By this point, the tension under the table was becoming unbearable.
“Pardon me,” Harper said, getting up and excusing herself to the restroom. She needed to splash water on her face. Take a moment to cool down.
“I have to go too,” Grace said, leaving Dean with an attractive female server who’d stopped at the table. Harper didn’t look back, but could feel Grace trailing close behind.
The unisex bathroom, a burgundy box with a toilet, was lit by a single votive candle. Jazz played through an overhead speaker.
As soon as Grace turned the lock, Harper pinned her to the door. The wave of desire splashing inside of her body was more frantic than anything Harper had ever felt. In an instant, Grace’s hands were under Harper’s top. Like the candle, their breaths flickered.
Hot fury between them, Grace shoved Harper to the sink.
Harper momentarily wrapped her legs around Grace’s waist,
stabilizing them as they devoured each other, both unable to kiss deep enough. In the vase behind Harper, a Bird of Paradise snapped in half.
Grace held Harper’s wrists together above her head and took each breast into her mouth, lapping up her nipples like a melting ice cream cone. Looking down, Harper was overcome by the sight of a frenzied Grace.
Finally, Harper twisted from Grace, and with both hands, pushed her against the wall, face first. It was her turn. Harper’s knee, cut by a pencil boucle skirt, separated Grace’s legs.
“Spread ’em,” Harper said.
Grace immediately surrendered and obeyed. “Whatever you say, officer.”
Grace’s forehead against the wall, Harper began patting Grace like a policewoman. She started at the top and stroked her way down. “Do as I say,” she said, lifting Grace’s skirt, lined in leopard print, “and no one will get hurt.”
She explored her stomach, her hips, her thighs. “Spread ‘em further,” Harper demanded. Grace widened her stance. “That’s a good girl.”
Suddenly, a firm knock at the door startled them.
“Damn it!” Grace said, pulling her skirt back down, fixing her hair.
Somehow, after three more knocks at the door, they peeled apart and returned to the table. Neither wanted Dean nor the people in line outside the door to wonder.
“Everything all right?” Dean asked, spinning his reading glasses on the tablecloth.
“Fine,” Grace said, scooting into her chair. She reached for the sweets menu. “How about dessert?”
After a chocolate soufflé, they left Spago and hit Sunset again, motoring their way up Kings Road to Franklin Avenue, where Dean’s house was situated right before the hillside bend.
Its modern style wasn’t unique to the street, but the large abstract sculpture in the front yard was; it had come with the house.
Dean explained the muted cacophony of boxes was supposed to symbolize repression.
“Huh,” Harper said. “Repression in Hollywood. Go figure.”
Inside, everyone dispersed throughout the house, which was much cooler now. The high pressure system over Southern California had given in to the pervasive ocean stream, rolling through Santa Monica to the mountains.
Grace was in the bedroom, Dean on the deck with his phone and Harper in the kitchen pouring Courvoisier.
Meeting Grace outside the bathroom, Harper handed Grace her nightcap.
“Thanks officer,” she said.
The strip search would resume shortly and they both knew it. With leashes in hand, the dogs at his feet, Dean appeared at the door. “Do you have everything you need?” he asked. Chaka was still on the turntable, back at it again. “Ain’t Nobody” this time.Squatting on the floor, Harper was changing her camera battery. “We’re good.”
Grace, in a sort-of pose against the door hinges, was intensely sniffing her cognac.
“Smile,” Harper said, taking a photo of Dean from the ground. He was still in his black high collar shirt and dark denim jeans, his bold John Hardy choker radiant against his neck.
“Goodnight,” he told them, and left.
Standing halfway in the bathroom, Grace, provocatively, had one arm up and her eyes held the same expression as when they were in the Spago restroom. Two of Grace’s sweater buttons popped open revealing her diamonded chest.
As soon as the front door latched shut, the show began.
Harper jumped onto the bed and rested against the red velvet accent wall, camera in hand. Slowly, to Chaka’s beats, Grace’s top came off. Her hips moved like she’d been peeling her whole life. The only thing missing was the stripper pole.
Grace improvised and slinked up and down the doorjamb instead, delicately unbuckling her skirt’s cloth belt. The clasp clanked on the wood floor.
From there, in her G-string and sweater, which would shortly be in a heap in the corner, Grace danced to the song, working the furniture in the room like a professional.
It was all recorded on film, even when Grace leapt onto the mattress and stuck her finger in Harper’s mouth as she slithered up and down the bedpost like a seasoned stripper.
Grace tweaked her own nipples, felt her own wetness and bent over for Harper, revealing everything. Harper’s mouth was on Grace, who straddled Harper when “Sweet Thing” began.
This was the point Harper put her camera down, as she needed both hands.
Grace knelt above her, moving her body with flawless rhythm. Almost channeling Chaka.
Where had this sexpot been hiding, Harper marveled.
Without control, Harper flashed on Jamie’s face, jarring her for a very brief moment amidst their passion.
It was no wonder, Harper thought, they couldn’t get rid of him.
“Secret Lovers”
Atlantic Starr
Getting back into the swing of school wasn’t easy that fall.
Especially with Grace’s post at the sorority house. Presidency had its perks—your own room, the primo parking spot, the prestigious title—but definitely had its drawbacks. People were always pulling on Grace and congregating in her room. Harper and Grace had to be extra careful when they were at the sorority house.
They had some close calls; times when they let their guard down. During one of their formal chapter meetings, when everyone was dressed in Gamma’s sacred robes, Grace and Harper took a crazy chance in the ritual closet, narrowly escaping the eyes of their advisor when they thought they were alone.
That night, while they studied into the wee hours at the Coffee Depot, they vowed to be more careful.
“We can’t let that happen again,” Grace warned, dipping biscotti into her latte.
“I know,” Harper said. “But she didn’t see anything.”
“This time.”
It had scared both of them, but especially Grace.
“It could destroy us.”
Between chapters, Harper took a break from chemical
0
compounds to work on her summer photo album. She’d just finished developing the batch and found the perfect red book that would tell the visual story of her journey across Western Europe. Carefully, she peeled back each page and organized it chronologically, starting with when she first arrived in Germany and roomed with Barb at their hotel. From there, it recorded her weekend trips to Prague, Budapest, London, Zurich and Paris, and then, of course, their time spent in Amsterdam and Italy.
The book had just enough pages to finish it off with LA.
“You’re such a whore,” Harper poked, getting Grace’s attention. She held up a photo of Grace in only panties, her bra dangling from her finger.
“Give me that.” Grace’s eyes widened. “You’re not putting these in your album?” Reluctantly, she handed it back to Harper, who was rifling through a stack of them, examining the best of the best of Grace’s Hollywood striptease.
“Why not? It’s just for me.”
“Are you kidding?” Grace asked.
“No one else will see it.”
“What if this gets in the wrong hands? Prom
ise me you won’t include ANY of these dirty ones.”
“Fine. Promise,” Harper said, sliding the incriminating photos into the back of the album to destroy later. “You worry too much,” she said.
When she got back to the sorority house, Harper put the album on the top shelf of her closet to ensure its secrecy. She had to get a chair to reach the spot and covered it up with a bunch of old costumes that had been collecting dust. Until she had time to finish it and shred the bad photos, no one would find it there.
She was certain.
Grace’s first tennis match of the season was scheduled for Thursday afternoon that week. Harper left her photography lab early to make it. Grace was playing a girl from UC Davis she’d beaten the year before, pretty bad actually, but Harper made a point never to miss a serve.
The match—which was being played on center court outside the University Club House—was nearly over. Grace pulled back for an overhead, her finger scoping the ball, before hitting a ferocious shot. A winner. Then, suddenly, she dropped her racquet and fell to her knees, holding her shoulder. As Harper raced from the stands, she could hear Grace crying, wailing, on the court, doubled over on the asphalt. People immediately crowded around.
It had taken Grace three years to climb to the top of U of A’s tennis ladder, but only seconds to tumble down. The whispers around Grace said she’d torn her rotator cuff, which everyone immediately knew put her collegiate career in jeopardy.
Even though she was surrounded by coaches and therapists, Harper was able to get her hand in through the swarm and squeeze Grace’s calf amidst the chaos. “I’m right here, Gracie.”
For Grace, tennis was all but part of the Dunlop pedigree, as ingrained in her daily routine as her Catholic guilt. She was barely out of diapers when she discovered her first ball, and for nearly a year, she didn’t put it down, sleeping with it, carrying it wherever she went. On the Dunlop mantle, there was a picture of Grace sitting on Santa’s lap; if you looked closely, you could see yellow fuzz sticking out of her small purse.
At the hospital later that day, Grace, doped up with a bag of ice taped to her shoulder, was, again, surrounded by people when Harper arrived with flowers. Red roses. From the hall, she could hear the radiologist going over the x-rays.
“There are tears in your supraspinatus and teres minor muscle.”
Grace’s tone was surprisingly strong and optimistic as they talked about options. “Ten weeks of therapy? I could be ready for the NCAA Championships.”
Harper waited for most of the group to dissipate before entering. “Knock, knock,” Harper said.
An older, heavyset nurse was taking Grace’s blood pressure.
Grace, who was staring out the window lost in thought, quickly
snapped her head when she heard Harper’s voice. A look of relief, or something equally calming, washed over her.
“Can you give us a minute?” Grace asked, her voice cracking.
“No problem,” the nurse said.
Harper approached slowly. “Hey you.”
All it took were these words for Grace to lose it. With her good arm, Grace reached out and pulled Harper onto the bed.
“What am I going to do?” Grace cried, burrowing into Harper.
A few days later, when she first saw Grace’s shoulder out of the sling, Harper couldn’t believe the discoloration. Already feeling weak, Harper had braced herself, but it was worse than she expected. Where her cuff had shredded, it was black and green. Gently, with her fingertips, Harper followed the jaundice streaking down Grace’s arm.
“Jesus,” she softly said.
Trying to be as thoughtful as she could, Harper waited for the right moment to talk to Grace about her surgery, about what the injury meant. It wasn’t until a few days later, when they were lying around the sorority house—Grace’s arm in a sling, still on ice—Harper knew the time had come.
“When do you go under the knife?” Harper asked, closing her notebook.
“They’re talking about doing it next week.”
Harper nodded. She was afraid of the answer, but asked anyway. “Did you hear it rip?”
“Not with my ears, but I heard it inside, you know,” Grace said. She was peeling the label off her Gatorade bottle. She rolled it between her fingers. “I’d recently changed my workout and my muscles were more fatigued than usual. I felt it tear as I followed through. There was a crunch sound.”
Grace talked matter-of-factly until the conversation turned to recovery.
“Coach Carter is livid. He’s worried I won’t be strong enough to compete in the championships. Even though I’ve given him
three great years, I overheard him tell one of the therapists I was money wasted.”
She didn’t say it, but Harper could tell by the way Grace related his words she wasn’t sure she’d recover either. “Athletes bounce back from injuries all the time,” Harper said, doing her best.“I know.”
They were done talking. Harper reached for Grace’s hand.
Later that afternoon, Harper gave Grace a ride to church.
“I want to ask Father Eric for a blessing,” Grace said. She was unable to drive her stick shift.
For an hour, Harper ran errands and then returned to the parish. Groceries for the dinner she’d make Grace filled the backseat. In the car, she fiddled with the radio stations until finally deciding to go inside. She entered through the front, two tall red doors that met in the form of an arch leading into the sanctuary.
Inside, Grace was nowhere to be found. In fact, nobody was anywhere to be found. Harper stood alone near an altar surrounded by blue candles. One on the end was lit. She stopped near the parish hall to admire the organ’s artful detail. She touched the dusty hardwood.
Suddenly, a man’s cough. It came from the confessional.
Beneath the drape, Grace’s feet—two small Nike tennis shoes with a pink swoosh. Harper, startled, immediately felt intrusive.
She quickly bolted from the church and waited for Grace in the car.
God was nowhere to be found when the surgeons scrubbed up the morning Grace went under the knife. Everyone’s worst fears did come true; the minute the anesthesiologist injected the juice into her IV, Grace’s tennis career ended.
They ceremoniously burned Grace’s tennis bag and all its contents on a drunken night at the Fiji house. It was a cleansing, what Grace needed to do, she said. The balls exploded like popcorn. The graphite melted like taffy. And they howled like wolves at the wonder and release.
In the days that followed, the girls spent much of their time at a secret apartment they rented off campus with Grace’s leftover scholarship money. They furnished it sparingly and bought the essentials from IKEA. The low-lying Malm bed, a striped sofa and a small bistro table with chairs. And, of course, candles.
Lots of them.
With the door locked and the blinds drawn, they disappeared for hours into each other, escaping the communal nosiness of the Gamma house. Occasionally on weekends, they even spent the night. It was their refuge, a place they could go and not worry.
Besides hunkering down in their sacred studio, sucking on each other’s toes and fumbling into each other’s panties, outside these walls, their life had become a covert mission: hiding their secret. It was a constant act, balancing what they wanted, what they needed to be happy, with what others expected of them. It wasn’t easy considering how devoted they were to their pledge class.For the first half of the fall semester, Harper and Grace dodged date parties and played the ellusive senior apathy card.
“We’ve got studying to do. We’re tired of fraternity parties.
We did happy hour last week.”
But that only worked so long. Their sorority sisters started asking questions and taking it personal.
“What’s your deal?” they asked. “Why are you avoiding us?”And that was just the tip of the iceberg; they got chastised by everyone, and it only increased as people started gossiping about where they spent so much time. T
hey found themselves wearing glasses and hats anytime they slipped into their love shack. They always checked the parking lot before leaving.
The fact they pulled away from everyone wasn’t easy on them or their friends, yet it was all they could do, considering the circumstances.
Eventually, it became too much, and they tried to cram back into the sorority mold once again, which also wasn’t easy. During their ruse that semester, whenever they could, they opted for the double date, a painful dance that usually left one of them crying.
But still, it was better than being apart; better than checking their watches every five minutes wondering what the other was doing.
Aside from Jamie, who was always a menace in the background during their masquerade that year, there was another guy who proved to be trouble for Harper: Nicholas Zavros, known as Nico.
Despite Harper’s objection, Nico’s sophisticated air and good looks caught Grace’s eye.
“He’s a player,” Harper said. “He’s slept with more Gamma Lambdas than you can shake a stick at.” She didn’t know this for sure, but passed it off as gospel.
“I’m just doing it for us,” Grace would say, her usual line, as she got dressed for their dates. “So we can be together.”
Ultimately, Harper would agree—she knew what needed to be done—but she didn’t like it. She didn’t like Nico’s green eyes; she didn’t like the size of his pecs; she didn’t like it when Grace said she recognized him from the gym when they first met at a mixer.
Born into a Greek shipping family, Nico was an heir to one of the biggest fortunes on the East Coast. But it wasn’t his millions that concerned Harper. Grace didn’t care about his money. She had plenty of her own, as her trust fund would keep her comfortable for life.
It was his handsome face, his generosity and class, the respectful way he treated her that kept Harper up at night. He turned out to be everything Harper complained he wasn’t. A keeper.
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