As I came, I bit his thumb hard enough to draw blood. I could tell that he was close, too, by the hitch in his breathing, but there had to be some sort of punishment for standing me up at the St. Leo, so I slid off him with no warning. He gazed up at me, pumping recklessly for a moment, mouth gaping like a fish. I leaned down and slapped him, once, twice, until I could see my hand’s red shadow on his face.
“Listen to me,” I hissed. “I don’t care where the hell you were or who you were with, but you better thank your lucky goddamn stars I convinced Ellen to see Klein again. If you fuck that one up for me, I’ll do worse than this, understand?” He blinked up at me, mute, and I felt a rush of hatred. I wasn’t sure if it was for him or myself or both of us.
I gathered my stockings and swayed unsteadily out of his bedroom into the kitchen, where the lemon smell was making me dizzy. It followed me all the way back to my car and into my own bed and even, it seemed, my own dreams.
Chapter 3
The Lady Upstairs’ Staffing Agency was located in the center of Little Busan Plaza, on the second floor, above Fish Heaven Aquarium Repair and Seven Galbi BBQ, and between a nail salon that never did any business—I had my own theories about that—and a payday loan shop that had long since been closed.
You could say we brought style to the place.
Seven Galbi was the main attraction, and their delicious specialty beef kept me shampooing my hair every day, trying to get the smell out. It was not the aphrodisiac you might have supposed. On weekends and at night, the restaurant was so crowded that we had to give the valet our keys. But during the day, I could’ve parked my car across three spaces and there still would’ve been room to spare. That day, there were only two other cars parked in the lot, a gray Mercedes and an oxidizing Honda that had once been beige.
It was a habit from another lifetime, one I couldn’t seem to shake, the need to be at the office by 8 a.m. Even when I knew Lou and Jackal wouldn’t be in for hours still. Even when I was so hungover I couldn’t remember my zip code. But that morning, having the threat of the Lady hanging over my head added an extra incentive. I needed all the time I could get to figure out Ellen’s next rendezvous.
I could feel Jackal and last night between my legs with each stair up to our office—the pleasant soreness of the well fucked, a little throbbing ache that lives in you like a secret—taking the steps two at a time to feel it deeper. It gave me something to focus on while I gnawed on the soft guts of a croissant, my pantyhose already sweat-chafing my thighs from the single flight of stairs.
Even this early in the morning, the smell of browning meat wafted up with me. I suppressed a gag. The sun bounced off the aluminum roof and cast dusty rays into my hangover, subtle as a spotlight, and I kept my head ducked like I was trying to crawl up the stairs incognito.
I’d almost bumped into her before I looked up.
She could’ve been twenty-five or forty, depending on which part of her you were looking at, with the calves of a go-go dancer and the carefully moisturized lipstick lines of a well-tended woman battling the inevitable with grace. She wore a silk blouse the color of a ripe melon, and the inch of dark roots under her bottle job seemed exactly right—the obvious artifice making it clear how good she looked. Large smoky sunglasses shaded her eyes, and she had one hand on our door. I couldn’t tell if she was coming or going.
“Hullo,” she said. Her voice was low for a woman, and her fingernails were painted a bright blue. She tapped one against the door and then her hand dropped. Around her wrist, another slim circle of blue. I squinted. A tattoo, little stars inked in a faded denim color.
“Can I help you?”
She flipped her sunglasses to the top of her head and studied me for a moment. Her dark eyes were bright but flat, the way I’d always heard sharks’ eyes described. Behind her ear, I could still make out the faintly tattooed outline of Perfect Alignment Massage’s logo on our door, the business that had owned the joint until the Lady came along.
“No,” she said, “I don’t think you can.” She didn’t move. I didn’t, either.
When the Lady had taken over the lease, back when Lou’s and my little side project had gone wrong and we’d needed cover, she’d registered our business as a staffing agency. It gave us cover for the shuffle of girls coming by the office, and more importantly, it gave us respectability. We’d created our cover so well that occasionally, we got mistaken for a real staffing agency. Sometimes, when business was slow and Lou was bored, she’d even take jobs and place girls for the hell of it, adding the seventy-five-dollar check to her rainy-day fund.
Half distracted, digging through my purse for the key and wondering how quickly I could reasonably expect Ellen to reschedule with Klein, I started to say, “Are you looking for a temp? Because I’m about to—” But she held up a hand. She hadn’t blinked since she’d taken off her sunglasses.
“Be a dear and give this to Lou for me,” she said, handing me a white envelope embossed with a blue fleur-de-lis. My scalp began to prickle. “I’d prefer it go to her unopened,” she added as she sashayed past me down the stairs, and I stepped automatically out of her way, then wished I hadn’t.
“Excuse me,” I called after her, but she held up a hand so I could see each cobalt almond perfectly. The diamond on her ring finger, big enough to anchor a small yacht, caught the sun, and little sequins of light burst across my face. My scalp prickled again, harder.
I dropped the croissant and followed her down the stairs, not sure what I meant to say, but she turned before I reached the bottom, one hand on the driver-side door of the Mercedes, like she’d been expecting me to follow, like it was a script, and said: “Lou told me you were pretty, but high hopes are such a bitch, aren’t they? Nowhere for them to go but down.”
And then she turned the engine and drove away.
Across the street, a congregation of women gathered on greenery in front of a flat-topped church. I watched her drive away, memorizing her plate number before I felt the eyes of someone else on me—one of the women clustered on the lawn, moving their arms in circles and slow spins, somewhere between kung fu and ballet. A sunglassed dumpling of a grandmother had her face tipped in my direction, and I held up a hand, dazed.
She gave me the finger.
I walked back up the stairs and unlocked the door. The massage parlor had left us with a small waiting area. Behind the front desk, there were three doors that led to separate offices for each of us. At the very back of the office proper, a bathroom, a sink, and a little balcony that afforded a view of dark glossy skyscrapers. At the front desk, a phone that almost never rang was nestled among neatly collated file folders.
At the front desk, I jotted down the license plate number on the back of the envelope in letters as small as I could manage. And then I peeked inside. It didn’t disappoint.