Taste for Trouble (20 page)
A
muffled snicker rose from the pack of girls. James tried a benign smile. “Yeah?
You’re a soccer fan?”
The
girl dropped her lids and peeked out from under her lashes. “No, but we got
plenty in common. I take my shirt off when I score, too.”
James
swallowed. “Ah huh.” He cast Bel a desperate look while the snickers turned into
outright giggles.
“Speaking
of sex,” Bel said in her usual cool tone. “Can anybody tell me what a hand job
is going for these days? Nothing fancy, just a quick tug.”
All
eyes swung back to her, James’ included. A
hand job
? Jesus lord. Bel had
been body snatched. There could be no other possible explanation for this.
Silence
stretched out. One beat. Two. The girls exchanged glances and James wondered,
not for the first time this morning, what the hell was going on with Bel.
“Kira?”
she asked, her eyes going back to the Asian girl with the x-rated pucker. “A hand
job?”
“How
should I know? I ain’t no whore. But Jackie is. Whyn’t you ask her?”
A choked
laugh flew out of the crowd and dropped like a stone into the suddenly charged
silence.
Whoops
, James thought.
Bad move, Kira
.
The
heavily pregnant Jackie said, “Fuck you, Kira. I ain’t no whore neither. Ask
your mama, why don’t you? She gets on her knees for a dime bag, don’t she?”
Later
James would conclude that Kira had opted for a physical response rather than
verbal. All he saw in the moment, however, was a lightning swift shift from
girls standing and talking to girls whooping and cheering as Kira and Jackie
rolled around on the floor walloping the snot out of one another.
But
by far the most disorienting feature of the fight was Bel’s utter lack of
expression or distress. She regarded the mayhem at her feet with not an ounce
of surprise. She simply waited for an opportunity to present itself, then
reached into the violence and hauled Kira to her feet by a handful of her shiny
black hair. No hand-wringing, no outrage, no lamenting the sad state of today’s
youth.
If
anything, Bel looked bored. Resigned. As if she’d seen it all before, more
times than she could count and was sick to death of it.
Kira
yelped and bucked against Bel’s grip but Bel didn’t flinch. She shoved the girl
toward Mrs. Break, who looked disappointed to have missed the opportunity to
use the tactical baton tucked into her belt.
Jackie
lumbered to her feet next, swiped at her bleeding nose and said, “Damn. Baby’s
kicking like fuck-all.”
Bel
nudged her toward Mrs. Break, too. “You can handle them both?”
Mrs.
Break patted her baton and gave Bel a grim smile. “I can handle them.”
Kira
and Jackie sank into sullen silence as Mrs. Break pointed them toward the door.
“All
right,” Bel said to the remaining girls. “Let’s get started.”
“Yo,
Ms. West?” Caren/Cara/Shirtless Scorer put her hand up.
“Yes,
Taryn?”
Taryn
, James thought. That was it. God, Bel had a brain
like a frickin’ Trapper Keeper.
“How
come you asked us what we charge for hand jobs?”
“I
don’t think any of you are prostitutes, if that’s what you’re after.”
“So
why you ask?”
Bel
shrugged. “We’ll probably be using sharp knives later on. I guess I thought I’d
light the short fuses first.” She lifted a brow. “Other questions?”
The
girls looked to Taryn who took her time considering. Finally she shook her
head. “No, ma’am.”
“No,
ma’am,” came the chorus.
“Fine,”
Bel said. “Let’s get to it.”
But
somehow James had the feeling that Bel had already done the majority of her
heavy lifting for the day. More power to her. Female social maneuvering was a
mystery that, in James’ opinion, smart men left alone.
His
own work, however, had just begun.
“I
don’t think I should go back there,” James said from the passenger seat of the
catering van as they drove home late that afternoon.
Bel
glanced at the speedometer. The needle hovered at a safe and respectable sixty
miles per hour. Which was good. Great. Admirable, even.
Because
what Bel wanted—wanted more than her next breath—was to stomp the living hell
out of the accelerator.
She
wanted to crush it to the floor boards, feel her old van reach its shuddering
limit and know that she was flying away as fast as humanly possible. She wanted
to snatch up the miles in great, greedy handfuls and shove them between her and
the gaping wound today had ripped in her memory. She wanted the animal inside
her caged again. Wanted to forget how necessary that animal was in a certain
world. Wanted to forget that world even existed. She’d forgotten once. She
could forget again.
She
did
not
want to listen to James Blake whine about his afternoon.
“Seriously,”
James said. He leaned into his seat belt and hit her with pleading eyes. “I
should
not
go back there.”
Me,
neither
, she thought.
Please God,
me, neither
.
“Nobody
said rehab was easy,” she told him.
“This
isn’t rehab,” James said. “It’s payback. Kate Davis hates me.”
“Kate
doesn’t hate you.”
“Of
course she does. She probably hates anything with a penis. And I’m the
penis-haver who took the shine off her golden girl on national TV.” He shot her
a quick look. “Which was, as you know, totally accidental.”
“So
you’ve mentioned.”
“She’s
got it in for me. Sending me to a reform school for the prematurely sexually
active. God.”
“Don’t
take it so personally, James.” Bel glanced at the speedometer and eased back on
the accelerator until the needle dropped back a couple notches. Her knuckles
showed white against her skin but whatever. She was handling it.
“Don’t
take it personally?” James flopped back in his seat as if she’d shot him. “Don’t
take it
personally
? Jesus, Bel, do you know what I’ve been through
today? Do you know what
happened
to me in there?”
Bel
kept her eyes steady on the road while her heart beat louder and fiercer inside
her, until it was a primal thump in her throat, in her ears. A banging, pulsing
drum beat that stretched her self control thinner with each wild strike.
“No,
James,” she said, her voice admirably even. “What happened to you today?”
“What
happened? What
happened
? What, you weren’t there? You didn’t see?”
She
forced herself to ease off the accelerator, to coast into a gentle curve. Look
at that, she thought. Absolutely in control. “Poor James,” she crooned. “Had a
hard day and nobody paid attention? Come on now, tell Mama Bel all about it.”
He
shot her a disgruntled look and folded his arms. “What for?”
“For
the pleasure of reliving the details in front of a sympathetic audience?”
He paused,
considered. “There is that. Okay, fine.” He settled into his seat, comfortable
now, basking in the glow of somebody’s undivided attention. “God. I haven’t
been in a game that physical since the last time we played Madrid Real. Those
girls...” He gave her an aggrieved look. “They, they
mauled
me, Bel. All
those porn movies about reform school girls? My brothers and me, we went
through a real phase with those. Figured them for bullshit but it didn’t
detract from the viewing experience if you know what I mean. I never suspected
it was goddamn documentary footage.”
He
leaned toward Bel, jerked back his head and exposed the tanned column of his
throat. “Do I have a hickey?” he demanded. “The little one, Maria? She trapped
me behind the big tub of flour and latched right on. Sucked like a goddamn
Hoover. And the big one, Taryn? She could draw my ass from memory, she spent so
much time handling it. God.” He shuddered. “I went into this inclined to feel
sorry for those girls. Being poor is no picnic, I know that. But Jesus. Girls
like that
need
to be locked up. If not for their own protection, for the
protection of the innocent male population. Hormones like that, on the loose? God
only knows—”
“You
think those girls
want
you?” The words shot out of Bel without warning,
a thin ribbon of lava bursting from the molten blackness shifting inside her. “You
think, what, they’re slaves to their sexual desires?”
He
flipped down the visor and inspected his neck in the mirror. He made a
disgusted noise and slapped the visor back into the roof. “I don’t know what
they’re slaves to but whatever it is, it’s terrifying. And my going back there
is only going to make it worse. How are you supposed to teach them anything
when they’re too busy looking at me and thinking—”
“What?
What are they thinking when they look at you, James?” Fury sizzled through her
veins. It leapt across her skin like fire and burned in her cheeks, her ears
but her voice was cold and jagged. “
God, what a man! I must fuck him silly
and have his babies immediately
! Is that it?”
His
eyes flew to hers, wide and startled. “You—” he began in tones of genuine awe,
then broke off. A brilliant grin spread across his face. “Bel. You said
fuck
.”
Temper
spiked higher, faster inside her. Her hands trembled on the wheel but not from
fear. God, not fear. It was exhilaration. Triumph. Release. Branches arched
over lush green ditches outside the van, all of it whipping by Bel’s window in
a verdant blur. She rocketed into light gone molten with the dying day and
wished it good riddance.
James
took a peek at the speedometer and the grin died. “Whoa. Maybe ease up on the
gas a little, huh, Bel?”
She
ignored him. “These girls don’t want you, James.”
“Uh
huh. Tell it to the hickey.”
She
snorted. “Please. They want what you have.”
“Which
is?”
“Power.
Money. Status. Safety. And they’re willing to pay for it with the only thing
they have that the world seems to value. Their bodies.”
“And
that’s wrong.” James frowned at the speedometer and surreptitiously tightened
his seatbelt. “I know that. That’s what I’m getting at, right? You’re teaching
them some real skills in there. Trying to, anyway. They ought to be focused on
learning. But they’re too busy throwing themselves at me to even—”
Bel
punched the accelerator to the floor. The van bucked forward and James paled. She
took a grim pleasure in that. “You object to women throwing themselves at you?”
“I
do when they’re fourteen,” he said.
“And
what about when they wait a few years? What about when they’re of legal age but
still desperate and poor? Still believe their only ticket out of hell is a hot body
and a pretty face?”
He
said nothing, only watched her with troubled eyes.
She shook
her head, gave a bitter chuckle. “They see you coming and they think, boy, this
is it. My big chance. So they give you everything you want and hope that maybe
if the sex is good enough, you’ll stick around. Or hell, maybe, if we’re
dreaming big, you’ll take us with you when you go. But you don’t. You get what
you want, you take a shower and hit the road a happy man. But what about us? What
happens to us?”
He
tipped his head slowly, as if sliding pieces into place and judging the fit. “Us?”
“Them,”
Bel said quickly. “Us.” She glanced at the speedometer. Holy hell. She jerked
her foot off the gas and flexed her aching fingers. Good God. What was she
doing
talking to him this way? Spewing all her madness onto him? “Women. You know, in
general. Collectively. As a species.”
A
doubtful silence filled the van. She stared determinedly out the windshield.
“What’s
going on with you, Bel?” he asked. “You’ve been kind of...off today.”
“I’m
fine.” Her chest felt hollow and strange, and a dull throbbing dug into the
base of her skull. She shrugged, suddenly weary. “Listen, all I’m saying is sex
isn’t the same for women as it is for men.”
“It’s
not fun for women?”
“It
can be, I guess. But it’s never simple, okay? I’m not saying they don’t want
your body. It’s just that they probably want something else, too.”
“My
money.”
“A
lot of times, yeah.”
“So
what about the girls who slept with me when I was poor? Or the ones who had
their own money? What were they after?”
“Something
else.” She breathed in and out, nice and steady, but it did nothing to fill the
echoing cavern of her chest.
“Like?”
“You
want me to say true love?” She shook her head, a jagged laugh erupting from the
emptiness inside. “Love’s just a word women use to pretty up their motives for
wanting what they want. It’s a lot easier to say they were in love than to
admit what they were really after.”