The Dirty Secret (10 page)

Killian thought back through the long list of rejections, to the girls who had let him down easy. “It’s not just the work thing,” he said. “It’s. Well. I’m. I might be seeing someone.”

Seeing, smelling, tasting, fucking—

“Oh!” Star leaned back in the booth. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He rubbed his hands down his thighs, unable to look at her. “It’s a new thing.”

“Oh my god! You’re blushing!”

Killian dragged his fingers through his hair, glancing at the door. He’d told the guys to come fifteen minutes late, to give him a chance to smooth things out with the marketing intern.

The hostess set their drinks down, taking great care with the coasters.

“Thank you,” Star said, and the girl bobbed her head, hands clasped together.

“Did she just
curtsy
to you?” He stared at the girl’s back as she walked away.

“Shut up. Don’t change the subject. Tell me about this girl.”

“She’s an artist.” He opened the menu, seeing not the appetizer list, but the girl in the bathroom mirror, her perfect ass against his groin, her orange bra pushed under her tits, shoving them impossibly high, crying
now,
now,
now
in time with his thrusts. Thank fuck for restaurant tables because he was growing hard. Again.

“Holy crap! You’re really into her.” When he shrugged, she gave him a condescending look worthy of Mara Bjorn, and turned his menu right side up. “How did you meet?”

“A mutual friend,” he said.

“You guys kiss and make up yet?” Bengt slid into the booth next to Star.

“I heard you have a mean right hook, girl,” Deb said, holding her hand up for a high five.

“You
told
everybody?” she wailed.

“She’s left-handed,” Killian told Deb.

“Ugh!” Star swallowed half her wine. “I hate you.” Then she took her revenge. “Killian has a girlfriend.”

“Cool,” Seth said. “What’s she like?”

“Let me guess,” Deb said. “Artsy, totally femme, bit of a loner and fucks like a rabbit in springtime.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.” Killian glared at her. Was she? Did he want her to be? “I just barely met her.”

A lifetime ago he watched Vessa walk down the sidewalk, damning a doorbell that didn’t ring. And now he knew what her mouth felt like on his cock and that she liked her clit pressed when she came.

“How long have you been dating?” Starla asked.

“Er...” He tried to picture her outside the house, eating in a restaurant, dancing in a club with all that hidden energy allowed free. A server sidled up to the table and took the latecomers’ drink orders, saving him from answering.

Bengt asked, “So when do we get to meet this mystery chick?”

“
You
don’t,” Killian said.

“Why not?” Bengt was genuinely taken aback. Killian and Deb shared a glance and both shook their heads.

“Because you’re a poacher,” Seth said.

“How many times do I have to say I’m sorry, man? And you wound up with her sister, anyway. I am not a poacher.”

“New Year’s Eve, two years ago,” Killian said.

“You passed out. All bets are off if you pass out on New Year’s Eve.” Bengt took his beer from the waitress before she could set it on the table, and clinked glasses with Star when the others wouldn’t toast him. “Et tu, Debbie?”

“Erica.” Deb didn’t even look up from her phone as she thumbed over it.

“Oh. Well.” He grimaced into his beer. “I’m not sure she was as bi as you thought.”

“She liked girls just fine until you stuck your hairy ass into it, Blondie.”

Killian’s phone buzzed with a text: You’re screwing your decorator.

Seth and Bengt argued about the ethics of swapping office Christmas party dates, while Star listened to them with her mouth ajar. Killian quietly asked Deb, “How did you know?”

“I’ve seen the house,” she said, under the voices of the others. “She’s got a filthy mind covered in powdered sugar, doesn’t she? And you’ve got her scent all over you, which means a nooner, and you wouldn’t take a girl you actually liked back to Dillweed’s couch.” She wrinkled her nose in Bengt’s direction. “I’m guessing she’s a brunette, but she might dye it pink.”

Killian gave Deb as dirty a look as he could manage. He muttered, “Violet,” though Vessa’s hair was never a single color, with its lavender and blue streaks in sable that flickered with the light when she turned her head.

“What’s so funny?” Starla asked Deb.

“You know why architects make bad dates?” Deb asked. “They’re forever making plans that never get realized, talk endlessly about their erections and only do it with models.”

Bengt asked Starla, “You know why plumbers make the best drug dealers?”

When she shook her head, Deb said, “Because we always fill joints with lots of dope and don’t hesitate to show off our crack.”

“If you guys start with the Jewish carpenter jokes I’m out of here,” Seth said.

The waitress took their orders. Star roped the others into going to a brewery with live music after they ate. When they left, Killian drove back to the house. Vessa wasn’t there.

The next day he left yet another job ticket to get the squeaky floor joisted, and then called landscapers. Two laughed aloud before giving their regrets when he named the date. One suggested he talk to an outdoor wedding planner.

He hung up the phone to find Bengt leaning over the cubicle wall, his face inches away. “Wanna shoot some hoops tonight, Killer?”

“If you don’t mind getting your ass beat.” He shouldn’t take the time, but he was too frustrated to be productive, stressed about the creaking floor and at a complete loss with his house’s exterior. Thrashing Bengt on a basketball court would feel good—the bastard’s house was already finished, the landscaping perfect.

They left early, going home to change out of work clothes before driving to the north end park in Killian’s pickup. Two women were playing Horse, with a towel-wrapped six-pack of hard apple cider open on the bench. They were friendly and receptive, and attractive in an athletic, summer-tan kind of way. Bengt chatted them into a game of two-on-two.

“Girls against guys?” the taller girl asked.

Bengt threw her the ball at the half-court line. After less than ten minutes of play, they’d lost by seventeen points. Killian caught the ball after the blond girl’s final reverse layup. He made a T with his hands.

“Time out,” he gasped. “Yield. Uncle.” He tossed Bengt the basketball. “We’ve been had, dude.”

“Fuck,” Bengt said, panting. “I should have guessed. You’re both so tall. You two play in college?”

“I did.” The taller girl jerked her thumb at the other girl. “She coaches semi-pro. You guys aren’t bad.” She had a nice smile. “You played in high school, didn’t you?” she asked Killian.

Killian nodded. Varsity, all four years, but he didn’t say so. “There’s no way we can keep up with you,” he told her. “We gotta switch out or something.”

“Brains versus Blonds?” She winked at him.

“Fuck you,” her platinum-haired friend said. “Bring it.”

Killian and his new teammate won by twelve, though he had to work hard to stay with her pace. By the end of the game Bengt was swearing in English, French, Swedish and Italian.

“Switch with me,” he told Killian. He wiped his sweaty face with his T-shirt. “You guys have at least twelve inches on us.”

“Excuses, excuses,” Killian’s partner said. She held up her palm for him to slap, and then traded places with the shorter girl. The pairs were more balanced this time, and they trailed Bengt and the brunette by two points the whole next game, catching up to tie at nineteen even. The tall dark-haired girl played a physical defense, her hand on his torso, her hip bumping his. Eventually Killian managed to steal the ball from Bengt and dodged away to land a three-point shot, winning the game.

“Ooh, you long-armed bastard,” Bengt yelled. “One more?”

Killian shook his head, flopping down on the bench to catch his breath. The girls offered them each a cider. Bengt took one and flicked the cap off the green bottle.

Killian declined. “I need to head out,” he said.

The women protested.

“You got plans?” Bengt asked.

“Yeah, my standing date with an AutoCAD file,” he said.

“Sorry, ladies,” Bengt said. “Killer is married to his work. And he’s my ride.”

“We can take you home,” the shorter girl said. The brunette smirked. Bengt’s grin grew wide as the ambiguity of the sentence was left unresolved—whose
home
and how many girls
we
implied. Killian high-fived both girls in farewell, murmuring to Bengt that he would make himself scarce.

“You sure?” Bengt asked, grabbing his phone and his keys from the passenger seat of the pickup. “I think she’s interested.”

The taller girl was still watching him. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

Bengt chuckled. “You’re really into her, aren’t you? This girl you won’t let us meet.”

Killian got in his pickup without answering. He turned on the A/C as he drove away, escaping the sweat, the girls’ heated glances and the air, heavy with curiosity and innuendo. The icy blast from the vents chilled his skin to goose bumps, leaving him grubby, drained and clammy. He drove to the house but she wasn’t there.

He stood in the hallway, at the point where the doorways into the rooms could be seen, the late summer sun casting long shadows through the front windows. All her painted walls looked back at him, glowing with their complicated moods, drawing him in, just like Vessa herself.

Would she go on a date with him? Did she even exist, away from his house, or was she some kind of mythical creature who materialized just for him? He shook his head at his own lunacy and walked upstairs, grimacing in the dark as the floorboards squealed. He felt along the wall of the bathroom and flicked the light switch.

The orange and hot pink walls were hung with lengths of rough canvas covered with broad loose strokes, an impressionist’s landscape painted with a house brush. On top was a collage of prints and postcards, snippets of sketches, all art gags like the shower curtain. Spoofs that poked fun at every masterpiece in history, from the cave paintings at Lascaux—the bulls having their way with each other—to a surfer riding Hokusai’s
Great Wave
. Some he understood, like Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
with the Batman signal in the swirling sky, but he had no idea why she’d painted
R. Mutt
on the side of the commode.

The whole effect was a jester’s motley, pastiche at every turn, the cleverness tainted with sarcasm, over the top with mockery. Killian left, pulling the door closed on the chaos and the dark humor, unsettled.

Bengt was right, he was really into her. And something was wrong.

Chapter Ten

Undressing Room

Vessa pulled her sweater tighter around her body, berating herself again for being naive—she’d thought she could just stay hidden until she could afford her own choices—but she’d forgotten how tiny Vermont was. The entire city of Burlington was smaller than her neighborhood in L.A.

Her laundry spun around and around in the industrial washing machines Manny kept in the basement of Brass and Bones. They were old avocado-colored steel with glass doors and slots for quarters, and they made the air in the cellar heavy and hot, but her teeth still chattered.

She watched her clothes splash back and forth in the washer, like a porthole in a stormy sea. The dryer tumbled clockwise, the same frenetic spin as the thoughts in her brain, always the same image: Starla and Killian in profile, him reaching across the table to touch her hand.

She’d imagined many scenarios of finally meeting her sister for the first time. Rescuing the entire family from hostages, in a VIP box at her own sold-out Broadway debut, showing up in an identical dress to their father’s White House inauguration. Her favorite was bailing Starla out of jail. But coming face-to-face with her while wearing a Pizza Piazza apron, in front of the guy she was having a fling with? That had never occurred to her.

A new fantasy lurked in the dark shadows of the cellar, one that involved the pulling of perfect strawberry-blond hair and fancy jewelry scattered on the floor.

Vessa’s phone rang four times—twice on Friday and twice Sunday morning. Each unanswered call was punctuated by the buzz of voice mail.

One message was from a number she knew by heart.

“Sweetheart, sorry I missed your call.” Her father’s words were hushed, like he was making an illicit call in a library—or his own living room. “You sound kind of low, honey. You want to make a day trip up to Montreal next month? There’s a Picasso exhibit at the fine arts museum. Give me a call sometime.”

The second message was from a deep voice with a rasp at the bottom and a Southern twang. Her response was immediate and visceral, a wave of arousal as if he had stroked her from lips to breasts to thighs, just by saying her name. “Vessa, this is Killian Fitzroy. It’s not an emergency, but the firm’s accounts manager needs the receipts from the credit card purchases. If you have the time to stop by, I’m planning to be at the house tonight. If you can’t, then just drop them off whenever it’s convenient.” There was a long pause. “The upstairs bathroom is pretty intense. You’ll have to explain the jokes to me. Okay. Bye.”

The third was from another familiar Vermont number. Nana’s voice was light as a bird’s chirp. “Hiya, Vess. Your dad told us you were here, and we can’t wait to see you. Come see us anytime. Except Tuesday, Thursday and Friday—your grampa has his physical therapy in the morning and he gets tired. And not this Monday, that’s my garden club. You know the way!”

The last was brief. “Hey, it’s me. Killian. A bunch of boxes were delivered today. Looks like kitchen cabinet doors. Just thought you might want to know. I haven’t seen you in a while, hope everything is okay.”

Vessa didn’t call him back, afraid she would blurt out questions—How did he know the redhead in the restaurant booth? And how
well
did he know her? But there was no way of asking that wouldn’t raise more questions, and she wasn’t ready to confess everything to a man she’d known barely a month, no matter how handsome he was, or how sweetly he’d kissed her most sensitive places.

She looked online, but Starla had less of a social media presence than even Vessa did, aside from campaign pictures with their father.

On Monday morning she took a shower, then dressed in a heavy hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and gathered up the receipts from her purchases for the house. The drive to the new development took eons and was over in an instant, but Killian’s pickup wasn’t parked in front. She left an envelope with his name on it on the mantel, stacked the shipping boxes in the garage and watered the trailing heart vine plant.

She paced the interior of the house, possessive of the rooms, threatened by another presence, though there was no evidence of anyone else. Upstairs in the bathroom, stuck to the mirror above the sink, was a note with perfect capital letters:

V—THIS ROOM SEEMS ANGRY. ARE YOU OK?—K

Was she?

She stared at herself in the mirror, a little girl in her mother’s dress-up clothes, dark eye shadow, green and brown and ochre, camouflage colors. Was she angry? Only at herself, for being so foolish to assume Starla wouldn’t be in Burlington anymore. Had Killian told her who was decorating his house? Starla’s mother didn’t know. Her phone still worked, her car hadn’t been repossessed and no angry calls had come from the condo manager in L.A. Vessa skulked in the farthest corner, measuring the most remote room, moving quietly, like she was protecting the walls from predators.

Her parking space was still empty when she got back to her apartment, and Manny’s shop was still dark. She walked up the street, peering at restaurant storefronts. A few were open. A trendy crepe place that she didn’t go inside, a seedy breakfast diner that wasn’t hiring—”come back at the start of the semester, maybe”—and a dusty teashop that had a Servers Needed! sign in the window. She pushed the door open and was hit by the scent of smoke and sugar, similar to Donna Edith’s office, but stronger. The baristas were young, harried, and the tip jar by the register only had a thin layer of coins. Vessa ordered the brew-of-the-day to go, and sipped it as she walked up Church Street.

One café had a discreet Now Hiring plaque in the window. It was a sleek place with an expensive menu in a chrome frame. She could imagine her father’s wife sitting there, drinking coffee from a tiny cup. Vessa walked past, unable to process the thought of serving her stepmother anything. That was not her fairy tale.

Farther down, indie band posters papered the way around to an alley with a bar. A cardboard sign was stuck to the door, HeLP WaNTed scrawled in marker. A man with a sloppy stomach and a huge beard swept trash from the doorway. Vessa couldn’t picture Starla or her mother anywhere near the place.

She caught the man’s eye and pointed to the sign. He pulled his headphones from his ears. “Are you in charge of hiring?”

He shook his head. “I need a dishwasher,” he said. “Preferably one who can back up security on Saturday night. I’ll be hiring servers when school starts, if you want to check with me then.”

She thanked him and headed toward her apartment, stopping in front of the downtown arts building, the last place on her job search list. The marquee was the classic fifties box of lights and neon over the street.

The lobby was painted in velvet rope red, with a black ceiling and fake stage can lamps with colored bulbs instead of gels. One wall held show posters arranged in chronological order, decades of seasons: sixties bubble font swirls through nineties minimalist silhouettes, up to current Photoshop collages advertising the new season.

On the other side was the ubiquitous mugshot wall of high-dollar donors. In the center, a color portrait hung in a gold frame. The Jamison family beamed from the canvas, a teenage Starla, her father and his wife. The lieutenant governor’s youngest daughter was, of course, not in the family portrait.

A woman sat in the box office, murmuring platitudes into the phone. Vessa followed a line of show pictures down a hall, mostly classic plays, a few avant-garde productions and several children’s musicals. One was a production of
Annie
, with Starla in the lead. She looked about ten years old, with red hair in curls and false eyelashes, wearing a tattered dress, beaming in the spotlight.

A door with a plaque was partially open, giving a glimpse of an empty room with a long table. On the wall outside were photos of the Board of Directors. Maxwell Jamison’s wife Celeste smiled warmly from the topmost picture, President etched into the frame.

Vessa turned away, pulling her hood up over her head. The woman apologized again to the customer for the online ticket service. She caught Vessa’s eye and shoved a pen and a sticky-note pad under the glass partition, and mimed writing with the hand not holding the phone. Vessa shook her head and took a season brochure as she walked out the door. The breeze tugged at her hood as she walked up Church Street.

The Closed sign in the window of Brass and Bones had been flipped to Open. Manny elbowed the door open, carrying a Sale sign, a café table stand and a jack-in-the-box.
“Hola, chica!”

Vessa grabbed the door for him.

“A man came looking for you,” the store owner said, arranging a display on the sidewalk.

The tea of the day turned cold in her stomach. “What did he want?”

“He asked if you’d been around recently.”

“What did you tell him?” She’d only told her father where she lived, and Donna Edith. The Pizza Piazza owner would know from tax withholding forms.

“I said you hadn’t been in the store since you bought me out of mirrors. Looked like he was going to jump out of his skin when I told him that.” He beckoned her inside, and carried a box of dusty Dia de los Muertos masks to a table in the back.

“Did he tell you his name?” Vessa asked.

“Did he need to?”

She scowled. “What did he look like?”

Manuel held up a skeleton mask, smiling teeth and anxious eyes topped with a black fright wig. “This guy, only worse.”

“What was wrong with him?”

“He the one you used to wear dresses for? Made your neck look like you’d been attacked by a vampire?” He hung the mask at a jaunty angle on the rollers of an ancient wringer washer. “And now he’s not anymore?” When she didn’t answer, he gave her a long look. “That’s what’s wrong with him.”

Vessa ignored his eyes and pulled another mask from the box, wiping a cobweb from the grinning donkey’s mouth.

Killian had come looking for her. He could have seen the shop name on a receipt, on the credit card bill, a price tag she’d forgotten to pull, but did he know she lived here? He wasn’t the type to show up at her door at all hours of the night, demanding she answer his questions. Was he?

Two years ago she’d run from a boy who had done exactly that.

Brass and Bones was her sanctuary, her home. She belonged there, as eclectic as the items in the showroom, with her Los Angeles hair, New Orleans makeup and South Brooklyn clothes. And she was tired of moving. She was tired of bearing the responsibility of other people’s secrets. Most of all, she was tired of relationships that weren’t allowed to grow beyond the final curtain.

She just had to stay hidden in this tiny town until she could afford to kiss and tell.

“Manny, do you need anybody? Like even just a couple days a week? Maybe some help getting all this warehouse stock on the floor? And your walls need paint badly.”

“What about your job at the pizza place?”

“That didn’t work out so well.”

“You lost a job after only a month? That doesn’t look so good to a future employer. Or a landlord.”

Vessa glared at the bony mask with the messy hair.

“Ah,” Manny said. “I’m sorry,
chica
. But I need to sell goods more than I need someone to do my housekeeping.” The cowbell rattled on the front door, and he stepped out of the warehouse to greet the customer. Vessa peeked into the showroom. The woman was polished, with shiny riding boots and hair in a perfect smooth bob, and should have been in a room with high-gloss taupe walls like a fancy manicure. She picked up an old print with a large pink bird craning its neck upside down. She set it down, but turned back to look at it twice.

When the woman drifted into another section, Vessa grabbed her bag and her jacket, and slipped into the store, ducking into a nook filled with mason jars and antique wooden hangers. She casually wandered into another display area nearer the woman, and pulled her phone from the bottom of her bag.

“Hey, it’s me,” Vessa said, without dialing anyone. “Are you sure you saw that Audubon print at Brass and Bones? Because I’m here, and I don’t see anything with a flamingo on it.”

The woman moved closer, examining a rooster cookie jar. She glanced at Vessa and then back toward the print she’d hesitated on.

“Well, if I can’t find it, I’ll ask him if he sold it already. If he hasn’t, should I see if he’ll drop the price a bit?” Manny scowled at Vessa as she held her unconnected phone to her ear. “Or would that be rude? Okay, I won’t risk it.”

The glossy woman slid back to the other side of the store and tucked the flamingo print under her arm. Vessa meandered into another room, full of old quilts and curving metal benches shaped like butterflies and wood buckets with cranks for ice cream. The credit card machine ratcheted out a purchase, and the cowbell clattered on the door again.

Manny stood behind the register, his arms folded over his chest. “You come in Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Eleven to three.”

* * *

Killian rolled over and covered his head with his pillow, but the rhythmic thud of Bengt’s headboard hitting the wall reverberated inside the couch springs. The girls, whose names he didn’t remember—and likely Bengt had forgotten as well—had been competing for the most dramatic approach to orgasm for the past ten minutes.

His shoes were under the sofa, next to a dusty half-full fifth of bourbon left over from some party. He grabbed his laptop, his car keys and the bottle, and drove to the house. No lights were on. He wasn’t expecting them to be, but he prowled the rooms anyway, sniffing at the slight smell of fresh latex paint.

He found an envelope on the mantel, full of receipts, but nothing else seemed different. The walls were all the same, no new layers of color, no flat base coats waiting for glaze. The upstairs floor still squeaked, a vicious squeal of wood that echoed to the roof.

The second-floor bathroom had changed. She’d taken the collage off the wall, leaving behind just the funny shower curtain, the scallop shell without the goddess. Towels sat in fluffy piles, the same color as Aphrodite’s robe. The walls were still the same color.

On the mirror, under his note, was another, with messy corkscrew writing: