Hazelnut Flavour Binge with Hot Fudge and Butterscotch!
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Miss Merritt’s Week Off
Rating: PG-13 (language and adult themes)
Challenge: Hazelnut Flavour Binge
Toppings/Extras: hot fudge
Wordcount: 3,926
Summary: What’s a woman with no friends, interests or life to do with a week off?
Notes: Flavour binge, Hazelnut! 2.5k+ words for the BtS challenge. Also, I think that this is the best thing I’ve ever written. It was enjoyable, anyway!
Order as so: #5 (ask a stupid question), #26 (a gift horse), #2 (spare the rod), #27 (on the list), #20 (waste not), #22 (on the side) #23 (free sample), #16 (a blind eye), #30 (buried treasure), #11 (paint the town), #14 (when it rains), #1 (piece of cake), #10 (two out of three), #6 (in the rough), #9 (rule of thumb), #18 (what doesn’t kill you), #4 (on the fence), #19 (outside the box), #24 (1000 words), #15 (second wind), #17 (under the bridge), #8 (black tie), #13 (backseat driver), #28 (jumping through hoops), #12 (the kitchen sink), #25 (top secret), #3 (what goes up), #21 (up a creek), #29 (the dotted line), #7 (lost and found)
“Why?” Horatio Newson asked his PA incredulously. “What do you mean, why? I like to go on holidays. You know that much, right?”
“Yes,” Adele Merritt replied, trying to keep her facial expression perfectly even. “But why go on your own?”
“Er, hello?” Newson opened his palms up. “Solo holidays are all the fucking rage right now, according to everyone in the universe who actually has a life. Why are you arguing? I’m offering you your first week off since you started working for me. Is that really so fucking bad?”
-----
He didn’t understand-but of course, Adele would never expect him to. As usual they were stood up in his office-a massive glass wraparound room at the very top of Hamlet Tower, with glass on every single side and a glass ceiling to boot. Around them, Britannia City was filled with life. It was a Saturday: people wanted to go out and do things. The spires of the Eyam Brotherhood Church reflected the sunlight gaudily towards them.
“Can’t I come with you?” she asked, feeling pitiable. It was a new level of depressing when she was asking her hateful boss if she could go on his hideously vainglorious luxury cruiser with him. Newson actually laughed at her newest plunge into wretchedness.
“That’s not the idea of a solo holiday, dipshit. For fuck’s sake, Merritt... here,” he said, and flicked a card at her which she caught in a rather ungainly manner. She was not the most agile of creatures. “Twenty thousand on there. That’ll last you a week and more besides. Knock yourself out.”
-----
She stared in perplexity at the card, as though it was alien to her.
“Are you leaving me any work to do?”
“For fuck’s sake!” Newson repeated, rolling his eyes and heaving his swarthy form from his office chair. His flawless plastic face was grimacing terribly. “You’re my fucking PA, it doesn’t involve a lot of fucking paperwork, does it? Just take your fucking break!”
Of course, Adele had grown used to filtering out Newson’s many expletives, but even for him this was excessive. I don’t want a holiday, she thought miserably.
“Jesus Christ,” Newson said, putting his hands on his blonde head. “Merritt, you’re even more pathetic than I ever suspected-and I didn’t think that was possible.”
-----
Waking up the next morning was eerie. It was Monday, which meant a five-thirty start. She got out of bed and carried out her usual morning routine mechanically, showering and brushing her teeth and drying her hair and dressing herself into one of her usual pin-sharp business suits so that she was ready at six. For a few moments, she stood by the window in her bedroom-she had her own living quarters in Hamlet Tower. She even lived at work. What was she meant to do with the day?
Newson had left the previous night. She knew because she’d had to help him pack, with a big list and everything. He always looked so damn amused when she pulled out a list.
She liked lists.
-----
It was early Monday morning and she had nothing to do. For some reason, the thought made her despair-there was nothing, not a singe thing, that she could imagine doing that day. Going back to bed was not an option. What was she going to do without Newson rushing her off her feet all day? It was hard, but it took her mind off of the grinding monotony and oppression of her entire life, which was all that she needed.
There was not a single person in the world that she could think of that she would want to spend time with-or, for that matter, would want to spend time with her. After trailing ghost-like around her living quarters for a few minutes, she decided to go out and grab a coffee. This time at least it would be for her, not for her boss. If she had a break, she might as well use it.
-----
She stalked importantly to one of the many elevators that constantly whizzed up and down Hamlet Tower and stepped into it, taking herself down to floor 185. That was one of the public floors of the tower, and was completely open-air: instead of walls there were pillars to support the floors above it, and walkways splitting out across to other nearby skyscrapers. She stepped onto one of the escalator walkways that pulled her up towards a large coffee shop in the next skyscraper over and walked in. It had opened minutes earlier, and it was apparent that she was the first customer of the day.
“Good morning, miss,” yawned the flop-mopped young lad behind the counter, and then he grinned at her lazily. What on earth was happening with that droopy fringe on his face? “Early bird, eh?”
“You could say that,” Adele replied stonily. “Just give me coffee. Black.” Being the repressed, neurotic, permanently angry and anxious creature that she was, not many people would be surprised to discover her inherent caffeine addiction. “Two, actually.”
-----
“Sure thing,” Floppy replied, grinning. “Do you want a free cupcake? We can’t sell it ‘cause it arrived with no sprinkles on. Still looks good, though. I was going to have it myself, but seeing as you clearly have a busy day ahead of you...”
He even winked.
Adele hesitated a moment.
“Fine, all right,” she said curtly, taking it form his hand dispassionately. After a moment, she even managed to dredge up-“Thank you.”
-----
“Don’t worry about it,” he grinned. “Not a morning person?”
“Not a people person,” she scowled in response, and walked out of the coffee shop. She looked down at the cupcake. It was also a bit misshapen-usually this meant that she would not touch it even if she was wearing oven mittens and a gas mask, but somehow, today, she decided that she would eat it. This holiday thing is already messing up my mind, she thought.
-----
With nothing better to do, she meandered aimlessly: something that she personally couldn’t stand. She needed aim. It being a Monday, most people wandering around were on their way to work. People who didn’t need to work were not desperate nor stupid enough to come out at twenty past six in the morning-aside from the occasional jogger. Smug, self-satisfied heathens, she thought as a couple bounced past her, with their limp waggling wrists and their unreasonable headbands. The sky was just about straining itself to a creamy colour, but the sun was not yet out.
It was quite cold, but Adele did not take notice of it. She was of the mentality that it was indeed possible to out-glare temperature.
A long day lay ahead of her, it seemed. At least the cupcake turned out to be delicious.
-----
She ended up skulking around Hamlet Tower a little, but eventually she got sick of the pitying glances that she received wandering about like a child that had lost its mother. Did people think she was dependent on Newson? Because that wasn’t true. She was dependent on work.
Although it had been years since she had been on an evening out, Adele was not looking forwards to it. It was not the sort of thing that she did. All of the clothes that she owned were business suits. She decided to go with that: although she didn’t wear tights under her skirt this time, and had the sleeves of her blouse neatly rolled up to the elbow.
This was as casual as it got with Adele Merritt.
Once she was fully prepared, having applied her snake-venom coloured lipstick and layered in the mascara, she decided it was time to go out.
-----
Of course, who should she encounter in the first bar she entered but Floppy the Barista. She didn’t recognise him, but he insisted on coming to talk to her, still grinning the same grin. Why did he think that she wanted his company? She stood by the bar letting an endless stream of wine pour into her while he nattered away at her side.
“Hard day at work?” he asked, seeming amazed as she moved onto the third bottle.
“I’m on a break, actually,” she replied curtly. Her alcohol tolerance was impressive-she still sounded almost perfectly sober. She poured another ribbon of crimson into her well-used wineglass.
“Holy smokes...”
-----
Her only thought when she considered going home with Floppy and having sex with him was: I guess I have nothing better to do. It was not hard to convince him. She just stood up somewhere around her fourth bottle, grimaced, and said: “Let’s go to yours.” He looked delighted. He hadn’t even had to try.
Neither had she, which was much more to the point.
His apartment was small but very neat, which was very good indeed, although Adele supposed that she wouldn’t have given a damn how messy it was. She felt like sex: Floppy was obviously there to provide it.
It was difficult to continue thinking of him as Floppy once he took her into the bedroom.
-----
Some time later, he rolled over sleepily and grinned at her; he had this slow, indolent grin that he probably fancied was quite slick and pretty.
“Was it good for you?” he asked.
Adele was in the process of re-applying her lipstick, sat up with a compact mirror held in one hand. She didn’t even glance at him as she smacked her freshly darkened lips together.
“The first two times it was satisfactory, I suppose,” she said apathetically. “The third time? Awful.”
-----
The next morning she didn’t feel so great, which probably accounted for why she didn’t wake up until ten to six. It was the longest lie-in she could remember in her life. After a few moments of consideration, she threw on yesterday’s business suit and felt a mild thrill at the feeling of it. Wearing the same clothes twice in a row? Including underwear?
She’d never, ever done that before.
The door was locked, so she went and impassively prodded Floppy until he woke up.
“Let me out,” she said.
-----
“Now, see... I have this reputation as a bit of a lady’s man,” Floppy was rambling as she waited impatiently, arms folded, for him to open the door for her. He was trying a jaunty, confident grin but it fell flat before her expression of utter disinterest. “I’ve got looks and stuff, see, I get a lot of interest from girls. Now, I don’t want you thinking that I was using you...”
“I assure you I won’t, whatever your name is,” Adele replied with a loud sigh. When would he get out of the way and let her go home to wash?
“It’s... Ben.”
“I really don’t care,” Adele said, brows pinching. “Can I go?”
”So you’re telling me,” the man who she had just discovered to be called Ben said slowly, “That you wouldn’t mind if I went out tonight and had sex with another girl?” He raised his eyebrows slowly, as though he thought this one would catch her out.
“Quite frankly, I wouldn’t care if you plunged to your death from a top story window tonight.”
As a general rule, Adele did not forge relationships with anyone that she slept with. Hell, she rarely permitted someone to have the pleasure of her company for more than a few minutes. She wasn’t sure who this Ben character was trying to kid.
-----
Unfortunately, ‘Ben’ was apparently a masochist. He padded along after her as she walked along the hallway his apartment was tucked into. It was narrow and smelled a bit salty. Adele frowned around it with superiority.
“Can I have your number?” he asked hopefully.
“No.”
“Why not?” He cocked his head, giving a little twitch that flicked his disastrous fringe slightly out of the way. “We could meet up again.”
She turned and stared at him.
“I don’t want to meet up again. Ever.”
“So that’s it? You’re just going to go and you never want to see me again?” The city was big. There was every chance that the two of them would never clap eyes on each other again. Which was the whole point. Adele rolled her eyes.
“Aren’t you the so-called womaniser here?” she asked curtly. “As the phrase goes, jog on.”
And then she left, just like that. Floppy was left staring after her in bewilderment.
“She used me...!”
-----
Once she went home, washed, changed and had something to eat, Adele wasn’t sure what to do next. But something had changed. She didn’t want to stay in Hamlet Tower any more. She went out-although she wasn’t sure exactly what she did want to do.
The next few days passed in a blur. The whole time, Adele Merritt-possibly for the first time in her life-had no idea what she was doing. No plan, no system, no itinerary. She just went out and walked around Britannia City. She took the aerial tube-trams to other parts of the city and went to art galleries and ate popcorn while standing on street corners.
It was, in all honesty, a rather bizarre experience for her.
-----
On one of these rambles she happened to be walking through a park with a map of the Asteroid Museum in one hand and a bar of fudge in the other. She had no idea how this had happened. Suddenly, she saw some people standing in a row, each one with an easel and a set of paints. They were all looking at one of the large fake trees that decorated the indoor park. Adele watched them a few moments, pinpointed who seemed to be the leader and walked up to him.
“Can I join in?” she asked.
“Sure,” he replied, before looking around as though something was missing. Which was exactly the case. “Do you have an easel?”
“No.”
“Paints?”
“No.”
“Do you paint a lot?”
“No,” Adele replied again, “ I never paint.”
He gave her a funny look.
She then flashed the card that Newson had given her into his face.
“Give me everything I need,” she commanded. “I want to try something new.”
-----
If a picture indeed says a thousand words, the one that Adele was in the process of painting merely said the words ‘why am I doing this?’ over and over and over again. She had never painted before, but she got the hang of it quite nicely.
“You’re actually quite good,” the man in charge-who was called Grayson-said, sounding surprised. Adele decided to let him off. This time.
-----
It was only a few minutes after this that a jogger suddenly stopped and gaped at her.
“Hey!” he said, grinning.
Adele looked at him blankly.
“It’s Ben.”
“Who?”
“Ah, very funny!” Ben said, making his way towards her and wiping some sweat from his forehead. He was even wearing one of the preposterous headbands that she found so repulsive. She had vague recollection of him, but her total lack of concern for his existence made it hard for her to make the effort to dredge up memories. “Well, what’re the chances, eh?” he said blithely. “I didn’t know you were into painting.”
“I’m not.”
“So why...” he began, but then he stopped. Now that he had encountered Adele Merritt more than once, he was starting to realise that there were certain types of question that were pointless to ask.
-----
“Do you know this man?” Grayson asked Adele after sidling up to them.
“No,” Adele said, and at the same time Ben replied: “Yes.”
Grayson hesitated-but having spent half a morning in Adele’s presence, he was beginning to think that perhaps she was not entirely sane. She had a too sane look to her, with her hair bound tight as wire and her business suit. He decided it was best not to interfere, and walked off.
“No need to be like that,” Ben said, nudging her with one elbow. Adele scowled at him, wondering how dare he so much as touch her with his sweaty skin. “Look, about that night... do you want to start over? Maybe sex isn’t the best way to meet someone. Let’s say it never happened...”
-----
“...I’ll take you out somewhere nice, really nice, a real silver service slap-up dinner... what do you say?”
Adele tried to concentrate on painting, but he refused to leave her alone. Her painting was beginning to become smeared with dark and angry colours from her irritation. The tree had become lost behind a blurry cloud of stormy oranges and reds and great slashes of black. He suddenly stopped and stared at it.
“That’s... interesting,” he said nervously.
No reply. Then, Adele washed her paintbrush off and laid it on the palette, putting them both on the astroturf they were stood on. Picking up the canvas, she turned and walked out of the park, careful not to touch anything with the wet paint.
-----
“Look... I’ll take you just to a cafe, a nice little place, if you don’t want anything too formal,” Ben continued to blather, following behind her. “Go left here, there’s a really nice... OK, don’t. How about-Ed’s Diner? That’s really... well, right, if you don’t want to go in...” He looked around desperately. “There’s the coffee shop we first met in! That’s where I work. Do you want to...?”
He trailed off as Adele walked straight past it, still ignoring him.
“Maybe Starbucks?”
“Why are you still following me?” she asked, exasperated. He didn’t mind that she seemed annoyed with him: at least she’d said something.
-----
“Because you’re just... interesting!” he said eagerly as she carried on walking. “And we did have sex, after all. Surely that’s worth something?”
“Not really.”
“I’ll do anything,” he wheedled, doing more insane flicks of his allegedly stylish fringe. He skipped around so that he was walking in front of her. “Do you want me to carry the painting for you? It’s quite big.”
Adele looked him up and down a moment.
“Fine,” she said, handing it to him. “If you insist on tagging along like a homeless goon, you might as well do something useful.”
-----
A few hours later, Ben was buried under a large pile of things that Adele had bought during her trip around Britannia City. He had an “I heart Liverpool” hat jammed on his head and piles and piles of tourism bits and bobs. Adele didn’t know why she’d bought it all, but she had. Now that she had Newson’s card, she felt as though she should spend it.
One of the things she had bought was a piece of clothing: an absolutely gorgeous, svelte, silky, slinky fishtail dress in a dark damson colour. It was the only piece of clothing that she (newly) owned that was not a business suit.
“I’ll probably never wear it,” she had hummed to herself as she swiped Newson’s card through the till machine. Ben probably would have replied something along the lines of please do, had he not been buried under the rest of her shopping.
-----
“Look, I’ve been following you around all day, carrying your stuff... can you at least give me your number?”
“That was not the arrangement,” Adele said, inspecting her nails idly as they sat on the Tube later that day. Britannia City shot past beneath and around them as the gleaming snake of a vehicle shot through the suspended titanium-and-glass pipe that it used to get around the skyscraper city.
“What was the arrangement?”
Adele smirked at him.
“There wasn’t one.”
-----
By the time they arrived in the public floor of Hamlet Tower, Floppy Ben looked fearsomely frustrated and tired. As far as he knew, Hamlet Tower was filled with the Nutriware Ltd offices-he had no idea that Adele Merritt also lived there. He was so close, yet so far...
“That’s it,” he finally said, red-faced. “Are you done? Are you fine? Are you going to show me any sort of gratitude now, or are you just going to stand there looking smug?”
“I’m going for smug.”
“Right,” Ben said, voice rising in protest. “You know what...? Right, right... I get it... ha!”
After this somewhat irregular trail of phrases, he picked up most of her shopping, hefted it towards one of the barriers that separated them from a two-hundred-storey drop, and threw it all over the top of it in one great heave. The barriers were high, but apparently all of Ben’s working out paid off, because all of it went over the top.
Adele hurried to the glass barrier and pressed her nose to it. She got there just in time to see her beautiful dress curling and flapping in the wind like a velvet flag as it disappeared from view. When she next looked at Ben, he distinctly heard the sound of rattlesnake tails.
-----
Needless to say, Ben ended up running for his life. He was only saved because of Adele’s sense of dignity: it simple wouldn’t do to be seen running after someone with a knife in your hand. Still, that look of black poison she had thrown at him seemed to have been enough to make him run for it.
It was mostly rubbish, I guess, Adele thought as she walked back towards her living quarters. She sighed lightly. I’ll miss that dress, though.
-----
She spent the remainder of her break cleaning up Newson’s office and his living quarters. It was a part of her immensely long contract, after all, and Adele Merritt believed in doing a thorough job. Thinking back upon the holiday, she had to say that it had been an interesting experience-but one that she would not be repeating for a few years at least. Not voluntarily, anyway.
As she tidied, she took swigs from a tall bottle of white wine. Straight from the bottle, too. Seeing as I’m on holiday, I may as well, she thought easily. The rest of the staff were gathered outside of the door, trying to keep quiet as they watched her hang up her painting on a small divider inside of Newson’s immense glass office. It looked like an angry red storm cloud.
“Do you think he’ll like it?” she asked one of the cleaners after admiring her handiwork.
“You’re definitely performing above and beyond the usual standards of a PA, miss,” the cleaner sad politely. “Did you paint it yourself?”
“Yeah,” Adele said vaguely. “It makes me think of him. Maybe because it makes me want to be sick.”
-----
“It was pretty fucking dull after the first day,” Newon said after his return as he poured himself some scotch. He was tanned to a toxic level of orange. “To be honest, it would have been better if you’d come. I missed having someone to throw things at.” He sighed and sat back in his chair, looking around the office. “I take it you just hung around in your room for the whole week? I’d imagine you went into a corner and powered down.”
He chuckled after this: Newon liked making little ‘jokes’ in which he pretended she was a robot.
“Yes, sir,” Adele replied, deadpan. “Of course.”
He suddenly spotted the painting.
“Holy shit,” he said, tilting his head. “Where the fuck did that thing come from?”
Adele shrugged, eyes fixed on her dark cherry fingernails.