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“Heartbreaking,” Wendy finished for him.
“I was going to say ‘disappointing,’ but if you want me to feel even worse about it . . . ”
She laughed halfheartedly. “Why don’t you accept it?”
He shook his head. “I can’t. My dad expects me to take over the firm next month so he can retire.”
“That sounds like his problem, not yours.”
“No, I have to run the place because my sister really wants to work there. She’s still in college.”
“That sounds like her problem.”
“And my brother . . . ” He looked up at the ceiling, unable to go on. It was impossible to explain his brother, who’d been the only member of the firm killed that morning because he went to work so early to impress their father. Daniel’s voice cracked a little as he said, “You don’t understand.”
“Explain it to me,” she persisted.
“Like . . . ” He was talking with his hands, fingers splayed in front of him, and he’d opened with like—two things his father had constantly belittled him for when he was young. He put his hands down. “Before my brother died, I was interested in history and rhetoric and politics and progress and forward thinking. Nobody told me I couldn’t pursue that, because my brother was there to take over the firm. And then after he died . . . ” Daniel forced himself to put his hands down again. “There was this double whammy. He died, and I couldn’t do what I wanted anymore. But somehow that second lesson never quite sank in.”
“Or,” Wendy said, “you still want that dream career for yourself, and the career you have now is for everybody except yourself.”
He shook his head. “You don’t get it.” She had no idea about that feeling he had sometimes, that he’d had since he was sixteen, of shoring up his whole family so the world didn’t cave in on them.
“Okay,” Wendy said evenly.
He looked over at her. There was absolutely no judgment in her face. She’d been grilling him a few seconds before, but now her expression was devoid of blame.
Absently he flicked his finger across his trackpad. The screen saver blinked off, and five new headlines scrolled up.
“When my dad started the firm,” he said, “things were different. It was a lot easier to keep a secret. There were no social media sites, for one thing. There was no Internet and a lot less television. There were fewer paparazzi because there were fewer outlets for selling a photo. But even more importantly, stars were genuinely stars. There was a reason they were famous—looks, family, occasionally even talent. They didn’t become stars overnight. They didn’t expect to ride the train for a few weeks and lose everything just as quickly. Today’s reality shows have interjected this strange influx of bums, ingrates, and no-talent sons of bitches into the mix, and sometimes you can’t tell who’s who at an Oscars after-party.
“Nowadays it just doesn’t matter, you know? I wanted to work in PR for something that really matters, like politics, like getting someone into office who can make a difference, and keeping that person there no matter what mud the other side slings. But whether the public likes or dislikes Colton Farr for pissing in the fountain at the Bellagio, and whether he’s able to land his blockbuster movie and pull his career out of the gutter . . . I don’t care, and nobody else should, either.”
“I care,” Wendy spoke up. “I mean, not about Colton. But if you’re a little girl living in the middle of nowhere and your life is basically nothing, it can really give you hope to idolize a glamorous star.” She pointed to her pink computer screen. “I have always read the tabloids.”
Daniel leaned closer, gazing dubiously at a montage of overdressed starlets and their ratlike dogs.
“Even reality stars have talent,” Wendy said. “They have a larger-than-life personality that people want to watch, even if it’s just strange or grating.”
“You should know,” Daniel said.
Wendy’s brow furrowed in protest, but then her expression relaxed, backing away from his challenge. “I guess I walked into that one.”
“I meant the larger-than-life personality,” Daniel clarified, “not the other.”
She sniffed. “Right.”
Daniel huffed out frustration. He really hadn’t meant to insult her, but he’d been putting his foot in his mouth constantly around her, which wasn’t like him at all. If he didn’t know better, he’d say she made him flustered. “I’m not telling you anything you haven’t heard already,” he said. “Isn’t that why you got kicked off the Darkness Fallz case? Isn’t that why you got called into the dean’s office a couple of times in college? I know that’s why nobody could take their eyes off you.”
“I think that was the hair. That’s what it usually is.” She grabbed a lock falling over her shoulder and examined the ends. The front of her hair was still bound in a braid, but tendrils had come loose and framed her face in soft gold. The back hung in big curls. Yes, it was the hair.
“Maybe,” Daniel said.
She looked over at him. “Do you need to get in the bathroom? Because I’m going to be a while. I need to wash my hair, which is an undertaking. I used it to mop the floor of that exhibit room. It’s three shades darker than normal.”
“Only at the roots,” Daniel said diplomatically. “It looks like your darker roots are growing out.”
“That’s grease.”
“There’s blood in it, too.” He nodded toward the bathroom. “Go ahead.”
She felt the back of her head for the blood. Then she walked toward the bathroom, slowing once and listing a bit to one side as if she weren’t quite steady on her feet. After she’d disappeared and he could hear the door start to swing shut, he called sharply, “Wendy.”
She stuck her head back out to look at him.
“Don’t lock the door.”
She didn’t protest this time. “ ’Kay.” The door clicked shut.
Reluctantly he navigated away from his news feeds so he could address his father’s concerns with a few well-placed press releases on Colton’s stability and his excitement about the upcoming awards show. But he found himself listening very hard for noises through the bathroom door: The whisper of Wendy pulling the cotton T-shirt across her bare br**sts and up over her head. A cascade that sounded like relief as she pushed the material of her sweatpants to the floor.
The vent moaned, and shortly afterward, the shower hissed. The striptease in his head was over. He tried to go back to his work.
But the sound of the shower danced with Wendy underneath it. The droplets drummed against the shower walls, paused as her body blocked the spray, and resumed their beat as she moved. He couldn’t get her out of his head. He pictured her na**d with the hot water streaming over her creamy body, turning her bright hair slick and dark.
He turned away from his computer, toward her. He peered down the hallway to the bathroom. He couldn’t go down it. Or, he could, but he wouldn’t.
Just for a moment, though, he put his chin in his hands, staring at the laptop but not seeing it, and allowed himself the fantasy of Wendy. He’d done this before, in college. Back then the fantasy had turned physical. He’d returned to the dorm after class, closed himself in his room, and pleasured himself with the thought of her, this saucy girl from Appalachia who thought she would get the better of him.
The fantasy had involved Dr. Abbott’s class. He’d bent her over Dr. Abbott’s desk, with or without Dr. Abbott still behind it, with or without the whole class watching. He’d wrapped her golden hair around his fist, holding her down and motionless as he entered her.
Now he was still thinking about her hair—how could he not?—but he didn’t need an audience. He’d grown out of that urge for public sex. The new fantasy had him walking down that hall. Turning the knob on that unlocked door. Walking through the mist and raking back the white curtain, slowly so he wouldn’t startle her, to be greeted by that brilliant smile, those sparkling blue eyes. Her long, wet hair would be streaming over her shoulders and down her front. He would reach forward and slick it away from her breasts—
“Daniel?”
He started in surprise and nearly lost hold of his laptop.
Shaking off his shock, he realized she’d called to him from the bathroom. She was in trouble.
He leaped up and reached the bathroom door in two steps. It was open a few inches, the light golden beyond it. He swung it open.
Wendy stood there with a white towel wrapped around her, gripping the terry cloth closed with both fists. Surprisingly, her hair was dry, with the same golden glow he’d always known, hanging in strange waves now that her braid was undone, but her face was wet. Her eyelashes were wet and dark, and he couldn’t tell from her expression whether she’d just washed her face or she was in tears.
Her shaky voice gave him the answer. “I am so sorry,” she sobbed. “I need your help.”
“Okay.”
“Because I’m not supposed to get the stitches wet. But I have to wash my hair. In this business it’s important that the smell of your hair doesn’t repulse people. You understand this.”
“Right.”
“And I tried but I’m not going to have enough hands. I’m going to get the stitches wet and then I’m going to have to go back to the hospital and while I’m gone Lorelei is going to have a threesome with a showgirl and a taxi driver and tweet the pictures and I’m going to get fired.”
He’d thought she was incredibly strong, seeming to shrug off the attack on her body last night. Turned out she just hid things well. Almost as well as he did.
“Hey.” He put out one hand, but hesitated to place it on her shoulder, which was wet and bare. He put it down. “I’ll help you. I would help you even if you weren’t na**d.”
“Oh.” She heaved a deep sigh. “You just looked so . . . I didn’t think you were going to help me. You looked mean.”
“I didn’t feel mean.”
She tilted her head, considering him, and her long hair inched even farther down her bare arm. “Someone could make a poster with captions for all of your emotions and use the same photo for each one. Meanness. Anger. Happiness. Hunger. Giddiness. Lust.”
He raised his eyebrows.
She swallowed. “Embarrassment.”
“Charitableness,” he said. “What do you need me to do?”
She handed him a small plastic bag. “Hold this over my stitches while I wash my hair. If you think that’s gross, I have latex gloves, too.”
“I have my own latex gloves, but I don’t think it’s gross.”
“You have your own latex gloves? I thought I was being weird to pack mine.”
“You never know what you’ll encounter in this job. Especially in Vegas.” He took the plastic bag from her.
She slid another towel from the rack as she turned, then dropped it on the tile floor beside the shower. She glanced back at him. “To kneel on, so you don’t hurt your knees.”
“Do I look that fragile?”
She shrugged, which made her towel slip a little. She tightened it around herself, blushing. “I just . . . okay.” She kneeled on the towel herself and pushed back the shower curtain to reveal the still-gushing faucet. A cloud of steam escaped.
“Just a sec.” Daniel stepped into the hall, pulled off his T-shirt, and tossed it in the direction of the bed, thinking as he did so that reality was verging closer and closer to his fantasy of Wendy. He stepped back inside.
Wendy was watching the door for him, looking small and so sexy with the towel barely covering her breasts. When she saw him, her eyes widened. He expected her to comment on his na**d upper body, but she didn’t. She turned back to the tub.
He kneeled behind her on the towel. Parting her hair, he found the stitches in the back and held the plastic bag over them, cupping his hand to protect the wound without using too much pressure and hurting her. “Okay, go.”
She leaned forward to wet the front of her hair. His hand didn’t follow, and her head slipped out from under the plastic bag.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You know what? I’m afraid I’m going to hurt you. Let’s switch jobs.” He brought her hand back and placed it over the plastic bag. “You hold it. Now lean forward.”
Obediently she held the front of her head under the stream again. Her long hair seemed to become part of the water, glinting golden and pooling on the bottom of the white tub. He reached behind him to the sink for the ice bucket, then filled that with hot water and poured it on her hair around the wound, carefully avoiding the stitches. He squirted out a handful of her shampoo, rubbed his hands together to spread it, and worked his palms through one side of her hair, then the other, massaging her scalp with his fingertips and lingering over the job way longer than he needed to. He was getting hard.
To steer himself away from the fantasy again, he joked, “You have a lot of hair.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. It wasn’t an insult, just an observation. If you could see the expression on my face, you would know that. I’m grinning ear to ear.”
“I don’t believe it.” She moved as if she would turn to look at him.
He put his wet hand on her bare back. “No, don’t look. I’m almost done.” And he needed to get rid of this hard-on before she noticed. He filled the bucket with water again and carefully poured it around the wound, then over the rest of her hair. The suds slid away and vanished.
