Rogue Passion (The Rogue Series Book 5)

by Chelsea M. Cameron

  “It’s nothing. Let’s go again.”

  “I’m worried about you, Patterson.”

  PJ might complain about being mother-henned by Ashley, but she did the same damn thing. PJ had been the one to drag her out of bed, keep her going when she was too mired in depression to even remember to eat.

  “I’m fine. Seriously.” She spun her finger. “From the top.”

  Every day—a dozen times a day, if she was being honest—Frannie had checked the status of the fundraiser. The notifications of donor levels selling out and big-ticket items being snapped up had kept her phone buzzing at regular intervals, too. Why they hadn’t considered this kind of effort from the beginning—well, she knew why. Their typical silent auction was a series of gift baskets from local shops and restaurant gift cards. They would never have been able to pull off something like this.

  Ashley’s pull even had regular donations rolling in. The development office was overwhelmed sending out new member thank yous and welcome packets. If they could retain even a fraction of them next year, they would be in the best financial shape in the museum’s history. They could do so much good. Twenty years working almost entirely for nonprofits had taught Frannie to be cynical, but she couldn’t stop a little spark of hope from clawing its way into her heart.

  And it was all thanks to her. God, she needed to get a hold of herself before Ashley showed up for the opening. Between gratitude, admiration, and if she was being honest, the crush she’d been nursing for years that was only made worse by trading emails with her, Frannie was going to be tempted to throw herself at Ashley’s feet and never leave. Add in her nerves about how Ashley would feel about the way they’d installed the show, the opening image, the way they’d laid out and juxtaposed the preset groupings to pull a particular narrative thread, and Frannie was probably going to be a puddle in a well-cut suit.

  She had a few hours left to get her shit together before Ashley arrived to do a walk-through. She’d lead her personal tour immediately ahead of the opening tomorrow and the group would stay on for the official opening celebration.

  Tomorrow, Frannie would be kept busy dealing with set-up and catering. And the police detail they’d had to request to keep Markham’s rag-tag group of protesters from either harassing attendees, or worse, getting into the museum aiming to deface the work. Ashley had promised her that Rian would have been beyond tickled to have one of their photographs smeared with paint or eggs, but Frannie wasn’t taking that risk.

  Tomorrow night was going to be a goddamn triumph like the board had never dreamed of or seen. Whatever grumbling they had done about the controversy, the money, however many imaginary donors they thought she’d alienated by pushing for a contemporary-heavy schedule, she was going to have a museum full of people celebrating the work of Rian Sampson, with all of its identity politics on display.

  Trenton Markham and his ilk could eat a bag of dicks. The news cycle was already moving on, and while his poll numbers still showed pockets of support, he wasn’t going to win the primary. The exhibition’s success, the amount of money they’d pulled in, was only going to be an embarrassment. His opponents were already using his failure to shut it down against him. Not that his challengers in the primary were much better, they all would rather people like her and Rian Sampson and Ashley Patterson go away—quiet or dead, it probably didn’t much matter.

  Her anger had carried her through the last few weeks, through load-in and installation, through pulling the threads of identity and confrontation in the work to make the show as visually challenging as possible. But Frannie was about ready to collapse. She was going to revel in her success and then hide in her office or her apartment between giving private tours.

  She just had to get through the next forty-eight hours without embarrassing herself in front of Ashley or any of the museum members and guests. Easy. She’d done it a million times. But she hadn’t done it when the special guest in question was a woman she’d been nursing a crush on, to whom she owed a massive personal and professional debt, and to whom she could never fully admit either of those things.

  She’d be fine.

  Holly knocked on the door frame. “Ashley’s car just pulled up.”

  With her stomach tumbling nervously, like she was eighteen and asking out a girl for the first time all over again, Frannie stood, straightened her cuffs, pushed a stray bit of hair off her forehead, and went downstairs.

  She could totally do this.

  Ashley was standing in the lobby, hips swaying as she shifted her weight from foot to foot, when Frannie appeared from behind a door marked Staff Only. She was taller than Ashley had thought. That didn’t help her nerves. She approached, hand outstretched, and Ashley felt like a hopelessly awkward teenager. She was supposed to be this badass rock star, and she was reduced to shyly taking this woman’s hand, ducking her chin at Frannie’s firm grip, and not wanting to let go.

  The slight lift of the left side of her mouth as they each dropped their hands back to their sides was the kind of thing people wrote songs about. The kind of thing Ashley wrote songs about, the first verse that came before the heartache. Get it together, Patterson.

  “Ashley, Ms. Patterson, welcome. We’re so grateful you’re here. But I expect you want to see the exhibition and get to your hotel for some rest.”

  “Please, it’s just Ashley.” Oh good, her accent was getting thicker. Because flirting with Frannie, in her place of work, was totally appropriate. “I’d love to see what you’ve done with it.”

  Frannie looked at the floor for a moment, flopping her dark hair forward in a move that shouldn’t have been hot, but it was. Unbutton her shirt a bit, rumple her a little, and she would belong on a magazine cover. Ashley would have given anything to see what Rian would have done with a woman like Frannie.

  “I hope…Well, I hope you’re happy with the direction we’ve taken it in. Under the circumstances, with everything that’s happened, I felt like we needed to make a particular statement, and…”

  Ashley wrapped her hand around the other woman’s wrist. “We wouldn’t have approved you for the exhibition if we didn’t trust you to install it in a way that honestly reflects the work. I know every curator is going to take it in a slightly different direction, editorialize it to suit whatever point they’re trying to make. And I know you have a point to make. I trust you.” Ashley let go and dropped her arm awkwardly to her side.

  “I…Thank you.” Frannie turned and bobbed her head in the direction of the far hallway. “It’s this way.”

  Ashley followed her up a slight incline and to the left before she stopped short. She’d seen the image before, obviously, but seeing her naked body, with her stretch marks and her heavy tits, and the absolute fuck you, I’m hot on her face blown up almost bigger-than-life made her throat catch. She bit her lip and looked at herself, tough, defiant, secure. Rian had always made her feel like the most beautiful girl in the room. And goddammit, she was.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I just…man, I remember that shoot. Rian was really into classical poses and themes at the time, but they wanted to make everything as bright as possible, make it impossible not to notice. Then we found that obnoxious yellow backdrop and I was originally going to keep my clothes on, but it was so hot under the lights that I said hell with it and got naked.”

  “You look so defiant. I may have been fueled by rage and caffeine when I chose that to open the show.” Frannie grinned sheepishly and Ashley smiled back.

  “It’s a good choice. That asshole wants to say you’re peddling porn, give him a naked fat girl that’s so bright yellow you can’t not look at it. Smart.”

  “It’s just…It’s a dare. You’re daring the viewer to try to make you an object, and it won’t work. You’re a whole person. You know you’re beautiful, but that’s not all you are, and the rest of the world can shut up or fall in line. And god help anyone who looks at that and tries to insult you.”

  “Yeah, well, people did.�
��

  “People are assholes.”

  5

  If a large part of Frannie’s brain was engaged in absolutely freaking out about the fact that she was getting the secret history behind Rian Sampson’s photographs from the subject of so many of them, live, in person, in front of her, and if that part was deeply confused if she was fangirling more over Sampson or the woman standing in front of her, well, who could blame her. Ashley was shorter than she’d expected. Frannie had always assumed she was a tall woman, given the size of her presence, but her short, chunky heels barely brought her even with Frannie’s shoulder.

  Dammit, she was cute with her giant sunglasses pushed up and holding her hair back. She was all sharp bangs, round cheeks, and pointed chin, dressed down in a tunic and leggings, face bare apart from a heavy coat of mascara and berry lipstick. In person, the lilt of her southern accent was stronger. Or maybe it was only that she was tired after a long flight.

  Frannie trailed behind her, letting Ashley move through the exhibition at her own pace. She walked slowly, taking in each grouping, moving between sets and walls without saying much. Occasionally she lifted her hand to her lips, covering her mouth as she let out soft noises of recognition and, Frannie suspected, pain. It couldn’t be easy reliving years of your life missing the person who’d left the document behind. She had so many questions, so many stories she wished she could know—how did that shot happen, where was this, how did you end up there, who were these people—but it wouldn’t change anything to know and it wasn’t her business.

  They’d set up temporary walls both because they needed the extra space and to force traffic to flow in one direction through the gallery. When Ashley got to the final section before the exit doors, she sat hard on the floor and put her head in her hands.

  “Are you okay?”

  Ashley wiped her eyes and sniffed. “Yeah. It’s…Fuck, it’s a lot. I didn’t think it was going to be this hard.”

  “You haven’t been to any of the other openings?”

  “Nope.”

  “I don’t know if I should feel special or like a jerk.”

  She laughed weakly. “I’m glad I’m here, you know? I needed to do this. I’ve been avoiding it for years.” She lay back on the floor and stared at the ceiling. “That Thanksgiving.” She sniffed as another tear tracked across her temple into her hair. “God, I knew something was wrong. They’d been sick off and on, and that cough did not sound good. But I left the next day for London to be on a damn chat show and then back into the studio and doing promo and I knew I had this perfect, magical window to get so much shit done, to do and say all of these things and be loud and get heard and I couldn’t give that up.”

  Frannie sat next to her, waiting for her to continue. She was tempted to take Ashley’s hand, to offer some small comfort, reassurance, the way Ashley had done for her, but she let her hand fall awkwardly to the floor inches from the other woman.

  “After, everyone wanted to talk about the failure of the healthcare system and the markets, and this was why we needed the ACA, to protect artists and freelancers who couldn’t afford insurance the way it was before. And that was part of it, but Rian didn’t give a fuck about the money. They would have found the money. They didn’t go to the fucking doctor because going to the doctor for a cough when you’re trans or nonbinary means spending half the time explaining to the doctor and the staff every detail of your gender identity and sexuality as if that has a thing to do with your goddamn pneumonia. And it’s still like that. We still have these fucking people who want to be allowed to refuse to even see us, to have paramedics be allowed to let us die in the street if they think the way we live our lives is wrong. Rian didn’t have a doctor they trusted, so they fucking died instead. And I am still so mad at them. But I’m more angry at people like Trenton goddamn Markham.”

  Frannie did clasp Ashley’s hand then. “I know. God, I know. That’s why…It’s why I needed to do this. I grew up here. I didn’t see people like me anywhere.”

  “Me either.”

  “Shit, at least I had Ellen and k.d. lang.”

  “Yeah, right? Like, yes, it got better, but in such a narrow way. And so slowly. It took me years to find queer femme role models.” Ashley sat up and wiped her eyes, letting go of Frannie’s hand.

  “And it’s not like I could tell people I wanted to look like k.d. lang when I grew up.”

  “You kinda do, though.”

  “It’s the hair.”

  “It suits you.” Ashley reached over and brushed an errant strand off Frannie’s forehead.

  “You want to get dinner?” Frannie blurted before she could let herself lean in and kiss her. She was not allowed to kiss Ashley Patterson, not in the museum, not while she’d just been crying over the memory of her last Thanksgiving with her dead best friend.

  “I’d like that.”

  Ashley splashed cold water on her face in the museum staff bathroom. Her eyes were still a little red, but she wasn’t in terrible shape. She’d known it was going to be hard seeing Rian’s whole body of work on display. She hadn’t counted on how angry she would feel. They should fucking be here for this. They should be tagging along rolling their eyes at the idea of their work being worthy of a retrospective and wasn’t the whole thing sort of gauche and hilarious, but hey, the champagne’s free.

  And Frannie. Jesus, Frannie. Sitting there while she raged and cried, just taking her hand and letting her do it. Someone like Frannie deserved so much more than someone like her and the one-night stands she had to offer.

  She would have dinner with her, and go back to her hotel. She would paste a smile on her face and keep her shit together while she led a private tour through some of the most intimate, joyful, and painful moments of her life. Then she would get back on a plane the next morning and leave. Less than forty-eight hours to keep her hands to herself and not invite a woman to bed because she couldn’t handle how much it still hurt.

  Frannie was waiting when she emerged from the bathroom. “Any preferences? We don’t have the widest variety of restaurants, but there’s a decent sort of Mediterranean place nearby. It’s a little pretentious, but the food’s good.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine. Variety where I come from means you have more than one fast food fried chicken place in town.”

  “We’ve got somewhat more variety than that. No good fried chicken, though.”

  She followed Frannie out of the building from a side entrance. “Careful coming around the corner. Most of the protesters are waiting for tomorrow, but there’s been a determined little group all day and I’m pretty sure they’ve got things to throw.”

  “You shouldn’t have to put up with this.”

  “The last month has taken years off my life, I’m sure. But we’ve presold more tickets than we thought we’d sell for the entire run, so I guess I can’t complain?”

  They slipped past a knot of people lurking across the street from the main entrance, their signs limp at their sides, condemning the queers and their pornography with snatches of poorly quoted scripture for good measure. The anger Ashley had felt in the room with Rian’s work thrummed in her veins, rising to the surface. She’d never been very good at picking her battles and a screaming match with a homophobe might feel pretty good right about now.

  “Don’t let them have it. You know it doesn’t do any good.”

  “It might make me feel better.”

  “So smack down some trolls on social media later. If you pick a fight with these people now, I have to order more cops here tomorrow, and I’d rather spend the money on giving museum passes to queer kids.”

  Ashley sighed. Frannie was right, of course, and she wouldn’t pick a fight here. By the time she got back to her hotel room, she hopefully wouldn’t want to pick fights with strangers on the internet either.

  “I know. And you should. They need this more than I need to tell another bigot to fuck off.”

  “I mean, believe me, I get needing that. I’ve been temp
ted more than once since this started to create a sock puppet account or twelve to knock down the people screaming at the museum online. Or the ones trying to publish my address or track down my parents and shame them for their lesbian daughter.”

  “Yeah, my mama’s gotten some questions at church. But we got big before everyone and their grandma had social media, so we never got as much of that shit from strangers.”

  “I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.”

  “You’ve never met my mother.” Ashley grinned. “I got my chin and my temper straight from her. She can hold her own.”

  “Your family…” Frannie trailed off. She didn’t need to finish the question.

  “It was rough for a bit, not ‘cause they didn’t love me, but they needed time to wrap their brains around it, change the way they thought about my future. Rian’s family wanted to bury them in a dress.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  Frannie stopped in front of the door to a cozy-looking restaurant. “Look, if this is too much, if you need some time to decompress, I’ll walk you back to your hotel.”

  “No. We should eat. I’m sorry I keep getting so heavy.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I get it.” Frannie held open the door for her to go in.

  Ashley was quiet as the host led them to a table. Frannie wanted to change the subject to something lighter, but everything they had in common felt heavy. Rian, the exhibition, bigotry, the dismal state of healthcare for queer and trans people. Knowing now that Rian’s birth family had rejected their identity added a whole other layer of meaning to the depth and strength of the family connections they’d forged as an adult. But all of that was too much for dinner. Too much to ask of Ashley, who Frannie barely knew, and who was doing her massive favor after massive favor.