Radclyffe & Stacia Seaman - Romantic Interludes 2 - Secrets

by Radclyffe;Stacia Seaman

  “What do you mean, Miss Shirley?” Cora Davis asked. Though she was the youngest of the three cooks on staff, she was the unquestioned best. She had plenty of practice. “Blessed” with eleven children, most of them boys, Cora’s mother had long depended on her to lend a helping hand in the kitchen. She had been tending to boiling pots and simmering pans since she was tall enough to see over the top of the stove.

  “When she’s out there tearin’ it up like she is now, all the food and drink orders dry up. The people out there paid to get in, but all they’re doin’ now is takin’ up space. That’s not makin’ me any money.”

  Cora smiled to herself. Though Miss Shirley constantly complained about how much things cost, everyone knew she had more money than she knew what to do with. She was the one people went to see when they were in need. If she really wanted to increase revenue, she would stop serving free meals or offering half-price admission to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who was down on his luck. But Cora knew that would never happen. Despite all her bluster, Miss Shirley was just too giving not to offer a helping hand whenever and wherever she could.

  “That’s okay,” Cora said. “She can’t sing all night.” When the music stopped, the orders would come fast and furious again. It was just a matter of time. This was the quiet before the storm.

  “You sure about that? She’s on her fourth encore.” Miss Shirley paused as the crowd treated Annie to another deafening ovation. “And from the sound of that,” she continued, “they ain’t gonna let her out of here any time soon. She might still be singin’ when her train pulls out in the mornin’.”

  Cora took a peek at the stage. She had to stand on her tiptoes to see over people’s heads and even then she didn’t get to see much, but the little bit she saw was enough. It wasn’t every day she got to see a genuine celebrity in person. In truth, she and the rest of the kitchen staff were enjoying the break. Before Annie began her set, they had been up to their elbows frying fish, baking pork chops, boiling shrimp, steaming crawfish, cooking grits, and digging pickled pig’s feet out of a five-gallon jar filled with briny pink liquid.

  Cora watched a handsome man in a gray suit and matching homburg back a woman in a low-cut red dress into a corner and whisper something in her ear. Laughing at what the man said, the woman threw her head back, exposing her long neck.

  “Nothing’s that funny,” Cora mumbled under her breath.

  “Isn’t that your man sidlin’ up to Marie-Claire Boudreaux?” Miss Shirley asked, following Cora’s gaze.

  Cora frowned. “Lafayette Andrews ain’t my man.”

  Miss Shirley bit the head off of another crawfish. “You could have fooled me.”

  Cora continued to watch them. Lafayette with his flashy clothes and flashier smile. Marie-Claire with her lilting accent and sensual beauty. Part Creole, Marie-Claire had green eyes, honey brown hair, and skin the color of lightly browned butter. Cora had to admit they made quite a pair.

  “He’s Annie’s manager,” Cora said. “He only talks to me long enough to tell me what Annie wants to eat after the show. Other than that, he don’t want nothin’ to do with me.”

  She didn’t add that she didn’t want anything to do with Lafayette, either. At the moment, what she wanted was to be in his place. To feel what Lafayette was feeling right now. She wanted the fingers sliding over Marie-Claire’s smooth skin to be her own. She wanted the lips brushing against Marie-Claire’s delicate earlobes to be hers. She wanted to be the one rounding those dangerous curves. But that wasn’t the kind of thing she could say out loud. Not if she expected anyone to sympathize with her plight.

  She and Marie-Claire had grown up together. They had been as thick as thieves from the time they were born until they turned fifteen. They had walked to school together. They had worked in the sugar cane fields together. They had done everything together. When they came of age, though, they had drifted apart. Marie-Claire had discovered boys and Cora had discovered that she liked Marie-Claire. Cora had never said anything to Marie-Claire. From the beginning, she had known that there was no point, but that hadn’t stopped her from feeling the way she did. Nothing could do that.

  As the years passed, they saw each other less and less as Marie-Claire went on date after date and Cora tried to insulate herself from the pain of watching the woman she loved fall for someone else. For men who treated her badly and who didn’t appreciate her the way Cora did. Men who were looking for nothing but a night on the town, a good time, and a ticket on the first thing smoking.

  Marie-Claire thought Lafayette could be her ticket to the big time. Her ticket out of town. She had said so time and time again. She threw herself at him each year when he arrived, but each year he boarded the train without her. Perhaps this year would be different.

  As Marie-Claire and Lafayette ground against each other on the dance floor, Marie-Claire looked over her shoulder to make sure Cora was watching. Cora was, but not for long. Dropping her eyes, she returned to the task at hand. Each year, it was her job to find out what Annie wanted to eat after she finished performing, then prepare the requests, wrap up the plate, and deliver it piping-hot to Annie’s hotel room.

  “What does she want tonight?” Bessie Johnson, the oldest member of the kitchen staff and by far the most easygoing, asked while dishing up two plates of shrimp and grits for table number seven.

  “The same thing she always wants—fried chicken, black-eyed peas, collard greens, cornbread, and peach cobbler,” Cora replied. She dropped chicken parts into a brown paper bag filled with flour and shook the bag to make sure all of the pieces were evenly coated. Then she seasoned the chicken with black pepper, salt, and liberal dashes of hot sauce.

  “For a skinny little thing, she sure can put it away.” Bessie half filled two Mason jars with moonshine, put the jars and the plates on a tray, and prepared to fight her way through the crowd to deliver the order.

  “This is probably the only week out of the year that she gets good meals,” Miss Shirley said, puffing up with pride. “She says nobody puts their foot in it the way we do down here at the Dew Drop.”

  “Then I guess we down here at the Dew Drop are due for a raise,” Bessie said, tossing a wink in Cora’s direction. She knew talking about money was a sure way to get Miss Shirley’s goat.

  “Yeah, well, there’s a Depression on, you know,” Miss Shirley said, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Her fingers were stained red from the crawfish she had helped herself to. “Things are tough all over.”

  “Not for me,” Bessie said, bumping the door open with her well-padded rear end. “I ain’t had nothin’ to lose in the first place.”

  Cora lowered the chicken into the frying pan, being careful not to crowd the pieces. She didn’t want to lower the temperature in the pan too much. That would take the chicken longer to cook, making it soak up more of the grease. She wanted all her meals to be perfect, but this one especially so. It was Annie’s last night in town and Cora wanted it to be a memorable one for all the right reasons. She didn’t want Annie’s last memory of her to be greasy chicken and watery collard greens.

  By the time Annie finished singing the last scandalous strains of Ma Rainey’s “Prove It On Me Blues,” a song that the married but openly bisexual Rainey had written affirming her love of women, it was past one but the night was still young. On Saturday nights, the party at the Dew Drop didn’t end until three or four. By the time Cora usually got home, it was almost time to get up for church. One Sunday a year, though, she was excused from having to attend services—the Sunday after she spent the night with Annie Simpson, helping Annie close out her affairs in town and pack her belongings so she could head to her next gig. On that day, Cora was allowed to sleep in as late as she wanted. Her family went to church without her and let her get some rest. When they got home, though, they would pester her for details about her night with Annie.

  What had Annie said? What had she done? Were her costumes really as glamorous up close as they looked from afar?

/>   Cora would dutifully answer all their questions but she wouldn’t tell them everything. Some things—the most important things—she kept to herself.

  She had just turned twenty and Annie had been a worldly twenty-five when it began. Annie had been coming to the Dew Drop for six years at that point and had been having her late-night meals delivered to the Rest Easy Motel for two. Three years on, Cora couldn’t remember how it had started that first night, but she knew she didn’t want it to end. It was one of the few things she had to look forward to.

  *

  Annie hunkered over her plate as if she hadn’t eaten in days.

  “There’s no way I can eat all of this,” she said, her voice slightly hoarse from all the exertions she had put it through. “Are you sure you don’t want some?”

  Draping a feather boa across her shoulders and doing a little twirl as she regarded her reflection in the mirror, Cora shook her head. Annie said the same thing every year.

  “I know,” Annie said with a wink. “You’re waiting for dessert, aren’t you?”

  This time, Cora nodded. Annie said that every year, too. And every year it was true. Cora lived for this. For this one week a year when she could express her desire for another woman freely and without fear of rejection.

  One hunger satisfied, Annie pushed her empty plate away from her and wiped her mouth on the linen napkin Cora had brought. Rubbing her full stomach, she looked at Cora with a different kind of appetite. She could have anyone she wanted, man or woman, but there was something about Cora that touched her soul. When Cora watched her perform, Annie didn’t just sing the lyrics. She felt them. She lived them. Afterward, when they sat in the big claw-footed tub licking peach cobbler off each other’s fingers, she lived that, too. She took those moments with her everywhere she went. If she had her way, she would take more than that.

  Annie slowly extended her hand. Cora took it and they moved toward the bed. Their hands tugged at buttons, zippers, and hidden clasps until nothing stood between them except gently yielding flesh.

  “How I’ve missed you,” Annie sighed, finally able to relax now that the pressure to perform was over. Now that she had fulfilled her commitment. Now that she could be herself again, not the Siren. She licked her way from Cora’s throat to her waist and back again, pausing to linger at Cora’s full breasts. She loved to taste the salt on Cora’s skin. It tasted like hard, honest work. It tasted like truth. It tasted like love. “I love you,” she said as Cora’s fingers slid inside her.

  Cora stopped, even though she desperately wanted to move forward. Annie had never said that before. Before it had been about fulfilling a need. About satisfying an urge. About soothing an ache. Now it felt different. It felt like something real. Cora wanted to say, “I love you, too,” but she couldn’t form her lips around the words. She had never thought she would ever have an opportunity to say them. She had said them in her head a hundred times and in her heart a hundred times more, but not out loud. Not for someone else to hear.

  “Come with me tomorrow,” Annie said. She’d been offered the lead in a musical. A two-reeler, not a full-length motion picture, but it was still the lead. The film, the producers promised, would do the same thing for her that St. Louis Blues had for Bessie Smith—introduce her to a wider audience. When she and Lafayette boarded the train the next day, they would head for the West Coast instead of returning to New York.

  Annie moved her hips against Cora’s hand, waking it from its stupor. “Will you do that? Will you come with me?”

  “Come with you to Hollywood?” Cora matched Annie’s rhythm. She felt the heat build between them. Annie might not sweat onstage, but she was certainly sweating now. “What would I do?”

  Annie clutched at her, looking for purchase. “Anything you want,” she gasped.

  Cora had never considered leaving town. Her family was there. Her life was there. But what kind of a life was it, really? It was existing. It was coping. It was getting by. It wasn’t living. Living was what she did when she was with Annie. She lived for only one week out of fifty-two. What if the other fifty-one could be like that one?

  “Don’t make me dream of something I can’t have,” Cora said as Annie’s walls closed around her fingers.

  “I’m not Marie-Claire.” Annie held Cora’s face in her hands and kissed her fervently. “You can have all this and more if you want,” she insisted. “Just come with me.”

  *

  “So it is true.” Marie-Claire stared at the cardboard suitcase in Cora’s hand before the porter whisked it away. She was wearing the same dress as the night before, though she and it both looked the worse for wear. The dress looked like it had been slept in and Marie-Claire looked like she hadn’t slept at all. “You are leaving.”

  “Good news travels fast.”

  Cora looked up at the train as it idled in the station. Lafayette, his hat pulled low to cover his eyes, had already boarded and was asleep in his seat by the window. Marie-Claire’s eyes pleaded with him to wake up and take her with him, but he didn’t move. On the end of the platform, Annie was saying her last good-byes to Miss Shirley. Cora had said good-bye more times than she could count. She didn’t know if she could take another. Especially not this one. Marie-Claire had meant so much to her for so long. Part of her still held out hope that Marie-Claire might one day feel the same way. She knew it was a pipe dream, but she’d already had one of those come true, hadn’t she?

  “It should be me, you know,” Marie-Claire said.

  The bitterness in her voice effectively put an end to Cora’s fantasy once and for all. Marie-Claire sounded like she hated Cora. And for what? What had Cora ever done but love her and be there for her? How many times had she sat there miserable and quiet while Marie-Claire cried on her shoulder about some man who had done her wrong when all Cora wanted to do was treat her right? Had that been for nothing?

  Marie-Claire’s full lips curled into a sneer. “It should be me and not you.”

  Cora had stayed up all night trying to decide whether to go or to stay. Now she was certain she had made the right decision. “But it isn’t you. It’s me. I always used to compare myself to you and come up short. Now I realize I was using the wrong measuring stick. You’re no better than I am. I just let myself think you were. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  Annie stood nearby but didn’t interrupt. When it became clear that Cora had said her piece and that Marie-Claire couldn’t formulate a response, she offered Cora her arm and a reassuring smile. “Ready to go?”

  They took their seats as the conductor shouted, “All aboard!” Looking out the window, they watched the scenery roll by.

  “Thank you for saying yes,” Annie whispered.

  “Thank you for asking the question.” Cora felt suddenly shy. She felt like she had on the very first night she and Annie were together. Like she was embarking on a journey she could never come back from. Like she could never go home again. Looking into Annie’s brown eyes, she realized she was already there. And there was nowhere else she wanted to be.

  Andrews & Austin are the authors of the Richfield and Rivers Mystery Series from Bold Strokes Books: Combust the Sun, Stellium in Scorpio, and Venus Besieged; and the romances Mistress of the Runes, Uncross My Heart, and Summer Winds. Andrews began her career as a broadcaster in NYC, moved into the advertising world as a writer/producer, and later became a movie studio executive. Prior to owning her own production company, Austin was co-producer and on-air host of a shopping channel. She partnered with Andrews in developing movies for studios, networks, and independents. Together, the couple owns a horse ranch in the Midwest and spends most of their time riding or writing. Strong, smart women and insightful dialogue are hallmarks of their work.

  Madame Broussard

  Andrews & Austin

  Women of a certain age were intimate with the shop on Rue de LaSalle—the whispered solution to inattentive husbands, less amorous paramours, and the sheer gravity of life that could weigh down one’s
sizeable assets—because the shop’s owner, Madame Broussard, once the French Quarter’s most notorious madam, knew precisely and to the hair’s breadth what interested men, and it began with elegant silk lingerie.

  Rumor persisted that the money to support Madame’s luxurious lifestyle and lucrative business came from one royal client who had loved her so desperately that he left his wife and son to be with her, despite Madame promising him only one night with her. After that night, true to her word, she would have nothing more to do with him, and the thought of her with another man drove him mad and was rumored to be the reason he put a bullet in his head…demonstrating just how entirely mad he had been driven.

  Madame Broussard was a striking woman, her high cheekbones, exquisitely pale skin, and voluptuous cleavage the envy of her clients. In addition to her slender creative hands and light brown satin eyes, she possessed a mass of red hair balanced atop her head in a huge swirl, tendrils dangling like succulent vines down her neck as if the wanton hair could not be counted on to remain in place, as could not Madame Broussard. She had traveled the world and met all manner of royalty, and the fact that she had chosen New Orleans’s Rue de LaSalle as final port was hailed as a great coup for the wealthy women of this fine city.

  In convincing me to shore up my marriage with a trip to Madame Broussard’s, friends had conveyed the shop’s lore. How each day, the small brass bell bearing the engraved initial B jangled on its sturdy metal post as the shop door swung open and Madame looked up, cocked her head seductively as if each new entrant were a lover, and said richly, “Bonjour, madame, I thought you would never come.” Her lifted eyebrow and rakish smile suggested that the emphasized words might be a husband’s lament unless, and until, the visitor took Madame’s suggestions on how to please a man. Her greeting kept her wealthy clients atwitter, and they no doubt stayed longer and bought more based on her talents and reputation.