Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

Ric stood up, clearly confused. Intrigued. Hot. Cold. Wary.

"You're not mad that I took out Haskell?"

"You're not mad that I crashed the Gehenna? Good. Now we only need to find out who the dead guy in Sunset Park was. But before that, there's something I want more."

I leaned into Ric, running his silk-wool blend jacket lapels through my hands. I'd learned that he liked that once-removed form of intimacy. I wanted, as I'd just thought, more.

"Your clothes always feel so good," I said. Then…"I'd love to slow-dance naked in your arms."

I felt him catch his breath, then think about it. We'd been intimate, but this was intimate on my terms, not his.

"Sounds like a plan," he said carefully, as if not believing his luck.

My own breath stopped. I'd wondered about his reticence. His privacy. What it hid. I didn't just want me naked with him. I wanted him naked with me. I wanted to tease him past his shelters, his borders. We were both experts at emotional poker playing. Sometimes you have to raise the stakes to see the other player's cards.

His eyes were all pupil, dark, half-satisfied already. "One condition."

"Only one?"

"You wear something that makes getting you out of it interesting."

I thought. Nodded. "So where in Las Vegas can we do this naked tango?"

Ric had taught me to be a tad exhibitionistic lately, but Los Lobos was out. Maybe in his mysterious, dark, glittering house of mirrors…

"Your naked dance. First drinks and dinner. Then we cha-cha. A big Las Vegas evening out. Leave it all up to me. I'll pick you up tomorrow at…seven."

"Isn't that a little late?"

"It's going to be a long, late night."

His words resonated in my throbbing heart, pulses, and especially elsewhere.

"Long?" I repeated.

"Naked," he echoed.

We nodded, agreeing and excited by it.

Talk about twenty-four hours of sheer anticipation. Ric wouldn’t pick someplace…public. Would he? Then again, he liked to show me off. I preened a little at the thought of his Latino possessiveness, a trait someone like me, always listed on the orphanage records as unwanted, unspoken for, would treasure. My wounds, his wounds, our aphrodisiac.

He called my cell phone that afternoon. "Drinks at the Palms' Ghost Bar, dinner at the Paris restaurant in the Eiffel Tower."

"Those are primo venues. How did you-?"

"No questions. This is just a friendly dress code alert."

"Expensive too. And neither of those places have dancing."

"Nor nudity."

I could tell my crazy impulse had really turned him on. Me too.

I ransacked my closet, looking for the perfect gown to get out of. Who was I? A stripper? Yeah. Something spectacular. Something…very frustrating. My fingers hesitated over the black velvet thirties Nora Charles gown. Perry Mason had returned it with a disturbing message: no DNA on it other than mine. Not even Snow's? What was he, invisible? In that case, Claude should have left a traceable memoir of his playful butt pinch. Time to figure that out later.

The gown? No. Too Snow. I didn't like to mix my…encounters.

At last my fingers slid along the slippery surface of one of my oldest vintage gowns. Made to order for my querido amigo. I smiled wickedly. Yes.

I wore a long, black velvet thirties cloak when Ric called at my door.

"That's it? That's all?"

I shrugged and slipped out the door before Quicksilver could get a piece of my cloak or of Ric. The cloak had an ivory satin lining that almost caught in the door of the Corvette as Ric ushered me in.

Ric was wearing an off-white blazer that looked as smooth as clotted cream over an ice-blue silk shirt carelessly open at the neck. His trousers were black wool-silk with a formal satin stripe up the side. Las Vegas dressy casual.

We skipped the line of gaggling tourists in front of the elevator to the Palms Hotel's Ghost Bar, the city's hottest destination, and fifty-five stories up. No shorts, no hats, no tennis shoes, no baggy or torn jeans allowed. Dressy sandals permitted, no flip-flops.

The Ghost Bar. I knew I'd be uneasy there. My kind of medium had not been defined yet when this place had been created. Sitting in this nineteen-sixties meld of blue and green furniture against silver and ice-white, I let my cloak fall back to swathe the chair behind me and studied the holographic photos of motion picture stars on the wall.

I knew Ric was studying my pale satin gown, all buttoned up to the neck in back and down to my wrist, thinking of my all too solid flesh beneath it. Nothing intrigues like extreme modesty.

I inspected the ghostly faces on the wall. The images blurred as you moved past them. They simulated life. Only, I felt them. Even the animate silver necklace around my neck thickened with my second-hand emotions and tightened into a dog collar under the pale satin.

I sensed their unspoken anxiety at being reduced to dead icons and instantly knew the weaknesses their fame had hidden. Watch me, love me, pick me! Hadn't I felt that all in the orphanage, on my own lonely stage? And hadn't I also found fulfillment in front of a camera? Playing a persona, a crusading journalist in my case.

I felt their pain. Idolized. Commercialized. So much more than mere image.

Clark Gable. Carole Lombard. Mae West. Gary Cooper…Cary Grant. Irene Dunne. Joan Crawford. Bette Davis. Katharine Hepburn. John Wayne…Tyrone Power. All dead and harried. All silver screen stars. Some had lived into Technicolor days before fading into forgotten idols. All had made their marks in silver nitrate in shimmering black and white. Glowing. Vibrant. Powerful.

That was their heyday. I felt it in my soul. But it wasn’t gone. Their images began to move in the hokey holograms. Some of them had been lovers, I sensed. Some of them had even been Howard Hughes's lovers! They were much better off captured in this holographic Hall of Fame, not preserved as Hughes was, old and at his worst, still trying to hang on to his money and power no matter the cost, to himself or anyone else.

No, these kings and queens of old-time Hollywood were best viewed through a Vaseline-coated camera lens of memory. They sensed that I was simpatico, sensed my admiration, my emotional guardianship. Delilah, they sighed. You see us. You love us. You will preserve us.

How?

Ric touched my hand. The music had a relentless, funky beat. Pre-orgasmic. "This place speaks to you."

Right. Shut it up!

"You speak to me," I said.

He was…the Sheik of Araby…Rudolph Valentino…Ricardo Montalban…Ricky Martin…my Latin lover. He pulled me up from the cocktail table and led me onto the glass-floored balcony at the Ghost Bar lounge with its fifty-some-floor drop to the Nude Bar far below. People were swimming nude below, and even at this impossible distance I must have felt exposed.

"I don't notice any lingerie impressions under this gown," Ric murmured in my right ear.

"It would ruin the lines." I struggled to keep my composure as the migrating silver familiar became a thong panty, delicate but way too intimate and… cold!

He looked down those tens of floors. "So the people looking up from the Nude Bar far below-?"

"-would see France if they had fantastic vision." And no silver thong in the way, Irma added impishly.

"Not as fantastic as my imagination," Ric said. "You ready for…dinner?"

"Sounds like a plan."

The Paris restaurant was only a third of the way up the Eiffel Tower but the view of the Strip and its lights was fabulous.

We were shown to the primo table, at the exact right angle of the restaurant overlooking the Bellagio's dancing fountain light show. The dinner had a dozen courses, small and exquisite.