Lynne Heitman - First Class Killing

They all took turns dancing with me, but when my last partner left, I didn’t want to go. I stayed in the middle of the floor and felt the crowd throb around me. It was like a human heart, pushing its raw, sweaty, sexual energy-the party’s lifeblood-out into the night. People danced in pairs, in threesomes, in groups, and in every permutation of man/men and woman/women. Bodies rubbed, hands roamed, boundaries evaporated.

I was far from home dancing under the stars. I was among people I didn’t know, doing things I wouldn’t normally do. When someone came up from behind and put his hands on my hips, I let him because it made me feel connected in all that disconnectedness. I felt anonymous and intimate at the same time, which was exactly right for me at that moment, so I put my hands over his, closed my eyes, and let the music come inside. Soon my body was twisting and shimmying and slithering in ways it should never have been able to. I took his hands from my hips, raised them over my head, and turned, and when I opened my eyes, the music came to a crashing halt, at least in my head, because it wasn’t someone I didn’t know smiling back at me.

It was Angel.

I let go of her hands and stepped back, and all the places where she had touched me started to burn.

She tossed her head like a stallion and laughed. “What’s the matter, sugar? You look so surprised.”

In a cacophony of sounds and sights and smells and tastes, she was the most vivid of all, mainly because there was so much of her. Up close, she was several inches taller than I had expected and bountiful in every sense. Handfuls of platinum blond hair framed her face and cascaded glossily down past her shoulders. Her breasts, full and meaty and freckled, overflowed the low-cut top that tried to hold them back. Her waist was small, her hips generous, and all the features of her face boldly outlined-eyes in black liner and mascara and lips in bright red.

It was hard to break through the blur of tequila except to know that she was there, right in front of me, and she’d caught me at exactly the wrong moment.

“Sweetie…” She reached out and took my hands in hers, then curled to the left and winked back at me over her shoulder. “Are you following me?”

I started to move again to the beat, mostly because she did but also because if I didn’t, my nerve endings, already crackling and hot, might overheat and melt me into a puddle.

“I saw you in Pittsburgh, you know.” My stomach clenched, thinking about her staring in the dark through that camera lens. She couldn’t have seen me. She couldn’t have. “I saw you at the airport with your little friends, Tristan and Irene.”

“I was working a trip,” I said. It was hard to talk in the crowd. I kept getting bumped and shoved, and we had to lean into each other to hear. “Why would you notice who I’m with?”

“I notice everything. What I don’t see, people tell me. What they’re telling me about you is that you’re asking a lot of questions, trying to get close to me.” She put one hand back on my hip and started an upward slide to forbidden territory. Unlike Tony the Actor, she knew how to keep her eyes where it counted-on mine. “Do you want to get close to me, Alex Shanahan?”

I did a quick spin, pivoting away from her. When we were facing each other again, I moved in closer but took both her hands in mine before she could put them where she wanted.

With no hands for grabbing, she began to use the rest of her body, rubbing her hips against mine. “You don’t like to be touched, do you?”

“Not without permission.”

“I don’t ask permission.” She snapped her hands away and, before I had a chance to react, clamped long fingers around my wrists, holding them with just enough pressure to make me aware of the bones underneath. She paused for a few hip swivels, long enough to let the new dynamic sink in. Then she pulled me close enough to put her lips to my ear. Her breath against my skin was so hot it felt cold. The smell of her perfume, sweet and heavy, floated around us. “Do you want to get close to me?”

The music was so distant that all I could hear was my breathing overlapping with hers, and then all I could feel was the tip of her tongue, wet and warm, tracing the edge of my ear. I tried to turn my head away, to fight her off, but she was strong. She held me where I didn’t want to be, which seemed to excite her. I stopped straining, because I could tell it was what she wanted. I also knew I couldn’t win.

“This is close enough,” I said.

She backed a step away, and we were facing each other again. “No one gets close unless they’re invited, sugar, and someone like you with your tight-assed, don’t-touch-me-I’m-so-much-better-than-you attitude will never be welcome in my company. So, fuck off.”

When she finally released my hands, my fingers were numb.

Of the several thousand things that bothered me about the encounter-hell, about the whole evening-I realized as I stood and watched that what bothered me most was what Angel was doing now. She was dancing with her eyes closed, so certain was she that she could put her tongue in my ear and I wouldn’t come after her.

Just before she was about to disappear into the crowd, I stepped forward, reached in, and pulled her out by her very solid upper arm. I pulled her close enough to whisper in her ear, which I could do if I stood on my toes. I left out the licking part.

“I know why you’re here tonight, Angel. I know all about what these girls in LA are doing. They want to put you out of business, and it would be my pleasure to help them, unless-”

She tried to pull away, but I squeezed tighter, ignoring for a moment the pain in my fingers as the blood rushed back in. The two of us stood perfectly still, a calm center in the middle of that surging dance floor.

“I know you’ve checked me out,” I said. “I’m not a hooker, and I don’t want to be a hooker. I’m a tight-assed, keep-your-fucking-hands-off-me management type with homemade hair and enough skill and experience to fix your little business problem here in LA without breaking a sweat. Or I could do the same for the women out here. You decide. But don’t take too long, because, like you, my services go to the highest bidder.”

I let go of her arm. She said nothing, just drifted back into the crowd wearing an enigmatic smile that said eitherI’m going to kill you orI’ll give you a call.

“What are you doing here by yourself? What’s with all the hand wringing?” Tristan had come up behind me. Both my wrists were adorned with flame-red bracelets. Holding them as if they were eggs, he inspected the damage. “What is this? What happened?”

“Nothing.” I tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let go.

“If you don’t want to tell me, Alexandra, say so. Don’t treat me as if I were your mother.”

I looked at him and lied again. “I’m fine. Nothing happened.”

He pulled his hands, with mine in them, almost imperceptibly toward his body, as if to recover from a blow to his midsection. “You should put something on them.”

I turned him, looped my arm through his, and walked him off the dance floor. “I’m going back to the hotel.”

“I’ll go with you. We’ll get a cab.”

“I’d rather go by myself, if you don’t mind. You look as if you’re having a good time here. Is that all right? I’ll get the bouncer guy to call me a cab.”

“If that’s what you really want. Just be careful. Do you have money?”

“I’m okay. Thanks.”

He gave me a hug. “I’m sorry you didn’t have a better time. Don’t forget, we have an early call tomorrow morning. I’ll see you then.”

I made my way back through the house, past the bar, and to the doorway that led to the foyer. Bouncer Guy was alone, still absorbed in his game of solitaire.