Aurora’s gaze grew more attentive. “When you were talking with us during our initial visit, I believe you used the word ‘bulletproof.’ What exactly did you mean by that?”
Lucy sank back in her chair, pulled into the conversation despite the little voice in her head urging her to flee now, flee fast! Aurora’s twinkling gaze was like some kind of tractor beam, compelling her testimony as if she were under some kind of self-improvement oath. “It’s not about being a knockout.” Lucy adjusted her reliable, if not-so-trendy, wire-rim glasses and gestured to her pleated khakis, pinstriped blouse, and Naturalizer sandals so boring they weren’t even on the cutting edge of schoolmarm fashion. “I mean, who are we kidding here?” She sighed. “I just want—hope—to feel confident enough so that when I walk in the door, the whispers and comments won’t shake me.”
“It’s been ten years. Perhaps your classmates have matured.”
“With the invitation came an invite to join an e-mail reunion loop. I signed up to see what was going on, who was attending, that sort of thing.”
Aurora made one of those hmming sounds. “And from what you’ve read, you feel like they would still find such behavior amusing?”
Lucy’s lips quirked. “Not all of them. But you know what they say about leopards and spots. Some have used the intervening years to elevate their catty behavior to an art form.”
“You don’t have any interest in renewing ties with any of them?”
“God, no.” Lucy waved her hand. “I know what you’re going to say. Why go through all this for a bunch of losers who aren’t even relevant to my life?”
Aurora didn’t respond to that. Instead, she said, “You said you want to be a knockout. And that you want to fit in. Do you think you need the former to get the latter?”
Lucy shrugged. “It’s a start. But I don’t want to fit in the way you mean it. It’s not about acceptance into their tribe. I don’t want to actually be one of them.”
Aurora’s eyes lit up a bit. “Then this is about going back and getting revenge, hm? Do you want to prove to them that you’re worthy of their acceptance, only to reject it when it’s offered?”
Lucy opened her mouth to deny it, then stopped, reflected for a moment. “Maybe a little of both.”
“You’re very honest with yourself.” Her smile widened. “That’s good.”
Lucy lifted a shoulder, not quite sure how to respond to that.
“Wanting revenge is human, if not always healthy.”
“It’s not like I’m fixated on it or anything.”
Aurora’s smile turned knowing. “I know. It’s . . . complicated, isn’t it?”
Hoist by my own petard.
“Yes. But I don’t see how telling you all the sordid details will really impact my two-week stay here. Just teach me how to do my hair, put on my makeup, give me some remedial fashion help, and make sure I don’t trip over my own two feet. I’ll be more than happy.”
“What have you read about Glass Slipper, Inc.?”
“What do you mean? I read your magazine occasionally. I know you do makeovers. That you’re considered the best in the business.” Lucy shot her a self-deprecating smile. “I figured that’s what it was going to take. Your two-week program sounded like it was the kind of all-around intensive program I’d need. A kind of makeover camp.”
“Have you heard the phrase ‘life makeover’?”
“I know that’s what you call what it is you do here. And I know you do a lot more than help make ugly ducklings into swans, but I don’t need all that. I don’t need help getting a better job or finding a husband. I just want to get through one night looking like someone who has her act together. Unshakable.”
“Bulletproof,” Aurora said.
“Exactly. And honestly, I am realistic about all this. Short of applying for Extreme Makeover, I know my improvement options here are limited.”
“What do you think about the phrase ‘Beauty comes from the inside’?”
Lucy snorted. “I think that no one cares about Pam Anderson’s insides. But I know what you’re really asking. And sure, some people might not be conventionally attractive and yet they are still compelling. I think that comes from having a certain level of self-confidence that they have their act together.”
“And do you think those people you went to high school with all have their acts together?”
“Of course not. And I realize that rather than finding solace in like recognizing like, they feel compelled to confirm the status of their peer group by denigrating all those who they feel don’t measure up.”
“So maybe they’re the ones who need their head examined. Not you.”
Lucy smiled a little. “You said it, I didn’t.”
Aurora sat forward in her chair and set her cup and saucer back on the table. “I’m happy with the progress we made today.” She slid a small spiral-bound notebook out from the folds of her caftan.
Lucy recognized it as the chart Audrey had begun for her earlier.
“I see you have a session first thing in the morning,” she said, tapping the schedule with a long fingernail. “So we’ll schedule you in at ten.” She looked up and smiled. “Phoebe should be back by then.”
“Tomorrow? I have another appointment?”
Aurora nodded. “I can’t really pursue much further than this. She’s more qualified, dear. Trust me, you’ll get a greater benefit from continuing with her.”
“But—”
Just then there was a chirping noise. Aurora fumbled in the folds of her caftan and produced a slender cell phone. Lucy wondered what the hell else she might be concealing. Probably a tape recorder, she thought with a defeated sigh.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Aurora told her, “but I have to take this. I’ll have Audrey confirm your appointment for tomorrow.”
As if so commanded, the office door cracked open and there was Audrey, beckoning Lucy to follow her. How long had she been out there? Had she been listening to the whole session?
Lucy lifted her hand in response to Aurora’s brief wave and smile, then stood and followed Audrey out as if on autopilot. She wasn’t in Barbie Boot Camp, she thought as she followed the back of Audrey’s perfectly pressed linen blazer. She was in Stepford Wife Hell.
Well. Not for long. She wasn’t exactly a prisoner here.
Chapter 5
I wonder how it’s going,” Jana mused, peeling the skin off her orange.
“She’ll be fine,” Grady said shortly. He tore off a piece of hot-dog roll and tossed it out to the pigeons gathering around their bench.
Yeah, but will you be fine? Jana sent him a sideways glance, worried about her best friend. Both of them. She’d finished up her preseason interview with head coach Joe Gibbs earlier than expected, so she’d left Redskin Park and made a beeline for D.C. with the sole purpose of ambushing Grady.
She’d been wrestling with her conscience over what to do ever since the invitation had shown up and Lucy had gotten it into her head to make herself over. Should she barge in and potentially change things between them forever? Or play it safe and keep her mouth shut? After all, she’d been keeping her mouth shut for what, going on fifteen years now?
She knew Grady jogged every afternoon, alternating his path between laps around The Mall or the Tidal Basin. It was Monday; Lucy had been gone two days now. Jana staked out a bench on The Mall, across from the Museum of Natural History, and waited. He hadn’t seemed completely surprised to see her. Wary, but not completely surprised. Of course, he’d been avoiding her calls since he’d dropped Lucy off at Glass Slipper headquarters. He had to know she wasn’t going to stand for that very long.
Only now that she was here, with no chance of Lucy popping up or calling, the perfect opportunity she’d so carefully staged staring her right in the face . . . she was chickening out. “Maybe we shouldn’t have given her such a hard time about this,” she said, inwardly cursing her cowardice. “If she feels she needs to do this for herself, who are we to say sh
e’s wrong? Right?” She picked at her orange. “What was the place like?”
“Very Tara Meets Capitol Hill.”
A smile tugged at the corners of Jana’s mouth. “Pretty much what we’d deduced from the website, then.” She hazarded another glance, but he wasn’t looking at her, didn’t so much as nod. To pry, or not to pry? “Did you meet the godmothers?”
“I saw them. Interesting lot. Not surprised they don’t include their photos on their home page.”
Jana straightened, both intrigued and shamelessly relieved to put off the Very Important Talk a bit longer. “Really? Why?”
“They were quite . . . colorful.” He didn’t add anything else.
Jana knew he wasn’t in the mood to dish. Of course, delivering one-liners while she and Lucy dished on the subject of the moment was more his thing. Another time she’d have dragged every last cynical detail out of him anyway. But not today. “So, was Lucy excited? Nervous?”
“Both.”
Christ, it was like pulling teeth. “Did she say anything else to try and convince you how great an idea this really is?”
Jana watched Grady as he threw the rest of his crumbs at the expanding, grateful flock, then leaned his rangy body back on the park bench. There had been times over the years when Jana had found herself looking at his body in more of an opposite-sex way, not a best-friend way. She’d even dared to quiz Lucy a time or two, when she thought she could get away with it, without giving away what she knew. What the whole world would know if it paid the slightest damn bit of attention. Lucy’s responses had generally been vague, like those of a sister being asked to rate her brother on a scale of one to hottie. Lucy said she found it hard to be objective about a guy she’d watched go through puberty; zits, developing body hair, and all.
Maybe it was because Jana was married. Or maybe it was because she had the analytical, objective eye of a reporter. Or maybe it was because she’d never been able to look at any member of the opposite sex without mentally ranking or undressing them—yet another reason why her coworker, Frank Winston, made her cringe with loathing—but at the moment, Jana found herself eyeing Grady’s mop of damp curls, the contemplative look on his oh-so-serious face, the way his sweat-soaked T-shirt clung to his lean but well-defined torso, the ropy muscles lining his long runner’s legs . . . and thought he ranked pretty damn high on the hottie chart. Especially for a self-admitted geek who was mostly clueless about his hottie potential. Which actually gave him added points.
“Yes, she did make a last-ditch effort,” he said. “And no, it didn’t exactly work.”
“‘Exactly’?”
He shot her a sideways glare. “Journalists are worse than lawyers. Don’t look for some hidden story in my every word.”
Jana smiled and half shrugged. “Can’t help it.”
“You could have saved the trip and interrogated me via cell phone.”
She chucked a piece of orange rind at him. “Which you never pick up when you’re in the lab,” she pointed out. “Which is where you always are. I figured with Lucy in Barbie Rehab, you might not surface for the whole two weeks.”
“Contrary to popular belief, my social calendar is not codependent on Lucy’s calendar.” He crossed his ankles and glared at the pigeons. “Or yours.”
It was the perfect opening. And he had to know it. A cry for help? Did he want her to out him? “You have no social calendar,” she said dryly. “Nailing that movie-geek manager at Blockbuster is hardly a social calendar.”
She saw his lips twitch. “You’re forgetting I also get first-run releases up to forty-eight hours before the general viewing public.”
Jana rolled her eyes. “I was happier thinking you were more interested in her for the sex. Sometimes you worry me.”
There was a slight pause, then he said, “Sometimes I worry me, too.”
Then there was silence. Followed by more silence. And she wasn’t jumping in with the obvious follow-up. It wasn’t because she’d suddenly lost her knack for knowing how to pin an interview subject to the wall. It was because she cared very deeply about this particular subject. And once she opened Pandora’s box, there would be no going back.
Finally, Grady filled the chasm of awkwardness with a long, whistling sigh. He rolled his head toward her. “Why did you come down here, Jana?”
And there it was. The moment of truth. She looked at him, at those soft, serious, studious dark eyes of his, and her heart jerked a little. Please forgive me if I’m about to screw up one of the best friendships I’ve ever had. “You know why I came down here, right?” she said quietly, earnestly. Chickenshittedly. Yeah, that’s courage, all right. Make him say it first.
He shifted his gaze back across The Mall. “To talk about Lucy.”
Oh, great. Soft lob, followed by an even softer one. Bastard. Who was the journalist here, anyway? “Yeah. Yeah, I did.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve often wondered why I waited this long. I thought about it once before, back during senior year. But we were heading off to college, and it didn’t seem right. Since then, I guess, uh, I guess it never felt . . . I don’t know. Critical.” She stole a glance at him. He was still watching a bunch of college students play football Frisbee. “Like it does now,” she added. Meaningfully.
He didn’t say anything right away. Just left his arms resting on the back of the bench, keeping his gaze forward. And very much not on her. “What makes you say that?” he asked at long last.
“The reunion. Glass Slipper.” She did watch him now, gauging his reaction. “Jason Prescott.”
Bingo. The stoic mask slipped. You had to be looking for it. But there it was. She hadn’t imagined that flicker of anger, that flinch.
“You don’t want her to go through that again,” she said, pressing on slowly, gently. Praying he’d jump in anytime now and just freaking relieve her of this horrible burden.
“Of course not. But she’s a big girl now. She can make her own mistakes.” Then, under his breath, she thought she heard him mutter, “Again and again.”
“Grady—”
He sat up abruptly, pressed his hands on his knees, and looked at her before standing. “Neither of us wants to see her get hurt. No shit. We’re her friends. I get that. Now, I have to get back to work.”
“Yeah, well, friends don’t let friends—” She broke off. “Okay, so I’ve got nothing clever to end that with. But you know what I’m saying here, Grady, right?”
“You’re saying I should do something to fix things so she doesn’t get her heart skewered like a shish kebab and handed to her on a reunion-size platter.” He did stand then. “I’ve spent a lifetime trying to do that. Maybe I shouldn’t have.” He looked down at her, his expression all inscrutable. Geeks occasionally had a real advantage that way. “Maybe real friends let friends figure things out on their own.”
Jana felt the prick of accusation. Of condemnation. He knew that she knew. And he didn’t appreciate or want her blurting it out. It should have been a giant relief. They could just go back to pretending they were all nothing more than good friends. Except it wasn’t a relief. If anything, the burden felt all the heavier because it was obvious he wasn’t going to shoulder any of it. “Yeah,” she said, just as quietly. “Maybe.”
“I’ll catch up with you later.”
She didn’t want him to take off. Not yet. Even though they’d basically agreed to disagree on how to handle things where his feelings for Lucy were concerned, she was still afraid she’d done harm to their friendship. “Dave and I are trying to have a baby.”
It took a second for her blurted confession to sink in. For both of them. She’d had no intention of telling Grady or Lucy about this very recent, still somewhat shaky decision she and Dave had made. She’d wanted to tell them. Badly. But with everything else going on, the tension between them all, she’d decided it could wait.
“What?” Grady asked, sitting back down next to her. He took her hand between his wide palms and curled his long fingers over hers.
“A baby?”
She couldn’t help it. She smiled. And maybe she got a little glassy-eyed. What he didn’t know was that it was more from sheer terror than a misty-eyed reverie. At the look of awe and wonder in his eyes, her throat got a little tight and she couldn’t spit that part out. She managed a nod.
He pulled her into a spontaneous hug, then immediately pushed her back. “Sorry, didn’t mean to sweat on you,” he said, but he was beaming at her. All thoughts of Lucy and their uncomfortable confrontation of moments ago were apparently forgotten. “That’s fantastic news. Does Lucy know?”
For a few seconds, anyway. “We really just started seriously considering it. I haven’t . . . I haven’t even really come to terms with it myself.”
Grady’s smile dimmed a little. “You’re not sure? Was this Dave’s idea, then?”
She shook her head. “No, no. It was mutual. We’ve been sort of dancing around the subject for a while. You know he’s from a huge family, so it’s no secret he wants one of his own.”
“And only-child you? How do you feel about that?”
She lifted a shoulder, wishing now she hadn’t been so quick to use her personal situation as a diversion from the Lucy situation. “I’m not sure.”
He smiled encouragingly. “It’s normal to be nervous. It’s a big step. If it helps, I think you two will make awesome parents.”
She couldn’t tell him it was more than being a little nervous. She managed a dry smile. “God knows we’ll be relying far more heavily on his experiences than on mine.”
“Hey, do any first-time parents really know what the hell they’re doing?” He rubbed her shoulders. “I mean, except for Lucy, we’re poster children for family dysfunction. And look how we turned out.”
Jana laughed at that. “Why do you think I’m so terrified?”
Sleeping with Beauty Page 7
