Friends with Benefits

by Melody Mayer

  Before Esme could reply, Platinum had joined them. “Hi, I’m Platinum; you guys are Kiley’s friends?”

  Lydia grinned. “I’ve seen you in so many magazines. You’re hotter in person. I’m Lydia Chandler. This is Esme Castaneda. That outfit is amazing—”

  “Can we just cut to the freaking chase here?” Platinum interrupted. “Which one of you works for Goldhagen?”

  “Me,” Esme replied.

  “Cool,” said the rock star, shaking her waterfall of platinum hair off her face. “So listen—what was your name again?”

  “Esme.”

  “Right, Esme. Somehow my publicist screwed up and forgot to get me on the list for Diane’s party on the Queen Mary tomorrow night. My ex-publicist, actually. I’m sure you can fix that for me. Right?”

  “Honestly? I really don’t think I—” Esme began.

  “—can even go myself,” Lydia interrupted, finishing Esme’s sentence. “That’s what Esme was about to say.”

  Kiley saw Esme shoot Lydia a lethal warning look, but Lydia ignored it and drawled on. “The same goes for me and Kiley. Of course, we’re all invited. But we don’t have a thing to wear. Now, if you were to give the three of us a small budget of, say, ten thousand dollars for clothes, shoes, and what all, I think Esme might be able to help you. Maybe.”

  For a moment Platinum was shocked into silence. Meanwhile, Kiley was ready to wring Lydia’s neck—Platinum was supposed to bribe Esme to get the ticket she coveted?

  Platinum’s eyebrows furrowed, her eyes narrowed.

  I am so fired.

  Then Platinum threw her head back and laughed hysterically. “Oh my God, you rock, I love the balls on you!” she shrieked, grabbing Lydia into a hug. Then she opened the small white embroidered raw silk purse she carried and took out a credit card. “American Express Platinum,” she said with a smirk, flipping it to Lydia. “Your budget is six thou. For all of you. Go over it and I’ll send a guy named Cheech to break your legs.”

  Kiley couldn’t believe this was really happening. “We’re supposed to go clothes shopping on your credit card?”

  “Did I stutter?” Platinum snapped back. “Hell, yeah. For a ticket to the Queen Mary FAB party? I’ll give you a couple of hours off tomorrow—that’s just the kind of bitch I am. What the hell, I’ll even throw in the dress you’ve got on—you already got photographed in it so it would be a bitch to return, and I never wear black anyway.” She turned to Esme. “So, we cool?”

  Esme barely nodded.

  “Have the ticket messengered to me; I don’t trust those freaking doormen with their freaking lists, you know what I’m saying?” Platinum spun on her heel and saw Courtney Love about to go into the tent. Courtney beckoned to Platinum, and the two superstars entered together.

  Lydia flashed the American Express card at her friends. “Am I good or am I good?”

  “Do I look happy?” Esme glared at Lydia.

  Lydia’s face fell. “Uh-oh, you’re pissed.”

  “You had no right to do that,” Esme seethed.

  “But you said Diane told you to put whoever you wanted on the guest list.” Lydia grimaced. “Wait, you can get her in, right?”

  “I’ll just give her name to Diane’s personal assistant, and see that the ticket gets messengered to her,” Esme replied.

  Lydia pumped a fist in the air. “Yes!”

  Esme set her jaw. “It should have been my decision, not yours.”

  “Esme, I just got us a shopping spree from a woman who probably lights her joints with thousand-dollar bills,” Lydia pointed out. “She’ll never miss it.”

  “That isn’t the point,” Esme began, and then stopped, staring hard at Lydia. “You know what, never mind. I have to go to Diane’s trailer and pick up the kids.”

  Esme turned, but Lydia put a hand on her arm to stop her. “Esme, wait.” She turned back. “Something bad happened,” Lydia stated. “I see it in your eyes. The shamans call it reading the soul.”

  Kiley saw Esme flinch as if Lydia had hit her—or maybe just hit the truth.

  “What is it?” Kiley asked.

  Esme hesitated, as if she was going to tell them something; then she just shook Lydia off. “I have to go.”

  “At least come shopping with us tomorrow,” Lydia called after her as she walked away. “I’ll call you!”

  Kiley winced. “She’s really ticked. You were kind of out of line, huh?”

  “Oh, she’ll get over it,” Lydia insisted, waving away Kiley’s concern. “That’s not what’s really on her mind, anyway.”

  Kiley saw the last of the line snaking into the tent. “Let me know when you figure it out, Madame Witch Doctor. I have to go sit with Platinum and pray that she doesn’t throw her nearly naked body at Tom’s feet.”

  “Cool. I’m off to meet Billy. Tonight I finally get laid, isn’t that great?”

  Kiley laughed.

  “Tomorrow we’ll celebrate the loss of my virginity and spend six thousand dollars—a perfect day.”

  Lydia saw Billy waiting for her by a side entrance to the main tent. She smiled. He was one delicious hunk of boy. If Tom Welling was a ten, Billy Martin was an eleven. He had on dusty jeans, there were paint speckles on his black T-shirt, and his chin was spotted with two days’ growth of sexy stubble.

  “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Billy Martin,” Lydia said.

  “Lydia Chandler. Didn’t I meet you in a hut in Amazonia? You were wearing a loincloth? Very hot,” he teased.

  She went along with the joke. “But so last year.” She gave him a soft kiss. “How can you be so straight and still be so funny?”

  “Someone told you I’m straight?” He gave her a look of mock surprise.

  Lydia furrowed her brows and wagged a finger at him. “This is a test. I repeat. This is only a test.” Then she kissed him, and felt it all the way down to the toenails she’d painted with Scarlet Lady Red nail polish.

  He held her close. “I could do that for a few more hours.”

  “What a great idea.”

  Billy chuckled. “You are one of a kind.”

  “You’re the lucky boy who gets me. Please tell me your roommate the football player isn’t home.”

  “He’s not.”

  “Excellent.” She took his hand. “Let’s go.”

  He held back. “We’re gonna have to table that.”

  “Tables, chairs, beds, let’s do it all,” Lydia agreed.

  Billy groaned. “My boss is screwing with my love life. I gotta work.”

  “No!” Lydia cried.

  “Yes. Eduardo went over to the Queen Mary to check out the set for the main ballroom and had a hissy fit. He wants it redone. Tonight.”

  Lydia stopped, disappointment welling up in her throat. “This is the second time—”

  “I know.” Billy sighed. “Welcome to the life of an underpaid intern.”

  “But he said you could have tonight off. That’s so unfair!”

  “Tell me about it,” Billy agreed. “Eduardo Parsons thinks an internship means slave labor. I know it’s gonna look great on my résumé, but I’m not sure it was worth it. Thank God it’s all over tomorrow.”

  “Oh, baby,” Lydia cooed sympathetically, and kissed him again. “Want me to zap him with one of my witchy-woo potions?”

  “Listen, I’m going to make this up to you tomorrow night, I promise. I’ll be putting the finishing touches on the damn set all day, so I’ll already be there. We’ll meet at the boat, okay?”

  Lydia sighed. “You’d better, Billy Martin. According to this article I read in Cosmopolitan, a woman doesn’t peak sexually until she’s forty-five, but a man peaks at around age twenty. I don’t think we want to let the best days of your life slip away.”

  20

  The portly limo driver opened the door to Diane’s trailer at FAB. “I’m looking for Mrs. Estella Castaneda.”

  Esme saw her mother give a little wave. “I’m Estella,” she murmured.

  “I
’m to drive you home,” the driver said. He wiped a bit of perspiration from his forehead with a white bandanna. “Diane Goldhagen’s orders.”

  “Could you wait outside a moment?” Esme asked him. “Five minutes, no more.”

  “Certainly,” the driver said.

  As he closed the trailer door, Mrs. Castaneda shook her head. “I could have gotten a bus. It’s just as easy.”

  “No, you cannot get a bus,” Esme insisted. “You did me a favor and your boss has gotten you a ride home. Accept it.”

  Certainly her mother had earned her keep. When Esme had come back to the trailer, Easton had been in its bathroom. She’d gotten stuck inside. When Esme had finally opened the door, she’d found that the little girl hadn’t gotten to the toilet in time.

  Esme couldn’t bear to scold her. She was doing the best she could, and it had been a very long day. Esme just helped get Easton cleaned up, put her wet clothes in a plastic garbage bag, then wrapped her in a cashmere sweater of Diane’s that she found in a closet. It gave Esme perverse pleasure to think of Diane’s dry cleaning bill.

  Mrs. Castaneda took her daughter’s hands. “Esme, there’s something you should know. While you were at the hospital, Jonathan came looking for you.”

  Esme flushed and looked away. She’d assured her mother that nothing was going on between her and Jonathan. At the time, except for an intense flirtation, it had been true. Her mother had instructed her not to let nothing turn into something.

  “Esme, mi querida. Por favor, sus ojos en mis ojos. Look at me.” Mrs. Castaneda gently turned Esme’s face toward hers.

  She’d never been a very good liar with her mother. She was sure that her mom could see the truth in her eyes. Or at least the part of the truth where nothing had, in fact, turned into everything.

  “Esme. You take time off work to go and see Junior, and then your boss’s son comes after you. What are you thinking?”

  “I can’t talk about it now,” Esme insisted.

  “Yes, you can.” Her mother’s face hardened. “I will not allow you to throw away this chance over a boy.”

  “It’s not up to you!” Esme defended herself. Her head was throbbing. “Just leave me alone about it. Please, Mama. Please.”

  Her mother didn’t say another word to her—which, in some ways, was even worse. She got her things, kissed the girls goodbye (they were transfixed by Shrek 2 on Diane’s portable DVD player), and left the trailer.

  Forty-five minutes later, she had the twins back at the Goldhagen estate. They fell asleep like a pair of kittens, arms and legs thrown around each other. Esme carefully untangled them and carried one, then the other, into the house and upstairs to their respective rooms. Rather than making them change into night-gowns, she just covered them with their quilts and put them to bed. Each was so tired that she didn’t even open her eyes.

  As Esme was working, her mind was on Junior, as it had been all evening. She was dialing the hospital on her cell before she was even out of Weston’s room.

  “Yeah?” He answered the phone.

  “It’s me,” she told him, sitting down at the top of the stairs to talk. “How are you?”

  “Looking good, Mama.”

  “No complications?” Esme had been warned that this was the doctors’ concern.

  “De nada,” he assured her. “If I don’t run a fever, I get sprung in a day or so.”

  “I’ll come home to take care of you,” Esme declared.

  “You will not, chica,” Junior retorted. “You will stay right where you are.”

  “But, Junior,” Esme remonstrated. “Who’s going to—”

  Esme heard the front door close downstairs.

  “I’ve got to go,” she told Junior quickly. “I’ll call you later.” She hung up.

  From downstairs: “Esme, you here?”

  Steven. Not Jonathan. Thank God.

  “Hey, Esme,” he greeted her easily when she came downstairs. He must have come straight from work, since he was carrying a stack of scripts under his arm. “Got the princesses to sleep?”

  She nodded and leaned her elbow against the banister. “They were so tired.”

  He shook his head. “Between you and me, making those girls jump through hoops today was insane.”

  Esme was silent. She agreed but wasn’t about to side with Mr. Goldhagen against his wife.

  “Anyway, you were great today, Esme. I’ll stay with the girls—you can go.”

  “I don’t mind—”

  “Boss’s orders,” he said with mock severity. “Can’t have you working around the clock. Listen, I know you’ve got to watch the girls at the party tomorrow night, so take some time off during the day.”

  “If you’re sure . . .”

  He was. She thanked him and said good night.

  Five minutes later, Esme inhaled deeply as she walked the gravel path toward her guesthouse. Orange blossoms. Roses. The scent of money, of all the freedom money could buy.

  The scent of Jonathan.

  She whirled around to confront him.

  Only he wasn’t there. Just the memory, in this very spot, of the night they’d first kissed. Her mind was playing tricks on her.

  When she reached the guesthouse, she saw that the basketball— the one Jonathan always used—had rolled under a rhododendron. She retrieved it and impulsively turned on the floodlights that lit the driveway and its basketball hoop. She dribbled, shot, and made the basket. Dribbled again, away from the basket, and hit a three-pointer. And another.

  Esme Castaneda had a great many skills. She could take a car engine apart and put it back together. Bake bread from scratch without a recipe. Design tattoos. She even knew how to take a bullet out of a wound, and stanch the flow of blood. She could speak two languages fluently and get straight As and be a nanny for the children of the most powerful man in Hollywood.

  What she couldn’t do was fool her heart into thinking that she wasn’t out there shooting hoops, hoping that Jonathan would come back.

  21

  Kiley edged along the crowded front row and slid into the empty seat next to Platinum just as Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock” began to blare from the sound system. She took in the T-shaped runway, now bathed in giant pools of animal-patterned spotlights. Upstage from the runway, six twenty-foot-high surrealistic trees, each painted a different animal print, dripped crystals where the leaves should be. The fashion show had a wild-animal theme—that much was obvious.

  The music grew louder; a spotlight circled from stage to audience and back again. The lights dimmed, and Kiley felt a little thrill of anticipation. Here she was, in a tent jammed with a thousand celebrities, sitting next to one of the biggest rock stars in the world, courtesy of one of the hottest male models in the world.

  The runway parted; a hidden surface rose. On it, Elton John himself, clad in a zebra-patterned faux-fur cape and matching faux-fur-trimmed glasses, was playing a leopard-striped grand piano and singing the music they’d been hearing through the sound system. The crowd roared its approval.

  Platinum leaned closer to Kiley. “Can you believe he used to try to pretend he was straight? He grabbed my ass at Mick Jagger’s birthday party, like, twenty years ago.”

  Kiley was too stunned to reply as Elton finished his number; the crowd stood and cheered. “He’s so toast,” Platinum said through her smile.

  Elton blew a kiss, the platform disappeared again, and models began to strut out onto the stage, this time to recorded Remy Zero. Fooled once by Elton John, people craned their necks to see if the band was actually in the tent. This time, though, the music was coming from a CD.

  First out was Heidi Klum, in a python-print minidress with a heavy brocade coat thrown over it; a live snake coiled around her shoulders.

  It was a FAB conceit to use hip actresses as well as models in the runway shows. Next out was Scarlett Johansson in a cow-print A-line silk dress cut down to her crotch, with hair extensions so long they were wrapped around the dress like embr
oidery.

  Katie Holmes was next in a camouflage-print evening suit with a bare midriff, set off by a sequined camouflage eye mask.

  “Who could actually wear these clothes?” Kiley asked Platinum.

  “No one,” Platinum replied. “It’s supposed to be over the top. All those couture bitches get stuff made exactly how they want it anyhow.”

  The last model was Marym. She wore a snow leopard–print ball gown whose twenty-foot train was carried by six little boys in white dinner jackets. This one was a real crowd-pleaser. Kiley heard many murmurs of approval; then a wave of applause swept through the tent.

  Platinum leaned in again. “She’s had more work done than Elton John.”

  “Marym?” Kiley was taken aback. “How do you know?”

  “Please,” Platinum snorted.

  “But . . . she’s only eighteen.”

  “She was this skinny little slut with a huge honker who finally screwed the right guy she met on some beach, I forget where,” Platinum explained. “He bought her the new nose, the cheekbones, and the tits.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Kiley declared. For some reason she felt like she should defend Marym, which was ludicrous, considering that she was planning to picket Marym’s beach home at sunrise. Plus, there was the niggling worry that Tom was more into Marym than he was into her. Literally.

  The music changed to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” and the lighting changed to pools of red, white, and blue. The trees began to shed their skins—Kiley had no idea how this worked—revealing statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. The female models came out again, one by one. This time they wore casual American-themed outfits: Heidi in a worn leather bomber jacket over a red-striped bikini, Scarlett in a blue and white nautical-patterned circle skirt with a safari jacket, Katie in red wide-legged, high-waisted silk pants with diamond-studded suspenders over bare skin (another big crowd-pleaser), and Marym in a glittering red, white, and blue bikini, which, according to the program that Kiley had found on her seat, was made of thousands of diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, and insured for ten million dollars.

  Marym looked fantastic. As far as Kiley could tell, all her body parts looked real.