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“Still…It had to be especially hard for you. All that mess and no way to clean it up.”
“I handled it. Now get out. I mean it, Georgie. I have to concentrate.”
Georgie should leave, but the turbulent emotions bubbling behind Chaz’s tough facade had drawn her in from the beginning, and somehow the camera demanded she record it. She shifted her questioning. “Does fixing dinner for more than one person make you nervous?”
“I fix dinner for more than one person practically every night.” She tossed the chopped garlic in a bowl with some peeled ginger. “I feed you, don’t I?”
“But you don’t put your heart into it. I swear, Chaz, even your desserts taste bitter.”
Chaz’s head shot up. “That’s a crappy thing to say.”
“Just a personal observation. Bram loves your cooking, and so does Meg. But then you seem to like Meg.”
Chaz pressed her lips tight. Her blade moved faster.
Georgie stepped to the end of the counter. “You’d better watch yourself. Great cooks know that extraordinary food is about more than mixing ingredients. Who you are as a person—how you feel about other people—shows up in what you create.”
The rhythm of Chaz’s chopping slowed. “I don’t believe that.”
Georgie told herself to let it go, but she couldn’t, not with the camera in her hands, not when this seemed so right. A wave of compassion overcame her, along with an odd sense of understanding. She and Chaz had each found her own way of coping with a world over which they seemed to have little control. “Then why do your desserts taste so bitter?” she said softly. “Is it really me you hate…or is it yourself?”
Chaz dropped her knife and stared into the camera, her black-rimmed eyes wide.
“Leave her alone, Georgie.” Bram spoke sharply from the doorway. “Take your camera and leave her alone.”
Chaz turned on him. “You told her!”
Bram came into the room. “I haven’t told her anything.”
“She knows! You told her!”
Chaz’s anger and self-hatred were visceral, and Georgie wanted to understand it. She wanted to film it as a testament to all the young girls consumed by their own pain. Except she had no right to invade her privacy like this, and she made herself—forced herself—to lower the camera.
“She doesn’t know anything you haven’t told her with your big mouth,” Bram said.
Once again Georgie ordered herself to leave, but her feet weren’t moving. Instead, she said, “I know you’re not the only girl who’s come to L.A. and done what she had to so she could survive.”
Chaz’s hands curled into fists. “I wasn’t a whore. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? I was some kind of crack whore!”
Bram shot Georgie a death glare and moved to Chaz’s side. “Let it go. You don’t have to defend yourself to anyone.”
But something seemed to have broken open inside her. She focused only on Georgie. Her lips pulled tight over her teeth and her voice became a snarl. “I wasn’t doing drugs! Never! I ju
st wanted a place to live and some decent food.”
Georgie turned off the camera.
“No!” Chaz cried. “Turn it back on. You wanted to hear this so bad…Turn it on.”
“It’s all right. I don’t—”
“Turn it on!” Chaz said fiercely. “This is important. Make it important.”
Georgie’s hands had begun to shake, but she understood, and she did as Chaz asked.
“I was dirty and living out of a backpack.” Through the lens Georgie watched tears spill over the inky dam of Chaz’s bottom lashes. “I went a day without eating and then another day. I heard about this soup kitchen, but I couldn’t make myself go in. I was feeling crazy from not eating and it seemed better to sell my body than take charity.”
Bram tried to rub her back, but she pushed him away. “I told myself it would be just once, and I’d charge enough so I could get by until the cast came off my hand.” Her words pummeled the camera. “He was an old guy. He was going to pay me two hundred bucks. But after it was over, he pushed me out of his car instead and drove away without giving me anything. I threw up in the gutter.” Her mouth tightened with bitterness. “After that I learned to get my money first. Mostly twenty bucks, but I wasn’t using—I never used drugs—and I made them wear condoms, so I wasn’t like the other girls who were using and didn’t care about anything. I cared, and I wasn’t a whore!”
