by Kait Jagger
‘That wasn’t—’
‘Or Saturday morning when I left you that pathetic message,’ she said, overenunciating ‘pathetic’ self-derisively. ‘Because, like the fool I was, I was worried about you. Or when I still didn’t get the hint and bloody texted you. Now,’ she wiggled her index finger between the two of them, ‘there’s nothing for us to talk about.’ Her voice began to give out during her final words and she was consumed by a coughing fit, twisting her mouth into the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
Stefan waited for her to stop coughing, then began in his most reasonable, logical voice, ‘There are things I need to—’
‘Fuck me,’ Luna interrupted, practically hopping up and down with fury. ‘Did you not hear me? Save the “this is all moving too fast” and “it’s not you, it’s me” speech for your next girlfriend. I don’t want to hear it.’
She continued towards the door, stopped, coughed twice and pointed at him, saying, ‘And another thing: the next time you want someone to do your donkey work for you,’ she waved her hand at the conference table, ‘have the courtesy to ask her yourself. Or better yet,’ she leaned close to him and gritted out, ‘try placing your request via the Marchioness, and learn the meaning of the words short shrift.’
She began to wheel away from him, and Stefan placed his hand on her arm, daring to ask, ‘Have you finished?’
Luna looked down at his hand, felt herself sizzle and crackle, and said ominously, ‘If you don’t. Take your hand. Off my arm.’
Stefan dropped his hand. And Luna walked out.
The supernova of her righteous fury sustained her all the way to Heathrow, onto the plane and halfway over the Atlantic, but eventually sputtered and burnt out as she sat in her window seat, looking down over a bank of clouds below.
‘The four words no girl wants to hear…’ Well, it appeared that now she and Miss Party Supply had something in common. She hadn’t really believed it till he’d said them, had held out hope, nay, she had assumed that there had to be some reasonable explanation for his behaviour. Because a man didn’t behave as he’d behaved with her, he didn’t say things like ‘I find I am possessive of you’ if he didn’t mean them.
She thought about the things they had done together…physically. Things she would never have done if she’d thought it was purely a casual thing. She felt hot shame at the prospect of having to tell her friends that they’d misjudged him, that she’d misjudged him. And worst of all, she felt something akin to horror that she had let her guard slip with him; had said and revealed things about herself that she could not now take back. For some reason, the fact that he knew she’d been upset by Florian Wellstone’s description of her as an Ice Princess bothered her most of all.
Finally, she thought about the way he had been with her. She believed, or wanted to believe, that his behaviour with her had amounted to more than the combination of respectfulness and sexual attentiveness Miss Party Supply described. What had tipped the scales for him? Realising that he was starting to feel possessive of her? Or was it that she’d begun to encroach on a part of his life he reserved exclusively for his overwhelming business drive? She pictured his face as he’d looked down at her in the office following his presentation and now it seemed to her that in addition to sexual desire there had been something else, a pleasure in having proven himself to her. A short-lived pleasure, apparently.
She shook herself, recalling Nancy’s words when Luna’s first and only boyfriend broke up with her. Nancy had virtually zero tolerance for feminine heartbreak, and when Luna had begun to speculate on what was going on in his head, why he’d chosen another woman over her, Nancy had said bluntly, ‘It doesn’t matter why he dumped you. All that matters is that he did.’ Sage advice, even if it was a little heartless. She didn’t need to know anymore what was going on in Stefan’s head.
Chapter Nineteen
Exactly two days later, Luna was running along the boardwalk in Miami Beach, just passing 30th Street and aiming to get all the way to 46th. To her left was the thin peninsula comprising around twelve avenues running north to south and seventy-odd streets running east to west that comprised Miami Beach, a separate entity from Miami itself reached by a number of causeways from the city. And to her right was the Atlantic Ocean, greenish-blue and calm in the late morning sunshine.
The boardwalk was actually a fair distance away from the water, punctuated occasionally by little shelters with clay tile roofs and wooden seating areas. As she passed next to one of the shelters, feet bouncing satisfyingly off the wooden surface, she saw a group of men in long black coats, hats and side curls standing together, chatting in Yiddish. Surprisingly, at least to Luna when she had moved here in her early twenties, there was a large Hasidic Jewish population on Miami Beach which, in addition to the sizeable Cuban-American and Haitian communities in Miami, made the area of bit of a melting pot.
It had been good to come back, better than Luna expected. If she was honest, when she’d left to go back to the UK she didn’t think she would ever return. Oh, her ex-boss, a well-known hotel and property magnate, had told her she was always welcome and he’d meant it; within an hour of her sending an email saying she was planning to visit, he’d sent her a reply insisting that she stay at the Pontiac, her favourite of his hotels, right in the middle of South Beach. And it had been nice to know that she was remembered.
But the two and a half years Luna had spent in Miami in her early twenties had seemed at the time like…enough. Her work for her boss had been on the hoof, following him around from hotel to hotel, property to property, tablet and Blackberry at the ready, an assortment of little black dresses her only uniform. And for a while it had been fun, but eventually it palled and she began to think longingly of England’s damp, chilly shores.
Something about all that sun; the hot, damp tropical air that had engulfed her the minute she stepped out of the airport – after a while it sapped your intellectual power. Or so, at least, Luna had found. Living in Miami reminded her of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale her mother used to read with her when she was little, The Snow Queen. There was a part of the story when the little girl, Gerda, whilst searching for her missing friend Kai, stops in the rose garden of an old witch, who combs her hair and makes her forget all about her friend. Miami was like that for Luna – it made her forgetful, and maybe just a little bit vapid.
Of course, she thought as she approached 46th Street where the boardwalk ended, right now Miami was just the tonic. As she’d hoped, the November sun was hot, but not too hot, and a day on the beach had miraculously burnt away the remnants of her chest infection. Her hair, responding to the humidity, had curled and become lustrous, like little Gerda’s hair under the ministrations of the witch. There was no way she’d ever have managed to maintain her ‘Arborage do’ here; her mane simply would not comply with any efforts to tame it. She was wearing it in a headband now, which was satisfyingly drenched with sweat. It had been a good run.
Exiting the boardwalk, she removed her trainers and socks and walked down to the water’s edge, amazed as ever by how uncrowded the beach was. Miami folks, she had found, rarely came here, so on mornings like this she had it almost to herself. The water was just cool enough, and she walked in up to her thighs, looking out onto the horizon under a cloudless sky. And she didn’t think of Stefan.
Nor did she think of him when she walked to her favourite bagel place, a little Jewish deli three blocks away, where she bought a poppy seed bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee she drank as she walked back to South Beach along the quiet residential streets, passing palm trees and walled gardens dripping with bougainvillea, tiny lizards scurrying across the pavement in front of her.
Sometime later she walked into the stunning art deco lobby of the Pontiac, with its cool polished concrete floors, glass brick exterior wall and stunning, original deco chandelier. She collected her key from the smiling woman on reception, the same one who’d checked her in the previous night, telling her that her ex-boss had
left strict instructions for Luna to be treated ‘like gold’.
Luna’s room was on the second floor of the hotel, in a prime position overlooking the courtyard pool and bar. It had a queen-sized bed, an inviting armchair and matching ottoman, and large, horizontal paned glass doors opening out onto a balcony.
Like many 1930s hotels, the guest rooms at the Pontiac were small. Some of them had been knocked through to make suites, but Luna’s retained its original dimensions. To give it a larger feel, wall-to-wall bevelled mirrors had been installed opposite the bed – even the door to the bathroom was mirrored. She went to the bathroom now and turned on the shower, pausing quickly to take her birth control pill. A tiny, bitter little thought of Stefan crept in then, which she quickly quashed.
She spent the rest of the day on the beach, alone, which was fine with her. She’d bought a stack of trashy magazines at the airport but didn’t open one of them, happy enough to just stare out at the sea or at passing walkers, digging her feet into the white sand and thinking mindless thoughts.
Sitting on her balcony that evening, listening to the hum of chatter from the bar below, Luna looked at the VIP pass the nice woman on reception had given her to Coast, a new gay club in South Beach. The South Beach and its many clubs had been Luna’s stomping ground when she lived here, but now, on her own?
Two hours later she stood in front of her bathroom mirror applying a thin coat of black liquid eyeliner, followed by a mixture of smoky grey and cobalt blue eye shadow. Eye makeup completed, Luna studied her reflection. Her mane tumbled down her back in a shining mass of curls and her sun-kissed face shimmered under a light coat of translucent powder. She briefly considered her lips. Given her dramatic eye colour, or rather lack thereof, lipstick had a way of looking strange on her, overly colourful, so she tended not to wear it. Besides, she remembered Kayla telling her once that she should never, ever wear both heavy eye makeup and lipstick. ‘It’s a prossie look,’ she’d said.
Luna was in a strange mood tonight, though, here in Miami Beach on her own. She reached in her makeup bag and pulled out her MAC Russian Red lipstick, the one she’d only used twice, and carefully applied it, standing back once more to examine her handiwork. Did she look like a prostitute? Well, maybe so, maybe so. A high-class one, she liked to think.
And, Luna reminded herself, she was going to a gay bar after all. Which meant it was important to look good – ‘like the good little fag hag you are rapidly becoming,’ Nancy had observed disparagingly during one of her frequent visits – but it didn’t really matter what the opposite sex thought, or didn’t think, of her.
Her dress was made of black shimmering fabric that never wrinkled, which had made it perfect for this travelling light weekend. It was both daringly short, with a tight-fitting skirt that fell to her upper thigh, and incredibly low cut. So low cut, in fact, with its sleeveless cowl revealing a slash of bare flesh reaching almost to her navel, that she couldn’t wear a bra with it; possibly the only thing in her wardrobe that made her glad of her modest but pert B-cup assets. And finally her shoes, her gladiator sandals with the five-inch heels and crisscrossing leather straps that ran all the way up to her knees. ‘Fuck me’ sandals, her South Beach chums had dubbed them, which she hadn’t worn since returning to the UK. They’d been hard to fit in her North Face backpack, but she’d squeezed them in on a whim and now, standing in her bedroom, looking at herself in the wall of mirrors, she was glad she had.
No, she could not be Miami girl anymore, Gerda with her beautiful hair and empty, forgetful mind. But she could pretend for a night. Jem would say she looked fierce, with her red lips and her smoky eyes and her fuck-me sandals. And that was good enough for Luna.
Coast was located in an old cinema that had been transformed into a black, purple-lit paradise inside, with a glittering bar along the full length of one wall and a large dance floor that was already heaving with dancers, both homo- and heterosexual, by the time Luna arrived at just past 11pm. A place where hot young things went to see and be seen by other hot young things.
Two sips into her second Tanqueray and tonic in the upstairs VIP area, Luna spotted a group of acquaintances down on the dance floor, gyrating to Pharrell Williams. Squaring her shoulders, she finished her drink and headed down the stairs, relieved and delighted to be greeted like she’d never been away. And it was perfect, really, dancing in a circle of hot young men, bass from the club speakers vibrating in her ears.
Two hours later, after much dancing and two more gin and tonics, it began to feel slightly less perfect. As time crept on, the atmosphere on the dance floor began to change, her dance partners scanning the room, their eyes drawn to the new and hard, their thoughts on where the night would end, and with whom. Luna was reminded of why nightlife on SoBe, and particularly as a resident fag hag, had begun to grate – three hours of preparation, two hours on the dance floor and suddenly you were surplus to requirements.
Not that it particularly mattered. The meter was running, as Nancy would say, on how much longer Luna cared to stay out anyway, being not much more of an extrovert here in Miami than she was at Arborage. She hadn’t chatted to a single heterosexual man all night and hadn’t felt the need to.
Then the opening guitar lines from her all-time favourite Arctic Monkeys song started to play. A slow song for them, about a damned, doomed love. Luna was standing alone at the bar at this point, and she wished, how she wished, that someone was there to dance with her. Jem, or Nancy, or Kayla, so they could have sung the words, which they all knew by heart, along with Alex Turner. Or a man, any man. She thought of her university boyfriend, who would have known immediately that she had to dance to this one. She thought of the professor she’d clandestinely dated for two months who had never made her come – she’d have danced with him, even.
And then, as Alex Turner began to sing about the colour in his lover’s cheeks, Luna thought of Stefan. And wished he was with her, just for this one song. It was a stupid, stupid wish, four gin and tonics in, but she wished it all the same and knew a moment’s despair that she couldn’t repel him from her mind. She wished he was there.
Luna placed her empty glass on the bar, and looked for an exit line between the bar and the crowded dance floor.
At first she thought it was some kind of alchemy, an apparition she’d magicked up, the tall blond man moving towards her across the darkened, purple-lit room. She mistrusted her eyes, of course she did. No, she told herself, heart thumping in her chest, this man – boy, more like – dressed in a short-sleeved, close-fitting white shirt, his hair looking a blond, sexy mess, was too young to be him, some college kid who’d doubtless gotten in using fake ID. It was her mind playing tricks on her, and the fact that he seemed to be looking straight at her like he couldn’t quite trust his own eyes, that was a trick of the light. The boy came to stand in front of her, and she saw his lips say, ‘Luna,’ saw his eyes travel down her neck to the bare slice of skin trailing to her navel.
She took his hand and it was warm against hers, hot even. She leaned towards him and said, ‘Let’s dance,’ and led him out into the middle of the floor, in amongst the slowly writhing bodies. He knew just where to put his hands; on her hips where he could feel them undulating in front of him. She placed her forearms on his shoulders, not holding him, just resting them there with her hands outstretched beside his head. Wearing these, her tallest heels, she was almost as tall as him, and rather than look at him, this spectre she had willed into being, she placed her cheek against his, inclining her nose into his hairline. His hand slid into her hair, twining it. He moved against her, saying her name again.
Soon the entire crowd was slowly clapping in time to the chorus, some stamping their feet and some even thumping the sides of the bar. Luna smiled, she had to smile, at what a surreal moment this was, and stamped her own fuck-me-sandal-clad foot.
They didn’t stick around after the song was over. This time it was he who grabbed her hand, leading her out onto the pavement. And then she
was kissing him, all mouth and tongues, right in front of the bouncers and the waiting queue. She didn’t care. Eventually they stopped kissing and he led her the three blocks back to the hotel. He seemed to know where he was going. Of course he did, Luna thought; this was the night when anything she wanted just magically happened.
Outside the hotel her heel caught in a crack on the pavement and she stumbled briefly against him, twisting her ankle slightly. She bent down to release the heel, quickly rubbing her ankle, then stood with a little wince. ‘Put your arms around me,’ he said, then lifted her up and carried her into the hotel lobby.
‘You found her then,’ the nice woman on reception smiled, handing Luna her key.
‘Yes, thank you, Carrie,’ he said, and carried Luna into the lift, lowering her down briefly so she could push the button for their floor. The doors closed and Luna looked at him.
‘How did you know I was here?’ she asked.
‘Luck, and a little guesswork. Your e-ticket was still open on the laptop, and I knew something of your former employer. So then it was just a matter of a little investigative work, which I assigned to Bibi. As a penance.’
Luna nodded and said, ‘Why have you come?’
The doors to the elevator opened. Stefan looked down at her, tightened his arms around her and said, ‘To get you back.’
Chapter Twenty
He carried her down the hall till she nodded toward her door, signalling to him to put her down. Her ankle felt okay as she inserted the key in the door and ushered him into the dimly lit room. She caught a glimpse of herself and him in the mirrored wall and wondered again at how little like themselves they looked, him in his white shirt, grey skinny jeans and sexy, messed up hair, and her like some kind of fierce gladiatrix.