She rolls over and is careful not to look at her Sir Lancelot sitting next to her. Instead, she focuses on the ceiling. The paint was too thick when they painted and dried in globs.
“So twins, huh?”
Out the corner of her eye, she sees Laura blinking like she’s taking a minute to catch up with the conversation. “Yes.”
“Do they know what you do? For a living?”
“No.”
“And Michel?”
“Of course he knows.”
“But he doesn’t work with you?” She figures that from the way people at the party fawned over him.
Laura laughs. “Despite his love of his adopted country, he’s still very French. Just a diplomat.”
Amelia’s fingers play at the edge of her pillowcase, gaze on Laura again. “So you two had two gorgeous kids, bought that fancy home, and the rest is history.” She wishes she had a cigarette. Or a drink. Or maybe some warm arms wrapped around her and soft lips pressing to the bump on her head. “It’s a nice story.”
Laura’s gotten more and more stiff. Looking like the little stone Saint Francis in her ma’s back yard. “Yes,” she says quietly. “I suppose it is.”
“I’m glad you started living in the world, Laura.”
Laura stares straight ahead. She’s on guard, waiting for the next goon to come through the door and try to murder them both.
“The thing is, I don’t think I have.” She says it softly. Almost quiet enough that, if Amelia wanted to pretend she didn’t hear, she could. But Laura looks down at her, and Amelia knows she’s meant to hear it.
And understand what Laura’s saying.
There’s a lot she’s intimating with a few well-placed words. A lot that makes things complicated for Amelia. Laura too.
Amelia doesn’t have the heart to tell her how romantic and stupid and impossible Laura’s being. The woman’s gone out of her way to keep Amelia safe, confessed she’s miserable and alone, and now she’s looking at Amelia with those dark earnest eyes. Wouldn’t be right to go and call her an idiot.
She’s woken up in a lot of arms over the last few years. Some smelling like cigarettes and others like fancy perfume and at least two that reeked of regret.
Laura just smells like Laura.
And maybe gun oil. Which is a very unique sort of oil smell and not so unpleasant on account of being associated with Laura.
Apparently, at some point in the night, she wrapped herself around Amelia like a python, gun still pointed at the door, and fell asleep.
Amelia twists around in her arms, until she’s facing her properly, and pulls a lock of blonde hair away from Laura’s eyes. Laura sleeps like she lives, with a frown making lines between her eyes.
The last time the two of them spent a night together, it was full of giggles and sex and bonding. Now, there’s all this weight between ’em, and it’s as if Laura’s decided to carry it in that frown.
She presses her finger up to it as if a little pressure could smooth it out. Then she tucks her head in under Laura’s chin and inhales her very particular and lovely smell and slips back into sleep.
She wakes up again, and she hasn’t got a clue as to the time, but she’s still wrapped up in Laura’s arms. Only now Laura’s awake, stiff as a doll, and looking at Amelia all stricken-like.
“I’m sorry,” she utters.
Amelia snuggles closer. “Don’t be. I can think of worse ways to wake up.”
Laura slips her leg between Amelia’s and reaches over to put the gun on the bedside table. It brings her close enough that all Amelia has to do is look up to place a kiss against Laura’s pulse point.
That earns a sigh.
But Amelia figures she can do better.
She kisses her. Slow and easy and as casual as the waking up. Laura pulls her closer. Her head’s nestled in the crook of Laura’s arms, and they’re kissing so lazily, she’s inclined to check the clock and make sure it’s not 1946 again.
All the girls Amelia’s kissed over the years—the famous and the not so famous—none of them kiss quite like Laura Wright. She’s got this way of pressing into a woman so that she’s everywhere at once. Possessing her but with none of the manly idiocy something like that usually entails.
She’s just holding Amelia. Not getting up to any kinds of business, despite the leg between her legs or the hand running lightly up and down her side. But it’s as erotic as a dance and some fancy lingerie.
Quite unplanned, Amelia moans into Laura’s mouth. Which works to get Laura all excited. Her thigh presses upwards into a bit of Amelia that doesn’t need the friction but enjoys the hell out of it, and if they’re not careful, they’re gonna get naked and never make it out of the motel room.
She pulls back. “I’m hungry,” she says.
Laura’s lips are all red from too much kissing, her eyes are wide with confusion, and her mouth is working as if she’s not sure if she should say “okay” or make a really well-timed come on.
“We should grab breakfast before they stop serving it.”
Laura nods. “Okay.” She kisses the corner of Amelia’s mouth.
It’s so easy that Amelia might just die from it. First, they both need to shower. Laura tries to say she’ll use the shower in the room she didn’t even sleep in, but Amelia glares until she blushes and uses Amelia’s. While she waits, Amelia sits in front of the mirror and tries to brush the worst of the dried blood out of her hair.
Lady’s got to love her if she was willing to kiss her looking like this. “I look an awful fright,” she says when Laura emerges, hair damp and soaking the wide collar of her navy dress.
“Auburn looks good on you,” she jokes and scrapes her nails along the back of Amelia’s neck.
If she were to chronicle their kisses, record ’em in her diary alongside anecdotes about actors, then this kiss would get all the top marks. Laura’s hand is on her neck, as Amelia cranes up to meet her. A curtain of wet hair surrounds them, damp, clean, and as pure as snow up on a mountain.
She gets out of the shower and creeps out of the bathroom. Laura’s back in the chair, but she’s moved it over by the bed so she can kick her heels up. Her back’s to Amelia, and she’s reading the James Joyce Amelia had in her bag.
Her publicist once asked if it was there to make her look smarter if her luggage was stolen, but she just likes his work. It’s somehow easy to read. Relaxing.
Less so for Laura. Her brow’s all wrinkled as she tries to suss out whatever’s happening on the page in front of her, but she still hears Amelia’s bad attempt at sneaking up.
“You know Gerard was always raving about Joyce, but I really don’t see the appeal.”
That makes sense to Amelia. Laura likes structure.
“Gerard. Was that…” She trails off, not wanting to actually say heavy words like “dead.”
Laura snaps the book shut. “You two would have gotten along,” she answers.
“Of course we would have. In love with the same gal, aren’t we?”
She doesn’t have a quick and easy answer for that one. She simply stares at Amelia as if she’s grown a second head.
Score one for the ditzy actress. That score immediately tips back in Laura’s favor when they sit down for breakfast. Over fried eggs, tomatoes, and toast, Amelia produces the “list.” A group of people who are either pissed enough to set her up or now angry enough to see her dead before she can spill some precious secret.
She originally took a stab at the list while staying in DC, before the idea of being under surveillance scared her out of the city. She took another stab at it while Laura was showering that morning. The busy work was a good way to take her mind off the slippery, wet, naked woman just a door away.
Amelia figures that with all the duress she’s be
en under and the big bump on her noggin, anyone would be impressed with the list she managed to put together. It’s a really nice list.
Laura, being a career spy, is less impressed. “Who on earth is Rock Hudson?”
“An up and comer. In a lot of the rags right now.”
Laura stops eating so she can reach over and cross his name off the list. “I don’t think he’s our fink.”
“Montgomery Clift?”
Amelia shrugs.
“Kat—” Laura has to put the list down. “Why is Katherine Hepburn on this list?” She glances at it again. “And Joan Crawford? And… Amelia, Greta Garbo doesn’t even go out in public.”
She sips her coffee. “What we did wasn’t fit for public.” She really enjoys how flustered and jealous that makes Laura.
She grumbles. “I’d think half this list would want you dead just for making the list.”
“You told me to make a list!”
Laura sighs. “Of people who might want to harm you. Not a list of every single person with whom you’ve had… dalliances.”
“I’ll have you know, every single fella on that list was above the belt.”
Laura closes her eyes and takes in a deep breath that makes her shoulders rise and fall. “Right. So we’re destroying this. Then we’re going to make another less dangerous list of people you’ve royally pissed off.”
“Better put Greta on that list too then.” She thinks about it. “And Marlene.”
“Dietrich?”
“Real mad.”
“Is there anyone in Hollywood you haven’t… engaged with?”
“Doris Day. Straight as a board and doesn’t like you implying otherwise.”
“Marvelous.”
“Lousy singer though.”
“Anyone who would legitimately want to hurt you? Besides angry European actresses you’ve loved and left?”
“Anyone who saw my turn in that Martin and Lewis flick?”
Laura rolls her eyes.
“I don’t know, I mean my whole job is about making people like me. I’d be pretty lousy at it if I had a list of those who didn’t.”
“But there must be someone… men you’ve rejected? Studio heads you’ve infuriated. Actresses who lost out on roles?”
“Grace Kelly is doing just fine.”
“What about the element you used to run with?”
“Spies who never call?”
Laura frowns. “The people with whom you used to rob banks.”
“Setting me up as a communist spy’s a little outside their purview.”
She’s kind of clueless as to who she knows that would want to torpedo her, and she doesn’t want to talk to Laura about the big married elephant in the room. She figures if anyone really wants to send her up the river for being a communist it was the guy sharing a bedroom with Laura.
She sure as heck would have done something that stupid in his position, and she wouldn’t have hesitated.
“Do we even think the guy who turned me in is the same as the one trying to murder me?”
Laura grimaces, but won’t meet Amelia’s gaze. “No. The man stupid enough to turn you in just kicked a hornet’s nest. Didn’t even think…” she mutters.
The man. That’s what Laura says. And the grimace. And not looking at Amelia.
Laura knows exactly who set Amelia up as a communist spy.
She hasn’t picked up on her minute slip and is still muttering to herself like a dotty old lady who gets mad when your dog pees on her tree. “Of course, doing something like turning you in for communism, would put you under scrutiny. Of all the high profile women in your… position, you’re the one with the longest list of Washington elite on your dance card.”
The “elites” again. “You think the folks trying to kill me have something to do with fellas like Chalmers,” she asks.
Laura shrugs and stirs cream into her coffee. “Makes sense. You can’t save yourself with a list of fellow communists, but this,” her long finger stabs the list Amelia’s made, “this would upend half the city.”
“But I don’t plan on actually making this list public.”
“They can’t know that.”
“The whole reason I dated those men was because we could all be discreet. If one of us goes up, we all go up.”
“And they think you’re going up.”
“So I tell ’em I’m not!”
All around them, people pause. A few keep staring down at their plates, while a few others crane their necks to look at her.
Laura purses her lips as if she’s cranky with an unruly kid. “We should go.”
Shit. Amelia nods. “Where? North?”
CHAPTER 22
West. They head west. Because Laura insists that the men out to kill Amelia will be waiting at her apartment in New York and near her place in Long Island. “Wherever you were planning on going? They’ll be there.”
So they drive west with no particular destination in mind. It’s a first for Amelia, who always has a plan—a goal—even if it’s a bad one.
Every time they stop, Laura tells her she’ll be “just a moment, darling” and disappears to make phone calls.
Amelia doesn’t ask who she’s calling because when they’re driving it’s as if there’s a spell around the two of ’em. They don’t talk about what could happen Monday, or Tuesday, or any day beyond the one they’re living. Everything’s easy in the immediacy of their escape.
Amelia doesn’t want to break this spell that’s come over them, and asking Laura who she’s calling will do just that.
She doesn’t want to point out how similar it is to forty-six either. As if the two of them can only be together when they’re racing across the countryside, running from bad men in cheap suits.
That night, they stop in a rustic looking motor lodge at the foot of the Appalachians. The mountains don’t look anything like Amelia’s used to. There’s no big hunks of stone jutting out of the ground and capped by white. Just walls of green trees that seem to go up and out forever.
They book just one room, unlike the night before. Laura insists on two beds and smiles at the boy who checks them in.
While Laura disappears to make more calls, Amelia mixes drinks for them in the room. Then drinks both of them and mixes two more.
Laura doesn’t mention the calls when she comes back. Instead she sits on one of the beds, smokes a cigarette, and nurses her gin.
“Are you hungry?” she asks. “I’m hungry.”
Amelia really doesn’t want to eat. Not after the drinks. Not after the dread that’s built in her since they checked in. She sips her drink and stares at the free newspaper on the coffee table. A church is having a festival tomorrow, and the Watkins lumber mill is still for sale.
“What if we never went back?” she asks. And she reaches over to idly flip the page on the paper. “Just keep driving.”
“Well…” Laura stretches her legs out in front of her. “We’d hit the Pacific after a while.”
“Could go south.”
“That won’t work,” she says between sips. “Central America is just a hot bed of communists nowadays.” She gesticulates when she says it, tumbler of booze still clutched in her hand.
“Why care? If I’m running, that’ll be admission enough.”
“But have you seen what communists wear? All gray wool and red? Better to fight them.”
“For fashion.” Amelia mock toasts.
“For fashion,” Laura agrees. She finishes off her drink but never takes her eyes off Amelia. It’s as if Superman’s sitting across from her—with his fancy vision. X-Ray. Heat. It’s all boiling up something inside of her.
Then Laura stands. Sets her glass on the table as she comes around it and sta
nds in front of Amelia.
She’s dead quiet as she carefully pulls Amelia up. Sets her glass on the table next to her own. Her hand splays across Amelia’s waist. Fingers dig. Thumb moving in slow circles.
Her other hand sifts through Amelia’s hair. Nails scratch her scalp.
She kisses her. Like gossamer. Gentle enough to be a dream. Kiss after kiss after kiss. Every press of her lips worrying away all the fears that have wrapped Amelia up.
It’s all right she says with nothing but her touch.
There are no words exchanged. This, the two of them, is more than enough. Laura’s cool fingers slip beneath the hem of Amelia’s blouse, and Amelia’s hand finds its way up to Laura’s cheek, and all of that is enough.
To deepen things. To unfurl emotions—wants—that at least one of them has been very good at reining in.
Laura sucks in a long breath through her nose and tilts her head, and Amelia sinks into her, into the kiss, into the feelings she told herself were dangerous to feel.
Because until now it’s been easy teases. Reminding Laura what she left, what she gave up.
But now…Now Laura’s kissing her, and it’s all Amelia could want. All she needs.
Her other hand presses against Laura’s dress. Fingers lifting up against the center of her and rewarding Amelia with a delicious gasp.
All for her.
Because of her.
She grabs a handful of the dress, that sharp looking navy blue sheath, and pulls up. Just reaches down and finishes yanking her dress up to her waist. Laura never breaks the kiss—which has grown ravenous. Her hands are holding Amelia’s face. Kissing her as if she’s afraid Amelia might disappear in a moment.
Amelia slips her fingers around delicate silk panties and into a wanting warmth that makes her sigh.
The Lavender List Page 18