Guys and Godmothers

by Candice Gilmer

  Denise laughed. “Well, talk about a small world.”

  He shook his head. “I… It’s so… I…” It didn’t make sense. None of it. All of it. It was too… too…

  Denise smacked him upside the head.

  “Hey!”

  “You sound like a broken record.”

  Lilly decided she loved Denise.

  “Go talk to her! She must think you think she’s a crazy person or something. Go!” She turned him around and pushed him toward the stairs. “Go! I got this.” And Denise finished straightening up the books.

  Bruce nodded, and headed after Greta.

  Lilly rubbed her head. This was not going to be pretty.

  Maybe she should convince Denise to accompany Bruce, in case he needed another smack in the head.

  Bruce couldn’t believe it. He just…

  A person he admired is the same person he considered one of his best friends.

  The friend he’d begged to come.

  Elation filled him.

  She’d come.

  But why didn’t she tell him?

  Was she afraid? Did she think he’d think less of her? Then their conversation about how he went on over her books. God, she must think he was like one of those crazy fan boys or something. He ran his hand over his face, trying to calm his racing heart as he headed toward the exit.

  He never considered she wasn’t telling him about everything.

  What else didn’t he know?

  Couldn’t they be honest with each other? After all their conversations, texting, Facebook, all of it. Weren’t they friends?

  Or was it more?

  Or maybe, it really was less. The thought made his stomach roll. He, well, he didn’t know what he felt for her, but the upset gurgling in his stomach was not good.

  Not good at all.

  His feet pounded against the wooden planks outside the dance hall, sunshine blaring in his eyes as he took off.

  Have to fix it. Have to…

  Where the thought had come from, he didn’t know, but he had to do it. He had to make this right, because…

  Greta was probably his best friend. He wasn’t about to lose her now.

  It was a stupid lie. Dumb. Why did she do it?

  The only way he’d find out was to ask her.

  People meandered along the wooden sidewalk, and he pushed past a couple on his mission to find her. One woman he’d chatted briefly with before twirled her umbrella and pointed over her shoulder.

  He must have looked desperate, if the woman was telling him where to go.

  He rounded the corner, and the crowd thinned out. Most of the buildings back here were closed, and the only thing at the end of this road was a huge passenger train car and train depot at the end of the road.

  “Where…” he whispered.

  And saw a flicker of fabric.

  She was on the train car. He could make out her shadow inside, in the very back, her head down, and shaking.

  His heart ached as he realized she must be crying.

  Good going, dumbass…

  He climbed up the train’s stairs, and surprisingly, the train door slid open without too much noise.

  This was important.

  A musty smell hit him as he blinked, trying to refocus his eyes in the dark of the car. Several of the curtains on the windows had been drawn—not all, but enough light cut through the room like beams, lasers revealing the dust stirred by his entrance. Seats faced each other, little couches for two, as if this was a dining car rather than a passenger one. Small tables, barely large enough for dinner plates stretched between each set, the dust on them thick enough to run his fingers through.

  He took a few steps closer.

  “Greta?”

  Greta sat in the farthest seats from the door, her back to him. Hunched over, she covered her face as she wept. “Go away.”

  “Greta, please.” Bruce crept down the center aisle. Pain swelled in his chest, and he immediately knew why he didn’t have long-standing relationships with women.

  This was why.

  The pain. He never wanted to jack with the pain. Pain made him vulnerable, weak. He’d seen enough of that in his life, between his parents and their repeated marriages.

  This was what he wanted to avoid.

  Yet he couldn’t.

  Just seeing her there, sobbing, tore through his chest. Need ripped through him again.

  Make it better.

  Fix it.

  “Greta,” he said again. Her name rolled off his tongue like silk, and he loved saying it. Even if now wasn’t the time to think about benign things.

  “Bruce, go away,” she said again. “I knew this was a bad idea. Monumentally bad. Huge. Massively bad. I…” She twisted in her seat, turning away from him, her hands covering her face. Her mask glistened on the table as a beam of light from one of the windows struck the golden finish.

  “Why is it a bad idea?”

  She froze, then straightened, staring at the window. The curtains blocked her from seeing out. “You really need to ask?”

  He took a step closer. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what? I write naughty girl porn? I don’t tell anyone I wrote those books. Why in the world would I tell you? You, who…” She shook her head. “I so see that going over well.” She waved her hand in the air, then touched the mask.

  “And what am I?”

  She tied the mask into place with a jerk. “You’re… You’re a guy. You’d never understand the reason for them, why I do it, what made me…”

  He moved to the seat across from her but didn’t sit down. He wasn’t ready. He doubted she was. She was a stray cat ready to bolt. He didn’t want to make her feel trapped. She kept her face covered, all he could see of her face—her beautiful face—was the side exposed with the mask.

  “Why not? I mean, I was gushing over your books. Yours. And you said nothing.”

  Her words muffled by her hand covering part of her mouth. “Would you have believed me?”

  “Why wouldn’t I? We were being honest. Brutally honest. I had no reason not to believe you.”

  “And you had no reason to believe me.”

  “Did you even try?” He reached into the pocket of his jacket. Inside, he’d stuffed a handkerchief, mostly for style. As he handed it to her, he was glad he’d added that piece to his costume.

  She accepted the handkerchief, blotted her eyes, and mumbled a thank-you, but twisted in the chair so she was angled away from him. “You don’t know anything about me, Bruce. It would be best if you left. We can go on. You can pretend you never met me. I will pack up my books, and we can go back to—”

  “To what? Pretending we don’t know each other? Chatting via Facebook? Why would you think I don’t want to talk to you?”

  “I lied,” she whispered.

  He nodded. “There is that. But were you going to tell me?”

  Her shoulders slumped. “I was going to see.”

  “See what?”

  “See how today went. If we got along today, I was going to tell you everything.”

  He blinked. “There’s more you haven’t told me?”

  Her hand rested on the mask. “Oh yes.” She started fiddling with her hair. “But not now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, you obviously are not nearly as thrilled as I thought you would be to find out, so what’s the point?”

  “I caught you in a lie. I can’t be horribly thrilled over it, Greta.” He stepped a little closer, inside the box of the seats.

  “And I am sorry. I didn’t want you to find out that way. It was… rude.” She fluffed her hair over the straps. “So I understand if you don’t want to talk to me anymore. You can go about your life, back to your stuff. I can get back to mine.
It’ll be better this way.”

  Bruce shook his head. “You don’t get it. I go more than a day and not talk to you, and it makes me nuts.”

  She turned, mask back in place, her makeup imperfect, and even in the odd lighting in the train car, he could see her cheeks stained pink. “Why?” She twisted the handkerchief as she spoke.

  Bruce put his hand on his heart. “I don’t know why. I’ve never had this problem. I’m… I’m addicted to you, Greta. I can’t quit.”

  “I’m no one to be addicted to. I’m… I’m a girl who lives in her parent’s basement.”

  “So?” Bruce said. “I’m a big nerd who takes pictures and makes erotic book covers.”

  Greta laid her hand on the table. “I—”

  He put his hand on hers. “You get me. More than anyone I’ve ever known, you get me. You don’t make fun of me. You weren’t disgusted or shocked or repulsed by my reading habits. We like the same stuff. Have the same sense of humor. And you love steampunk as much as I do. That in itself is a rare thing.”

  “I think you need to get new prescription in those goggles. But other than that…”

  He smirked. “That’s it… Exactly what I’m talking about. You get me. And you don’t like me or want to be my friend because I’m a photographer, because it’s sexy or cool to date one.”

  She snorted. “And what makes you think I would date you?”

  “I don’t know. Hope?”

  She sighed. “You have a lot.”

  “I blame Denise. She’s filled with the shit. Though she applies it to her career, but still. Look, I was an ass back there. I should have said something, I don’t know… normal. I shouldn’t have froze.”

  “You caught me in a lie.”

  He sighed. “I don’t like lies.” He sat in the chair across from her. “All my parents did when I was a kid was lie to each other. They thought I was too little to understand what I saw, but hearing Dad say sweet nothings to another woman on the phone then lie about it to Mom will really screw with your head.” He ran his fingers over the wooden table, gliding them along the grains. “I could have been like him. I remember being a teenager, and there was a girl I’d been seeing. She wanted, well, everything. I wasn’t interested in anything but some fun. I was right there, on the edge, ready to be like my dad, and lie about it. I decided no, I wouldn’t. Not to her, not to me. I wouldn’t lie about how I felt.”

  Bruce let out a sigh. “I don’t do lies.”

  Greta looked down. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He looked around the train car, noticing the wood and scrollwork in the trim, and how, even though it was old—probably over a century old—it was fixed up. A little dirty, but fixed up.

  A realization came to him. “It shows how much I want to fix this, because in the past, a lie would have been it—the gal would have been out. But I don’t want to do that this time. I want to fix it.”

  And he did. His gut said she had her reasons. They might be dumb, but she had them, and he had to respect them if he had any plans to make this relationship work.

  It wasn’t a great relationship, but it was what they had. Hell, it wasn’t even close to perfect, but they could make this work.

  He had to.

  He didn’t know why, but he knew he did.

  “What is so special about me?” Greta asked.

  “Well, the steampunk thing is a good start.” Bruce grinned.

  She smiled. “You’re a dork.”

  “You like it.”

  “Maybe, a little.”

  He leaned closer, elbow on the table. “Now that’s what I like to see. You, smiling. Though, I must admit, I’d like to see the whole smile, not half of it.” He reached up and brushed his finger over the mask.

  “One thing at a time,” she whispered, turning away.

  He didn’t think about it, and brought his hand to her chin, to pull her face to him.

  She jerked away. “I… uh…”

  “Sorry. You don’t like touching?”

  “It’s not … I, well… It’s related to the ‘more’ I haven’t told you yet.”

  “When you’re ready.” He didn’t want to push her. After all, she wasn’t crying anymore.

  A start, he thought.

  “Shall we go back?” He stood and held out his arm.

  She nodded and put her arm onto his, and he balanced her as she stood, her skirt swished around them while they walked.

  The train’s narrow center aisle was too small for them to walk side-by-side, so he led the way toward the exit at the other end. For a moment, Bruce’s imagination wandered, and he thought about, well, about some of her steampunk stories.

  “This is practically right out of the Gears books,” he said as they reached the front of the train car.

  Greta let out a laugh. “Yes, it could have been.”

  The train door grinded on its sliding track. “You write about trains a lot.”

  She shrugged. “They’re quintessential steampunk.”

  He hopped down and helped Greta. She clenched his hand tight as she tried to manage her skirts and the steep steps.

  “I know why women always hang onto men in old days,” Greta said.

  “Because you can’t live without us?”

  She laughed—a soft, sweet sound Bruce adored. Now he knew why it sounded familiar before, in the theater. “Men built everything so women would have to depend on them.”

  He smirked. “Maybe they were onto something.” He held out his arm.

  She did, and the two started walking toward the dance hall. A few people meandered along the wooden sidewalks.

  Bruce led her to the sidewalk, and she stepped onto it, her boots clacking on the wood. “I guess I never thought about them not having concrete in the 1800s.” Greta looked down. “One of those little details I’ll have to put in a book somewhere.”

  “You going to do more?” Bruce asked.

  “I turned one in a couple weeks ago, and I’m waiting to hear back from my editor.”

  “That’s great. What’s it about?”

  She shook her head. “It’s bad luck to talk about stories before they’re contracted.”

  “Bad luck?”

  “Yes.” She looked in the shop windows as they walked. Greta paused at one of the windows. “Do you know what the big glass ball is?” she asked Bruce.

  “No, do you?” He realized they were at a drugstore, with a mishmash of medicines and other bottled tonics and tools of the Old West. The real Old West. Greta had pointed to a large, round, blown glass ball hanging inside the window, filled with bluish liquid.

  “In the Old West, most people couldn’t read,” Greta said. “So pharmacies would hang this outside their shops, filled with colored liquid, to tell people where to come for medicine.”

  Bruce grinned. “I didn’t realize.”

  “In fact,” she said as they walked a little more, “if there was sickness in the city, a plague or whatnot, they would change the liquid to red, as a sign to travelers not to stop and stay.”

  “You know a lot about this stuff.”

  She shrugged. “It helps with the writing.” She pointed to the barber pole. “Do you know why a barber pole is red and white?”

  “That I do know,” Bruce replied. “For the white and red rags they would hang. White for the haircutting, red for the dentistry.”

  Greta smiled. “Very good. Most people don’t know. Why do you?”

  Bruce shrugged. “My mom worked as a barber for a few years. She hated cutting women’s hair.” They continued on, talking to different people, smiling at others. People in their heavily adorned steampunk, and even cowboy attire, were everywhere. There were a few people in street clothing walking about, but not very many, compared to all the cosplayers milling about.

/>   It was incredible. Like they’d stepped into a time warp of some kind. An alternate universe.

  “So how did you know I did your covers?” Bruce asked as they reached the dance hall.

  “When I talked to Denise.”

  “You could have said something then.”

  “I… Maybe I should have.” She bowed her head, looking away for a second, as he pulled the door open for her. She entered before him, whatever embarrassment she’d had from his question disappearing.

  They entered the hall, and the dancing-girls show was going full swing. Bruce led Greta to the stairs where they’d been sitting, and noticed Denise had put everything back. A couple of ladies looked at the books on the tables, picking them up and reading the back covers.

  Greta went around and took her seat, greeting them with a smile, and started telling them about her books. She shook hands, grinned, made little jokes.

  It was like she was on stage all of a sudden.

  Denise caught his gaze from the other side as he sat next to Greta, and his sister gave him the evil eye.

  He leaned back, and Denise did the same in her chair, and he gave her a thumbs-up. She nodded.

  Greta bumped her arm, and Denise slammed the chair down.

  “Sorry!” she said to the people who had turned to see who had interrupted the show.

  Greta kept her smile on her face. “I figure they were talking about me,” she said to the customer as she finished her transaction.

  “Probably.” The lady gave Bruce a dirty look.

  “Well, if they’re talking about me, then they’re not talking about anyone else,” Greta told her as she handed the woman the book she’d signed. The lady thanked her, and tucked it into her purse.

  “Everything okay?” Greta asked Denise.

  Denise nodded. “Just making sure my brother wasn’t being a bonehead again.”

  “He does that, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, he does, let me tell you,” Denise said.

  “Now wait a minute,” Bruce said.

  “Down children.” Greta laughed, and reached for her bag under the table. She pulled out an envelope and handed it to Bruce.

  “What’s this?” Bruce asked.

  She shrugged. “Thought you might appreciate it.”