Starlight (Peaches Monroe) (Volume 2) Paperback – September 2, 2013 (24 page)

I caught my reflection in the window before it finished rolling down. I looked like someone covered in sticky champagne and dust, who’d just spent the night partying and had makeup smeared down her face.

“Sure, we’d love a ride,” I said.

The window finished lowering, and I gazed into the devilishly handsome green eyes of Dalton Deangelo.

“On second thought, I’ll walk,” I said.

Mitchell was already climbing into the back, though, and I could hear the security guard woman yelling as she got closer.

“Fuck my life,” I said, and I reluctantly climbed into the front seat.

Dalton’s car was comfortable and cool—a black BMW that looked expensive, but not as flashy as I’d expected.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Dalton said, looking like a vampire who just ate a nice family.

From the back seat, Mitchell said, “Hey! You’re Dalton Deangelo. I’m a huge fan. I just want to say that Connor is the worst, and I’m Team Drake all the way. I don’t like how Connor drags all his lines out. Just. Too. Dramatic. Oh, listen to me. I’m a total rabid fanboy. Please someone, just knock me out right now or I won’t stop talking.” He paused all of two seconds. “Is it true that Drake’s backstory is based on your life? I mean, aside from the whole serial killer thing. Did you grow up in an orphanage and have to fight other boys in an underground fight club? Wait, I’m being stupid. We don’t have orphanages these days, and you’re mortal, so that can’t be true.” I heard the sound of his palm hitting his forehead. “Why do I always embarrass myself like this? Seriously, though, if I was a girl, I’d have your babies.” He let out a shocked gasp, as though he couldn’t believe the words coming out of his own mouth. “I’m so hungover! I’m not even thinking straight. Not that I ever think straight, ha ha. Holy shit, what were those pills we were taking last night? Oh, Peaches, I don’t feel very—”

Dalton interrupted, “Dude, are you going to throw up? Don’t chuck in my car.”

I turned back to see Mitchell’s face turn a sickly shade of pale. He had his lips pressed together so hard, they were white, and sweat was streaming down his face.

“You should probably pull over,” I said to Dalton.

Frowning, he pulled the car into what looked like a park, with one of those playground sets. It seemed ridiculously out of place, in the Malibu neighborhood full of giant mansions, and I wasn’t surprised to see that the only people using the park were a teen couple making out on a bench under a tree.

Mitchell opened the back door, stepped out, and commenced with the water-splashdown sound. This triggered my gag reflex, but I fought it, hard.

Mitchell sobbed, “I’ll never drink again,” in between splashes. Then, after a minute, “Huh. That’s interesting.”

Curiosity got the better of me, and I stepped out of the car. There on the grass was a bright green plastic ring with a pretend diamond.

A memory danced through my brain. Mitchell, holding the ring up and pretending to propose to me. I said yes, then he swallowed the ring and chased it down with Jack Daniels, straight from the bottle.

We’d bought the rings and some other kids’ toys from vending machines, right outside the…

My body turned icy cold, like a cloud just passed over my whole life.

“Mitchell, where did we go last night after they kicked us out of the club?”

“I don’t know. I shouldn’t have taken those pharmaceuticals.”

I wiped my mouth, because the inside of it tasted like how I imagine an organic fertilizer factory smells. Something sat in the corner of my memory, but when I tried to reach for it, instead of the detail from last night, I got perfect recall of a news story about a woman who heard a scratching noise inside her ear that turned out to be maggots tunneling toward her brain.

I bent over and blasted the grass with bile, champagne, and what tasted not unlike pool water. Wait. It was pool water. “Gotta hydrate yourself,” was one of the things I’d said the night before as I stuck my face in the pool water and took a good drink.

Okay, that was gross, but why hadn’t I gone into the pool and washed my sticky body off? I love being in the water.

And why did I have something crinkly inside the waistband of my panties, just above where my pubic hair started?

I pulled up the hem of my dress at the front.

“Whoa, not here!” Dalton said. He’d gotten out of the car to either help or laugh, and he hadn’t held my hair back when I chucked, so clearly he was there to laugh at me.

Ignoring him, I pulled out the waistband of my underwear. I had what looked like a paper towel, folded in a square, taped to me.

Right. The vending machines were right outside a tattooist’s shop. And the boys had gotten temporary tattoos in their prize packs, but my plastic bubble had a bracelet that broke when I tried to put it on. Then I’d started crying about having big wrists. (Shit, man. Why couldn’t I have forgotten that embarrassing detail?) Daniel cheered me up by offering to buy me a tattoo.

I dropped my green sundress back down. The sun was high overhead, and the smell of someone’s stomach contents was getting to me. The square of paper taped to me was only two inches wide, so how bad could it be? Knowing me, the tattoo was probably a cartoon peach. I could work with that.

Dalton was hovering and had already come to the same conclusion as I had. “You got a tattoo?” he asked.

“Yup. Team Connor. I’m switching sides now for when
One Vamp to Love
comes back in the fall.”

“No, you didn’t.” He looked amused.

“It’s totally Team Connor, dummy.”

He frowned. “Dummy? That’s not nice. I picked you two up, and I could have kept driving.”

I remembered his sensitivity about being called a meat puppet, and the reputation of good-looking actors being dumb.

Mitchell asked Dalton, “How did you happen to be exactly where you were? Peaches told us last night you don’t live in Malibu.” He was still hunched over, but appeared to be finished being sick, by the way the pink had returned to his cheeks.

Dalton gave me a devious smile, his green eyes as mischievous as ever, and that million-dollar dimple in his chin mocking me. “My little secret.”

I tossed my purse down on the ground. “You had a tracking device implanted in my bag! You weird-ass rich fucker!”

He started laughing, then doubled over, and finally fell back on the grass, rolling with laughter.

Mitchell looked over at me. “That’s a little paranoid.”

Dalton sat up, still grinning. “Show me your tattoo, and I’ll tell you how I knew you were in trouble.”

“No fucking way.”

Mitchell got my attention and pointed to the nearby water fountain. We both dragged our bodies to the water like zombies, and drank deeply.

Normally, public fountains gross me out, but I would have wrapped my lips around this one happily. Sweet, sweet water.

I was still enjoying the water when Dalton grabbed my arm. “Come on, we gotta go.”

Pulling my arm away, I snarled, “Don’t touch me.”

He held up his hands. “I’m done.” He backed away slowly, hands still up. “You’ll look awesome in the paparazzi photos. Really. Good luck with that, and have a nice life.”

Photos? I spotted a car rolling into the near-deserted park, a long camera lens visible behind the front windshield. Paparazzi.

Mitchell and I ran toward the car, Mitchell muttering about Team Drake all the way, and me apologizing in between curse words.

Dalton let us into the vehicle, and we took off, kicking up gravel with the tires. Mitchell clapped his hands. The windows were tinted, and nobody could see in, but I still slouched down low in the front seat, covering my face with my hand.

“Let’s get brunch,” Dalton said.

Mitchell squealed and started back into fanboy mode again.

When Mitchell finally stopped to breathe for a minute, I said to Dalton, “Are you seriously inviting us for brunch?”

“I have the time off. You and I were supposed to be spending this whole week together.”

“Right.” I felt about three inches tall. Meekly, I said, “Sorry I snapped at you. I’m a little hung over.”

“No shit!”

“Can you lower the volume of your sarcasm before you make my ears bleed?”

“Someone had a fun night.”

“And can we pull over at a gas station so I can take a whore’s bath at the very least?”

He turned to me, one dark eyebrow raised magnificently.

I explained, “That’s where you get a wet paper towel and just… do your armpits… and… oh, never mind.” I covered my face again. “Stop looking at me. I can feel your eyes groping me, Dalton Deangelo.”

Mitchell piped up from the back set. “We could swing by my apartment and freshen up. My roommate has some dresses that would look great on Peaches.”

I turned back to face Mitchell, who was looking peppier by the minute. “I thought your roommate’s name was Steve?”

“His drag name is Luscious Hilda Mae Sparkles. She’s inspired by this plus-size vintage pin-up girl from the fifties, plus Mariah Carey. Of course.”

“Of course,” I said, trying to wrap my dehydrated brain around the concept.

Mitchell gave Dalton his address, and we were at the door in twenty-five minutes.

I took the first shower, while Mitchell very awkwardly entertained Dalton by showing him his collection of vintage LA postcards from the sixties.

Alone in the bathroom, I pulled off my sticky, sweaty dress, and stared at myself in the mirror. I still had a square patch of paper towel stuck to myself, a few inches inside my front hip bone, and I didn’t have the nerve to see what lay beneath the bandage. The skin stung, like a scrape or a burn.

There was cellophane over the paper, so I made sure the tape was water resistant and got into the shower. The bathroom was really old, everything pink and blue from the fifties, but it was clean and welcoming, and I was grateful. The shower head was better than average for an old apartment.

Steve/Luscious Hilda Mae Sparkles was at her day job at the coffee shop he/she managed, but had given approval by text message for me to wear anything from the costume closet. After my shower, I zipped into a retro floral dress with a pink sash for a belt. I’d hand-washed my champagne-sticky underwear in the shower and dried them somewhat with the hair dryer before putting them back on.

I let Mitchell take over the bathroom, and I came out to find Dalton sitting at an easel with a paintbrush in his hand.

“That’s random,” I said.

“I like to paint.”

I took a seat on the orange-vinyl vintage sofa across from him. “You like to paint? Yup, that explains everything.” The sofa cushion compressed slowly under me, letting out an embarrassingly audible wheezing of air.

Dalton continued to dab at a canvas with his paintbrush, loaded up with tangerine-orange paint.

He said, “Mitchell likes for guests to contribute to the decoration of the apartment, by putting a cheerful saying on a canvas.”

I looked around the room, noticing that some of the paintings I thought were abstract color washes actually had words on them.

The biggest painting, on the long wall, read:
After a storm comes a calm, Matthew Henry.

I said, “Holy sheep tits, we’re sitting inside a Pinterest board.”

Dalton laughed. “Is that an internet thing? I don’t go online. Too toxic.”

“It’s a page where you share over-engineered craft projects you’ll never actually do. But look at my man, Mitchell. He’s really doing the whole make-your-own-art thing.” I crossed my legs, feeling it was the only appropriate pose for such a low-rider sofa. People must have been way shorter a couple generations back, because the furniture legs are tiny.

Dalton got up and fetched us both bottles of water from the kitchen.

This is weird
, I thought, and then I couldn’t un-think it. Here I was, hanging out with Dalton Deangelo, in LA, only we weren’t dating. I wouldn’t be licking the side of his gorgeous neck or riding him like a pony back in his palatial master bedroom. We were going to have brunch. With our chaperone/fanboy.

And then, after a few minutes, it didn’t feel so weird anymore. We could just be in a room, and not put each other’s body parts in our mouths. That’s how friends are.

I raised my water bottle. “To future old friends, which is what we are.”

He cracked the lid off his bottle, but didn’t move in for the toast. “Are we friends now? Have you forgiven me for words written on a piece of paper by someone who isn’t me?”

“I wasn’t mad about the words on the paper. It was you saying them.”

“I thought you were mostly irate about the tasteless threesome joke in the manuscript. By the way, we cut that out in the final draft. I thought the joke made my character unlikeable.”

“Fuck your character. He sucks.”

Dalton stared steadily at me, his green eyes giving away nothing but inner stillness and control. “Why were you out partying last night with your new buddy? What happened to underpants boy? Michael Crow or whatever?”

“Keith Raven. Don’t act like you can’t remember his name.”

Dalton’s sultry lips quirked up in a smirk. “You didn’t answer my question. Why didn’t you spend the night in your new man’s arms?”