Maggy's Child, page 4
“A thirtieth-birthday present from me to you.” He reached into his coat, fished in an inside pocket, and extracted a pack of Winstons and a book of matches. Tapping out a cigarette, he returned the pack to his pocket then lit the one he held with a flick of a match.
“You never used to smoke.” Maggy was surprised at the disapproval she felt as she watched him. For an instant, just an instant, she was the young Magdalena again, and Nick was her mentor and her world. The girl that she had been then would have snatched the cigarette from his mouth and stomped it underfoot, treating him to an angry tirade as she did so. But then, the boy he had been would never have smoked. He hadn’t been an angel, but he had never done drugs, never gotten drunk, never smoked. In his vicinity, at least, she’d never done those things either. Nick would have tanned her backside if he’d caught her the few times she had experimented with alcohol and pot behind his back—or at least he would have tried. She would have put up a heck of a fight.
Ah, Nick. Her heart ached suddenly for what might have been. If only—if only—but the die was cast and her path chosen with no possibility of turning back. She’d made her choice twelve years before, and now she had to live with the consequences no matter how painful she might find them.
Another of Tia Gloria’s sayings was that the wheels of God grind slow, but they grind incredibly small. She felt as if they were grinding her into particles smaller than dust at that very moment.
“I never used to do a whole hell of a lot of things,” Nick replied, returning the matches to his pocket and nodding at the package in her hand. “Aren’t you going to open it?”
The glint in his eyes warned her again to be on guard even as her fingers ripped clumsily at the paper. And just as well, too, because what spilled into her hand as the paper tore were a videotape, a folded yellow business-size envelope—and four three-by-five, full-color photos of herself at seventeen, dancing nude.
She dropped the package as if it were a live snake. As the contents scattered around her feet, she stared down at the one picture that landed faceup with as much dreadful fascination as if it were a cobra poised to strike.
In it she was onstage in a dive that made the Little Brown Cow seem the epitome of class and sophistication. Her arms, raised over her head, sexily lifted away from her body the heavy fall of red-tinted mahogany hair that then cascaded in lush waves down past her hips. Her skin was pale as alabaster, her mouth pouty, her eyes heavy-lidded and dreamy from the pot she had smoked to get the courage to do what she needed to do to earn the hundred dollars the manager had promised her every night. There was a fortune to be made, or at least it had seemed a fortune to the girl she had been then, if she would only dance naked except for a satiny G-string six nights a week for an audience of thirty to fifty drooling men.
They weren’t allowed to touch her in the bar—the manager had explained that the owner was afraid of losing his liquor license, and so the rule was strictly enforced—and whether or not she “dated” a customer for more money after her performance was over was strictly up to her. She’d known she never would, so she wouldn’t be a whore. She would be only dancing, nothing more.
Thus she had persuaded herself, convinced that in the long run the money would be worth the shame that had twisted her insides whenever she had allowed her imagination to take her as far as actually getting up on that stage. She would make nearly four times the money dancing as she did working split shifts as a waitress at the Harmony Inn, where she got decent tips only on Tuesday nights because of the all-you-can-eat fish special. It would be stupid not to take the job, she told herself with her customary hardheaded practicality, stupid not to cash in on her young, lithe body and pretty face while they were still there to be cashed in on. Yet she couldn’t tell Nick what she meant to do, though he was her best friend and her closest family all rolled into one and she told him everything else. Nick would hit the roof if he knew.
When the time actually came for her debut performance on a less than crowded Thursday night, she never would have been able to go through with it if another dancer, more inured to the life, hadn’t taken pity on her obvious fright and gotten her high as a kite first.
For three whole nights, she’d been one of the nine beautiful girls and three ugly ones (or so the newspaper ads described them) who had comprised the stable of dancers at the Pink Pussycat. Each night she’d vomited from nerves as she’d gotten ready for her performance, and each night she’d thought she couldn’t possibly go out there on that stage again. Smoking grass had gotten her through it. All the girls did, passing joints back and forth as they applied body makeup in the tiny rest room that served as their dressing room. Maggy had deliberately inhaled until she was comfortably lost somewhere in space. Only then had she been able to go on.
Stoned, it hadn’t been so terribly hard. She’d felt she was floating as she walked out on the tiny stage and the bright stage lights hit her, all but blinding her. At first it had been easy to pretend she was alone, undressing to music in the privacy of her apartment. The pounding rhythm of the rock anthem “Born to Be Wild” had swelled until it seemed to be right inside her brain, and she had moved instinctively to its beat. For her entrance, her hair was piled high atop her head by one of the other girls. She began her act by removing the pins from the heavy mass and shaking it loose. Then she slowly untied the sash of the scarlet, feather-trimmed robe that was the outermost part of her costume. That first night, when she felt the silk of the robe slide down her arms to puddle at her feet and realized that she was almost completely naked beneath, she suffered an attack of fear and modesty acute enough to pierce the drugged fog that shielded her. Panic assailed her as, dressed in nothing but high heels, black thigh-high stockings, and a black sequined G-string, she faced the audience of dozens of drooling, clapping men. She had glanced down, been confronted with the hard pink tips of her bare breasts and the naked curve of her belly and thighs—and had nearly died of shame on the spot. Quickly, instinctively, she whipped around so that her back was to them, then tilted her chin toward the dusty rafters overhead, because she knew that if she did, her long hair would fall low enough to hide her bare butt. Somehow her feet kept moving in the semblance of a dance while she prayed for deliverance and the audience alternately cheered and booed. The manager hissed furiously at her from the wings—she had to show them something—and as she glanced his way her hair had apparently shifted enough to afford the audience a glimpse of the naked cheeks of her behind. The crowd roared approval. Startled, she glanced around at them, affording them another peek. They howled for more. The manager hissed at her again, making frantic turning motions with his hands, inscribing a horizontal circle in the air. Her drug-dulled wits froze, then gave up the struggle for independence. Nauseated with fear, she obediently turned around—but shook her hair forward so that it covered her breasts. The manager growled. The audience stomped its feet. Frightened to death of both him and the crowd, Maggy closed her eyes to shut them all out and swayed to the beat, trying not to hear the thunderous mixture of catcalls and stomping feet and clapping hands that greeted her amateur gyrations. The manager hissed again—“Show them some skin!”—and Maggy’s eyes opened. She was out there onstage, there was no way off except past the angry manager on one side and a burly bouncer on the other or through the crowd itself, and if she didn’t perform she wouldn’t be paid.…
Getting paid was what it was all about, after all.
Suddenly the crowd was silent. The men licked their lips and sweated and stared as Maggy slid both arms under her hair and lifted the glistening curtain of waves, then dropped it, over and over again, in a somnolent, sensuous sleepwalker’s dance born somewhere in her subconscious. The watching men went wild, but the commotion just barely penetrated the haze of nauseated fear and pot that blunted her senses like an anesthetic. Her body was there, dancing nearly naked for money, but she, the part of her that was Magdalena, was not.
On her third night, a busy Saturday, Nick walked in during the middle of her performance. She found out later that he’d been tipped off to what she was doing by one of his friends. When he appeared, she was down to her heels and stockings and G-string, her thick fall of hair all that protected her modesty. Her back was turned to the audience, so she didn’t see him when he entered and threaded his way between the crowded tables, didn’t see him when he stopped directly in front of the stage, arms crossed over his chest, staring up at her as—once, twice, three times—she lifted her hair and wiggled her bare butt, as he put it later, for all the world to see. Largely over her initial stage fright by that time and high as a kite, she turned around as the audience roared for more and smiled sleepily into the closest pair of male eyes—only to come to the slow, awful realization that they were blazing green with outrage and all too familiar.
Nick.
Shocked sober, she had frozen where she stood. With a single lithe movement Nick jumped up onstage beside her, snatched up her robe from the floor, wrapped it around her body, and picked her up over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, all without saying so much as a word to her.
Then all hell had broken loose. The Pink Pussycat didn’t take kindly to having its dancers snatched from its stage right before its patrons’ eyes. By the time the melee was over, twenty-year-old Nick had battled his way through the club’s three massive bouncers and about a dozen other assorted pugilists, suffered two black eyes, a bloodied nose, and bruised ribs, and barely escaped being arrested when Maggy dragged him out the door just ahead of the arrival of the cops, who were called to quell the disturbance.
And was he grateful? Not he!
Roaring away from the club in his ancient car—Maggy was driving, though as she told him he didn’t deserve that she should go to so much bleeping trouble to save his ass—they had had the mother and father of a quarrel. If Nick hadn’t been so bloody and battered, Maggy would have slapped him silly herself. Mind your own damned business, she screamed at him. She could do what the hell she wanted with her life and her body! If she wanted to dance naked in the middle of the expressway at high noon, she would! His response, as he’d tilted his head back against the seat and tried to stanch the blood that poured from his nose, was to call her a stupid little fool and tell her to slow down.
After that, the battle had raged at white-hot pitch for a good ten minutes.
Then, because however angry she was at him she hated to see him hurt, Maggy had whipped the car into the parking lot of a closed-down warehouse, slammed the gearshift into park, and started wiping at his bloodied face with the feathered hem of her scarlet silk robe.
He had knocked her hand away, grabbed her by her shoulders and kissed her, bloody nose and all. His kiss—the first time he had ever kissed her in a way that was not entirely brotherly—had rocked her world on its axis.
For an instant, no longer, the memory burned to life in her mind. But she wouldn’t let herself remember. She couldn’t. That kiss had happened long ago, another lifetime ago, to another girl. A girl who no longer existed.
Now, staring down at the picture of herself dancing before an audience of blurry male faces, Maggy felt the image sear relentlessly into her brain. There she was, beautiful at seventeen, with her high young breasts with their rouged nipples—courtesy of the same girl who provided the pot and the fancy hairstyle—bared for all the world to see, along with her narrow rib cage and small round belly button and flaring hips and the tiny triangle of black sequins that covered her sex. Poised on six-inch-high heels, with her long, slender legs clad in sheer black stockings to the thigh, she appeared to be flaunting her nakedness. She looked somnolent, sexy, as though she were loving every minute of her own performance.
“Remember, Magdalena?” Nick’s soft voice flayed her.
She glanced up at him wildly. “No, I don’t remember! I don’t ever want to remember!”
Whirling, she began to run back the way she had come.
He was upon her in an instant, catching her around the waist with one arm and clamping a hand over her mouth with the other as though he feared she might scream. She would have, too, uncaring at the moment of the consequences of being found alone in the woods with Nick of all people. She struggled and kicked as he lifted her clear up off her feet and carried her away from the path through the underbrush until at last she regained some control and stopped struggling in his arms. Then, in the lee of a just-greening wild-cherry tree, he set her upright again.
“Don’t scream,” he said, his hand still covering her mouth. Held tight against him, her breasts flattened by his chest, her thighs plastered against his, Maggy registered anew the size and strength of him—Nick was six feet two, and while he had weighed in the vicinity of 180 as a youth, she suspected he was now 200 or more well-muscled pounds—and made a negative movement with her head.
He rather cautiously removed his hand from her mouth.
“Is that why you came back? To blackmail me?” she demanded in a shrill voice, shoving against his chest in a futile bid to free herself. “I have plenty of money now, right? So how much do you want?”
One of his arms was still clamped around her waist, and Maggy felt it harden. Her head tilted back in time to catch the narrowing of his mouth and the icing-over of his eyes. Her words had angered him, she saw at a glance, and she was fiercely glad. She wanted him angry. No, she wanted him to hurt, as he was hurting her.
For a moment he said nothing, just looked measuringly down at her.
“A million dollars or I show the pictures and tape—oh, yes, that’s a videotape of your whole performance—to Lyle? Interesting thought, that.”
“I—I can’t get a million dollars. I don’t have access to that much. Nowhere near it.”
His gaze met hers, and he smiled, a slow, lazy, taunting smile.
“I bet Lyle could get it, if I threatened to send copies of everything to the local movers and shakers. TV might even be interested. I can just see your little dance ending up on something like A Current Affair, can’t you? With the appropriate blackouts over strategic areas of your anatomy, of course.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“You know how I always hated to hear you swear. I still do. Maybe I ought to up the ante for every cussword that comes out of your mouth.”
“Go to hell!”
“Watch yourself, Maggy May, this could get expensive.”
“Don’t you dare call me that!” The once-familiar endearment stung her like the flicked end of a bullwhip.
“In my experience, blackmailers can call their victims anything they want.”
“Oh, so you have experience? Is that how you make a living these days, blackmailing innocent people like me?”
“I’d hardly call you innocent, Magdalena. Not then, and not now.”
Maggy could feel a hot rush of fury rising inside her. It was a familiar, if long forgotten, sensation. In her teen years she had been renowned throughout the mean streets of Louisville’s west end for her fiery temper. She and Nick had once fought like two angry cats swung together in a sack. Since marrying Lyle, the fight had been systematically knocked out of her.
“How much do you want?” She was quivering with shock and outrage and pain. That Nick could do this to her, Nick whom she had once loved with a fierce wild tide, was unbelievable. No, it was very believable. After all, hadn’t she learned the hard way that no one was what he or she seemed, and that even the best-known, most trusted person had as many unfathomable layers as an onion?
“What would you say if I told you that I wasn’t after money?”
A suggestive glint in his eyes told Maggy what he meant. She laughed, the sound forced and high. “Sex? Is that what you want? Fine. Go ahead, lover. Throw me down on the ground right here and now and get your rocks off. It’s a cheap price to pay to get you the hell out of my life again.”
His eyes narrowed, darkened. “That’s my Maggy May. Foulmouthed and bullheaded.” Taut mockery curled his mouth while his arm tightened around her waist, drawing her up on her toes as he pressed her even closer against him. Maggy didn’t bother to struggle—she knew from experience that Nick, when seriously annoyed as he was at that moment, possessed the strength of two ordinary men—but she glared up at him with all the rage she had kept stored inside her for the last dozen years. His brows twitched together as he absorbed her expression, and then he bent his head to kiss her.
Only he didn’t. Maggy, rigid, hating, her arms wedged between them holding him slightly at bay, braced herself for nothing.
Nick let her go and stepped back.
“The pictures and tape are a gift,” he said, folding his arms across his chest and watching her like a dog at a rabbit hole. “The negatives are inside the envelope. They came into my possession from someone who did indeed intend to use them to blackmail you, my dear Mrs. Forrest. Luckily for you, I bought them—and they weren’t cheap—before anyone else could see them, and now I’m giving them to you, no strings attached.”
Maggy stared up at him for a moment, too dumbfounded to speak. She had behaved abominably, and she knew it. But she had forgotten how to trust anyone, even Nick.
“Why?” She thrust her hands into the pockets of her anorak, all at once desperately cold.
“Why not?” The words were flippant.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s all you’re going to get.”
“Nick …” Maggy hesitated, searching his face. The features were the same as those of the boy she had loved: the thick straight black brows, the slightly crooked nose with the small bump on its bridge from where it had been broken that fateful night, the broad cheekbones and square chin. Even the elusive dimple on the right side of his mouth was the same. But there were differences, too: lines of experience at the corners of his eyes, a hardness that was new, a certain cynicism in the set of his jaw and in the gleam of those bright hazel-green eyes. He was indubitably Nick, her Nick, but he had changed, inside where it didn’t much show. But then, of course, so had she. “I owe you an apology.”
