Mike rolled his eyes and grinned. “Your one-track mind is very sexy. But I’ve told you, Balmer’s cool now. He was just showing me his costume for the party this weekend.”
Oh my God, in all the excitement, I’d completely forgotten about Rex Freeman’s infamous Mardi Gras soiree.
It was the one time a year when every kid at Palmetto, save a few of the most self-righteous youth groupers, cut loose and got a little crazy. All the typical girls would be wearing feathered masks and fishnets, but I was determined to come up with something that stood out in the crowd of wannabe sluts. The boys would be all Panama hats, flasks in their jackets, and barely buttoned French-cut shirts. Often, they ended up looking more scandalous than the girls.
I did love to pick out costumes for us to wear every year, but I think my favorite part of Mardi Gras was seeing everyone all showered and appropriate at church the next morning, when you’d still be picturing them flashing for beads. It was something I looked forward to every year, but today, the thought of Rex’s party was just one more thing getting under my skin.
“So what?” I asked Mike huffily. “You and J.B. were swapping beads in the locker room?” Mike and I had already agreed to keep our costume concept this year a surprise until we showed up at the party.
“Course not,” Mike shrugged. “Just his. Dude’s gonna wear a feather boa. It’s hilarious.”
“I doubt it,” I said. The mental image of J.B. stumbling around drunk in a hot-pink feather boa did nothing for me — unless that feather boa could be used to publicly humiliate/ annihilate him.
Then Mike put his thumb on my lip. “Hey,” he said softly. “If I promise to get you the Jessamine to shame all other Jessamines, will you kiss me already?”
I leaned into him and tried to gauge the look in his eyes. He looked totally earnest. I wondered if that would change if I clued him in on a few unsavory details about J.B. That would involve divulging some information about my past that I’d banished to the recesses of my mind, but you know what they say about desperate times.
“Come on,” he coaxed again. “Kiss me.”
I pulled Mike to me so that our lips just barely brushed when I spoke. “If I kiss you, will you promise to keep your costume plans a secret from J.B. until Saturday night?”
Mike’s brow furrowed the way it did when he couldn’t quite keep up with my logic but trusted me enough not to question it. His strong hands folded around me, and he pressed his lips to mine. His tongue parted my mouth, and when I opened up to him, I could feel a new kind of power moving in.
There’s the daytime getup (string bikini and gauzy black cover-up) that you bring to your boyfriend’s bayside villa for the after-dinner jaunt on his state-of-the-art cigarette boat. . and then there’s the lavender-jersey tennis dress and impeccably white cardigan that you threw in your bag in case his blue-blood parents pop by the house unexpectedly for dinner. . again.
“Look who’s in the neighborhood!” Diana King trilled as she stepped into the foyer of the King family’s weekend house. I listened for the
“That’s my cue,” I groaned, rolling off of Mike on the navy quilted bedspread. It was a sure bet that she’d be up here sniffing around before Mike could even collect himself after all the hard work I’d been doing.
“To be continued,” Mike said, pulling on my earlobe with his lips. “Hi, Mom,” he called loudly, crossing the room to rifle through his nautical mahogany trunk for some clothes.
I managed to shut my scantily clad self inside Mike’s Jacuzzi-equipped bathroom exactly one nanosecond before Diana took over the bedroom. I could smell her signature Shalimar perfume as she stood in the doorway. And from the hurried rummaging in the next room, it sounded like Mike was still scrambling into his shirt. Perfect. As if Diana needed more ammunition to play Ice Queen with me.
“I didn’t realize you were coming out today,” Mike said smoothly, probably standing to give her the double- cheeked kiss she always insisted on. “What’s the occasion?”
“Tsk tsk,” I heard Diana say, recalling my own mother’s favorite zinger about that annoying blue-blood habit of speaking in onomatopoeias:
“Darling, don’t act so surprised,” Mike’s mother was saying. “You can’t think Natalie’s the
Sniff sniff. I envisioned her rhinoplastied — excuse me — deviated-septum-altered nostrils flaring with thinly veiled suspicion.
“She’s, uh, in the shower,” Mike covered for me, and I promptly turned on the faucet. I hadn’t been planning on showering until
Huffily, I resigned myself to shampooing my hair. Minutes later, when I felt the waft of cold air from the shower curtain being pulled back, I jumped.
“Jesus,” I gasped. “I thought you were—”
“My mother, coming in to soap your back?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Get in here.” I grabbed his arm to pull him in. Finally, things were getting back to the way they belonged: steamy.
But Mike looked around, as if his family could see us alone in the bathroom.
“I can’t,” he said. “I have to help my parents unload the car. Mom was hoping we could all have dinner.”
“Dinner?” I said. Dinner chez Diana’s was so not part of the plan. I needed alone time with Mike to gear up for our big week. “What about the lake?”
Mike took the loofah out of my hand, turned my body around with one deft movement of his wrist, and started lathering my shoulder.
“Don’t change the subject,” I moaned.
“We can’t exactly get out of it,” Mike said. “I’ll take you out in the boat after dinner.”
I whipped my head around. “Just the two of us?”
“On a school night,” he winked.
“Ooh,” I smiled. “What will Mother think?”
Clean enough and appropriately attired in the tennis dress Mike had even laid out for me on the bed — what, did he think I was going to wear the teddy to dinner? — I tromped down the hardwood stairs.
Through the French windows, I could see Mr. and Mrs. King relaxing on the terrace facing the glittering water at the west end of the Cove. Diana was cross-legged in her navy-blue skirt suit, reading the paper and sipping her token glass of Viognier. Her frosted hair was gathered in a low bun at her neck and, as ever, her foundation was flawless. Mike’s father, Phillip, who carried visible stress in every part of his body — and who Mike took after in looks alone — had his brow furrowed and was shouting into his cell phone. The toe of his polished leather dress shoe was making rushed circles in the air.
Nothing indicated the imminent parental dinner party. But when I heard the telltale clamoring of pots behind the closed doors of the kitchen, I got it. Just because no King had set foot in that kitchen since they approved the architect’s floor plan, it didn’t mean someone else wasn’t whipping up a feast in their honor. Of course, they couldn’t travel the thirty miles to the shore without “help.” Of course, they would have brought their housekeeper Binky in tow.
Binky and I had a complicated relationship — there were times, like right now, when I almost related more to her than to the rest of Mike’s family. I knew that when she wasn’t boarding with the Kings, she lived in my old neck of the woods, in Cawdor across the bridge. In fact, the first time I met Binky, we bonded over a shared love for the huevos rancheros at Dos Hermanos, a hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint near her house. It wasn’t until Mrs. King cocked her head at me and asked when on earth I would ever have been on that side of town that I remembered my new position over here. I had to resort to stammering something I’m not proud of about getting really lost one time during my driver’s ed test. After that, I learned to be cautious about what I let slip in front of Binky. By now, I
