Page 30 of Nasty
“You’re lying out of that fine ass of yours. You don’t need to tell me the truth if you don’t want to. You’re entitled to your secrets. But, just so you know, you fucking suck at lying.”
“No, I don’t!”
“That smile that you’ve plastered all over your face? It’s the fakest smile I’ve ever seen. Do you have any idea how fake the smiles are in a Catholic church on a Sunday, Sera? I used to stand in front of a sea of people all smiling so hard, it looked like they were trying not to collectively shit themselves. Yours is worse than that.”
“Oh, gee. Thanks so much. So full of compliments.”
“I could compliment you all day,” he replied. Reaching up, he took hold of a strand of my wet hair and held it up, studying it intensely. “There are a thousand things I could say to flatter you…but you don’t want that. You want someone real, and I’m about as real as it fucking gets. Want to know whatIwant? I want to know everything about you, Sera Lafferty. I’m not just here to whisper sugar and honey into your ears. I want your dark and ugly, as well as your beautiful and bright. Maybe one day I’ll make you comfortable enough that that won’t be such a frightening prospect. Until then, know that every time you give me that bullshit smile, I’ll know you’re lying to me.”
God. If he were any sort of gentleman, he wouldn’t have called me out like that. He would have seen through my shitty smile and would have pretended like he’d believed me, and we would have moved on. But no. Fix had to be a contrarian. Fix had to open his mouth and say things that made me feel like I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. Fix had to put me on the spot and make me feel uncertain of myself.
“I’ll never give you my dark and ugly,” I said tightly. “You should count yourself lucky that youmightjust get the beautiful and bright.”
A soft, muted sadness glittered off the ice of Fix’s eyes. “Believe me, I do. But…there aren’t many men out there like me. I’ve seen shit that would make most men soil their underwear. I’ve heard things that would give guys like your ex night terrors. There isn’t a thing that you could tell me that I can’t handle. There isn’t a thing you could share with me that would come close to breaking me. I’d never judge you. I’d never pity you. I’d never feel sorry for you—”
“That’sa lie,” I snapped. My vision was see-sawing. If he kept talking about this, I wasn’t going to be able to help myself. I was going to snap, and I was going to launch myself at him. He didnotunderstand. Couldn’t. “Everyone tries to hide it, but I can always see the pity, Felix. Everyone feels sorry.”
“Why the fuck would I feel sorry for you?” he said, shrugging. “You’re not a weak person. Whatever happened to you hasn’t broken you, Sera. You’re a force to be reckoned with. Whatever shitty, hellish experiences you’ve had in the past have forged you into this relentless, empowered, fierce individual. You’re unstoppable.”
I met his gaze, and his eyes were crystal clear, lancing into me.Who did he see when he looked at me like that? When I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t think I saw the same person he’d just described. I saw someone who was hiding, who had been hiding for some time now, and was very used to living behind the safety of a very thick, very high shield wall. That woman wasn’t brave. She wasn’t empowered or fierce. She was a goddamncoward. If I were the person Fix thought I was, I wouldn’t have just withheld the truth about my childhood from him. I would have taken a deep breath and told him everything, regardless of whether it made me uncomfortable or not. It didn’t help matters that I was currently wearing nothing but a towel. I was incredibly vulnerable, and in more ways than one. “Can we just…notdo this right now, please? I—" I stopped talking. A loud alarm had begun to pulse, the throbbing sound echoing throughout the penthouse like a frantic, loud, uneven heartbeat. My eyes went wide as I stared at Fix, lips pressed together, not daring to breathe. “What the fuck isthat?”
“The doorbell,” he answered. So fucking cool. So fucking calm. I wanted to kick him in the balls. Who had a doorbell like that? It was worse than that wailing, haunting siren from fucking Silent Hill. “Don’t be shitty with me, but I got you something,” Fix said, as he exited his bedroom and headed toward the front door. I followed behind him, clamping my towel tightly under my arm to prevent it from falling.
“Something? What kind of something?”
“A dress. A few dresses. We have an event to attend this evening, and I’ve seen every single item of clothing you brought with you on this trip. I love the jeans and t-shirts, Sera, but tonight requires something a little more…elegant.”
We were going out? And Fix had bought dresses for me? The headache that had been threatening to split my skull open when I woke up earlier was now gone thanks to the Tylenol. I was feeling better, but it would have been nice to have been asked before Fix started organizing things for us to do. “Hey! What if I don’t want to go out, huh?”
Fix planted his palm on the security pad beside the door to the penthouse. He turned his attention to me, cocking his head to one side. “If you don’t want to come, you can stay here. You can go sightseeing. You can do whatever the hell you like. But I’m going to be gone for hours, and it would reassure me to know that you weren’t having sheets of skin peeled from your body by Carver’s new hitman while I was out, drinking champagne and shovinghors d’oeuvresinto my face. But like I said, it’s entirely up to you.”
Well. When he put it like that…
Fix winked at me, then pulled open the door, revealing not one but two women standing out in the hallway. Maybe in their mid-twenties, both of them were beautiful with dark, raven-black hair that was pulled back tightly into neat buns, not a strand out of place. Their eyes were dark, smoky and heavily kohled, their full mouths were slashes of bright crimson lipstick. They wore plain black dresses that emphasized every line and curve of their willowy frames. In each of their hands, they held at least three hangers, hooked over their fingers, and the items on those hangers were covered with plastic garment bags.
Fix didn’t say a word to them. He stepped to one side, and the women entered the penthouse, strutting in on perilously high heels, the light bouncing from the toes of their superbly shiny patent pumps.
They moved rigidly, their eyes slipping coolly over me as they passed me by, heading down the hallway and into the bathroom.
“Robots,” I whispered over my shoulder. “They look like robots.”
“Either that, or Robert Palmer finally released the extras from the ‘Simply Irresistible’ video shoot.”
I hid the fact that I was smirking as I followed after Fix’s guests. In the bathroom, the two women had already removed the garment bags from the dresses, and they were hanging them up on a rail by the window.
I gasped as I surveyed the different materials—black, red, gold, all glimmering and shimmering under the light. Some of the dresses were understated and classy, while a couple of them looked like burlesque outfits, barely anything to them, and covered with sequins and sparkling stones. I’d never seen anything like it. I balked when one of the women selected a particularly scandalous gold number, holding it aloft in my direction, squinting at me.
“Oh no. Sorry. That thing is way too short. I’m not leaving this penthouse with my ass hanging out,” I said.
The women wrinkled their noses in unison. “So crass,” the woman holding the gold dress said. Her accent was thick; at first I thought she was Spanish, but when she spoke again, I realized she was, in fact, Italian. “You don’t need to worry, miss. No one will see something they are not supposed to see,” she reassured me.
“This dress is long enough to cover everything that matters,” the other woman said. Their English was colored by their heritage, but it was also perfect. Soft, melodic, and lilting. It sounded like music. I pulled a face.
“Very pretty, but it’s a no from me.”
The woman on the right turned to the woman on the left, frowning. “Does she get a choice?” she hissed.
I stepped forward, frowning. “I’m sorry? What did you just say?”
