by Christa Wick
She used to be so pragmatic.
"Sit," Cammie ordered. "Let me get you something to drink. A virgin—"
"Just water, please."
Turning back, Cammie made a sweeping appraisal. "Water to start, but you need more than that in you. There's no color to your skin."
"Not wearing any makeup."
Melanie wanted to lean her head back against the couch, close her eyes and maybe sleep a few minutes. Cammie's sharp, knowing gaze wasn't going to let her get away with hiding, not even for a few minutes.
"There's a day with no makeup and then there's the look of someone who's been running on empty way too long."
Uncapping a bottle of cold water, she brought it over to the couch, sat down next to Melanie and handed her the drink.
"I don't really need to ask what you're doing, do I? The email you sent and the fact that your cell phone seems to be turned off because you're mom is messaging and calling me now—"
"Sorry," Melanie interjected. "I sent her an email, too. I just didn't want to talk to anyone."
"Because you know I'm not going to say 'oh, poor Melanie, you should leave that man.' Your mom might coddle you because she's your mom, but not me."
Melanie's head swung a hard left. Her brows arched as she looked at Cammie.
"Yeah," Cammie nodded. "I said it."
Ignoring the challenge, Melanie took a long draw on the bottle of water.
"You said in the email that it felt like no one wanted to work with Declan. Did he tell you to get out of his life because you're ruining his career?"
Melanie shook her head.
"Has he been the least bit unkind?"
"He told me I was being silly," Melanie whispered.
"About what?"
Melanie shook her head again. Knowing Cammie, the dancer would tell her the same thing. Silly Melanie. Stupid Melanie. Ugly Melanie.
Cammie would pick at the facts until Melanie doubted herself. But her friend didn't understand. Little details like where Willie's bin was placed, or her picture inside and on top—those things had to be experienced in real time and in the flesh for someone to understand their meaning. And there were all the other details experienced over a month's time that formed the foundation of an intuitive, but still logical, conclusion.
"What matters," she said at last as Cammie leaned in for the next phase of her interrogation, "is that Declan doesn't love me."
"He said that?" Cammie challenged.
Melanie looked away, lips sealed in a flat line.
"Oh, I see, it's opposite day. He said he loved you so of course it means he doesn't," Cammie huffed and jerked her hands up. "Go on. Continue telling me why you're leaving."
Melanie huffed back, her nostrils flaring from the sharp needling by her best friend.
"It doesn't matter whether he wishes he could. He doesn't. Trying to cling to any other belief is hurting us both. Once I'm out of the picture, the industry will forgive him and so will his fans."
"And they'll stop reminding you that you don't look like that Shayna bitch," Cammie muttered.
Melanie's fingers twisted against one another in her lap. "It's not how I feel about me—"
"Yes it is," Cammie persisted.
Dropping her gaze to the water bottle, Melanie stopped arguing. Cammie curled an arm around Melanie's shoulders then lightly touched heads with her.
"I've seen how he looks at you."
"You only saw us together for a few hours one day and that was almost a month ago."
"And he was already in love." Pausing, Cammie withdrew her arm and studied Melanie for a long, hard, uncomfortable second. "Maybe you're the one who's not really in love."
A bomb exploded in Melanie's chest. Bilious shrapnel filled her mouth. She forced herself to swallow it down, coughing until her eyes blurred and leaked with the strain of trying to hold everything in.
Cammie wrestled her into another tight hug.
"Oh, honey...I'm sorry. I don't know that I'm wrong, but it was wrong to say it."
"I love him," Melanie protested. "I love him so much I don't know how I'm going to survive."
Cammie stroked at her hair, her throat softly murmuring little nothings in an attempt to calm Melanie.
"Okay, baby, I believe you. It's okay. I'm sorry."
Melanie shrugged her friend's touch away. She didn't want more emotion, she needed an absence of feeling. She needed sleep and darkness. She hadn't come here to have her hair stroked and be lied to that it was going to be okay. She was leaving the rest of what was left of her heart in California and flying to Massachusetts with a giant hole in her chest.
There was no murmuring that fact away.
"I need to make sure you'll be okay," Melanie said as Cammie tried to keep her on the couch for more coddling.
Escaping, Melanie returned to the entry table where she'd left her bags. She pulled out her checkbook and a pen and started writing a check for fifty thousand dollars.
"What are you doing?"
"I don't know that Declan won't change his mind about you living here. I don't think he will, but I want to make sure you're—"
Cammie ripped the checkbook from Melanie's hands. Seeing the amount, she turned her sharp scowl from the check to Melanie.
"Are you freaking insane?"
If she was, Melanie thought, maybe Declan would actually love her.
"I'm going to Massachusetts, starting over. I don't want to leave thinking I messed up my life and yours. I don't nee—"
Finished rolling her eyes, Cammie tore the check into tiny pieces.
"Shut up while you're ahead," the dancer advised as she sprinkled the confetti-sized pieces of torn check into the small trash receptacle by the entry table. "I'm not staying here, either."
"What?"
"I'm going home," Cammie announced as she steered Melanie back to the couch. "I've paid off the last of the mortgage and have six month's in expenses socked away in the bank."
Stopping, Cammie grinned and shook her head, as if amazed by what she was about to say. "I even have a normal, mundane job lined up."
Melanie couldn't keep the slightly skeptical look off her face. "What about listing your work history?"
Melanie didn't have a problem with her friend's work history, but she could imagine a lot of employers viewing it negatively. Female supervisors might take her as some kind of threat, especially in a family-run business. Male supervisors might think Cammie's history as an exotic dancer meant they could call her into the office for a blow job or a quick fuck.
The dancer's grin didn't falter. "Marco is listing me as a book keeper for the holding company for the last four years, which isn't even a lie. Half my time between sets was spent running payroll."
Melanie seized Cammie's wrist and gave it a squeeze. "You never mentioned that."
The dancer shrugged. "If I told you, I'd have to admit how slimy it feels spending the whole time doing lap dances. If the place is full of creeps, I might spend all my time offstage in the office taking care of the books."
"Lately," she admitted, "it's been full of a lot of creeps. Trickle-down misogyny someone called it on television."
Leveraging the hold on Cammie's wrist, Melanie tugged her into a tight hug and asked, "When will you go?"
Pulling back, Cammie wrapped her hands around Melanie's shoulders and squeezed.
"When you're ready for me to leave."
Melanie blinked at the answer. She knew six months saved in expenses didn't mean rent and utilities at the Normandie Avenue apartment. It meant six months of Cammie's two younger siblings and her son in school, all of them engaged in extra-curricular activities like band and soccer. It meant orthodontics, driving lessons for the oldest, and so much more.
How long had Cammie been holding back, ready to go but staying for Melanie's benefit?
"Don't look at me like that," Cammie admonished and wiped at her own cheeks. "I've been afraid to pull the trigger—to be a mom full-time. And this last month put m
e over what I need between working extra shifts and doing more back office accounting because I don't have anyone to spend the rest of my day with—not to mention being out of the lease on that rathole."
Unable to conceal her own tears, Melanie nodded. "I understand."
She shouldered her backpack then picked up the second bag.
"I'm ready," she said, flashing a weak smile as the dancer's cell phone began to vibrate.
Cammie pulled the phone from her back pocket, the happy-yet-sad smile on her face thinning to an anxious line. She looked up from the display as the phone continued to vibrate.
"It's Declan. What do you want me to do?"
Melanie walked over, took the phone and pressed the decline icon. Then she powered her phone back on and sent Declan a short text before powering down again.
I’m safe. Leave Cammie out of this. Please.
Shoving the phone in her bag, she turned back to her roommate and best friend for the last three years.
"Can you give me one last ride?"
40
Having Cammie drop her off at the JetFly terminal at LAX, Melanie bought a ticket to Boston. With six hours remaining before the flight, she went to the stands outside the baggage claim area and jumped on a shuttle bus bound for the Courtyard Hotel that was only a mile away. Once there, she paid two hundred dollars for a room she would use for slightly less than three hours, just long enough to shower and take a nap before leaving the hotel to find her first meal in more than a day.
She left the Courtyard wearing a big, floppy sunhat, Declan's beloved Boston Red Sox cap left with Cammie after extracting a promise that the dancer would mail it to him right away. The sunglasses, of no known importance to Declan, she kept because they helped hide her face.
And leaving didn't hurt so much when she could hold them, her heart momentarily fooled into thinking he'd just stepped out of the room and would soon be there to reclaim the glasses—and Melanie.
Ninety minutes before her plane was scheduled to depart, Melanie slid the glasses on and approached the security line at her terminal. She handed the guard at the front of the roped off area her boarding pass and ID as she looked at the two hundred or so people between her and the x-ray machines.
"Remove your glasses and hat, miss," the TSA officer ordered.
Forcing a smile, she took off the hat and glasses, nestling the Ray-Bans in the hat's crown. The man, young and eager looking, studied her ID and her face a few more seconds until the elderly woman behind Melanie cleared her throat.
Thank God for impatient people, Melanie thought as the officer returned her boarding pass and driver's license.
She slogged along ten minutes, then twenty, the line in front of her only reduced to maybe a hundred bodies because the airport seemed to be on a higher alert level than usual.
"You," an authoritative voice called out.
Just like the hundred people ahead of her and the hundred behind, Melanie looked up to see if she could spot the person being singled out. People shuffled and she saw another TSA officer, his arm extended and one damning finger pointed in her general direction. She scanned the people directly next to her, looking for the potential smuggler or international bad guy.
"In the hat and glasses."
A young man with a ball cap but no glasses lifted his brows in her direction. She shook her head. She'd already been subject to scrutinization at the front of the line.
"He means you," a cute, geekish girl with glass-free frames said to Melanie as she paused half a second while swiping through her iPhone.
Looking at the officer, Melanie touched her index finger to her chest. Nodding, he crooked his finger, calling her out of line. Apologizing her way past a dozen or more people, she reached the rope barrier. The officer unhooked it and gestured for her to step through.
She paused on the other side, studying him as he hooked the rope back in place. Despite the cool temperature of the air conditioned terminal, the man had started to sweat profusely. Beyond that, he was relatively unremarkable. Standard good looks, medium height, medium build, somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, the hair visible beneath his TSA cap shaved close.
"Boarding pass and ID."
Already clutching them in her fist, she handed the documents over. "The gentleman at the front of the line checked them."
Her lips sealed tightly together as soon as the veiled protest left her.
"Come with me, Miss Archer," he ordered, his voice dipping low before he said her last name.
With a feeling of deja vu from the Colorado flight home washing over her, Melanie planted her legs apart and crossed her arms over her chest. "Where are you taking me?"
She could vividly imagine how the officer at the front of the line would have responded to her flash of resistance. But the man standing before her looked like he wanted to pass out.
"To my office, where I will explain why I pulled you," he answered, his voice low and intended for her ears only.
Before he turned, she caught a flash of several badges hanging on a lanyard attached to his right shoulder button. There was the magic green LAX card that would open all the doors in the airport. In front of it was his TSA badge identifying him as a supervisor. Beneath the picture was his name.
M. Greggs
By the time they reached the office, Officer Greggs' earlier perspiration had turned into a waterfall. She'd never seen someone sweat so much just from walking at a slow pace.
"I'm not sure you're cut out for this kind of work," she said, taking the seat he offered.
Snorting, he sat down after removing a handkerchief from his back pocket. He dabbed at his moist forehead and upper lip.
"Catching bad guys, keeping the skies safe," he answered after a few more dabs. "Piece of cake, I assure you."
Reaching under his desk, he hesitated a second. "I need to step out for a moment. Can I get you anything to drink?"
"I'll wait until I'm on the plane."
The look on his face as he stood and reached into his pocket before leaving the office told Melanie she wasn't getting on the plane, at least not the one listed on her boarding pass.
Alone, she folded her hands in her lap and looked around the room. It clearly wasn't a temporary work space for him. Pictures lined the wall. She saw what looked like a younger, more muscular version of him in desert camouflage, another of him completing TSA training of some kind, and a third with him standing next to a wheelchair occupied by a young boy.
After a glance over her shoulder, she reached forward and rotated one of the picture frames on the man's desk. Same boy, a few years older, the wheelchair newer than the one in the picture on the wall and pimped out in the same colors as the Boston Red Sox cap she’d left in Cammie's care.
She turned another frame, the man and the boy on the deck of a large boat with what looked like deep sea fishing rods behind them and maybe a marlin, the boy's hand gnarled into a thumbs-up gesture and a grin on his face that was bigger than the fish.
Rotating the frames to their original positions, she folded her hands in her lap once more and waited for the officer's return.
He came back a few minutes later with a sealed water bottle that he placed in her hands before taking a seat on the other side of the desk. She thought about reminding him that she couldn't take the bottle past the security lines, but they both knew that was no longer a consideration.
"So you went from the Army to the TSA," she said with a nod at the pictures on the wall behind him.
His throat bobbed nervously and then he nodded.
"Pay sucks," she mused, her gaze pointedly sliding to the third picture. "But I imagine the healthcare coverage makes up for it."
His face pinched forward but he remained silent.
"Does your son like movies?"
"Doesn't everyone?" he asked, his expression shifting yet again, the guilt momentarily washed away to be replaced by caution.
"Does he like Declan Bain movies?" she clarified.
&
nbsp; She knew she wasn't paranoid when he blinked three times in a row.
"The ones he's allowed to watch," the man admitted. "Funny thing, we had no idea who Declan was until the first time he helped Jamie out with a fundraiser."
First time...
Melanie closed her eyes for a few seconds, searching for composure and an extra measure of resolve. When she looked at the man again, she nailed him with a firm stare.
"I'm not interested in getting you in trouble," she started. "I just want to get to Boston."
"I've been assured you will," he answered, his return gaze unwavering. "Since that's what you want."
Her head dipped. Trying to outstare the man was tiring, especially after the last few days of torment.
"Did he call you?"
"No, ma'am," Greggs answered. "I called him. Tim—the officer who checked your documents at the front of the line, is new. I was evaluating him on camera when he asked you to remove your hat and glasses. I recognized you immediately."
Great, she was famous.
Infamous, rather, and for all the wrong reasons.
Greggs' phone vibrated in his pocket. He fished it out, tapped at his screen for a second and silenced the device. Rising from his desk, he jerked his head at the office door.
"I need to step out again."
Passing where Melanie remained seated, he thrust his hand toward her. "I'm Mike, by the way."
She sighed, hesitated the length of a slow blink, then accepted the handshake. Whatever happened next, she wasn't going to cost Mike his job—or the healthcare he needed for his son. She just wished he wasn't already certain she would not complain. She knew he was certain, too—he had stopped sweating.
Hearing the door shut, she tried to relax her shoulders. She considered praying that Declan had come to his senses since her text to him at Cammie's place, but someone had assured Mike that she would get to Boston despite her getting held up in security. And she knew he had already talked to Declan at least once.