Growing into the Job, Post 449: Gala, p7 (Interlude re: Rina)

“Who is she again?” Randi asked, taking another swig of champagne as she looked across the crowded atrium. From where she and Marisela now stood, on the raised platform under the statue, it wasn’t necessarily easy to pick the girl out, another curvy figure in a sea of curvy figures. Though Marisela had better eyes than her, Randi had finally been able to spot the red dress after Marisela had shown her a post from the girl. Apparently it was from the ladies room here, taken an hour or so ago. The mayor-elect’s impromptu address had ended a while ago, and Randi had sent Josie and Lakshmi off to find Dr. J. Nancy Nunez had called out looking for him, wanting him up at the foot of the statue with her to ‘christen’ it, whatever the fuck that meant. 

Where had he gone? How had he slipped away? Weird. 

“That’s Rina, Rina Rubens,” Marisela answered, “She used to work here like, four years or whatever ago.”

“She’s the girl Dr. J had an affair with, that we hear about?” Randi queried, now watching the well-built woman mingling, talking with a group of Far Horizons girls that had come from Evolution in their early waves of hiring - Lexi, Nadia and Mallory. Rina was dark of long, straight hair and wearing a tight red cocktail dress that made clear what Dr. J’s attraction would have been. “She’s the one that…”

“Yeah, freaked out when he had to break it off with her,” Marisela confirmed. She was sipping on a seltzer. “She basically stormed right into the main office that morning and announced to everybody what their, uh, relationship was like.”

“And that was..?”

Marisela chuckled, remembering Rina’s heated but eloquent diatribe, where - in no uncertain terms - she laid out the depth and breadth of their boss’ infantile fetishes and fixations, for all to hear. “Let’s just say he’d been Rina’s good little boy wayyy before Melissa ever got to him.” 

“I hear she was a new mom back then,” Randi posited, “breastfeeding her kid…”

“...yeah and apparently our boss, too,” Marisela quipped, in her typically dry tone. 

Both she and Randi carefully eyed the woman, who had drifted to the edges of the crowd, each privately feeling a little pang of something that felt like envy. They saw Rina was now speaking with an older lady that neither of them knew. 

“What happened after that?”

“Oh, yeah, she quit right there, stormed out,” Marisela answered, “most of us lost touch with her.” The fight they’d just witnessed and, had to break up had stirred Marisela’s juices. She paused, taking a moment to to flex her bare, elegantly muscled back; it was a bit of a struggle to keep herself in check but the last thing she wanted was for those things to burst out of her shoulder blades with News Channel 5 around. “All I know is that she was eventually hired at Evolution, worked actually on our study as a compliance officer.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Like, she helped get the Product approved by the FDA. She just got a promotion, I hear.”

“Ah. So she’s like an executive now?”

“Yeah supposedly. She’ll have an office here, in the new wing,” Marisela answered, “She starts here Monday.”

“So, this woman, four years ago. She, like, single-handedly destroyed all the respect Dr. J had in the eyes of his staff, left, and now she’s coming back to work under the same roof as him again, now as an executive for the pharmaceutical company whose purse strings keep his practice afloat and basically writes his paycheck?”

“Yeah I guess.”

Randi’s skeptical, serious tone suddenly shifted.

“Holy shit, how fun!”

“Haha, yeah,” Marisela agreed. Both young women, in their nearly-matching black dresses, sipped their drinks in thought.

“Better to keep Dr. J away from her, you think?” Marisela finally offered.

“Yeah probably, at least at first.”

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thanks, RiF, for the edits