Ingenue (13 page)

Then he lifted his head and pierced her with cold, dark eyes. It was strange, Gloria thought, how the same eyes she looked into so lovingly could at times be so hurtful.

“I didn’t know you thought you were making some high-and-mighty sacrifice for me,” Jerome said. “I don’t need your charity, all right? I don’t need your accusations. You think I love this life any more than you do?”

Gloria blinked. “Of course I know you don’t
love
it, but—”

“But what? You think the poor black boy likes this because he’s used to it?”

She paled, suddenly lost for words. “No, Jerome, that’s not what I—”

He put his hand up to stop her. “Save it. You are not the only one who had to leave Chicago. You are not the only person all of this happened to. I’ve been fighting my whole life for what I want. You do it for a few months and think you deserve some kind of medal.” He didn’t look angry anymore, just hurt. “I thought us being together made all this worth it. I guess you don’t feel the same way.”

He stalked into the bedroom.

Gloria sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs, breathing hard.

Jerome was right—he
had
spent his life fighting. He’d fought his father’s disapproval of his career choice, fought to stay alive among the gangsters who ran the clubs. Fought through the grief at the death of his mother—the person who’d taught him to play piano in the first place. Fought discrimination every single day of his life from the people who thought they knew what he was because of the color of his skin.

Gloria had never gone through anything remotely like that.

She looked up in surprise as Jerome walked back into the kitchen. He’d changed into a blue shirt and gray trousers. He wore a newsboy cap and held his beat-up briefcase in one hand. In the other hand, he had a small velvet box.

He held the black box out to Gloria. “Here. Maybe you can pawn this for some money.”

Gloria stood still and stared at him in wide-eyed confusion. “What …?”

“It’s your engagement ring,” Jerome said. “I bought it with the advance from the Opera House.
That’s
why I wanted to see Ethel Waters at the Cotton Club. They want to have the same sort of thing at the Opera House and they want me to accompany you.” He walked over to the piano and set the velvet box on top.

He straightened his cap and picked up his briefcase. “I’ll see you at rehearsal. Take some time to think about what you really want, and then we’ll decide what to do.”

He opened the door and walked out, leaving her alone.

After a few shocked moments, she went over to the piano and picked up the small box. She opened it and stared at the simple ring inside: an unadorned gold band with a tiny diamond.

She’d given his name to Spark only a few days before, with express instructions
not
to let Jerome know that she had gotten him the job. What sacrifices had Jerome made so that she could have this beautiful ring?

She was tempted to slip it on, to see what it would look like on her finger, against her skin. It was the moment she’d been waiting for, uncertain it would ever even happen.

Yet here was the ring.

And Jerome was gone.

LORRAINE

“I think that spot is clean, Raine,” Spark said with a smirk.

Lorraine looked up from the bar, startled, and put down the rag. She’d been staring at Hank’s backside and wiping down the bar for a good five minutes. “It is now.”

The last couple of the evening had left an hour earlier—a tired-looking flapper on the arm of an overweight but rich-looking man, stray feathers from the girl’s headdress falling in her wake.

Lorraine had stayed to help Hank close the club. She wiped down the bar while he washed and stacked the night’s glasses, hosed down and scrubbed the rubber floor mats, and helped the busboys mop the barroom floor. Hank was new, after all, and had never closed before. He might not know what to do and might need to ask Lorraine a question.

And from this vantage point, Lorraine had an excellent view of Hank’s sculpted muscles tensing as he pushed the mop. There wasn’t an ounce of flab anywhere on the man. He’d stripped off the blazer he’d been wearing, and now he was working in a white shirt and suspendered trousers. Hot sauce! Lorraine felt like making a mess more often just so she could watch him clean it up.

She tore her eyes away to glare at Spark. “Go do something useful.”

Spark pointed at Hank and said, “Listen, I can finish up here. Why don’t you go enjoy the rest of the morning with the big six over there?”

Lorraine was suspicious. Spark had never done anything genuinely nice for her. “Are you sure?”

“Go on—I just had a cup of coffee so I’ll be awake for a while yet. You look about ready for bed. Maybe Hank can help you out with that.” Spark winked clumsily. “Get it?”

“Spark, you are an absolute toad,” Lorraine said, but then caught herself smiling.

“Boys!” Spark called to the men, who were wringing out the mops and setting them back in the buckets. “Floor looks good, you can all call it a night!”

A few of the men shouted out goodbyes and walked to the storage room to get their things. Lorraine was delighted when Hank hung back from the others.

“Hi, Lorraine,” he said. His dark hair had been fixed with pomade at the start of the night, but now it was disordered in the sexiest possible way. A bead of sweat rolled down his golden neck and under his collar, making Lorraine want to rip the shirt right off him.

“Will you be here awhile yet?” he asked.

“Actually, I’m all done. I just have to get my purse from the office.”

“Great!” Hank replied. “I’ll grab my hat and meet you out front.”

Lorraine nodded mutely. It made sense that she and Hank would walk home together, considering they lived in the same building. But he wouldn’t have looked so happy about it unless he was interested in her, too, right?

In the office, she checked her reflection in the mirror over the desk. She wiped her smudged eye makeup until the smudges looked sort of intentional. At least her dress still looked amazing. Hank’s sudden entrance into her life had inspired several purchases of some of Paris’s latest fashions. This dress had sweet little butterfly sleeves and was made of sheer silk velvet with a floral pattern. A cloth belt was cinched with a rhinestone buckle at the back. She freshened her lipstick—a delicate pink to match her ensemble.

Why wouldn’t he be interested in her? She was the cat’s pajamas! Nay, the cat’s negligee!

Hank looked around at the empty streets and darkened windows as they walked. “This is one of the things I officially love about New York. You’re free to roam the sidewalks at any time of day or night. Back in Los Angeles, I had to take the trolley whenever I wanted to go somewhere.”

Lorraine winced as her heels chafed her feet. A trolley sounded pretty good to her right about now.

He casually slung an arm over her shoulders. “Nice, eh? No one else around, no cars or wagons rolling by—it’s like the city belongs to us alone.”

Between his arm around her and his use of the word
us
, Lorraine was having trouble not shouting “I love you, too!” into the night air.

She looked up at the sky. The sun wouldn’t come up for another hour or two, but it wasn’t pitch-black out—the dark was a deep purple. Aside from their footsteps on the pavement, the street was silent. When she walked home alone, the early morning had always seemed desperately lonely. But with Hank along, this early-morning twilight time seemed exhilarating and full of possibility, as if they could do whatever they wanted and no one would be around to stop them.

“It is kind of nice,” she replied at last.

When they reached a subway station on Broadway, Hank stopped. “I’m not tired,” he proclaimed, a warm smile stretching out across his face. “Are you?”

Honestly? It had been a busy night and she’d barely had five minutes to rest her aching feet. But Hank’s copper-brown eyes were like a stiff shot of coffee. This beautiful man didn’t want to waste his morning sleeping—he wanted to spend it with her.

“I’m completely awake,” she replied.

“Good,” he said. “Then I say we go up to Central Park and go out on the lagoon. Afterward, we can get breakfast at this delicatessen my friend Eddie always raves about.”

“The boats will be locked up for the night, Hank.”

“Passion always finds a way,” he said.

Hank was such a risk-taker. How exciting! “You really think so?”

He caught her hand and winked, pulling her down the stairs to the subway platform. “I think
you
, Miss Dyer, can do anything you put your mind to.”

Lorraine stared at the tall chain-link fence around the boathouse and the lagoon. The gate was chained and padlocked. “This may be a problem.”

Lorraine hadn’t really loved running through Central Park toward the lagoon in her expensive dress. For one thing, she wasn’t the sort of girl who
ran
. Running was for people who didn’t mind sweating. And for another thing, she’d had to shuck off her heels and run in her stocking feet, and she didn’t even want to imagine what wet things she’d stepped in. But after a few minutes of galloping through the soft darkness hand in hand with Hank, she forgot to be bothered. For the first time in months, she was
having fun
.

Hank shrugged, pulling off his derby and flinging it over the fence. “See? That doesn’t look so hard.” He wound his fingers into the chain-link and began to climb. Once he reached the top, he swung over and landed gracefully on his feet.

He looked at Lorraine through the mesh. “Are you coming?”

The moment of truth.

She tossed her purse over. Then she took a deep breath, slipped on her shoes—no way was she leaving them here; they cost a week’s wages—and wedged a toe into the chain-link. Then the other foot, and up a little farther.

This wasn’t so bad! It was like climbing the trellis outside her window when she was thirteen and her mother wouldn’t let her go see Terrell Spitznagle, even though Lorraine had explained that she was in love with him. Though come to think of it, Terrell was now fat and balding and about as interesting as a clump of moss on a rock, so maybe her mother had been on to something.

“Come on, slowpoke!” Hank called. “I’d like to make it onto the water before the sun comes up!”

“Excuse me,
you
are not wearing heels,” she replied through gritted teeth.

“True, I left those at home tonight,” Hank said, laughing.

Lorraine had reached the top. It was a delicate maneuver, swinging a leg over a fence in a dress. A boy wore pants, sure—that was
easy
. But for a girl, there were issues of modesty as well the whole impracticality of rolling a skirt up far beyond the knee.

“Umm,” she said, and dropped her leg over the other side, her weight pulling her over, and then it was too late: The hem of her dress was caught on a loose bit of metal.

“Hank!” she yelled, trying not to panic. “I can’t get my dress off!”

“The best thing you can do is jump,” he said, looking up at her. “I’ll catch you.”

Ugh
. She anchored her feet in the fence, then sprang away and fell. She grimaced at the distinct sound of fabric ripping.
Oh no!
Her beautiful lilac Lucien Lelong was ruined.

But then she was in Hank’s arms. He’d caught her effortlessly.

He smiled as he looked at her. “See? That wasn’t so bad.”

She couldn’t help it—she burst into laughter. “Not so bad? I could’ve broken my neck! And I ruined my dress.”

He inspected the damage as he sat her on the ground. Half the hem of the dress had ripped off, exposing the bottom of her white slip. The torn fabric hung limp against her calf.

Hank picked up the frayed edge. As he reached for it, his fingers grazed her leg—they were so warm, warmer than she’d expected, and yet they made her shiver with anticipation. It had been so long since a man had touched her. Since anyone had touched her, really. Even her mother hadn’t hugged her when she’d left town.

Hank toyed for a moment with the fabric he held, then dropped it, instead of ripping it further and ravishing Lorraine against a tree as she’d hoped. His thin but delicious lips formed a playful grin. “I think it looks better this way. You’ll start a new fashion trend for sure.” He handed over her purse.

Lorraine was sad about the dress, but a few moments in Hank’s arms had made it seem less important. “It’s just a dress, right?” she said, and hoped he didn’t hear the quaver in her voice.

She had been to Central Park on visits to New York with her parents, but she’d never seen the park like
this
. Now that they were over the fence, she could see the moonlight shining off the lagoon. From here it was easy to see the starry sky, framed by the bushy tree branches along the water. She stared up in wonder. “So pretty,” she whispered.

“This way,” Hank said, already heading off to the old wooden boathouse. There they ran into another padlock, on the two front doors. Hank began rummaging around in his trouser pockets. “Don’t worry, I can take care of this.”

“Sure you can, Houdini.” Lorraine swatted mosquitoes away from her bare arms.

Hank turned away, and she heard clicking noises. A few moments later, the padlock opened and he dropped it to the ground.

Lorraine stared at the piece of metal in his hand. “Why were you carrying that lock pick?”

He tipped his hat. “Why? In case a beautiful young lady needs help breaking into a boathouse for some late-night rowing.”

Lorraine loved it when a man came prepared. And had he just called her beautiful? This was swiftly becoming the best date she had ever been on, and the date hadn’t even technically started yet!

Hank dragged open the double doors, which creaked like a dying cat in the silent night.

He bowed his head and gestured to the open doorway. “After you.”

Lorraine couldn’t see much in the inky dark of the boathouse, though her eyes adjusted quickly to the light peeking in through the slatted wooden walls. Flimsy-looking rowboats rested in the water. Everything smelled like mildew. No wonder she’d never come for a boat ride. This was disgusting.

Hank tugged a rope and the doors onto the lagoon swung open. He plucked two oars off the wall and hopped inside one of the boats. As he untied it from its moorings, he said, “You going to stand there all night? Or are you coming along?”