The darling hostess plunked a wineglass in front of me with sloppy purpose. Ruby liquid heaved over the edge, pooling around the base of the glass like it was a gunshot wound.

“Here you go!” she chirped, giving me what I’m sure was her nastiest smile, which wouldn’t even rate on my scale.

And like that, the curtain went up, the spotlights roasting: showtime. “Oh, no,” I gasped. I tapped my finger on the line between my two front teeth. “Big piece of spinach. Right here.”

The hostess slapped her hand over her mouth, her face heating from the neck up. “Thanks,” she mumbled and slunk away.

Luke’s eyes were confused blue orbs in the lazy evening sun. “She didn’t have anything in her teeth.”

I took my time leaning over the table, slurped my wine from the rim to spare my white jeans. Never fuck with a rich white bitch and her white jeans. “Not in her teeth. Up her ass, on the other hand . . .”

Luke’s laugh was the standing ovation. He shook his head, impressed. “You can be pretty vicious, you know?”

“The florist will charge you by the hour for next-day cleanup. You need to negotiate a flat rate on the contract.” Monday morning. Of-fucking-course I had to ride the elevator with Eleanor Tuckerman, née Podalski, fellow Women’s Magazine editor, who, when she wasn’t leeching my talent in her nine-to-five, assumed her acting role as authority on everything wedding and etiquette related. Eleanor was married a year ago and she continues to discuss the event with the kind of somber reverence you would 9/11, or the death of Steve Jobs. I imagine this will continue until she gets knocked up and goes on to birth our next national treasure.

“Are you serious?” I punctuated my words with a horrified little gasp. Eleanor is the features director, someone I report to, and four years older. I need her to like me, and it doesn’t take much. All girls like this want is for you to widen your eyes at them, Bambi innocent, and beg them to impart their wisdom to you.

Eleanor nodded, gravely serious. “I’ll e-mail you my contract, so you can see what to do.” And so you can see how much we dropped, she didn’t add, which was totally the point.

I gushed, “That would be such a help, Eleanor,” and bared my recently whitened teeth. The elevator doors dinged my freedom.

“Good morning to you, Miss FaNelli.” Clifford batted his eyes flirtatiously. Eleanor got nothing. Clifford has been the receptionist at The Women’s Magazine for twenty-one years and has various, absurd reasons for hating the majority of people who walk past him every day. Eleanor’s crime is that she is awful, but also that one time, an e-mail went out that there were cookies in the pantry. Clifford, who couldn’t leave the phones unattended, forwarded it to Eleanor asking her to bring him one, plus a coffee with enough milk that it turned the color of a camel. Eleanor happened to be in a meeting, and by the time she read the e-mail, the cookies were gone. She brought him his precious camel-colored coffee anyway, but Clifford turned his nose up at it and hasn’t spoken more than five words to her since. “Fat cow probably ate the last one instead of giving it to me,” he hissed to me after “the incident.” Eleanor is just about the most anorexic person I know, and we fell to our knees we laughed so hard.

“Morning, Clifford.” I gave him a little wave, my engagement ring winking under the farm of fluorescent lights.

“Look at that skirt.” Clifford whistled, his eyes approving on the size two leather tube I’d stuffed myself into after yesterday’s carb catastrophe. The compliment was as much for me as it was for Eleanor. Clifford loved to showboat what a peach he could be if only you never crossed him.

“Thank you, doll.” I opened the door for Eleanor.

“Fucking queen,” she muttered as she passed through, loud enough for Clifford to hear. She looked at me, waiting to see what I would do. If I ignored her, it was a line drawn in the sand. Laugh, and it was a betrayal to Clifford.

I held up my hands. Made sure my voice carried the lie, “I adore you both.”

When the door closed and Clifford could no longer hear us, I told Eleanor I was going downstairs in a bit to do an informational interview. Could I get her a snack or any magazines from the newsstand while I was there?

“A Kind bar and the new GQ if they have it,” Eleanor replied. She would pick at that thing all day. A nut for a mid-morning snack, a dried cranberry for lunch. But she gave me a grateful smile, and that was the goal, of course.

Most of my co-workers automatically delete those e-mails, subject line “Can I Take You to Coffee?” written by dutiful twenty-two-year-olds, at once terrified and woefully overconfident. They all grew up watching Lauren Conrad on The Hills and thought, I want to work at a magazine when I grow up! They’re always disappointed to find out that I have nothing to do with fashion (“Not even beauty?” one pouted, cradling her mother’s YSL bag in her lap like a newborn). I take pleasure in taunting them. “The only freebies I get in my job are the galleys of books three months before they publish. What are you reading right now?” The color draining from their faces always reveals the answer.

The Women’s Magazine has a long and storied history of mixing the highbrow with the lowbrow. Serious journalism appears here and there, along with occasional excerpts from moderately prestigious books, profiles of the select few female execs who managed to break the glass ceiling, and coverage of hot-button “women’s issues,” aka birth control and abortion, that softer terminology really grinding LoLo’s gears because, as she’s fond of saying, “Men don’t want a baby every time they fuck either.” That said, this is not the reason one million nineteen-year-olds purchase The Women’s Magazine every month. And my byline is much more likely to appear next to “99 Ways to Butter His Baguette” than it is next to an interview with Valerie Jarrett. The editor in chief—a chic, asexual woman named LoLo, with a menacing presence I thrive on because it makes my job feel forever in jeopardy and therefore important—seems to be simultaneously disgusted by and in awe of me.

I’d been pigeonholed into the role of the sex writer at first, I think, because of how I look. (I’ve learned to camouflage my boobs, but it’s as though there is something inherently vulgar about me.) I ended up stuck in this role because I was actually good at it. Writing about sex is actually not an easy thing to do, and it was certainly not something most of the editors, regular subscribers to The Atlantic, would ever deign to do. Everyone here is falling all over themselves to flaunt how little they know about sex, as though knowing where your clitoris is and producing serious journalism are mutually exclusive. “What’s BDSM?” LoLo asked me once. Even though she knew the answer, she gasped gleefully as I explained the difference between a sub and a dom. I play her game though. LoLo knows it’s not a profile of the founder of EMILY’s List that keeps the magazine flying off newsstands every month, and she needs those sales numbers in her back pocket. There have been rumors over the last year that LoLo will usurp the editor of The New York Times Magazine when his contract runs out. “You’re the only person who can write about sex in a funny, intelligent way,” she told me once. “Just tough it out and I promise you, this time next year, you will never have to write about a blow job again.”

I carried around this little tease, precious to me as the shiny parasite attached to my finger, for months. Then Luke came home and announced he was in talks to transfer to the London office. There would be a significant bump to his bonus, which was already significantly fine. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to live in London one day, but not on someone else’s terms. Luke was taken aback when he saw the devastation curtain my face.