AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She didn’t personally know well anyone who’d played with Heidi. Occasionally, people showed up at Clay’s events looking for a certain kind of evening and would negotiate something with Heidi, but none of the regulars could—or would—say anything about her. In general, most of the less prolific body collectors tried not to piss in their own pond. Even Carine could count on one hand the number of regulars she’d slept with over the past three years and still have three fingers left over.
“Do you want the help or not?” Carine grumbled, suddenly soured on the realization she’d made her world so tiny without intending to. Before buying her membership to Clay’s, intimacy had somehow been easier to come by. She wasn’t sure what went wrong.
Eying Carine speculatively, Heidi tossed her hair over her shoulder and leaned her forearms onto the cart handle. “Are you asking genuinely?”
“Sorry, the grumble wasn’t for you. I was annoying myself again.” Everyone who knew Carine at least a little bit knew she was prone to doing that. “And yes, I was being sincere. My scouting years ended thirty pounds and two cup sizes ago, but I think printing those shirts should come naturally to me.”
“You’ve got nothing better to do with your free time?”
“Than to snoop first-hand into Dowd Wave Cruiser business? No, I actually don’t.”
Heidi’s grin was wry as she plucked a few more shirts out of the nearly empty display box. “In that case, I’d appreciate the extra decoration you’d make in the offices for a few hours. Gets so grungy in there.”
Carine tittered. She didn’t think she’d ever been called a decoration before.
She didn’t exactly hate it and chose to read into the statement that Heidi, at the very least, considered Carine to be a well-put-together mess.
“Well, itisa factory,” Carine said.
“Mm-hmm. But I wouldn’t want to take you away from your work, either.” Heidi gestured to Carine’s cart of monstrosities. “Looks like you’ve got something going on.”
“It’s something, all right, but I’d much rather be painting shirts than turning the sales office into a sock hop.”
“Sock hop?” Heidi’s upper lip curled as the derision poured out of her. According to Tim, Heidi had been the prom queen who missed her crowning because she spent the evening following around the quarterback and making sure he didn’t escalate his “tonight’s the night orelse” proposition to his girlfriend.
Carine didn’t know if the story had much of a happy ending beyond the QB squealing tires out of the parking lot and leaving his date to find her own ride home.
“Imagine howIfeel,” Carine said. “I assure you the celebration wasn’t my idea.”
“Lipton up to their usual time-wasting plots, hmm?”
“How do you always know everything?”
Heidi gave her a blank stare. “Did I not just admit to not knowing how to screen-print? That’s a thing.”
“A minor thing. But you know everything, and that doesn’t feel right somehow.”
That wry smile again.
Carine couldn’t help but feel that Heidi tolerated her simply due to their long association. Clay sometimes called Carine “The Doll in Disarray” because she couldn’t get her shit together half the time, which was supposedly part of her charm.
She knew she was a lot to put up with.
She gritted her teeth from self-annoyance and felt inside the shirt box to see what was left. At the price they were going for, having a few spares wouldn’t be the worst possible thing. “Lipton’s tossing new tasks at me because I’m not busy enough, I guess. Instead of paying me a fair salary to run the on-site office, they keep me on a base plus commission scheme. They dangle the opportunity for bonuses if they need me to do things an actual admin should be tasked with doing. Can’t really tell them no. Too risky. I’mthis closeto paying off my debts.” She held her index finger and thumb a couple of millimeters apart. “As soon as I’ve got that monkey off my back, I’m free as a bird and getting out of the real estate business. It was always meant to be a backup plan, anyway.”
“What are your plans for after that?”
“Maybe I’ll screen-print shirts for boat companies who remember their promotional obligations last-minute. There’s probably more than one of those around here.”
Carine couldn’t tell if Heidi was amused by that response or pained by it. Her smile tended to look the same with either of those emotions.
Just once, Carine wanted her to smile at her for reasons that weren’t from pity or aggravation or mild amusement. Her vanity was powerful, and women like her collected those bare minimum acknowledgments from gorgeous people who were out of their reach.
The reasons Tim had married Heidi were evident. She’d been stunning as a young, whip-smart twenty-something fresh out of college, and at forty-three, she was hypnotizing.
Despite knowing the truth, Carine had seen enough pictures of Heidi in the past to make her second-guess the woman’s actual age. One of the builders at Shora had stumbled onto an old high school yearbook at an estate sale and, when thumbing through, spotted the well-known acerbic blond. Knowing they were at least loosely associated, the builder had held the open book in front of Carine’s face and said, “That woman’s a fuckin’ vampire. Tell me she isn’t. Botox don’t work like that.”
That Heidi Dowd, or HeidiMurray, had a gleam of optimism in her eyes and an uncynical smile. She was pretty. She was desirable. She was brave enough to bully quarterbacks.
