Read Air Kisses for Free Online

for their skin tone.’
    ‘Good. And the hair story?’
    ‘Um, that’s a cut-and-carry hairstyle piece. I’ve already got all of the celebrity shots ready to go for art to layout into, um, long or short or curly—’
    ‘Perfect, it’s time I tried a new cut…’
    Everyone laughed; Karen changed her hair almost weekly. ‘And Beauty Beat, anything of interest there?’
    ‘Just the regular five pages, and one is a full-page shot of pink make-up, nail polishes, glosses and blush, and, um, I thought maybe we could shoot them with little sweets and candies?’
    ‘Gorgeous. I think I saw one like that in
Elle
, so make sure it’s not too similar, okay? All sounds great, Hannah. Okay, Bianca, where are you at with your pages?’
    Too Much Eyeshadow spoke up. ‘Um, sorry to interrupt, but is the Soppy Couple Story’ – this was actually how it was described on the schedule – ‘going to need us to shoot the couples?’
    ‘No. I think we’ll use drawings this month. Yes, Annabelle, we’re going to shoot them, you nutter. Bianca?’
    Annabelle grinned bashfully and wrote on her schedule.
    Tess, the baby-faced fashion junior, put her hand up. Today she was wearing a bright-yellow scarf as a headband, a white vintage dress, wild roman sandals that stopped just below her knees, and twenty nails’ worth of chipped black polish. She looked fabulous.
    ‘With the denim shoot, is that sponsored or are we all right to use a variety of labels?’
    ‘
Great scarf
, Tess. All you need are some cat-eye sunglasses and a red convertible! I love it! Okay, denim. I need to chat to Laura about that. Kate, can you schedule a meeting for this morning? No biscuits, as per Laura’s orders. Oh, did you all know our advertising manager, Laura, is pregnant? Have I just ruined her news? Probably. Oops. That’s two ad girls in the last month gone the way of the baby. I’ll have to sell my own pages soon. Don’t drink the water upstairs, girls…’
    We laughed because she was funny and she was nice and the way she spoke was interesting and we were glad that, unlike so many of the other magazines in the industry, we didn’t have an editor who terrorised us and belittled us and made us want to leave the industry entirely and become belly dancers.
    Twenty-three minutes later and Karen was done. Back at my desk, I answered a few emails and then got stuck into writing a story about glycolic acid and why it was so brilliant for acne. But after a few paragraphs I got stuck. Not only was my brain not on task – it was back on Saturday morning again – but I actually had no idea what I was writing about. I leant my head on my hands and sighed. I wasn’t sure what had made me think this was going to be a fun/easy/achievable job for amonkey from an advertising company because it clearly wasn’t.
    To take my mind off that now-familiar sick feeling of missing Jesse, I decided to start calling in products with glycolic acid. Perhaps reading the press releases and learning about their celebrity fans would give me the inspiration to finish the story. I opened up my Beauty Contacts document. There were no less than 456 Beauty Contacts listed, and each was liable to swap jobs, brands or agencies within the next week, just to further confuse me. They were a transitory bunch, beauty PRs.
    I had worked out that this was a huge part of my job, knowing which PR company or person looked after which beauty brand.
But how was I supposed to remember them all
? Just then an email from our advertising manager, Laura, popped up in my inbox, reminding me that our new presentation to advertisers would be ‘live’ from next week, and could I please have a five-minute spiel on what the
Gloss
reader loves about our beauty pages ready for her by this afternoon to slot into the PowerPoint presentation.
    A huge wave of Fraud Complex washed over me. I felt entirely out of my depth. I had only worked here for a few weeks. How could I be expected to speak convincingly