The Kiss Test (3 page)

Our walk up Fifth Avenue to Central Park served as a warm-up for our daily run, dodging New York citizens and tourists to hone our reflexes. The incessant noise was comforting in its sameness, in its constancy.

Unlike my employment.

Damn.

I picked up my pace.

“Margo. Honey.” Adair panted beside me. “You know I can’t fan in these crowds. Can’t you go slower until we get in the open?”

Katya, his roommate and conscience, growled at him from behind me, and I could imagine the look on her face. It would speak volumes—“Don’t say anything to upset Margo. She’s just been fired.” Okay, I was exaggerating. I hadn’t been fired. I’d been downsized, laid off, phased out. Whatever.

Adair remained silent all the way to the park. I was feeling too mean to care whether he sweated up his designer tank or not. Don’t take this wrong. I liked Adair a lot. He’s a great friend, aside from having had to
almost
compete with him for men a time or two. But his vanity and freakish paranoia about sweating while running—and thus possibly staining—his trendy duds, was highly annoying. Adair would pull out a pocket fan—to prevent wetness from forming anywhere on his body—as soon as we hit the “openness” of Central Park and there was no chance of someone bumping into him and getting the blades tangled up in his chest hair.

I’d insert an eye roll here if I had the mental energy to actually roll my eyes.

I dodged people and cabs, barely stopping for lights in my desperation to run. Adair and Katya, ever the faithful friends, kept up their suicide watch. We entered the park and took off like taxis through an intersection. As we moved onto the road that threaded through the park—used by runners, bicyclists, rollerbladers and any other souls brave enough to risk being stampeded by the health-conscious—the elm trees closed in, and the traffic and horns were silenced, or at least muffled. Central Park was like a completely separate world from the rest of Manhattan. A bit of nature persistent in its survival amidst the stone and steel of the city. Something to be cherished, a respite from rushing, even while running.

As predicted, Adair pulled out his fan the minute the coast was clear, and every few minutes he’d aim it at an armpit or down the front of his racer-back tank, ensuring any droplets of sweat that dared to appear were instantly blown into submission.

“Do you want to talk about it, Margo?” Katya asked tentatively, keeping pace with me on my left while Adair brought up the right. “It might make you feel better.”

Adair agreed. “Talking always makes things better. Kat and I talk all the time and look how healthy and well-adjusted we are.”

I shot a glance at the man running beside me, chin thrust in the air, pointing a whirling pink pocket fan at his neck. “I’m not sure I could stand to be as healthy and well-adjusted as you, Adair. It might just make me sick.”

Katya chuckled nervously. “Did they say anything about who else might be, you know, let go?”

“Everyone on-air,” I said. “I didn’t hear anything about anyone else.” I didn’t voice my concern that it might be just a matter of time before many of the other English-only-speaking employees were let go in favor of Korean-speaking employees. No need to scare my friends half to death. The very idea of them both losing their jobs at the same time was frightening. The two of them had shared an apartment for five years and were almost like an old married couple—minus the sex, given they both had a preference for sleeping with men. They pooled their money and their support. Take that away and they’d be in trouble.

“That’s just wrong,” Adair professed, craning his neck to follow the assets of a cute guy who sped past us on roller blades.

“His ass?”

“Don’t be perverse. I can carry on a conversation while admiring the view. It’s
wrong
that you were fired.”

“She wasn’t fired!” Kat protested. “She was laid off. There’s a big difference.”

“And the difference would be?”

“This wasn’t her fault. She didn’t do anything wrong!”

If I ever needed defending, I’d go to Katya. She should have been a lawyer. Or an animal rights activist. She was passionate about protesting mistreatment and upholding the downtrodden. Not that I fit that description. I might be down, but I wasn’t trodden yet.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I agreed, “except study the wrong language in high school. And be born on the wrong side of the world.”

“That wasn’t your fault either,” Katya repeated, and I had to smile despite my depression.

“Of course not,” Adair agreed, blowing his brow-line with the fan.

“Geez, you guys. Lighten up. It’s just a job.” I said it like I meant it. And, I suppose, underneath it all, I really did. I knew I’d find another job. At least I was pretty sure I would. It wasn’t like there were a glut of country stations in New York City. None to be exact. The closest one was in New Jersey. Maybe they had an opening for a morning girl.

I shuddered a bit. Did any self-respecting New Yorker actually commute
to
Jersey to work?

I picked up the pace a bit. I needed my pulse rate up, a sheen of sweat on my skin. I needed to find the “zone.” I needed to forget my troubles for a few minutes at least. My friends ran silently beside me for several minutes, keeping pace easily, until finally Adair protested.

“Margo, honey, I bought this fan at the dime store. It doesn’t do high speed.”

“Sorry,” I muttered, slowing a bit to avoid being the sole cause of Adair’s profuse, fabric-dissolving perspiration.

For a moment I was distracted by the comical sight of my fan-toting friend. A small man in stature, only an inch taller than me, Adair was bigger than life in personality. He dressed to the nines even in the casual atmosphere at WKUP and made an entrance everywhere he went. Running in the park was occasion enough to demonstrate his fashion sense. Made the rest of us running in old T-shirts and no-name-brand shorts look bad.

“Hey, isn’t that Chris?”

I jerked my head in the direction Katya pointed. A group of people, including Chris and his business partner, Chip Xavier, surrounded a couple of hot-shot skateboarders doing their stuff. Probably testing out a new board for X-Treem Sports, the sporting goods store that Chris and Chip owned. They catered to the young and daring—or immature and stupid, in some cases—and frequently bought new, state-of-the-art equipment they’d tested for manufacturers before the rest of the country.

“Oh yummy. Let’s stop and say hi.” Adair dropped back a few paces to head in that direction.

“Keep running,” I snapped.

He huffed out a breath and sped up again.

“You don’t want to stop?” Katya asked, feigning innocence. At the same time, she moved around me to run beside Adair. She grabbed the fan out of his hand and began attempting to dry the sweat stains from her own T-shirt in case I changed my mind and agreed to circle back to say hello to Chris.

“No, I don’t want to see him yet. He doesn’t need to worry about my job.” How different that conversation with Chris would be compared to yesterday’s. “Besides, I’ve told you…you didn’t pass the stupid Kiss Test, so there’s no chance for you.”

“I was nervous!” Katya protested. “All I need is one more chance.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I replied. “The rule is ‘one kiss, one chance.’ It’s a dumb game anyway.” Chris was my best friend, and I’d defend him over just about anything except The Kiss Test. He’d developed it in high school—maybe even earlier. Chris claimed he could tell instantly if he was meant to be with a girl by kissing her. He administered the Kiss Test with the seriousness of a physician removing an appendix. If she passed, she was guaranteed at least one supposedly unforgettable night with “Extreme Treem.” And if, according to Chris, he felt nothing from the kiss, it didn’t matter how well they got along, how attractive the girl was or how much he liked her, she was out of the running.

Katya had been administered the Kiss Test two weeks ago and failed.

“Doesn’t sound like a dumb game to me,” Adair said, snatching the fan back from Katya, who was now sulking beside her roommate, who would no doubt soothe her later with Häagen-Dazs and Kahlua. “He just needs to give that Kiss Test to the right person.” He puckered his lips and made kissy noises. “He’s doling out those tests to the wrong people. No offense, honey.”

Katya glared at him and went back to pouting.

“Don’t even think about it,” I told Adair. “Stick to your own team.”

“Speaking of.” Adair’s entire demeanor suddenly changed. He tucked the fan away in his back pocket and stood taller. His hands immediately went to his hair, quickly patting it into place. “In
com
ing.”

Katya and I followed his fluttery-eyed gaze to where the Wide-Strider moved along the sidewalk, making his way to cross the running path. This guy never failed to get a laugh out of Kat and me, but Adair was totally smitten. At probably six-foot-ten, the guy was nearly skeletal, and usually wore a tan polyester suit with a black silk shirt and tie. His pasty white head was shaved bald, he wore ultra-mod shades no matter what the weather and carried a big black leather purse. Okay, it was probably a soft-sided briefcase, but it sure as heck looked like a man bag to me. To Adair, it was a sign that they walked on the same side of the fence.

The funniest part about this guy, though, was the way he walked, like an exaggerated member of Hitler’s SS—long, straight-legged strides, like his knees didn’t bend or he thought it might take less time to traverse the park if he took larger steps, his body bobbing up and down with each slow-mo stride. He never failed to crack us up. Even today.

As soon as the Wide-Strider passed us, Katya stopped running and mimicked his bobbing saunter.

“You stop that right now!” Adair scolded. “He may be our new roommate some day, if I can figure out how to meet him. I’ll run my own Kiss Test, and
that
Mr. Studly will be mine.”

Katya met my gaze behind Adair’s back and we both cracked up. Mr. Studly?

“He’d better not move in with us,” Katya said, when we finally stopped snickering and returned to running. “I don’t think I could ever look that guy in the face without laughing.”

“Humph,” Adair snorted.

“Well, back to a subject that makes
some
sense,” Katya began with a smirk. “Aren’t you going to tell Chris about being laid off, Margo?”

“Not yet. I’ll tell him Friday night over drinks.” We parted waters to pass a couple of dawdling walkers and met up again on the other side. “I’m not telling Kevin yet either.”

“You’re not?”

“No.” I’m not sure when I’d decided that, but the minute it was out of my mouth, I knew it was the right decision. “He’ll just try to micromanage my job search, which I don’t need.”

“How are you going to keep it from him?” Adair asked, apparently not angry at us any more for making fun of his dream man. “Won’t he notice when you don’t get out of bed and go to work every morning?”

“I have one more week left. By then I’ll have a job.” Hopefully. “Even a one-week reprieve from telling him is better than nothing.”

“What if he calls work and someone blows it?”

“He never calls work. He calls my cell.”

“What if he hears that the station’s been sold?”

“If he asks me point-blank if I lost my job, I’ll tell him. We have an honest relationship.”

“Dishonesty by omission is still dishonesty,” Adair said, with a slightly haughty look.

I returned it with a look of my own. “Oh, you mean like how you’ve
omitted
telling your parents you’re gay?”

He pinched his lips together and faced forward again. “That’s different.”

“Why? You don’t tell them because you don’t want them to try to run your life, right?” A raucous cheer went up from a group of Frisbee throwers playing in a grassy field, drawing our attention momentarily, just to make sure none of those deadly disks came in our direction. Katya still sported a scar on her forehead from a wayward Frisbee thrown while we were running last summer. “Same reason I’m not telling Kevin just yet. I wouldn’t be able to make a move without him analyzing it and trying to correct any tactical errors I might be making. I’m perfectly capable of getting a job without his strategic help. I’ll add my Best Country DJ award to my résumé and have a job before my first unemployment check kicks in.”

All of a sudden I ground to a halt. My heart raced, and it wasn’t from the exercise.

I’d just thought of something.

Shit.

Adair looked back at me. “What’s wrong?”

I sped up to catch them again, my mind now racing nearly as fast as my heart. “I just realized something.”

“What?”

“
Today’s Country Magazine
is giving me this award. I have to go for an interview next month.”

“So? Isn’t that a good thing?”

“It is if I have a job. How am I going to explain to
Today’s Country
that I got fired the day after I won the award?”

“But you didn’t get fired!” Kat protested again.