“I thought I saw a little spark of desire in your eyes when you saw me. A little of that gleam you used to get before we’d get down and—”
“Shut up.”
“Hurts to remember what you lost, huh?”
“Just tell me where to find you when I have the money.”
“I told you, I’ll come to you. How should I put this? Mmm . . . you’ll feel my presence around you all the time. When you’re ready, just whistle.” He laughed and hung up the phone.
Immediately she dialed *69, just in case he’d slipped up, but he hadn’t. Of course he hadn’t.
She sank to the floor, holding the phone against her chest, and felt the tears come like a tsunami she was powerless to stop or escape.
She didn’t ask herself how her life had come to this. She knew. It had been coming to this for years. How stupid she was to think that just because a few years passed without it catching up with her, she had gotten away with it all scot-free. She’d thought she’d turned her life around. Thought she’d made up for her past mistakes, or at least made up for some of them, but no—here she was right in the thick of it.
It was as if the past twelve years didn’t mean a thing.
Brian was an illusion.
Parker was an illusion.
It was the thought of Parker that really got to her. A montage of images raced through her mind—the first ultrasound in which he was declared “normal” despite her past with drugs; the day he was born; the first Christmas; the first day of school; the first lost tooth; and a million days in between—and disappeared into the ether like they’d never happened.
What would happen if Brian found out about her? Would he leave? How could he not? And how could he leave Parker with a woman like her?
Abbey clutched the phone with white knuckles and sobbed until her chest ached. Then she did something she hadn’t done in years. Something she’d never thought she’d do again.
She dialed a number she’d tried since high school to forget.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice trilled.
“Mom?”
“Becky, where are you? I thought you and the kids were coming over to go for a swim!”
Becky had kids now? How could that be when she was just a kid herself? Except that she wasn’t. Thirteen years ago, she’d been eleven. Now she was a grown woman.
“It’s not Becky, Mom.” The silence between her words seemed to echo. “It’s Abbey.”
The chill that came across the line was nearly palpable. “I told you never to call here again.”
The pain was extreme. “Mom, I—”
A heavy sigh. As if they’d just had this conversation five minutes ago and she was fed up with it. “What is it, Abigail? Have you been arrested again? Did one of your johns beat you up again?”
Abbey should have felt shocked, but she didn’t. These accusations had come before. “I’m not a hooker, Mom; I never—”
“You don’t wait ten years and call out of the blue unless you want something. I know your type.”
Thirteen years. It had been thirteen. What kind of mother didn’t know something like that? And what kind of mother was so hard, so cold, that after thirteen years of silence and uncertainty she didn’t have one single soft impulse toward her own child?
“Nothing’s wrong, Mom. I have a good life. I’m married, I have a son—” The words caught in her throat. “You have a grandson, Mom. His name is—”
“I have two grandsons. Trent and Kurt, and they’re on their way over here now, so I don’t have time to argue with you, Abigail. Now if you’ll excuse me—”
“Mom, please!” The words came out without thought. Without consideration. Just the primal pleading of a child to her mother, begging for help.
But it was too late for that. Far, far too late.
Her mother had already hung up the phone.
Abbey sat still. Motionless. What else could she do, with her life spinning out of control?
Becky had kids: two sons. She’d named one after her and Abbey’s father, Kurt.
He would have liked that.
Or he probably would have liked it. He died when Abbey was fourteen and Becky was just six, so what did she really know about him, besides the fact that he smelled of Old Spice, always had those round red and white peppermints in his pockets, and was soft-spoken? Like Brian.
And once he’d gone, it was as if Abbey had been left with a mother who more resembled a wicked stepmother from a fairy tale. The more she tried to get her mother’s attention, the more her mother hated her. Until they’d finally reached this peak that her mother had apparently never come down from. She hated Abbey. She hated her enough not even to care that she had a grandson through Abbey.
Poor Luella Parker Generes.
She’d never know what her hostility had lost her.
And what it had cost her daughter and her grandson.
Chapter
9
This is Mimi,” Loreen practiced in a sexy whisper. She was holding her new pay-as-you-go cell phone in her lap, waiting for her first phone sex call. She wasn’t quite sure how to approach it. “Hello, there,” she said, in a lower voice this time. “I’m Mimi, who are you?” Only she sounded more like Rula Lenska from those old Alberto VO5 commercials. “Mimi here,” she tried, with a crisp British accent.
Nope. Decidedly unsexy.
The phone rang in her lap and she was so startled she jumped and it went skidding across the floor.
The ringing stopped.
She scrambled to grab it. “Hello?” Nothing. “Hello?” she repeated, more frantically.
A man cleared his throat on the other end of the line. “I—I’m not sure I have the right number.”
“You do!” She was too eager. “I mean, this is Mimi,” she added, shooting for sexy but hitting psychotic. “What can I do for you? To you? What can I do to you?”
Silence.
“Hello? Are you there?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Good. So what do you want to do?” She sounded like she was setting up a playdate.
“Uh . . . nothing. Thanks.” He hung up the phone. And who could blame him?
Jeez, she’d really messed that up.
Hopefully he’d call back.
She waited for a few minutes, phone in hand, but it didn’t ring again.
Wearing the new shoes Sandra had given her for inspiration, she tiptoed into Jacob’s room, for about the twentieth time, to make sure he was really asleep. He was. Until the phone in her hand rang. She clutched it and ran from the room so it wouldn’t wake Jacob up, but in the process she pushed the OFF button and hung up on her second caller.
Why was this so hard?
So she wandered back into her own room, hoping the phone would ring again so she could at least save her pride and try again.
It did ring again. This time she was ready. Or so she thought.
“This is Mimi,” she said, and was actually impressed with her own calm, sexy intonation. “Who’s calling?”
“Mom? I’ve been naughty.”
Oh, for Pete’s sake. Her shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, honey, you have the wrong number.” She hung up quickly so the poor kid didn’t have to incur a big phone bill that he’d later have to explain to his parents.
Then she realized that (1) the caller hadn’t sounded like a kid, and (2) every caller got a warning message before the charges started, stating the cost-per-minute and the fact that they needed to be over eighteen. Now, that didn’t preclude a younger kid from calling anyway and pretending to be eighteen or older, but it did mean that no one could possibly call and sit through all of that and then think he was talking to his mother.
So she’d just lost a third caller.
Zero for three.
What was she going to do?
Midnight. Time for Tiffany to be Crystal.
Tiffany crept around the house from room to room, like Santa Claus making sure everyone was asleep before she pulled out her bag of tricks.
Then she waited in the basement, by the washer and dryer, for calls to come in on her new designated phone. In the meantime she folded laundry, dividing everything neatly into four piles—one for each of them.
When she found a man’s bathing suit with huge hibiscus flowers splashed on it in Charlie’s things, she hesitated. Why would Charlie have a bathing suit out at this time of year? The community pool didn’t open until next week, and his last couple of business trips had been to Cleveland.
Hadn’t they?
Was Charlie lying to her?
Tiffany pondered this for a few minutes, almost as puzzled by her own lack of feeling as she was by the mystery of the swimsuit. It was possible, of course, that there was a logical explanation for it. Maybe there had been a mix-up at the hotel cleaners; maybe the hotel had even had an indoor pool and Charlie had decided to use it.
But what about when Charlie had called her from Cleveland, supposedly, and she’d thought she heard a steel drum band in the background?
There was only one reason Charlie would lie about being someplace that had a steel drum band, and that was because he was there with someone else.
Still . . . it was hard to imagine. If he was having an affair, wouldn’t he be sucking up to her and being nicer than ever? Instead he’d been the same bear around the house that he’d always been.
She folded the bathing suit and put it on top of Charlie’s pile, where he couldn’t help but see it and know that she’d seen it, too.
It would be interesting to hear what he had to say about that.
In the meantime, she wasn’t going to feel quite so guilty about having virtual sex with strangers. If anyone called, that was.
By 12:20, the phone still hadn’t rung, and Tiffany was starting to feel like an idiot for sitting in the darkened basement, among the brooms and mops, boxes of Christmas decorations, and the large highly scented boxes of Bounce dryer sheets she’d bought at Costco. At one point, someone had sent her an e-mail with about a hundred things one could do with Bounce sheets—everything from taping them under the kitchen counter to get rid of ants to soaking one in your lasagna pan overnight to loosen the baked-on cheese and sauce.
Rubber banding them to the receiver of your phone in hopes of disguising your voice in case someone you knew called you for sex hadn’t been on the list.
But she hoped it worked.
Five minutes of finger-tapping later, there were still no calls, and she was beginning to grow offended that no one liked Crystal. Which was absurd on just so many levels, because Crystal was an amalgam of some of the sexiest women in show business and porn sites today. Tiffany had anticipated more calls than she could keep up with.
She got up and made her way to the spare fridge they kept drinks and overflow items in. There was a box of Franzia wine she’d been keeping for ages because she’d seen on a cooking show that boxed wines were the best to keep on hand for cooking because the packaging really did keep them fresh.
Well, right now, Tiffany needed to feel a little fresh. So she rinsed out the lid of the detergent bottle and tapped some wine into it, then returned to her place on a pile of clean folded towels and felt pathetic drinking out of the still-slightly-soapy plastic.
She was so deep in self-pity that when the phone did actually ring, she was so startled she dropped it, knocking the battery out. She scrambled to put it back together, hands shaking with frenzy, but it was too late, the call was lost.
And with it, perhaps the only ego gratification she was going to have all night.
When the phone rang a moment later, she was still unprepared, but she made an effort to collect herself and answer, in the most seductive Jessica Rabbit voice she could, “This is Crystal—”
“Tiffany Dreyer?”
Oh, shit! Had she accidentally been sitting here holding her regular cell phone instead of the pay-as-you-go one she’d purchased for Crystal?
Tiffany put the phone back to her ear. “Yes?”
“Yeah, look, this is Ed at the relay center. It looked like a call was just cut off on your line. Was that on purpose?”
“No, I dropped the phone.”
“So you do want calls?”
“I’m available for them,” Tiffany corrected carefully. She didn’t want to put the word out into the universe that she wanted calls, exactly. Then again, she didn’t want to sound like a petulant brat who was doing this grudgingly.
“Cool,” Ed said. “You were specifically requested, so the next time your phone rings, it won’t be me.”
Tiffany waited just a couple of minutes, flattered that she’d been requested, before the phone rang again.
By now, the wine was warming her up a little, so she took a quick breath and flipped the phone open. “Hey . . . this is Crystal. . . .” She turned it up at the end like a question.
“Hey, um . . . Crystal?” It was a husky male voice, not remotely familiar. At least not so far.
“Yes, who’s this?” Tiffany cooed.
“This—” He cleared his throat. “—this is Pete, er, Derek. This is Derek.”
“How are you doing tonight, Derek?” This was easy. So far, anyway.
Particularly since Pete/Derek sounded so much more nervous than she did.
“Good, good.” There was the faint sound of him clapping his hands together nervously.
At least, she thought it was his hands.
And that it was nervousness.
“Where are you tonight, Derek?” She had her notes from Sandra on hand, but so far she hadn’t needed to consult them: (1) call him by the name he wants, even if it’s obviously fake, and (2) ask questions to draw him out and use up time before getting down to business.
Frankly, she wasn’t looking forward to the getting down to business part.
“I’m at home.”
“Where is home?”
“Kensing . . . uh, Potomac, Maryland.” The guy was a terrible liar. It was almost endearing.
“Oooh, I like Potomac. Do you have a nice big house?” Sure. It was probably right down the street from Ted Koppel’s place.
“Yeah.” He took a shuddering breath she later realized must have been the gathering of his nerve. “And I want to fuck you with it.”
Crystal should have gone with this, but Tiffany was so shocked by the change of subject that she said, “I beg your pardon?”
“Huh? Oh. Hey, that’s good. So I say I’m from Potomac and you get all hoity-toity like you’re from Potomac.” He gave an earthy chuckle. “That’s good, I like that. Take off your diamonds and jewelry, bitch.”
Tiffany was seriously disconcerted by his transition between awkward geek named Peter from Kensington, to Asshole Derek from Potomac, but as long as he was paying the exorbitant fee to talk to her, she was going to try to keep the conversation going.
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
The old chain collar they’d used on Rover—yes, Tiffany’s family had actually had a dog named Rover, in part because it was so rare—was hanging on the wall opposite her, so she took a few stealthy steps toward it, took it off the hook, and then set it down on the concrete floor, link by link. “There goes my necklace.” Clink clink clink. “And my bracelet.” Then, as an afterthought that felt like brilliance, “Do you want me to take off my nipple ring?”
The idea of having a nipple ring struck Tiffany as so incredibly stupid that it was funny for her to play the role of the kind of girl who would have one. Or more.
Presumably of the expensive variety.
“Is it like Janet Jackson’s?”
Tiffany remembered Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction, but she couldn’t remember the nipple ring. Not that it mattered. She’d never have to prove it. “It’s exactly the same,” she said, shrugging to herself.
/> “Can I touch it?”
“Of course.” Then, in case that wasn’t inviting enough, “I want you to.”
“Man,” he breathed. “It’s cold. Does that cold metal turn you on?”
“Yes.” Why not? “Does it turn you on?”
There were a couple of grunts and moans, and Tiffany had her answer.
“I gotta go,” he said. “Thanks.”
He clicked off, apparently unwilling to spend one dime more than necessary once he was finished.
She couldn’t blame him, really. You wouldn’t pay a housekeeper extra to stick around and talk about the Washington Redskins. Why bother with niceties?
The call had lasted approximately four minutes. It was still more than ten bucks. Way better money than she’d make working retail.
And it had been easy.
When Sandra had first mentioned the idea, Tiffany had had visions of really perverted talk, graphic descriptions, and porn movie sound effects. The whole idea had been pretty daunting.
But this had been no sweat. She could do a hundred of these calls without ever feeling too funny about it.
First Sandra and now Tiffany—was it something that ran in the family? She was adopted, so she and Sandra weren’t actually blood relatives, but maybe there was some sort of subversive messaging in the old mystery series books they read as kids. Maybe Nancy Drew had a hot life after midnight.
Who knew?
All Tiffany knew was that maybe she’d be able to pay off her Finola Pims debt and get herself a little convertible before too long.
“Put me in a diaper and make it real tight.”
Abbey, who was on her third call as Brandee, groaned inwardly. Three calls in a row, and all three of them oddballs. Number one had wanted her to bark like a dog to the tune of the national anthem. Number two begged her to speak only pig latin—which she found she was surprisingly good at. Now number three had requested a bare-bottom spanking and then a diaper.
This was not the kind of phone sex she was accustomed to.
Well, actually, she wasn’t accustomed to any phone sex anymore.
But that was changing rapidly. With Brian asleep in bed after a long day, and Parker asleep in bed after a long bath, Abbey had gone outside to the detached garage and was sitting in the car in the dark, taking calls.
Secrets of a Shoe Addict Page 10
