A Novel Seduction (14 page)

“You’re funny,” she said. “You might be a lot of things, but no one could ever say you’re not funny.”

“How you flatter.”

She laid her head on the bar and closed her eyes, grinning happily. “I don’t know, Axel. I’m feeling it now, and it’s feeling waaaaay too good for me to work.”

Great.

Then her eyes flew open and she grabbed his arm. “I’m not going to think I can jump off the building and fly, am I?”

“Nope. The flying pills are green.”

She snuggled back into the bar, sighing happily.

“I’d let you relax,” he said, “but I know you’d never forgive yourself for missing your Jack Kerouac opportunity.”

“Jack Kerouac?”

“You know he wrote
On the Road
in three weeks using the same pills you are.”

She sat up and blinked. “Really?”

“It’s true.”

“Oh my God, I’ll be like… like… the Billie Holiday of journalists.”

“There you go. So, why don’t you do your thing”—
which was to talk to enough people to develop the narrative for this part of the assignment—“while I set up for some portraits?”

A singular determination seemed to come over her face—admittedly a little hard to make out behind the smear of margarita salt curling up from each side of her mouth—and she threw her shoulders back. “My thing! You’re right, Axel. That’s exactly what I should do.”

He didn’t quite know how to respond. “Well, um, great. I’m glad we agree. So I’ll get the camera set up and then just find you?”

She nodded like she hadn’t been listening and hopped off the stool.

Axel dug into his bag, looking for his Tamron AF 28–75. It was the best lens for portraits, though he knew he’d have to bump up the ISO to accommodate the room’s darkness.

The
ooga-ooga
siren went off again. He rolled his eyes and hoped Ellery was in position to catch a couple of good quotes.

Ellery stepped into position on the platform, feeling her heart pound.

No fun am I?

At this moment, with Axel’s wonder drug tripping through her brain, Ellery knew she was in the midst of a profound change. She was a butterfly emerging from her cocoon. She was a peacock about to spread her feathers.
She was Sarah Connor kicking the Terminator’s ass. She was a—Wait, butterflies came from a cocoon, right? Or was it a chrysalis? It didn’t matter. Buhl Martin Black might hate her. Carlton Purdy might disavow her. Axel might look at her like he couldn’t remember they ever dated. But Ynez would understand. Ynez never faltered. She’d faced the impossible and survived. More than survived: She’d conquered.

No fun? Kate and Jill would eat their words. Oh, they would eat their words. Ellery was a zebra with a TiVo, and she would watch whatever show she wanted!

She grabbed the closest rung and swung off the platform, feeling her third-grade muscle memory returning. These weren’t even as hard as the ones at Howe Elementary School. The ones at Howe were free-swinging. These were fixed.

She grunted, using the momentum of her body to propel herself. She kicked a leg and her shoe flew off, hitting a spectator in the forehead. Didn’t matter. Could apologize later. She could feel the friction on her palms as they rubbed the metal and the buds of blisters, just like in third grade. She should’ve rubbed her hands in dirt before she began. The bars were set on a rising incline, making the approach a matter of more than just distance. She wondered if she still had the shoulder strength. She wondered if she’d shaved her underarms. In between the sounds of the sirens, she could hear the
thump-thump-thump
of a Donna Summer remix. Or was that just her head?

Each movement jerked her breasts a little higher out of her bra. Was wishing for God’s hands to squeeze tighter
sacrilegious? She stole a glance at the people below. The world was jiggly. Drunken jiggly. And she was being carried on the glorious slow wave of imbibed substances like a rock star surfing the crowd. The women were cheering. The man who’d wanted to dance flashed her a thumbs-up. She was glad she’d gone for pants under the slip.

She reached the opposite platform, breathless but exhilarated, and a wonderful happiness uncurled into her fingers and toes. She didn’t know what was in the stuff Axel had given her, but she knew she could count on him to have the best. It was probably the one and only thing she could count on him for. The garbage can—wasn’t it supposed to be a cauldron?—flashed red lights, making it hard to see. She felt more than a little dizzy, but it was a dizzy mixed with thrill and exquisite satisfaction, like one of those Side by Side shakes at Steak ’n Shake. She squeezed her eyes tight to keep the world from spinning. She wished she’d had something to eat.

Axel clicked the lens into place and rejected the light meter for a more hands-on approach. He scanned the heads of the cheering crowd as “Bad Girls” played, looking for the telltale raven hair and ivory shoulders, but didn’t spot them anywhere. After another moment of searching, he wondered with a flicker of guilt if she was in the ladies’ room, divesting herself of the alcohol she’d consumed. Then he remembered the TAG Heuer guy and with a flicker of something far different hoped she hadn’t done something foolish.

“Va-va-voom,” muttered a man with a Tweety Bird tat-too.
“Look at the lungs on that one. Snow White with titties.”

Axel adjusted his f-stop and shook his head.
Effing asshole—Oh, shit!
He jerked his gaze up. Ellery was teetering on the platform next to the makeshift cauldron, her back to the room. To the chants of “Off! Off! Off for Ynez!” she slipped her hands up her dress and came out with something that looked like a cross between his grandmother’s girdle and a Madonna throwback. Ellery tossed it into the can. Grinning like a kid, she turned to the crowd and began pumping her fists—and by default everything else under that thin silk—in victory.

Mr. Tweety made a kissing noise and said, “Niiiiice.”

Axel stepped directly into the asshole’s line of sight. “That’s my coworker. Knock it off.”

The guy was about to say something stupid and Axel felt his fists tightening, when the room erupted into a roar. Ellery had turned her back to the crowd and whisked off her dress.

It had been a long time since Axel had seen her half naked, but the spectacle hadn’t lost any of its power. Catching only a flash of that pale skin in profile, his heart cramped and his balls contracted—the one-two punch of what he’d lost and still desired.

The roar was deafening, and Mr. Tweety, who had caught the look on Axel’s face, snickered in amusement. “Thought that was your colleague, jerk-off.”

Ellery grabbed the prize T-shirt off the hook, slipped it on and turned to rake in the adulation, her cheeks pink with pleasure.

Axel lifted the camera automatically and clicked off
half a dozen shots. On the sixth shot, however, he saw her take a step backward, which brought her unknowingly close to the edge of the platform. She lifted her foot again. He dropped the camera and ran.

It was as if she were slipping in slow motion, her foot questing and flexing before her arms instinctively went up to balance her. He was flying, his heart working in overdrive. In five paces he was almost beneath her—just in time to see the guy with the TAG Heuer catch her neatly.

Axel sat at the bar, frowning into his club soda.

At least she was safe, he thought—and finally interviewing someone. In any case, that’s what he hoped was happening on that couch in the corner, though he’d never seen an interview conducted with the interviewer’s feet in the interviewee’s lap. Fucking TAG Heuer. He’d never hated a watch so much.

He glowered into the carbonation, damning his luck. With a wave, he caught the bartender’s eye and asked her to take a cup of coffee to Ellery.

“Put some maraschino cherry juice in it,” he added. “And tell her it’s spiked.”

He pulled out his phone and checked it. Two missed calls, both from Black. He rolled his eyes and opened his e-mail. Black hadn’t stopped at calling. “Send me what she’s written so far. And I want a daily update. Eleven a.m., my time.”

Oh, for Christ’s sake.

Axel doubted she’d written anything so far—that is,
unless she’d done her writing rolling around on her back. And he knew she’d be in no condition to write after this.

He sighed and looked at the time. Midnight. He had been hoping to get some candids of the people Ellery talked to, but he’d be damned if he’d take a picture of the guy on the couch.

The bartender returned from across the room with the cup of coffee still in her hand. “No luck,” she said.

“She didn’t want it?”

“Didn’t get a chance to ask. The guy’s been pouring Dom Pérignon.”

“What? No.” Axel jumped off the stool. After martinis, margaritas and who knows what at the hotel, the last thing Ellery needed was to turbocharge it all with champagne.

He fought his way through the crowd, but the couch was empty—and so was the bottle of Dom Pérignon, which sat upside down in a champagne bucket.

After a fruitless survey of the crowd, he stopped a waitress. “Did you see the woman sitting here?”

“The couple?”

He winced. “Yes.”

“She said something about a zebra, and they went that way.” She pointed toward the hallway that led to the restrooms.

Axel trotted down the hallway. When he made the turn, his blood began to boil. Ellery’s T-shirt was up to her neck, and the guy had his face buried in her breasts, snorting coke off them.

In two steps he was at the guy’s side. He grabbed him by the shirt and shoved him into the wall hard enough to
rattle a picture loose. “She’s drunk,” Axel said. “There’s a line.”

The guy had no interest in a face-off with Axel and ran off. Axel turned back to Ellery, who had pulled her T-shirt down. She was old enough to take care of herself—Jesus, she was old enough to do whatever she wanted—and she looked at him with no apology. What she hid could fill a book, but in that moment he could smell her skin, taste the salty sweetness of her flesh and feel the coke charging like tiny thunderbolts through his lungs and into his heart.
This must be what an alcoholic feels when he sees a drink,
he thought. It was if he’d done the snorting himself, so alive was his sense of it in this dark corner.

And he had done it, though not with her. He remembered her question earlier and felt a rush of shame, wondering if that was what she’d meant.

Did you… I mean, when I first met you, there was this story about you and this woman.

Ellery’s look hadn’t changed, but her eyes had grown bolder. There was an offer in them, no question. To kiss her? To roll up a bill and finish what TAG Heuer had started? He wished she’d believe he was done with that stuff. He wanted his word to mean that much to her. But he also wanted to lift up that T-shirt, loosen those jeans and plow her thighs.

She touched his wrist. It was too much, as if all his sorrow and longing had been concentrated into a vial and released into his vein with the jab of a needle. He pulled her against him and brought his mouth to hers. She kissed him eagerly, the pungent mix of liquors on her tongue
filling his head. She leaned into him, just like the old days, skimming his ear with her fingers and nipping his lips. The aching pleasure of holding her again was more than he could bear, and when he moaned, she bit him.

He wrenched himself free, surprised at the willpower he’d had to marshal to stop.

“Axel,” she said sadly, curled into his chest, “why did you have to disappoint me so?” Then her body went limp and he caught her before she fell.

“Oh, there you are,” the bartender said, turning down the hall. “Your hamburger’s at the bar.”

Ellery’s head hurt, but that was nothing compared to the horrible sensation in her mouth. It was like she’d been chewing the lining of a litter box. She moved a little. Nope. Wrong about the head. It was definitely as bad as the mouth.

She slitted an eye.

Holy Christ, she’d been moved to the inside of a steam engine. Large silver vats topped with tubes and dials surrounded her. She could feel the
glug-glug-glug
of the pistons and smell the smoky scent of something cooking. She wondered for an instant if she’d been shrunk to the size of a cell and injected into the engine block of her mother’s ’71 Olds Cutlass.