Sleeping with Beauty (20 page)

Chapter
15
                                                                                                                                       

I
t’s always been about you,” Grady muttered as he yanked the pizza box out of the fridge. He wasn’t remotely hungry when he’d showed up at her doorstep, but suddenly he was feeling ravenous.

He didn’t need a shrink to dissect that one.

He’d promised himself he was going to stay away from her until the damn reunion was over, or until he got his head screwed back on straight. Whichever came first. Even Jana was losing patience with his lame, morose attitude. Of course, Jana wasn’t exactly acting normal lately, either. Which was why he was here now. Or so he’d told himself.

“Okay,” Lucy announced as she flounced into the kitchen. “So what’s this all about?”

She never used to flounce,
he thought, biting savagely into a cold piece of pizza. “Jana,” he said after swallowing. He rummaged in her fridge for a Coke, both to wash down the cold lump of pizza and give him an excuse not to look at her.

“What about her?”

“She’s not acting like herself. She’s all distracted and moody and, I don’t know, just not herself. Did you notice it tonight? I wondered if she’d said anything or given any indication there was a problem. Are she and Dave okay? Is it a work thing?”

“Why didn’t you show up earlier tonight and ask her yourself?”

He paused at the sharp tone, but decided not to go there. So she was pissed at him for all but vacating her life the past two weeks. She’d have to get over it. She was better off without him, at least for the time being, even if she didn’t know it. “I got caught up at work late.” Which was only a partial lie. He was always caught up in work. Lately more than usual. Specifically the past two weeks. And that was only partly due to the funding approval. He hiked himself up on her counter. “So, did you notice?”

Lucy didn’t answer right away, which made him immediately suspicious. She was the world’s worst liar and she knew it. But that didn’t stop her from trying if and when she thought it necessary. “Notice what?” she asked, with next to zero innocence.

“Jana. She’s been acting weird.” He polished off his pizza while watching her try and decide how much, if anything, to tell him. He would find out all of it anyway, now that he knew there was something to find, but it could be amusing to watch her go through the motions.

In the end, she just sighed and said, “Yes, I noticed. I’m just not sure I should be the one to tell you.”

Surprised by her candor and the seriousness of her expression, he lowered the Coke can he’d been about to drink from. “What do you mean? Why not?”

“She has . . . news. And she should probably be the one to share it.”

“I take it she’s shared it with you.” At Lucy’s nod, he continued. “So why wouldn’t she want me to know, too?” Then it clicked into place. “Oh, wait a minute. This is about the baby thing, right?”

Lucy’s eyes narrowed. “‘The baby thing’?”

“Yeah. While you were in Barbie Rehab, she let it spill that she and Dave were trying to start a family. I just didn’t think it would distract her as much as it apparently has.” He gave her a leering grin over the edge of the can as he polished it off. “I guess boffing your brains out night and day could do that to a person.”

“You should know,” Lucy commented as she tore the crust off the last remaining slice and popped it in her mouth.

“Excuse me?” He tossed the empty can into the plastic bin. “What was that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Except you’re the Hugh Hefner of one-night stands.” Her words were muffled as she chewed. “Okay, okay,” she swallowed hard, lifting her hands, “maybe two-night stands, three max. I mean, you are single, so it’s your choice.” She shrugged, condemning him in tone, if not in words.

“Yes, I date. And no, I haven’t been interested in looking for anything permanent with anyone I’ve met so far. But I’m hardly with a different woman every night. Or even every week.”

“All I’m saying is you can be cavalier when it comes to sex, so I wouldn’t go casting stones.”

“I wasn’t ‘casting stones,’ ” he said, his voice rising, “I was only making a joke about Jana and Dave and . . . wait a minute.” He leveled a stare at her. “You’re purposely misdirecting this conversation, aren’t you? What do you know about Jana, or Jana and Dave, that I don’t?”

Lucy grabbed the empty pizza box. “Why don’t you go bang on their door in the middle of the night and ask them?”

Grady grabbed her wrist as she turned to throw the box out, tugging her back around. “This
is
about the baby thing, right?”

Lucy turned and looked up at him, her unnaturally straight hair swinging in a perfect curtain as it skimmed over her shoulders. Devoid of makeup, she still looked mostly like the Lucy he knew and loved, but the fake tan, the blonde hair, the new attitude, still threw him. Badly.

Just not badly enough to make him not want to tug her closer and—

“Yes, it’s about the baby thing, okay?”

He frowned. “Why the hostility?”

She pulled her arm free and finished disposing of the pizza box. “I’m not hostile. I’m tired. It’s late and I want to go to bed.”

So did he, but he didn’t need to be going there at the moment. Talk about purposely misdirecting a conversation. “So, what is it? She wants to try and he doesn’t? Are they having fertility problems, what? I mean, they just started trying, so how do they even know if they’re going to have problems?”

“I swear, you’re worse than us.”

“What? How?”

“Gossip Guy. You can’t stand not being in the loop.”

So he did the Offended Guy look. Because she was exactly right and it was his only defense. “I’m just a concerned friend, that’s all. That’s what friends do, they look out for one another.” And as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized the trap he’d walked into.

Her newly tweezed Barbie brows came together in perfect harmony with her arms folding across her chest. How did women do that, anyway?

He took the offensive before she could launch her first volley. “I know you’re going to blast me for being in absentia these past couple of weeks, but I’ve been swamped at work.”

“You’re always swamped at work. Super-secret spies never tire of obtaining new gadgets to better snoop out the scoop on the bad guys.”

“It’s a new and dangerous world out there,” he said, actually serious.

“So it is. And I’m sure we’re glad to have our surveillance needs securely in the hands of your twisted genius. But that has nothing to do with you being a friend to both me and Jana at the same time.”

“What needs have I abandoned exactly?” He waved a hand in front of her. “Look at you. You don’t need me.”

She snorted. “Is that what you think? Really? Come on, I expected better of you. The packaging might be different, but I’m the same Lucy Harper I’ve always been. And if you think it’s been easy adapting to the changes—”

“Wait, wait, wait a minute. Are you saying you don’t like the new you? That you wished you’d never gone?” A smug smile began to curve his lips. “Are you saying ‘You were right, Grady, and I was wrong,’ that superficial changes are shallow and lame?”

She smacked him in the chest.

“Ow,” he said, rubbing the spot over his heart. There was symbolism for you.

“Sissy.”

“You have bionic arms. Be careful where you wield them.”

“‘Shallow and lame,’ am I?”

His smug smile turned instantly sheepish. “So that’s not what you were saying, then? My mistake.”

“Don’t get all Pound Puppy on me. You know I have no defense for that.”

He stuck out his bottom lip and whimpered.

She swatted at him again, which he easily deflected as she tried hard not to smile. “You’re such a loser geek.”

“So were you,” he said without meaning to.

She sobered instantly. “‘Were’?” Her shoulders slumped. “Is that what this is about? You think I’ve abandoned you or something? Do you know how ridiculous that is?”

“You’ve become one of them and you’re calling me ridiculous?”

“‘Them’?”

“You know, one of the shiny pretty people.”

Her eyes lit up. “You think I’m pretty?”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” He slid off the counter. “You’re right, I shouldn’t have come over.”

“Grady!”

She trailed after him as he walked—okay, stalked—to the door.

“Come on,” she cajoled, “don’t be a jerk about this. You’re the brainiac; why is this so hard for you to comprehend? For God’s sake, it’s just lipstick and hair!”

He turned abruptly at the door, bracing her shoulders with his hands to keep her from running into him. “What was wrong with staying the way you were?” he blurted out. “Were you really so unhappy that you thought you had to do all this?”

She looked both sad and weary. “I liked who I was on the inside. Was it really so bad for me to want to spruce up the outside a little?”

“You didn’t just change the outside. You’re . . . different.”

“Maybe when you look better, you feel more confident in yourself.” She gave a stubborn little shrug, trying to shake him loose.

He didn’t take his hands away. “You’ve always been your own person. It’s one of the things I admire about you most. You know who you are and you’ve always been fine with that. Screw the rest of the world.”

“You just described you. Not me. And, well, the world wasn’t noticing Lucy Harper. It’s hard for someone to get to know who I am on the inside when I can’t get their attention in the first place. So I decided to change that.”

His heart constricted a little. “And are you getting the attention you wanted?”

“Yeah.” She said it a bit defiantly.

And just like that, he got his head back on straight.

“I do want you to be happy,” he told her. Then he leaned in and pressed a kiss to her forehead. He swore that wasn’t him shaking. “I’ll try to have a better attitude.”

She closed her eyes and let out a relieved sigh. “Just be my friend.” When she looked at him again, her eyes were shining. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice suddenly rough. “Me, too.”

Chapter
16
                                                                                                                                       

L
ucy was supposed to be getting ready for the reunion. God knows, she’d had plenty of notice to plan ahead. And yet, there she was, staring in the mirror, wondering why in the hell she’d ever dreamed she could pull this off.

The dress, the black and slinky number from Lorna’s Closet, hung on the back of the door. The come-fuck-me heels leaned seductively against each other on the floor beneath. (Jana had corrected Vivian’s terminology, saying, “Nobody calls them CDM pumps.” Lucy wasn’t sure she was grateful for that.) She was grateful that Grady had seemed to pull his head out of his ass after their little talk two weeks ago. He hadn’t come so far as to laud her self-improvement campaign, but he had at least shown up on Pizza Night. They’d reached a détente of sorts. Mostly because of Jana.

Jana had sprung her news on Grady that next day. And every day since then, their world had turned from talk of the reunion and Lucy’s conquest thereof, to topics that were loads more fun. Like what breast pump worked best and which monitor could pick up the whimper of a meerkat from five hundred yards away. In a dense jungle.

Okay, so perhaps Grady had taken to the technological aspects of his impending godfatherhood a bit too keenly. But if Grady’s nursery suggestions were, in fact, implemented, nothing would ever happen to Little Baby Pelletier that wasn’t monitored, scanned, coded, and recorded for posterity.

To be honest, it had been a bit of a relief to have something else to focus on. The ever-exhausting Back-to-School night had come and gone. To her surprise, she’d been hit on by not one, but two of the dads. Only one of them had been single. And though he’d seemed very nice, she’d had to turn him down—dating a student’s parent was strictly forbidden.

She smiled. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t privately gloat over being asked in the first place. Jana thought she should have gone out with him anyway. Called it a “conference lunch” or something. Grady had—well, come to think of it, he hadn’t really passed judgment one way or the other. A tactic she just now realized he’d come to use more and more often. Well, she wasn’t going to go there tonight. Right now she had more pressing concerns.

Like should she even attempt lip liner when her hands were shaking?

She glanced at the phone, debating for the hundredth time whether she should call Vivian. She wanted to. Vivian had called several times to check up on her over the past month, though the last time she’d been forced to leave a message when Lucy had been kept late at school for a staff meeting.

So she knew Vivian wouldn’t mind the plea for a last-minute pep talk. She couldn’t call Jana or Grady. They both meant well, and they were her support unit, come thick or thin. But their support in this was a kind of hollow offering. They wanted the best for her, but they really didn’t get it. Not the way Vivian seemed to.

Grady invariably changed the subject to the latest developments in nanotechnology or sports. Any sports. Basically any topic Lucy would have no opinion on. Jana didn’t exactly leap to her defense, either. In fact, she usually willingly followed Grady’s lead.

But she hated to bother Vivian. Especially on a Saturday night. It might have seemed like her godmother was always on the job, at least during Lucy’s stay at Glass Slipper, but Vivian had alluded—often—to a very active social life. Which Lucy took to mean “sex life.” Whatever the case, she doubted Vivian was at home much in the evenings.

“So, you’re on your own,” she told her reflection. “Final-exam time is now.” Visions of Jason Prescott popped into her head. And she just as quickly shut them out. This wasn’t about wooing Jason. Like that was going to happen, anyway. She planned to represent herself better this time around, but she had no grand illusions about how the evening would end. “Just show them Lucy Harper kicks ass, and you’ll have aced your exam.”

Still, she admitted privately that she wouldn’t mind if he at least looked at her like he wanted to throw her over his shoulder and find the nearest bed.

Or wall. Or hallway carpet.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Tonight was about proving something to herself.
So why have you turned down the few offers you’ve gotten for dates in the past couple of weeks, hmm?
Sometimes she hated her little voice.

But she went through the mental exercise anyway. She’d turned down all offers because, after all, she hadn’t aced her final yet, right? She’d just felt like she had to see the reunion through, and then she’d be ready to really unleash herself on the world.

God, that was so lame even she wasn’t buying it.

Sure, one offer had been from a married man and yet another from a grimy construction worker, and while there had been something of a cheap-thrill factor in eliciting a business card from the former and a catcall from the latter, she’d never considered actually accepting either offer. Just like she couldn’t accept dates with her students’ dads. But that didn’t explain why she’d turned down the guy she’d bumped into—literally—in the Comedy section of Blockbuster. She was still a klutz on occasion—all right, on more than one occasion—especially when she wasn’t concentrating on being the New & Improved Lucy Harper. And yet the guy—Todd something or other—had smiled at her and fumbled his way through a few cute ice breakers before asking her if she’d like to get a drink sometime.

Looking back, she should have said yes. I mean, wasn’t that at least partly why she’d done all this? To attract attention? He’d been cute enough, and seemed sort of funny in an endearing kind of way. They even had the same taste in movies. Well, his pick had included Adam Sandler, and hers, Harrison Ford. But they were both comedies. “Harmless” had been the adjective that had come to mind at the time. So she told herself she’d learned a valuable lesson. Cute or not, “harmless” didn’t turn her on.

“And because men are just throwing themselves at your feet, you can afford to be so damn picky,” she told her reflection. She had to stop doing that. She had to put herself out there. So what if he didn’t make her pulse race right off, it was still a date. Maybe, even with all the improvements, that was all that was out there for her.

“Well,” she told herself, “I guess you’ll find out once and for all tonight.” She started with the bra and panties, liking how the silk felt against her skin, but paused before putting on what came next. Namely, the matching garter and stockings. She’d tried them on before. Exactly once. But she’d felt so incredibly naughty that she’d giggled the entire time she’d spent wriggling back out of them. She hadn’t dared buy herself more of them, despite Vivian’s heartfelt sermons on how when a woman wore garters she projected sexual tension. She didn’t need to project sexual tension in the classroom, and frankly, she didn’t need to in Blockbuster or Safeway, either.

Tonight was different.

Lucy fingered the satin straps and finally unhooked it from its personal little padded hanger. Vivian shopped at places that actually hung up their lingerie on hangers. She tried to imagine opening her closet and shifting through rows of padded hangers as she selected today’s underwear. Couldn’t do it. Hers were all in a jumble in her dresser drawer. Oh, they might start out perfectly folded and sorted, but, inevitably, one morning of sleeping through her alarm clock and her dresser looked like the white sale at Bloomingdale’s. After the sale.

Still, she’d kept this set on its little hanger. And she did have to admit that just looking at it and imagining herself in it raised her pulse rate a few notches.

Lucy gingerly unclipped the strips of slinky satin nothingness. “Here goes nothing.” She fastened the hooks in the front, then spun it around so they were in the back, then bent down to slip on the stockings. They were Parisian, pure silk, another Vivian find, with a very thin seam up the back. After three tries, the seam still wriggled up the back of her calves, looking like a map of Rock Creek Parkway.

The stockings were starting to get stretched out and she was losing patience when the phone rang. Sighing in frustration, she strode into her bedroom, garters slapping against her thighs, and yanked up the phone. “Hello,” she said, knowing she sounded harried. She
was
harried! She’d had all day, and somehow there was only an hour left and she still had to finish dressing and do her makeup and get out before traffic became a nightmare.

“Darling!”

Lucy slumped in relief. “Vivian. Hi.”

“You’re sounding vexed, darling. What is the problem? This is your night and you should be shining. I know you will be triumphant.”

“At the moment, I can’t even triumph over a pair of stocking seams. I’m about two seconds away from another glass of wine and a package of Safeway panty hose.”

“‘Panty hose’?” Vivian made the two words sound like some dreadful disease.

“It’s the seams. They look like I let one of my students loose with a marker up the backs of my legs.”

“Well, then, I suppose it’s a good thing I’m here with backup.”

Lucy’s head swiveled toward her door. “‘Here’? As in—?”

“As in, go open your front door. We’re coming up.”

“‘We’?” she squeaked, but the line went dead.

Lucy scrambled off the bed, tripped over the CFM pumps, ended up staggering into the bathroom, looking wildly around for something, anything, to cover herself with. Her bathrobe. Where in the hell had she left her bathrobe? Then she remembered she’d had it on earlier in the living room while attempting to paint her own toenails. (Money saved toward the Brazilian.) Major mistake for several reasons. Her toenails looked like they were done by the same eight-year-old who had helped with her stockings. And her coffee table had come dangerously close to a serious polish spill. Fortunately, Jennifer Lopez’s breasts had borne the brunt of the disaster. Lucy knew that subscription to
Us
magazine would come in handy someday.

But her bathrobe had sacrificed itself in the name of frugality. That, and L’Oreal Jet-Set Red.

So she grabbed the next best thing. The towel she’d slung over the curtain rod after her shower. It was still damp, and immediately soaked her flimsy lingerie, but it was better than answering the door in peek-a-boo silk.

A brisk knock, followed by a “Yoo-hoo, darling!” sounded at the door. She tossed a frantic gaze at her not-so-tidy apartment, wishing Vivian had given her more notice. Like a week. She could have hired a cleaning service by then. Or moved.

She stopped in front of the door, managed to catch her breath, push her hair out of her face, and attempt at least some semblance of the new sophistication she’d supposedly learned at Vivian’s master hand. With one hand firmly clutching the towel knotted between her breasts, she opened the door. “Hi! What are you doing here?”

Vivian’s expertly outlined and painted lips spread into an immediate knowing smile. “Darling, you didn’t think I’d leave you to the wolves without a last-minute pep talk, now, did you?”

Lucy couldn’t even pretend to fake it. She all but wilted against the doorframe, she was so grateful. “I was going to call you, but I wanted to handle this on my own. Shouldn’t I be able to do this myself? Isn’t that the real test?”

Vivian patted her on the shoulder, then futzed with her hair a little, before smoothly barging her way inside Lucy’s apartment. “Darling, life is a series of tests. I’ve learned never to turn down a helping hand. It’s hard enough being a woman in demand. We need all the assistance we can get.”

Lucy went to close the door behind Vivian, when someone cleared their throat. She looked into the hall to find not one, but three people standing clustered in front of her door, carrying an assortment of what looked like luggage. “Hi,” they all chimed together.

Lucy looked from them to Vivian and back to them. “Hi?” she managed.

The tallest one, a guy who looked like the love child of David Bowie and Sting, spoke first. “’Ello, luv. I’ve brought along my magic pots. We’ll ’ave you ready for the ball in no time.” He bustled past her frozen form. “I’ll just set up by the windows in the parlor,” he said after a quick scan of her apartment. “Best natural lighting there.”

“‘Magic pots?’” Was she so far gone she required supernatural help? And she hated to break it to him, but the “parlor” he’d referred to was the central room of her entire home.

“I’ve got your headgear,” the next one said. She was elfishly small, with spiky, white-blonde hair and tortoiseshell glasses that, on her pixie face, somehow looked trendy rather than nerdlike.

“‘Headgear’?” Lucy repeated numbly as the woman moved past her, pulling a wheeled suitcase. Images of padded helmets floated through Lucy’s mind. “I’m really doing much better with the heels,” she commented, earning a confused look from both Sting and the elf.

“She’s talking about brushes, hot rollers, that sort of thing,” the final member of the makeover trio said as he skirted around her, careful not to let the lumpy garment bag he was carrying over his shoulder so much as graze the doorframe. He was wearing leather pants so tight Lucy could see the DNA of his children, and an extremely short haircut that was as black as Spiky Elf’s hair was blonde.