“Oh my God! I told her it was you.” The three were all obviously drunk and reminded Noelle of the woman who’d dropped into Lex’s lap on the boat weeks before.
One of them pointed at Lex. “You’re Alexander the Great Snake, aren’t you?”
A hush fell over the table and then there was a masculine snicker.
Noelle looked around the table in confusion. Adisa looked annoyed and Taj laughed again.
“Not this again,” Adisa muttered. “I thought we were done.”
Done with what?
Noelle felt like she was on the outside of the joke. Or whatever it was, since, judging by Lex’s face, it was far from funny. She tightened her hold on his arm.
“It’s been a few years, but you’re still sexy as hell.” The woman who’d pointed dropped into an almost conversational tone, her screeching finished, and moved closer to Lex.
Noelle slipped from his lap and stood up, her hand on his shoulder. He was as tense as steel under her touch. “Maybe you should take your party someplace else,” she said.
“What? It’s not every day you run into the best stripper you’ve ever seen in your life.” The woman looked at Noelle. “I bet you’ve seen him in action. Even without all the muscle he had before, he’s still gorgeous.”
“Oh my God! I remember him. Can he dance for us right now?” The one in pink turned to Lex, tottering and drunkenly hopeful. “Dance for us!” But Lex only watched her, still sprawled in his seat, looking completely at ease. Only because her hand was touching his rigid shoulder did Noelle know differently. Lex shook his head at the woman but didn’t say anything.
“Okay, ladies.” Taj joined Noelle at Lex’s side. “Just let the man enjoy the night in peace.”
Once he spoke, the women started to size him up too. Their eyes moving hungrily over him like they pictured him naked and hanging from a pole just for them.
“Are you—?”
“Don’t let things get ugly,” Noelle snapped, suddenly impatient with the whole thing. “You’re interrupting our evening. I’m sure you can find something better to do down the road.” She jerked her head to the sidewalk.
“Oh I get it, you have a woman now. True. We all have to change when we boo up.” She sighed, eyes misty like she was watching a Lifetime movie, beautiful and tragic. “Have a great night.” the woman said and then snagged her arms around the waists of the other two. “Come on, girls. Let’s get a cab to King of Diamonds. I’m in the mood to see some hot people dancing to trap music.”
The women clattered off on their high heels, remarkably steady as they wove through the thick Collins Avenue pedestrian traffic. Under her hand, Lex’s shoulder remained tense.
“What was that about?” Noelle looked down at him and then at his siblings.
“Just some annoying drunk chicks,” Adisa said at the same time Taj said something Noelle didn’t hear.
“Ghosts from the past,” Lex finally said. He rolled his shoulders and, even though the careless expression was still on his face, she could feel even more tension radiate from him.
Alice and Temple walked out of the pizza parlor, both carrying half a crepe. “What did we miss?”
“Some women who saw Lex dance in Jamaica a million years ago and are still wetting their panties.” Adisa stood up. “You all ready to go?”
Alice scrunched up her face. “We just got our sweet things.”
“You can eat and walk.” Adisa grabbed her sister’s elbow. “Come on, guys.”
Taj threw a sympathetic glance at Lex and stood up with a scrape of the metal chair against the concrete sidewalk. “Later, brother.”
The Diallos trailed away from the pizza parlor, strains of their conversation floating on the wind back to Noelle.
“Why did we have to leave? I wasn’t ready.”
“Lex should come with us...”
The table felt empty without them, the chairs left at angles to the table and littered with crumbs and wrinkled napkins. Noelle sank into one of the empty chairs, pressed her knees together and looked at Lex.
“You were a stripper?”
The second the words left her mouth, she felt like an idiot and a prude. Two things she’d never once associated with herself.
Before she could apologize and ask in a different way, Lex swiped a hand over his face and blew out a breath. “Yeah. When I was in college, I did dance.” Now that the strange women and his siblings were gone, he seemed to settle into a different version of himself, slightly nervous. Hard-jawed. Like he was bracing himself for something.
“In Jamaica?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not...that’s not a big deal,” she said carefully. “Why didn’t you tell me before? We’ve talked about everything else.” Dread, a cold and heavy weight, dropped into Noelle’s stomach. If he’d hidden such a simple thing from her, what else was he not telling her?
“It was a long time ago and I don’t talk about it.” He didn’t say it didn’t matter. “The stripping and other things I got up to back then are things I prefer to keep in the past, like teenage acne or an addiction to porn.”
She jerked her gaze to his face. “You were a porn addict?”
He laughed, a painful sound. “No.” His fingers tapped a disjointed rhythm across the chrome surface of the table. “Sorry. Bad joke.”
His eyebrows jerked once and he looked at a point over her head. “That part of me is in the past and, although while I was doing it I wasn’t ashamed, these days I don’t want my parents to know what I did just because I was bored.”
Noelle knew what it was like to be half caught between the past and the present. It had taken her years to be able to talk about her parents’ drug and alcohol addiction to anyone but Margot and even longer to trust herself with a drink out of fear she would become like her mother. The things Lex revealed were nothing in the larger scheme of things, the bad decisions of a boy who’d had nothing to rebel against but the privileges and safety he was born with.
But he’d lied to her. It was something small, but she couldn’t ignore it.
The night in the reggae club, she had asked a simple question: Where’d you learn to dance?
By watching you, he’d said, whispering the lie against her lips.
She pressed her purse against her stomach, nearly sick with the uncertainty that cut through the elation she’d felt being with Lex and his siblings.
“I have to go,” she said.
“Noelle...” He stood up the same time she did, his chair screeching back from the table. “Stay.” He cupped her elbow, tugging her closer to his warmth and the desperation in his eyes. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
She felt herself weakening, the hardness of her suspicions melting with his touch and the naked emotion on his face. But she couldn’t afford to ignore her gut instinct telling her there was something else lurking behind his lie. She needed time and space to think. “I can’t. I know this shouldn’t be a big deal, but... I can’t stop thinking about what this could mean.”
“Like what?” He asked the question, but she could see the flicker of something—an awareness—at the back of his eyes.
Noelle pulled back until his hand fell away from her elbow and the feel of it was like a tightly pulled string about to snap in two. “I can’t do this now. I’m sorry.”
She turned away from the devastation in his face and left Collins Avenue with her heart beating fast and painful in her throat. Instead of heading home, she found herself driving the path to Margot’s condo. At each turn on the side streets, she made an effort to see logic and not damn Lex with the memory of her past experiences. But all she could remember was the lie.
At Margot’s downtown Miami condo, she flashed her ID to the doorman and used her key to get into the penthouse elevator. She call
ed Margot on the way up.
“Hey,” she said once her sister answered the phone. “Are you still up?”
“Of course.” But the rustling of cloth, like sheets on a bed, came through the phone and made Noelle feel selfish. Maybe she should have just gone home. It was a long time past midnight.
“I can come back some other time,” she said.
More rustling, the sound of glass on glass like she was putting something down on that ridiculously expensive coffee table of hers. “Stop your foolishness. Come on up.”
Margot’s front door was open by the time she got there, a welcome spill of light inviting her into her sister’s glassed-in loft. It was an odd place. Floor-to-ceiling windows, glass fixtures and furniture. The only things not hard and reflective were the leather pieces in the room. Black sofa, armchair and dining room furniture visible from the living room.
“Come in.” Margot stood by the sofa, folding a blanket. She draped it over the back of the leather sofa and reached out to pull Noelle into a stiff hug. “Are you okay?” Her sister blinked, drowsy-looking and slow. The leggings and oversized T-shirt she wore made her look soft and inviting, not at all like someone who lived in such a cold place.
“Um...maybe.”
Margot guided her to the sofa and went into the kitchen where Noelle heard the high-pitched whistle of the tea kettle. Moments later, she was back with two cups of mint tea, a jar of honey and cubes of brown sugar balanced on a silver tray. She sat close to Noelle and prepared tea for them both.
“Tell me what’s wrong.” She pressed the warm teacup into Noelle’s cold hands.
A shiver worked its way from Noelle’s scalp to her toes. She didn’t want to be weak like this. Hadn’t she just insisted to Margot that she was a grown-up now and didn’t need any more mothering?
But she was tired of holding this thing, whatever it was, within herself.
“The guy I’m dating is lying to me.” She blurted out the words and waited for Margot to say something, to offer to make a call initiating a full background check, to ask Noelle if she was sure. But in the resulting silence, she stared into the depths of her teacup. Tiny green leaves floated in the water and sugar mixture, unmoored things plucked and isolated from far-off bushes. “You know Lex, don’t you?”
Nearly an hour after it happened, the moment of the women’s approach up to the table on Collins Avenue still felt surreal. After sleeping with Lex and allowing her feelings for him to bubble up and fizz inside her, a celebration of the journey to self-acceptance she was well on the way to, everything seemed suspect.
Margot had traveled to Jamaica a lot while Noelle had been in school. Her sister made sure to leave only when Noelle was away at summer camp or any of the academies where there were other adults to supervise her teenage behavior. Those women on Collins Avenue acted like anyone in Jamaica at the same time as Lex would know him. Alexander the Great Snake.
Damn. What a name.
“What’s going on, Noelle?”
She’d been so deeply buried in her thoughts she didn’t notice that Margot was farther away from her on the couch than when they’d sat down. She noticed now though. And also noticed the slight wrinkle between her sister’s otherwise smooth brows. Sometimes she wondered if Margot had had surgery or if her skin was so flawless simply because she rarely smiled.
“The man I’ve been seeing. Lex. Did you ever get a lap dance from him? Did he blow your mind so much that you have dreams about him ten years later.”
“Noelle, Alexander is a child to me.”
Margot’s words hammered into her brain and left a dizzying echo that made Noelle swallow and swallow again before she could talk. “He’s a child?”
“Of course. He could be my baby brother. I wouldn’t have let him dance for me, much less sleep with me.” Whatever impression of softness Noelle had had about Margot was completely gone. The bones of her face stood out in severe relief against her skin. The look in her eyes was sharp enough to cut.
Margot’s words washed over Noelle, but she wasn’t sure she was hearing them right. Her sister actually did know Lex. Had known him in Jamaica. Knew his full name.
“Margot, how...?” But she couldn’t go on.
“So he told you?” Margot’s question was one she wasn’t quite sure how to answer except with the truth.
“Yes, he did.” Noelle fumbled to bring the teacup to her mouth but dropped her hand at the last minute. She didn’t trust herself not to shake and spill tea all over her dress. Something was snaking in the air between them, a truth she could feel but couldn’t see yet. As if her mouth was separate from her thoughts, it opened and kept talking. “At first, I couldn’t believe it. But sometimes the truth is unbelievable, right?” Lex. A dancer. Margot. Who had known him then and never told Noelle.
“He wasn’t supposed to tell you,” Margot said. Emotion rippled over her face, transforming her beauty into something desperate and seeking. “I know you’re upset, but I only did it because I was worried about you.”
“Margot, you did...” What does his past have to do with you? She blinked at her sister, a pulse of worry beginning to pound in her throat.
But her body knew something before her mind did and her hands began a more intense tremor that rocked the teacup against the saucer, a frantic tapping that charted her rising agitation. She shoved the cup and saucer on the coffee table and squeezed her hands tight in her lap. Another truth slithering out to bite her.
“I didn’t know if you were okay after Eric left,” Margot said. “I just thought if Lex went out with you a few times, you would forget about Eric and start being happy again. He was only supposed to help you past the hump and get you out of your depression.”
Past the hump? Depression?
The words tumbled over Noelle like lead bricks, one after the other until she was dizzy and dumb from shock. She opened her mouth a few times, cleared her throat before she was finally able to say anything. “Did...did you pay him to sleep with me too?”
“You slept with him?” The emotion on her sister’s face was unmistakably anger then. Dimly Noelle thought she should be grateful for small mercies. She stumbled to her feet, face hot as she turned in a frantic circle, her hands gripped tight against her belly.
“You paid Lex to date me.” It sounded too ridiculous.
“I never paid,” Margot said with a hard shake of her head. She watched Noelle with a mounting fear so obvious that it was frightening. “He did it for me as a favor.”
Noelle’s stomach clenched and a wrecked sound left her throat. Her entire body flushed with anger. “You told him—he’s one of yours? He’s always been one of yours?”
And the things she’d said to Lex came back to her in nauseating detail. Her confession to him in the restaurant, the things she said when they rocked together, locked in heat in his car. The things she felt for him.
“He’s yours.” No longer a question.
Margot stood up, frowning. “I thought you already knew.” Her face stretching in a look of deeper horror.
Noelle’s disbelief and anger spilled out in a bitter splash of vomit all over Margot’s carpet, over her shoes. She couldn’t control it. Her face felt hot. A scorching line of tears. Throat raw.
Margot grabbed the blanket from the couch and came toward Noelle with it spread out, but Noelle backed away from her. “You did this to me.” She swallowed until the unwanted moisture drained away from the bed of her tongue, the sickness receding, and she could stand without stooping over. “I thought you loved me.” Noelle didn’t wait for what her sister was going to say. She ran from the living room, from the condo. At the elevator, she frantically pressed the button for it to come, panting and shivering.
This can’t be happening.
“Noelle, please! Come and let me explain.” Margot ran after her, feet bare, th
e sleeve of her oversized shirt falling down her shoulder.
“No! Stay away from me!” Noelle ran for the stairs.
Noelle ran until her lungs burned, racing down flight after flight of stairs until she was sure Margot wasn’t behind her. Then she stopped on a lower floor and took the elevator the rest of the way down. In the lobby, she hid her tear-streaked face from the guard and ran out to the sidewalk, craning her head looking desperately for a cab. But none appeared. The idea of standing outside her sister’s condo, on her street, made sickness rise up in her again, sharp and urgent. She pressed a fist into her stomach then and, after barely thinking about another option, started walking toward her house. Without her purse or her car keys. Without any idea how she would make it all the way there.
Chapter 13
Lex opened his door at nearly three in the morning to see Noelle’s ravaged face staring back at him.
She was barefoot and carrying her high heels in one hand and wore dried tears streaked over her face like war paint. But she seemed almost calm.
Fear kicked in his chest and his hand tightened around the doorknob. “It’s late,” Lex said, low and gentle like talking to a feral animal on the verge of trusting him. “Come inside.”
At first, she didn’t react to him. Her face stayed blank. Only her eyes moved over him, eager and hard, hungry and hurt. Then her entire body heaved with a breath and she blinked rapidly, Sleeping Beauty waking.
“I really liked you, Lex.” The words left Noelle’s mouth on a wisp of breath, just loud enough for him to hear even though he had to lean close. “You screwing me over is almost okay, but I can’t believe my own sister, who I actually...love and who I thought loved me too, did this to me.” Noelle slammed a closed fist into her chest and the sound was loud enough to make Lex flinch. He gripped the edges of the door frame to stop himself from reaching out for her. “Anyway,” she sighed again, “I’m giving you the courtesy you never gave me. I’m telling you to your face what I really think of you. You’re despicable and I wish you hurt even half as much as I’m hurting now.” Her lashes fluttered again and for a frozen moment, Lex thought she was going to cry. But she wiped a rough fist over her eyes. “Jesus, you two must have laughed your heads off at me. Pathetic Noelle thinking that a guy like Alexander the Snake would actually be into her.”
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