Chapter Four
Steel Magnolias
Daisy
“These are fine. These are fine times about seven
thousand. I need these.”
“You’ve got seven thousand pairs of shoes, Tod. You don’t need
anything.”
“Stevie, love of my life, are you not seeing these?”
“I’m seeing them.”
“Then have you gone temporarily insane?”
“I’m thinking he has,” a girl said.
“I’m thinking if he doesn’t let you buy them, I’ll get them
and you can borrow them from me,” another girl said.
“Sold!” the first (obviously gay) guy cried.
“Let’s go,” the first girl said. “Las Delicias has been
there for years but I’m not taking any chances seeing as I need a beef burrito,
STAT.”
“Box ’em up and let’s move, I’m
hungry too,” the second (also gay, seeing as he was the love of the other one’s
life) guy stated.
I sat with my back to them in chairs in the Nordstrom shoe
department, listening to them go, and I didn’t turn around to look at them. Not
because I didn’t want them to see my face. The bruises were fading good now so
my conceal job was kickass.
But I did sit there thinking I needed a gay posse.
Especially if they went shoe shopping with you.
I also needed a girl posse.
But even though all the strippers were real nice, that
wasn’t my thing. I’d never managed to pull one of those together, even in the
days when I’d put the effort in to try.
And since I didn’t, I quit trying.
In my line of work, especially at Smithie’s where he took
care of the girls in a way they didn’t feel the need to be catty, I might have
been able to manage it.
The thing was, I was the headliner. The red velvet rope out
front was for me.
I suspected Britney Spears was probably friendly with her
dancers.
But they didn’t go shoe shopping together.
And I didn’t want to turn around in Nordstrom of all places
(where some dreams came true, even if they did this
to the tune of a credit card machine) to see what I was missing.
Not just then, but my entire life.
I knew I wasn’t meant to have any kind of posse, as much as
I’d always wanted it, and especially as much as it’d be good to have it right
then after what had happened to me.
I just didn’t need it staring me in the face when I didn’t
have it.
Instead, I looked down at the shoes I was trying on.
They cost twelve hundred dollars. They were class on a
lollipop stick. Considering the serious hike in pay Smithie gave me a month
ago, I could totally afford them (and could do that even before he jacked up my
pay, but did it weirdly making me work less, but I didn’t quibble).
And they were so not me.
“What do you think?” the shoe saleslady said.
“You got anything in denim?” I asked.
“Uh…no,” she answered.
“Clear plastic, maybe with a daisy embedded in the
platform?”
“Um…I don’t think so.”
“Slides with a seven-inch heel, three-inch platform, the
whole thing bejeweled, maybe in pink?”
“Well…um, I think that’s a no too, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
I nodded.
I’d already learned Nordstrom shoe department didn’t do
Daisy.
It still didn’t hurt to try.
I unbuckled the strappy sandal I had on and slid it off,
murmuring, “That’s okay. But thanks.”
“Valentino does ‘Rockstud,’” she
informed me.
I’d checked out the Rockstud.
It wasn’t all that bad.
But it didn’t say Daisy.
“Not my thing,” I shared, putting the sandal in the box,
grabbing it, and handing it to her.
“Okay, well, if there’s anything else you see you’d like to
try, I’m here.”
“Thanks, honey bunch, you’re sweet.”
I smiled at her.
She smiled at me and wandered away with the box.
I put on my shoes (black patent, platform sandal, one-inch
rhinestone ankle strap, tube of rolled open red lipstick for a heel), got up,
hitched up my purse on my shoulder, and glided to the makeup counter to while
away more of my Saturday afternoon.
The shoe department might let me down in a variety of
places.
But any makeup counter from Walgreens to Neiman’s worked for
me.
And that afternoon, it so did.
The doorbell rang right in the middle of Julia
Roberts having a diabetic fit in a salon chair in Dolly Parton’s garage.
This did not make me happy.
Not Julia having a fit, of course, that never made me happy.
But I was right then not happy about my doorbell ringing
during the best movie of all time.
I paused the movie, got up on my bare feet, and marched to
the door in my hot-pink Juicy Couture tracksuit with the rhinestone, interlaced
“JC” on the back with the crown on top surrounded with an oval of sparkles.
I looked through the peephole and I knew what I’d see
because he’d told me he wasn’t going to give up.
But he was interrupting Steel Magnolias.
No one did that.
Not even a tall, dark, rich, hot guy gentleman who opened
doors for me.
And right then, even if he was not in a suit but looked just
as f-i-n-e, fine in a V-necked, dark-blue
sweater that did things to his eyes that, if I wasn’t ticked about Steel
Magnolias, would have done things to my coochie,
and dark-wash jeans, he had to know that.
So I unlocked the deadbolt, slapped open the latch, and
yanked open my own damned door.
“You’re interrupting Steel Magnolias,” I snapped
tetchily to Marcus Sloan.
He burst out laughing.
He really shouldn’t have done that.
He really shouldn’t have laughed.
Really.
He was handsome, for sure, just as he was.
But laughter took years off his face.
Years.
I didn’t know how old he was. He looked in his mid-thirties
(and I wasn’t going there seeing as he clearly had established his place in
Denver at a young age which said something about him and what it said, to a
girl like me, was all good).
But right then, he looked like the boy you hoped would neck
with you (and you’d let him get to second base) after he took you to a movie.
Though, it was more.
The deep sumptuousness of his laughter felt like everything.
Every diamond in the world laid at your feet.
Every fur piled deep.
Every gold necklace a tangle of beauty twenty feet deep.
Still chuckling, he turned to the side and jerked his head
toward my apartment, “Set it up.”
Without a choice, I shifted out of the way as a tall, blond
man wearing a black suit, white shirt, and thin black tie walked in carrying a
paper bag by the handles in one hand and balancing a baker’s box in the other.
Following him came a heavyset man dressed the exact same
way. He’d lost most of his steel gray hair and was for some reason wearing
sunglasses even though the sun had gone down, not to mention, he was indoors.
He had two bottles of champagne pressed to his chest in one arm, two delicate
champagne flutes dangling from the other with…
I narrowed my eyes at them…
Beautiful peacocks engraved in the glass.
Really beautiful peacocks.
Perfection.
Damn him to hell.
I turned my narrowed eyes to Marcus as he moved in, putting
a hand to my waist, and this time he used it to guide me where he wanted me to
go.
Right smack dab into the middle of my living-slash-dining
room.
I let this happen mostly because I was beginning to smell
something.
Something so good it forced all of your attention to it.
Which meant I saw the first guy opening lids on food
containers, the aroma of what was inside beating back the scent of flowers and
filling the room.
“Barolo Grill,” Marcus said and my suddenly food-dazed gaze
drifted to him. “Prosciutto and melon. Lobster salad. Truffle risotto. And bombolonis for dessert. With Dom, of course.”
With Dom, of course.
Dom Pérignon and lobster salad in my two-bedroom,
not-much-to-write-home-about,
uninspired-floorplan-like-gazillions-of-complexes-all-over-the-you-nited-States-of-America,
galley kitchen, living-slash-dining-room,
only-thing-good-about-it-was-the-master-bath apartment that I’d rented before I
started to make a mint off stripping.
“Are you loco?” I asked.
His lips curled up. “No, I’m hungry.” He turned his
attention to his men. “That’s good and that’s all.”
They started to move out but stopped when Marcus told them
to do it.
His hand slid to the small of my back. “Daisy, this is my
man, Brady, and my driver, Ronald.”
In turn, first the blond, then the sunglassed
man nodded to me.
“Pleased to meet you,” Brady said.
“Same,” Ronald grunted.
With nothing more, they both took off.
I watched the door close behind them and looked back at
Marcus.
“You have a driver?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“So he can drive me where I need to go.”
I felt my eyes get squinty again.
He put pressure on my back and guided me to my
not-much-to-write-home-about round dinette (that was so going to go
when I got my fabulous new pad—there, I’d have a proper, Southern woman’s
dining room table, meaning big, gleaming, and covered in fine china, even if I
didn’t have any friends to sit at it) where they’d laid out the opened food
cartons, baker’s box, champagne, and flutes.
“I have a variety of concerns,” he explained as we went.
“Time is always in short supply. I can’t use it wisely if I have to concentrate
on driving. While Ronald drives, I can do things I couldn’t if I was.”
He stopped us by the table and I asked, “And you have a
man?”
“I have several,” he answered.
I gestured to the door with my hand. “So what’s that one
for?”
“Extra eyes.”
“Extra eyes for what?”
He held my gaze steady. “For being certain, should someone
think to do something stupid that I wouldn’t very much like, they won’t do that
because they either saw Brady and got smart or Brady saw them and stopped
them.”
“So with these concerns of yours, you’re constantly
in danger,” I guessed.
“No. Not many would be foolish enough to attempt to put me
in a dangerous situation. What I am is cautious.”
I nodded. “You sure strike fear in the hearts of the
strippers, sugar. The ones who don’t want to sleep with you, that is. But just sayin’, they might wanna get laid
by you, but you scare them too.”
He grinned at me. “No offense, honey, but I’m not sure I
consider strippers a threat.”
“None taken, darlin’, but gotta
know. Do you consider anyone a threat?”
“No.”