Page 10 of Playboy For Hire

“Oh, it is you. Wonderful. I wasn’t sure at first. Violet? Violet, are you there? Well, I can see that you’re there, but I can’t hear you. Can you hear me, Violet?”

I looked over and saw Violet, her hair set with big curls, her lips freshly coated in drag-queen magenta, talking back at Thea. No sound was coming from her lips, though.

“Violet? I think you’re muted,” I said. “Can you look for the mute button on your phone and see if you pressed it by accident?”

Violet frowned and pointed at us, then mouthed a sentence that clearly included the words ‘mute button’ before jabbing her finger at us again.

“No,yourmute button, Violet,” I said. “If you can hear us, but we can’t hear you, then that means that—”

Before I finished speaking, the screen went black.

“Now what happened there?” Thea asked, frowning at the screen like a dissatisfied squirrel. “I didn’t hang up on her, did I? No, I didn’t touch that button. She must have hung up on us by accident. Let me try again.”

She called Violet a second time, then a third, but got no answer.

“Oh, no, do you suppose something’s happened to her?” she asked. “Maybe we should go and see. Hold on while I—”

But before she could move into her wheelchair, the door to her apartment opened and Violet appeared, grinning at us in a cherry-red velour sweatsuit.

“You were muted!” she cried at us, in a voice that only sounded ninety-five percent like a crow scolding you for walking too far into the woods. “You have to learn not to press the mute button, Althea.”

“I did no such thing,” Auntie Thea retorted. “I wasn’t muted,youwere.”

“Nonsense.” Violet stalked across the thick cream and blue carpet. “I would never do something like that.” She turned to look at me. “And how is the handsomest man in Washington, DC today? Your aunt didn’t tell me you were coming over. Trying to keep you all to herself again, I see.”

I suppressed a sigh. I really disliked it when Thea and her friends told me how good-looking I supposedly was. I knew they were just trying to make me feel better, but in reality, it just rubbed in hownothot I was. I was skinny, and too tall for my weight. I looked like a coat hanger had untwisted itself and become a person. And I had a big birthmark that covered most of my right cheek.

I’m fairly light-skinned, so it’s pretty much the first thing you see when you meet me. Kind of hard to hide something the size and shape of Australia that takes up one side of your face. And the more that people like Violet told me I was handsome, the more it reminded me that I wasn’t.

“I’m doing alright,” I said. “How are you today, Violet?”

“You know he comes over every Saturday,” Thea scoffed. “It’s your own fault if you can’t remember what day of the week it is.”

“Oh, I’m not that far gone yet,” Violet said, coming to a stop directly in front of the TV. “And you’ll go before I do, I’ll put money on it.”

“If I go before you do, I won’t remember taking that bet,” Thea replied tartly. “Now move over, you’re blocking my view.”

“I’m not going to move until you tell me why you called. I was about to take a nap, you know. It had better be important.”

“Ungrateful, she is.” Auntie Thea turned to look at me. “Do you see how she treats me? Accuses me of hiding you from her, then when I generously invite her over to see you, she yells at me for interrupting her nap.”

“You didn’t invite me over, I invited myself.”

“As usual.” Thea tossed her head. “I know I shouldn’t expect an old dog to learn new tricks, but really, you would think after eighty-three years on God’s green earth, you would have learned some manners. I was going to ask you a question, but I’m not sure you even deserve our attention.”

“As if you’re not a month shy of your eighty-fourth birthday yourself. And you watch who you’re calling a dog or I won’t help you at all. Now what was your question?”

You could be forgiven for thinking Thea and Violet only tolerated each other’s company due to forced proximity at Swannvale, but in fact, the two had been best friends since they began work in the same secretarial pool some sixty years ago. That was Auntie Thea for you. Sweet as sugar to strangers, she only really let her viper’s tongue fly with those she loved—and those who could give as good as they got.

“Quinn here has agreed to your suggestion,” she said, gesturing at me. “So now we just need the name of that company.”

Violet’s face went from suspicious to delighted in an instant. “He did, did he? Well, we always knew he was a smart boy.” She looked over at me. “You won’t regret it. My granddaughter swears her boss used them to find a date for the company holiday party. She says they were very discreet. Let’s see that tablet, Althea. I can look them up myself.”

“I can do it if you’ll just tell me the name, you busybody.”

“You’ll just forget it again before you pull up the keypad. I’ll do it.”

“You type like a sloth with sleeping sickness. I’ll do it.”

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