Not just then, but my entire life.
I knew I wasn’t meant to have any kind of posse, as much as I’d always wanted it, and especially as much as it’d be good to have it right then after what had happened to me.
I just didn’t need it staring me in the face when I didn’t have it.
Instead, I looked down at the shoes I was trying on.
They cost twelve hundred dollars. They were class on a lollipop stick. Considering the serious hike in pay Smithie gave me a month ago, I could totally afford them (and could do that even before he jacked up my pay, but did it weirdly making me work less, but I didn’t quibble).
And they were so not me.
“What do you think?” the shoe saleslady said.
“You got anything in denim?” I asked.
“Uh…no,” she answered.
“Clear plastic, maybe with a daisy embedded in the platform?”
“Um…I don’t think so.”
“Slides with a seven-inch heel, three-inch platform, the whole thing bejeweled, maybe in pink?”
“Well…um, I think that’s a no too, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
I nodded.
I’d already learned Nordstrom shoe department didn’t do Daisy.
It still didn’t hurt to try.
I unbuckled the strappy sandal I had on and slid it off, murmuring, “That’s okay. But thanks.”
“Valentino does ‘Rockstud,’” she informed me.
I’d checked out the Rockstud.
It wasn’t all that bad.
But it didn’t say Daisy.
“Not my thing,” I shared, putting the sandal in the box, grabbing it, and handing it to her.
“Okay, well, if there’s anything else you see you’d like to try, I’m here.”
“Thanks, honey bunch, you’re sweet.”
I smiled at her.
She smiled at me and wandered away with the box.
I put on my shoes (black patent, platform sandal, one-inch rhinestone ankle strap, tube of rolled open red lipstick for a heel), got up, hitched up my purse on my shoulder, and glided to the makeup counter to while away more of my Saturday afternoon.
The shoe department might let me down in a variety of places.
But any makeup counter from Walgreens to Neiman’s worked for me.
And that afternoon, it so did.
* * * *
The doorbell rang right in the middle of Julia Roberts having a diabetic fit in a salon chair in Dolly Parton’s garage.
This did not make me happy.
Not Julia having a fit, of course, that never made me happy.
But I was right then not happy about my doorbell ringing during the best movie of all time.
I paused the movie, got up on my bare feet, and marched to the door in my hot-pink Juicy Couture tracksuit with the rhinestone, interlaced “JC” on the back with the crown on top surrounded with an oval of sparkles.
I looked through the peephole and I knew what I’d see because he’d told me he wasn’t going to give up.
But he was interrupting Steel Magnolias.
No one did that.
Not even a tall, dark, rich, hot guy gentleman who opened doors for me.
And right then, even if he was not in a suit but looked just as f-i-n-e, fine in a V-necked, dark-blue sweater that did things to his eyes that, if I wasn’t ticked about Steel Magnolias, would have done things to my coochie, and dark-wash jeans, he had to know that.
So I unlocked the deadbolt, slapped open the latch, and yanked open my own damned door.
“You’re interrupting Steel Magnolias,” I snapped tetchily to Marcus Sloan.
He burst out laughing.
He really shouldn’t have done that.
He really shouldn’t have laughed.
Really.
He was handsome, for sure, just as he was.
But laughter took years off his face.
Years.
I didn’t know how old he was. He looked in his mid-thirties (and I wasn’t going there seeing as he clearly had established his place in Denver at a young age which said something about him and what it said, to a girl like me, was all good).
But right then, he looked like the boy you hoped would neck with you (and you’d let him get to second base) after he took you to a movie.
Though, it was more.
The deep sumptuousness of his laughter felt like everything.
Every diamond in the world laid at your feet.
Every fur piled deep.
Every gold necklace a tangle of beauty twenty feet deep.
Still chuckling, he turned to the side and jerked his head toward my apartment, “Set it up.”
Without a choice, I shifted out of the way as a tall, blond man wearing a black suit, white shirt, and thin black tie walked in carrying a paper bag by the handles in one hand and balancing a baker’s box in the other.
Following him came a heavyset man dressed the exact same way. He’d lost most of his steel gray hair and was for some reason wearing sunglasses even though the sun had gone down, not to mention, he was indoors. He had two bottles of champagne pressed to his chest in one arm, two delicate champagne flutes dangling from the other with…
I narrowed my eyes at them…
Beautiful peacocks engraved in the glass.
Really beautiful peacocks.
Perfection.
Damn him to hell.
I turned my narrowed eyes to Marcus as he moved in, putting a hand to my waist, and this time he used it to guide me where he wanted me to go.
Right smack dab into the middle of my living-slash-dining room.
I let this happen mostly because I was beginning to smell something.