Smoke Signals

by Catherine Gayle

  One of his hands lay firm against the small of my back, arching me toward him. The other rested against my cheek, a caress so tender it might crush me. With gentle pressure, he tilted my head to the side and moved his lips toward my ear.

  “You have to make Tallie think we got married because we love each other,” he whispered, the words so quiet I could barely make them out. “Understand? If there’s an investigation, they’ll question people we know. No one can think we did it just to get you a green card.”

  This was getting worse and worse. I nodded my understanding. After another brief kiss, Razor backed away from me. He reached in his wallet and took out a credit card, passing it over to me. I tucked it in a zippered pocket of my purse where it would be safe. When I looked up again, Razor winked at me.

  “Y’all are just too cute together,” Tallie gushed, bouncing up on her toes.

  “You know how it is,” Razor said. “You meet someone and you just know. Like with you and Hunter.”

  Tallie nodded. “You know, sometimes I think it’s better when you jump in without looking. No time for second-guessing. No questioning if you should or you shouldn’t. You just do it, and then find a way to make it work. That’s not to say it’s easy, but I think it’s worth it in the end.”

  Razor chuckled. “What’s Hunter up to today while you two have girl time?”

  “Putting together the nursery with his brother. He and Kade said it was the perfect time to deal with painting and constructing the crib and all—because I’ll be out of their hair for hours.”

  “Hours?” I repeated, trying not to cringe.

  Tallie gave me a you-can’t-be-serious look. “Of course! Oh, I made an appointment for us to get manis and pedis this afternoon, too. I hope you don’t mind. But if we’re going to shop the way I haven’t done in months, my feet are gonna need it.”

  I shot a look in Razor’s direction, pleading with my eyes. “You could come with?”

  “Oh, that’d be perfect!” Tallie said. “You could carry all our bags, and—”

  “I can’t,” Razor interrupted. He gave me an apologetic shrug. “There are a few things I need to take care of while you’re gone. Besides, I’m sure you two could both use a little girl time.”

  I didn’t want girl time. Being around Tallie for too long was sure to leave me feeling overwhelmed, and I was stressed enough as it was. Everything was shifting all around me, and my feet couldn’t find solid purchase.

  But Tallie said, “Aw, that’s too bad. But we’d probably drive you up the wall in no time anyway.” She pouted a bit, but she hooked her arm through mine and tugged.

  I trudged beside her, glancing over my shoulder at Razor for reassurance. He gave me a smile, but it didn’t do much to ease the panic that had a death-grip on my heart. All I wanted was to go home. But where was that? I wasn’t sure I knew anymore. For now, I supposed it was here, at Razor’s house. But for how long?

  I got into Tallie’s car with the utter certainty that sooner, rather than later, I would be deported turning my stomach to stone. Because I knew exactly what awaited me when I returned to Russia. And it was worse than all that I’d been through since I’d left.

  “OH MY GOD, that’s so good.” Tallie’s words came out in a half moan, half sigh. She leaned back in the pedicure chair with her feet in the bubbling water, letting her head fall back in pure bliss. She peeked at me through a single slitted eye. “Don’t get me wrong. I love shopping like nobody’s business, and I am tickled pink with all the adorable stuff we got you, but I needed this. My feet are killing me.”

  I was still in awe of her shopping prowess. We’d been gone for six hours. In that time, we’d been to two malls and a shopping strip, bought clothing and shoes from at least eight separate stores—I’d honestly lost count—spent more money than I could have made in a month of porn shoots, eaten lunch at an expensive restaurant, and now we were getting manicures and pedicures together.

  I took off my shoes, hoping to get my feet in the water as quickly as possible. As a ballerina, I was always self-conscious about my feet. All those years in pointe shoes had left so many calluses and cuts that my feet were nothing short of hideous to look at.

  “You’re a dancer?” Tallie said, her eyes popping open wide as she struggled to sit upright.

  Embarrassed, I dunked my feet into the water before I’d properly rolled up the hem of my new jeans, drenching them. I’d worn them and some of my other new clothes out of the store because I didn’t want Tallie to feel embarrassed about being seen with me. When I’d left school with the intention of becoming a prostitute, I’d sold all of my normal clothes to a resale shop. I knew I’d need every penny I could get, and my new profession had certain wardrobe requirements that they just wouldn’t suit.

  “You have to be,” Tallie said. “One of my girlfriends—a sorority sister—she had feet that looked just like yours. Ballet? I would have loved to take ballet. Mama pushed me into jazz. Said it was better for the pageant world.” She rolled her eyes.

  “I’m ballerina,” I forced out as two women rolled over on tiny stools and started working on us.

  “Why didn’t you say something? Do you still dance? Even if you haven’t in a while, you should take it up again. It’ll give you something to do while Razor’s busy. There’s a lot of time to fill when the guys go on the road. We should go get you what you need for that before I take you home. Some of the other guys and their families will start coming back to Tulsa soon, too, so I can introduce you around. Granted, some of them, you’re better off not knowing at all, but I’ll be sure to point them out to you. Oh, do you like frozen yogurt? There’s this place we can stop by on our way home, and I’ve been having these serious cravings, but Hunter’s trying to keep in shape for the season so I don’t like having it around the house to tempt him…”

  She kept prattling, apparently content for me to occasionally nod or make a humming sound. I didn’t pay much attention. My mind was going a hundred miles an hour, trying to figure out how much time my marriage to Razor might buy me before the immigration people wanted to send me back to Russia. And then there were all the implications involved with trying to fool people into believing that we married for love. Not only would we have to get to know each other well enough to put on a convincing show, but we would have to display the same kinds of physical intimacy that Tallie and Hunter did. I’d watched them during the wedding reception. They truly belonged together, and it was clear from more than just the way they’d teased each other, more than their playful banter. They’d touched often, in small, seemingly inconsequential ways. He’d kissed her on the cheek, on the forehead, on her knuckles. She’d rested her hand on his thigh. He’d draped an arm around the back of her chair. When her baby had kicked, she’d reached for his hand and pressed it to her belly. And through it all, it had seemed both natural and wanted on both their parts.

  I wasn’t sure I could behave like that around Razor. He was already trying to do his part to pull off this scheme. The way he’d kissed me in the hall before Tallie and I left was proof enough of that.

  But that small amount of contact had made everything inside me go haywire.

  Sex, I could do. It might not be what I wanted. I might not enjoy it. It would likely even be painful. But it was what I knew. Sex was the way I communicated. Tender touches and loving kisses were not part of my vocabulary.

  The women finished our pedicures and cleared all their supplies out of the way, leaving us in the chairs while our toenails dried.

  Tallie wiggled her toes and grinned at me. “Do you think that coral shade is good on me? I worry that it’s too orange with my skin.”

  I shook my head. “Not too orange. It’s good.” It was bright and vibrant, much like her personality.

  “That grayish-blue is almost an exact match of your eyes,” she said. “Too bad it’s so far away from them. I bet Razor’ll like that.”

  I let out a hum. The distance wouldn’t matter. I had no intention of
letting anyone see my feet any more than absolutely necessary.

  She waggled her brows at me, much like she’d done with her toes a moment before. “You don’t think he’ll notice? I’d bet he notices everything about you.”

  I couldn’t think of a thing to say to that.

  Wordlessly, Tallie stared at me so long I thought I would melt under her assessment. She sighed. “You should tell me to hush up sometimes, you know. It’s all right. I know I talk too much, and I’m not letting you get a word in edgewise.”

  “Not much for me to say.”

  The hint of a smile curled up the corners of her lips, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “I don’t believe that for a second. You’ve got a lot to say. Maybe you’re just not ready to say it. That’s all right. But when you’re ready, you just let me know I need to hush up and listen. I can do that. It won’t hurt my feelings any. Lord knows Hunter tells me to shut my yap all the time.”

  I smiled and nodded, wishing our toenails would hurry up and dry so we could leave. With just the two of us, and nothing else going on but for us to talk, she was focusing in on me like a laser beam. I felt stripped bare under her attention, much as I was starting to feel with Razor every time he pried away one of my layers.

  “Look, Tori,” Tallie said after a long silence. “I don’t know what’s happened to you. But I do know it looks like you could use a friend. I could use a few friends around here, too. When you’re ready, I hope you’ll let me be one.”

  “But you don’t know—”

  “I don’t know much of anything because I’ve talked over you almost nonstop since we first met. I do know you’ve got a lot going on in your head. I can see it in your eyes and in the hunch of your shoulders. It’s in the way you wrap your arms around that purse and hold it all tight to your chest. There’s a lot of hurt in there. I’m not going to lie to you and pretend I understand, because I don’t. I don’t have a clue what all you’ve been through. I’m just saying, if you want to talk, I’ll listen. And even if you don’t want to talk, we can still get together to go shopping and have frozen yogurt and get our nails done. There’s nothing worse than feeling alone, and I don’t want you to feel alone. Okay?”

  I was on the verge of tears, but I knew that if I let one drop, I’d never be able to make them stop. Today had been too much. This whole week had been too much. So I nodded, because it was all I could do.

  “Good.” She bent her knee and tried to touch one of her toenails to check for dryness, but with the size of her belly, there was no chance that would happen. “Okay. Help me out here. Check to see if yours are dry.”

  I lifted my knee to my chest and touched the pad of my thumb to one of my toenails. “Dry.” The single word sounded as harsh and pained as my heart felt.

  She grinned. “Then let’s get out of here and go to Black and Pink. We’ll get you everything you need to start dancing again.”

  “But where will I dance?”

  “Oh, honey.” Tallie spun her feet to the side of her chair and slipped into her flip-flops. “Don’t you worry about that. There’re lots of dance studios and whatnot around here.”

  Ever since they’d informed me I’d been kicked out of my dance program, ballet had been the furthest thing from my mind. I’d been focused on finding a way to live, but dance might just be exactly what I needed. I nodded, and I actually smiled. I knew it was a real smile, too, because it caused an ache in facial muscles unaccustomed to being used in that way. How long had it been since I’d smiled? Or laughed? Too long.

  Without a word, I toed on my flats and lowered the still-wet denim over my legs before grabbing my purse.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “Ready.” For what, I couldn’t be sure. Change? The hope of something better, even if it was only for a brief moment in time?

  I followed her out of the spa, ever so slightly lighter on my feet than I’d been when we entered.

  “WHY IS IT that my only son gets married, and instead of hearing about it from his own mouth, I find out through the local hockey grapevine?” Mom asked. At least she was laughing, not hurt or mad.

  “I’m calling to tell you now,” I said sheepishly into the phone. It wasn’t that I’d wanted to keep my mother in the dark. There were things I needed to talk over with Mom while Tori wasn’t sitting there listening in, and almost every moment since we’d gotten married had been spent together, just the two of us. I could have called Mom earlier this morning, as soon as Tallie whisked Tori away to go shopping, but I’d spent that time on the Internet, trying to figure out as much as I could about immigration laws and what sort of uphill battle we would be facing.

  It didn’t look good. At all.

  At the moment, Tori was still out with Tallie, and it seemed like as good a time as any to fill Mom in on the latest developments, not to mention to get her take on what to do to help Tori through her sexual issues. Not that I had a good plan for how to broach that subject, but I figured it would come to me. Mom had always been easy to talk to about almost anything. She was an open book. We’d had some very serious and frank birds-and-the-bees types of conversations when I was still very young, and throughout my teens she had constantly checked to be sure I had an adequate supply of non-expired condoms available to me. Mom was no-holds-barred when it came to any discussion of sex. She told it how it was, and she didn’t have a filter.

  She let out a snort-laugh, which I knew was from trying to keep her voice down at work. She had her own office, but the walls were thin and people might overhear. No one at her job would give her a hard time about taking a few minutes to talk to me on company time, but that didn’t mean they needed to know what we were discussing.

  “A week later?” she asked. There was a definite eye roll included in that tone.

  “Not quite a week yet.”

  She chuckled. “I see how important I am to you.”

  “Mom, you know you’re the most important person in the world to me.”

  “Except maybe for your new wife…”

  I started to contradict her but stopped before the words were fully formed. Would I put Tori before my mother? It was a thought that shook my foundation.

  Because I wasn’t sure, but I was leaning toward Mom being right. Not surprising. Mom was always right. I hadn’t thought so for a few years in my teens, but as I’d gotten older, it was a truth I’d simply come to accept.

  “It’s all right, Ray. I’ve always known that someday, someone else was going to step in line ahead of me. If and when you have kids of your own, there will probably be several someones in front of me. That’s how it works.”

  “No matter what, you’re always going to be my one and only mom.”

  There wasn’t a doubt in my mind she was smiling. It was almost audible. “You’d better believe it. So, tell me about her. How’d you meet? What’s she like? When are you bringing her to meet me?”

  Probably better to ease her into it. “Well, her name’s Tori. She’s a ballerina.” All true.

  “A ballerina? Like, a professional ballerina?”

  “Not exactly.” Yet. That could change, though. Only now, I realized I had no idea if she was any good or not. I didn’t know the first thing about dance, and I hardly knew anything about my wife. “We met in Vegas while I was there for Babs’s wedding.”

  “You just met her?” Her laugh was full this time, a big, familiar belly laugh that warmed me all the way to my toes. “Why doesn’t it surprise me that you got married on a whim? That’s my boy. Puts on blinders and jumps in without looking. For years, you’ve been dating all these girls, a new girl every time I talked to you, but you’d hardly ever let me meet any of them.”

  “They weren’t the one, so why bother with having them meet you? All it would have accomplished is getting you to tell me how wrong for me they were, and then I’d feel like I was letting you down.” I couldn’t stand letting Mom down. Not after all she’d done to help me get ahead in life. I might as well stomp on her if that was how I we
nt about repaying her for everything she’d sacrificed.

  “You never could,” she said. “But Tori is really the one? And you knew it the instant you met?”

  We have to be convincing. If I took Greg’s words at face value, chances were high that there would be a lot of interviews of people in our lives, and that meant they would talk to Mom almost undoubtedly. So I bit down on the inside of my cheek and prepared to lie to my mother, even though it killed me to do so.

  “Yeah. She’s the one. And I knew it right away.”

  The first lie. Only, it didn’t exactly feel like I was lying. Was Tori the woman I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with? I honestly hadn’t thought about our relationship in those terms before now, which seemed insane considering the two of us had made the relatively permanent decision to get married. Even if I didn’t know the full extent of the law as far as getting Tori a green card through marriage, there was definitely a part of me that realized our union wouldn’t be a temporary situation. We couldn’t just marry for six months, wait for the paperwork to go through, and then get a quick divorce. Tori needed someone to stick around in her life. She needed me. Was that enough for her to be the one?

  “How’d you know?” Mom demanded.

  Well, hell. Without thinking, I spit out the first thing that came to mind. “I recognized a piece of you in her.”

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you’re not supposed to marry your mother? Someone should have mentioned that.”

  “I think that would have been your job, Mom.”