Desire: A Contemporary Romance Box Set

by R. R. Banks

  “Um….”

  That was about as much as I could figure out to say.

  “Girl, you’ve got to get the hell over that. You have a life to live, and Skeezy McSlimeball shouldn’t be a part of it, even in your thoughts. You’ve got to prove to yourself – not to him – that you’re worth more than what he thinks you are. You need to start living.”

  I felt her words filling my chest and pushing into my mind, reaching into a place that felt raw and uncomfortable, but that was something I didn’t want to deal with anymore. I nodded.

  “Where do I find a costume?”

  Chapter Two

  Beatrice

  Open-air malls were another evolution of modern society that bothered me. I thought that malls had been invented so that people didn’t have to wander around outside to get to different stores. Several dozen shopping locations under one roof was a comfort and convenience in the rain, cold, or heat but now somehow it had become a status symbol to shop in coiling trains of interconnected stores that looped around to create a shopping mall with no overhanging roof. But since it was still not trendy or fashionable to be wet, shivering, or sweaty, these malls asked a lot of shoppers. I didn’t care how snazzy the landscaping in the courtyards was or how tall a replica grandfather clock the mall developers could place in the center (this, I believed, was the teenage girls’ version of the biological clock. It constantly reminded them of the seconds ticking by until it was too late to get what they wanted). I wanted to spend my shopping hours in the mind-numbing monotony of a florescent-lit, faux marble cocoon. Nia, however, was drawn to the sprawling outdoor mall that had sprouted right outside the city and that was where we ended up in search of an appropriately inappropriate costume for the party.

  “It makes me feel like an adult,” Nia insisted as she pulled into one of the thirty thousand parking spaces outside of the mall’s arched stone entrance and caught the sour expression on my face.

  “You are an adult. You have been for many years now.”

  “It makes me feel like a classy-ass adult then, ok?”

  “The phrase ‘classy-ass’ just brings it home for me.”

  The cobblestone walkways were swarmed with designer barely-clothed teenagers brandishing their daddies’ credit cards, bored wealthy women walking bored spoiled dogs, and the occasional hoodlum weaving through the horrified crowds with neon hair and skateboards thinking it would earn them punk-outcast points if the rent-a-cop chased them out. I walked closely alongside Nia, ready to shove her into any store not dripping with obscenely over-priced materialism and that looked as though the clothing inside would preserve at least most of my dignity.

  “You’re simmering on the evils of brand-names and commercialism again, aren’t you?”

  Nia had stopped in front of one of the few stores whose easily-identifiable logo wasn’t plastered on the chest, back, and underwear of every mainstream middle-class teenager in the country.

  “Not evils, per se, just…non-goodness. I think it’s just one more thing to make kids self-conscious and that it damages individualism and open self-expression.”

  I sound like an after-school special.

  “You sure are deep and hippified for someone who wears mascara to the mailbox and whose nails could kill someone.”

  I glanced down at the acrylic nails that had become a fixture of my personal look in the few years that I had been away from my childhood home.

  “And you sure do hate me, for someone who proclaims they are my best friend.”

  “I don’t hate you. What makes you different makes you beautiful.”

  “I thought we agreed that you would destroy the bad nineties music collection.”

  Nodding guiltily Nia led the way into the store.

  After several minutes we both had armfuls of garments that Nia was doing her best to convince me she could transform into amazing costumes, and were searching for fitting rooms. A falsely cheerful-looking girl with a heavily overloaded lanyard around her neck approached us.

  “Are you looking for a dressing room?” she asked, surveying the stacks of clothing each of us held.

  No. We’re going for a brazen daylight robbery.

  We nodded and followed the girl to a row of skillfully camouflaged doors along a back wall. Selecting two keys from the hundred on her lanyard she opened two of the doors and gestured Nia and me inside. The key plethora reminded me of an old-time prison warden and I had the distinct feeling that I was being punished for something that I did to offend the Great Celestial Greatness.

  “What do you think the rest of those keys are for?” I muttered to Nia who slid her eyes toward the lanyard.

  “My name’s Chloe if you need anything. Different colors or…sizes,” the girl said with a distinct slide of her eyes up and down our bodies.

  Chloe turned on her heel and stalked away.

  “Did she just call me fat?” I hissed.

  “Try on the blue one first.”

  **

  A full hour was devoted to that store, locked in dressing rooms working through what felt like endless mountains of dresses, skirts, tops, and pieces of glittery, state-of-matter questionable cloth that could probably function as two or more articles depending on size and adherence to the laws of the area in which they were worn. Chloe continued to perfectly perform the pantomime of the sulking teenager until my dropped credit card and Nia’s non-too-subtly flashed threatening glare sent the salesgirl skittering through the racks of clothing with renewed verve. Unfortunately for her and her verve, soon after she decided our discovery of the ideal articles for our Halloween celebration was her personal mission, she returned to the dressing rooms to find that Nia and I had escaped and run from the store like we were making a break for the border.

  “So, you voluntarily come out in the sunlight now?”

  I turned sharply from where we had paused to catch our breaths around the corner from the store. Behind me a tall, middle-aged, self-described voluptuous man stood holding six shopping bags in one hand and an antiqued bronze lamp in the other.

  “Mr. Adam?” I said, stunned to see him out in the wild rather than in the confines of our usual context.

  “Oh, Honey, flashbacks, flashbacks,” he said, squeezing his eyes closed as though he couldn’t bear hearing the name again.

  “Sorry. It’s so good to see you.”

  I rushed forward and tried to hug him, got tangled in his bags and smacked with the lamp, and settled on a modified headbutt into his chest. I turned to Nia who was trying to maintain the same frustrated, astonished look she had when we had encountered Gregory in the grocery store, but was only managing to look confused and slightly afraid.

  “Nia, this is my old manager from the restaurant, Adam Gillis.”

  My year-long stint as a hostess at a tiny, locally-adored, strawberry-themed restaurant had brought me bitterness, an ulcer, and Mr. Adam. There were days when he was truly the only thing that had kept me from smearing strawberry juice across my cheeks as war paint and raising a rebellion against the rude and stunningly dumb guests that wandered in.

  “Actually, not anymore.”

  “You aren’t at the restaurant anymore?”

  “Oh, no. I’ll be there until Hades does a tap dance with Jesus backed up by the Ice Capades. What I mean is I’m not Adam Gillis anymore. Andy and I finally changed our last names. It was our twelfth anniversary gift to each other. Now we’re the Gilliamses.”

  “Gilliamses?”

  “We were considering Williamillises but that was too difficult to pronounce.”

  “Good choice. Have you eaten?”

  Adam looked down at himself, twisting back and forth as if examining his girth.

  “Far too much for far too long, but that’s not stopping me from doing it again. Lunch?”

  We wove through the crowd with both Nia and me using Adam as a human battering ram to form a path on our way to a bistro at the front entrance to the mall. Inside the pseudo-fancy restaurant, a disturbingly
thin girl with eyes I didn’t want to look at too hard for fear they would pop out flashed a smile with at least double the number of teeth she should have had.

  “Hi!” she chirped, and I took an involuntary step back. “How many?”

  “Three,” Adam told her.

  The hostess’s smile widened as she looked to a diagram of the restaurant and a waitlist on her podium.

  “I didn’t get a podium,” I muttered to Adam.

  He waved me toward a bench near the door.

  “It’s going to be a fifteen-minute wait,” the hostess announced as Nia and I walked toward the bench.

  I recognized the tone as if-I-am-exuberantly-optimistic-about-making-you-wait-you-are-less-likely-to-get-mad-at-me. The other hostesses at the little restaurant where Adam and I had worked had learned to master that tone, but I had never bothered. If these people wanted to wander into the packed restaurant on a Friday night, get told that there were twelve reservations in front of them, and still choose to get put on the wait list, they could damn well wait without complaining.

  Which is probably why it’s a good thing that I left the restaurant when I did.

  After giving our name, Adam joined us on the bench. Ten minutes later Nia glanced impatiently at her cell phone. Five minutes later she started to stand up but I grabbed her and yanked her back down.

  “Don’t do it.” Nia looked at me strangely and went to stand up again. “Don’t do it,” I repeated and pulled her down again.

  “What?” Adam asked, looking up from his bags of goodies.

  “She’s going to go ask the hostess where we are on the list.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I was going to…” I tilted my head at Nia, “Ok, I was. But it’s been fifteen minutes!”

  “She can’t make the people move. Don’t be one of the people I hated.”

  Twenty minutes later the hostess had stopped giving us the encouraging looks she had been flashing us every thirty seconds in hopes of seeming like we were on the same team and lulling us into complacency. Five minutes after that she was hiding behind a column.

  “Remember the princess?” Adam asked.

  I laughed, shaking my head at the memory. The woman we were talking about had trained me when I started working at the restaurant. In fact, she had been one of the first people I had met after leaving home and having my heart drop-kicked by Gregory. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Adam I would have thought that all people outside of my hometown of Whiskey Hollow were like her and would have run home even faster than Gregory had traded me in for a woman who as at least three-quarters peroxide and silicone.

  “The doctor?” I asked

  Before we could explain anything to Nia, who was staring at the empty podium as if she was afraid that there had been a very localized rapture and she had been overlooked, the hostess appeared from behind the column clutching menus and grinning nervously.

  “Angola, party of three?”

  My eyes widened. Adam gathered up his purchases and stood without looking at us.

  “Single-file everyone.”

  Mouth hanging open, I watched Adam swish subtly after the hostess, holding the lamp to his chest as if to protect it from any lamp-snatchers that may have stopped for a quick bite to eat.

  “I thought his last name was Gilliamilles-thingy,” Nia whispered from beside me.

  Without looking at her I pressed three fingers to Nia’s lips and shook my head.

  “Follow him quickly before he asks her where the showers are.”

  My salad closely resembled grass clippings and my iced tea was so saturated in sugar I was relatively confidant I could float my spoon in it Dead Sea-style, but I was laughing so hard I barely noticed.

  “How many times was she pregnant before she quit?” Adam asked.

  He sliced into his salmon with a delicateness that belied his life’s goal to be rolled up in the world’s largest pancake (cooked in the world’s largest skillet located in Dollywood, also known as Adam’s Mecca) armed only with a bottle of syrup and with the mission of eating his way to safety.

  “At least three.”

  “How did she support so many children just as a hostess?” Nia asked, shocked.

  “She didn’t have any children,” I told her.

  “That’s terrible! Miscarriages?”

  Her voice dropped when she said ‘miscarriages’ in that way that people whisper words that they don’t want to put out into the universe.

  “Delusions. Girly was the compulsive liar to end all compulsive liars.”

  “Oh.” Nia sat back, comforted that the other hostess wasn’t some blighted, dysfunctional mother and was just crazy. A moment later her face contorted as though she had just processed something that we had said. “Why was she a princess?”

  “Well, apparently she came from royalty on top of being direct from Zimbabwe. I’m guessing there was some end-of-the-spectrum Black Irish thing going on. Her family was on a horribly misdirected cargo ship and became a small, highly specialized clan that produced a sickly pale, Southern twanging white girl.”

  “And she was a doctor.”

  The confusion was settling in now, reflecting how all of us at the restaurant had felt about this girl before we had caught on to her craziness and just found her exhausting.

  “Apparently. When she quit she announced she was leaving to be a doctor for the Red Cross in Africa. She was very excited because they had provided her a waterfront house…in Johannesburg.”

  I choked on the gulp of iced tea I was taking. Laughter overflowed as I remembered the map of Africa Adam had printed out and posted on the wall of the wait station, a bright red star indicating the land-locked Johannesburg. Dr. Princess left quickly thereafter. Only following a drama-soaked breakup with her boyfriend/imaginary baby daddy. We never heard from her again.

  Because I still felt underlying anger towards the groups that would linger endlessly in the restaurant, especially at the specific tables I needed for that huge reservation that walked through the door twenty minutes early with three extra people, a baby that needed a highchair but wasn’t counted as a person, a wheelchair, two cellos, balloons, a cake, and a seeing-eye dog, I ushered Adam and Nia out of the bistro within ten minutes of finishing our million-calorie dessert.

  I might have a little touch of restaurant worker PTSD.

  As we walked down the gradually clearing sidewalk Adam took a very shiny high-tech communication gizmo from his pocket.

  “Let me get your phone number. We should do this again.”

  He pressed a few buttons and the little machine made a noise and glowed happily.

  “That’s cute,” I said.

  “Isn’t it? It’s new. This thing does everything. It holds your phone book, keeps your schedule, sings to you, wakes you up…calls your mama a whore.”

  I recited my number while Adam fought to program it into the device.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s how I do that. Damn, I’m old. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Andy is making dinner and I think I have at least four things in these bags that he’s going to need.”

  Adam leaned in to hug me but one of the frolicking punks broke in between us and rolled into the distance. Holding his packages and lamp in the air Adam gave a flailing kick toward the boy’s back then a decidedly shimmying advance.

  “That would have been a lot more effective had you not wiggled like that,” I told him.

  “Float like a butterfly, bitch, float like a butterfly.”

  Adam turned with a flip of his head and walked away.

  “Love you,” I called after him.

  “Love you,” he responded over his shoulder before disappearing behind the huge, booming clock.

  Nia lifted her cell phone to check her lipstick in the reflective cover and started when she noticed the time.

  “We need to get our asses in gear. I have to leave in an hour.”

  “Why?” I asked. “The party isn’t until tomorrow.”

  “I have to go to a family reunion
tonight.”

  “You didn’t mention that to me.”

  “That’s because I’m not terribly excited about it. It’s nice to see the family and all, but it always ends up with at least three arguments and usually a curse or two.”

  “That sounds delightful. Why would your family keep getting together if that’s how it turns out?”

  “Because way down deep we’re still pretty tight. And everything always works out by the time that the reunion is over. I am a little bit excited for this year, though, because my cousin is coming.”

  “Don’t your cousins always come? Isn’t that the point of a family reunion?”

  I, for one, didn’t have enough family to actually warrant a reunion, but I had been witness to some in my day and they tended to seem like whole family trees had exploded onto the lawn in front of the host house for the event.

  “Most of us do, but my cousin Roman hasn’t been in a while. He’s quite a bit older than me, but we were always close when I was growing up. Then he and the family had a falling out.”

  “Over what?”

  “He decided that he didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of all of our parents and their parents before them and their parents before them and be a part of the family business.”

  “What did he do instead?”

  “I’m not entirely sure of everything, but I know he’s a pretty powerful business mogul. He owns three chains of hotels and a couple of specialty resorts. A few years back he made some mutterings about starting a custom yacht tour business, but I don’t know if that ever actually came to fruition or if he moved on to something else.”

  “It sounds like he does pretty well for himself.”

  Nia scoffed.

  “I should say so. He was a billionaire before he hit 35.”

  “Billionaire?”

  “Yeah. With a ‘B’. Like that thing you wanted to be for Halloween and got banned from.”

  “If your cousin is a billionaire, why do you have roommates and work in a hotel?”

  “Because he’s my cousin, not my daddy or my husband. Besides, who says he hasn’t helped me out some?”