Choices

by Tessa Vidal

  Shell reached over and squeezed my hand. Unlike me, she wasn't tangled up wondering if it was all right to touch or not. “I shouldn't have shared my unease with the situation. I'll say this. In my opinion, Dickens is an exceptional dog. He could do very well as a performing animal. But, if he appears on television...” Her voice trailed off, letting me complete the thought.

  If Dickens goes on TV, somebody might pop up and claim he was their stolen dog.

  Nah. It was a step too far. “If you don't want me on your show, you can just say you don't want me on your show. Don't invent all kinds of exaggerated scenarios.” I got up and rattled some bottles around the bar. Shell had barely touched her beer. “Would you like something else?”

  “Some of that sparkling water.”

  “Blue bottle or green?”

  “Green.”

  I brought back two bottles. Our knees brushed as I sat down next to her on the couch. Electricity sparked there. Or was I the only one who felt the sparks?

  She's working for you. And you may soon be working for her. Play it cool until you know where you stand.

  “What's the deal with Ryder?” As soon as I blurted it out, I realized Ryder might not be the nice, neutral topic of conversation I was striving toward.

  Shell snorted. “Actually, I was going to ask you that.”

  “He's been very... under the radar.”

  “Yeah. I've seen him once in eleven years, but he must have been watching me for a while. He arranged to run into me on an isolated mountain trail. Not many people know about that. I keep it quiet because I exercise and train a lot of celebrity dogs there.”

  “He met me outside my yoga class and pretended to be a fan looking for a selfie. Anybody watching us from a distance would think that's all it was, a pesky fan who kept futzing with his phone camera.”

  “Somebody's after him,” she said.

  No shit, Sherlock, as we used to say back home. “Where do you think he went after...?”

  “No clue. Somebody paid the bills for my mom's treatment, but the FBI guy who questioned me about it wasn't dropping many hints.” Shell's mom, a sometimes housekeeper, sometimes home health aide like mine, had never owned private health insurance a day in her life. Without it, in Mississippi, she was only entitled to emergency treatment. I often wondered if she would have lived more than a few months after her diagnosis if she'd been able to get to a doctor sooner.

  Instead, she'd kept working, she'd kept the secret. She'd wanted Rayna and Ryder to have one last carefree year.

  “Did you know?” Shell asked. “I mean, before? Did you know my mom was so sick?”

  I shook my head. “She hid it, that's what my mom said. She didn't want you kids to worry.” My mom, shrunk down to an image on a screen. After Ryder, after I got sent away, I never saw my own mother again except over Skype. She was never able to get together enough money to travel all the way to Los Angeles.

  And now she was gone too. A silent heart attack. They say people in Mississippi have the lowest life expectancy in the country. They blame the barbecue and deep-fried chicken, but now I'd been around the world enough to see other people ate barbecue and deep-fried chicken too.

  “Why did we have to lose them so early?” I asked. “It just isn't fair.”

  “I know. And I feel so clueless. I knew she was tired, but I thought it was just the job, you know? I didn't know she was so sick. But Ryder knew. My twin, and he didn't tell me.”

  “I know. I know. It's so hard.” I wanted to hug her into my arms. Embrace her. Rock away the pain. It was easy for women to hug in Los Angeles. Except now, alone, it didn't seem easy. I wasn't sure what she wanted, and I didn't want to take advantage.

  “He should have told me,” Rayna said. “She should have told me. There's so many things I still don't know. When she first got sick, when he first found out, where he met those guys who cut him into the casino deal...”

  Shell, I reminded myself. There was no more Rayna. And Shell wasn't going to be anybody's victim, either. We were both survivors. Our moms gave too much for us not to survive.

  “They didn't want you to worry. Maybe he would have told you after the birthday party...”

  “Except he never came home from the party. How did he expect to get away with it?”

  “I don't know, Ray... Shell.”

  “Raychelle.” She laughed. “That sounds so Mississippi.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don't be sorry.”

  We finished the bottles of water. Our knees touched again. I remembered everything about that night so long ago. A lot more than knees were touching back then. I remembered tongues, young and eager, probing for all the sensitive places.

  “I have a theory about the casino heist,” she said. “It was a sort of hazing, wasn't it? An initiation. The money wasn't enough to be worth it, it had to be about more than money. It was too damn bold. There were cameras in the parking lot, cameras on the back exit they used. Not as many as in the main casino or on the elevator to the counting room, but enough.”

  Oh. Of course. The stupid-ass crime was a fucking test of courage. Eleven years, and I never figured that out. Shell, who had a male twin, had to tell me flat-out. She understood a mind under the influence of testosterone in a way I couldn't.

  “He had to prove he had the balls to work for whoever he went to work for,” she said. “The money came from a bank in the Caymans. So these were serious men, not the goofy rednecks they were made out to be on the ten o'clock news.”

  “The Caymans.” All I'd ever seen of Grand Cayman was a one-day photo shoot on a beach, but I knew it had a reputation as a money-laundering destination. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “They still have pretty good banking secrecy, or they did back then. I don't think the FBI ever got anywhere running down that lead.”

  “And now he's back,” I said.

  “Well, he was back for a minute,” Shell said.

  Funny how if you don't see somebody for a long time, all the questions dry up and you don't even know where to start. Shell leaned in as if to take my hand but then changed her mind and leaned back.

  There was another little pause. We were both out, and some of those photographs taken today might eventually find their way to social media. Dickens would eventually become known as my dog, and then the girl in the scarf would be identified as me. “There will almost certainly be rumors about the two of us.” Had I ever been this awkward with any woman?

  “I don't give a damn about rumors,” she said.

  “My, um, lawyer asks everybody to sign a non-disclosure form. No giving interviews about me or my dog or anything you see going on in my house...”

  She all but rolled her eyes. “I don't give interviews about clients or their dogs. I'd lose my entire celebrity clientele overnight.”

  This was hard. So hard. She was an inch away, and yet she might as well be across the room. “I know you don't, I know you wouldn't, I'm just saying stupid things because I don't know what else to say. We lost so much time.”

  “Yeah. We didn't get closure.”

  Was closure what we wanted?

  She leaned into me, those steel-blue eyes inches away from mine. “I never got my kiss goodbye, Caro. Is that too much to ask? One last kiss goodbye?”

  Chapter Eight

  Shell

  I wanted to bite my own tongue.

  This is work, not a date. You're here to do a job.

  So unprofessional. How could I sit here on a movie star's couch and ask for a kiss? It wasn't like I'd never met a celebrity before. They were my bread and butter these days, and I'd learned to move among them like I belonged.

  Then suddenly I was a drooling fangirl begging for a kiss.

  Blame it on the beer, half drunk but still somehow going to my head.

  Blame it on the subliminal scent of apple-blossom shampoo in her hair.

  Blame it on the long bare toes, the golden polish catching the light as she kicked off her sandals when
she walked in the front door.

  Ah, fuck, that was a sight. The vision of Caro striding into her luxurious home could launch a thousand daydreams. The foyer had a shelf with some hooks beneath it and a mirror above it, a place for her to unknot a scarf and shake out her beautiful hair. Drop the handbag on the lower shelf. Place the dark glasses on the higher shelf. Step out of the sandals. Those bare pink toes again, that gold polish...

  Did she know how sexy it was to watch her make her entrance? Did she know the way she waltzed inside her front door was a preview of a beautiful woman undressing?

  She caught my gaze in the mirror where she was smoothing back her hair. Laughed and turned around. At last, once again, after eleven long years, I was gazing directly into glorious hazel eyes that flashed all the world's shades of amber, green, and brown.

  Don't slobber. Don't dream. She was once yours, but that was a one-night-only event, never to be repeated.

  If she took off her shoes inside the door, I should do the same. Breaking eye contact, I hurried to pull off my running shoes. Practical for walking athletic dogs, they looked large and clunky next to her cute sandals. Well, I'd feel like even more of an idiot if I walked around a movie star's house in my sock feet, so I quickly rolled off my socks as well.

  My toes weren't polished in gold. They were a shade of purple I never wore in public anymore. A color I liked in high school, but not a color you associated with a celebrity dog behaviorist who might soon have her own reality TV show.

  Caro glanced down and bit her lip to conceal a tiny smile. Did she remember that color?

  On bare feet, we padded across plush rugs to a great room complete with a wet bar. The couch, a shade of lavender implausible for leather, was big enough to host a football team. Too big. I leaned in, telling myself I wasn't too close, that we still had space between us, that all I wanted to do was inhale that intoxicating mix of her apple-blossom shampoo and spicy citrus fragrance. Except I wasn't inhaling, I was barely breathing.

  I should keep my distance better than this. Eleven years. She was a stranger, she was nobody I knew. And yet...

  “I never got my kiss goodbye, Caro,” I heard myself say. The words seemed to echo around the room.

  She made a soft sound and snuggled closer. Was she too trying to breathe in a long-forgotten scent?

  “I guess I always knew we couldn't hold you in a town like that,” I said. “Hell, we all knew one day you'd go away and be a star, but I never knew it would be so soon, and I never knew you'd go without a word of goodbye.”

  “I'm sorry, Rayna. Shell, I mean. I'm really sorry, I didn't know what to do, it wasn't my choice.” She was so close. Her warm bare foot brushed softly against my own bare foot. “I was really scared the way my mom was freaking out, yelling and screaming like I've never seen her. I should have yelled back, I should have put up more of a fight, but I wasn't used to seeing my mom like that. She always said she didn't know who my daddy was, but the way she was yelling about how we could be in jail made me think maybe he was in prison.”

  I'd heard similar rumors about not just her dad but my own. With both our moms gone, we would never know the truth.

  “I was scared, and I thought if I went along with what she wanted, she'd calm down. I never dreamed we'd be apart so long.” She twisted her pale hands together in her lap. “I thought in a week or two, maybe a month...”

  “I missed you so bad,” I said.

  “I did try to see you. Did anybody ever tell you that?”

  I shook my head. “When? How?”

  “When I realized my mom was going to send me away, that she wasn't going to give herself a week or two to calm down... that's when I knew I had to see you. I didn't want to leave without letting you know I'd make a way for us to talk to each other.”

  “Except you didn't.”

  “My mom was on fire. I couldn't even sneak out the back window without getting caught.”

  “Well,” I said. “Of course, I believe you, but at the time I had no idea. Nobody told me anything. All they did was pound me with questions.”

  The police had taken our phones, although my phone wasn't very smart, so I'm not sure it had anything useful to tell them. It was a Wednesday morning when the police broke into our hot tub suite. It was the next Wednesday before I went back to school and found out Caroline wasn't there.

  That she'd never be there again.

  That her mother had somehow found a way to get her on a plane for Los Angeles.

  “You could have sent an email,” I said. “I could have picked it up at school or at the library.”

  “I couldn't. My aunt went full psycho, she had controls on everything I did. I seriously thought about calling the police and getting help to leave. I was eighteen, I didn't have to live with her if I didn't want to.”

  “But.”

  “But I wanted a high school diploma, Shell, I didn't want to end up on the street. Maybe it seems silly now. No one asks a star if they have a high school diploma. But I didn't know, I wasn't sure...”

  Hard to imagine Caroline ever not knowing, ever not being sure, that she'd make it as an actor.

  All this time, I'd assumed if she didn't contact me, it was because she wanted me out of her life. Who'd want the old girlfriend from Tunica County hanging around if you could have your pick of Hollywood blondes? “I figured you were having all kinds of fun being a senior at a fancy Hollywood high school. I even thought being sent away from us might be the best thing that ever happened to you.”

  “The fancy high school I attended was no better than our school back home. It was just as scary, hell, more scary because it was bigger, and I wasn't always sure those metal detectors were keeping out the guns.” Her jaw was soft as satin, and yet it was stone underneath. “But I wasn't going to back down, I wasn't going to quit. You've got to be tough to make it in a town like this.”

  You had to be tough to make it in any town, I thought.

  We were so close, and yet I told myself the moment of danger had passed. We'd talked it away. My stupid, unprofessional demand for a kiss was already forgotten.

  Except...

  She touched my cheek, the pads of her fingers soft as velvet, and then we were falling forward into each other, mouth to mouth, unable to resist. All those years. All that fight and struggle.

  All that loneliness.

  It was gone in a blink when her soft lips melted into mine. Our tongues remembered how to fence and flirt, our hands remembered how to slide down a spine. The taste of her, the scent... she was a taste I couldn't afford. One sweet cube of sugar, and I was lost.

  The kiss went on. Deeper. The kind of kiss that doesn't want to end. The best kind of kiss goodbye. Also the worst kind. You don't want it to be goodbye. You don't want that awful moment of chill and distance. You want endlessness. A kiss that goes on long and long...

  She was leaning into me, onto me, and I was leaning back, and now the length of her long, light body was sprawled over mine, and my arms were wrapped at her shoulders and waist, the better to hold her securely on top of me, and the kiss continued with more tongue, more urgency.

  “We didn't get enough time,” she said. “We were cheated of our time. Of our chance to be young together.”

  “Well,” I said. “We're not old.”

  “I'm going to be twenty-nine in August. And then you'll be twenty-nine.”

  “Mmm.”

  “The almost-thirty birthday,” she said. “It's a wake-up call.”

  “The age when people start adopting puppies. Or babies.”

  She realized I was laughing and sat up a little. The weight of her lithe body felt so good adjusting itself on top of me. “Well, maybe not babies. I think maybe that's thirty-nine in Hollywood. I'll stick with the puppy for now.”

  Then we were both laughing. We both wanted each other, we were both out and single, and we'd been high school sweethearts. Was it really so terrible if we wanted to be together one more time?

  Yeah, so, yeah. A
ll that shit about keeping it professional...

  I'd blown by that at about ninety miles an hour.

  “We can really do this,” I heard myself make excuses as if I was listening to myself from a great distance. “If you want to, we really can. Nobody's stopping us but us.” I'd started the kissing, but now she was on top, and I let my embrace go slack, so she could shake it off if she wanted.

  But she was very far from shaking anything off, what with those striking hazel eyes inches away from my face. Those long thighs of hers, sprawled out wide to hug my thighs, weren't making any move to spring away. With her on top of me, we were in contact from head to toe, one of her bare feet already twining itself sinuously around mine.

  Her flexibility was a promise, just as my strength beneath her was a promise.

  She pressed down long against me, her mouth hot against my mouth. This kiss was worth every minute of the endless years of waiting.

  Chapter Nine

  Caro

  I was on top of Shell Tate. Kissing her. Grinding her. So much for keeping my hands off the person I'd hired the same fucking day. My pelvis locked easily into her pelvis, allowing us both to feel the heat trapped between us even through our clothes.

  Should I really be on top of her like this? We'd be working close together on a daily basis while she trained me how to handle a dog like Dickens. Maybe it was a mistake to hump somebody when she was going to be coaching you the very next day. So many things could go wrong. We didn't really know each other. Not anymore.

  My lips tingled. Hell. It was just a kiss. A kiss she'd started.

  Or had she? Was it really all that clear who started what?

  We'd fallen into each other, lips open, and then Shell fell back, her arms loose around me, her body sprawled on the wide couch. One of her bare feet wound sinuously around my ankle. Or was it my bare foot winding sinuously around hers? There were sparks at the places where our bare skin touched. Electric sparks, the kind that dazzle your ability to think things through.