Vicki Pettersson - The Taken

Who was Griffin Shaw?

Fleur swung a hip, the bullfighter cape flaring, letting out a whistle as she turned away from the window. “Looks like Handsome and Exciting’s illegitimate love child.”

“More like Terse and Cryptic’s outlaw cousin,” Kit muttered, following.

Fleur raised a brow as she gestured to her chair. “Sounds like your type,” she said, though she didn’t say it like it was a good thing.

Kit made a face, but the tension left her as Fleur swiveled her around to face the mirror. Unfortunately, tension was the fundamental ingredient keeping her upright. Kit met her friend’s eyes in the mirror, and they both fell still. It was only the welling tears, but the mirror seemed like a water wall, reflecting all the grief Kit had dammed up just to keep moving.

“Nic loved this place,” she said, voice breaking.

She had, in fact, been the one to encourage Fleur to open it two years earlier. Fleur had been cutting and coloring their hair since junior high. She’d given Kit her first Middy haircut, and taught her how to do a proper Victory Roll. Making a living was incidental.

“I should pay my clients,” Fleur had protested, when approached by Nic and Kit with the idea of the salon. “They allow me to touch them in an intimate way. Lovers are allowed to touch a person’s hair and head. Parents and children. Other than that, it’s a social taboo.”

But Fleur’s passion for her art made it impossible not to think of her as an intimate friend. Even Marin softened under Fleur’s loving touch. Kit brought her aunt in after chemo turned the stubble from her once-blond hair to gray ash, and Fleur handled the new tufts like priceless china, saying each strand gleamed with wisdom and experience and strength. Marin sailed from her chair like she had wings of silver, and it was that intimacy and touch Kit needed today.

Too bad there wasn’t a way to explain that to Grif.

Leaning forward, Fleur wrapped her arms around Kit, so close to her neck that she tensed for a moment, remembering the violation of the night before. Then she relaxed, the embrace soothing her like a balm. “I didn’t want to bring it up first. You were besties. But, oh, I’m going to miss her.”

Kit rose at that, and they hugged hard. “Nic’s gone, and the whole world is worse for it.”

That was the real tragedy, the constant heartbreak that’d remained with Kit in the long night of her undreaming. So they wept in each other’s arms, in lieu of the friend they really wanted to hold, and while they did, Kit couldn’t help thinking it was their duty to fully embrace this life, if only because Nic no longer could.

And fight for her, too, Kit thought, pulling away and wiping at her face. She sniffled, and looked into Fleur’s no longer so-perfectly-powdered face. She sniffled again. “Nic would hate what I’ve done with my hair.”

Fleur pursed pinup lips. “Yes. She would.”

They laughed, without humor, before falling silent, each feeling the moment moving away, but neither wishing to leave Nic’s memory behind. But that was life, wasn’t it? It went on.

Or, sometimes, it was interrupted by Buddy Holly’s “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.”

Kit wiped her face as she pulled her cell from her leopard-print bag. Fleur leaned over her shoulder, and Kit caught the distaste on her friend’s face in the mirror. “Well, now the ringtone makes sense.”

Kit shook her head sadly as she sat again, silencing the call and erasing Paul’s accompanying picture at the same time. “I actually used to like that song.”

She’d picked it for him because it’d annoy him if he ever heard it, a virtual impossibility but a pleasing idea all the same. It also reminded her of the cool, gradual way he’d let Kit-and the rest of the world-know how important he planned to be. Only a few summers ago had they listened to it and other rockabilly songs in what Kit had begun thinking of as the beginning of the end of their relationship. They’d driven down the Strip in her convertible, the hot night whispering against their soft skin, smiling as they ignored the sweat because sweat was what they did back then.

But by Christmas everything had grown cold, and he was telling stories that rarely included her, and making plans that never did. They drove down the same stretch of asphalt with the top up, and he spent the whole time pointing out the things he intended to leave behind, mostly places and memories they’d shared. Then it was on to talk about a law appointment he felt entitled to, a potential summer internship with a political candidate she already found suspect, and a disdain for her clothing, her alternative lifestyle… her.

Kit knew he thought he was sharing his dreams with her, but by then it could have been anyone riding alongside him in that car.

“Ah, he loved you,” Fleur said unconvincingly, when Kit shared these thoughts with her.

“Please,” Kit said, tossing the phone back into her bag. “The only bone in my body he ever loved was his.”

“Shh. Not so loud.” Fleur held her scissors to the side as she leaned close, voice melodramatic. “Contact shame.”

“Was he really that bad?” Kit asked, though what she was really wondering was, Was I really that blind?

“Don’t worry, honey,” Fleur said, scissors flying like she could snip away Kit’s worry along with her split ends. “We’ve all had judgment lapses that had us tiptoeing toward our own personal apocalypse. Besides, Paul started out all right. Then he was tainted by the lure of zeroes in his bank account.”

“A need for obscene wealth is just a symptom of his disease.”

“Which is?”

“A profound lack of self-worth.”

Fleur snorted. “That’s because deep down he knows he gets through life on white male privilege and looks rivaling Narcissus. I mean, what kind of man looks over his shoulder just to see who’s watching him?”

Kit thought about the way Grif had walked away from her-back ramrod-straight, steps even and unhurried and sure-never once looking back. “Yeah, well you know Paul. He wants to give the appearance of being ‘fiscally sound.’ ”

“Fiscally sound?”

Kit held up her palms. “His words, not mine.”

“I’m fiscally sound,” Fleur declared after a moment. “I’m a sound thousandaire.”

Kit snorted. “I’m potentially wealthy, but totally unsound.”

“And he loved you because of the first part of that sentence.” Fleur smiled through the mirror. “The rest of us love you because of the last.”

“Unsound is a good adjective. Unfortunately, Paul has other adjectives for me.” Stubborn. Irresponsible. Strange.

Sensing the serious turn, Fleur cleared her throat. “Enough about Paul. He’s so fake he should have ‘Made in China’ stamped on his ass. Tell me about Mr. Tall, Dark, and Dangerous. Let this old married woman live vicariously through you.”

Kit rolled her eyes-Fleur was both younger than her and insatiably hot for her rocker husband-but she went with it, spilling everything about the previous night, how she’d been nearly dead on her feet-too sad, exhausted, and outnumbered to do much more than flail when she’d been attacked in her own home. “One guy was a cop, we think. I’m sure he had some part in Nic’s death. I don’t know about the other, but Grif drove both of them away.”

Fleur, who’d fallen utterly still at the beginning of the telling, came to life, waving her scissors and comb around so wildly she looked homicidal. “But you have to go to the police!”

“Did you hear the part about my attacker being a policeman?”

“But your bruises…” Fleur touched Kit’s neck gingerly now, like she was breakable. Kit gritted her teeth, and shooed her away.