Red Hot Obsessions (161 page)

“Like,” Georgie continued, “I think he likes live music and books, probably. He almost always takes a date to some sort of concert but he must choose it based on what she likes because sometimes it’s rock, sometimes pop, sometimes classical, and he took Nona to a country music concert. If you talk to him about books, either he’s already read the book that you’re talking about, or else he has you text him the name and author, and quite often, a week later, he’ll have something interesting to say about it. But I’m not sure, because most of the girls are bookish types, so it might be the reflecting thing again.”

“I don’t think so,” Lizzy said. “He’s read a lot. He’s read everything that I’m reading for class: Pope, Woolf, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Sand, and both T.S. and George Eliot, and he can quote stuff. I don’t think you can fake all that.”

Georgie nodded. “And he has moderate, intelligent views on sports and politics, and anything else you ask him about.”

“And he speaks a couple languages,” Lizzy said.

Georgie nodded. “I’ve heard him speak some sort of Chinese and something Middle Eastern.”

Lizzy spoke over her, “I’ve heard him speak Russian. And he likes sex.”

“Yeah, the sex. He loves women,
craves
women, and likes to be with women, in the plural,” Georgie said. “He likes sex, and if you’re ever with him, it’s almost,” she looked at Lizzy, “like he gets inside your head and knows what you want, even if you don’t know it or don’t want to say it. It’s the mirror thing.”

Lizzy nodded, and her lips plumped again. She breathed deeply, and Rae felt her own breath open up as Lizzy’s back was firm against her breasts, and Lizzy’s hand braced on her thigh as the car took a corner and pressed them all back into the leather seat.

“A couple hundred years ago,” Georgie said, “The Dom would have made a great sultan, and his whole harem would have all been like Lizzy here, still suffering after-shock orgasms a week later.”

“I am not,” Lizzy protested.

Georgie glanced at Lizzy. Her knowing smile turned indulgent, and there might have been some nostalgia in there, too. “Sure, you aren’t. He’s odd in some weird ways. Do you know whatever happened to that cat?”

“The black one hanging around work a couple months ago?” Lizzy asked. “I thought The Dom had someone take it to the Humane Society.”

“No. He just said that he ‘took care of it,’ but he wouldn’t say anything else.”

“You don’t think he hurt it.”

“I don’t know. No one knows.”

“He’s not evil like that. He’s not evil at all.”

“Yeah, well, we don’t know what’s underneath that shiny mirror-ball. Maybe there’s some swirling dark secret. Maybe he’s just a regular guy who lives an odd lifestyle. He might just be a really private person, though that’s not likely, considering. Maybe there’s nothing under the shell, and that shell is just all there is.”

Rae knew that last part, about the shell being all there was, was a textbook definition of a psychopath. Killing animals, if he had killed the cat, was the textbook gateway that turned a psychopath into a serial killer. She had a lot of psychology textbooks.

Her textbooks were also full of the emotional devastation that normal people suffer after a personal or working relationship with a psychopath. A serial killer was worse. It scared the shit out of Rae, and she worried about Lizzy and her extended, possibly emotionally manipulative “date.”

“What did you do afterward?” Lizzy asked Georgie.

Rae relaxed a little. Lizzy’s question sounded like she was handling it well, or at least with clear eyes.

Georgie shrugged. “I threw myself into my job.”

Lizzy laughed.

Rae was glad that Lizzy was laughing, even if she didn’t understand the joke. Lizzy’s fingers lightly trailed along the shiny material that barely covered Rae’s thigh. Shivers slid on Rae’s skin.

The car stopped at the curb beside one of the downtown grand hotels near Symphony Hall and the golden-domed capitol building. Rae stared out the window at the blazing light bulbs and towering buildings that she had never seen from closer than the freeway overpasses. Rae’s third grade teacher had shown slides of the capitol’s gleaming dome, and the dusty children had gawked at their magnificence.

Georgie opened the door and stepped out, into the dark night and shining lights.

Incandescent light bulbs, those clear-glass ones with the fiery filament inside, studded the hotel wall. Rae saw yellow, curly after-images all over the black inside of the car.

Lizzy pulled away from Rae and scooted across the seat. Rae wanted to sigh, but she didn’t know why she would sigh about a car ride being over, so she didn’t.

Just before Lizzy reached her leg out of the car, she turned back to Rae. “You won’t say anything about this, will you?” She laid her hand on Rae’s leg again.

All Rae’s attention focused on her thigh where Lizzy’s hand touched the sparkling fabric covering her leg. “Of course not.” Rae was solid like that.

“Everyone wants a date with The Dom, and everyone is bleary for a day or two afterward, and it’s embarrassing.”

Rae didn’t understand, but she went with it. “I won’t say anything. I don’t even know what you guys were talking about.”

Lizzy laughed. “Of course.”

Lizzy leaned over and kissed Rae smack on her lips, but her fingers tightened on Rae’s leg. Lizzy’s lips tasted like cherries when Rae breathed in and were soft, like her silky, white skin.

Rae couldn’t seem to breathe as her blood raced to her face and her lips and she kissed back, wanting it to last, and then Lizzy was out of the car and gone.

The light bulbs glared white outside the dark car.

Rae could just see Lizzy’s pale hand dangling in the bright air outside the car, inviting Rae to come out.

~~~~~

A Different Kind of Cocktail Party

The three girls rode the hotel’s mirror-lined elevator way, way up, so high that Rae grabbed the handrail because her legs grew heavy and she was surprised that the elevator didn’t pop out the top of the building.

The doors opened straight into a ballroom where a crowded party was swinging. The clear air smelled like expensive perfume and clean people.

A wide, tall black man in a black suit stepped in front of the elevator doors as they walked out, and Georgie and Lizzy smiled at him and nodded.

He nodded and stepped back, but he didn’t smile.

They walked a few steps into the party before Rae whispered to her friends, “Was that Dom?”

“No,” Georgie whispered. “That’s Jeff, one of the security guys. He’s nice. He just takes his job seriously.”

“Okay.” Rae, being tall, looked over the crowd, trying to see everyone and to find someone named Dom, as if she could figure out people’s names just by looking at them. Her curiosity had made her a little stupid.

About half of the people at the party seemed older than Rae and her friends, maybe in their thirties and forties. Those men were wearing suits, and most women wore black satin formals. A few more adventurous women wore navy blue silk.

The people who were near Rae’s age, however, dressed differently.

Beside Rae and her friends, one buxom, blond, young woman, surely a second wife or mistress, wore a mini-dress of shimmering pearl pink. The other young women were bright dots weaving in the dark crowd.

The few young men wore tailored, modern suits. One had an open collar instead of a tie, and Rae saw a glimpse of silver at his throat, like he was wearing a chain.

Rae asked the girls, “Is Dom here?”

The girls glanced around. Rae thought, considering the crowd was pretty dense in spots, that their cursory glances couldn’t spot a red cape at a bullfight. She wondered if Dom was thoroughly distinctive-looking or if they just weren’t really looking.

Lizzy said, “I don’t see him. Let’s dance.”

Lizzy’s small hand slid into Rae’s, and Lizzy pulled Rae and Georgie through the crowd. Lizzy had pulled Rae through life a lot these last twenty-four hours, but it seemed to be turning out all right, considering that she was at a high-falutin’ cocktail party instead of a smoky frat drunk-fest. Rae should just follow Lizzy and see where she ended up.

Maybe it would be something really interesting, far more interesting than the life that Rae had been falling into. She just needed to act
vivacious
.

Rae wasn’t sure how to act
vivacious
.

A crowd bopped on the dance floor. A deejay spun old, old rock songs and seventies disco.

Lizzy began to dance, and Georgie started dancing, and Rae shuffled her feet and swayed. After one song’s worth of Rae’s awkward stumbling, Lizzy told Rae, “You need a drink.”

Rae agreed. She felt like a spectacle in her flashy dress. Everyone seemed to be glancing side-eyes at her like she was making a fool of herself.

While they drank jewel-colored, pucker-sweet girlie martinis, Lizzy told dirty jokes.

After Rae drank a cocktail, and then another, the jokes got funnier and funnier.

After all her dark thoughts about flunking out of college, laughing felt great, and Rae went with it. Last night at the Delta Chi house, she had pursued sex and drunkenness with angry intensity. Tonight, Rae breathed. If this was her last week of fun, let it be. She was going to laugh her way through it.

When Rae was good and giggly, Lizzy dragged them to the dance floor again. Rae found her rhythm this time and didn’t care if anyone was watching her, and she danced to the old rock music from years before she was born.

A young man dancing next to Rae shrugged off his shirt. Rae stole a glance. His chest was smooth, and he was flinging his shaggy hair in time to the beat and dirty dancing around a woman who was as least a decade older than he was. The woman reached out one long finger and hooked the thick silver torque around his neck. He turned, his eyes and his body and all his attention on that woman. She kissed him.

On Rae’s other side, a white-haired man with a flabby face danced with a woman who might have been Rae’s age. She was a wasp-waisted, blond bobble doll in turquoise sequins, and his hands were all over her, grabbing her breasts and ass.

If Rae hadn’t been so tipsy, she might have been shocked, but Lizzy and Georgie danced close to Rae because the crowd shoved them together. Their curvy bodies pushed up against Rae’s shimmering dress, rubbing her back and her thighs and her breasts, and it all felt so good that she danced for an hour until the deejay called out to slow it down. The music slipped from bompity-thumps to silvery flutes and a high soprano’s singing.

Rae was just reaching out to Lizzy when a man slipped into Rae’s arms, and she looked
up
to see his face. Her hands settled on his muscle-bunched shoulders before she knew what she was doing.

The man stood even taller than Rae even though she was wearing heels, which meant that he had to be at least six-feet-three. His gold-blond hair was trimmed military-short, and his neck and jaw were pristine-clean. Covering up those strong cheekbones and jaw-line with any sort of beard would be a crime against nature, anyway. His eyes shone bright, clear blue.

“Um, pardon me?” she said. “I was just going to dance with my friend here,” but when Rae turned her head, Lizzy wasn’t standing there, and some other guy’s suit back was turned toward Rae.

The blond man—for he was a
man
, not just some guy—gathered Rae in his strong arms. He wrapped one arm around her waist, and his other hand gripped her right hand firmly. He smelled like lemon tea, fresh soap, and something darker, muskier. He smiled, but the smile didn’t quite reach his blue, blue eyes. “Shall we dance?”

Georgie and Lizzy’s abandonment surprised her. “I guess we shall.”

The man moved purposefully like he could waltz if he wanted to, and her body swayed with his. He didn’t arch his back like those professional dancers, but his whole body felt like he was wrapped in steel. His strong arms held her so firmly that she felt tied to him.

“So,” Rae said, casting around for conversation. “Great party.”

“Yes, indeed. You dance well.” His deep voice sounded impressed, like this was unusual.

“Thanks. Aren’t you here with someone? It looks like most people are coupled up.”

“No,” the man said. “I’m stag.”

Rae wasn’t sure that she heard him right. “Is that your name? Stag?”

“No,” he chuckled. “Not at all. I am here, alone. Stag.”

“Oh, I get it.” She smiled brightly at him, trying to be vivacious instead of dim-witted, in case Dom was watching. Hey, this guy might even be a test. She grinned harder. “So, my name is Rae.”

“Have you availed yourself of the bar?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, embarrassed. “My friend made me drink lemon drop martinis. They were really sweet like, you know, a lemon drop.”

He spun her, dancing in a tight circle, and her feet matched his step to step. “Did you like them?”

“Yeah, they were good.” She kept staring up at him. Even his eyelashes were golden. Her dad would have called him a pretty boy because no scars or lumps roughened the smooth skin on his linear jaw and cheekbones. She decided to call him The Blond Hottie in her head because she hadn’t heard his name or couldn’t remember it. Jeez, she hoped she hadn’t gotten rufied again.

The Blond Hottie asked, “What are you studying in college?”

“Psychology. I just read a research paper that said that all men can be described as either sparkly vampires or werewolves. I almost thought it was a spoof paper, but it was in a good journal.”

“That is interesting. Tell me more.” His amused tone encouraged her too much.

“The paper had pretty good data, convincing associations. It seemed like most men identify quite readily with one or the other. So, are you a sparkly vampire or a werewolf?”

His smile took on a wry tilt. “I assure you, I’m neither a vampire nor a werewolf.” His voice had a light accent, maybe British.

Rae decided to go with the conversation. What the heck. The high-grade alcohol running through her brain damped down the useless paranoia, the childhood church-induced shame, and her common sense, so she pointed to the older guy molesting the blonde and asked, “How about that guy? Vampire or werewolf?”

The Blond Hottie smiled with more real humor. He bent down, and his whisper tickled her ear and bare shoulder. “A vampire, at least in years.”

“And that guy?” Rae pointed out the shaggy kid gyrating about the nonplussed woman.

He glanced to where Rae pointed. “A wolf cub, yeah?”

“Sure looks like it,” she said.

The Blond Hottie backed up, giving her some space. “Did the psychology paper mention if women could be so easily cast into pop literary roles?”

“No, just guys,” Rae said, “but I think women can be either like Bella or like Katniss.”

“Your hypothesis sounds like it should be developed into a paper. Which are you, Bella or Katniss?”

Bella.
Rae knew that she was a carbon copy of passive little Bella who waited and obeyed. She hated that.

Heck, for tonight, for this last beautiful night before she got kicked out of college, Rae was going to ditch her inner Bella. She lifted her chin and smiled. “Katniss.”

The Blond Hottie’s smile and blue eyes focused on her. “How so?”

Oh, dang. Now she had to come up with something. “I love my family more than anything, and I can bowhunt.”

The Blond Hottie blinked, and Rae was a little surprised that gold dust didn’t sprinkle out of his thick, shimmering lashes. He said, “There’s a surprising answer.”

“My dad taught me to bowhunt when I was nine. My whole family bowhunts.”

“You are a little Amazon, aren’t you?”

No one called gargantuan Rae a “little” anything, but this guy stood several inches taller than she did. “I s’pose so.”

“And your friends, Georgie and Lizbeth. They’re Bellas, yeah?”

Rae heard his accent again, just when he asked,
yeah?
She said, “Oh, I don’t think they’re Bellas. Georgie is going to be a litigating lawyer, and she’s going to be awesome at it. Lizzy is wicked with a Taser if you cross her. I think she’ll end up as a professor. So you know Georgie and Lizzy? Do you know their friend Dom?”

The man’s blond eyebrows lifted with amusement, and that should have tipped Rae off, but she was tipsy and sweaty from dancing with her friends.

The Blond Hottie asked, “Should I know him?”

Rae said, “They said he would be here. This Dom guy sounds kind of humorless to me, though.”

One of his pale eyebrows twitched just a little. “Humorless? Is that how they described Dom?”

“No. They seem to like him. He sounds like he’s hard to know.” Rae didn’t mention anything they had said because she was solid like that. “They just coached me on what to say, like they didn’t want me to make a mistake if I met him.”

“Really?” he asked, as if she had said the most fascinating thing, and to Rae’s lemon drop martini-soaked brain, she was kind of fascinating right now. He smelled good to her, like sweet cinnamon and like something growing in a meadow, and like a strong, clean man.

“Yeah, they just said to tell him the truth, but they made it sound like I had to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, like he was a judge or psychic or something.”

“Surely that’s not the case. Perhaps we should practice your truthfulness. That would please Georgie and Lizbeth, yes?” The Blond Hottie smiled again, and his white teeth were not pointy like a vampire at all. His smile had a sweetness to it, like he was truly happy that Rae was dancing with him and that they were talking.

Rae laughed, and her body pulsed with laughter. “Sure. Why not?”

“What a wonderful laugh, you have.” His blue eyes crinkled like he was pleased.

“I used to sing in the church choir.” Rae just wanted to make him smile some more. “Singing strengthens your diaphragm, and then you get this loud, obnoxious laugh. I hate it.”

“I think your laugh is delightful. It sounds like bell choir. You said you tried the cocktails?”

“Yes! A few.”
More than a few.
“And I tried some of that blue-label whiskey, too. It was really good.”

“You like whiskey,” he mused. “Interesting. And the music?”

She babbled because she liked to see him smile. “A little, um,
classic
for my taste, but it’s fun to dance to.”

“You like to dance.” He spun her around in a circle as if to show that he was bigger and far stronger than she was, that even almost-six-feet Rae was fragile in his arms.

Rae stiffened her back and controlled the spin.

Mrs. Geerhardt had taught Rae’s seventh-grade Bible School class to foxtrot and waltz. In the cool church basement, the pimply boys and girls had held each other’s palms out in front of them and counted out loud to the classical music. Eventually, Minister Stoppard had made old Mrs. Geerhardt stop teaching them such a heathen thing as dancing.

She held her arms and back taut and didn’t let him fling her around.

The Blond Hottie looked down at her when she pushed back. His sweet smile became amused at her. “You partner well. Do you tend to lead?”

She lifted her chin because, well, she wasn’t sure why she did other than that Lizzy and Georgie had been rubbing up against her, which had turned her on more than she would ever have admitted, and she liked the feel of this man in her arms. She hadn’t had a boyfriend for eight months, to the point where she had gone to the frat party last night with the intention of getting laid, and she was going home to Pirtleville in three and a half weeks. No one at this party would tattle on her.

She smiled up at The Blond Hottie. “Yeah, I tend to lead.”

He smiled a little more, and he inclined his head like she had said something funny and slightly outrageous. She felt awesome. He asked, “What do you think of the people here?”

Rae looked at the college-aged guy with the domineering woman in black satin and at the white-haired man fondling the young chick. “They’re an odd mix. I’ve been too busy dancing to look around much.”