What I Did for Love

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  She sensed Bram coming up behind her just before his hand curled around her bottom. “Why’s the table set for seven?”

  “Seven?” The time had come to deliver the news, but she acted as though she’d never heard the number before. “Let’s see. You, me, Dad, RoryandTrev, Laura, Meg…Yes, that’s right.”

  His hand, which had been exploring her bottom, came to a dead stop. “Did you say…Rory?”

  “Uhm…”

  “Rory Keene is coming to dinner tonight?”

  “You never listen when I tell you things. I swear, my voice is just white noise to you. It’s like we’ve been married forever.”

  “Rory?” He abandoned her bottom.

  “I’m positive I mentioned it.”

  “I’m positive you didn’t! Are you crazy? Your father hates my guts. I only have two and a half weeks left until that option expires, and I don’t want him anyplace near Rory.”

  “I’ll take care of him.”

  “Like you’ve done such a good job taking care of him so far.”

  “I thought you’d be happy.” She attempted a pout and wasn’t surprised when she couldn’t pull it off.

  “Rory loves that script,” he said more to himself than to her. “If I could just get her to trust me.”

  “From what she told me, that’s probably a lost cause.” As he paced the veranda, she replayed her conversation with Rory. When she finished, she said, “Why did you bring those cretins out to L.A. with you?”

  The bitterness he kept tucked away escaped. “Because I was a stupid kid. I didn’t have a family, and I thought—I don’t know what I thought.”

  Georgie had a fairly good idea.

  He hunched his shoulders and looked away. “The guys told me Rory made the whole thing up. I wanted to believe them, so I did, and when I finally wised up, she was long gone. By the time I found her, my career was in the tank, and let’s just say she doubted the sincerity of my apology.”

  “And now she has her revenge.”

  “It’s not over till it’s over. She wants that script, and she can get it a lot cheaper working with me than trying to snatch it up after my option expires.” The same guy who’d once blown off three days’ shooting to go deep-sea fishing was suddenly all-business. “We need to be on top of our game tonight. She likes you, and I’m fully prepared to take advantage of that. Lots of touching. Affection. Not a single wisecrack.”

  “Everybody will think we’re sick.”

  “I’m counting on you to help make sure I get some time alone with her.” He took in her lemon and artichoke centerpiece. “See if you can find a florist. I’ll hire a bartender and someone to wait tables. And we need to get a real chef in here.”

  She held up her hand. “Stop right there. No florist, no bartender, and Chaz is making do-it-yourself kebabs. Chicken, beef, and scallops.”

  “Are you crazy? We can’t serve Rory Keene kebabs.”

  “You’ll have to trust me. Remember, I have a purely selfish interest in convincing Rory to back your project. If you screw this up for me…”

  “Georgie, I told you. Helene has to be cast—”

  “Leave me alone. I have things to do.” Mainly she had to help him convince Rory that he was the person to make the film. If Rory saw how well he could behave these days, she might forget his past idiocy.

  Unlike Georgie, who couldn’t forget a thing.

  After he left, she busied herself setting candles around the veranda, but eventually she couldn’t resist grabbing her video camera. Today of all days, she should leave Chaz alone, but what had begun as a whim was turning into an obsession. In addition to her fascination with Chaz, she was also falling in love with the whole process of recording other people’s lives. She’d never imagined how absorbing standing behind a camera instead of in front of one could be.

  She found Chaz in the kitchen making a ginger-garlic marinade. When she spotted Georgie, she slammed her chef’s knife down on some garlic cloves. “Get that camera out of here.”

  “You won’t let me help. I’m bored.” She panned around the kitchen, taking in the well-organized chaos.

  “Go film the cleaning people. You seem to have all kinds of fun doing that.”

  Did Georgie hear a note of jealousy? “I like talking to them. Soledad—she’s the tall, pretty one—sends most of her money back to her mother in Mexico, so she has to live with her sister. There are six of them in a one-bedroom apartment. Can you imagine?”

  Chaz rocked the blade over the garlic. “Big deal. At least she’s not sleeping on the streets.”

  Georgie’s skin prickled. “Like you did?”

  Chaz dipped her head. “I never told you that.”

  “You told me about the accident and that you got fired after you broke your hand.” Georgie zoomed in. “I know your money was stolen. It’s a fairly obvious conclusion.”

  “There are a lot of kids on the streets. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “Still…It had to be especially hard for you. All that mess and no way to clean it up.”

  “I handled it. Now get out. I mean it, Georgie. I have to concentrate.”

  Georgie should leave, but the turbulent emotions bubbling behind Chaz’s tough facade had drawn her in from the beginning, and somehow the camera demanded she record it. She shifted her questioning. “Does fixing dinner for more than one person make you nervous?”

  “I fix dinner for more than one person practically every night.” She tossed the chopped garlic in a bowl with some peeled ginger. “I feed you, don’t I?”

  “But you don’t put your heart into it. I swear, Chaz, even your desserts taste bitter.”

  Chaz’s head shot up. “That’s a crappy thing to say.”

  “Just a personal observation. Bram loves your cooking, and so does Meg. But then you seem to like Meg.”

  Chaz pressed her lips tight. Her blade moved faster.

  Georgie stepped to the end of the counter. “You’d better watch yourself. Great cooks know that extraordinary food is about more than mixing ingredients. Who you are as a person—how you feel about other people—shows up in what you create.”

  The rhythm of Chaz’s chopping slowed. “I don’t believe that.”

  Georgie told herself to let it go, but she couldn’t, not with the camera in her hands, not when this seemed so right. A wave of compassion overcame her, along with an odd sense of understanding. She and Chaz had each found her own way of coping with a world over which they seemed to have little control. “Then why do your desserts taste so bitter?” she said softly. “Is it really me you hate…or is it yourself?”

  Chaz dropped her knife and stared into the camera, her black-rimmed eyes wide.

  “Leave her alone, Georgie.” Bram spoke sharply from the doorway. “Take your camera and leave her alone.”

  Chaz turned on him. “You told her!”

  Bram came into the room. “I haven’t told her anything.”

  “She knows! You told her!”

  Chaz’s anger and self-hatred were visceral, and Georgie wanted to understand it. She wanted to film it as a testament to all the young girls consumed by their own pain. Except she had no right to invade her privacy like this, and she made herself—forced herself—to lower the camera.

  “She doesn’t know anything you haven’t told her with your big mouth,” Bram said.

  Once again Georgie ordered herself to leave, but her feet weren’t moving. Instead, she said, “I know you’re not the only girl who’s come to L.A. and done what she had to so she could survive.”

  Chaz’s hands curled into fists. “I wasn’t a whore. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? I was some kind of crack whore!”

  Bram shot Georgie a death glare and moved to Chaz’s side. “Let it go. You don’t have to defend yourself to anyone.”

  But something seemed to have broken open inside her. She focused only on Georgie. Her lips pulled tight over her teeth and her voice became a snarl. “I wasn’t doing drugs! Never! I ju
st wanted a place to live and some decent food.”

  Georgie turned off the camera.

  “No!” Chaz cried. “Turn it back on. You wanted to hear this so bad…Turn it on.”

  “It’s all right. I don’t—”

  “Turn it on!” Chaz said fiercely. “This is important. Make it important.”

  Georgie’s hands had begun to shake, but she understood, and she did as Chaz asked.

  “I was dirty and living out of a backpack.” Through the lens Georgie watched tears spill over the inky dam of Chaz’s bottom lashes. “I went a day without eating and then another day. I heard about this soup kitchen, but I couldn’t make myself go in. I was feeling crazy from not eating and it seemed better to sell my body than take charity.”

  Bram tried to rub her back, but she pushed him away. “I told myself it would be just once, and I’d charge enough so I could get by until the cast came off my hand.” Her words pummeled the camera. “He was an old guy. He was going to pay me two hundred bucks. But after it was over, he pushed me out of his car instead and drove away without giving me anything. I threw up in the gutter.” Her mouth tightened with bitterness. “After that I learned to get my money first. Mostly twenty bucks, but I wasn’t using—I never used drugs—and I made them wear condoms, so I wasn’t like the other girls who were using and didn’t care about anything. I cared, and I wasn’t a whore!”

  Once again, Georgie tried to shut off the camera, but Chaz was having none of it. “This is what you wanted. Don’t you dare stop now.”

  “All right,” Georgie said softly.

  “I hated sleeping on the street.” Muddy tears dripped down her cheeks. “And I hated trying to keep clean in public bathrooms most of all. I hated it so much I wanted to die, but killing yourself is a lot harder than you think.” She grabbed a tissue from a box on the counter. “I met this guy not too long before Christmas, and I got some pills from him. Not to get high. Pills so I could…stop everything.” She blew her nose. “I was going to save them for Christmas Eve, like this present to myself where I would take the pills, then just curl up in somebody’s doorway and fall asleep forever.”

  “Oh, Chaz…” Georgie’s heart ached. Bram drew Chaz’s spine against his chest and rubbed her shoulders.

  “All I had to do was wait until Christmas Eve, but I got too hungry.” She balled the tissue in her hand. “One night I saw this guy coming out of a club. He was by himself, and he looked really clean. When I went up to talk to him, he asked me how old I was. A lot of them asked that, and I would answer depending on what they wanted to hear, like sometimes I’d say fourteen or even twelve. But he didn’t seem like one of those creeps, so I told him the truth. He pulled out some money, gave it to me, and walked away. It was a hundred dollars, and I should have just said thank you, but I was sort of crazy from not eating, and I yelled that I didn’t need his charity. And when he turned to look at me, I sort of threw it at him.”

  She pulled away from Bram and dropped the tissue in the trash. “He came back and picked up the money and asked how long since I’d had anything to eat. I told him I didn’t remember, and he took me into the bar and ordered hamburgers and stuff. He wouldn’t let me go wash my hands because he said I’d try to duck out the back, but I wouldn’t have. I was too hungry. I wrapped a paper napkin around the food and ate it that way, so my hands didn’t touch anything.”

  She went to the sink and turned on the water. Keeping her back to them, she washed her hands. “He waited until I was done, and then he said he’d take me to this place, like this homeless shelter where they had social workers, and I told him I didn’t need any social workers, what I needed was a job in a restaurant, but even though my cast was off, I couldn’t get a job because I didn’t have an address, and I couldn’t keep myself clean.”

  Georgie lowered the camera and licked her lips. “So he gave you a job himself. He invited a street kid he didn’t know into his house and gave her a job.”

  Chaz spun back to face her—proud, defiant, sneering. “And he thinks he’s so smart about everything. I could have stuck a knife in him. He doesn’t understand how bad people can be. Do you see why I have to watch him so close?”

  “I do,” Georgie said. “I didn’t before, but now I do.”

  “I’m sure I could have held my own against a runt like you,” Bram said.

  Chaz grabbed a paper towel and stalked toward Georgie, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Now that you’ve got all that in your camera, maybe you’ll leave me alone.”

  “Maybe,” Georgie said. “Probably not.”

  Chaz whipped around to confront Bram. “Do you see how weird she is? Now do you see?”

  He slipped his hand in his pocket. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Just—I don’t know. Just tell her she’s fucking weird.”

  “You’re weird,” he said to Georgie. “Chaz is right.”

  “I know. I appreciate the two of you putting up with me.”

  Feeling as though she’d done something good, she left them alone.

  Chapter 16

  Georgie locked herself in Bram’s bathroom and soaked in his tub. She and Chaz had both been betrayed by men—Chaz, much more horribly, on the streets; Georgie on a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan, and later by the husband she’d promised to love forever. Now they were each trying to figure out how to move on. She wondered if Chaz would have told her heart-wrenching story if the camera hadn’t been there? This is important,” Chaz had said when Georgie tried to stop filming. “Make it important.”

  Did the camera simply record reality or did it alter it? Could it change the future? Georgie wondered if having her story documented might help Chaz begin putting her past behind her so she could live a fuller life. Wouldn’t that be amazing? And wouldn’t it be even more amazing if recording Chaz’s story helped Georgie put her own life in perspective.

  She sank deeper into the water and considered the only part of Chaz’s story that had truly shocked her. Bram’s role. He’d been Georgie’s destroyer, but he’d been Chaz’s rescuer. She kept learning new things about him, and none of it fit with what she thought she already knew. He proudly proclaimed that he cared about no one but himself, but that wasn’t entirely true.

  She washed her hair and blew it dry so that it fell straight and shiny around her fuller face. She applied smoky eye makeup and one of her many nude lipsticks, then dressed in cayenne red stretch chinos and a shiny gray cami accompanied by silver ballet flats. With the addition of a pair of abstract silver earrings, she was done.

  At the bottom of the stairs, she found Bram pacing the foyer in white pants and shirt. “I thought you were wearing jeans,” she said.

  “I changed my mind.”

  He took her in, doing his eye-smolder thing, which made her nervous. “You look like Robert Redford in Gatsby,” she said. “Except hunkier. A statement of fact, not a compliment, so no need to thank me.”

  “I won’t.” He kept smoldering her, his gaze moving from her silver ballet flats, up over her legs and hips, lingering on her breasts, and ending up at her face. “You look pretty good yourself. Those big green eyes…”

  “Bug eyes.”

  His smoldering gave way to exasperation. “You don’t have bug eyes, and you should have gotten over your insecurities a long time ago.”

  “I’m a realist. Moon face, bug eyes, and rubber mouth, but I’m starting to like my body again, and I’m not getting implants.”

  He sighed. “Nobody wants you to get implants, especially me. You don’t have a moon face. And when are you going to stop trying to camouflage your mouth and splash it with some red lipstick? I happen to have an intimate acquaintance with that mouth, and I’m here to tell you it’s spectacular.” He slid the palm of his hand along her hip. “A statement of fact, not a compliment.”

  This was getting way too hot for her, so she broke the mood with a friendly suggestion. “If you want Rory to think you’re reformed, maybe you should lay off the booze.�
��

  “Iced tea.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  She headed for the kitchen to check up on Chaz. Cobalt pottery bowls with red pepper chunks, figs and mangoes, curls of sweet onion, and wedges of fresh pineapple covered the counter. “Make sure you turn the chicken on the grill after four minutes,” Chaz told Aaron, who was arranging glasses on a tray. “No more. Understand?”

  “I understood the first two times you told me.”

  “Those rosemary sprigs go on top of the beef while it’s cooking.” Ignoring Georgie, she pitched a tomato she’d dropped into the sink. “And baste the scallops with the sweet chili sauce. Remember they dry out fast, so don’t keep them on the heat too long.”

  “You should be grilling instead of me,” he said.

  “Like I don’t have enough to do?”

  Chaz seemed as bad-tempered as ever, which was reassuring. Georgie gave her a break and spoke only to Aaron. “What happened to your hair?”

  “I got it cut this afternoon.” Chaz snorted, and he glared at her. “It was taking too long to dry in the morning, that’s all.”

  Another snort.

  “It looks great.” Georgie observed him more closely. The buttons lined up in a neat row down the front of his dark green shirt with no sign of strain, and his khakis no longer stretched so tightly across his stomach. Aaron was losing weight, and she had a feeling she knew who was responsible.

  “Thanks for helping Chaz tonight,” she said as she stole a mushroom from a bowl on the counter. “If she gets too dangerous, use some pepper spray on her.”

  “He’d squirt himself in the eye,” Chaz retorted. She was all attitude, but she knew Georgie had witnessed her pain, and she wouldn’t look at her.

  Georgie squeezed Aaron’s arm. “Remind me to give you hazardous-duty pay when this is over.”

  Meg stuck her head in. She wore a very short chartreuse tunic with blue leopard-pattern leggings and orange ankle boots. A narrow, braided jute headband had replaced the bindi on her forehead. She grinned and spread her arms. “I look fabulous! Admit it.”