Venner seemed to be calculating something. He picked at a hangnail on his sausage-sized thumb. The room was so quiet it absorbed sound. The road outside must have gone silent because there was so much silence in the diner.
Finally, Venner looked at Merritt like a man appraising a jewel beneath a magnifying glass…or pinning a butterfly to a corkboard.
“I don’t know what you’ve done to Avery,” he said.
Merritt shot Avery a startled glance. Avery snatched her hand off Merritt’s shoulder. Merritt wasn’t sure what she had done to Avery either, but she wanted to do it again. She remembered every luscious curve of Avery’s body in the Jupiter Hotel. Had she felt Avery’s clitoris touch hers? Could she tell? Could she bear the fact that Avery was probably thinking the same thing and she herself had to say no. For the sake of her heart. For the long winter that would come after Avery left, she had to say no.
“When did you grow a set of balls?” Venner demanded of Avery. He slapped the table again. “Okay. Goddamn it. Deal. She can have her goddamn building if she does everything—I mean everything—TKO wants out of this show. You had better be a unicorn.” He stuck out his hand to shake Merritt’s. “You will be. I can tell. I’m the Finder. Greg, get her a contract.”
Chapter 16
Avery caught Merritt in the parking lot outside. Merritt looked as dazed as Avery had felt when she’d met Alistair at the Four Seasons and King & Crown was born.
“I can’t believe that actually worked,” Merritt said. “Why me? There are thousands of women in Portland. Like he said, they’d do it for free.”
Avery admired Merritt standing in the dilapidated parking lot. She could have been a model, but it was more than that. It was that cool reserve. Had she really thought Merritt would say yes to a fling? Was it fair to be disappointed when it was so clear Merritt was out of her league? And yet there was something in the looks Merritt had given her in the command center. We’re in it together, she’d seemed to say.
“You really don’t know, do you?” Avery shook her head. “And that makes it even better.”
“What’s better?”
“You’re A-list, Merritt. You always have been.”
“There’s no list in Portland.”
“Ah, but there is.” Avery knew. Everywhere. Every city. Every table at every restaurant. There was a hierarchy. Ask any woman in any room to list the coolest, the prettiest, the richest, and the skinniest. She could guess within the pound.
“People in Portland still wear gunnysack dresses,” Merritt said. “There’s no list when you’re wearing a gunnysack.”
Avery motioned to Merritt’s perfectly creased slacks, her tank top, and her pin-striped vest, which could not have fit her more perfectly if Ralph Lauren had designed it himself. “Where's your gunny-sack?” she said flirtatiously. After all, a girl could hope.
“This?” Merritt gestured to her outfit. “This says I buy antique hinges for a living. This says I can’t find the right pair of jeans.”
Nothing about Merritt’s slender body said buy hinges, and if she couldn’t find the right jeans it was because she had psychologically blocked the existence of the mall…or Target…or yard sales.
“Do you have to go anywhere right now?” Avery asked.
“Back to the shop.”
“Can you skip it?”
“I’m the boss.”
She looked like a boss. She’d flipped Venner as surely as she’d flipped Bunter.
“Let’s go.” Avery said it before she could lose her nerve. She was supposed to be filming meeting-the-contractors. In two and a half minutes, Alistair would come out to see where she’d gone. But it was Merritt who made her heart race. “Hurry. My car’s in the back.”
Her car was a comped Mercedes Benz AMG. Bright pink.
“I am so not surprised,” Merritt said.
“I get to drive it for free as long as I eat Body Biscuits in it.”
She pushed it into second, spun out for a second, and then caught traction and turned onto the road.
“Are we escaping?” Merritt asked.
“Basically.”
“Where are you taking me?”
The top was down and Merritt’s short, dark hair blew around her face.
“I want you to meet my friend.” Avery might not be cool herself, but she could be cool by association.
* * *
A few minutes later they were pulling up in front of the Nines Hotel. The valet opened the door to the AMG.
“Your friend is waiting for you. Here’s a card to get you up to the suite. She says you’re three minutes and forty seconds late.”
“What’s that about?” Merritt asked as they entered the retro glamour of the old department store turned luxury hotel.
“She probably put a tracking device on my car.”
“Really?”
“It’s DX.” For Avery that explained everything.
Merritt looked curious. “DX? The singer? Is that like a Hollywood thing? You all know each other? I’d never have put you two together.”
“I would never know DX except for my mom.”
She wished Merritt hadn’t noticed that DX and Avery were a mismatched friendship. No one thought Avery was cool enough to be friends with DX. Usually, even Avery didn’t think Avery was cool enough to be friends with DX. But she wished Merritt had nodded, as if to say, Of course. You’re clearly the kind of sexy renegade who would hang out with the singer who forgot to accept her Grammy.
“True story?” Avery said. “My mom was Jerry Xan’s agent. That’s DX’s dad.”
They waited for the bronze-plated elevator doors to open. For once, Avery was happy that no fans greeted her.
“When I was ten and she was thirteen,” she said, “Jerry Xan lost DX in the Berlin Airport. He told my mom when he got back to America. Just said it, like, We had to refuel in Puerto Rico and my daughter is somewhere in the Berlin Airport. So my mom flew over. DX had taken a train to Amsterdam and was playing guitar outside a brothel. My mom brought her home and tried to give her a normal childhood for two hot seconds.”
The elevator doors opened and then closed behind them with seductive privacy. Avery didn’t look at Merritt. Her desires would be to plain to read.
“I didn’t know what to think of DX,” she went on. “She’s crazy. Then one night I was lying in bed and I heard Marlene—my mom—and DX arguing.”
She remembered the fight, her mother raising her voice to say, Avery doesn’t have your talent, DX. Let’s face it. She can’t throw away a brilliant career because she’s not going to have one, but you can.
“My mom was all about how talented DX was and I wasn’t, and DX—she was thirteen then—just said, ‘You corporate whore. You can’t read the future.’ I think she was the first person who ever believed in me.”
“I believed in you,” Merritt said quietly.
Avery wished the doors would stay closed a moment longer, so she could linger in that moment. As it was, they opened. Sunlight poured in. Before them an enormous suite spread out like Louis XIV’s bedroom retrofitted for the twenty-first century.
DX greeted her with, “Avery! You lovely American Girl doll!” She turned to Merritt, lifting up the silver aviator shades she wore even at night. “And this is the girl.”
Avery shot DX a look that said, Be cool, but DX was already so cool, scolding glances meant nothing to her.
“The woman,” DX corrected. “Merritt Lessing.” She held out her hand. “A pleasure. Avery has told me all about your prowess.”
There was no doubting what DX meant. It was not Merritt’s prowess at acquiring interesting lumber. Avery thought maybe she would drop dead on the yellow-and-purple-interlacing-squares carpet. She would have been mortified if Merritt were her woman, but Merritt wasn’t. Whatever coolness Avery acquired by association with America’s top-grossing female artist was lost…by association with America’s top-grossing female artist.
“We’ll be having dinner soon,” D
X said. “You two have to stay. I had a water buffalo fetus shipped over from Ban Bua Yai. The chef from Pok Pok is going to cook it up for us.”
Merritt’s face registered the same disbelief Avery would have felt if she hadn’t known DX since childhood.
“Don’t worry. It was a miscarriage,” DX added. “No murder.”
“I’m not sure that helps,” Merritt said.
DX laughed. “We have a psilocybin etouffee. I’ve heard so much about you. Let’s talk.”
DX’s band and several other people Avery did not recognize were clustered around a rat’s nest of plastic tubes in the center of the elegantly over-decorated suite.
“They’re making a bong,” DX said. “They’re trying to use a mile of tubing. It’s BPA free.”
DX poured Avery and Merritt a drink from a shaker on an end table and beckoned for them to join her on the porch outside. DX closed the sliding glass door behind them and leaned her elbows on the stone railing. White, canvas sun canopies shaded them. Beyond that, the blue-green high-rises of Portland reflected dazzling sunlight. They looked different in every season, Avery thought, like it was always a new city.
Merritt clinked her glass to DX’s, took a sip, and said, “Water buffalo, not so sure. This drink I can do.”
The drink tasted like grain alcohol and hot peppers distilled to the point of spontaneous combustion.
“Straight from Mexico,” DX said. “I got it from El Chapo.”
“But you didn’t,” Avery said. “People don’t buy drinks from El Chapo.”
DX’s grin said, Drink up, my little innocent.
“So Avery says you loved her and left her at the Jupiter Hotel,” DX added.
“DX! No!” Avery said. “You don’t talk to people about stuff like that. In confidence, DX. Confidence.”
It was too late.
“You seem like the type.”
Merritt looked pained. Avery’s embarrassment was like the red slash across a discarded script. DX put her arm around Merritt.
“Avery’s really a frickin’ sweetheart. Repressed. I mean she’s kind of like one of those indigenous tribes that bans homosexuality and eats twins because they think they’re possessed by the devil—”
“No, DX! That isn’t even a thing,” Avery protested.
“But she’d knit you little things if you dated her. Little sweaters and scarves. You can’t underestimate little sweaters. I mean Tony doesn’t knit, but he would.” DX punctuated the declaration with another swig of her atomic drink. “He would knit me little sweaters if I wanted because he loves me.”
Avery’s mortification had reached an embolism-exploding level, but Merritt was suddenly grinning. She joined DX at the stone railing and leaned her back against it, silhouetted against the high-rises. A hot breeze stirred her silky hair. They looked stylish together, like singer and drummer on the cover of Rolling Stone.
“I know this performance artist in Milan,” DX said, “who will have sex with you in a hammock strung between two cathedral towers. And he’s a hermaphrodite, so, best of both worlds. I tried to get Avery to do it, but she was always, like, ‘I want a sweet woman who knows how to make miniature birdhouses for little tiny birds.’”
“There were no little tiny birds,” Avery said.
Merritt laughed. DX laughed with her. And they were laughing at Avery, but somehow it didn’t hurt.
“Could your hermaphrodite have sex with me while knitting a little sweater?” Merritt asked.
“He knit the whole hammock.”
Avery had always had the inclination to correct DX, to remind her of a world that included gravity and the legal system. Merritt was just playing along. They joked back and forth a little bit more, and then Merritt held out her hand to Avery. They were almost too far away to touch, but Merritt pulled her a step closer, and for a moment all Avery could think was, Kiss me.
“Avery used to loan me her sweaters,” Merritt said. “When we were at Vale. She said I always looked cold, and she loaned me these cute little argyle sweaters.”
Avery’s sweaters had always been embarrassingly loose on Merritt.
“They were so fuzzy.” Merritt lifted the collar of her shirt to her nose. “And they always smelled like jasmine.” She looked wistful, like someone recalling a cherished memory. “No one ever gave me a sweater besides Avery.”
* * *
A few minutes later Merritt went inside to use the bathroom. It was another example of her supreme confidence. That, or the fact she didn’t know there might be a python in the bathtub or the toilet or loose because DX didn’t think creatures should be caged for human convenience.
When she was gone, DX said, “I like her. You like her. Good choice.”
“I know,” Avery said. She looked down at the shoppers and businessmen far below them. “But she’s not interested.”
“She’s all over you.”
“No she isn’t.”
“In her mind.” DX tapped her own temple. “She’s all over you in her mind.”
Avery sighed and turned toward the glass door that led into the suite. The city was reflected there too. Merritt’s city.
“I threw myself at her. She said we should get brunch instead.”
“Ouch,” DX said. “But maybe…”
“There’s no ‘but maybe.’”
“Maybe brunch is what they call it in Portland.” DX stuck her tongue out between two fingers.
“She had a restaurant in mind…and mimosas. She’s probably regretting that she slept with me at all. I mean, I think on some level she wants to, but not really. Maybe she just hasn’t gotten some in a while. Maybe she’s got a thing about celebrities.”
“Ah, no,” DX said. “Does anything about that girl say, Star fucker?”
“No.”
“Okay then.”
“I just have to not humiliate myself for five weeks. I’m not going to follow her around like some stalker fan.”
DX squeezed her shoulders, much like the python might be squeezing Merritt at that very moment.
“Don’t go down like that. Win her back. Send her a gift. Something big. Something she can’t say no to.”
“Like roses?”
“If you send her roses, you’d better send her a five-thousand-rose arrangement in the shape of your vagina.” DX pulled out her phone and touched the screen. “Here it is.”
“Just leave it,” Avery said. “I’m not going to send her anything. She’s not going to be my secret lover. I’m not going to quit the show and be a gay role model. I can’t do that to Alistair. She said no. No doesn’t mean try harder.”
I had fifteen years to try.
“Done!” DX said.
“What?” Avery asked.
DX held out the phone. “This thing is amazing.”
The screen showed a sculpture that looked like a droplet of liquid gold, enlarged and frozen in time. It also looked phallic, as though the tip of Midas’s penis was emerging from the gold. It was elegant in a way, like an art piece someone (who didn’t work for King & Crown) might set on a coffee table. A photo illustrated the thing angled inside a woman’s body.
“Get this,” DX said. “It’s plated in twenty-four-karat gold. It vibrates. And it has sensors so it reads your body’s response. But the best part”—DX pointed to the base of the dildo—“is that this part here is weighted with Australian lead. You put it inside of you, the weight pushes it in, and it’s like being fucked by a gold mine. I mean really! I don’t want some big rubber penis when I can have the real thing, but this isn’t instead of. This is its own thing.”
Avery glanced at the image. The price was listed at $25,000. She could afford it, a fact that would probably make Merritt like her less.
“I’m not going to buy her a gold-plated dildo.”
DX took a step back, texted something quickly, and drew her finger across the screen. She held the phone in Avery’s direction but out of her reach. Avery squinted.
“You already did,” DX sai
d.
Chapter 17
Watching the crew take over Hellenic Hardware reminded Merritt of watching good painters prep a room. White vans lined up in the parking lot between Iliana’s dojo and the loading bay at the back of Hellenic Hardware. Men in the pocketed vests that seemed to be the crew’s uniform climbed out of the vans. No one moved fast, but it took only a minute until equipment filled the shop. Men tested settings and called questions and suggestions to each other with clipped efficiency. Venner was blessedly absent, and Greg took a moment out of surveying the progress to sip his coffee next to Merritt.
“It’s quite a production,” she said.
“Not really. We’re a small operation. Unscripted makes money; it doesn’t spend money. That’s the motto. We fund other shows. Dramas, that kind of thing. Between comped supplies, product placement, advertising, and reselling the buildings for a huge profit”—he looked apologetic—“we make a lot of money for TKO. And Avery and Alistair have worked way under salary for such a long-running show. You know, they’re such good people. It’s so the crew can get more. And Alistair is not good with money, so it’s not like he doesn’t need it. It all drives Avery’s agent, her mom, crazy. She’s good with money and running people’s lives. If she were my mother, I’d go into witness protection.”
“I never met her.” Merritt remembered Avery sitting at a coffee shop, drawing circles on the table with her finger. My mom. It’s hard. She’d thought Avery meant getting into the industry, but maybe it was something else.
One of the pocketed men called out, “Greg, what angle do you want for the ladder?”
Worth the Wait Page 11
