Glitter Baby

  “Fucking unbelievable, you’re so wrong.”

  “Read your book and try to feel a little compassion for that poor, brave kid who’d had his nerves burned raw—”

  He jumped up from his chair, his face white with fury. “You missed the whole point! You don’t get it! You didn’t see what’s right in front of you. This isn’t about pity!”

  “Read your book!” she cried into the cold night. “Read about the kid who didn’t have a single person in the world who gave a damn about him!”

  “Why can’t you understand?” he shouted. “This isn’t about pity! This is about disgust!” He kicked away a chair that stood in his path and sent it crashing into the pool. “I want you to feel disgust so you get out of my fucking life!”

  He stormed toward the house, and the gates of the couvent slammed shut on her for the thousandth time. He walked away like they all did, leaving her stranded, cold, and alone. She sank down on the concrete, shivering and numb. The old cedars around the house groaned. She grabbed for the orange beach towel and wrapped herself in it. Then she rested her head on her pillow of ruined clothes and drew up into a ball. Finally she let herself cry until she had no tears left.

  Jake stood next to the window in the dark living room and looked down on her crumpled at the side of the pool. She was a beautiful, shining creature of light and goodness, and he’d dragged her into hell. Something swift and sharp tore at the backs of his eyelids. He wanted to take on her pain as his own. But he didn’t go to her—wouldn’t let himself go. He’d given her the book. He’d written it just for her so she’d understand why he couldn’t offer her everything he wanted to, everything that exquisite creature deserved, everything he was too weak—too unworthy—to give.

  He remembered the night he’d walked in on her when she and Kissy were watching Butch Cassidy. Redford wouldn’t have ended up lying on a cot curled up like a fetus. The Doc wouldn’t have cracked up. And neither would Bird Dog. How could she love a man who’d ended up as he had?

  He turned away from the window. He shouldn’t have brought her here, shouldn’t have let her back into his life, shouldn’t love her so goddamned much. If he’d learned anything by now, he’d learned that he wasn’t cut out for love. Love tore down the defenses he needed to get through the day. Because she was so strong herself, she didn’t want to accept that he was weak. The other guys hadn’t cracked up, but he had.

  She’d scattered the manuscript pages around the chair where she’d been reading, and in his mind he could see her sitting there, those long legs tucked up under her, that big, beautiful face creased in concentration. He walked over to the chair and knelt down to stack the pages. He was going to build a fire and burn them before he went to bed. They were like live grenades lying around, and he couldn’t sleep until he’d destroyed them, because if anyone but Flower ever found out what was in them, he might as well put a pistol to his head and blow out his brains.

  He walked back over to the window. She was quiet now. Maybe she’d fallen asleep. He hoped so.

  He returned to the chair where she’d been sitting, and his eyes fell on the top page. He picked it up and studied the layout, the quality of the type, the fact that he’d run the right margin too close to the edge. He took in all those separate, unimportant facts, and then he began to read.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Everything in ’Nam was booby-trapped. A pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a candy bar wrapper—all those things could blow up in your face. But we didn’t expect anything other than another small, dead body when we saw the baby lying at the side of the road outside Quang Tri. Who could have imagined that anyone would booby-trap the body of a baby? It was the ultimate rape of innocence…

  Sometime during the night Jake carried her inside. He bumped her head trying to get her through the guest room door and cursed, but when he laid her down and whispered good night, she heard a horrible tenderness that made her pretend she’d fallen back to sleep.

  Emotionally dishonest. That’s what she’d told Kissy about him, and she’d been right. She’d had enough pain in her life, and she was bailing out. Loving a man who batted around her heart like one of his basketballs had grown too awful to bear.

  Early the next morning, she found him asleep on one of the couches, his mouth slightly open, his arm dipping into the puddle of manuscript pages scattered on the floor beneath him. She located the key to his Jag and threw everything into her overnight case as quietly as she could. His truck was parked in the garage, so she wasn’t leaving him stranded.

  The car started right away. As she slipped it into reverse and backed around in the drive, the morning sun struck her in the eyes. They were still swollen from the night before. She reached into her purse for sunglasses. The driveway was steep and rutted. Jake and his insecurities. He’d made the approach to the house nearly impassable, all so he could guard his precious, stupid privacy.

  She started to crawl down the drive. A movement in the rearview mirror caught her attention. It was Jake running toward the car. His shirttail had come undone, his hair stood up on one side of his head, and he looked as if he wanted to murder someone. She couldn’t hear what he was yelling. Probably just as well.

  She hit the accelerator, took the next curve too fast, and felt the car bottom out on one of the ruts. She overcompensated by jerking the steering wheel to the right. The Jag swerved. Before she could straighten, the front wheel was hanging over a ditch.

  She turned off the ignition and rested her arms on top of the steering wheel, waiting for Jake and his anger, or Jake and his wisecracks, or Jake and whatever other facade he’d decide to throw up between them. Why couldn’t he let her go? Why couldn’t they finally take the easy way out?

  The driver’s door swung open, but she didn’t move. His breathing sounded as ragged as hers had on that Fourth of July night six months ago. She pushed the sunglasses higher on her nose.

  “You didn’t take your necklace.” His voice was higher-pitched than normal. He cleared his throat. “I want you to have your necklace, Flower.”

  The morning glory pendant slipped into her lap. She felt the warmth of the metal from where he’d clutched it in his hand. She stared straight ahead through the windshield. “Thank you.”

  “I—I had it made especially for you.” He cleared his throat again. “This guy I know. I did a pencil drawing for him.”

  “It’s beautiful.” She spoke politely, as if she’d just received it. Still she wouldn’t look at him.

  His feet shifted in the gravel. “I don’t want you to go, Flower. All that stuff last night…” His voice sounded hoarse, as if he were getting a cold. “I’m sorry.”

  She wouldn’t cry, but the effort cost her, and her words sounded as broken as her heart. “I can’t—I can’t take any more. Let me go.”

  He drew a ragged breath. “I did what you said. I read the book. You…You were right. I—I’ve been locked up inside myself too long. Afraid. But when I went to get you by the pool last night…All of a sudden I knew I was a hell of a lot more afraid of losing you than I was of anything that happened fifteen years ago.”

  She finally turned to look at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. She pulled off her sunglasses and heard him clear his throat again and suddenly realized he was crying.

  “Jake?”

  “Don’t look at me.”

  She turned away, but then his hands were on her arms, and he was pulling her from the car. He squeezed her to his chest so tightly she could barely breathe. “Don’t leave me.” He choked out the words. “I’ve been alone for so long…all my life. Don’t leave me. Jesus, I love you so much. Please, Flower.”

  She felt him crumbling. All the protective layers he’d built around himself were breaking away. She finally had what she wanted—Jake Koranda with his emotions stripped raw. Jake letting her see what he’d never shown to anyone else. And it broke her heart.

  She covered his tears with her mouth, swallowed them, made them disappear. She tried to heal h
im with her touch. She wanted to make him whole again, as whole as she was. “It’s all right, cowboy,” she whispered. “It’s all right. I love you. Just don’t shut me out anymore. I can take anything but that.”

  He gazed down at her, his eyes red-rimmed, all the cockiness stripped away. “What about you? How long are you going to keep shutting me out? When are you going to let me in?”

  “I don’t know what you—” She stopped herself and rested her cheek against his jaw. His smokescreens were no different from her own. All her life, she’d tried to find her personal value in the opinions of others—the nuns at the couvent, Belinda, Alexi. And now it was her business. Yes, she wanted her agency to succeed, but if it failed, she wouldn’t be any less a person. There was nothing wrong with her. She’d been just as much a victim of her misconceptions as Jake.

  Try to feel some compassion for the kid you were, she’d told him. Maybe it was time she took her own advice and felt a little compassion for the frightened child she’d been.

  “Jake?”

  He muttered something into her neck.

  “You’ll have to help me,” she said.

  He slipped his fingers in her hair, and they kissed long enough to lose track of time. When they finally moved apart, he said, “I love you, Flower. Let’s get this car out of here and drive down to the water. I want to look at the ocean and hold you close and tell you everything I’ve wanted to say for a long time. And I think you have some things to tell me, too.”

  She thought of everything she needed to tell him. About the couvent and Alexi, about Belinda and Errol Flynn, about her lost years and her ambitions. She nodded.

  They got the car back on the road. Jake drove, and as they began their slow crawl down the drive, he picked up her hand and kissed her fingertips. She smiled, and then she gently pulled away. Her purse held a compact with a pocket mirror. She flipped it open and began to study her face.

  What she saw was unsettling and disturbing, but she didn’t turn away as she’d been doing for so many years. Instead she stared at her reflection and tried to take in her features with her heart instead of her brain.

  Her face was part of her. It might be too big to fit her personal definition of beauty, but she saw intelligence in her reflection, sensitivity in her eyes, humor in her wide mouth. It was a good face. Well-balanced. It belonged to her, and that made it good. “Jake?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “I really am pretty, aren’t I?”

  He looked at her and grinned, a wisecrack ready to slip from his mouth. But then he saw her expression, and his grin disappeared. “I think you’re the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen,” he said simply.

  She sighed and settled back into her seat, a satisfied smile on her face.

  The motorcycle rider waited until the Jag disappeared around the bend before he came out from behind the scrub. He lifted his helmet, took in the road. Then he headed up the rutted drive to the cantilevered house.

  Chapter 27

  They returned an hour later, shivering with cold from their rambling, kiss-filled walk along the ocean. Jake lit a fire and laid a comforter in front of it. They undressed each other and made love—slow and tender. He mounted her. She, him. Her hair drifted around them both.

  Afterward, they ceremoniously burned his manuscript, and as one page after another went up in flames, Jake seemed to grow younger. “I think I can forget it now.”

  She rested her head against his bare shoulder. “Don’t forget. Your past will always be part of you, and you have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  He picked up the poker and pushed a loose page back into the flames, but he didn’t say anything, and she didn’t push him. He needed time. It was enough for now that he could talk to her about what had happened.

  She called the office and told David she needed a few days off. “It’s about time you took a vacation,” he said.

  She and Jake shut out the world. Their happiness felt iridescent, and their tender, passionate lovemaking filled them both with a sense of wonder.

  On their third morning, she was lying in bed wearing only a T-shirt when he came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. She inched up against the suede headboard. “Let’s go horseback riding.”

  “There’s no good place to ride around here.”

  “What do you mean? There’s a stable not three miles away. We passed it yesterday when we out for a drive. I haven’t been on a horse in months.”

  He picked up a pair of jeans and seemed to be inspecting it for wrinkles, something she’d never known him to care one thing about. “Why don’t you go by yourself? I need to catch up on some work. Besides, I have to ride all the time. It’d be a busman’s holiday.”

  “It won’t be fun without you.”

  “You’re the one who pointed out that we have to get used to separations.” He stumbled over her sneakers.

  She looked at him more closely. He was fidgety, and an outrageous suspicion struck her. “How many Westerns have you made?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Take a guess.”

  “Five…six. I don’t know.” He seemed to have developed a sudden reluctance to drop his towel in front of her. Snatching up his jeans, he carried them back into the bathroom.

  “How about…seven?” she called out brightly.

  “Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I guess that’s about right.” She heard him turn on the faucet and then the sounds of a noisy toothbrushing. He finally reappeared—bare chest, jeans still unzipped, a dab of toothpaste at the corner of his mouth.

  She offered her most polite smile. “Seven Westerns, did you say?”

  He fumbled with his zipper. “Uh-huh.”

  “A lot of time in the saddle.”

  “Damned zipper’s stuck.”

  She nodded her head thoughtfully. “A lot of saddle time.”

  “I think it’s broken.”

  “So tell me? Have you always been afraid of horses, or is it something recent?”

  His head shot up. “Yeah, sure. Yeah, right.”

  She didn’t say a word. She merely smiled.

  “Me? Afraid of horses?”

  Not a word.

  Another jerk on the zipper. “A lot you know.”

  He was determined to gut it out. He even managed an appropriately belligerent sneer. Her smile passed from sweet to saccharine. Finally he dropped his head. “I wouldn’t exactly say I was afraid,” he muttered.

  “What exactly would you say?” she cooed.

  “We just don’t get along, that’s all.”

  She let out a whoop of laughter and fell back on the bed. “You’re afraid of horses! Bird Dog’s afraid of horses! You’ll have to be my slave forever. I can blackmail you with this for the rest of your life. Backrubs, home-cooked meals, kinky sex—”

  He looked hurt. “I like dogs.”

  “Do you now?”

  “Big ones, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Rotweillers. Shepherds. Bull mastiffs. The bigger the dog, the more I like it.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Damned right you are.”

  “Very impressed. I was starting to think you were more of a Chihuahua guy.”

  “Are you crazy? Those suckers bite.”

  She laughed and threw herself into his arms.

  On their last day together, she lay with her head in his lap and thought about how much she didn’t want to fly home alone tomorrow, but Jake needed to stay in California for a few weeks to take care of all the business he’d neglected while he’d been writing his book.

  He made a paintbrush out of a lock of her hair. “I’ve been thinking…” He trailed the curl over her lips. “What about—what do you think would happen…” He painted her cheekbone. “What if we…got married?”

  A rush of joy shot through her. She lifted her head. “Really?”

  “Why not?”

  Her joy bubble slipped aside just enough to reveal a tiny yellow caution light. “I think—I think it’s too
fast.”

  “We’ve known each other for seven years. That’s not exactly fast.”

  “But we haven’t been together for seven years. Neither of us can stand to fail at this. We bruise too easily. And we have to be absolutely sure.”

  “I couldn’t be surer.”

  Neither could she. At the same time…“Let’s give ourselves a chance to see how we handle the separation of having two careers—how we deal with the rough spots that are going to come along.”

  “I thought women were supposed to be romantics. What happened to impulse and passion?”

  “They’re opening in Vegas for Wayne Newton.”

  “You’ve got a smart mouth.” He lowered himself over her and began nibbling at her bottom lip. “Let’s do something about that.”

  His mouth moved to her breast, and she told herself she was right not to leap to marry him. They’d both received important insights about themselves this weekend, and they needed time to adjust.

  But there was another reason. Some small part of her still didn’t entirely trust Jake, and she couldn’t handle another abandonment.

  His kisses dipped lower, her senses ignited, and the world faded away around them.

  Success bred success, and now that it didn’t matter so much, everything she touched seemed to turn to gold. She renegotiated Olivia Creighton’s Dragon’s Bay contract, then signed one of the most promising of Hollywood’s new wave of actors. Kissy’s movie was going fabulously well in London, Rough Harbor’s album was getting the kind of airplay that signaled a big hit, and orders were rolling in for Michel’s designs. As icing on the cake, she came back from a business lunch one afternoon to find a Mailgram on her desk, the crux of which read:

  ELOPING AT HIGH NOON TOMORROW STOP WILL PHONE AFTER HONEYMOON STOP CHARLIE JUST TOLD ME HOW RICH HE REALLY IS STOP AINT LOVE GRAND

  Fleur laughed and leaned back in her chair. Ain’t love grand, indeed.

  Jake flew out from L.A. for a long weekend of sex, conversation, and laughter, but he had go back to do some overdubbing. She talked to him two or three times a day, sometimes more. He called as soon as he woke up in the morning, and she called before she went to bed at night. “This is good,” she said. “Since we can’t touch each other, we’re learning to relate on a more cerebral level.”