My Secret Santa's Secret Baby

Chapter One - Skye

Few things hold more terror than the first day of anything.

First day of school, first day of a new job, first day of the rest of your life.

The sheer open potential could be almost paralyzing. It was for me, anyway, the potential for making a fatal error weighing on me like bricks.

My state of mind wasn’t helped by the fact that the job I was starting had been an accident. No, not an accident really, but more of a coincidence. The fates had smiled, the planets had aligned, and it had just so happened that at the exact moment in world history that I was looking for a job, a major New York publishing house was looking for a junior editor for their speculative fiction imprint.

It wasn’t a secure position, or even a permanent one. The ad was crystal clear about that fact.

Without putting it in so many words, potential applicants were warned that the job in question was basically an emergency stop gap over the holiday season. The annual buying glut, affecting everything from Black & Decker blenders to Black Metal albums also applied to the publishing industry.

Most of the houses, from biggest to smallest, found themselves in various degrees of short-staffage compared to the demand, around the time the Halloween decorations started coming down and the Christmas lights started being stocked mere steps away from the turkey and stuffing.

The first item on the potential glitch list, at least the one running through my head, was the outfit. I’d always been taught that you only got one chance to make a first impression and once it was there, it was unshakable. Because the job was basically probationary, I wanted to make sure I made as good an impression as possible and carried it on until the new year.

Sophisticated and slightly sexy or studious and serious? That was the question.

Pigeon Press was counted among the most important publishers in the English-speaking world. On the other hand, I was going to be working in the speculative fiction area, known for its casualness.

Pigeon was different among the corporate entities, acting more like a nation of city states than a vast and all-powerful cohesive kingdom. The department heads were given a free hand as long as the profit margins lined up, despite the personal feelings of the higher-ups. This freedom came at a cost, however, the commanding editors the first to go should even the smallest thing go wrong on their watch.

I couldn’t find much online about the speculative fiction department in general. The head editor, Simon Del Rey, was a bit of an enigma. He had no photo on the company website, or anywhere else online, and there was precious little biographical information to be found on him.

All I was really able to glean was that he was thirty years old and was an almost obsessive fan of the 19th century British author William Morris, the mad genius who was generally credited with innovating the modern Fantasy genre with books like News From Nowhere and The Wood Beyond the World.

According to GoodReads, Del Rey had written no less than ten books on Morris or his work, encompassing everything from biography to fanfiction, most of it self-published, though all of it with very respectable ratings.

I got the strong sense that editorial wasn’t Del Rey’s first choice of career. Like so many writers before him, he had to take a writing adjacent job while climbing what Neil Gaiman once describe as the mountain of becoming a successful author.

I could definitely relate, having upwards of twenty finished novels on my hard drive, dating back to grade-school, some of which might actually be publishable. Not that I was likely to find out.

I was 18, fresh out of high school, and my parents were insisting I either secure a ‘proper’ job or a degree that would help me get one. They made it clear that they would be having none of that ‘Liberal Arts’ nonsense.

Usually, the best I would have been able to get at a place like Pigeon was an unpaid, and probably technically illegal, internship. Happily, they were desperate right about now, and my powers of creativity made my resume look rather convincing.

Which was a major part of my outfit dilemma. I needed something that made me look as old as possible without coming across as too severe.

Settling on form fitting black jeans with a tucked-in t-shirt and tailored suit jacket, I pulled my hair back into a ponytail. That was something that was easier said than done, considering it hadn’t been cut since I was 14 and it had grown down to my hips.

I looked at myself in the full-length mirror and decided to go for a bun instead. It looked more like a dessert plate, but it would do. I glanced at myself again, liking what I saw. I had curves in all the right places, but my outfit didn’t accentuate them so much that I felt too exposed.