by Jessica Pine
She lowered her voice at the end of the sentence. When I opened my mouth to speak the bell rang and we were no longer alone. A biker walked in, all in black leather. She kind of fluttered and stuttered in a way I'd never seen before and it took me a moment to realize I needed to close my mouth too.
Goddamn, he was good looking. Like, so good looking it was almost ridiculous. He frowned at me for a moment and then said, "It's Clayton, right?"
"Uh, yeah." My brain was about five minutes behind everyone else's. Nobody's jaw needed to be that square. Or his eyes so blue. It was just...unnecessary. Worse, Lacie was gawking like a total fucking goon. "Trey," I said, finally making the connection in my head. "Right?"
"Hey man." Oh great. Even his grip was godlike.
"Hi, can I help you?" said Lacie, in a breathy rush that sounded like she was asking him to father her babies.
"Actually yes," he said. "You could. Can I get a closer look at that desk in the window? The roll-top one."
"Escritoire," said Lacie. "Eighteenth century French influences."
"Escritoire. Right," he echoed, and fuck me if he didn't pronounce it like he'd just stepped off the plane from Paris. She gave me a dirty look and I stomped out into the back. Out with the mom-joke, in with the biker God. Whatever.
I avoided her for the rest of the afternoon. Her old man came in and we worked on a dining table, taking it apart and removing the old paint. Despite what I'd told Lacie I wasn't an expert stripper in any sense of the word and I was always worried I was going to scorch the wood with the paint remover gun. I preferred doing it with chemicals - the paint just floated right off and revealed the wood-grain underneath.
"I never understood why anyone would want to paint a solid oak table," I said. "Why mess with perfection?"
"Some people, I guess," said Gus. "Gotta gild the lily. It's not enough for them."
"Yeah, and they end up making a mess."
"C'est la vie," he said, fishing a table leg out of the vat. "You're always gonna end up cleaning up one kind of mess or another, or so I've found."
He was a nice guy, her Dad. Steady-headed and kind - the kind of Dad I'd always wanted. I was pissed that everything was falling apart around me; what was going to happen when he figured out I was the one who was making his daughter so miserable?
The thought of her was like a sore spot inside of my mouth. I couldn't stop thinking about her. The question gnawed at me inside for hours until finally it came out. "Is Lacie okay?" I asked.
I don't know why. Maybe I just wanted him to ask her and her to tell him and then we could just get it over with. I could get fired and I'd never have to see her again, which was probably what she wanted.
"Nope," he said, matter-of-factly.
"No?"
He shrugged. "She's never okay. I don't know what to do to make her happy - never did."
To say I was surprised was an understatement. Surprised, relieved and kind of mad too. I was relieved because here was her Dad admitting that she was as closed off with him as she was with me, so it couldn't be just me. And I was angry - angry at her for not even letting her own father know what the fuck was going on in her head.
"She doesn't tell you?" I said.
Gus shook his head. "Never does. Never has. Not since she was a little girl, anyway. After the thing with her brother we all learned to smile pretty and pretend everything was okay."
"Oh," I said. "Right."
He frowned. When I'd first started working for him I thought Lacie must have taken wholly after her dead mother, but her eyebrows were the same shape as her Dad's. She also had his frown - the same two little indentations over the upswept part of her brow. "I thought you two were getting pretty friendly," he said.
"We were. Are."
"Huh," he said. "Guess it's not just me she doesn't talk to then."
"No," I said. "It's not." I swallowed. "Do you mind me asking what happened?"
"Cancer."
"Oh shit, man. I'm sorry."
He shook his head. "Two years between them. Byron was two years older - couldn't have asked for a more picture perfect family. One of each." He reached into the miniature fridge and took out a couple of Diet Cokes. "At first we thought he was just accident prone," he said, popping the top on the can. "Bruises. You expect little boys to play hard, don't you? Then his kindergarten teacher called us in - stone faced as you like. We thought she was going to start talking child protective services. Caroline - my wife - she was furious that anyone would call her parenting into question."
He took a long pull of his drink. "But that wasn't it. This teacher - she had a sister who was a cancer nurse. Mostly pediatric cases. I guess she just knew the warning signs and said had we thought about taking Byron for tests?"
"Oh my God."
He shrugged. "Leukemia. What are you gonna do?"
"I'm so sorry. She never..."
"No. She doesn't. I blame myself sometimes. We didn't want him to know, you see. They talk about positive mental attitude and you know how kids are - they pick up on emotions. Get anxious real easy."
"Yeah. I know that."
"Well," he said. "We played it down. We never let Byron know exactly how sick he really was - to keep our spirits up as much as his. That poker face of hers? We taught her that."
"You do what you have to, right?" I said. "To keep them safe."
"I guess so," he said, and sighed. "I guess so."
I waited a while before trying to approach her again. Trey wasn't there so she'd stopped being all pink and fluttery; when I walked in she just looked cagey. "Can we please talk?" I asked.
"Why?" she said, leaning back against the desk.
"What do you mean 'why'?" I knew things were never going to be the same again and it pissed me off. Like she was inventing things to get mad about.
"Well," she said. "You're just gonna say you don't do that kind of thing and I'm going to say that you do. That you did. And that you need to get checked out."
"Excuse me?" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Just because I've slept with more than one woman in my life I'm suddenly Captain Herpes?"
She arched an eyebrow. "You're honestly gonna look me in the eye and tell me the whole mother/daughter thing wasn't skeevy?"
"Okay, yeah. It was skeevy. It was also a mistake. Have you never made a mistake like that before?"
She had the decency not to say it, but I could tell she was thinking it.
"Look," I said, swallowing my anger. "I know life hasn't been great to you. But it hasn't been great to a lot of people. And I get it, I really do - you don't want to show how you feel..."
Lacie held up her hands. "Whoa. No. Wait."
"...I know what happened with your brother..."
The look in her eyes was all out mean now. "No," she said. "You do not get to go rummaging around in my head, trying to figure out what I feel and what I think, okay? I have had enough of that shit for a fucking lifetime."
"...I just wanna..."
I reached out to touch her arm, but she jerked away. "No, Clayton. Jesus. I said no. Just leave it alone. We had fun. It's not fun any more. So that's that."
Wow. Cold. "Okay," I said. Two could fucking play at that game. "Okay. So we're cool? Because I have to work."
She gave me a slitted, catty look. "What? You think I'm going to make you lose your job. Please."
"Big of you," I said, and walked out.
I got in my car and called Steve. "You owe me lunch," I said.
I heard him exhale. "You're fucking kidding me?"
"Nope. Right now I'm looking for that rare Himalayan orchid that says 'I'm sorry you're an emotionally closed off bitch and I hope you enjoy growing old and lonely with half a dozen cats.'"
"Ow."
"Yep. Shit sucks."
"Relax," said Steve. "You have to take the rough with the smooth, the peaks and the valleys, the yin and the yang - it's totally Zen. So you're in a valley now but I think I can get you to a peak."
"Dud
e, that sounds so incredibly gay I can't even..."
"...no, not in a gay way." Steve snorted. "Holy crap, man - even if my toast was buttered that side you think I'd wanna wake up every morning looking at your ugly mug? Listen, I have some really good news. Get your ass round here and bring Bog. By the time we're done you'll have forgotten all about your little novelist manqué and her emotional issues. Besides, if she's the chick I think she is then what the Twilight hell has got into you? The antique store girl? Little Miss Mope and her three layers of flannel shirts? If we were in Oregon right now she'd take up passive-aggressive cliff-diving. Talk about the whine dark sea."
I called Bog and met Steve at his place. Steve met me with red eyes and a slightly paranoid grin on his mug. He slapped a stack of bills across my palm. "Finish your floor repairs," he said. "Or get the hell out of Trailer Town. Whichever."
I flipped through the pile of twenties. "Holy shit."
"Your cut," said Steve. "And all you had to do was baby-sit a Hawaiian hybrid for a couple of days. Don't tell me I never do anything for you."
"What about Psycho Bob?"
Steve narrowed his eyes. "Always worrying. You need to relax more."
"I'll relax when you tell me that an insane Hell's Angel doesn't want to kill me."
"Why would Bob want to kill you?"
"I don't know. Maybe he found out you were cutting the stuff with catnip."
"Maybe," said Steve. "But why would anyone tell him that unless they were so far round the fucking bend you could use 'em as a hairpin?"
"Is this what they call a rhetorical question?"
"Damned skippy," he said, opening the fridge and tossing me a beer. "Now start drinking, hit the bong and put a GPS tracker on your wallet. We're gonna go make it rain for some of the most talented ladies in Vermont."
I knew right away what he meant. Twenty-four hours ago I might have given a shit about digging myself deeper with Lacie, but it had gone way past that point. That's how I ended up in a titty bar, trying to look enthusiastic as a chick in a leopard print thong and Lucite heels shook her well-shaped ass over my lap.
She turned to face me, straddling my knees. Her thong was a little wisp of nothing and I wondered just how much she had to wax - probably everything. She cupped her naked breasts, tossed back her long dark hair and pouted. I glanced over to see how Steve was getting on with his dancer.
A hand smacked me lightly across the face. The girl was glaring down at me. "Hey! No touching!" I said.
"Pay attention," she said. She was no longer pouting. She just looked pissed. "You think I'm doing this for the sake of my health?"
"Right," I said. "Sorry. Carry on."
"Thank you." She started writhing slowly to the music once more, squeezing her tits, running her hands all over her body. I looked at her and tried to look appreciative, but it just made me look weird and made her uncomfortable.
"Okay, I'm sorry," I said. "This isn't really me."
"You gay?"
"No!"
She raised her eyebrows. "Homophobic?"
"No! Of course not."
"You sure? Because you sounded a little defensive there when I asked you if you were gay." She turned her back to me again, her ass in my face. She could arch her back so far that the ends of her hair brushed the top of her butt.
"I'm sorry," I said, again. "I've just got a lot on my mind."
"Don't we all, baby? Don't we all."
She bent over. Really bent over - like practically folded herself in half. I could see the tiny little leopard print diamond of her crotch, and see where the fabric went in at the cleft. Oh yeah. Maybe this wasn't so bad after all.
"Would you be really mad at me if I called you Princess Fuckpants?" I asked.
She glanced over her shoulder at me and shimmied her butt. "For an extra fifty bucks you can call me Gerald if you want."
"Gerald? Your name is Gerald?"
"No. It was an example," she said, turning back round in a silken swish of shiny hair. "Your head's really not in the game, huh?"
"It's really not," I said. "Can we just talk?"
She gathered up her boobs and pinched her nipples. "Nope."
"Are those real?"
"Nope."
Her hands traveled slowly down her body once more. She played with the waistband of her tiny thong.
"Why can't we talk?" I asked.
"Because I'm a lap dancer. I'm paid to lap dance. Not talk."
"So stop fucking talking," I said, annoyed. The words were barely out of my mouth before I realized how bad they sounded. "Not that I think of you as a sex object," I said, quickly. Oh God. Now she was giving me a look that could strip paint. "Not that you're not very good at being a sex ob...um...I mean, sexy. Lap dancer. I mean, it's cool. It's very empowering, right?"
"Nope," she said.
"It's not?"
She stopped gyrating for a moment and glared down at me, hands on her hips. "Look, for an extra hundred I will take off this thong and do it bottomless on the pole. It doesn't matter how many times they spray that pole with disinfectant, because I will always be thinking of the hundreds of snatches that slid against that pole before mine, okay? There is nothing empowering about that thought, especially when you have mild to moderate OCD like I do."
"Right. Sorry." Why did I have to get the touchy dancer? Bog was having a lovely time somewhere under a pair of redheaded twins.
She started to sway and rock her hips to the music once more.
"Just so you know," I said. "I don't want you to do that. Bottomless, I mean. Not if you find it degrading."
"Honey, just stop," she said. "You're giving me douchechills. Who's your friend over there, with the hat?"
"With the redheads? That's Bog."
"Bog? Does he ever take the hat off?"
"Not that we know of. You'd like him - he's a direct line descendant of Genghis Khan."
'Gerald' took herself off to poach on the twins’ turf, while I took myself to the bar to carry on drinking.
When I woke up the next morning my pillow felt a lot like pizza, mainly because it was. I picked the worst of the mozzarella out of my hair and drove reluctantly into Westerwick. The only thing keeping me going was the knowledge that Gus had a fridge full of Diet Cokes in the workshop - right now cold caffeine sounded like heaven.
Cassandra was already there, raising the garage shutters with a clatter fit to wake the dead. "Oh dear," she said, when she saw me wincing at the noise. "Who's living the life of Reilly then?"
I didn't say anything, mostly because I was worried that if I opened my mouth something other than words would come out. Cassandra looked me up and down, frowned and reached up to my face. Like some kind of gross magician she produced a piece of pepperoni from behind my ear. "So," she said. "Let me guess - in order to celebrate your first fight with my niece you went out and got hammered. Am I right?"
I nodded. "Breakup," I said, taking a deep breath. "She pretty much...broke up with me."
"Right," said Cassandra. "That explains why she's gone running off to New York."
"New York?"
"Is there an echo in here? Yes. New York."
"Oh my God," I said. "What am I going to do?"
Cassandra poked me in the small of the back, pushing me into the workshop. "You want advice?"
"Do you have any?"
"Sure," she said. "Same as I gave her. Stop being an asshole."
Chapter Seven
Lacie
I was lost in a forest of beauty.
I was like a hobbit in Lothlorien. All around me were impossibly tall, slender creatures with huge eyes, dewy lips and astounding cheekbones. They wore ridiculous runway make-up - splashes of red and purple that made them look as though they'd been punched in the face, insane beaded lashes and crayon brows - but even with the outlandish cosmetics they were still beautiful. The kind of beautiful that hangs off the cheekbones, fine, sweeping cheekbones that delicately cradle the perfect sockets of enormous eyes.
The kind of beautiful that makes men stupid.
I'd never been to a fashion show before, let alone backstage. It was a kind of screaming, gorgeous chaos that made me wonder if the term 'hot mess' had been coined at such an event. The models came flying in and out and as soon as they did the dressers descended on them to tear the clothes off their backs and fasten them into the next outfit. The only time they seemed to stop moving was during these costume changes, when they stood strangely inanimate as the make-up artists and dressers attacked them with hairpins, brushes and powder. Haute couture, Courtney explained, was Art with a capital A, and I could kind of see it in these moments. The model was nothing more than a canvas, a block of marble from which a vision had to be freed.
Someone crashed into me from behind - a guy with platinum hair arranged in Jean Harlow waves. "I need two bottles of Cristal and an eyelash curler," he said, in the same way an ER doctor might ask for two units of O-neg and a crash cart.
"I'm sorry..." I began. "I'm not...er..."
"Then what the hell are you doing here?" he said.
"Um...I'm a writer?" Fake it ‘til you make it, right?
"Out," he said, and pushed me through the door.
Ugh. Great. I stood and stared for a while. I tried to explain to anyone going through the door that I was supposed to be backstage with Courtney, but everyone just blasted past me like the White Rabbit past Alice. Eventually I skulked back into the show, where thin girls in giant hats were pacing back and forth to an earsplitting Lady Gaga remix. The endless camera flashes lit up the darkness of the front row beyond the catwalk - a row of celebrity skeletons clutching 'goodie bags' full of expensive crap that cost more than most Vermonters made in a year.
When Courtney came out I almost didn't recognize her. She looked like some kind of alien beekeeper, in a giant white plastic hat that curved high above her head to fall to her waist in a net veil. Her lips shone bright red through the veil and the white dress she wore had a kind of translucent top, with big red sticking plaster x's where her nipples should be.
"Madonna/Whore," someone said, behind me.
