Feast of Saints (4 page)

Lilly gently set the cast on a counter out of the way. She pulled out another organized tray marked, “J.Durant dental cast.”

Jake, who knew that Phillip had called Lilly the day before to request her to be here, was starting to have an appreciation for how organized and prepared she was on such short notice. Mixing another smaller batch of goo, she smiled ruefully at him.

“This is the last of the unpleasantness. But if you’ve ever been to the orthodontist, you’ve done this before.”

He nodded. “Yes. I didn’t like it.”

“I know. It feels like the alginate is going to run down your throat and choke you, but I promise it’s not. It cures so fast it won’t go anywhere I don’t want it to go.”

Lilly touched his chin and gently tugged his mouth open, then used a spatula to spread the goo over his teeth and the roof of his mouth, avoiding his tongue.

“I have to press to make a good impression.” she said, inserting a mouth piece. It was not pleasant, but he didn’t feel panicky like he had when his childhood dentist had done this.

“Almost done, just a couple more seconds.” She smiled at him appreciatively, like he was a well-behaved patient.

“Okay, that’s it,” she said, loosening the hardened material and pulling it out of his mouth. She deposited the dental casts in a plastic bag and set them by the head cast.

Bending over her bin, she popped up with a bottle of water. “Here you go. Rinse and spit. The worst is over.”

The hand and feet casts were simple in comparison. All he had to do was dunk each limb in a container of goo, wait five minutes and gently pull it out. The challenge was the prep. To ensure they would come out of the hardened material smoothly and make a good cast, Lilly spent ten minutes gently massaging oil into his hands and feet.

His sexual excitement, which had been smoldering for well over an hour, was catapulted to an intensity that he had difficulty managing. He frowned ferociously at himself in the mirror when she turned away to mix a new batch of alginate.

When she was ready, he started to stand to help her dip his foot, hoping she wouldn’t notice his bulging jeans. Thankfully, she stopped him, saying, “It’s better if you sit. You’re less likely to step down with your weight and ruin it.”

Settling back in the chair, Jake calculated he had about thirty minutes between the time she spent mixing each batch, and the time it took to set each cast, to get his raging erection under control. He needed a distraction. Reaching into his front pocket to pull out his cell phone, he stifled a groan as he grazed his sensitive cock.

Sliding his finger across the phone’s glass screen and tapping in his security code, Jake began flipping through his inbox subfolders, scanning his priority one business emails. He received email at a daily rate of about two hundred per hour. The sole responsibility of one of his four secretaries was to triage the electronic messages as they came in. That job, and it was a big one, meant reading every email, categorizing it by business type, making an educated decision about its priority, and moving it into the appropriate subfolder. Otherwise, he would never have time to do anything but wade through email all day.

Jake deliberately tuned Lilly out, turning his attention to her only long enough to follow her direction on how to hold his hands for the casts. One-handed, he continued reading and responding to emails, typing with one thumb. He still didn’t look up when she made him switch hands.

By the time she gently worked the last hand out of the hardened material, he could breathe easier, his business empire and his body under control. Putting away his phone, he asked, “All done?”

“Not quite,” she said, eyeing his naked chest and reaching for the oil. “I need to cast your chest, then your back.”

He nearly leapt out of the chair to take the tube from her. “Here, let me do that,” he said quickly. He was not about to let her slather his chest in oil. He’d have her on the floor.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll mix the molding material while you apply the oil to your chest.”

Was that relief in her voice? Jake didn’t like the thought that she might be unaffected by him, when all he could think about when she touched him was bending her over the mirrored vanity.

Rubbing the oil on his chest, he asked, “Everywhere?”

“Yes,” she said, measuring and mixing a large amount of alginate. “Imagine you’re wearing a shirt with the sleeves cut off and apply the oil everywhere the material would cover you. Do everything but your back. I’ll have to get that.”

When she’d finished mixing, he helped her move the heavy, wet mass closer to the chair, glad he could finally stand without revealing his physical reaction to her.

When he sat back down, Lilly reclined the barber’s chair and began spreading the alginate over his chest and shoulders, tolerable only because the goo prevented skin to skin contact. She covered his entire chest, over his shoulders, under his armpits, along his sides. When she’d finished spreading, she went to the sink and uncovered a tray of wet plaster bandages.

“I’ll lay a matrix of plaster bandages to support the alginate cast. Otherwise, we’ll ruin it taking it off of you,” she explained.

He hadn’t seen this part of the process. His hands and feet casts had stayed in the containers she’d had him dip into. She had used plaster on his head cast, but his eyes had been covered.

She unfolded each wet strip and layered it on his chest like a giant lasagna. When the last strip was placed, she asked, “Are you okay? It can be a bit heavy. If you can, try not to take deep breaths until I get this off. The stiller you are, the more detailed the molds will be.”

Jake made a show of holding his breath, puffing out his cheeks.

She laughed. “Don’t pass out on me!”

Every few minutes she touched the plaster, and then began tapping here and there when it started to harden, making sure it was uniformly dry before attempting to take it off.

When she pronounced it dry, he rapped his knuckles in the center of his chest. “I feel like the Chief Inspector in the
Curse of the Pink Panther
,” he said.

Lilly smiled broadly at him. He’d struck a chord with her. She said enthusiastically, “There were some fabulous special effects in those Pink Panther movies. Brian Johnson worked on at least one of them.”

At his uncomprehending expression, she went on, “He later won an Academy Award for Visual Effects for
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
– you know, the one with Yoda. It was the best
Star Wars
movie by far.”

“I don’t know,” he said, amused by her enthusiasm. “I think I like the first one best. When Chewbacca fixed the Millennium Falcon and it finally hit hyper drive, now that was something to see.”

“Okay, you got me there,” she said, leaning over him and pushing her little hands under the alginate around the edges to loosen it from his chest like a baker prying up a rolled out pie crust.

“You’re going to have to help me lift this off of you,” she said.

Picking up his hands, she placed them under the alginate at the level of his hips where she wanted him to push up and stuck her own hands under the cast under his armpits.

“Okay? On three. One… two… three!” With a sucking sound, the alginate pulled free.

“Can you help me get it over to the counter? Be careful not to crack the plaster or it will tear and we’ll have to start all over.”

Gently, the two guided the chest cast over to the counter and laid it plaster-side down. It looked like a giant, oddly shaped, empty tortoise shell.

Smiling at him, she said, “We’re almost finished. You’ll need to lie down for the back.” She pointed to the padded gym bench. Jake did as he was told, squelching a tingling feeling of anticipation. He heard her rubbing her palms together, warming the oil. And then she was touching him.

She had an incredible amount of strength in her little hands. As she rubbed in the oil, she alternated between pressing the heels of her hands and kneading his knotted muscles, working over his trapezius, erector and dorsal muscles. It was stimulating, yes, but more than anything it just felt damn good. He was nearly asleep when she stopped to mix the alginate for his back. It was cold at first, but warmed as it set, completing the best massage he’d ever had.

When she began her systematic tapping on the plaster, he mumbled, “It’s going to be hard for me to help you get this off.”

“Oh, I can get this one by myself,” she said breezily. “When I did the front, I included the tops of your shoulders and sides, so it was twice as heavy and hard to get off because of the way it wrapped around your body.

“The back is a piece of cake,” she said, and effortlessly peeled it up and carried it over to the counter.

“That’s it. We’re all done.” Looking at her watch, she said, “I’m afraid I’ve run over my time. Please don’t feel like you need to stay while I pack up.”

They had been going at it for nearly three hours. Still, he was reluctant to let her go. He wasn’t likely to see her again for a month.

“I’ve got a few minutes,” he said, standing and pulling on his T-shirt. He had about an hour before he had to drive up to Malibu to meet with his southern California marketing team. If he could have, he would have cancelled it, talked her into a leisurely lunch and driven her home himself. But, by now, his team was already halfway there from San Diego.

“Would you like some lunch?” he asked casually, as if he hadn’t already instructed Kwanga to prepare her lunch. “I saw how you can pack away food on Friday.”

Lilly narrowed her eyes at him. Smooth, he thought. That’s how you score points with a girl – make a comment about how much she eats. Not surprisingly, she turned him down, but she was professional about it.

“No. Thank you. I’d better get going,” she said. “The alginate breaks down quickly. If I don’t start making the molds in the next hour, I’ll lose a lot of detail, and I need accurate molds to make sure the appliances fit you properly.”

“Appliances?” he asked, feeling like this was a term he ought to know. She clearly wasn’t using the word for its normal meaning. Stoves, refrigerators.

“They’re prosthetic skin applications. Special effects appliances can be anything from a full face mask, to a simple mole or scar and can be made from gelatin, silicone or foam latex. The ripped and sloughing skin of a zombie is an appliance adhered to an actor’s skin and painted and made-up to blend in.

“I don’t know yet what we’ll be using for Allegrezza, but I’ll make them myself using your casts to be sure I get a perfect fit.”

She stepped toward him and peeked under the sleeve of his shirt at the grid she’d drawn earlier.

“The materials we tested today included the raw materials, adhesives and removers you’re likely to be exposed to on a daily basis.”

Walking over to her allergy kit, she pulled out a small bottle and squirted some minty smelling liquid on to a cotton ball.

“I use only medical grade plastics and stay away from solvents, which aren’t good for you if absorbed in the skin.” She used the minty smelling cotton ball to wipe off the grid, and said, “There are naturally occurring oils that will take off what I put on.” When she finished, she inspected his skin closely before tugging down his sleeve.

“Looks good,” she said, patting his arm. She had such an easy way of touching him. In just three hours he’d grown to like it. Very much.

He lingered as Lilly started packing up. When she pulled a roll of bubble wrap out of her supplies, he helped her gently wrap the casts and place them in the extra empty tub she’d brought.

While they packed, he asked her, “How did you come to be in this business, Lilly?”

“It was a fluke, really. I interned in college with Dow Chemical’s medical prosthetics department in Kansas and received an offer for a fulltime position after graduation. I have a brother who is less than a year older than me. We went through the same engineering program, although he’s now a geneticist. When we graduated, he had an offer with Tarrant Labs in La Jolla. Dow’s got a big medical prosthetics division out here, so it made sense to move out together.

“I’d been working about a year when my department was asked to present a segment on artificial limbs and medical implants for a children’s science show on public television. I got talking with the artistic director for the program about the similarities between my medical prosthetics work and special effects work.

“I guess you could say I caught the Hollywood bug. I quit my job, moved in with my brother and his wife for a year, and went back to school to study special effects makeup.

“The same director who introduced me to the idea gave me my first job in children’s television. I think you know the rest.”

Jake did know. In fact, he knew a lot of what she had just said, although not the details of how she became interested in Hollywood special effects.

He knew a lot of other things about Lilly, too. Like her 4.0 GPA and the fact that she didn’t have any speeding tickets or a criminal record. Last year, when Ty started talking incessantly about Lilly, Jake had run a background check on her as a precaution. His celebrity status, and his wealth, introduced a level of risk into the lives of his loved ones that he dealt with by fiercely protecting them.

Lilly’s background check came back squeaky clean. Although, glancing down at the high-heeled hiking boots, he wondered if she didn’t have a wild side that she kept well hidden.

As she bent over right in front of him to put the lids on her tubs, Jake rolled his eyes to the ceiling, turned away and texted Wil to bring the Bentley around front and to come down and carry Lilly’s goods. He also instructed Wil to have Kwanga box up Lilly’s lunch and put it in the car.

“I’ll have Wil take you home,” he said.

When Jake and Wil had put the last item in the back of the vehicle, Lilly turned to him in the driveway and stuck out her hand.

“I didn’t properly express my thanks for this opportunity on Friday, Mr. Durant,” she said rather formally, considering the last few hours. She flushed when he took her hand and just held it.

Tugging it out of his grasp, she said, “I’ll make sure to keep Phillip posted on my progress.”