“I think they got arty with it.”
“Two minutes!” a voice called from the dance space. If the rest of the dancers had two minutes, I had one.
“Arty? Looks brown to me.”
He was so good-looking. The parts of his face clicked together like a puzzle. I could see the sections in a way I hadn’t before. The high cheekbones. The square jaw. The full lips. Click, click, clickety-click.
“They got fancy with the taste. They put something else in it.”
“Like? Describe it with words.” He’d scoffed at the salad with his cheeseburger comment, but he speared the last flat leaf and ate it.
“Thirsty.”
“You have water right there.”
I ate the rest of the rectangle and folded the tinfoil over the other.
“No, they taste like thirsty.” He had no idea what I was talking about, and to be honest, neither did I. “But good. Really good.” I handed him the foil packet. “Not as good as a cheeseburger, but in case you’re hungry later.”
He took the foil, and I ran back to the studio.
I could hear Darlene working with her voice coach in an adjacent room as I went through the next set of moves with the dancers, chanting the counts I’d designed to help them remember the steps. I felt fine at the first break, but about two hours later, as we were doing the last of the moves for the day, Darlene got far away. I lost my connection with distance and time. My body pulled out like taffy. My stomach felt sucked in on itself and the thirsty taste took over my mouth, but I kept working, hoping I wasn’t coming down with a stomach bug.
Monty was a very good dancer. He threw himself into every step until he got it right, and in this case he threw his torso too far left and his shoulders too hard around, and he fell over.
It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, and I laughed. I never laughed at a mistake. That was rude and unprofessional. But I couldn’t help myself. I laughed and laughed until I fell down, then I laughed more. Laughing was for the sake of the laughter. Hands and heels on the floor, I wasn’t even the one laughing anymore. It was separate from me, and I was so separate from the room I had no idea what everyone else was doing. My chest hurt, and that was funny. I couldn’t breathe, and that was funny. Carter was leaning over me, and the hilarity of his concern was shattering.
CHAPTER 5
CARTER
You need to lighten up.
Gotta admit, when I saw that note under the brownie, I thought it was directed at me. But it wasn’t my dessert. It was Emily’s. She was a serious girl. Cute but serious, and for good reason. I wanted to wipe all those reasons away and give her a reason to laugh.
But I’d never tell her to lighten up. It’s not a friendly suggestion. It’s an aggressive demand. I put the tinfoil packet on a speaker and flipped over the paper. Nothing. Just brownie crumbs and oil spots.
Were brownies oily?
I sniffed it. Cloying. Sour. Garlic. Eggs. Skunk.
I took a tiny bite of the brownie and had my suspicions confirmed. I folded the brownie away and grabbed a bottle of water to wash out the taste. I wished the story of her ex-boyfriend washed away as easily. Stalkers had a special place in my heart. The place where I kept violence and foul language.
Emily cackled from the studio area. I hadn’t heard her laugh like that in the past two weeks. I went to the sound.
She was the center of attention in the middle of the floor, laughing so hard her face was magenta. That tiny slip of a thing in her black dance clothes laughing so hard her face was red? The tears streaming down her cheeks? Now that was cute.
“What the hell are you doing, Em?” Darlene pushed past her dance team to stand in front of Emily with her arms crossed. I kneeled over Emily and held my hand up to Darlene, because she needed to shut the fuck up right now.
“Emily?”
She was gasping for breath, up on her elbows and ass, chest heaving, eyes bloodshot and slick with laughter. I wanted to lick those tears right off her. I’d seen her out of breath, and I’d seen down her shirt plenty, but I’d never seen her or anyone laugh like that. It was the sexiest thing I’d ever laid eyes on.
“Yeah?” She licked her lips.
“Thirsty?” I held my hand out for her. She took it.
“Uh-huh.”
“Hungry?”
“Yeah. And I feel weird.”
Darlene put her hand on Emily’s arm when she was close enough and looked into her eyes.
“Girl! What the fuck? You’re stoned?”
“It’s not her,” I said. “It’s . . . She ate a brownie. Do you know where they came from?”
I handed Darlene the note, but Emily swiped for it, missed, and slapped it out of my hand on the second pass. It fluttered down, and I caught it before it hit the floor.
Both women held their hands out for it. One swayed; one was steady. One woman paid my salary; the other was the owner of the note itself.
I gave it to the woman who paid my bills.
“That motherfucker,” she said, holding it up for Emily.
“Vince,” she whispered, nearly falling. I held her up, and she gripped my biceps like a vise. She looked at her hand on my suit, then made eye contact with me.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re not hurting me.”
She was about to start laughing when Darlene cut in.
“No, I said just no. This is not gonna work.” Darlene was a force of nature. Everything she brought to the stage and studio could be leveled against one person. I was bigger, stronger, and more able, but she was damn intimidating. She paced two steps one way, then two the other, a ball of sharp intensity.
“I’m sorry,” Emily said, cowed even while high.
“Vince Ginetti and his twisted shit are not okay.” She pointed at Emily as if she’d done something wrong. “I knew he was too quiet. Guy like that doesn’t stop wanting to hurt you just because you don’t hear from him. No, no. He’s been waiting. Biding his time. I told you he’d be back.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Emily said.
I didn’t know Emily that well, and I knew even less about her relationship with this Vince guy, but she wasn’t talking to him.
“No,” Darlene shouted. “No, you will not. He’s a stalker. He’s a classic, unoriginal ex-boyfriend stalker. He’s the guy you see on TV in some still picture with an Uzi. And everyone watching hears how he killed his ex-girlfriend’s cat before he chopped her into pieces, and they all wonder why no one did anything.”
“He really killed your cat?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Emily said.
“Yes. Yes he did. For the millionth time, yes he did.”
“I left the poinsettia out. It’s poison.”
Darlene wasn’t done. “I am not going to sit around and wait for you to turn into Genevieve Tremaine.”
My skin crawled at the mention of the dead actress. The gruesome scene of death and everything after it. Every stalker story started and ended with a comparison to that double murder. I went blank for a minute while Darlene continued.