“I see,” said Vivian slowly, retracting her hand. “I see. Please have a seat. So Caryl has Ironbones on call now. Charming.”
“People keep calling me that,” I said, leaving a stool between us so our legs didn’t accidentally touch. “Is that a thing?”
She laughed. “Not really. It’s like, oh, what do parents say around here? The boogeyman.”
“A monster with iron bones, I take it?”
“Also claws. The comic book character Wolverine is loosely based on him, in fact, or so the rumors go. Len Wein’s Echo must have been very naughty as a child.”
“I’m the fairy boogeyman,” I said dryly. “No wonder everyone in the Seelie bar panicked.”
Vivian let out a musical laugh, even as she touched a finger to her lips to silence me. She leaned in a bit, lowering her voice to an almost seductive murmur. “I’d love to have been there to see that,” she said. “Seelie are so adorable when they’re frightened.”
“So all these people,” I said quietly, “they’re just regular -people? Not . . . in the know?”
“That’s right.”
“How did they even get in?”
“They have invitations,” she said. “If you have an invitation, it’s a perfectly normal club. If not, it doesn’t appear. That makes the bouncers’ jobs boring, but it gives me exquisite -control over my social life.”
“Well, if we can’t talk business here at the bar, could we move somewhere else?”
“Am I keeping you from a date? By all means then, let’s hurry things along.”
She moved us to a small corner table in the next room that was removed from the general flow of traffic, but unfortunately, it was still not secluded enough to allow us to talk with perfect privacy. The chairs were spidery and misshapen in a way I couldn’t quite place.
I declined a stoned-looking waitress’s offer of something to eat, but Vivian ordered a slice of chocolate cake before leaning back in her chair at ease. “Before we talk about the studio,” she said, “let’s talk about you a little.”
“All right,” I said warily. “What would you like to know?”
“What exactly happened between the time you slept with your screenwriting professor and the time you jumped from the roof of Hedrick Hall?”
If I’d had a drink, I would have choked on it. I had a feeling she was dying for me to ask how she knew, so I didn’t.
“It’s complicated,” I said, running my fingertips over the wood of the table. Its gleaming, raspberry-chocolate finish echoed Vivian’s hair. “And it’s really not relevant to our business here.”
Vivian did nothing more than shift her gaze directly to mine, but I felt as though she had grabbed me by the collar and yanked me across the table. “I asked you,” she said in a tone that made my arm hair stand up. “That makes it relevant.”
For maybe the length of two frames of film I saw her. I don’t know if she dropped her facade, or if I disrupted it in some way, or if I simply saw through it. But for that subliminal flash of a moment I was sitting across from a bat-winged creature of horrible grandeur, with spiderweb hair and mantis jaws and eyes like bleeding wounds. And then it was Vivian again, smiling sweetly.
“I’m going to ask you one more time,” she said. “What exactly happened at UCLA?”
34
When I was able to locate some saliva and peel my tongue off the roof of my mouth, I did my best to answer Vivian’s question. “Like you said, I slept with my screenwriting professor,” I said. Treading this old ground turned my stomach into a lump of lead. “We’d gotten pretty close outside of class by then, but he was . . . cold to me afterward. I was confused, and I confided in a couple of people I considered friends. After that, somehow the whole campus knew.”
I paused as the waitress approached the table with Vivian’s cake, setting it down in front of her. Both waitress and cake may as well have been invisible for all Vivian noticed them; her eyes were fixed on me. “So what happened next?” she prompted.
I waited until the waitress was out of earshot. “He told everyone that I had made the whole thing up. He was highly thought of, and I’d shown just enough signs of crazy by then that people believed him. Rooms got quiet when I walked in. I was miserable, started flunking classes, so I confronted him about it. He accused me of sexual harassment and said that if I ever tried to talk to him alone again or continued with my ‘accusations,’ he would involve the authorities.”
“Fascinating,” Vivian said, leaning forward slightly. “He lied even in private? How did you end up sleeping with him in the first place?”
“I wish I knew. I went over to his place, and was trying to get him to talk to me about what was bothering him, and then suddenly we were—” I stopped and shook my head.
“You were what?”
My hands went cold. “Please don’t make me talk about this.”