Em, obviously unable to stand it anymore, plopped down on the couch next to her, directing LaDawn to bring her a bowl and ladle from the kitchen. She smoothed the fan of her skirt over her knees. “First off, Cat sends her love. She didn’t want to, but we made her stay home. Wouldn’t be good for her to catch somethin’ from you with the baby on the way.”
Marybell loved Cat Butler. A free spirit, a hugger, one of her first real friends, and now madly in love with Flynn McGrady and well on her way to beginning their family. “Tell her I said thank you, and keep that bun in the oven safe.”
Em popped her lips. “So, how is it that we’ve been friends for all this time now, and we’ve never seen the true Marybell?” She plucked at the eye mask, making Marybell swat at her hands. “Well, almost the true Marybell. You’ve seen us in all sorts of manner, miss. Drunk, seminaked, riding a mechanical bull, for heaven’s sake. Fair is fair.” She asked the question as though it were some slight for Marybell never to have revealed herself without her makeup and gel-spiked hair.
She really wanted to ask why they’d surprise-attacked her with food and hospitality when she’d expressly told Dixie she’d be fine and back at work within the week. All she needed was some rest and cold medication. She’d done that with the fervent hope they wouldn’t catch her exactly as they’d done.
But leave it to Em and Dixie to have to see for themselves she wasn’t going to do something as dramatic as die of the latest illness they’d hunted down on WebMD.
Still, her friends made her smile. They were a reason to get up these days when for so long, there wasn’t any reason at all.
They were loving, nurturing machines, the lot of them. Give them an ailment, and they were fixing it with age-old home remedies and more smothering love than you could shake a stick at. How could she be angry with them for caring about her?
But she hadn’t been prepared for their insistent knock on her door. It left her more than uneasy without her cloak of heavy makeup and piercings in place. There was always the chance, even in small-town Plum Orchard, Georgia, she’d be recognized. The people here had been ever so slow to come to terms with how different her appearance was from the likes of them.
Yet she’d sucked up the strange looks and whispers behind hands at Madge’s Kitchen where she had dinner almost every night before her shift for a reason. It beat the livin’ daylights out of the alternative.
Rather than answer Em, Marybell deflected, looking her friend square in the eye. She was the master of deflection. “Do I ever see the true Emmaline?” she asked with mock innocence, glad for the cloak of her congestion concealing her weak attempt at subterfuge.
“Bah! You most certainly do see the true Emmaline. You see her with lipstick.” Em pursed her lips, dragging a throw from the back of Marybell’s couch to cover her with it. She tucked the edges under her chin with gentle fingers, pressing the back of her hand to Marybell’s forehead with a wince.
Marybell coughed, turning her head and using her arm to shield Em from her germs. “Exactly.” She smiled.
“Gravy,” Dixie murmured, patting her on the back while setting a cup of steaming lemon tea laced with honey on the end table, her eyes perusing Marybell’s freshly scrubbed face. “Even stricken with the flu and a gel eye mask, you’re beautiful. I don’t like this turn of events Ms. MB,” she joked with her infamous flirty smile. “I’m glad Caine didn’t see you without your goo or I’d be a goner. Plus, you’re younger than me by six years. I simply won’t have you, or anyone in this town, bein’ prettier than me.”
Em clucked her tongue, shooting Dixie a chiding finger. “Are you sayin’ Caine wouldn’t fall for her with her makeup and the pointy green-and-red things all over her head? Are you sayin’ he doesn’t love you for what’s on your insides, Dixie Davis? That he’s nothing more than a shallow shell of a man with a heartbeat and a chiseled jaw?”
Marybell giggled, letting a little of her tension ease. Conversation successfully deflected. “I don’t think you have to say anything, Dixie. Caine can’t see anyone but you, whether you have insides or not. Now, I thought I told y’all to stay away so you don’t catch this nasty bug. Surely you don’t want to leave me to answer everyone’s calls because you’re all too sick to do your jobs, do you? Especially if I have to answer LaDawn’s calls. I’m not nearly the Jedi master with the flyswatter she is. I always miss and end up swatting myself.”
The joke at the Call Girls office, situated in the guesthouse of dearly departed multimillionaire Landon Wells, a man who’d given Marybell everything when she’d had nothing, was LaDawn’s skill with her beloved flyswatter.
She was like Bruce Lee with a pair of nunchakus. Daryl from The Walking Dead with a bow and arrow. Phone sex operators throughout the land should all cower in fear when LaDawn broke out the flyswatter.
It was really just an audio prop for her BDSM clients to hear over the phone, but she fooled them into believing it was a flogger every time. For her birthday, they’d collectively had a real flyswatter bronzed with her name on it, which she proudly displayed in her office on her desk.
Dixie rolled her eyes at Em. “First off, not a chance we’d let you go this alone. There’s nothing like some love and coddlin’ when you’re so sick. Second, you hush, Em. I’m not saying that at all, and you know it. I love our Marybell—even today, nose redder than a tube of crimson lipstick and eyes drippin’ from behind that mask like a leaky faucet.”
Marybell took the tea with a grateful sigh, still keeping her eyes semiaverted over the rim of the china. “I think what Dixie’s saying is, I’m not Caine’s type.”
That was okay, too. She was no one’s type, and that was just as well. Buried in small-town Georgia, she’d never have to worry about the temptation of finding someone whose type she was.
There were few available men in town, anyway, but the men here liked women who wore pretty dresses, the proper-height heel for the appropriate time of day and subtle makeup. Their hair was always long and flowing, or up and smooth. It wasn’t riding a colored line along the tops of their heads, and they certainly weren’t wearing clunky black work boots and leopard-skin leggings slashed as if a knife had been taken to them.
LaDawn sat down on the chest, scooting the Crock-Pot to the side, tilting Marybell’s chin upward to look her in the eye. Well, as much as her cooling gel eye mask allowed, anyway.
Her heart stopped cold for a moment, her fingers trembling on the handle of the teacup. Caught. She was caught. They knew who she was and her safe, quiet, if not terribly exciting life would be over.
That clawing anxiety, usually reserved for late-night insomnia and mentally backtracking every move she made, pushed its way to lodge in her raw throat.
LaDawn’s lips, the color purple meant to match her nails, turned into a smile. She plucked at a strand of Marybell’s now drying, shoulder-length hair “As I live and breathe. You’re a natural blonde, aren’t you? How do you get all that red-and-green gunk in your hair every day? You know, I’d hate you if it wasn’t for Brugsby’s Drugstore and Miss Clairol.”
Marybell gulped before she forced a smile, praying she could stare LaDawn down without looking away. “It’s a spray. It washes out easy. And you’d love me any ol’ way, LaDawn. Who’d bring you those frosty pink doughnuts and coffee from Madge’s on the night shift, if not for me? Not even Doc Johnson does that. I’m forever your girl.”
LaDawn’s
