and women and having them judge you; watching and trying to smile as they perused your appearance and body language, reading from a file which detailed your entire adult working life.
     
    Shirley was a social creature, but when it came to job interviews she would happily be a hermit.
     
    It was an office job, nothing too taxing. She would be sitting behind a desk all day answering phones, making calls and filling out forms and other menial nonsense on the computer. She wasn’t even sure she wanted the job, she still had a part time job in a restaurant, working most weekends and some nights, and she was happy to wait until something better came along. On her way to the interview, driving erratically and trying to keep her mind occupied by listening to the radio, she wondered why she even bothered going, why she was putting herself through the stress. She was fairly confident that even if they wanted her to fill the position, she would refuse.
     
    They had asked though, and she had applied. It would be rude to turn them down, and she still clung to the hope that the job would be better than she envisaged; that it wouldn’t be as tedious and soul destroying as she suspected it would be.
     
    She pulled up outside the office block, parked the car and looked up at the imposing brick building with her eyebrows arched into a hesitant frown. It looked like a prison, only the inmates here wore shirts and suits and shared gossip and bullshit around the water cooler. It was a square, unimpressive building that sat in a dark and dreary part of town, around the corner from a busy road that blared a constant wall of noise at the weather-stained three decade old structure; next to a line of smaller buildings that had seen better days and made the office block look like paradise by comparison.
     
    She sighed heavily, slunk out of the car and paused to straighten her skirt and study the building again, hoping it would look better in the open air. It didn’t.
     
    “Shelly Marshall,” she told a stern-faced woman at the front desk, a woman who looked as bleak and menacing as the building in which she sat. “I have an interview?” she frowned, not sure why she had phrased that as a question. She was wondering just how naive or