Friends with Benefits

by Melody Mayer

  The girls gave way to the guys. Unlike the girls, Kiley recognized none of them but Tom, who was the third one out. He had on an unbuttoned red and blue paisley shirt, revealing a tan, ripped six-pack; his oversized pants slithered tantalizingly low. They’d spiked up his hair and hidden his gorgeous eyes behind black sunglasses. He slouched and posed; Kiley could actually feel the women in the audience wanting him.

  I’m with him, Kiley thought. Me, Kiley McCann.

  According to the program, Tom was followed by some European model named Marcus—hadn’t Tom mentioned him at Marym’s party? He wore a long distressed black leather greatcoat over naked skin, and bleached-out jeans ripped at the knees.

  The guys did their clothing change, but stayed with the same theme. Tom posed right where Kiley was sitting. This time he stopped, lifted his sunglasses, and flashed a half smile right at her. She blushed furiously. What that look did to her insides was right out of one of the torrid romance novels her mother read. Maybe that light switch of hers really was in perfect working order.

  Tom replaced his glasses and strutted to the other side of the runway. Then Platinum nudged Kiley. “Did you see him check me out just now? I should send him the bra I was wearing when we met with my phone number on it.”

  Crap. Had Tom been looking at Platinum, and not at her? In the real-world scheme of things, it made a hell of a lot more sense. So what if Platinum was more than twenty years older than Tom? On Planet Platinum, such things were meaningless.

  Insecurity flooded Kiley. Maybe this wasn’t a date. Maybe Tom had invited her as a friend, a pal, a—damn him—kid sister. The idea that she could compete with Platinum was beyond ridiculous. If that was so, what should she do when the fashion show ended? Tom hadn’t said. Was he planning to take her out? Kiley knew there were VIP parties that night. She didn’t want to put him in an awkward position, nor did she want to look like a nerdy cheesehead, even if she felt like one.

  Okay, so she’d find him and thank him for the tickets, and then act like she was leaving, and if he wanted to stop her, he’d stop her. That could work. She turned to tell Platinum, but her seat was empty. Huh. Well, it wasn’t Kiley’s problem. For once, Platinum could take care of herself.

  The show ended when Ralph Lauren came out onstage with Marym on his arm. All the other models came too, applauding the designer.

  The lights went up and people began to move out of their seats. It took nearly ten minutes for Kiley to snake her way out of the tent. A guard directed her to the backstage entrance. But since she didn’t have a backstage access pass, she could go no further. She felt like an idiot. If Tom wanted her to come backstage, he would have arranged for the pass, right? Which meant she should just leave before she humiliated herself—

  “Kiley!” Tom bounded over to her, buttoning his worn denim shirt. “I saw you out there. I’m so glad you came!”

  “Of course I came. You were great.”

  “It’s not exactly brain surgery.”

  “But it probably pays better,” Kiley pointed out.

  Tom laughed. “How screwed up is that? Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t get you a backstage pass; it just slipped my mind. But it’s a zoo in there, anyway. So, you ready?”

  Kiley hesitated. “For what?”

  Tom bounced backward on the heels of his Nikes. “Tell me I didn’t forget to tell you about the thing.”

  “The thing?”

  “Heidi and Seal are giving a thing on the beach; supercasual. I’m not into the big FAB stuff. I mean, if you want to go to J.Lo’s bash at the Beverly Hills Hotel we could—”

  “No, no, the beach sounds great, perfect,” Kiley said quickly.

  Yes! He did want to be with her!

  “I just have to find Platinum and see if she can drive herself home or if—”

  “Where the hell were you?” Platinum demanded, pushing rudely through people when she spotted Kiley. “What, I’m supposed to go hunting for my freaking nanny? What’s that about, huh? You want to explain that to me?”

  Uh-oh. Yellow alert; Kiley could tell already from Platinum’s manic voice. She must have snorted something or other in the ladies’ room just now. Damn. Kiley couldn’t very well have Platinum drive herself home if she was high on something.

  “Sorry,” Kiley replied; taking the blame seemed like the lesser of evils. “I’ll drive you home now, okay?” She turned to Tom. “Maybe you could follow us in your car?”

  Platinum flung herself at Tom, who had no choice but to catch her. “You are so freaking hot, man! I just wanted to roll those pants right down your legs, that’s how hot you are. Man, I could eat you with a spoon.”

  “Thanks. I think.” Tom gently extricated himself from Platinum’s embrace.

  Oh God, how embarrassing. Kiley felt her cheeks flame.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled to Tom.

  Platinum turned and rubbed her butt against Tom. “This place is nuts! Isn’t it insane?” She whirled around again. “Hey, let’s go somewhere! I want to dance. You want to dance, right? Let’s freaking dance, baby!” She lifted her hair onto her head and shimmied up and down like a stripper. “Whoo-hoo!”

  Kiley saw Marym slide past the backstage guard, then stop when she saw Platinum rubbing against Tom. She looked amused. “I didn’t know you two were acquainted.”

  “Screw off, coke ho,” Platinum spat at Marym. She flipped her middle finger at the model just as a photographer snapped her shot. She whirled toward him. “Hey, shoot this, asshole!” She reached under her flimsy gown and lifted her bra top, flashing her breasts at the photographer, who obliged by taking another picture.

  Oh. God.

  “We should go, Platinum,” Kiley said quietly.

  “Hey!” Platinum’s face lit up; she didn’t bother to pull her bra top down again. “Let’s get the kids and have a party! Shit, yeah, that’s what we should do!”

  Not Yellow. Orange.

  “Tom, I’m sorry, but—”

  “No, it’s okay. I know you work for her, so . . .”

  “It’s not just that. It’s her kids. I have to make sure they’re okay.”

  “You want me to follow you back in case you need any help?” Tom offered.

  God, no. She didn’t want to involve him in this nightmare. Besides, he was just being nice.

  “I got it covered,” she assured him.

  Marym moved closer to Tom. “We understand, Kiley. We’ll miss you at the party.”

  Yeah, I bet, Kiley thought.

  They looked so perfect together. It wouldn’t even matter that Kiley was going to picket Marym the next morning, because, let’s face it, she couldn’t compete with Marym anyway. There was really no point in trying.

  Marym hooked an arm through Tom’s, as if to prove Kiley’s point. Then Platinum moved off into the crowd, and Kiley had to go after her.

  22

  Kiley recognized the stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway as she neared Marym’s Malibu mansion. It was still so early in the morning that the sun had not risen above the hills; a bank of fog was poised offshore, threatening to drape the coastline in a blanket of gray. But the road was clear, with just a few cars traveling in either direction. Obviously, the time to get from point A to point B in and around Los Angeles was when the rest of the city was sleeping.

  As she drove along, she had a lot of time to think about what had happened the night before. She’d found a coked-up Platinum flirting with the FAB parking valets. Once they’d gotten home, Platinum had ordered Kiley to crank one of her CDs to ear-splitting volume, then danced all over the living room with Serenity and Lori. Sid and Bruce came home from someplace and wandered through the living room without stopping; Platinum didn’t acknowledge their presence. When Kiley went to see what they were up to, Bruce had slammed the door in her face. There was nothing she could do about it. It wasn’t like she could discuss it with their mother.

  Serenity finally whined that she was tired; Kiley took her off to bed, leaving Platinum and Lori to retir
e to Platinum’s suite to do God only knew what. Kiley didn’t want to leave Serenity alone, so she fell asleep in Serenity’s desk chair, her head on the white desk. She’d woken up with a start and checked the luminous hands of the clock on Serenity’s dresser—4:30 a.m. The little girl was sleeping peacefully. Kiley figured she had just enough time to shower, change, and hit the road for the demonstration in Malibu.

  Damn Platinum anyway. She had to be the most selfish person Kiley had ever met. She might love her children, but she didn’t really think about anyone except herself.

  Before reaching the final stretch of the PCH by Marym’s house, Kiley stopped to take in the view. The stretch of beach was deserted save for a pair of early-morning surfers on their long boards, enjoying the peace and the four-foot swells. Kiley left her shoes on the floorboard and walked barefoot down to the water’s edge to gaze at the ocean and the surfers in their black wet suits. One of them acknowledged her presence with a friendly wave; Kiley waved back. Then he caught a perfect wave and rode it toward shore. Just as he kicked out of the wave, two silvery porpoises broke the water to his left, shimmering in the early-morning light, seemingly timing their jumps for the exact moment when the surfer’s ride ended. It was so perfect that Kiley laughed in pure delight; this was just the kind of moment she had dreamed about when she’d decided to come to California.

  No one, certainly not Marym Marshall, had the right to keep access to this ocean to herself. Kiley got a funny feeling in her stomach. She couldn’t think about Marym without thinking about Tom. Maybe she should have mentioned that she planned to go to this protest . . . but no. That would have felt like asking his permission, or something. She was doing the right thing; she was sure of it.

  The demonstration leaders had placed helpful signs along the Pacific Coast Highway—FREE THE BEACH! MARYM MANSION: 1 MILE. As she approached the mansion itself, she saw a few police cars with their lights flashing. Across the road, a long line of parked cars and TV broadcasting trucks snaked back along the east side of the highway. Since there was no place else to park, Kiley pulled her white BMW 550i (actually, Platinum’s BMW—Kiley never drove the Lotus unless specifically instructed to do so) behind the last car in the row, and then crossed the highway at a makeshift crossing point run by a California highway patrolman. “Just stay off her private property,” the young cop advised Kiley as she started to cross. “And you won’t have any trouble.”

  There were already fifty or sixty people in front of the mansion, walking a ragged picket line. As Kiley joined them, one of the event leaders, a young woman with bright pink hair and multiple facial piercings, carried a bullhorn and led a call-and-response chant.

  “What do we want?” she bellowed, in a voice that belied her diminutive stature.

  “Free beach!” shouted the demonstrators.

  “When do we want it?”

  “Now!”

  The chanting continued. For a moment, Kiley stood off to one side, not knowing exactly what to do. It wasn’t like she’d ever been part of a protest before. Then a bearded, bearish-looking man in his forties walked over to her, grinning.

  “Don’t just stand there.” He pointed to a pile of ready-made picket signs. “Pick up a sign and join us!”

  Kiley did. A moment later, she found an opening in the line of picketers, and was shouting “Free beach! Free beach!” along with the rest of the demonstrators. Part of her felt ridiculous. But part of her felt great. She’d been on the beach on the other side of Marym’s house. It was glorious, much nicer than any of the others between Malibu and Santa Monica. The sand was crystalline, the ocean pure and unpolluted. The California legislature had given everyone the right to enjoy that beach. It didn’t seem fair for rich people to own houses that blocked the way in for ordinary people like herself. If she hadn’t been invited to Marym’s party with Tom, she’d never have had the privilege.

  She thought of her mother, back in La Crosse. Her mom would love to see that beach sometime—if a panic attack didn’t make the trip impossible. Life was so damn unfair. Her mom was such a good person, but she was stuck in La Crosse at a dead-end waitress job, crippled by panic attacks, and married to a guy who was married to a bottle.

  Well, that wasn’t going to be Kiley’s life. She wasn’t going to be the kind of person to sit around and be crippled by . . . by anything. She hoisted her sign a little higher, glad that she was willing to stand up for the right thing.

  “Free beach! Free beach!” Kiley found herself among the loudest of the chanters, feeding off the energy of the crowd. One of the television cameras came in tight on her face, and a blond reporter in a short skirt asked for an interview, but Kiley shook her head emphatically. That was going too far—she didn’t want to make a spectacle of herself. Most of all, she didn’t want Tom to see her on TV before she had a chance to talk to him.

  The girl with the pink hair had no such reservations. She pushed over to the cameraman; a moment later, she was being interviewed by the blond reporter. Suddenly, some of the demonstrators cheered, shouting to one another.

  “What’s happening?” Kiley asked the guy with the beard.

  He smiled. “A light just went on in the upstairs window. That means the bitch is home. She saw us out here, I bet.” He cupped his raised hands together. “Free beach! Free beach!” he yelled up at the window.

  Kiley’s instinct was to hide; what would Marym think if she saw her? I can’t let that matter, she thought resolutely. Marym may have beauty and money and even Tom, but I have the ocean.

  Kiley winced. Her mental tape was sounding just a little too Joan of Arc.

  Now that the demonstrators knew Marym was home, some of them edged up onto her driveway, which prompted a quick response from the police. They got between the home and the people with the picket signs.

  “Why are you protecting her?” the girl with the pink hair screamed at the police. “You should be helping us! Tell her to open the way to the beach!”

  Several other demonstrators started to chime in. “Free beach! Free beach! Free beach!”

  Kiley could feel the mood change from ebullient and fun to something more ominous. Across the road, more people were parking to join the demonstration, moving closer to the property line.

  “We really shouldn’t go any closer,” Kiley told the pink-haired girl.

  The girl stared back at Kiley as if she’d just grown horns. “Whose side are you on?”

  “Stay off the property!” a cop warned again.

  “What are you gonna do, arrest us?” the bearded guy taunted, getting in the cop’s face.

  This was not good. Arrested was something Kiley definitely did not want to be. She’d made her point. It was time to leave.

  Then she realized something. She’d probably see Marym that very night, at the FAB closing party aboard the Queen Mary. She was looking forward to the party, but she wasn’t looking forward to seeing Marym.

  “This will be so great,” Lydia assured Alexis as they stood together on the doorstep of Evelyn Bowers’s home—a beautiful Mediterranean-style villa in Brentwood. Evelyn had warned Lydia that she lived on Rockingham, the same street where O. J. Simpson had his home back in the nineties, but she said that these days there were very few tourists; the murders were, in Hollywood terms, ancient history.

  The two-story home was white stucco, with expansive windows and blue trim, set far back from the street behind a row of ten-foot hedges. Hedges similarly blocked the view of the neighbors, so the place felt more private than it actually was.

  Lydia pressed the buzzer; Evelyn answered so quickly that Lydia suspected the woman had been waiting just inside the front door.

  “Welcome, welcome!” she said when she saw that it was Lydia and Alexis. She beamed first at Lydia, and then at her new nanny. “You must be Alexis. It’s a pleasure, an absolute pleasure.”

  She ushered Lydia and Alexis inside. Lydia was pleased with how Alexis had chosen to dress for this meeting with her potential new employer—s
he was wearing conservative black trousers and a white shirt. Lydia had suggested that Alexis bring a small suitcase with her—to show that she was ready to start work immediately, should Evelyn decide to hire her. Alexis had complied.

  Lydia had tried to give Kiley’s friend Nina one last shot by calling her in La Crosse while she was drinking her morning coffee in her aunt’s kitchen. Just like all the other times, there had been no answer. When Lydia had gotten Nina’s voice mail, she didn’t leave a message. Instead, she called Alexis and said the job was hers, if she could get through a personal interview that morning with Evelyn Bowers. Then she called Evelyn and set the meeting. It had been as easy as trapping a stunned thorntail iguana after it had tumbled from the jungle canopy in a storm.

  “The children are gone,” Evelyn explained after she ushered Lydia and Alexis inside. “I thought we’d have more privacy that way. Let me take you on a tour, then we can talk. Sound good?”

  “Sounds great,” Lydia agreed. She’d told Alexis to let her do all the talking at this stage. Back in Amazonia, a visiting doctor had brought a copy of Forbes magazine with him to read. Lydia was desperate for anything new, so she’d begged for him to leave it when he departed for America. It was from a Forbes article that she learned that the person in a power position should always do the talking in any meeting.

  The house was exquisite. The living area led to an open courtyard that boasted soaring palm trees; there were five bedrooms, six and a half bathrooms, an ultramodern forest green kitchen that opened directly to a sunken family room with the biggest plasma TV Lydia had ever seen, and a sunroom with a massage table and glass ceiling. The backyard featured a lap pool and a paddle tennis court.

  “It’s awesome,” Alexis said, clearly unable to keep herself from commenting.

  Evelyn smiled. “Well, I’m so glad you like it, Alexis. Right this way.” She led them past the pool and through a sliding glass door that led to what appeared to be a home office.

  “Oh, so you work here,” Alexis said.