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She couldn't remember feeling quite so awful in years.
On Monday, Andrea had bounded in with the kind of energy Miranda could only hope to achieve with a minimum of seven lattes downed within the space of two hours, then proceeded to positively fling her arms around Nigel's neck.
He murmured back something she didn't quite catch, but she didn't miss the thousand-wattage beam her second assistant's face had lit up with.
This should not have bothered her, and if it did, it ought to have only been in a professional sense, that her most reliable employees were spending on the clock time hugging instead of contributing to the work of the magazine.
And yet the strange prickling in her chest did not seem professional at all.
She did what she did best with unwanted emotions. She buried it.
***
Unfortunately, it appeared the dead were capable of rising. For Tuesday afternoon rolled around, and Miranda was having a perfectly average day. That was to say no one had died fetching her coffee, and the collective IQ of Runway's floor was not languishing below subterranean level.
Until she rounded the corner to the closet, only to behold a most unpleasant sight. A teary-eyed Emily, wrapped tightly against Andrea's torso.
The prickling sensation was back, stronger now.
Miranda turned sharply on her four-inch heels and strode away. She had people to fire, reputations to destroy, rooms to freeze.
***
It was a rare event that Miranda personally picked her daughters up from Dalton. But on Thursday, an unexpected cancellation (she could hardly fault a designer for falling ill, even if she pretended otherwise) meant she had the time available to do precisely that.
She stepped out of the car, scanning the gaggle of uniformed schoolchildren swarming down the steps for her Bobbseys. And there they were, sequestered within the middle of the crowd, hair askew and ties loose.
"Caroline! Cassidy!" she called out as they approached. Acting on instinct, she bent down slightly and held out her arms, smiling.
Caroline quickly glanced back behind her.
"Mo-om," Cassidy hissed, "we're too old for hugs."
"Oh," Miranda said quietly, hands dropping to her sides with a dull thud. "I see."
But the following evening, Andrea dropped off the Book.
From the den, Miranda heard the patter of feet down the stairs. Her curiosity piqued, she rose to stand and moved to peer through the crack between the door and the wall.
Andrea whispered something to Cassidy, who beamed. Next to her, Caroline beheld her assistant with a similar variety of adulation.
And then - to Miranda's shock - both girls hugged her. Enthusiastically.
The Editor rubbed her arms, then wrapped them around her waist. She couldn't look away, as much as she wished every time she blinked for the scene in front of her to have disappeared.
***
Come Sunday evening, Miranda made a resolution. She would attempt to secure if not a hug, if not an affectionate gesture, then at least something vaguely resembling a casual touch.
Over the next week, she tried. And tried. Then tried some more.
She stood just a little closer to Nigel, leaning in slightly more than was necessary to peer at the layouts spread over his desk. And flinched when he daintily stepped back to avoid their arms brushing together.
She handed instead of threw her coat at Emily, aiming to result in just a moment of fingertip contact. It was not to be. Her First Assistant's eyes widened in alarm at the advance of the coat, and she quickly pinched the corner furthest away from Miranda, snatching her hand away as if burned.
Finally, she set her sights on Andrea. Andrea, who seemed to hand out touches and taps and embraces like they were as common as rain.
Miranda stayed horribly dry.
Every time she got remotely close to Andrea such that they would have been placed in touching distance, she was greeted with a subtle stepping back, a motion as dispiriting as it was polite. What was worse was that it was clearly practised, as if Andrea had rehearsed the moment in her head Miranda would reach for her, so that she might pull away in the most elegant manner.
She did not try again.
Instead, she snapped, "Have you developed a force field around you, Andrea?"
The girl blinked, her face blushing as if she was embarrassed. "N - no. Um, should I?"
Miranda didn't even dignify that one with an answer. She pointed at the telephone, which had begun to emit a shrill tone into the conditioned air.
"Answer it."
***
The twins were at their father's, and Patricia had gone with them. A temporary stay it was, outlined clearly in the custody agreement, but she felt their absence as if it had dragged on for ten years.
The house was cold. Miranda couldn't sleep. The bed felt too big, and her skin prickled. Every part of her body was hypersensitive, every inch.
She filled up a hot water bottle and sheathed it inside the cover. Her next stop was the laundry cupboards, in which she rooted around until her hand closed around the long-discarded weighted blanket at the back. Trying not to think about what she was going to do, the pathetic depths she had determined she would sink to that night, Miranda gathered some spare pillows and walked back to her bedroom. She lay the blanket over the sheet, lined the pillows up one by one along her less-preferred slide to sleep on, then lay down. Lastly, she placed the hot water bottle on top of the pillow parallel with her chest and moved the blanket around her body so it wrapped her snugly against the pillows. For a reason she didn't quite comprehend, she imagined the scent of slightly artificial lavender and roses enveloping the room.
To her horror, she realised her cheeks were wet, the left more than the right, owing to the tears from the latter trickling over her nose and pooling on the pillow her head rested against. A sob curled up in her throat, like a tremendous syringe pushing up from her stomach.
Part of her recoiled from herself in disgust at the thought of anyone else perceiving what she had resorted to, constructing a childish apparatus to cling to, pretending to hug a person that was in actuality but cloth, water, and feathers. Another part of her - smaller, weaker, less controlled - wondered if someone (and for some reason Andrea's face blurred in the forefront of her slumber-tinged mind) might take pity on her were they to behold the miserable picture Miranda made.
The answer would almost certainly be an emphatic 'no'. For she thought that even if she donned one of those ridiculous sandwich boards or held up a sign across which were emblazoned "Free Hugs" in bold bright capitals, there would be no takers.
It was more likely that she'd probably receive offers of payment to stay away.
Even her own daughters - her own flesh and blood - rejected her, only to turn around and welcome Andrea's embrace. As did Nigel, and Emily - Emily, who didn't hug anyone. And, of course, Andrea herself, who saw fit to extend the milk of human kindness to everyone around her. Everyone that was, except Miranda.
Why everyone else?
Why not her?
She knew why. She'd responded to Andrea not with honesty, not with a plea for candor, but outright aggression instead at the assistant's awkward moving away. With that vituperative comment, she'd no doubt destroyed any fleeting, foolish hope perked up low in her chest that Andrea might be the one to extend a smidgeon of contact. That the girl who she had hired against type and had blossomed into by far the most competent (and, if Miranda had to admit it to herself, by far the most fetching) assistant she'd ever employed. It seemed that even Andrea's kindness did not extend to those who were wretched of their own making. Those who could not help but make themselves to be avoided, or interacted with at a removed distance. Entirely undeserving of even scraps of affection. Unhuggable.
The sobs turned to a short bark of laughter at how bitterly reflective her current physical predicament was to her emotional one.
She'd made her bed. Time to lie in it.
***
She forgot to ask for more coffee. Then she misplaced her house-keys. The final straw was when her hair appointment slipped her mind.
Miranda couldn't possibly continue to tolerate such distraction, distraction which stemmed from one single question, as loathe as she was to pose it.
Needs must, however. Hence finding herself waiting in the darkened foyer of her townhouse, awaiting Andrea's arrival.
The key turned in the lock and the door swung open. The young woman moved silently inside, placing the Book on the table with the flowers. She turned to leave, but before she had taken a step Miranda cleared her throat.
"Oh!" Andrea cried. "Miranda - you scared me!"
Miranda swallowed. Hard.
"Andrea," she began hesitantly, forcing the words from her lips, "I appear to have encountered a… problem. A question. I'm hoping you might be able to provide me with an answer."
Andrea's eyes widened momentarily, but she recovered admirably quickly.
"I'll do my best," she replied sincerely.
Miranda had been half-hoping that Andrea would let loose an uncharacteristic display of unhelpfulness, anything that would allow her to console herself with the fact she had tried without actually having to follow through with asking the damned question.
No such luck. Closing her eyes and inhaling deeply, like breath itself could ever sufficiently prolong the inevitable, she folded her hands together in front of her stomach, as if preparing to suffer a great wound.
"Why," she said, eyes still resolutely screwed shut, "does everyone seem to think I'm - I'm diseased?"
Silence. Absolute silence. Horrible, awful, cavernous silence. It caved down onto her, warping around her body.
"What?" Andrea sounded… confused? Upset? A mix of the two? "What do you mean? Why do you think - diseased?"
Her voice was softer, and it gave Miranda the final little push she so fervently needed. And it was as if great floodgates had open, and her troubles spilled out like blood from a severed limb.
"I've noticed that people, everyone - they recoil from me. My touch. Nigel, Emily, you, even my girls when I tried to give them a hug" - her voice broke - "what is so wrong with me? Can you tell me?"
The meekness of her tone forced her to open her eyes once more, for even trembling at the height of emotion Miranda couldn't bear to be both weak in voice and sight. But none of the expressions she had so feared might be looking back at her existed.
There was only compassion.
Compassion, written all over Andrea's face, painting her lovely features into something altogether more arresting.
"There's nothing wrong with you," she said gently. "Don't you remember your rule?"
"My what?"
"Your rule." A hint of perplexment crept back into Andrea's voice. "One of the many which gets passed down from assistant to assistant, employee to employee. I was told on my first day, you know. You don't touch Miranda under any circumstances. At all."
Miranda opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
It was her own fault for hiring a smart girl. Andrea cottoned on immediately to what was going on.
"You didn't know," she whispered.
With a herculean effort, Miranda jerked her head from side to side.
"And the girls - oh. They mentioned the, um. School episode."
"Did they?" The Editor rasped.
"Yes. Cassidy told me she only said it because the, and I quote 'cool girls' were behind them at the time. A case of temporary pre-teen embarrassment. But they felt really bad about it, actually. They knew you were hurt. That's, um. Well, I know you were watching me hug them on the stairs last week. It was because I'd helped them get an apology present for you."
The stifling weight on her chest lessened slightly. She decided to redirect the conversation to hopefully less personal waters.
"And Emily? You hugged her while she was in tears. Is there some sort of personal crisis I should be aware of going on?"
Andrea's form shuddered in a repressed laugh. "No, no. Quite the opposite, actually. They were tears of relief."
"Relief?"
"Yes. She wanted to ask Serena on a date, like really, really wanted, in-love-with-her for months type wanted, but she knew I, um. Anyway. Doesn't matter."
"It does." Pleasingly, Miranda's mental acuity was returning to her in leaps and bounds, her inbuilt lie detector roaring back to life. "I insist you tell me."
The younger woman shifted from foot to foot, clearly uncomfortable. "She, um. She knew I liked someone in the office, and thought it was Serena. I confirmed it wasn't, and she just started crying."
"Why Serena, of all people?"
"I'd, ah. Used 'she' to refer to her before."
Intriguing.
"Who?"
Let no one say Miranda was a coward.
"I can't say."
"You must."
"With the greatest respect in the world, Miranda, no. I can't."
Which, naturally, aroused the question of just why Andrea was being so evasive. Who on earth - what woman - could produce such defensiveness, secrecy, as if - as if -
Andrea stepped back, panic alighting in her eyes at the gleam of clarity Miranda knew her own must be radiating at full-force.
"Please don't fire me," she squeaked. "I won't say a word, no one will ever know, I won't do anything or - "
"- Andrea," Miranda interrupted. "Breathe. You're not fired."
"I'm - not?"
"No."
"In that case," Andrea whispered, "will that be all? Is there anything I can do for you?"
Her heart-rate might have struck a chord of familiarity with a family of hummingbirds. She ignored it.
"You are of course free to decline," came the quiet statement, under which shook a tremulous plea. "But if you are so amenable… "
The confusion at the other end of the hall had given way to a simultaneously shy and encouraging smile. Almost imperceptibly, Andrea nodded.
"Can I have a - a hug?"
In the entire time she had owned the property, only Patricia had moved quicker over the floorboards than Andrea in that moment.
And Miranda received what she had yearned for. Andrea, soft and hard and alive and warm and hugging her as if she wished to merge them whole. Being so much taller, her assistant crouched as the embrace continued, burying her face in the crook of Miranda's neck.
"Don't leave me," she said suddenly, surprised as to where that sentiment came from. "Don't."
"What?" Andrea asked. "I - no."
"Even when you're not my assistant anymore. I would like to see you. If you would - could bear to -"
" - Yes," came the eager reply. "Yes."
She chose not to offer a verbal response, instead preferring to inhale the floral scent of Andrea's shampoo.
"Maybe," Andrea whispered, "it might be best if I stop being your assistant. I've gotten a contract with the New York Times, somehow. That's what I was hugging Nigel about. I never, ever thought you'd care about me one bit one way or the other, and it was - it was getting too hard to stay. Emotionally. I cared about you too much, you see. I still do. Care, I mean."
"You mean…" she hardly dared believe it. Andrea's hand pressed strongly against the flat of her back, and she pushed into the touch.
"If you, um. If you're remotely open to it?"
"It?" She wanted to hear the words from Andrea's mouth, lest fate be playing a cruel trick on her and she find herself rejected in the most brutal way.
"Being your friend. Being maybe more than your friend."
"Yes." She surprised herself by how quickly she accepted it. And then realised that such an instinct had been lying dormant within her for quite some time, that she had subconsciously picked up on and imagined Andrea's scent comforting her on that particularly isolated night in her empty bedroom, how it had only been after Andrea had seemingly spurned her subtle request for touch that she had succumbed to tears.
"I'll hug you every day from now on, if you'll let me," came the muffled rumble into her shoulder. "You won't be able to get rid of me. I'll be like a limpet."
"My limpet," Miranda breathed, then pressed a delicate kiss to the crown of her head.
FIN