What Comes After Dessert

by Ren Benton

  “Not right away. Between the grieving and the uncertainty, they weren’t in any condition to even consider it for the first year. Then Will was against the idea of putting Liz through that again.”

  “Or himself.”

  The miscarriage was harder on Liz, both physically and emotionally because she felt her body had failed, but Will had one fear she didn’t.

  Tally read his mind again. “He’s afraid of losing her, too.”

  Will confided, in one of his rare quiet moments, that he could live without another person to love. He’d rather give up fatherhood than risk losing the woman who meant everything to him — which put the sacrifices Ben was willing to make for his relationships in shameful perspective. “I don’t know if they agreed to try again or if this was a surprise.”

  “And your feelings are hurt because they left you out of the decision.”

  Ridiculous. Accurate, but ridiculous. “I don’t need to be in on the decision, but they could have let me know what was going on.”

  “I was wrong. You are in love with her. You’re in love with him, too.”

  He’d been forbidden to utter words to that effect, but there had been no prohibition against Tally uttering the words on his behalf. “They emailed me an ultrasound picture.”

  “And now you’re in love with someone you only known from a photo online.”

  His twinge flared to life, burning pepperoni and tomato sauce like coal in the furnace of his stomach. “That never ends well.”

  “That’s not true. I didn’t keep records, but I’d guess a third of the bachelor parties I worked were the result of online matchmaking. A woman I worked with met her husband in a chat room, and that was their relationship for two years until he came back from Afghanistan, and they’re the super couple all other couples aspire to be. It can have a happy ending.”

  It took a moment to identify the subtle imbalance setting him on a precarious edge. The saddest person he’d ever known was doing her best to lift his spirits. Cutting off the fuel supply for his fear. Restoring balance where he’d dragged it down. The effort made more of a difference than the words.

  They were still a good team. “Thank you.”

  “I didn’t do anything.” A fingertip grazed his neck before she took her hand back. “You don’t have it in you to be gloomy.”

  She hadn’t been around to witness any of his gloomy periods. In her absence, he was prone to wallowing face down in a puddle of gloom, hoping he’d drown. “I do when I can’t make everything right.”

  “That’s life for most people, but it never stopped you. You fling yourself at it and don’t even try to protect yourself.”

  “I have the scars to show for it.” Literally and figuratively.

  “And success,” she emphasized. “You don’t hold back, and you get everything you want.”

  He hadn’t gotten Tally.

  But hadn’t he held back with her? He loved her from afar for twelve years, and when he finally had her in his arms, he didn’t squeeze too tight for fear she’d squirm away. When she left, he didn’t chase her for fear of looking like a stalker. Fear immobilized him where she was concerned.

  Had his mistake been being so timid with her that he hadn’t given her everything he had? Did she believe he didn’t love her because he hadn’t flung himself at her the way he did at football and parrot wrangling, with the intensity she expected from him?

  The one time he tried to protect himself, he destroyed what meant the most to him and suffered the greatest hurt of his life.

  She craned her neck to check out an elephant-sized brush pile they’d passed twice already. “Are you going around in circles?”

  Literally and figuratively. He’d drive until they ran out of gas if it kept her talking. The passenger seat had a lip-loosening effect on her — nothing for her to do but talk. “Memory Lane is circuitous.”

  “It would be funny if you ran out of gas and had to call your mom to rescue you.”

  Hilarious. “Your turn. How did you get on her shit list?”

  She gave the box in her lap a quarter turn to give her a fresh corner to pick at. “I was a stripper.”

  “A paint stripper?” It wouldn’t be the first time Westard’s rumormongers took one word out of context to create a scandal to liven up a dull news cycle.

  “There was a short-lived gig involving showering off body paint, but it turned the stage into a water slide, so management shut it down before it became an occupational health and safety violation.”

  One glance at her rigid posture confirmed she wasn’t joking.

  This would be a great time to say something tactful, and Ben had never been more conscious of that missing part of his brain. “When you said you worked bachelor parties, I thought you meant catering.”

  She stared out the windshield, jaw set. “I thought you knew. You can make up with your mom by bonding over what a whore I am because I took my clothes off for money.”

  “No.”

  No, he hadn’t known, and no, he wouldn’t pick up a torch and join the witch hunt. He would have expected gossip of this magnitude to reach him, but his mother couldn’t be bothered to talk to him when he was in Seattle and had been too busy being smug since he got here to let him in on the secret. Maybe she knew inability to resist editorializing would lead to the mother of all arguments.

  Or maybe she wanted this — Tally all prickly and expecting him to be an asshole after being forced to tell him herself.

  None of the things that shaped his opinion of her had changed. This was just so far outside his expectations of sweet, shy Tally Castle, he had a hard time wrapping his head around it. “Were you paying your way through college?”

  “Wouldn’t that be inspiring? I could go to career day at the school and be a role model for the girls.” Her tone flattened. “But no, and I never met the mythical stripper who was. There is no career aspiration for which public nudity constitutes an acceptable up-by-the-bootstraps story, and anybody smart enough to get into college knows that.”

  Tally had been smart enough for college. Smarter than him. She just had a different life plan. “You were going to be a famous dancer.”

  “Yeah. Two problems with that. The first: name one famous dancer.”

  Easy. “I’ll name a dozen.”

  “Who isn’t primarily a pop star.”

  Less easy. “You could be a pop star.”

  “I can’t carry a tune in a bucket.”

  “Like that matters nowadays.”

  “‘Nowadays’? Are you doing that, too?” She made her voice frail and rickety. “Back in my day, gas was only two dollars a gallon and singers only faked live performances.”

  “Why, you’re just a whippersnapper. This morning, I mowed the lawn wearing black socks with sandals.”

  She shook her head and muttered something that sounded like dog years.

  “Say again into my good ear?”

  He heard the noise she blew with her lips just fine. “My mother tried singing first. It didn’t go well. Same for acting. I could say what they wanted to hear like someone had been putting words in my mouth my whole life, but I couldn’t emote with sincerity.”

  Because you’re a terrible liar. Prolific, but terrible.

  “Then she tried modeling, but they didn’t like my face.”

  He sucked in a breath as if the insult had been aimed at him. “There is not one goddamn thing wrong with your face.”

  “If it was one goddamn thing, my mother would have found a plastic surgeon willing to carve up a five-year-old and gotten it surgically corrected. Since I failed plans A and B and was too irredeemably ugly for plan C, she had to settle for D.”

  “Dancing.”

  “I had the flexibility and the memory, and the strength could be trained, so that took.”

  “You’re forgetting talent.”

  “I convert oxygen to carbon dioxide pretty well, too. I don’t consider it a talent.”

  She talked about dancing like
it was an everyday bodily function. Most people who didn’t abstain from the activity had a shame threshold exceeded only by their blood alcohol level and flailed around the dance floor like epileptic Muppets. Her achievements were far from ordinary. “You were in the paper every week for winning another competition.”

  “For twenty bucks, Floyd would put anybody’s name in the paper.”

  “It wasn’t true?”

  “I won the trophies. It just wasn’t newsworthy to anyone but my mother. I think of it as Bonnie Castle’s promotional campaign for Bonnie Castle.”

  “That explains why her name appeared three times for every one of yours.”

  Her gaze probed the side of his face. “How do you know that?”

  He collected the articles from the time he became aware of them until they stopped being published. Side by side, the pattern was obvious. He’d thought the focus on her mother strange but attributed the imbalance to Floyd’s questionable journalistic skills.

  A binder of newspaper clippings probably crossed the line into stalker territory, though, so he kept that to himself. “What was the second problem with the plan?”

  “Everyone except my mother knew I was too fat to be a respectable dancer.”

  “You have never been fat a day in your life.” If she’d been any scrawnier as a kid, he could have read the blackboard through her. No wonder she’d politely declined most of the food his mom and Stella tried to force on her when she had to go home and listen to her mother call her fat for weighing more than air.

  Maybe that also had something to do with why she’d barely touched her dinner last night and hadn’t even tasted the pizza despite the occasional audible grumble from her stomach.

  “If I didn’t eat for a month, I’d still have more body fat than a professional dancer.”

  She hid it well. She looked sleek and fragile as a greyhound, all hollows and slender limbs, with two notable exceptions. “Are you referring to your awesome knockers?”

  She huffed with laughter. “There’s the smooth-talking boy I remember.”

  If Julie told him Tally hated him since eighth grade, he would have known exactly why. Tally came back from that summer vacation built like a centerfold. When he saw her, he thought, She’s becoming a woman. Say something mature.

  What came out of his mouth? Awesome knockers. After she walked away, he banged his head against his locker until the bell rang. “I never looked below your eyes, I swear, but I heard other people talking.”

  “I told you, Fielder, those aren’t eyes.” She gave the box another turn. “That’s when I decided I liked you.”

  “I bet.” It was a miracle she’d ever spoken to him again.

  “I mean it. Everyone else just stared and didn’t say anything, like I didn’t know I was lugging around a couple of cantaloupes in my bra or that every single person was gawking at them. I could count on you to be honest, at least.”

  “Tactless would be a better word.”

  “Tact is overrated.”

  It involved too much lying for his taste. Maybe Tally didn’t care for it because the lies had to be convincing. “You’d like Will, then. He has only half my tact.”

  “Is that humanly possible? Are you friends with a honey badger?”

  “Giant spider.”

  “That’s good. Someone experienced should handle your company’s web presence.”

  He’d groan about how awful that joke was, except Will did actually deal with a lot of that stuff.

  Ben wished he’d been reliable for something better than his propensity to blurt the truth, which was a source of strife more often than an asset. If she really thought he was obnoxious, though, she’d have lied about it badly enough that he’d know.

  On the bright side, if she wanted tactless, he had plenty to go around. “How did you get from not-a-ballerina to body glitter and a G-string?”

  “I never took a class in anything practical. I never had a job because every minute of my life outside school was dancing. All I could put on a résumé was big tits and dancing — oh, and the stripper name that mommy dearest thoughtfully saddled me with at birth. That skill set uniquely qualifies one for the field of disreputable dancing.”

  In the course of being a guy, he’d had occasion to visit a strip club more than once. He had nothing against the concept of attractive, scantily clad women earning a living by being attractive and scantily clad. But in practice, even in the glitziest establishments, an aura of pathetic desperation permeated a room full of men staring at women paid to let them stare, depersonalizing the intimacy of getting naked and vulnerable with another person.

  He assumed the dancers were clinically detached, whether from boredom or self-preservation, and his own detachment prevented him from asking them insensitive questions. Unfortunately for Tally, he cared too much in her case to keep his mouth shut. “Did you like it?”

  “It paid for my share of the rent and a bus pass. Most of the places I worked had strict no-creep policies.”

  He bristled at the implication she hadn’t been protected from creeps everywhere. “Most?”

  “You start getting long in the tooth, you can’t compete with the youngsters for the quality naked jobs.”

  What the hell did he say to that? I’d pay to see you naked any day sounded offensive even by his standards. “I’m not hearing a lot of like.”

  Her hands fanned out as if to offer some reassurance, then fell, empty, to rest beside her thighs. “I didn’t have to like it. Put on the costume, put on the face they want to see, do the routine. As long as the crowd liked it, I got to come back and do it again.”

  Her mother trained her well to do tricks she hated to please others. The life she described went beyond clinical detachment to quiet suffering. And he’d been one of the onlookers for whom it was entertainment. “You must think anybody who’s been in the crowd is scum.”

  “For going? Not any more than I think anybody who’s gone to a sports bar is. Getting asshole drunk is never good, but wanting something to look at while you have a drink isn’t inherently awful.”

  “The strip clubs in Washington don’t serve alcohol.”

  “Not even the just-topless ones?” She made a little sound of disgust at the shake of his head. “Okay, maybe dedicated lechery is a little creepy. Most states don’t allow alcohol with full nudity, and it’s gross when you can’t kid yourself that your job is selling alcohol. The guys who qualify as scum, though, get it in their heads it’s something other than a show, like it’s an auction for them to bid on the chattel they want, which probably happens more when the club doesn’t sell anything else. Or better yet, the ones who think the dancers are there looking for that special man with booze breath and a semi who will save them. And before you ask, strippers dating customers is almost as mythical as stripping for tuition. Unless your definition of dating includes sex in exchange for cash and prizes.”

  He couldn’t envision the girl he’d known — sweet, shy, prim — entering that world, living in it, learning more ways people could be ugly. There were things she shouldn’t have to know. Someone should have protected her. “Is there a lot of that?”

  “Enough. That’s an uncrossable line for a lot of dancers, but some take the job with the intent of using it as a networking opportunity to connect with clients for their existing career in prostitution, and some fall into it when they find out being pretty onstage isn’t enough of a skill to keep them in diamonds and furs. And before you ask—”

  “You wouldn’t have come back here if that was an option for you. I was not going to ask.” If there was any greater motivation for resorting to prostitution than avoiding returning to Westard, it was beyond his considerable powers of imagination. Given those two choices, he couldn’t say he’d be quick to choose moving back into his mother’s house. “I was going to ask who you did date.”

  She was quiet for so long, he was certain he’d broken the spell that had kept the words coming for so long. The shredding of the corner
of the pizza box was the only sound she made.

  Finally, so softly he had to strain to catch them all, the words came back. “The thing is, even if they never see you work, they expect a stripper to be a certain way. Walk around the apartment in butt floss and a flimsy bra with no support. Flip the hair. Make the face.”

  Put on a performance, in other words. Make the relationship another chore she hated but did to please someone else.

  He stopped the car in the empty road. “What face?”

  She turned toward him and tossed her head — if her hair hadn’t been confined in a heavy braid, it would no doubt have fallen over one eye and cascaded fantastically around her shoulders — and smoldered at him.

  It was effective. His dick responded immediately. She wants me. Mount up, cowboy.

  His heart broke in his chest. There was nothing of Tally in that mask. “Don’t ever make that face at me.”

  It vanished, leaving her looking slightly sick. “Sorry. Out of practice.”

  “It works, Tally, but it’s bullshit.”

  She faced forward again. “See, you know I’m not sexy.”

  A laugh hung itself in his throat. “You’re not whatever that was.”

  “Marketing. My mentor called it the Madison Avenue.”

  Mentor. He wanted to believe that was a good thing, that someone had been there to help her when he hadn’t. “Liz calls it Boner Transference. You can’t bring home the girl practically masturbating in the commercial, but you can buy the crappy cheeseburger that made her so horny.”

  “And use it as bait to catch hot chicks with a cheeseburger fetish. Is your marketing director wielding this wisdom on your behalf?”

  “No. She insists on having class, whatever that is.”

  “That’s no way to earn a living.” She opened the box and finally put one slice of pepperoni in her mouth. “Ready for another piece of pizza?”

  He didn’t remember finishing the first, but his hand had been empty and white-knuckling the steering wheel for a while. “I’m dedicated to staying below the legal limit. Your mom didn’t pay to have news of your disreputable dancing run in the paper. How does everybody know?”