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Needing something is the surest way not to get something. I learned that lesson young.
Which is why it was a good thing those elevator doors opened.
I was enjoying her embarrassment too much. She really was smelling me. Her neck was so pink when I called her on it, her frown so pouty, it was all I could do not to press her to the wall and take that pretty little mouth like a rabid animal.
I cut out another trunk, focusing on getting my shit back together.
Part of Vicky’s genius is that she doesn’t add up as a scam artist. She’s fun, interesting, easy to be with, pretty. Gorgeous, really, much as she tries to hide it. She’s creative. Tenacious.
A weaker man might fall for her, might not care she puts all that goodness to use as a grifter.
She stares down at her tiny tree, inspecting her handiwork. She sets it down and uses the tweezers to make a quick adjustment while the glue is still drying. The tip of her tongue edges out the side of her mouth as she concentrates, peeking just up over the very corner of her upper lip.
If I was a different man—a more gullible man—I might be turned on by that. I might be imagining the taste of that tongue, maybe even the soft rasp of it against my cock.
I get up and go to the window, to the familiar old view, force my mind far away, back to the long afternoons after school in this room with Brett and Renaldo. Dad would be on his jet somewhere and we’d have escaped from this or that bored French au pair and found Renaldo, gotten him to bring us up here. He was running a lot of the operations by then, but he was never too busy to teach us model making. Or he’d take us out to the sites and we’d watch the subs work, tag along while he lorded over the superintendents on building sites across the five boroughs.
Renaldo’s eighty-five now. He can’t move around or remember much, but coming to work means everything to him—more than all the golden parachutes Locke Worldwide can give him, so we have him on models. The trees we’re making took him days. It would crush him to see them down. He’s frail like that.
I miss those days of getting lost in making the structural bridges and the tiny models. It calms me. I might be a happier person if I could just design, but the company needs me.
I slide the new trunk over for Vicky and her tiny gluing technique. “That’s a good one,” she says brightly.
I give her a look, like I don’t need her compliments on my model-making technique.
She looks back down, chastened.
I watch the rise of her chest, the shift of light on the dark fabric covering her breasts that I’ve spent a lot of time trying not to wonder about.
She forms a kind of kiss as she blows on the drying glue. Does she know she’s doing that?
Of course she does. She’s a grifter. I need to always remember that.
Again the pink tongue tip!
A lot of women lick their lips at me—the long gaze, the lick of the lips, they have their place. But the most lewd lip lick has nothing on the appearance of Vicky’s pink tongue tip during intense concentration. Her and her witchy little smile and mad tree skills and pink tongue tip.
Hot damn.
She holds it up for me to see, twirling it, inspecting it. “What do you think?”
I’m not looking at the tree.
“Why did you leave Vermont?” I ask.
“What?”
“Two young girls. Their parents die. Why leave?” It seemed suspicious to me when I read it in the report. “Why not stay?”
She looks away. “Prescott’s in the middle of nowhere. Very rural.”
“If I wanted to know that, I would’ve looked on Google.”
She casts her gaze down; thick lashes sweep over high cheekbones. I sense she’s hiding something, and I’m glad. I want her to lie, and for it to be obvious. Something to counteract how nice it is to spend time with her. How much I admire her quiet focus. Her sense of humor.
“Surely you knew people there. You came to a strange city.”
“I didn’t…like it there.” She glues a tiny curl to a new tree.
