Page 49 of The Fallen Man
“Oh my God, so late!” complained the assistant, walking her back to the design area.
“I thought the call time was nine?” She’d worked with Roggario before. He was a petite man who blew through the workshops, marking and giving instructions and then dashing out again. He barely looked at the fit models, but she was the right body type for most of his clothes. They’d been a good client. She didn’t want to screw this up.
The assistant gave her a look that said she was an idiot.
“Scarf and glasses off,” said a photographer with a polaroid camera.
“Uh, OK.” She dropped her accessories and bag on the chair, and he pushed her up against the plain gray wall and snapped her photo.
“I said white T-shirts!” snapped Roggario from the far end of the room, stomping toward her. “Why can’t anyone follow directions?” He was wearing designer black and a pair of bright pink sneakers.
The polaroid was promptly taped to a whiteboard with photos of a dozen other girls in white T-shirts.
“I don’t think—”
“Sheet?” Roggario demanded, snapping his fingers at her in command.
Caitlin looked around the room at the photographer and assistant and the handsome guy playing on his phone with his feet up on a table covered in model sheets and realized that she’d stumbled into a casting call for the Roggario show.
“I don’t have one,” she said. “I’m—”
“No one follows directions!” he howled. The guy playing on his phone looked up with an eye roll. He was good-looking in a sexually ambiguous way. Gay, straight, just a fashion model? It was hard to say.
“Fine,” said Roggario, “let’s just see you walk, and then you can go.”
Caitlin stared at him. She had just had the best sex of her life, her hair looked amazing and she was being mistaken for an actual model. Why the fuck not?
“Sure,” she said. “Down and back?” She gestured to the open area.
“That is the usual way.” His sarcasm was biting.
She did model walks all the time. Usually just to pick up glassware and to amuse Jessica, but it wasn’t like she didn’t know how. She went down, she came back, and fixed Roggario with her patentedget the fuck away from creep on a trainstare.
“Worked for me,” said the guy behind the table.
“Thanks,” said Caitlin. “Meanwhile, I’m Kate St. Cloud. I’m the fit model you have scheduled for nine.”
“Oh,” said Roggario, his face going blank. “You’re five minutes early.”
“Yes, I am.”
“But,” protested the assistant, as if her world had shifted on its access, “you were with the hot guy in the car.”
“Last time I checked, fit models were still allowed to date.”
The guy behind the table began to laugh. “Well, babe,” he said standing up and kissing Roggario on the cheek, “I’m going to let you all extract your own feet from your mouths. Miss St. Cloud, it was nice to meet you.”
Jackson
Deveraux House
Jackson drove toward Deveraux House and collected at least two tickets from intersections with cameras. He didn’t care. Tickets were a line item in his monthly budget. He counted them as a luxury of the rich. Only poor people had to obey speeding laws.
Last night had been a better trip than any drug he’d ever tried. The sex had been mind-blowing, but her personality had been an unexpected revelation. Katie’s face when she’d come out of the bathroom with the condoms made him laugh out loud just thinking about it.
“They aren’t even expired,” he muttered to himself, still laughing. It wasn’t often that he’d met someone so undeniably gorgeous, but somehow also the cutest thing on the planet. Who the fuck had she been seeing that they had they had allowed that box to get anywhere close to the expiration date? Katie made the phrasegetting luckyan absolute truth. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he deserved to get that lucky more than once. Why she hadn’t been scooped up by some guy with a fat wallet who would give her fat babies, a diamond ring, and a house to go with it was beyond Jackson. She was clearly forever material. Too bad he wasn’t.
Jackson’s mood had dipped by the time he got back home, but the sun was still shining so he smiled as Theo opened the front door for him.
