Vicki Pettersson - The Given

Kit’s breath caught like it’d been snared. She dodged the sweaty limbs of a couple marrying their actions to Imelda May’s bluesy, rasping voice, which soared over the sound system and climbed into their bones. Kit’s heart tripped over itself as she took two more steps directly toward the man, almost a run. Then he closed the distance between them.

Kit recoiled. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t Grif.

She missed him like rain. She was as parched as the cold, unyielding desert outside, longing for his voice or touch or anything to make her feel alive, or at least less desiccated. Hating herself for feeling that way, she turned to find a drink. Maybe one of the greasers would buy her a Pabst. She needed something that would go down easy and quickly.

The hand fell on her arm before she could move. The man in the fedora had caught up with her, and his fingertips trailed her wrist. His gaze was bright and playful in a face too youthful yet to be chiseled. His size was close, though. And a slow song was beginning. She might be able to close her eyes and pretend.

“Would you like to dance?” he asked, as she knew he would.

She gave him a gentle smile and wondered how he’d respond if she said, What I’d really like is to die.

Then she shook her head—both an answer and a way to empty her mind of the thought. Kit tried not to think too much these days. She didn’t like where her thoughts led. The man took it well, doffing his hat, offering up a rain check with a shrug, and returning to his crew in the club’s center. Kit smiled wistfully after him. What a life. Checking out Betties, rocking to Elvis, slamming back brew. Kit was not much older than the guy, only thirty, but she felt ancient.

She was wondering when and how that’d happened when she suddenly felt another pair of eyes on her. Searching the room, she found him. Dennis Carlisle. He stood out because, like her, he was the only other person who wasn’t moving. Light rocketed off the planes of his face, and though he otherwise fit in—dressed like a greaser in a white T and cuffed jeans, hair slicked and sideburns long—his rigid stance still reminded her of a police officer. His frown also reminded her that she’d broken his heart by not returning his calls, his texts.

And that, again, reminded her of Grif.

After another moment, Dennis shook his head and sighed. Then he turned away, and Kit just let him go.

“That’s it.” Another hand appeared, this one on the opposite arm, and way less gentle than the first. Kit spun like a top and found herself being dragged directly across the dance floor by Fleur Fontaine, her friend’s steps quick and light in a mermaid-tail dress that sparkled in the strobes. Kit actually stumbled in her vintage peep-toes, trying to keep up.

“What’s going on?” she said, as Fleur pulled her into the side bar. Velvet walls muted the MC’s voice from the other room, along with the upright bass that meant the start of a new set. Seated at a high-top table adorned with a flickering red-domed hurricane lamp were three other of Kit’s besties. Lil DeVille, Charis Cointreau, and Layla Love—new to their inner circle. All sported stage names, de rigueur in the rockabilly subculture where they lived and thrived. False identities . . . for true friends.

Yet she tilted her head as she looked at them now. Despite their smiles, Kit noted concern in their gazes, and that had nerves jumping in her belly. “What is this?”

“This,” Fleur said, depositing Kit dead center, “is an intervention.”

Layla slid a drink across the table. Not a Pabst but a gin fizz. It’d do. Kit picked it up. “What are we intervening . . . in?”

“Not we,” Fleur corrected, then waggled her finger to exclude Kit. “Us.”

Kit set down the drink and rose to leave.

“No.” That firm hand again, pushing her back to her red-cushioned seat. “Hear us out. We love you and if we don’t tell you this shit, who will?”

She placed her hand on her hip. “What shit?” Though she already knew.

“You’re in trouble, Kit-ster,” piped in Charis, eyebrows drawn low beneath Betty bangs. A bright yellow poppy pinned back one side of her dark hair. “You’ve stopped living.”

“I haven’t—”

“You used to laugh—” started Lil, whose own smile lines fanned out in winking flirtation from eyes that were always alight. Except for now, Kit noted.

“You did. All the time,” cut in Fleur, no stranger to fun. None of Kit’s girls were. That’s why they were . . . well, Kit’s.

And now she was mute. She lowered her gaze. She already knew all this.

“You used to smile,” Charis pressed.

But now Kit cried even before she was awake.

She said nothing. She didn’t press back.

That seemed to embolden Fleur. “And you used to dance .”

But Kit couldn’t even imagine that anymore. Sometimes she had trouble just getting to her feet in the morning. Forget the dance floor.

“Talk to us, Kit,” said Layla. She was powdered and dyed into Monroe perfection, and Kit found herself thinking, But you’d never understand. You’re too perfect. Too whole. You’ve never been broken like this. “You used to talk to us.”

But Kit had run out of things to say. For the first time in her life she felt alone, solo in a world she’d once felt a part of, without even the desire for something, someone, more. She was a reporter who dealt in fact and had once believed that the truth really did set you free. But then she learned that the man she loved had a wife who was still alive, and he left Kit to go find her. It hadn’t set her free at all. Instead, it’d set her adrift . . . and now nothing really touched her anymore.

She closed her eyes and lifted her drink. “I know. I’m . . . pitiful. Mooning over a boy. I’m a fucking country song.”

“It’s okay, honey,” Fleur said, voice overly bright now that Kit had said something, anything. “We all know the tune.”

“Sure,” said Layla, edging so close her perfume threatened to clog Kit’s pores. “When I was with Joe I thought I was Eartha Kitt, all ‘C’est Si Bon.’ Then he met someone else and it turned out I was Tammy Wynette. ‘Stand by Your Man.’ ”

She made a gagging motion with her finger, and Kit almost smiled. They were trying so hard.

“Look,” Fleur said, folding her hands over Kit’s. “Griffin Shaw is just one man. One of millions who are just waiting out there for you to either moon over them or break their hearts. I bet there’s some greaser in the other room right now who would be willing to take you for a swing and heal that beautiful heart.”

Kit thought of Dennis, how patient he’d been with her, how he’d waited for her to turn her mind from Grif and finally choose him. That patience had eventually snuffed out, along with the expectation that lighted his gaze whenever he looked at Kit. He was right to turn his back on her. He knew that Kit’s heart was a seeping wound.

Kit thought about playing along just to end this uncomfortable conversation. She could flash her own dazzling smile—God knew she was good at hiding behind that—but these were her best friends, the girls who knew of her frailty and faults, and loved her anyway. If she didn’t share what she was feeling with them, who would ever really know her?

“Look,” she said, leaning over the table. The other four women did the same, closing rank in a tight huddle. “I used to think I understood the world at large just because I got paid to report it. I thought I could intuit a person’s motives by merely adjusting the focus of my critical lens. Zoom in close enough and any news story will reveal itself. I trusted my gut. I always sought and spoke the truth. And I believed that most people out there were like me, like you.” She gestured to them all. “Good people who treated others the way they want to be treated. Who wished strangers well and meant it. Who took joy in the simplest things . . .”