Painted Walls

by Megan Mitcham

  “How do you know?” Ava asked with a hitched brow and a fat grin on her lips.

  “Because I’m the hottest piece of muff-munchin’ snatch around the office, we’re friends, and you’ve never made a move or given me the signal to make one.”

  Ava’s laugh sprung from her chest and bounced around the glass coffee tables, arched ceiling, and decadent chandeliers in the entryway. Two men in suits eyed them as though they might yank their bras off and burn them in the lobby.

  At a distance, Annelise appeared to be the picture of purity, with sharply tailored suits, pearls, and pearly whites. Her look was corporate chic, until you took into account the blouse she’d chosen to wear today—which was the parting blow of an argument she’d had with their boss the previous day. But share a coffee with her proper image and it morphed to less-than-conventional one foul word at a time.

  “You’re outrageous and I love you.” Ava winked.

  Annelise rolled her shoulder. “I love you, girly. Us outcasts have to stick together.”

  Ava didn’t like to think she and Annie—as only she called her—were friends based on their taboo states in the social stratosphere, but it had brought them together. They were too complicated to sit at the cool-kids table at lunch. Though they’d each left high school behind over a decade ago, their independent stigmas stuck.

  They split the circular table with its extra-large vase and fresh arrangement. Annelise stayed straight, aiming for the elevators, while Ava veered sharply toward the stairwell on the left.

  “I thought you worked out?” This was their routine, but she loved giving her friend a hard time and no way would Ava take the elevator. She hated confined spaces.

  “I do. Just not on your stairs.” Annelise switched the hanger to her other hand and then pushed the call button for the car.

  Ava backed into the stairwell and lifted her gaze. If she looked at the walls her insides quaked, slowly at first, but they gained strength with each additional second. As a functioning member of society she’d learned tricks for getting by without drawing more attention to herself than being her already did.

  She jogged up the steps, her legs accustomed to the single flight of stairs multiple times per day. The five full bags in her hands made turning the knob difficult, but if she’d adapted to anything it was a challenge. After conquering the metal door, she crossed the hallway to her apartment and dropped the bags from her right hand to fish out her keys.

  Her gaze slid up and down the corridor, eyeing each of the seven other doors in view. Ava’s fingers grazed the simple silver baton on the end of her key chain and tugged it from the depths of her briefcase. She flipped past her car’s key fob to the one for her home of six years and slid it into the deadbolt. Unease zapped her triumph over finding all the outfits she needed. Not even the extra 30 percent off she’d scored curbed her hesitance to twist the lock and open the door.

  Maybe it won’t be there today.

  Yeah right.

  The lock smacked into the mechanism. Ava braced herself with a deep breath and shoved the door wide. As it had been for the last four days, a newspaper lay on the tan wooden floor exactly six inches inside the threshold.

  In all her time at the apartment she’d never ordered, nor ever paid, for a newspaper. She sure as hell hadn’t requested one from 1989 announcing the ruling on James Bloody Red Hardy’s trial.

  A ding heralded the arrival of the elevator.

  Ava scooped up the paper without reading the headline she knew by heart. Guilty on All Counts. She hurried between the bed on the right side of the room and the fancy bureau that housed a television she never watched. At the bedside table she folded the ancient print and stuffed it in the drawer with the others.

  Annelise’s heels clicked closer. Bags rustled. “So excited about your new shoes you forgot your makeup?”

  Her friend stepped into the apartment, closed the door, and laid the bags she’d brought in from the hallway onto the bed. She spread the garment bag out next to them and sighed. Annie peeled out of her jacket and tossed it onto the bed too.

  No denying it any longer. The taunts had started again. One of her neighbors must have found out who she was. It didn’t have to be someone in the building, but it was the most likely scenario.

  “That’s better.” Annelise stretched her bare arms wide and tilted her narrow face to the whirling fan. She sighed again. Her arms dropped to her sides. She straightened. Her gaze zeroed on Ava. “What’s wrong? Having buyer’s remorse? Or do you want me to go so you can use your swizzle stick?” Annelise’s finger glided through the air and pointed at the open nightstand.

  The over-the-top comment scattered Ava’s anxiety. She closed the drawer. “Uh, I don’t have a swizzle stick.”

  Annie clutched her heart. “Oh my Lord.” She plucked her jacket off the bed and dug through the bags for her purse.

  “Where are you going?” Ava began unloading her evening’s spoils. “Can’t be my friend if I don’t have a swizzle stick?”

  “We are going shopping.”

  Ava grabbed a handful of clothes from the nearest bag and tossed them at Annelise. She swatted them onto the bed with a chuckle. “I don’t need a…I don’t need one of those.”

  “Holy shit.” Annie slapped her palms together. “Please tell me you masturbate. If you deny it, we’re going shopping immediately or taking you to St. Patrick’s and enrolling you in the nunnery.”

  “Annelise!” She tried to wither her friend with a stern glare.

  “What’ll it be, Sister Serenity of the bored vagina?”

  Ava tossed her hands into the air and growled. “Fine, I masturbate, daily, and my fingers do the job, every time.”

  The hand was back over Annie’s heart, but this time soothing with gentle pats. “Thank goodness.”

  Ava laughed at her own heated face and her crazy-ass friend.

  Annie joined in, but too soon her laughter died. She set her jacket down. “So, what’s wrong?”

  Ava shooed away her concern and headed through the seating area, into the dining nook, and into the kitchen. She grabbed two cups from the cabinet and filled them with water from the spout on the front of the refrigerator. Annelise rounded the corner and rooted a hand on the granite countertop.

  “What did Dickey say about your shirt?” Ava asked.

  “He growled, told me no matter what the Supreme Court decides, neither God nor nature support homosexuality. We should all be put on an island and the problem would be solved in one generation.”

  Ava choked on her water. “That narrow-minded horse’s ass. What did you say?”

  “That I don’t believe in fairytales. That they could send their one-hundred fifty-million orphaned children to the island, we’d raise them to be kind, well-adjusted adults, and make the world a better place. And no, he couldn’t visit.”

  “How is it that he gives us orders?” Ava abandoned her cup and shook her head. The end of her red ponytail caught on her collar. She slipped off her suit jacket, rounded Annie, and hung it on the back of a dining chair.

  Annie scoffed. “Being the assistant to a pig-headed man like that…” She paused, inhaled deeply, and grinned. “It makes going to work every day a treat because I know I annoy him way more than he does me. Besides, he’s all about work and only says something like that when I stick it to him.”

  She drank deeply, and then added, “And no one gives you orders. Hell, you haven’t been in the office all week.”

  Their office was the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI’s facility on Quantico. And yes, she mostly did her own thing at work, since she did it so well. Dickey Greaves, their boss, had been the most renowned profiler the bureau had ever known, until—after more than seven years in the ranks—they’d finally given Ava a shot. In the first two years with the special unit she’d bested his record of unsubs apprehended through extensive profiling.

  And you won so many friends in the process.

  “I�
�ve been hosting the Crime Analysis Workshop at the Law Enforcement Convention in Alexandria all week. You knew that. It’s why I could only go shopping this evening.”

  “I’ll bet Stan was pissed Dickey picked you to host instead of him.” Annelise's smile said how torn up she was about that.

  “Ever the instigator, you.” Ava wagged her finger.

  “So, I shouldn’t mention it to him?” She frowned.

  Ava rolled her eyes and caught the numbers on the microwave’s digital clock. “It’s ten-thirty! I haven’t even packed yet.”

  “Because you just bought clothes. Nothing like waiting till the last minute, sister girl.”

  “The conference,” she reminded.

  “What about last week or last month?”

  “I still didn’t know if I could go. I was working on the strangler case in Idaho.”

  She’d have hated to miss Nathan’s wedding and the mini vacation she was forced to take because of it. Without that incentive she would’ve never touched the stack of leave she’d accumulated over the years.

  “Idaho. Now that’s a random place.”

  “What?” Ava asked, clueing back into the conversation.

  “Idaho.” Annie shrugged. “Who goes to Idaho? Arizona has the Grand Canyon. Nevada has Vegas. Wyoming has Yellowstone. What does Idaho have?” Ava thought about it for so long that Annelise wandered into the other room. “My point exactly.”

  “Potatoes,” Ava countered.

  Annie grabbed the most recent copy of Time from the coffee table and plopped onto the white couch. She absently rolled the magazine into a tube and pointed it at Ava. “Now, what were you all wigged out about?”

  “You’re a croc.” Ava huffed. She marched past her friend and the mound of clothes on her bed to the open door on the far wall. A right turn brought her face to face with a nice walk-in closet full of clothes not suitable for a beach wedding on a tropical island.

  “Full of shit?” Annelise hollered from the sofa. “You’re not the first to say it.”

  “No. Not a crock of shit. A crocodile. Once your jaws clamp on an idea they never let it go.” She hefted her small suitcase from the corner, rounded the wall, and tossed it onto the remaining space on her white comforter.

  If Annie hadn’t made her paint the kitchen a violet gray, the main room a pastel green, and her bathroom blue, everything in her life would be white, including half of her wardrobe. Yeah, when her shrink found out about her white obsession, the scholar had nearly come out of her armchair.

  “Never.” Annelise bobbed her head. “So you might as well tell me.”

  Ava knew she should tell someone about her anonymous heckler. But she hesitated. At thirty-two years old she’d seen a hell of a lot worse than musty newspapers. She’d seen the true nature of God fearing, upstanding, well-meaning citizens and their offspring. Too often it had been hideous.

  “Release the burden,” Annie prodded. “You know you’ll feel better.”

  “You know you’ll feel better.”

  “Yes, because I’ll have helped my friend work through something that’s troubling her.” Annelise toed off her shoes and tucked her bare feet under her bottom. She planted her elbows onto the arm of the white sofa. Her lids batted a thousand.

  Ava turned away. She unzipped her suitcase, pulled off price tags, and blindly folded a pair of shorts, the bottoms of a bathing suit, a cover-up. There was something else she’d been agonizing over. She didn’t want to say the words aloud, but she had to give Annie something or the womon would dig in her heel on the subject.

  “He’s going to be there,” Ava whispered. The fact was a secret, a surprise for Nathan, but she’d found out from her mother, who was good friends with his mother, despite the time and distance that had been their undoing.

  “You should’ve bought sexier panties.”

  “He’s not going to see my panties.”

  “True. Commando. Always a good choice.”

  Ava smacked a lace sarong onto the stack of folded clothes and pivoted toward Annelise with folded arms.

  “What?” Annie flipped her palms up at her lap as though she were flashing her panties. “Easy access.”

  “He’s not getting access. He doesn't want access.” Ava tossed her hands into the air. She dipped through the doorway, but veered left this time. The small bathroom with its sky-blue walls and white porcelain failed to ease the clench in her stomach. She yanked the extra toiletry kit she kept for trips from the cabinet without looking at her reflection in the mirror.

  When she spun around Annelise stood in the large closet with hands on slight hips, accentuating her disproportionate D cups. “Oh, he wants access. You never forget a good piece of—”

  “Don’t say it,” Ava interrupted.

  “Pussy,” Annie continued with a sinister grin. “I guarantee when he gets an eye full of you in that dress he’ll fall at your feet, and that’s a perfect height for fellatio.”

  Ava closed her eyes and slapped her hands over them. She listed onto the doorframe. A groan rumbled in her throat, taking with it the fight she clung to every day of her life. “Isn’t Fiona waiting up for you or something?”

  “Nope, she’s on night shift at the hospital. Come here, let me prove my point, and then I’ll stop.”

  On weary feet Ava shuffled forward.

  “Open your eyes before you trip, break your nose, and make a good deep-throating session impossible. You can’t breathe through a broken nose.”

  Ava dropped her hand and opened her eyes. “How do you know you have to breathe through your nose when giving head?”

  “Believe it or not I tried to be normal for the first half of my life.” Annelise took the travel pack from her hand and set it on a shelf.

  “You, any other way than you are, would be abnormal.”

  “Which is why we’re friends.” Annie grinned. She placed a cold hand on Ava’s shoulder and turned Ava away from her to face the bathroom. “Don’t move.”

  She did as she was told, not even straightening the lilt of her head.

  Annie skirted her and walked to the bathroom. Her hand grasped the knob and pulled it closed. Too late to bolt, Ava realized her friend’s intent. The beveled mirror hanging on the outside of the door caught Ava’s reflection. Her gaze jumped to Annie’s.

  “I might be small, but I’m deceptively strong,” Annie said, pointing to the mirror. “Look at yourself or I’ll make you.”

  Ava rolled her eyes. “I have a gun and I know how to use it.”

  “It’s in your purse.”

  “Then let me amend that. I have guns and I know how to use them.” Ava pulled out the top drawer of the built-in chest to her right.

  “You’re too moral to shoot me, especially when I’m trying to help you.”

  “Help me what?”

  “Look in the mirror and you’ll see.”

  Ava closed the drawer with a bit more force than necessary, and then used the mirror to stare into the center of her chest.

  “Your tits are nice, but I want you to look higher.”

  She looked at the little mounds barely interrupting the hang of her powder pink silk blouse. “My breasts are hardly B cups.”

  “Perky B cups that won’t hang to your knees in a few years. I’ll have to get a lift before my fiftieth birthday because I refuse to wear a granny bra.” Annie circled her index finger around her face several times. “Now higher.”

  Incrementally, her gaze rose to the hollow at the base of her pale throat, to the slant of her slender jaw, and then her wide peach-colored lips. She stalled, not wanting to go higher. In the mornings, when getting ready for work, she could look at her features as nothing more than tools of a trade. In order to catch bad guys, she needed to be able to speak. She needed to see.

  But in the evenings she became the legacy she couldn’t deny, no matter how hard she tried.

  Annelise’s phone vibrated a second before Bruno Mars’ Count on Me filled the intimate space. The first time
Ava heard the poppy, heartfelt hit crooning from her friend’s phone, her eyebrows nearly hid behind her hairline. Annie’s preferred tunes ran toward the sexy beats of R & B. Her friend used the upbeat song sparingly, reserving it for her sister, and then six months ago, Ava.

  “If it were anyone else I’d decline.”

  “If it were anyone else you’d answer and tell them to piss off.”

  “I only do that to telemarketers.”

  “My, how the years have tamed you.”

  Annelise pinched the phone from her skirt pocket, but pointed at Ava before answering. “This doesn't mean you’re off the hook.”

  When her friend left the room Ava huffed and lifted her chin. Her gaze lanced into the clear green eyes in the mirror. The pit in her stomach yawned. She rubbed a hand over her belly, smoothing out the wrinkles of her tan pencil skirt. Fly-aways fanned her forehead in a ginger halo. After an eight-hour day lecturing groups of law enforcement professionals on the broad points of profiling and four hours of marathon shopping the strands had defected from her fishtail braid. She swatted them back and then ran a manicured finger over the sprinkle of pigment on her nose.

  Ava toyed with the pearl button at the top of her blouse. Would it kill her to show a bit of skin? Sure her top lacked sleeves, but the jacket she’d worn all day had them. She slipped the bead through the slit and flattened back the cool material. A small V of alabaster flesh peeked from the silk.

  Her fingers slipped down to the next button and unveiled another inch of skin. Not scandalous by Catholic school standards. Not even outrageous by her own standards for anyone else. Nope. She held these standards for only herself ever since she’d been accepted into the FBI training program nearly ten years ago.

  “You’re so hard on yourself,” Annie whispered. She leaned against the door frame and crossed her arms over her rainbow blouse. “You are a smart, loving, beautiful woman. Sure you made a mistake. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t still have feelings for you.”