The Dirty Secret (3 page)

He took the seat between Deb, the firm’s master plumber, and Seth, the head carpenter on the new development.

Bengt poured beer from a pitcher into a glass and passed it to him. “Is Starla coming?” he asked.

“On her way,” Seth said.

Killian waited for the foam in his glass to settle and kneaded his neck, stiff from crouching in chairs too short for his frame. His phone rang with an alarm, a reminder for a deadline. He glared at it and reset it for an hour later.

Bengt raised an eyebrow. “Hot date?”

“Addendum bidding opens at midnight, and it’s still covered in red lines,” Killian said.

“No working during happy hour, dude.” Bengt emptied the pitcher into Seth’s pint. “Hey, how many carpenters does it take to change a lightbulb?”

The carpenter frowned. “Only one, but the contractor has to approve the job ticket before it goes into the queue?”

“Nope,” Deb said. “It’s a trick question. Only the architect can make blueprint changes.” She waved at the waitress, holding up the empty pitcher.

Killian asked, “So how many plumbers does it take to change a lightbulb?”

Seth smirked. “Three. One to come by when no one is home, one to show up with the wrong parts for the job, and one to replace a perfectly good faucet.”

Deb flipped him off as she chuckled.

“How many architects does it take to change a lightbulb?” Bengt asked.

“Only one,” Killian said. “He holds the light and the house spins around him.”

A low catcall rose from the table of guys next to them. Bengt waved as a young woman walked through the room. She wore corporate clothes and supermodel makeup, her light red hair coiled up in a severe bun. Every male eye in the bar followed her movement as she approached their table.

“Oh my god, I need a drink.” Starla dropped her jacket and purse in the empty chair at the table. “If the waitress comes by, I want a Cosmo. Or four.” She left in the direction of the restrooms.

“So how many marketing interns does it take to change a lightbulb?” Deb asked, watching her disappear.

“Depends on how short her skirt is,” Bengt said, tilting his chair for a better view of her legs as she walked away.

“That’s inappropriate,” Seth said.

“How much beer does it take until you get fun?” Deb asked him.

The handbag in the chair was made of polished leather and had chrome findings, the complete opposite of Vessa’s backpack, which was patched with stars and had words in French drawn onto the fabric. Killian drank his beer in big gulps, the way he’d swallowed his relief when she said she’d take the job, or at least start it. He wondered what she would do with the tiny washroom in the hall—the absolute smallest that builder’s code would allow. She hadn’t asked him for a budget and he didn’t care. He’d pay for it himself if it meant she got the job done by the opening.

“I love this song,” Star said, nudging his chair leg. “You want to shake off a bit of the work week?”

“Er. I have food coming,” he said.

She rolled her eyes at him and then leaned backward over Bengt’s lap, demanding he dance with her. As soon as they left the table, Killian caught their waitress and ordered a burger and fries.

“How does it all work with straight girls?” Deb asked. “She wants to sleep with you, a funny-looking bag of bones who is essentially homeless, rather than the Nordic bodybuilder heir to the throne.”

“She’s the lieutenant governor’s daughter,” Killian said. “She doesn’t need her fuck toys to have money, Deb. I doubt my student loans bother her.”

“So she’s rich, stacked, horny and into you, and you don’t want to tap that?”

“I’m not going to jeopardize my job with a work hookup,” he said, the same response he’d given Bengt when his friend had told him to “bang that like a brass gong.” He didn’t have time for a fling, much less a place to take a girl. And Starla still lived at home with her parents.

“Why would it? Nothing in the employee handbook that says you can’t,” Seth said. “You’re not her supervisor.”

“Things could get weird at the office,” he said, watching the dancers across the room. More couples had joined them. “I’ve got enough to deal with as it is.”

“I can’t believe you’re not going for it.” Deb poured from the new pitcher. “I’d love to just turn her over my knee and spank her until she couldn’t sit down for a week.”

Seth choked on his beer, and Killian swallowed half his pint to clear the images he didn’t want to think about—Star did have a nice ass—and shook his head.

“What?” Deb said. “I’m not her supervisor. She’d be into it, too. I bet she even has panties with days of the week on them.”

His plate came, heaped with fries, and after the food and another beer, Killian felt human again. The next time Starla waggled her fingers at him, he followed her to the dance floor, out of excuses when Bengt said, “Your turn, Killer.”

The song had a bump-and-grind bass, and she worked her hips and her ass as she moved, catching his eye when she shimmied. It was a rush, dancing with the best-looking girl in the room, the envy of every guy in the place. Usually Bengt got all the attention.

Starla touched his waist as she twirled around him, and when she moved close, eyes shut, his mind slipped back to yesterday and the girl with darker brows and no lipstick. He’d babbled something inane at her about being twins.

He couldn’t imagine two of her, either. There would be too much to look at, with her pretty curves and paint box hair. And those wide eyes, shining with all that glittery stuff as she said his house was clever, before she’d known it was his design. Upstairs, her dress had moved with her, swirling above her knees as she turned. She’d been so female, so perfect.

“Hello,” Starla said, sidling closer as the music changed. She turned, leaning back into him, riding his thigh, ass sliding. “I was wondering when you would notice me.”

She ran her hand down his hip, and Killian damned his cock, too dumb to realize his inebriated thoughts were of another girl. The music blared around him, and he caught Starla’s hand before it inched nearer his crotch, spinning her by the fingertips to keep her at a distance. When the song was over, he led her back to the table, ignoring Deb’s snort of laugher.

“That was fun,” Starla said, “but I’m getting a bit tipsy.”

“We should really go rescue Seth,” Bengt said, pointing. The builder was dancing with two women and a beer pitcher, and the pitcher was leading all three in a dance that deserved an accordion and suspenders.

“I could use a smoke,” Deb said.

The waitress brought them the check, and they shepherded Seth outside for some fresh air. He helped Bengt decipher the name and number a girl had written on his coaster, while Starla called a cab. Killian followed her outside to wait for it.

She leaned back against the streetlight, her eyes drifting to his mouth with invitation. He was tempted—it had been so long since he’d kissed a girl—but common sense won the brief battle with his two-over-the-legal-limit libido.

“Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Killian?” Starla asked.

“Because, as she put it, I was much more interested in building a future with Bergman than with her.” He chuckled. Two years and the beer had numbed the sting of getting dumped. “She wasn’t wrong.”

“What about that girl Bengt set you up with from the state highway project? Didn’t you go out with her?”

“Well, Bergman decided to submit plans six hours before I was supposed to meet her for dinner.” And when they rescheduled, a site tour had run three hours late. The woman hadn’t answered his pathetically apologetic voice mail. He’d felt like an asshole and hadn’t asked anyone else out since.

He waved at the approaching taxi. The driver was an older guy and seemed safe enough.

“Come with me,” Starla said, pulling on his tie. Killian opened the door for her. She puffed her bottom lip out in a dramatic pout, then laughed and got inside. He closed the door and tapped the top of the car.

“Man, you’re a fool,” Bengt said after the cab drove off. “What happens at happy hour stays at happy hour.”

“You need that tattooed on your ass in Latin.”

“Listen, I’m gonna stick around.” Bengt jerked his thumb back over his shoulder to the building where a girl with tattoos—one of the two who had danced with Seth—waited in the doorway, smoking a cigarette. “Can you get a ride home with Deb or something?”

“I’m going to walk back to the office. By the time I finish picking up the latest red lines on the addendum, I’ll be okay to drive.” Half his job consisted of correcting the boss’s plans, redrawing the twenty-first-century standardizations the old man refused to learn. The addition to the courthouse had more red
X
s than his freshman English Lit papers.

“Can you even plot a straight line right now?”

“Can’t be worse than the wiggly ass shit you draw sober.”

Bengt flipped him off. Killian walked down the street, goofy because the prettiest girl in the place had flirted with him. She was the wrong girl, though, with her lipstick smile, and his thoughts strayed again to the other woman. The one with the naked lips who in a whole conversation never once started a sentence with
I
.

Chapter Three

Calla Loo

“A light night, Tess?” the manager asked, cashing out Vessa’s small bills for twenties.

“The drink orders tripped me up a few times,” she admitted. Four in fact, and a deep dish with no onions wound up a thin with extra. Her head was filled with paint chips and faucet knobs and the vintage medicine cabinet she’d stripped down to the original wood that morning.

“I could use you on lunch tomorrow if you can change that appointment of yours,” the supervisor said. “We’re down two servers.”

She shook her head. “Sorry.” She could have used the money, but fifteen hours from now, she was meeting the architect with the raven hair at his house. “Would you like me to come in as soon as it’s over?”

“If you can get here before the after-school rush, I’ll bump you from training pay to full server’s wage.”

From the restaurant Vessa went straight to the hardware store, arriving twenty minutes before it closed. The smell of Italian sausage stuck to her clothes like a meat lover’s cologne, but thankfully the store was empty of patrons. A lonely stock boy loaded buckets onto shelves in the joint compound and spackle section.

“Hey, pizza girl, do you deliver?” he called down the aisle.

Vessa looked down at her clothes. In her rush to get to the hardware store before it closed, she’d forgotten to take off her work apron. She gave the boy her best polite waitress face. “Why, do you need a midwife?”

“I ain’t looking to get married,” he said, backing away, holding a putty knife like a shield to ward her off.

“Well, then maybe you can help me find some plaster of Paris instead?”

As the stock clerk scanned the shelves, a teenage boy walked by. He wore the green vest of the garden department, carrying several pots in his arms, each with drooping flowers. He paused, clearing his throat. “Are you finding everything you need?” he asked her, fixing his older coworker with a beady glare.

The saucy stock boy handed her a carton of plaster mix.

“Right on,” the gardener said coolly, and the clerk scuttled off, pushing his hand truck of buckets.

Vessa untied her apron and followed the boy with the plants to the glass refrigerators at the front of the store, where he set the plants on the floral counter and snipped off the browning blooms.

“What are those?” she asked him. The flowers were white, with one huge pointed petal curving around a yellow fuzzy phallus rising from its center. The leaves were shaped like arrowheads with undulating edges.

The young man was blond and too thin, almost gaunt, with a teenager’s baby cheeks. Under his green vest he wore a tie-dye T-shirt. “Calla lilies.” His breath smelled of skunk and sage smoke, and his eyes were suspiciously bloodshot.

“What will you do with the sad ones?” she asked.

“They’ll go back to the earth,” he said, opening the lid to a pail marked Compost.

“You’re just throwing them out? Would you let me have them?”

“Can you give them a good home?” he asked in a mock stern voice.

“Nicer than that,” she said, wrinkling her nose at the brown-and-green sludge in the bucket. He wrapped the flowers in green paper as if they were still fresh, and sealed the package with a
Paid sticker. She laid them gently in the child seat at the front of her cart next to her bag, and headed to the paint section.

The woman at the mixing counter scowled at the clock above her head as a loudspeaker announcement cut through the business-casual jazz, announcing the store’s closing in ten minutes.

“Just getting a sample,” Vessa reassured her, grabbing a jug of glaze. She ran a mental total on how much she had spent on Killian’s card, and chose the smallest pre-mixed can of cyan blue.

At the register, the credit card machine squawked at her. She’d been off by a dollar and eighty-seven cents. Vessa paid for the rest in cash, like all her recent purchases, anonymous, no paper trace to her presence in Vermont. The cashier locked the door behind her as she left. Across the street, the lights at the used-car sales lot went out one by one.

Vessa pulled her car up to the garden department entrance, and held up the box with the rejected double onion thin-crust her boss had insisted she take home. “Would you like to adopt a sad pizza?” she asked the skinny gardener as he wrapped a padlock chain around the metal gates.

He looked at her like she’d fallen from heaven. She left, shuddering as she imagined the effect of the food on the boy’s breath—her car smelled vicious after only twenty minutes with the take-home box on the passenger seat.

Back at the architect’s house, Vessa unwrapped the bouquet of wilting lilies in the unfinished kitchen. She stripped the leaves and arranged the flowers in an empty plastic cup she’d found on the back steps, then set them on the card table, letting the blooms have the last of their pretty before they faded completely.

She sorted through the leaves, selecting the three sturdiest. They were stiff and slightly waxy, with a deep vein running down the center and curling edges. She cut them from their stalks, then coated the surfaces with petroleum jelly. Next she mixed up the plaster of Paris, following the directions, and poured it into three shallow pans made from aluminum foil. She pressed a leaf into each, facedown, smoothing the edges with a fingertip to make sure the entire thing was below the surface. The plaster heated as it set, melting the Vaseline. The scent of minerals rose from the tins, sour and strange, warming the pungent greenhouse vegetation.

While the molds hardened, she tidied the hallway of the debris left from her plumbing endeavors. She rolled the old sink basin onto a sheet of painter’s plastic, and dragged it into the garage. The cabinet was light enough for her to lift by herself. She left it by the old sink, near the water heater.

When the plaster was firm, she pulled the leaves from the surface, and danced a jig on tired feet when the imprint of the leaves turned out in perfect detail. She peeled away the aluminum foil and set them in the microwave, keying in the lowest defrost setting.

Killian was due at the house in twelve hours. She imagined two of him painting glaze beside her, long arms reaching where she couldn’t and then coming down around her. And her between both of them, arms around the neck of one and the other behind her, four hands on her everywhere, holding her in the framework of their arms, surrounding her, supporting her, intense eyes under black brows and that
voice
—

Vessa dug her phone from her backpack and pulled up a live feed from the college station to drown out her architectural fantasies.

Two weeks ago she’d been in California, packing the last of her things. She wasn’t going to let herself get distracted by the first man she met her age. Especially not by one with an artist’s eye—despite his button-down shirt and lace-up shoes—who was perceptive enough to design such a pretty house. The last thing she needed was another fling of creative passion for her to disentangle herself from after he asked too many questions.

Not that Killian had. He hadn’t seemed interested in her at all—he was more concerned with his deadlines and his meetings than her abilities and what she might do to his house, and that suited her just fine.

She washed her paintbrushes in the kitchen sink. The biggest she hung from a yardstick balanced over the back of two folding chairs to dry. The smaller artist’s brushes went handle down in an empty paint can after she rinsed them.

Her hog-hair fitch was clumped. She smoothed the bristles flat between her fingers, then ran the brush down her inner forearm, shaping the chiseled edge with the lightest touch. The damp bristles left a cool line on her skin, tickling, like the fingertips of her invisible lover, and she traced the same line on her jealous right arm with her fan badger brush, conjuring his twin. She shivered and forced herself to focus.

She swigged down an energy drink. It tasted like cherry cough syrup and made her heart race. At nine in the morning she left, dashing to her apartment to grab a shower and scrub the paint from her fingernails. She twisted her hair up in clips and dusted her eyes frosty white, like the callas, with a smudge of gold at the corners and dark green mascara—two coats.

She hadn’t fully unpacked yet. Vessa was used to moving, and comfortable with her trunks and traveling boxes. Some were decorated and as permanent as furniture, with brass corners and hinged lids with name plates on the front. The box labeled Tights and Sox was hidden under the one that contained Tenn Williams and Shakes scripts. She rooted through it, not even pretending she wasn’t dressing for the tall architect with the laughing eyes.

She ran down the stairs to the street, then three sidewalk spaces to the next doorway. On the second floor of Manny’s store, directly below her living room, was a room with lighting fixtures hung from the ceiling. Pull strings dangled from chandeliers and bar shades, ceiling domes that looked like sculpted breasts with metal nipples in the middle, and Chinese lanterns painted with cherry blossoms. The walls were lined with shelves of lamps.

She blew the dust off one, a Tiffany wish-it-were with metal violets and too many roses, heavy handed and not authentic in any way. The shades were shaped like callas: two-toned frosted glass, yellow shading to peach. She coiled up the cord and then dashed down the stairs, nearly tripping in her boots.

“You break it, you buy it,” Manny told her.

“It’s already broken,” she said. The lamp was missing an arm, the empty socket obscene, like a mutilated arm of a doll, but Vessa only wanted it for the shades.

Her landlord looked her up and down. “There’s a man in all this, isn’t there?”

Vessa shook her head but fire rushed to her cheeks, and Manny’s laughter brayed through the shop, startling an early customer.

She drove back through the tiny city, relaxing only when she arrived to an empty driveway. Killian’s pickup was nowhere in sight. Inside, she brushed her hand over the wall in the bathroom. The surface was still cool with the drying paint, but none came off on her palm. Careful not to bump the walls and mar the tender surface, she cleaned the plumber’s putty from the sink drain and tested the faucets, breathing a sigh of relief when no water ran from anywhere it shouldn’t.

She was exhausted, loopy with caffeine and almost no sleep for two days. When her phone buzzed fifteen minutes before Killian was due to arrive, she checked her hair and gathered her supplies from the kitchen, then ran upstairs to tidy up her design materials. She’d used the upstairs space—her favorite room—to design, where the sunlight made her watercolors pop off the page. She arranged her books in a neat pile, and sorted her sketches.

“Hello?” a voice yelled from downstairs.

“Upstairs,” she called back. She knelt on the floor and pulled her dress around her thighs.

Killian rounded the staircase, dressed the same as when she’d met him—oxford shirt and black dress pants, tortured tie pulled away from his throat. She stared at his hair, wanting to either smooth the side that stuck up in odd tufts, or muss the side that lay flat. “The light up here is nice for sketching,” she said, squaring her drawings into a stack. “Did you see it?”

“No!” He blinked, then rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Er. See what? I just got here.” He looked away, to the stack of books on the floor. “You’ve got some design sketches?”

Vessa held her renderings up to him, the watercolor washes and charcoal details highlighting lines and flower motifs. He looked at the sketch, and then glanced over it to her, his eyes narrowed with surprise. She basked in it, the expression that was the collective sigh of the audience when the curtain opened on a set reveal, the gasp of surprise as lights came up on new scenery.

He flipped to the next, and the next, and then knelt on the floor at her side. “How did you know? What made you do these?”

“Your house,” she said. Her heart pounded in her chest at how near he was, at how he looked at her, admiration and something else...something dark and intense. She swallowed and licked her dry lips. “You made arched windows, and the decorations at the top—the way your roof has all the angles—it feels like the Secessionist movement, you know, with all the detail. And then, well, you had the Finnish flag on your key, so...” She pulled out a textbook and flipped to the chapter she’d bookmarked with sticky notes. “These are some interiors in Helsinki from that time period. The color palettes are lovely, and since the tile was already there—”

He stroked the page she’d opened and tapped the picture with a fingertip. “I’ve been to this house,” he said. His eyes were smiling, silver and slate and stone, and she forced her gaze down to the book. He pulled a sketch from the pile, an elongated view, exaggerating the slant of the ceiling. “This is great. And you nailed it with Katajanokka.” He cleared his throat, watching her.

“Gesundheit,” she said.

He laughed, and the crazy tension in the sunlit room splintered. “That’s the neighborhood where all these houses are. I interned there for a summer.” He was too tall, even on his knees next to her, and too close, pinning her down with those eyes. She would have stayed there forever looking at him, but this time she was the one with somewhere to be. Full server’s pay at the Piazza wasn’t much of a raise from trainee wages, but it meant she wouldn’t have to share her tips with her trainer.

“Well, would you like to see it?” she asked. “The paint should be dry.”

* * *

Killian followed her down the stairs, brain still reeling with the rapid shift from awe and arousal to total trepidation.

He’d heard the creak in the ceiling when he’d come into the house, and walked up the stairs. There she was—or there was her ass, round and upturned, the hem of her dress barely covering it. He’d crept down the stairs, stunned, and shouted “Hello?” because there was no way to come back from that, and he didn’t want her knowing he’d seen her at that moment, private and exposed.

Fuck
, she had a nice ass.

Her drawings, the books... She couldn’t have guessed he’d spent a summer term in Katajanokka, held in thrall by every rooftop, every arched window and door. He was almost afraid of how she’d seen into him so quickly. Not like Donna Edith had, not a dissection. But like a priest, able to see what he loved. Her eyes had white snow dust on the lids. He wanted to blow on her skin to see if it would fly away.