The Clinch Cover (sample)
She’s been airbrushing pecs all through lunch. “This is good,” Margot mumbles, stepping back to look over her handiwork, watching light and shadow play on the chest of the guy who’d been holding a redhead last week. He’d been a sexy pirate back then. Her eyes dart up to the clock, half past one, then back to the iMac, filled with love. Not bad. The title’s a placeholder—marketing’s waffling—and just to be cute she types in something silly, Margot’s Passion, just to see how it looks, to imagine such a thing. Either way, okay. The composition pleases. The models look good, and convey adoration. Sensuous, eternal. Same old, same old. Margot Donner’s job makes people’s eyes go wide at parties. She knows because she watches their reaction when she murmurs, half into her drink, that she churns out the covers for mass-market romance. “No way,” say the friends of her friends. “Someone does that. I can’t believe you do that.” She doesn’t take the pictures, she doesn’t book the models—nothing like that. “I never even meet them,” she would say. But Pennaline Press is small, and does quite a few things in-house. (“It doesn’t feel like a house,” she would joke, “more like someone’s apartment, but bigger than mine.”) Someone has to execute the vision, mix the colors, set the font—someone has to push the buttons, monkeylike. She had gone to school for art and found graphic design still acceptably hip, as a trade, and although she had never been much of a reader, it did not matter much in what she did. “I don’t even read all the books,” she says at parties, when she’s asked for salty stories from the romance factory. “There wouldn’t be time. We get a brief—we see the cover copy.” She sips from a red plastic cup with a shrug. “Sometimes the author will say what the people look like.” They are always so beautiful.
Around about four-ish, or even less specific than that, Margot takes out her earbuds just long enough to overhear her boss’s private phone call. A grown person’s crisis. Her kid sick at day care. Pickup required, but nothing too serious. “I gotta get Rhys. You’re fine on your own, anyway,” burbles Beverly Ann, hurling herself together to depart. “There’s nothing on the docket that can’t wait for me to see.” “Huh,” says Margot, just to show she heard. Keys are snatched, a coat thrown on. “And oh, you’ll have to interview the new guy.” Margot doesn’t think to ask just what that means until the door’s already shut.
This concludes the free sample, but you can buy the full story at this link! . . . |