My Secret Lover Is Actually My Boss novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: Ink

"Nine days," I said.

"Nine days," Pip said.

We looked at each other across the studio.

Then we both screamed, and the junior writer dropped her coffee.

The next four days went by in ink.

Pip lettered all sixteen cards again from my originals, on the big table, with the radio on.

Leon brought the originals over from the hotel in a shoebox every morning and took them back every night.

He never opened the box in front of anyone. He handed it to Pip and walked away.

On Friday afternoon the plates came back from the plate maker in Milwaukee, because no one in Chicago would take a Winship order anymore.

My dad drove up to get them himself.

"Halvern doesn't own Wisconsin," he said, and put the box on my desk like a cake.

We started the first run at eleven that night.

All ten of us were in the back room.

The colorist had left on Thursday with a cake we'd all signed. Her desk still had her mug on it.

Leon came at eleven thirty in jeans and the grey sweater, and stood in the doorway.

"I'm not here," he said. "I'm a man who's good with a wrench."

"You're terrible with a wrench," Pip said.

"I'm a man who's present with a wrench."

"Get in here," I said.

Card nine went first.

It had to. It was the one Lyle had held up on television.

I fed the first sheet of heavy cream stock into the windmill myself.

Leon turned the wheel.

The arms came round. The platen closed with a soft clap.

It opened.

I peeled the sheet off the plate.

I'm not okay and you don't have to fix it.

My words. Pip's lettering. Deep blue ink pressed so far into the paper you could close your eyes and read it with your thumb.

It was eleven fifty-nine.

At midnight Pip hit play on the speaker, and the whole back room shouted.

The junior writer was jumping up and down.

One of the old guys from shipping, who'd come up "just to see," was wiping his eyes with a shop rag.

We ran card nine two hundred times.

Then card one. Then card six, the junior writer's version.

At one in the morning Pip clapped her hands.

"Okay. Everybody home. We do the rest tomorrow, sober and rested."

"We're not drunk," somebody said.

"You're drunk on ink. Go home."

They went in a loud bunch to the freight elevator.

Pip went last.

She looked at me at the drying line, and at Leon at the wheel, and back at me.

"Lock the door," she said. "And wash your hands. There's a sink."

The freight elevator clanked down.

It was suddenly very quiet in the back room.

The work light buzzed.

Two hundred copies of card nine hung on the drying line over our heads like flags.

I looked down at my hands. Blue to the wrist.

He looked at his. Black to the elbow.

"There's a camera in the hall," I said.

"Not back here," he said. "I checked the day we found the press."

"You checked."

"I checked."

"Why?"

He didn't answer.

He just looked at me under the work light, and I knew exactly why.

I walked to the door and turned the lock.

The click was loud.

When I turned around, he was right there.

He put both inky hands up on either side of my head, flat on the door, not touching me.

"Last time I got ink on you, you sat on the floor until sunrise," he said.

"Last time you could sign my severance."

"I still can't."

"I know."

I reached up and drew one blue finger down the middle of his chest, over the grey sweater.

It left a line.

"Now you're mine," I said. "I've marked it."

He laughed, low, and then he wasn't laughing.

He kissed me against the door, hard, and my blue hands went into his hair.

He picked me up.

I wrapped my legs around his waist, and he carried me past the press to the big wooden work table, and swept a stack of blank card stock off it with one arm.

It went everywhere. Neither of us looked.

He set me on the edge of the table and didn't step back.

He stood between my knees, both inky hands on the wood on either side of my hips, and looked at me.

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