My Faire Lady (The Extra Series Book 6)

by Megan Walker

  “Right,” I say. “And I do. I really want to strip to music for my boyfriend.”

  And while I still don’t appreciate the doubtful looks on their faces, I can totally get why they have them. Because I sounded as convincing as if I’d announced I wanted to give up Fong’s and start running marathons in my free time. But the truth is, what I want is to help Will and I connect again. I love him more than anything, and I want him to want me like he used to. I want him to be happy in our relationship, to find some joy amidst all the sadness of late. And if this is the kind of thing that will help with that, then yes, I want to.

  It’s me and Will. I don’t want to lose that; I can’t.

  “Okay,” says Anna-Marie, clearly not convinced, but thankfully not challenging me on it. “I’d be happy to help. I could come over after work sometime this week.”

  I smile at her, relieved she’s agreeing to help, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I see a knight walking by with a meat pie. It’s not Chris, but it reminds me of the whole Chris and Delia situation, which a big part of me also wants to fix—or at least help along. Clearly these two former theater nerds, both of whom once liked each other and now both of whom are working at Renaissance faires, are made for each other. But he’s been snubbing her for a couple years now, and I don’t know if just explaining the situation will be enough. He needs a grand gesture.

  I might have an idea for that, too.

  “Hey, so there’s something else you guys might be able to help me with,” I say. I start telling them about Delia and Chris, and, as I guessed, Josh and Anna-Marie are soon jumping in with their own ideas, eager to help out. And by the time I’m back in my infirmary, I’m feeling better about something, at least—we have the beginnings of a plan I can present to Chris, see what he thinks.

  That may not help any of my problems, but I’ve got a plan for that too. Even if that plan reeks a little of desperation.

  But desperate times call for desperate stripping.

  Twenty-two

  Gabby

  It’s not long into my strip tease lesson before I’m really beginning to regret this whole plan.

  “No, you swivel your hips, like, slowly. You’re not trying to hip-check the guy,” Anna-Marie says. “It’s supposed to be sensual.” She demonstrates, and damn it, it sure looks sensual when she does it. I, on the other hand, spend a decent amount of my life trying not to draw attention to my ass, let alone slowly swivel it in my boyfriend’s face.

  But I did ask to learn this, so I give it another shot. We have a long body pillow propped up in a chair, with a picture of Justin Timberlake taped on where Will’s face would be, and I go slower, trying to make it as sensual as possible.

  That’s right, Justin. Enjoy the view of my ass, drifting before your face like the orbit of a planet . . .

  “Better,” Anna-Marie says. “But definitely don’t make that face while you’re doing it.”

  “What face?”

  “The one that says ‘I’m miserable and I just want to get this over with so I can get back into sweatpants and watch TV.’” She gives me a knowing look.

  “Yeah, okay, but maybe sweatpants and TV are sounding really good right now.” I tug down the crazy-short black skirt Anna-Marie and I found when we went shopping today (at a discount store, given my money situation) for this very event. It’s black and elastic-waisted, so I can just slip it off when the time is right, but it’s also tight and not super comfortable. Same thing with the shimmery blue crop top we found that ties in front, with long loose ends of fabric that Anna-Marie said would be perfect for teasing Will with (though I’m not entirely sure what that means yet.)

  “I’m sure every stripper in the world thinks so, too, but they don’t show it.” Anna-Marie gives me a small smile. “Are you sure you still want to do this? Because—”

  “I’m sure,” I say, a little more snappish than I intended. But I need to learn this. I need to get this right, and I can’t do that with her asking whether I’m sure every ten minutes.

  Anna-Marie blinks and looks away, and I feel bad. She’s taking her whole afternoon to try to help me with this, and I haven’t exactly been in a great mood about it. Possibly because the last couple days with Will haven’t gotten any better. We’ve barely seen each other, between his working at Home Depot and my two jobs, and the absence hasn’t seemed to make him lust more for me—he’s been crawling into bed with hardly a word, let alone a touch of any kind.

  Which means it doesn’t matter whether I want to do this. I need to.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I do want to do this. I do.” I give her a pleading look so she doesn’t decide to just abandon me to my discount stripper clothes and half-hour of hip-swivel practice.

  Anna-Marie sighs. “Okay,” she says, even though I can tell she doesn’t believe me. “Let’s start from the top.”

  We work through the steps she showed me. None of them are in and of themselves very difficult—she’s obviously simplified the routine she actually does when she performs this for Josh. The difficulty for me lies in making the moves sexy and not like I’m some spastic robot trying to understand humanity through the art of stripping. (Though when I mention this to Anna-Marie, we both agree that would be an amazing movie.) She assures me I’m way sexier than I think I am, and that I’ll get this with some practice.

  And so practice I do. I practice the sexy saunter. The hip-swivel. The coy little smack on my ass. The quick-drop into a crouch and undulating my way back up. I practice shimmying my way out of my tight skirt and running the long swath of fabric from my crop top seductively over picture-Justin’s face (the teasing she was talking about), before I give it one good tug and pop the top open (which just exposes my bra for now, because I’m too shy to go full nude in front of anyone but Will, even Anna-Marie).

  “Nice!” Anna-Marie exclaims when I finally get the one-tug knot-untying right. “Look at you, hot stuff!”

  I smile, wiping some sweat from my brow. Who knew stripping was so aerobic?

  Probably strippers.

  “I feel less hot stuff and more Jiggly Puff,” I say, remembering one of Ty’s favorite Pokémon, and a little sad he’s not here to hear me make this joke. Though I definitely don’t want to be stripping in front of my nephew.

  Anna-Marie shakes her head. “Let’s take a break for a few minutes and then we’ll start with the music,” she says, getting a glass from my cabinet and filling it up with water from my sink. I tie my top back up and wiggle my skirt back on over my underwear and grab a Capri Sun from the fridge.

  Anna-Marie eyes my drink of choice, and I take a big slurpy sip. “What? They’re good.”

  She grins and takes another drink of water.

  “So I told Chris our big idea for how to ask out Delia,” I say, sitting down on one of our mismatched chairs and propping my feet up on the other one. “He was really excited about it. Well, and terrified, because for a hot guy who puts on a daily jousting show for hundreds of people, he’s super shy.”

  “But you think it’ll work?” She plops down in a chair across from me.

  “I hope so. I think Delia does actually like him. Also, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have pubic lice, so that’s good.”

  There’s a beat of silence, filled by the sound of me slurping my Capri Sun.

  Anna-Marie stares at me, her brow furrowed. “I have no idea how to respond to that.”

  And that’s when it hits me. “Oh my god, I never told you about crab-a-palooza!” Not that I didn’t have a lot else to talk about, given the Will situation and the pregnancy . . .

  But how could I have not mentioned the crabs?

  “Apparently, like half the workers at the faire have contracted pubic lice in some massive faire-wide plague,” I say, and Anna-Marie wrinkles her nose, which I feel is an appropriate response. But soon she’s cracking up at all my description
s of checking out wench after wench, trying to keep them all from sitting on any surface that couldn’t be sanitized, then Pickle Guy’s desperate flashing to clear his name.

  She’s wiping tears from her eyes by the time I finish. “And here I thought nothing would top your hospital stories. But the great medieval pubic lice epidemic . . .” She giggles some more.

  I finish the last bit of Capri Sun, the bag crunching inward. “Yeah, well, I guess it’s a good thing for me, because if I hadn’t been at the store to buy all that treatment cream and seen the test, who knows how long it would have taken me to realize my period was super late. Not that I would have minded a few more weeks of blissful ignorance—”

  I cut off at seeing the small wince on her face, the way her blue eyes dart down to her water, and I cringe inwardly. I’m about to apologize when she asks, hesitantly, “So how have you been feeling? Any morning sickness or anything?”

  “Not yet, no.” I smile grimly, toying with the long fabric knot ends on my top. “Not everyone gets that, though. Maybe I’m one of the lucky ones.” That last bit comes out more bitter than I meant—well, than I meant to say to her—and I cringe again. Outwardly, this time.

  “Maybe,” she says quietly. She clears her throat and smiles. “I mean, that’s good. Hopefully it’ll stay that way.”

  “Yeah, hopefully.”

  There’s a long, awkward pause that I know both of us hate and neither of us quite know what to do about—at least not until Anna-Marie says, “So, should we try the routine with the music?” and I jump on that idea like shaking my ass in Justin Timberlake’s face to some club beat has been the dream of my lifetime.

  Ironically—or maybe very purposefully, given my overall body reservations—the song Anna-Marie has chosen for this strip tease is actually called “Confident,” and it’s this blast of Demi Levato girl-power pop. It should make me feel sexy, powerful, able to make men (or at least one man in particular) salivate at the sight of my uninhibited sexual confidence.

  What it actually does, through no fault of the song itself, is make me remember how very very bad I am at following any kind of rhythm. All those moves from earlier I’d been starting to feel at least okay about? Now that they had to fit into a song beat, they were back to being jerky—too fast, too slow or too likely to end with Will being concussed.

  We try for nearly an hour, until I’m sure I’m going to be hearing that opening fanfare in my nightmares for the rest of my life, and it doesn’t get much better.

  “Maybe you should just do it with no music,” Anna-Marie suggests finally.

  I flop onto the couch. “No way. Silent stripping?”

  She makes a face. “When you put it that way, it does sound sad. Like you’re some horny mime.”

  “Right? And god, I haven’t even practiced in heels yet.”

  Anna-Marie’s eyes widen. “Heels? Are you serious?”

  “Of course I am! Who does a striptease barefoot?”

  “People who never wear heels because they call them ‘not worth the inevitable broken leg,’” she points out, and I regret that she knows me so damn well.

  Except she doesn’t know everything about me. “Just wait until you see these,” I say, and dash (well, more like waddle, in this skirt) into my bedroom where I grab the pair of silver-studded black heels I bought at a thrift store and have yet to ever wear. Because she (or really, I suppose, past me) is right. I don’t do heels well. I’m normally not a person who cares about shoes at all—part of the appeal of nursing is the practically required comfortable footwear.

  But these heels caught me at a weak moment, and I’d tried them on and my calves suddenly looked slimmer and my body felt leaner, and maybe it’s all optical illusion, but they made me feel a little more confident, even just having them in a bag as I left the store.

  If I ever needed confidence, this strip tease is it.

  Anna-Marie all but snatches them from my hands when I come out carrying them, eyeing them like a jeweler examining fine diamonds, minus that little jewelry magnifying thing—though if one of those existed in the world of shoe-appraisal, I’m sure she’d have it.

  “These are Tomasinis,” she says in awe, and I nod like I have any real idea what that means, other than that she’s impressed. Maybe some of her eye for designer shoes has worn off on me after all those years as roommates. “They’re gorgeous. But unless you’ve gotten a lot more comfortable wearing heels since we lived together, you definitely shouldn’t wear them for stripping.” She sets them down on the coffee table.

  I frown. “But they make my legs look so good!”

  “I’m sure they do. But how good are your legs going to look when one of them is broken?”

  “I can’t believe I’m getting resistance on wearing cute shoes from you, of all people,” I grumble, and sit down to start slipping them on. Crap, I don’t know if it’s because my feet have already swollen due to all the dancing, but these feel tighter than they did at the store.

  “I mean, if you were just going out to dinner in them—” she starts, and I can feel my frustration building.

  “Look, Anna, I need to wear these. My legs need all the help they can get. They’re like really pale sausages, and these make them look like . . . Skinnier sausages.”

  Anna-Marie sighs. “Oh my god, Gabs. They are not sausages. Seriously, you don’t need to—”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” I blurt out, waving a hand in her general perfectly-toned direction. “You don’t have to worry about arm flab or stomach flab or butt flab when you do your strip tease. I do.” I know this isn’t fair, that I was the one who asked her to help me with this, but I can feel the heat building in my face the more I wish this could all come as easily for me as it does for her.

  Her face hardens, and she opens her mouth and then shuts it again, looking away.

  “I know,” I say. “I know. You work out, and you don’t eat at Fong’s all the time, or ever, and—”

  “That wasn’t what I was going to say,” she says tightly.

  “Well, what then?”

  “I know you don’t appreciate your body, Gabby, and you think I have no reason to complain about mine, but seriously, right now, I really wish I could switch with you.” She folds her arms and stares fixedly at the floor.

  I open my mouth to protest—how could she wish that, with her career—but then I get what she means, and my stomach drops.

  Guilt curdles in my chest, and I squeeze my eyes closed. What’s wrong with me?

  There’s another long silence, and then she says, “I’m sorry, Gabby, I shouldn’t have said—” at the same time that I say, “God, Anna, I didn’t think—”

  We both pause and give each other small smiles, hers looking almost as nervous as mine.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She comes over and sits next to me. “No, I’m sorry. I know you’ve got enough stress going on with the pregnancy thing. The last thing I want is to make you feel guilty about it, just because I’m having problems getting pregnant.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not fair for me to get pissy at you just because I’m uncomfortable with all this,” I say, looking down at myself, at the overabundance of pale skin showing every which way.

  Her face squishes up, like she’s clearly trying to hold back, and this time I do know what she wants to say.

  “Go ahead,” I say. “Ask me if I’m sure I want to do this.”

  “You don’t need to, you know. I really think you could be great at this with some practice. But it’s hard to do a sexy striptease when you’re super nervous or worried about butt flab.”

  I nod. I know she’s right. “But I want to do this. I want to be able to, you know? I want to be confident and sexy and feel that way again for him.”

  Like I used to, I realize. Because while I’ve always had issues surrounding my body, it wasn’t
this bad before. Not even when he and I first had sex and I was a virgin, while he was . . . Well, decidedly not. And the sex painting thing had made me feel so much better, had made us feel like us again, so it stands to reason that this, something he seemed legitimately excited about, would be even more effective.

  “I get it,” she says, and I think maybe she does, on some level, at least. She leans forward to grab her phone and check the time, then winces. “Yikes. I need to get going, or I’m going to be late for this dinner thing Josh and I have with some people from his agency. But how about we practice some more later this week, okay?”

  “Yeah?” I’m a little relieved she’s not giving up on me as some lost stripper cause. Then again, Anna-Marie has never been one to shirk a challenge.

  “Yeah.” She smiles broadly. “We’re going to get you so good at this, you’ll consider going pro.”

  I’m dubious of that, but I appreciate the optimism—and her willingness to help. So I thank her, and we hug and plan to practice more later this week, and she takes off.

  But as I find myself nervously pacing the apartment, I know that I can’t bring myself to wait days longer—and that’s even if one more practice is all I’d really need, which is doubtful. I’m too stressed out about it, too stressed out about Will and me, and I think if I don’t do this tonight, I’m going to lose my courage and not do it at all.

  So I start the music again and take it from the top.

  Twenty-three

  Will

  I’m sitting on our bed, reworking a section of terrible dialogue, when I notice Gabby skulking around the apartment. She’s casually set up her phone with some mobile speakers and has slipped into the bathroom and is shuffling around in there. The water keeps running, and I’m pretty sure I hear the clicking of shoes on the tile floor—not her usual tennis shoes, but something with a hard sole.