“You—” His voice choked off. His anger beyond speech.
“Mom ran my career with an iron fist for seven years, though she never struck me again anywhere that would show. By the time I was eighteen, I was a lot smarter. She’d been waiting for that moment, had been focusing all her efforts toward the big payouts. She had Playboy, Hustler, and a couple of porn movie companies all lined up for the day I became legal.”
Joshua merely ground his teeth.
Usually when she’d thought of those years she felt ill, misused, and so very alone. But now she simply felt disconnected. She could have been reading a school report aloud for all she felt. Again, the safety of Joshua’s arms.
“Did you—” There was no doubt as to his feeling on this. He wasn’t some man asking if there were salacious photos he had missed somewhere. This was a man angry almost past tolerance.
“No. Never. If you see a naked photo of me, it’s a fake. Not even a peep shot from the changing areas backstage at a runway. I gained a rather fierce reputation by smashing high-end camera equipment pretty early on.”
“Well done!”
“I did a family divorce, got custody of myself, so to speak. Put out a restraining order against my mother. Shed myself of her name, that is why I use no last name. I let her keep the money she’d embezzled as my manager.”
“You let her keep—”
“I didn’t want it. Not after her slimy hands had been all over it. Actually, every account I was a signatory on, I signed over to charity. I’m sure she had accounts I didn’t know about, but I bet I got most of it. The day I turned eighteen I was broke, but I was my own woman. And I was in demand. I’d studied business like hell and have been my own manager since that day. I own a small studio apartment free and clear in a secure building in Manhattan. Everything else—everything, went into savings.” She smiled and kissed Joshua’s chest. He still hadn’t let her up and it felt wonderful. “I’m very well off.”
“Shit!”
“What?”
“I was wrong before.” She tried to read his voice, but she couldn’t. The anger was gone but she couldn’t tell what had replaced it.
“Wrong about what?”
“About the whole perfect thing.”
“Blew my cover, did I?” She tried to smile as she said it. She really hoped this wasn’t where he pushed her away. And she should never have mentioned all the money. Bad slip.
He finally released her. Rolled slightly until they lay face to face, just inches apart. His dark eyes were intent, warm, welcoming. No signs of disgust or avarice. Every time she second-guessed his motivations, she’d been wrong.
“Totally blew your cover,” Joshua acknowledged with a brush of knuckles along her cheek. “What’s the word for someone who’s better than perfect?”
She shoved against his shoulder which barely moved him. He was far stronger than he looked.
He leaned in and kissed her.
She let herself melt into the kiss.
“Wait,” he murmured against her lips. “What’s better than that?”
Then he showed her just what he really thought of her.
Chapter 12
For a whole week Melanie let herself play house. During the days she worked with Perrin on her business plan and consulted with Tamara after school on her new line.
In the evenings she and Joshua began exploring the local restaurants from the old tradition of The Merchant Café to the little Pho noodle shop on the corner. At night she had the best lover imaginable.
And they never shut up around each other. Joshua’s characters were starting to take shape. He was cast-building and between them they worked out how his characters walked and talked, their backgrounds and how they reacted to different stresses. Teaching Joshua how to do the walks enough to feel them with his body had left them both in tears with laughter.
Joshua held Melanie’s hand when they took long strolls along the Seattle waterfront. They would walk an hour or more because they were so enjoying the discussions.
Shelley was now one of his main characters.
“She walks just like you did that night,” Joshua’s eyes went dreamy at the memory.
She had more where that came from.
“Though I gave her thick dark hair. She’s a military trainer.”
“Who lives where?”
“How should I know? In a renovated missile silo?” he’d tossed it out flippantly.
Melanie’s spontaneous laugh had apparently settled that idea for Joshua. So, they’d gone about the task of designing the levels of her missile silos. Two silos: one to live in, one to run training sessions in. It was all a great game.
During the day while she was at Perrin’s, he’d be at Angelo’s or the Pioneer Square condo pounding out words. In the evening she’d read through them, marking the bits she liked and the bits she didn’t. He had a turn of phrase that made her smile when she least expected it.
One afternoon she’d received a text to meet him at the urban park on the high side of Second and Madison. She found him sitting on a bench in the bricked yard, shaded by leafed-out maple trees. Melanie could easily spend the day just watching him work.
But the sixth sense Joshua had developed about her presence had him turning within moments though she’d come up behind him. The afternoon traffic was loud, the metro buses shuffling and roaring.
“How?”
“Me and Superman.”
A quick scan and she spotted the tall coffee shop window in which they were both clearly reflected. “No, Joshua. Just you. Superman didn’t have eyes in the back of his head.”
Josh loved that Melanie had both spotted his cheat and let him have the win anyway. He kept his kiss brief because they were in a public place and he didn’t want some random scandal photographer to get a photo and make her life miserable.
“C’mon. I just discovered this place that I’ve got to show you.” He offered his arm.
She slipped in her hand and he led her two blocks up the hill and toward a building that filled an entire city block, six or seven stories of diamond-shaped glass. He waited until she spotted the sign.
“The Public Library.” He could hear the blasé tone. Nothing was as good as NYPL; the New York Public Library was one of the best libraries on the planet after all.
“Trust me,” Joshua was grinning as he led her inside.
“Stacks. So what’s the big deal?” The place was bustling, but it was just stacks on the first floor.
Without a word, he led her up the escalator. And the world opened above them. Computers and comfortable meeting rooms ranged far and wide across the floor. Light poured in from above. The modern version of the NYPL’s Rose Main Reading Room, with lines of reading desks and fifty-foot ceiling muraled like the sky.
“It’s pretty.”
Rather than speaking, he led her to an elevator and took them to the top floor. The view from the top was nice, but nothing spectacular. Without comment he led her down the ramp that circled downward. Level bookshelves ranged off to either side, but the aisle descended in a spiral row by row.
They were in the 100s before she noticed the numbers painted on the floors, the walls, the bookcases. By the 200s she was looking a little dazzled as they completed the first lap of their descent.
“How many stories?” she barely whispered.
“Four full laps to go from 000s to 900s. This isn’t New York. You can just walk into the stacks without a catalog query and a request to a librarian. Any subject. Look!”
He led her into 391 and there was costume and history. Just as he’d hoped she got all gooey-eyed. She reached out to touch some of them like old friends.
“I’d show you 746, but I’ll never see you again if I do.”
She leaned and began whispering in French close by his ear. It took him time to translate, especially as he didn’t know some of the words and he had to kind of cobble together the sense of them. Then he caught on.
The gorgeous lover of h
is was describing things that maybe even the Kama Sutra didn’t know about. Things she’d do tonight if he led her to that section directly.
He considered blushing, considered it seriously as they were standing in the middle of the library stacks. Instead he took a deep breath.
“You are not motivating me to do anything but drag you back to the condo right away.”
“Then you get zéro. Rien. Nada. Zilch. Nichts. Ny—”
“I get the idea. I get the idea. Why do you know how to say ‘no’ in so many languages.”
“It is, how you say, useful around men.”
“You’re killing me with the accent.” One of the things she’d started doing was that all of their sex was done in French. It was definitely improving his language skills, but it also made him horny as hell every time she said even a word or two in the language.
And she bloody well knew it. Merde! But the woman was going to kill him yet.
He zigzagged her through staircases that cut across the middle of the loops instead of walking the descending spiral of the full catalog.
Joshua let her walk into 746 on her own. Textile Arts and near the very end of the category, one of the most impressive fashion collections he’d ever seen.
Melanie ranged along the bookcases. There were references here she hadn’t known existed. Other volumes she’d only seen in Óscar de la Renta’s personal collection.
But the greatest surprise was that Joshua had found this for her. He’d had clearly scouted out the two non-fiction sections she’d most care about and given them to her as a treat.
He stood in the “bead embroidery” section pretending interest so that she wouldn’t feel rushed. What was he doing to her? How had she come to care so much about the man?
Melanie didn’t “fall” for men; she chose lovers. Carefully, with forethought and discernment. Joshua simply swept her feet from beneath her.
This week held other surprises. Apparently, having been beaten back twice in the same week by Joshua, her depression had given up its attacks and fled. At least for now. Melanie didn’t even feel it lurking, though it couldn’t be completely gone. That was too much to ask.
It was often six months or once whole a year between attacks that drove her to go to ground for a week. She’d always managed to hold it off when there was work scheduled, but this time it had been driven away by the man now browsing through the fabric dyeing section. Future retribution worried her somewhat, but she did her best not to contemplate the problem.
She and this man had bared their hearts to one another. They’d spoken of their pasts, the cracks in his marriage—only visible in hindsight. Her failure with Russell. It was as if the revelation of her childhood had taken down the last of the walls between them.
The one thing they carefully didn’t discuss was the future. They curled up each night as if it might be their last together, and woke with a shared look of surprise and wonder.
This was as close as they’d come, his showing her something he knew she would love, this beautiful fashion collection just begging to be studied and enjoyed over time. She wondered if he was conscious of it, that he was trying to find reasons for her to stay in Seattle even if there was no possible way for it to work without destroying her career.
It was an eloquent statement and she would gladly repay him for the effort by delivering every single thing she had whispered into his ear.
But they both knew it was impossible.
About that there could never be any words.
Chapter 13
Angelo’s two restaurants were open over the weekend and closed Mondays and Tuesdays, so everyone had shifted their schedules to match. Jo managed the Pike Place Market on that schedule. Russell and Cassidy were freelancers so they were always busy, but were more likely to take time off on Monday and Tuesday.
Perrin was caught in between, with the kids in school and her husband as the stage manager for Emerald City Opera. So, she worked Monday through Friday, but the shop ran Wednesday through Sunday.
When Melanie arrived on Monday morning, the front door on Second Avenue was locked. But she spotted the light in the back of the darkened shop. She went around to the alley door, picking her way around a couple of city-ugly dumpsters to tap on the back door, though the alley itself was open and totally harmless.
Perrin let her in. No seamstresses today, so apparently they too were working the Wednesday through Sunday schedule. The shop was quiet and peaceful, but Perrin was still a whorl of activity with a half dozen projects spread about.
“Tomorrow is Tuesday, you know,” Perrin stated as if that explained something.
“Which means what?”
“It means that you and Josh are coming to dinner. We all go to Maria and Hogan’s every Tuesday.”
Melanie blinked. It was no longer a shock that she was included, but still a pleasant surprise. “What do we bring?”
“Oh, first timers just show up.”
She reminded herself to talk to Joshua. Melanie didn’t like the idea of being a “first timer,” of being somehow different from the others. They’d think up something appropriate.
“They’re also probably going sailing tomorrow.”
“That’s so not going to happen,” sailing was not a Melanie sport. Not even a little. She recalled touring Russell’s boat on that wonderful-horrible Valentine’s Day that had been the end of their relationship as lovers. She felt slightly nauseous just remembering the oil swirl of water across the bilge exposed through the missing floorboard.
Perrin laughed, “Yeah, our first trip didn’t work out so well either.” By Perrin’s grimace it must have been something spectacular. “I almost lost Bill and we both almost lost Jaspar. The boys still go out with Russell, but Tamara and I almost never go with.”
They chatted a while, talked business for a bit. But something was bothering Perrin. She was holding back, which wasn’t like her. Neither was she working on a design or a construction while she talked.
Melanie tried prying it out of her without success, so finally she just asked.
“Well, you’ve been so kind to me, I hate to ask. But Russell said I should.”
“Perrin, spill it or I’ll force you to make me a dress out of that very expensive fabric you had the other day.”
Perrin’s eyes slid aside for a moment, but her smile increased rather than diminishing. “Not yet,” but declined to explain that comment when Melanie pushed.
“The thing is,” Perrin went to a clothing rack in the corner and fussed with a line of garment bags. “I answered the phone yesterday. I really shouldn’t do that, but Raquel was busy with a customer and I happened to be in the shop with Tammy and… Well, I…”
Melanie waited her out until Perrin spilled it all forth in a single breath. “It was Fashion Alive magazine. Not that editor; the ad department. They had a last minute cancellation—after they were already in layout—so they have to fill the ad space. The editor told them, I have no idea why, that I could fill it on short notice. They’re giving it to me gratis if I can send the images by tomorrow.”
“Are you kidding, Perrin? That’s great! They’re on the verge of challenging Marie Claire. A third-page ad is almost ten thousand dollars. Gratis is enormous.”
Perrin’s nerves were wilder than usual. She began folding and refolding a piece of blue corduroy that must be for one of Tamara’s projects; the blue had pop, it was a thoughtful selection. Melanie grabbed Perrin’s hands to still them and sat down on a stool. That forced Perrin to come to rest opposite her.
“It’s a game changer, isn’t it, Melanie? You told me one was coming, but it’s too soon. I’m not ready.”
“Yes,” Melanie had to acknowledge, “stepping into Fashion Alive is a game changer. Even a small ad will have a real impact on your business. But this is really too important an opportunity to miss. You’re far more ready than I thought you were at the beginning of the week. I’ll commit to staying at least another week so that I can show you how
to tweak the plan to make it work. You’ll have to bring on more people. I already talked to the owner of the shop next door. He said he’d love to rent the back room, it’s empty right now. So you could just punch a door right there,” Melanie pointed at the wall, “and create a sewing room pretty easily.”
“Okay, I kinda hoped you’d say that it made sense, but that isn’t the favor I wanted to ask.”
Melanie kept a tight hold on both of Perrin’s hands as she could still feel Perrin’s nerves humming.
“Russell is willing to take the pictures for me, but would you be my model? I can’t pay very much, but you’d be so perfect for these designs and it really freaks Cassidy and Jo when I make them pose and—”
Melanie cut her off. “Yes.”
“Really?”
“No, I said that just to get you to calm down,” Melanie laughed at the abrupt disappointment that flashed onto her friend’s features. “Of course I will, Perrin. I love your designs. They always make me look so at the edge of new ideas. I’d be thrilled to pose for you.”
“Wow! Uh, how much do you—”
“How about that dress I mentioned?”
Perrin’s smile was electric. “Well, that might be cheating, but it’s a deal.” She didn’t explain her enigmatic comment.
“It’s a deal!” Melanie and Perrin spoke in unison and together shook their still-clasped hands up and down.
“Two other things I should probably mention.”
“What are they?” Melanie was pleased. It would be fun to do a shoot, even a little one.
“First, Russell rented my old apartment upstairs as a studio and he said to call him as soon as I found you. I should have called you earlier. I was trying to get up the nerve when you came by. He wants to do it right away.”
Melanie took a deep breath and checked in with herself about modeling for Russell. She was feeling wonderful, much of which was Joshua’s doing. And it would be great to work with Russell again. He always found a way to make her look so alluring. Even if it was just a third-page ad, the discards would create some fresh material for her website.
Where Dreams Are Written Page 15
