by Sey, Susan
He hadn’t always said no. But despite what the tabloids printed and what Kate Davis clearly thought, he hadn’t said yes nearly as often as people assumed, either.
Not that he was some kind of throw-back caveman who didn’t think women should have their shot at the driver’s seat. Maybe James preferred, in general, to do his own driving, but there was definitely something to be said for a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and had the brass to go after it, balls out. James had nothing against headstrong women. Turned out he liked ‘em stubborn. Challenging. And, lately, extremely well-pressed.
But even James didn’t know quite what to do with the six sets of hungry eyes fixed directly on him. Particularly since at least four of them—and possibly more—were well under the legal age limit.
Ms. Halliday had marched the girls in and lined them up across the wide, stainless steel island in the center of the concrete dungeon that passed for a commercial kitchen according to the state of Virginia. She’d rattled off their names but James hadn’t caught them. He’d been too busy trying to decide if the lingering aroma was more powdered eggs or boiled hot dogs.
Then he was distracted by the perfect racial equity of the group. Two white girls, two black, one Hispanic, one Asian. Two were visibly pregnant, maybe three. Or maybe the little Hispanic girl just ran toward chunky. Hard to tell at this age. Damn shame if she was. Kid couldn’t be more than—
He broke off in blank surprise when the girl caught his eye and trailed her tongue over her bottom lip.
What the hell? Had a chubby twelve-year-old just come on to him? He glanced over at Bel for a reality check.
“Mrs. Break will escort the girls back to their dormitory when you’ve finished,” Ms. Halliday was saying to Bel. She indicated a hatchet-faced matron standing near the door. Bel flicked a glance at the woman, nodded once. James gave Mrs. Break a cheerful wave, grateful for the distraction from the heat of all those lustful gazes.
“Thank you, Ms. Halliday,” Bel said. “I can manage from here.”
“I’m sure you can, Ms. West.” She gave the girls a stern look. “Do not make me sorry I extended you all this privilege,” she said.
“No, ma’am,” they all chorused as Ms. Halliday left.
Bel laid a stack of aprons and a box of hair nets on the counter. “Suit up, girls,” she said.
The girls lined up for aprons in deference to some internal pecking order James couldn’t begin to fathom. The fine-boned Asian girl was first and she dropped the apron over her head but sneered at the box. “I ain’t wearing no hair net,” she said to Bel.
“Fine,” Bel said. “Mrs. Break? Will you please take Kira to Ms. Halliday? She’s chosen not to participate.”
Kira’s dark eyes went wide and innocent. “Damn, girl, I didn’t say that!”
“No?” Bel gave her a bland smile. “I must have misunderstood.”
“Straight up.” The girl gingerly pulled the hair net over her glossy black head. “Clear the wax out, heard?”
“Heard,” Bel said solemnly. She pointed Kira toward a terrifying contraption with a bowl the size of a kettle drum on the floor against the wall. “Stand there.”
Kira crossed the kitchen, her stride the jaunty hitch-skip James had only ever seen on MTV. She slowed as she passed him, dropped one lid in an exaggerated wink and blew him a moist little air kiss.
“Ah,” James said, utterly at sea. What the hell? These girls were, what, about fifteen on average? What had he been doing at fifteen? Playing soccer six hours a day, twelve on weekends? He wouldn’t get anywhere near a pucker that perfect in real life for years. Where the hell had a kid—because he didn’t care what she’d done to land herself in juvie, fifteen was still a kid—learned that kind of sexual self-possession?
Bel joined Kira at the huge thing against the wall—turned out it was an industrial-sized mixer—and the rest of the girls followed her in a casual pack.
“I’m Belinda West,” Bel said to the group when they’d given her their attention. “This is James Blake.” Those eyes swung James’ way again and he gave them a little wave.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey, baby,” said one of the white girls, a hand propped on a skinny hip. Caren? Cara? Something like that. Bel would know. “Saw some of your moves on the computer last night.”
A muffled snicker rose from the pack of girls. James tried a benign smile. “Yeah? You’re a soccer fan?”
The girl dropped her lids and peeked out from under her lashes. “No, but we got plenty in common. I take my shirt off when I score, too.”
James swallowed. “Ah huh.” He cast Bel a desperate look while the snickers turned into outright giggles.
“Speaking of sex,” Bel said in her usual cool tone. “Can anybody tell me what a hand job is going for these days? Nothing fancy, just a quick tug.”
All eyes swung back to her, James’ included. A hand job? Jesus lord. Bel had been body snatched. There could be no other possible explanation for this.
Silence stretched out. One beat. Two. The girls exchanged glances and James wondered, not for the first time this morning, what the hell was going on with Bel.
“Kira?” she asked, her eyes going back to the Asian girl with the x-rated pucker. “A hand job?”
“How should I know? I ain’t no whore. But Jackie is. Whyn’t you ask her?”
A choked laugh flew out of the crowd and dropped like a stone into the suddenly charged silence.
Whoops, James thought. Bad move, Kira.
The heavily pregnant Jackie said, “Fuck you, Kira. I ain’t no whore neither. Ask your mama, why don’t you? She gets on her knees for a dime bag, don’t she?”
Later James would conclude that Kira had opted for a physical response rather than verbal. All he saw in the moment, however, was a lightning swift shift from girls standing and talking to girls whooping and cheering as Kira and Jackie rolled around on the floor walloping the snot out of one another.
But by far the most disorienting feature of the fight was Bel’s utter lack of expression or distress. She regarded the mayhem at her feet with not an ounce of surprise. She simply waited for an opportunity to present itself, then reached into the violence and hauled Kira to her feet by a handful of her shiny black hair. No hand-wringing, no outrage, no lamenting the sad state of today’s youth.
If anything, Bel looked bored. Resigned. As if she’d seen it all before, more times than she could count and was sick to death of it.
Kira yelped and bucked against Bel’s grip but Bel didn’t flinch. She shoved the girl toward Mrs. Break, who looked disappointed to have missed the opportunity to use the tactical baton tucked into her belt.
Jackie lumbered to her feet next, swiped at her bleeding nose and said, “Damn. Baby’s kicking like fuck-all.”
Bel nudged her toward Mrs. Break, too. “You can handle them both?”
Mrs. Break patted her baton and gave Bel a grim smile. “I can handle them.”
Kira and Jackie sank into sullen silence as Mrs. Break pointed them toward the door.
“All right,” Bel said to the remaining girls. “Let’s get started.”
“Yo, Ms. West?” Caren/Cara/Shirtless Scorer put her hand up.
“Yes, Taryn?”
Taryn, James thought. That was it. God, Bel had a brain like a frickin’ Trapper Keeper.
“How come you asked us what we charge for hand jobs?”
“I don’t think any of you are prostitutes, if that’s what you’re after.”
“So why you ask?”
Bel shrugged. “We’ll probably be using sharp knives later on. I guess I thought I’d light the short fuses first.” She lifted a brow. “Other questions?”
The girls looked to Taryn who took her time considering. Finally she shook her head. “No, ma’am.”
“No, ma’am,” came the chorus.
“Fine,” Bel said. “Let’s get to it.”
But somehow James had the feeling that Bel had already done the m
ajority of her heavy lifting for the day. More power to her. Female social maneuvering was a mystery that, in James’ opinion, smart men left alone.
His own work, however, had just begun.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I don’t think I should go back there,” James said from the passenger seat of the catering van as they drove home late that afternoon.
Bel glanced at the speedometer. The needle hovered at a safe and respectable sixty miles per hour. Which was good. Great. Admirable, even.
Because what Bel wanted—wanted more than her next breath—was to stomp the living hell out of the accelerator.
She wanted to crush it to the floor boards, feel her old van reach its shuddering limit and know that she was flying away as fast as humanly possible. She wanted to snatch up the miles in great, greedy handfuls and shove them between her and the gaping wound today had ripped in her memory. She wanted the animal inside her caged again. Wanted to forget how necessary that animal was in a certain world. Wanted to forget that world even existed. She’d forgotten once. She could forget again.
She did not want to listen to James Blake whine about his afternoon.
“Seriously,” James said. He leaned into his seat belt and hit her with pleading eyes. “I should not go back there.”
Me, neither, she thought. Please God, me, neither.
“Nobody said rehab was easy,” she told him.
“This isn’t rehab,” James said. “It’s payback. Kate Davis hates me.”
“Kate doesn’t hate you.”
“Of course she does. She probably hates anything with a penis. And I’m the penis-haver who took the shine off her golden girl on national TV.” He shot her a quick look. “Which was, as you know, totally accidental.”
“So you’ve mentioned.”
“She’s got it in for me. Sending me to a reform school for the prematurely sexually active. God.”
“Don’t take it so personally, James.” Bel glanced at the speedometer and eased back on the accelerator until the needle dropped back a couple notches. Her knuckles showed white against her skin but whatever. She was handling it.
“Don’t take it personally?” James flopped back in his seat as if she’d shot him. “Don’t take it personally? Jesus, Bel, do you know what I’ve been through today? Do you know what happened to me in there?”
Bel kept her eyes steady on the road while her heart beat louder and fiercer inside her, until it was a primal thump in her throat, in her ears. A banging, pulsing drum beat that stretched her self control thinner with each wild strike.
“No, James,” she said, her voice admirably even. “What happened to you today?”
“What happened? What happened? What, you weren’t there? You didn’t see?”
She forced herself to ease off the accelerator, to coast into a gentle curve. Look at that, she thought. Absolutely in control. “Poor James,” she crooned. “Had a hard day and nobody paid attention? Come on now, tell Mama Bel all about it.”
He shot her a disgruntled look and folded his arms. “What for?”
“For the pleasure of reliving the details in front of a sympathetic audience?”
He paused, considered. “There is that. Okay, fine.” He settled into his seat, comfortable now, basking in the glow of somebody’s undivided attention. “God. I haven’t been in a game that physical since the last time we played Madrid Real. Those girls...” He gave her an aggrieved look. “They, they mauled me, Bel. All those porn movies about reform school girls? My brothers and me, we went through a real phase with those. Figured them for bullshit but it didn’t detract from the viewing experience if you know what I mean. I never suspected it was goddamn documentary footage.”
He leaned toward Bel, jerked back his head and exposed the tanned column of his throat. “Do I have a hickey?” he demanded. “The little one, Maria? She trapped me behind the big tub of flour and latched right on. Sucked like a goddamn Hoover. And the big one, Taryn? She could draw my ass from memory, she spent so much time handling it. God.” He shuddered. “I went into this inclined to feel sorry for those girls. Being poor is no picnic, I know that. But Jesus. Girls like that need to be locked up. If not for their own protection, for the protection of the innocent male population. Hormones like that, on the loose? God only knows—”
“You think those girls want you?” The words shot out of Bel without warning, a thin ribbon of lava bursting from the molten blackness shifting inside her. “You think, what, they’re slaves to their sexual desires?”
He flipped down the visor and inspected his neck in the mirror. He made a disgusted noise and slapped the visor back into the roof. “I don’t know what they’re slaves to but whatever it is, it’s terrifying. And my going back there is only going to make it worse. How are you supposed to teach them anything when they’re too busy looking at me and thinking—”
“What? What are they thinking when they look at you, James?” Fury sizzled through her veins. It leapt across her skin like fire and burned in her cheeks, her ears but her voice was cold and jagged. “God, what a man! I must fuck him silly and have his babies immediately! Is that it?”
His eyes flew to hers, wide and startled. “You—” he began in tones of genuine awe, then broke off. A brilliant grin spread across his face. “Bel. You said fuck.”
Temper spiked higher, faster inside her. Her hands trembled on the wheel but not from fear. God, not fear. It was exhilaration. Triumph. Release. Branches arched over lush green ditches outside the van, all of it whipping by Bel’s window in a verdant blur. She rocketed into light gone molten with the dying day and wished it good riddance.
James took a peek at the speedometer and the grin died. “Whoa. Maybe ease up on the gas a little, huh, Bel?”
She ignored him. “These girls don’t want you, James.”
“Uh huh. Tell it to the hickey.”
She snorted. “Please. They want what you have.”
“Which is?”
“Power. Money. Status. Safety. And they’re willing to pay for it with the only thing they have that the world seems to value. Their bodies.”
“And that’s wrong.” James frowned at the speedometer and surreptitiously tightened his seatbelt. “I know that. That’s what I’m getting at, right? You’re teaching them some real skills in there. Trying to, anyway. They ought to be focused on learning. But they’re too busy throwing themselves at me to even—”
Bel punched the accelerator to the floor. The van bucked forward and James paled. She took a grim pleasure in that. “You object to women throwing themselves at you?”
“I do when they’re fourteen,” he said.
“And what about when they wait a few years? What about when they’re of legal age but still desperate and poor? Still believe their only ticket out of hell is a hot body and a pretty face?”
He said nothing, only watched her with troubled eyes.
She shook her head, gave a bitter chuckle. “They see you coming and they think, boy, this is it. My big chance. So they give you everything you want and hope that maybe if the sex is good enough, you’ll stick around. Or hell, maybe, if we’re dreaming big, you’ll take us with you when you go. But you don’t. You get what you want, you take a shower and hit the road a happy man. But what about us? What happens to us?”
He tipped his head slowly, as if sliding pieces into place and judging the fit. “Us?”
“Them,” Bel said quickly. “Us.” She glanced at the speedometer. Holy hell. She jerked her foot off the gas and flexed her aching fingers. Good God. What was she doing talking to him this way? Spewing all her madness onto him? “Women. You know, in general. Collectively. As a species.”
A doubtful silence filled the van. She stared determinedly out the windshield.
“What’s going on with you, Bel?” he asked. “You’ve been kind of...off today.”
“I’m fine.” Her chest felt hollow and strange, and a dull throbbing dug into the base of her skull. She shrugged, suddenly weary. �
��Listen, all I’m saying is sex isn’t the same for women as it is for men.”
“It’s not fun for women?”
“It can be, I guess. But it’s never simple, okay? I’m not saying they don’t want your body. It’s just that they probably want something else, too.”
“My money.”
“A lot of times, yeah.”
“So what about the girls who slept with me when I was poor? Or the ones who had their own money? What were they after?”
“Something else.” She breathed in and out, nice and steady, but it did nothing to fill the echoing cavern of her chest.
“Like?”
“You want me to say true love?” She shook her head, a jagged laugh erupting from the emptiness inside. “Love’s just a word women use to pretty up their motives for wanting what they want. It’s a lot easier to say they were in love than to admit what they were really after.”
“Which is money?”
“And security. Or escape.” She lifted her shoulders. “Validation. Admiration. Novelty. You name it. They want it enough, they’ll screw you for it.”
“So let me put this into my own words, just to make sure I’m getting it.” He tapped his lips with a finger and squinted into the sunset. “You’re saying that women have sex they don’t necessarily want or enjoy in the hopes that I won’t be an arrogant prick who takes what I want and to hell with anybody else?”
“That’s about it.” She tossed him a sideways glance. “You’re offended.”
“Please. My ego is made of sterner stuff than that.”
The urge to grin took her by surprise and blunted the leading edge of whatever was driving her. “As I suspected.”
“It helps that you’re totally wrong.”
“Am I?” She slowed for the turn onto the macadam road leading to Hunt House and the Annex.
“Maybe not in all cases, but for sure in some.”
“You know best, I’m sure,” she murmured.
