Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 548

I wiped my face with the back of my wrist. "He does not want me. I know that. You do not have to keep saying it."

"He does not want a virgin. That is a different sentence. Read it again."

I stared out at the passing lights and let her talk, and this time I listened, because there was nothing left in me to argue with. "You said you could help me."

"I can." She glanced at me, quick, and there was something bright in her face now. "But you have to do the one thing you refused to do. Tonight. Not tomorrow, not next week. Tonight, before you talk yourself out of it. And listen, the contract is nothing. Nobody is going to recognize you. Not the way I am going to fix you up."

I thought about Seraphine's black dress and the silver shoes and the way Sparrow's eyes had gone when she walked toward him. I thought about the limousine pulling away with me standing on the drive like a bag somebody had left behind. Then I thought about Scarlett's hand across my face, and the word vipers, and the way she had wiped her own tears with her wrist and walked off without a single look back. "All right," I said, and my voice did not shake. "I am ready."

Lucia lived in a house with a long white hallway and a bathroom bigger than the room I had grown up in, and she left me alone in it with a towel and a robe and told me to take my time. The water came down hot enough to turn my skin pink, and I stood under it until the heat had worked into the back of my neck, and I washed the whole evening off me, the chlorine, the slaps, all of it, and when I got out I did not look at the mirror because I did not want to see the girl who was about to do this.

When I came back into the bedroom, Lucia had laid everything out on the bed. A white dress, short, the kind that stops just under the hip and hangs from two thin straps, cut so that my chest pressed against the fabric and my waist showed beneath it and there was nowhere for a man to look except at what the dress was doing. A black wig, shoulder length, blunt across the brow. A makeup case opened up like a toolbox.

"I know."

"Drink. It will help."

It did. The room went warm at the edges, the music turned into something I could feel in my chest, and by the time the place began to fill I had three drinks in me and my hands had gone quiet. Every man who came through the door looked at me, and every one of those looks sat on my skin like something wet. I thought about Sparrow. I thought about the sound the limousine made pulling away, and by the time a man came over, I had stopped being nervous and started being angry, which was better.