Alice in Glass Slippers

by L. C. Davenport

  Adam stood there in Arthur’s bathroom and stared at his reflection. “I could just stay,” he repeated slowly. “Dad would kill me, but…”

  Jillian sighed. “No, he wouldn’t. He was young and in love once, too.”

  “I’m not…” He caught the hopeful look on his own face in the mirror and couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Good job, son. I’m glad to see my money wasn’t wasted after all. Tell Alice I said hello, and that I’ll be looking for her at the carnival in two weeks. Oh, the invitations should arrive at your office in the mall tomorrow. Send me your new address when you have a chance.” With that Jillian hung up, leaving Adam to shut the phone slowly and run his hand through his hair again. He felt strange, like he’d just had an epiphany and wasn’t sure what to do about it.

  He wandered out into the hallway of his new home a few minutes later, perking up considerably when he sniffed something that smelled suspiciously like homemade soup, and his footsteps quickened until he practically ran into the kitchen. He skidded to a halt in the doorway.

  Alice looked over her shoulder at him. She had a long spoon in her hand, and her cheeks were flushed. “Hey,” she said softly, “do you feel better?”

  Adam blinked and took a step back. “Are you cooking for me?”

  She blushed and turned back to stir the pot. “You had a pretty rotten afternoon,” she mumbled. “My mom always made this for me when I was upset about something, and it always made me feel better, and Lewis called to let me know he and Whitney were going out to eat, so…”

  Adam’s brain finally convinced his feet to move forward, and they didn’t stop until he was standing so close to her that his arm hairs stood on end. “Thank you,” he told her quietly.

  Alice glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. Then she blushed again.

  They took a quick tour of the house while the soup simmered, and to Adam’s surprise his favorite part was in the basement. “Where do those stairs go?” he asked, leaning against the washing machine.

  “Up to my apartment. Dad put them in so I wouldn’t have to run around outside in the winter to do my laundry.” She cocked her head in his direction. “Will it be a problem? Technically I have access to your part of the house.”

  Grinning at her, he stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Aren’t you worried that I’m going to sneak up there in the middle of the night and smother you with your pillow?”

  She made a face at him and started climbing his stairs. “I have a deadbolt on my side,” she said. “Besides, you wouldn’t kill me. I’m feeding you dinner.”

  She had a point there, Adam thought. “You should let me return the favor next week,” he blurted out.

  He held his breath as he waited for her reaction, and when she finally smiled down at him, his eyes nearly crossed with relief. “I’d like that. Can I trust you not to burn down the house?”

  Grinning, he put his hand on the small of her back as they walked into the kitchen. “You have nothing to worry about.”

  The soup was delicious, and the company even more so. Adam couldn’t take his eyes off of her, and when she caught him staring he just grinned at her. “Tell me about your shop,” he said, scraping his spoon against the bottom of his bowl and looking hopefully at the pot.

  Alice laughed and nodded at him. “Help yourself. I don’t know what to tell you about The Glass Slipper; you’ve been in there enough times to have a feel for what it is.”

  Adam ladled another bowl and carried it carefully back to the table. “Not really,” he said around a mouthful of carrot. “All I really know is that you have an uncanny knack for sizing my feet, and for finding the best pairs of shoes I’ve ever had the pleasure of wearing.”

  Alice’s cheeks grew a little pink, but she waved him off. “My grandmother opened it not long after she was married,” she told him, watching in amusement as he slurped. “She passed it down to my mother, and then…” She became quiet, and Adam cursed himself. “And now,” she went on, and Adam wisely decided to ignore the slight shake in her voice, “I get to work there every day and carry on the tradition.”

  “Have you ever wanted to do anything else?”

  “I wanted to be a lion tamer when I was five. Does that count?”

  Laughing, Adam pushed his bowl away and sat back in his chair contentedly. “Why didn’t you try? I’m sure you would have been good at it.”

  Snorting, Alice carried their dishes to the sink only to have them taken out of her hands. “You cooked. I clean,” Adam told her, opening the dishwasher.

  She smiled at him and let him lead her to the family room when he was done. “I would have been great at it if I could have seen past all the teeth. I couldn’t, so I fell back on my other option.”

  “Do you like working at the mall?”

  Alice gave him a strange look. “Why do I have the feeling that I’m in the middle of a job interview?”

  Adam shrugged innocently. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  The strange look didn’t leave her face, but she answered his question anyway. “I love the mall. At least, I used to before Mimi showed up. It’s big and it’s classy and it’s eclectic. You can find almost anything you want inside, and at Christmas time even the grouchiest people can find it in themselves to smile at least once.”

  “I think the people who come into your shop smile no matter what time of year it is,” Adam said drily. “When they leave, they turn back into scrooges.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “Aren’t you a little young to be so cynical?”

  This was the second time in as many hours that someone had called him young. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to get a complex. “I’m twenty-seven,” he loftily informed her. “I’m plenty old enough to be as cynical as I please.”

  She studied him for a moment and then sighed. “That’s sad.”

  Adam shifted on the couch until he was facing her. “Why’s that?”

  “Because if you always doubt everyone’s intentions, they’ll gladly live up to your expectations.”

  Adam thought about her words for a long time after she’d told him good night and had disappeared into the basement.

  It was terribly ironic that the one person who fit his entire interviewing criterion was also the person he’d fallen in love with without trying to.

  He slowly cleaned up the kitchen and ambled through his new home, finally stopping in the basement where he stared at the stairs leading two flights above him. He sighed when his phone buzzed with an incoming text, but when he read it; he couldn’t keep the smile from spreading across his face.

  It was from his mother, and all it said was, Fever by Peggy Lee.

  Alice had a new ring tone.

  Chapter Ten

  Even with a fuzzy, barely-awake brain, Alice could smell cinnamon. Her eyes still closed, she sniffed the air appreciatively and considered rolling out of bed. Then someone chuckled softly, and the scent got tantalizingly closer, only to retreat.

  “What are you doing in my room this early?” Alice mumbled, kicking her legs under the covers in a vain attempt to make contact.

  “Breakfast. It doesn’t taste as good when I eat it in my apartment.” Alice cracked an eye open and squinted at Lewis.

  “Is that right? Funny. You didn’t have this problem until Whitney moved in.”

  Lewis just grinned at her and took another bite of his cinnamon roll. Alice had never seen someone enjoy a breakfast pastry that much.

  “Shouldn’t you be in the kitchen waiting for your love bunny to wake up instead of sitting on my bed and getting crumbs all over the sheets?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t want to wake her up too early.” He stuffed the rest of his roll in his mouth, licked his fingers clean, and stretched his legs out until his feet were propped beside Alice’s head. “That was good,” he sighed. “You should really get more of those.”

  “I should never have given you a key,” Alice said drily, struggling to si
t up. “You waltz in like you own the place and empty my refrigerator.”

  “You should just let me set up camp on the deck. It’d make things a lot easier.”

  “Easier for you, maybe.”

  Lewis looked like he wanted to press the point, but changed his mind. “What happened to all the flowers in the front yard? It looks like someone face planted in them.”

  Alice stared up at the ceiling and tried not to laugh. “I don’t know, exactly,” she told him. “They were like that when I went outside yesterday afternoon.” She wasn’t sure why she didn’t just tell him that Adam had, in fact, stuck his head and half his upper body in the flowerbed, but she didn’t. Perhaps it was because this information would give Lewis more ammunition for future torment.

  It was probably good that neither one of them had ever been blessed with a younger brother.

  Lewis narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re not telling me something.”

  Lifting a shoulder, Alice started to unwind herself from her covers. As soon as she was free and out of bed, Lewis snagged her pillow with one last suspicious glance in her direction. He wadded it up, flipped over on his stomach, and stuck it under his chin.

  “You’d better hop in the shower,” he told her, and rolled his eyes at her when she smiled innocently in his direction. “And don’t forget to use that conditioner I made you buy. You’re starting to get split ends.”

  Alice rolled her eyes, but once she was standing under the hot water she inspected her hair and sighed. She hated it when he was right.

  When she emerged Lewis sat up and took her brush off the dresser. He waited until she’d situated herself cross-legged on the bed in front of him before slowly running it through her wet hair. Alice sighed and let her eyes drift shut. Lewis was the best hair-comber in the world–all gentle strokes with an occasional scratch at the scalp. It was really too bad that he only did it when he had something heavy on his mind.

  “You know I love you, don’t you, Alice?”

  Alice turned her head so quickly the brush skidded across her cheek. “What?”

  Lewis grimaced at her and pushed her head back into its original position. “You know that, right?”

  She stared at his reflection in the mirror hanging over her dresser. “What did you do to my car?”

  A strange noise, almost a mix between a laugh and a strangled cough, came from behind her. “I didn’t do anything to your precious car,” he said, snapping the water out of the brush and onto her robe. “Just answer the question.”

  It seemed a little ironic that Lewis used the word ‘precious’ when referring to her car, Alice thought, but the light mood from before her shower had disappeared and he no longer seemed to be interested in snappy retorts. “I love you just as much as you love me,” she said, hoping she sounded as sincere as she felt. “I’ve never doubted that.”

  Lewis snorted. “I can think of one or two times when you weren’t too sure about that. Remember Bryan?”

  “I still think I should have been the one to break up with him,” Alice said. “Just because he wanted to put a turret on top of his apartment building so he could attack poor, unsuspecting people with a potato gun. Hardly gives you the right to–”

  “We’ve been over this before,” Lewis interrupted mildly. “And for the record, he wasn’t after poor, unsuspecting people. He was after any guy that happened to glance your way.”

  They didn’t say anything for a long time. Lewis moved the brush steadily through her hair, and Alice was on the verge of dozing off when his quiet voice broke through the silence. “I think I’m falling in love with Whitney.”

  Alice smiled at his reflection. “I know you are.”

  Lewis dropped the brush. “What–I didn’t–how do you know?”

  She leaned back and kissed his cheek affectionately. “I’d have to be dead not to figure it out,” she told him, and laughed at his shocked expression. “The Whitney? Really, Lewis, You can’t tell me that was Adam’s idea.”

  “It could’ve been,” he protested.

  Ignoring him, Alice slid off the bed and opened her closet. “And I saw the way you looked at her outside the restaurant. Either you were in love or you were developing an ulcer.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence, and then Lewis flopped back on the bed in an attitude of defeat. “Is there anything else I should know about myself?” he asked, plaintive.

  Alice considered this as she pulled a skirt off its hanger. “Nothing that I’m willing to tell you.” She grinned at him over her shoulder and ducked back into the bathroom. “Why were you so worried before, anyway?” she called as she got dressed.

  “I wasn’t worried about anything.”

  What was it about some men that made them unable to admit to awkward emotions? “Then why did you want to make sure I knew you loved me? Are you sure you didn’t do anything to my car yesterday?”

  Lewis pushed the door open just as Alice was smoothing her sweater over her stomach. “Will you stop obsessing over your car? It’s fine. Not a scratch on it. I just wanted to make sure you knew that just because I have feelings for another woman, that doesn’t mean that you’ve been replaced.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” She hooked an arm around his neck and squeezed tight. “It’s okay if Whitney pushed me over a little bit in your heart. Your wife is supposed to be your best friend, after all.”

  Lewis stiffened and pushed away from her. “Who said anything about a wife?”

  Smirking at him, she took her makeup bag out of the drawer and pretended not to notice his flabbergasted appearance. “You never do anything by halves, Mr. Hughes,” she said, and then, in her best impersonation of his mother, continued, “and men have biological clocks too, you know.”

  He banged the back of his head against the wall and laughed. “I think you should stop talking to my mom.”

  Alice just smiled at his reflection serenely. It hadn’t escaped her notice that he hadn’t said her assumption was dead wrong. “You’re not allowed to move in after you two get hitched,” she warned. “I can only stand so much lovey-doveyness in my home.”

  Sighing, Lewis started to twist her hair into an intricate knot at the nape of her neck. “Yes, ma’am.” He concentrated for a minute before saying, in a too-casual voice, “I met Whitney’s dad yesterday.”

  That brought Alice’s head snapping up. “Her dad?” she asked. “Whitney never mentions him. I kind of figured he’d passed away or something.”

  Lewis’s tugging became more languid. “No, he’s around. He and Squeaky divorced when Whitney was little, and there was a huge custody battle. Whitney says Mimi only wanted the girls so she could collect money from their father. She’s probably right,” he added, pulling angrily on a strand of her hair and making Alice wince. “Sometimes I wish she wasn’t a woman so I could deck her.”

  “I guess it’s good that your mother instilled proper non-woman-beating values in you.”

  Lewis huffed out his breath and started sticking bobby pins into his creation. “She might make an exception for this particular woman. Anyway, Whitney used to spend summers with her dad until Mimi decided he was putting ideas into her head.”

  Mimi was the queen of unoriginal thought, so this didn’t surprise Alice a whole lot. It did, however, explain a few things about the way Whitney acted when she made a suggestion. She’d have to remember to be more encouraging, especially when they were in the shop. “What did you think of him?”

  Lewis sat on the counter next to her, his hands behind his head. “Surprisingly normal, considering who he married. I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to him, unfortunately. He had to run off to a class.”

  “Class? What’s he studying?”

  Lewis shot her a surprised look. “He’s not studying anything. He’s a philosophy professor at Oakland University.”

  ***

  All the way to the store that morning, Alice plotted ways to tell Mimi she could take her blasted list and shove it… well, somewhere ver
y unpleasant. She couldn’t seem to get her mind around the fact that Mimi had blackmailed her by inferring that she could keep Whitney out of college when Whitney’s father was a college professor. And, according to Lewis–tenured.

  Maybe Mimi didn’t really believe Alice was living with her daughter. After all that thinking and planning, and a healthy amount of anticipation that was most likely not very healthy after all, Mimi didn’t even have the common courtesy to show up for her tongue-lashing.

  In fact, she didn’t come into the shop until nearly closing time. When she finally sauntered through the back door, Adam was there at the front, clutching a formal-looking envelope and grinning at her like he held the keys to Krispy Kreme’s production plant in his hand.

  Alice stood in the middle of the shop and waited as they converged on her from opposite directions. To her surprise, Adam spoke first. “Good evening, Miss Riverton,” he said, and winked a second. Seconds later an eager-looking Mimi sidled up and snatched the envelope from him. “Ms. Walker. It’s a delight, as always.”

  Mimi batted her eyes at Adam and fanned her face with her free hand. “Oh, Adam, you’re so sweet to say such lovely things to an old lady like me.”

  Adam’s eyes rolled ever so slightly upward and he plastered a fake smile on his face. “I’d hardly call you old, Ms. Walker.”

  Eyelashes fluttering even faster, Mimi stuck one extra-long fingernail into the envelope and slit it open. “Is this an invitation?” she cooed before glancing down at the paper she pulled out.

  Adam nodded and stole a quick glance at Alice, who was trying not to gag. The corners of his mouth quirked up so slightly that she was sure she’d imagined it–until she caught the glint of humor in his eye.

  “Oh, my,” Mimi gasped. “Brittany will be so pleased to get this. She’s been dying for a reason to wear that new dress she bought when we heard you were coming to town.”

  “I hope all of your employees will be able to attend. Please send your RSVP to–”

  “Oh, I can tell you right now.” Mimi placed her hand on Adam’s arm and squeezed. “Brittany and I will definitely be there, but I’m afraid Alice Riverton and Whitney will have to work.” She giggled at him and leaned closer. “Working girls have to earn their privileges, you know.”