The Law of Tall Girls

by Joanne Macgregor

  I jammed the suit back between a maid’s outfit and a petite-sized evening gown and frantically hunted through the garments, sending up a cloud of dust which set me sneezing. My hands stilled. A maid’s outfit! Weren’t French maids supposed to be one of the hottest of skanky Halloween ensembles?

  I pulled it out. It consisted of a short black dress with a laced bodice, thigh-high black stockings with a garter belt, a frilly white apron and lacy headpiece, and a teeny pink feather-duster. Hmm. Caitlyn had worn this in last year’s production and she was tall — not as tall as me, of course, but it just might fit. Only one way to find out.

  A couple of minutes later, I was dressed and bending at the knees to see my reflection in the mirror. It was tight. Very tight. The top was made for someone a good size (or two) smaller than me, but here’s the thing — I have good boobs. I mean, really good. They’re the only part of my body I truly like, apart from my ears — tiny, pixie ears stolen from some elfin baby and reassigned to big old me at birth. They’re even slightly pointed.

  But my boobs are first-class — round, firm and perky. And in that super-tight dress, they bulged out of the low-cut décolletage. The skirt was way too short, and the garter belt and stockings peeped out from under it in a way that they hadn’t for Caitlyn, but the resulting spectacle was kind of … hot. I was all long legs and round curves.

  The costume begged for black high heels, but there were no shoes in the room and, even if there were, I’d bet my whole college fund that not one of the ladies’ pairs would fit my boat-sized feet. I’d just have to wear my flat black ankle boots. They looked odd with the sexy ensemble, but I could almost hear Chloe saying, “Girl, I don’t reckon anyone will be looking at your feet!”

  Screw it, I’d do it! I bundled my jeans and sweatshirt into my knapsack and left the wardrobe room, locking the door behind me. I couldn’t sneak out unseen via the back exit because I needed to return the keys to Doug. Just my luck, Jay and Zack were still rehearsing their scene, with Doug beside them giving notes, and so I had to cross the stage to get to the auditorium under their full view.

  Zack was speaking, but his words petered out to silence when I appeared. “Is that you, Big P?” he asked, gaping.

  “In the flesh.”

  I handed Doug the keys. He gave his head a little shake, as if to clear it.

  “Why the hell didn’t I cast you as the maid last year?” he said. “You were wasted as the butler.”

  I shook the feather duster dismissively at him, releasing a puff of dust. Another sneezing fit seized me, and my boobs came dangerously close to bursting free from their laced restraints. Jay’s eyes — which had been fixed on my chest — boggled, and he muttered something that sounded a lot like “Holy shit!”

  I crossed the stage and headed off down the aisle to the exit at the back of the auditorium, walking as fast as I could without breaking into a run, because I feared that might cause a serious wardrobe malfunction. As I passed them, Wren and Angela pulled their heads together to whisper something which I was sure, from the direction of their gazes, was about me, and not in a good way.

  I ran the two blocks to the bus stop, but as I turned the corner for the home-straight, I saw the bus pulling away. I ran down the sidewalk, yelling and waving both arms above my head like a maniac, but the bus disappeared down the road.

  Crap! That bus was always late. Always.

  The honk of a horn made me jump. “Hey baby, cute ass! Wanna come clean my house?” a truck driver yelled at me as he cruised by.

  Ignoring him, I spun around and walked back to the bus shelter. A middle-aged man puffing on a cigarette outside a corner convenience store smirked at me as I walked by.

  “Smile, honey. Your frown is ruining the show.”

  I gritted my teeth and kept walking. When I got to the bus stop, I checked the timetable pinned on the side of the shelter. The next bus would only be in half an hour. I’d be late for work for sure, and in the meantime I’d have to stand here in my skimpy outfit, in the chilly breeze, suffering catcalls and come-ons from Neanderthals.

  A car pulled to a stop in front of the shelter, and I was just gearing up to tell the driver where he could shove his sexism, when I saw who it was — the rhyming couplet. Jay, with Faye in the passenger seat beside him.

  “I thought you had to hurry to work?” he asked.

  “I missed my bus.”

  “Jump in, we’ll give you a ride.”

  Faye’s glance shot daggers.

  “No, it’s okay, really, the next bus should be along soon.”

  “Don’t be silly, it’s on our way.”

  “No, it’s not,” corrected Faye.

  I was tempted to accept just to piss her off.

  “Well, it’s not far out of our way,” said Jay. “Plus, I wouldn’t want you to be late and lose your job.”

  Trapped by my own lie, I accepted. Faye sat up front, and I folded myself into the middle of the tiny rear of the car, all arms and long, stockinged legs and pushed-up boobs. Rearranging my limbs, trying to find a more comfortable way of perching, I caught Jay’s glance in the rearview mirror, and he grinned back. Faye scowled and pursed her lips into a dog’s bottom of disapproval.

  “Don’t you have a car?” she said.

  Why, yes, of course. I just prefer not to use it because I have a secret fetish for public transport.

  “No,” I said.

  I tugged my skirt down, trying to cover more of my legs, but it was no good, the full length of my thighs, with their garter belt and stocking tops, was exposed. I could swear that more than once, Jay’s glance flicked back and to the side to take in the spectacle.

  A soon as we pulled up outside Jumping Jim’s, I thanked Jay and scrambled out of the car. Jim himself met me at the door. He seemed a bit surprised at my outfit, but kindly told me I looked fine, and serenaded me with an Elvis song which informed me that while I looked, walked and talked like an angel, I was really the devil in disguise.

  ~ 21 ~

  I was good at keeping secrets. I had to be. I’d learned how to hide things, how to prevent anybody finding out the truth. And I’d had loads of practice concealing what I felt, at hiding the real me. Turns out this was a good thing, because I was still disguising how I felt about the boy playing Romero to my Juliet.

  And how I felt, was that I liked him. Really liked him. Spending so much time with him, I’d discovered that he was a genuinely good guy, so much more than his awesome eyes and heart-stopping height. But my infatuation was a dangerous business. For one thing, it would be dead humiliating if he or the cast detected I had the serious hots for him. For another, he liked Faye.

  She still attended every rehearsal — although she’d been looking increasingly sulky, and she no longer applauded at the end of every one of Jay’s scenes. To be fair, she just didn’t applaud at the end of his and my scenes, and that may have been because I was screwing them up.

  Between our scenes, I forced myself to hang out with other cast members, rather than allowing myself to gravitate toward Jay as I wanted to. I worked furiously not to blush or let my face light up when he came over to chat with me. As I spoke Juliet’s lines of love and longing, I kept a tight rein on the deepest parts of me — the parts that wanted to stare dreamily up into his eyes and touch his arm, his hip, his jaw. That wanted to ask him a thousand questions about himself. And every time we rehearsed a kissing scene, I busted a gut holding myself back.

  I was so focused on this performance of forced casualness, so careful not to put too much of me into my acting, that I still wasn’t putting enough of me into it. I knew this was a problem, knew it before I overheard Doug discussing it with Jay during a break in one of our Wednesday night rehearsals.

  “She’s holding back,” said Doug.

  “Give her some time,” Jay replied. “It’ll come right.”

  “I hope so. I mean, she’s passable, not awful. But honestly not great.”

  My stomach sank. I’d be the weak link in
this production, not because I couldn’t play Juliet well enough, but because I couldn’t play just-not-that-into-you to save my ass. I didn’t much want to hear more critique of my performance, yet I stood still in the darkness of the wings alongside them, eavesdropping.

  “Do you think maybe she’s uncomfortable getting into the part — getting into you — with Faye looking on?”

  “Could be.”

  Yeah, let’s go with that.

  “Do you think maybe you could speak to her — Faye, I mean. Ask her to stay away from rehearsals?”

  Jay must have appeared skeptical at the chances of that request succeeding, because Doug added quickly, “Or even just sit, like, more toward the back of the auditorium?”

  “Sure, I’ll ask her.”

  “Cool. I think that’ll help Peyton’s performance. Maybe. Hopefully. I mean, I’m not frantic about it — you’re good enough to carry the both of you,” Doug continued, “but I guess I was just hoping for more … spark, more energy sizzling between our star-crossed lovers. She was pretty good that time you two did the first kiss, and I hoped she was loosening up, but she’s stiff as a board again.”

  “She’s anxious.”

  So much for hiding my feelings from Jay.

  “She needs to learn to trust me before she opens up, I think,” he added.

  “Yeah, maybe that’s it. But do what you can to loosen her up and get some feeling out of her tonight, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  That evening, I noticed the extra effort Jay put into our scenes. He stared even more deeply into my eyes; he took my hand and kissed my knuckles in one scene, and tucked a curl behind my ear in another, and traced a finger across my cheek in the part where we danced. And even though I knew this was just an act to get me loosened up and lovelorn — as per Doug’s instructions — it still had a dizzying effect on me.

  Because Jay was that good an actor. Too good.

  So good that I might have imagined — from the intense heat of his gaze, and how tenderly his hands caressed my bare arms, and the way his lips seemed to linger on mine in the kiss — that he was totally into me. But I knew better. It was just a performance.

  Still, it felt real. So the harder Jay tried to get me to loosen up, the greater was the danger that I might slip up and reveal my true feelings, so the tighter I clamped down on myself, and the more lifeless my performance became. The goose bumps on my arms where he had stroked me were the only part of my performance that was spontaneous that night.

  Zack kept trying to give me tips on how to kiss Jay better — “Hold him close, and grab his butt — do you want to practice on me?” but not everybody was as unhappy as Doug with our lack of visible chemistry. Faye seemed mollified, and Wren seemed delighted. Judging by the told-you-I-could-do-it-better expression she regularly wore, she hadn’t given up hope of reclaiming the role from me.

  Rehearsal ended with Doug setting up the first private session for Jay and me, for the trust and body exercises.

  “I’ve got cheer practice on Thursdays. We’ll need to make it another time,” Faye complained once Jay and I had agreed on a time for the following afternoon.

  Oh, crap. I was going to have to build trust and be close to Jay’s delicious height and man muscles in front of his girlfriend? She’d find me out for sure.

  “I don’t think —” Jay began, but Doug said baldly, “You weren’t invited.”

  Yeah, suck it, Faye.

  “What do you mean, I’m not invited?” she snapped.

  “I want the two of them” — Doug gestured to Jay and me — “to work alone together. To build a sense of connection and intimacy, I want them to look like — to be like — they’re lovers.”

  Faye’s eyes narrowed to slits, and her mouth did that dog’s bottom pucker again. “We’ll talk about this later, Jay,” she said, before spinning on her heel and stalking out of the auditorium.

  “Do you need to go after her?” Doug asked.

  “Nah.” Jay waved a hand. “Let her go.”

  Yeah, just let her go.

  “Okay. Do I need to explain what you two need to do?” Doug asked Jay.

  “No, we’ve done plenty of those sorts of exercises in drama class; I’ll choose some of the better ones.”

  “Great, then I’ll expect a huge improvement at Saturday’s rehearsal. Peyton, I’ve got two words for you: trust, and relax, dammit!”

  At school the next day, we got our midterm reports, and I was relieved that I’d done okay. But still, I was anything but relaxed when I arrived at the trust-building session that afternoon. Jay was already waiting for me, seated on the edge of the stage in the deserted auditorium, doing breathing exercises. And he was alone.

  “Hiya,” I said. “No Faye tonight?”

  “Nope. No Faye any night.” He gave a rueful smile. “We’ve called it quits.”

  Yesss! Elation at his newly single status — and his reinstatement on the list of tall boys, I realized happily — fizzed through my veins. I wanted to laugh and pump the air with my fist. But since I was a better actor than anyone had yet been able to see, I merely pulled a sympathetic face and said, “Sorry, that must be tough.”

  “It’s been coming for a while.”

  “Sure you’re up for us tonight?”

  “What d’you— Oh, right. Yeah, of course, I’ll be fine.”

  And in truth, he hardly seemed heartbroken. “So, trust exercises first, you reckon, or bodywork?” he asked.

  “Trust,” I said, suddenly nervous again.

  Jay stuck a hand into his backpack and pulled out a long, black silk scarf, running its length through his slender fingers.

  “Do you always keep a scarf in your bag?”

  “Oh, yeah, definitely. I like to be prepared,” he said with a sexy smile. “You never know when you’ll need to blindfold a girl.”

  I swallowed.

  “Or” — he gave me a wink — “tie her up.”

  Heat flooded my cheeks.

  “Um,” I said, my eyes on that length of black silk. He was wrapping the ends around his hands as if he might be getting ready to throttle me with it.

  “Kidding! It’s my mom’s, I just borrowed it for tonight. But there is going to be blindfolding tonight. Ready to start?” Jay held up the scarf in question.

  “You first.”

  “See, no trust. Zero trust. We need to fix that.” He wrapped the scarf twice around his head, covering his eyes, and tied it at the back. “Right, now I can’t see anything. I’m entirely in your hands.”

  He reached out blindly for my arm but brushed his hand against my breast instead.

  “Sorry! Sorry,” he said, while I thanked God that he couldn’t see my face had turned nipple-pink again. “I need your arm.”

  I took his right hand and placed it on my left forearm. It felt pleasantly heavy, like a promise of strength. He slid his grasp down to rest on top of my hand, then linked his fingers through mine. His hand was warm — and dry (sorry, Mark). And indisputably bigger than mine. I sighed in pleasure.

  Jay turned his face toward mine. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said hurriedly. “What do we do now?”

  “You lead me all around this place. Don’t make it too easy — it’s supposed to be like an obstacle course. I’ve got to trust you not to walk me off the end of the stage, and to tell me when we’re going upstairs, or when I need to duck — that sort of thing. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  This, I could do — no problem. This was easier than the acting because I had an excuse to hold his hand, and I could study his features to my heart’s content — which I did now, staring at his lovely lips.

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Right, okay. We’re going to turn to your left and walk about ten paces. No, make that six — your legs are long. And over here are steps going down, five of them … Careful. And … last one. Good job!”

  He smiled at the praise. His lips were full and a deep rusty pink, with
a perfectly etched cupid’s bow. They were pretty enough to be a woman’s lips, but on his face with its square jaw, shaded with a hint of stubble at this time of the day, and slightly crooked nose, it saved the strong angles from being almost too masculine.

  I led him up toward the lighting box, enjoying the feel of his hand on mine and growing almost cocky at the ease of the exercise.

  Then Jay said, “Right. Now it’s your turn.”

  He wrapped the soft scarf twice around my eyes and then gently tugged it tight behind my head.

  “All in the dark?”

  I hesitated a moment, debating whether to go with the truth or a self-protective lie. If I looked down while keeping my head level, I could still see a thin sliver of the floor. It made me feel safer and less helpless, but also like a cheat.

  “I can still see a bit,” I confessed.

  Jay adjusted the silky fabric until I nodded that I was now completely blind. I was aware of the complete silence, apart from Jay’s breathing beside me, and the fast beat of my heart in my chest. I felt exposed and vulnerable, and the realization that I’d have to depend on him entirely to keep me safe was unsettling.

  “I don’t like this,” I said, sounding almost panicky. “I’d rather not do it.”

  The hand that I lifted to yank off the blindfold was caught in his and laid on top of his forearm.

  “Peyton, do you trust me, even just a little?” he said, and I thought I heard an edge of intensity in his tone.

  “Um …”

  Truth was, I didn’t trust anyone. In my life, I’d perfected the skill of self-reliance. If you didn’t need people, you weren’t as vulnerable. If you were totally independent, you couldn’t get hurt as deeply.

  “Can you trust me, Peyton?”

  ~ 22 ~

  Could I trust Jay?

  “Uh …”

  “Will you at least try?” he asked.