The shrill sound of Marimba rang throughout the otherwise silent room, causing Addison, who’d been seated at her desk, to nearly jump out of her skin. For the past hour, she had been engrossed within her inbox. While many designers preferred to have their assistants handle correspondence, Addison liked to have as much personal contact with buyers and clients as possible. This meant that once every week, she sat down at her desk and replied to as many e-mails as she could possibly could without carpal tunnel kicking in. Normally she enjoyed a bit of light music playing in the background while working on tasks from home, yet she often found that the lyrics distracted her from her own responses. Thus, when wading through her inbox, she preferred to work in silence, although her phone had apparently not received the memo.
Picking up the device clamoring around the desktop, she quickly slid her thumb across the screen to answer the call before it turned to voicemail. “Hello?”
“Addison?” A sweet British voice sounded through the opposite end of the speaker. The voice was almost angelic and very familiar. It took her only several moments in order to correctly identify the speaker, at which point they had already carried on. “It’s Eleanor. I asked Harry for your number. I hope that’s alright.”
“Of course it is,” Addison pushed back her laptop, leaning back into the chair she was sitting in. It was at that moment that she realized how tense she had become. Every muscle in her body screamed from sitting in such tense posture for so many hours. This phone call actually came at a great time, giving her a chance to rise from her desk and stretch her legs.
“I know this is very sudden, but I really enjoyed dinner the other night and I’m headed back to Manchester in a few days, so I was wondering if you’d like to go out shopping or for drinks. If you have free time, that is.”
Addison rose from her chair, gazing back down at the screen of her laptop, full of bolded, unopened messages. Somehow, the idea of the returning to them wasn’t particularly appealing. And she had already made quite a dent this morning. A few hours off couldn’t hurt. It was the weekend after all.
“I’d love to,” she responded, running a hand through a tangled mess of hair. It seemed as if she had forgotten to brush it this morning after waking up. Striding into the bathroom, she began opening and closing drawers, in search of a brush. “When did you have in mind?”
“Um, are you free at all this afternoon, by chance?” Eleanor’s voice was hesitant, almost as if she had anticipated Addison would be otherwise inclined.
“Aha,” Addison mumbled under her breath, at last successfully retrieving a hair brush and running it through her thick dark locks. “Actually,” she spoke a bit louder into the phone’s speaker, shifting it to rest between her ear and shoulder, “I am. Where did you have in mind?” Deciding that her hair was presentable enough to go out in public, she tossed the brush back into the drawer and seized a can of hair spray to ensure that her loose waves wouldn’t frizz in the outdoors.
Eleanor trilled on the other end of the speaker. “Lovely! I’ve been meaning to go Barney’s. Although I’m sure you get there quite frequently.”
“I never say no to Barney’s,” Addison interrupted. The department store was one of her favorites. When their line had gotten optioned several years ago by the buyers are Barney’s, she almost passed out from sheer excitement. That night, she and Sabrina drank one too many bottles of champagne in celebration and spent the entire next day hugging the porcelain throne between doses of Ibuprofen.
