Authors: Ellen Lane,Taylor Young
“I’m hoping to have it all over and done with within six months,” he finally answered Michael, crossing his arms firmly over a broad chest. “I can’t afford to waste any more time with the bloody thing.”
“As I’m sure whoever you pick will be sufficiently chewed to a pulp by the time you’re done with them,” his friend rebutted with no small amount of snark. “And be running for the hills.”
“All the better,” Elias breathed, running a hand over the prickly hairs covering his chin. “I’ve no patience for anyone without a backbone. It’s the only way you get anywhere in this business.”
“And… I suppose it makes no sense that you chew up backbones and spit them out like toothpicks?” Mike jibed, before exhaling a long sigh. “Trust me, I’m far more worried about whoever you chose than I’m worried about you, Eli. You’re going to rip an aspiring mind to shreds.”
“What I will
do
,” Elias replied crisply, “is challenge them. Which is precisely what they will need at this stage in their career. It will be a trial by fire – the most telling kind.”
At the reverence in his tone, Michael merely laughed softly, shaking his head. “I’ll be sure I’m on hand to extinguish any flames, then.” With that, he set his glass down at the end of a grand staircase, winking at Elias’ frown of disapproval. “Shall I get you one this time, then?”
Elias ran fingers through his mussed raven-haired locks, trying not to think of the trials to come in the next few weeks. Even contemplating looking at the designs of the finalists was enough to make his head throb. “Two, if you can carry them.”
Michael smirked, nodding in his direction understandingly. “Whiskey it is, then.”
**
When the bell signaling the entry of a customer sounded, a dark head was buried deep in a textbook, and the only greeting it provided was a quick flash of a hand.
“Hey, Bernie.”
Portly Bernard Barnes stopped cold in the doorway, arching a brow at the small figure enclosed behind the check-out desk of the corner store, before shaking his head with a slow smile. How the
hell
did she do that?
“We got in a shipment of Watermelon Snapple this morning. I put a couple in the front of the case for you.”
Bernie’s face lit up in appreciation. “You’re a gem, Cat.” With that, he started for the back of the shop, grin firmly in place.
From behind the register, Catherine Harris peeked over her book at one of her every day customers, sparing him a small, impish smile as he extracted four bottles of Watermelon Snapple from the case. Bernie was predictable. He came in every morning on the way to work at precisely seven fifty two, ordered a small coffee and an egg sandwich. Then, every evening on the way home, he showed up at four twenty for his Watermelon Snapple and Snickers bars.
And he, of course, was only one of a plethora of people who frequented the shop. If Cat hadn’t seen them around the neighborhood – a place she knew like the back of her hand – then she’d seen them in the three years she’d worked at the corner shop. Some of them came in at the same time every day, and some of them ordered the same thing, but she’d always had a head for places and names.
And her customers liked that.
It was one of the two things about her job that made shit salary a little bit better. Cat had always liked meeting people and hearing about their lives – and during her shift, she heard all kinds of juicy gossip. Part two of the advantages was, surprisingly, the large amount of down time. She only got paid seven dollars an hour, but Moe’s shop was on the outskirts of the city which meant that the busiest hours were the morning ones.
For the rest of the day she just had to make sure that she kept the shop tidy, greeted customers and kept an eye on things – which was easy enough.
“Long day today?” As Bernie set his loot on the counter before her, Cat put aside her book with a small smile at his inquiry.
“Not really. I’ve been trying to get a bit of studying in while it’s dead.” She rang up his Snapples and candy bars, along with a box of Marlboro Lights.
“Studying, huh? European architecture again?” He glanced down at the thick, peeling volume on the counter next to her before shaking his head slowly. “Isn’t building just a lot of math? Definitely not my area of expertise.”
Cat laughed softly, patting the book lovingly. The local library had offered to give it to her in lieu of throwing it out, and she’d been forever grateful. She must have read through the book, which detailed some of the beginning and intermediate principles of architecture, at least five times in the past year. Her mother thought she was slightly obsessed, and maybe she was right.
But was it really so bad to lose herself in her dreams sometimes?
“Well, there
is
math,” she conceded, bagging his items for him “But I like to think of it as art. All those numbers eventually combine to make something that speaks more to the eye than to the logical mind…at least for those who didn’t design the thing.” She added sheepishly, with a slight blush.
Visibly amused, Bernie merely chuckled as he paid for his items. “But I’m guessing you want to design?”
The young woman sighed whimsically, resting her chin in cold palms as the very prospect warmed her. “That would be something, wouldn’t it?”
“You’re a smart one, Cat.” Bernie winked at her winningly, “If anyone deserves to get out of here, it’s you.”
Catherine only flushed in embarrassment, shaking her head as she snapped her book shut. “No…I can’t leave. Who would run the shop?”
Her customer rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “I dare say Moe could run it himself. It’s not like he’s got much else to do.”
Well, that was certainly true. As far as Cat knew, on the days that Moe
did
come in, he posted up in the back room and fell asleep watching Seinfeld reruns until it was time for her to leave for the day. But, if she suggested that he actually run the shop, she was pretty sure the tiny, irate man would just blow her off.
“Yeah, well, maybe I’ll have a discussion with him.” Her smile lacked any real enthusiasm, but Bernie was too busy breaking into his first Snapple to notice.
“You do that, Cat. Have a good one.” And just like that, he was gone with the tinkling of the bell.
Leaving the young woman alone, once again, with her book. Cat barely hesitated a moment before opening it again. She knew that it was slightly obsessive that she read the same book over and over, but this was the book that had taught her everything she knew about architecture.
One of her last links left to her father.
As her slender fingers slid over the outline of the Eiffel tower on the first page of the chapter on Parisian architecture, she sighed.
He
had been there more than his fair share of times. Her father, that was. When he’d been alive, he’d been a translator for some huge corporation that had sent him all over the world. He used to make Cat and her mother laugh by calling them to tell them good morning in French, good afternoon in German and good night in Spanish. Taylor Harris had a penchant for languages that bordered on the supernatural, and at the time of his death, he’d been fluent in no less than six.
He’d managed to impart quite a bit of French on his daughter before he died, and to this day, Cat’s mother’s face glowed with pride when she conjugated simple verbs. It was those times that she felt closest with her father, and could forget the acute pain of his loss.
At least, her mother always reassured her, the cancer had taken him quickly. By the time the doctors found it, it had been far too late to do anything but make his last days comfortable. And so, they had.
Taylor Harris had died with a smile on his face, and that was how Cat liked to remember him. It was a lot easier than recalling how his death had stripped them of any and all income they’d had. How he’d left behind reams of medical bills that had rendered them destitute within weeks. They’d had to leave the bright, airy New York apartment where she’d grown up for the suburbs of Detroit, which were rough even on good days.
Nothing had been the same since.
Cat’s mother had struggled every day to raise her daughter – to put her through school and keep food on the table. The little girl had only been eight when her father died, and Cat often remembered the first years after his death as some of the darkest. Naomi Harris had turned to drink to keep her exhaustion and desolation at bay, and more often than not, Cat had been forced to fend for herself – cooking and cleaning for two people.
Of course, by the time she’d been halfway through high school, her mother had begun to clean up her act – she’d returned to the real world and discovered that Cat needed her just as much as she needed her daughter – and she’d ponied up. Catherine had never really blamed her for the dark years. It was a time in which she’d been in a pretty difficult place herself as she and her mother had come to grips with the situation they found themselves in.
They had never managed to recover, and still felt the pang of poverty acutely. While their apartment was bigger, Cat hadn’t gotten the opportunity to attend University. She didn’t have anywhere near enough money – even after working at the corner store for what seemed like forever. At one point, she’d saved up enough for a single semester of courses, and it had been absolutely heaven. That was, of course, before a fire had damaged their apartment and eaten up the rest of her funds, dashing those particular dreams.
But, while she stood behind the register in the corner shop, twenty-six year old Cat sometimes lost herself in what could have been. Her father, with the tales of all his wanderings, had instilled in her a desire for travel and a lust for adventure. Though she hadn’t been beyond the Michigan State line since she and her mother had moved to Detroit, she visited places like Dubai and London every night when she closed her eyes.
And she pictured what it would be like to add her mark to the famous skylines emblazoned across her mind.
It was these dreams that had driven her to send one of the many buildings she’d drawn in her spare time off to Europe, knowing that she’d never hear anything back. Impulse had woken her the night after she’d seen a special on the news detailing how
Elias Johnson
, the best known architect currently living, was looking for new talent to design a new personal residence for himself.
While Cat’s mother had ooed and ahhed at the prospect, her daughter had merely scoffed, even as her heart ached. There was nothing she’d like more than to jaunt off to Europe and have the opportunity of a lifetime.
Put poor, skinny young women with too many freckles and lacking college diplomas couldn’t be architects.
No matter how much they dreamed.
In fact, every time Cat recalled the drawing she’d sent in, the more embarrassed she felt. It had been rudimentary – less plans than an
idea
of a building – one with wide, modern pillars at the entryways and an open floorplan. Floor to ceiling windows served in the place of many walls, providing the entire structure with an open, airy feel – but necessitating an isolated property. Honestly, when she pictured it now, she winced. Certainly, an architect of Elias Johnson’s caliber didn’t want every Tom, Dick and Harry seeing him naked every time he got out of the shower.
Though, she supposed that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Leaning over the front counter behind which she stood, Cat peered at the cover of the city papers on the rack just inside the shop. The front page had a picture of the man standing in front of his newest project – an extension to the Louvre museum in Paris that had opened just the previous week.
Though she had only seen Johnson’s face a handful of time, it astounded her how young the man was each and every time. Young and devastatingly handsome. Men like Elias Johnson
knew
they were attractive. How couldn’t he? With those clear blue eyes, gorgeous raven-haired hair and beginning of a beard gracing his chin? The man was dressed in a suit, but it was clear that the body inside said suit was not only statuesque, but well-kept as well. It probably came from all the hands-on work he was rumored to do on his projects.
It was a curious approach to architecture, but part of Johnson’s allure.
Funnily enough, little was known about the man’s personal life. Unlike other famous personalities who practically shat dollar bills, Johnson didn’t make it a priority to make his business public knowledge. If anything, the man was somewhat of a recluse – only appearing for grand opening and banquets – and only then reluctantly.
He was an artist, people asserted, and that was that. Atop that, he was a
rich
artist, so the man could do whatever the hell he pleased.
Including search the world for the next big name in architecture.
Sighing, Cat glanced at the clock above her head. It was close to five o’clock – almost quitting time. She had to run a few errands before she got back to her mother…which meant banishing her dreams for a while.
Closing her book, the young woman shoved it in the bag she kept under the register along with a pad she doodled her designs on whenever she had a moment. They were the two most precious things she owned – her gateway to another world.