S.E.C.R.E.T. Shared (Secret 2)

“Just call down if you need anything,” Claudette said as they left, closing the double doors behind them.

We waited a beat to make sure we were really alone. Then, with grins smeared across our faces, we leapt onto the platform bed, landing in a pile. I was happier than I’d been in a long, long time.

“This is so cool,” he said. “You are so cool.”

I noticed the iPod and speaker on the mantel of the fireplace.

“Any requests?” I asked, getting up and skipping across the room.

“Surprise me,” Mark said, echoing my instructions to S.E.C.R.E.T.

It occurred to me then just how well the organization had done that. They’d surprised me over and over again. But this was by far the biggest surprise—my favorite musician singling me out in a crowded room, pleasuring me in the back of a club, then bringing me to this beautiful place, making me feel wanted, special, treasured, if only for a night. I wheeled through the iPod menu, stocked with some of the best Louisiana blues and jazz, and chose Professor Longhair, which made Mark convulse with joy on the bed.

“Yes! He’s the king!”

“My favorite’s ‘Willie Mae,’” I said, joining him again, working my hand under his T-shirt. “Don’t you wish you could have seen him play at Tipitina’s?”

“Tipitina’s. Yeah. From now on, I can only think of it as the place where we met,” he said, pulling me on top of him.

We launched into a luscious make-out session, the kind I hadn’t enjoyed since high school. Then he flipped me onto my back, his kisses rich and deep, his arm beneath me as I arched into his tight body.

“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he whispered. “I could talk with you all night long.”

“Me too,” I said, meaning it. “But there are lots of other things I could do with you all night long too.”

My fingers aimlessly circled a strand of his hair as we lay together, just like that, for a few songs, taking quiet bites of grapes and chocolate and cheese, nodding to the songs that he would play for me and I for him. Rapturous with the music and with each other.

CASSIE

I HAD TO admit it was a little weird to see Angela Rejean frosting a cake in her kitchen while wearing an apron and a sundress, her now-straightened hair pulled into a low ponytail at her nape. Last time I saw her she was on the other side of one-way glass, making a meal out of Mark Drury.

Dauphine would have had her fantasy with him last night and I assumed because I hadn’t heard from her that it had gone well. At least, I hoped it had. I hated the idea of her fleeing S.E.C.R.E.T. in anger and resentment. And I liked to think I had picked well with Mark.

Angela told me to take a tour of the place, while she put last-minute touches on Tracina’s fancy baby-shower cake and Kit tied bows on little gift bags for invitees. The narrow living room in her mint-colored Creole cottage on North Roman was decorated with pink and blue paper flowers around the windows, since the sex of the baby was unknown. But the goofy decorations didn’t take away from the grown-up style of her place. Red Oriental rugs were strewn about the living room’s original pine floors, where two surprisingly comfortable antique loveseats, reupholstered in bright purple paisley, faced each other. The walls were painted a dark coral, not pink, more like the color of the lipstick she always wore. Framed photographs of Nina Simone and Billie Holiday dotted the narrow hallway to her bedroom, where an imposing four-poster bed sat draped with billowing white netting, her even more

imposing tuxedo cat, Boots, sitting moored in the middle like a fat boat. On her antique dresser was a collection of Haitian dolls, and above it, a framed black-and-white aerial photo of Port-au-Prince from the ’60s, next to that a wall-mounted flat-screen TV. The whole place was feminine, not girly, cozy without feeling cramped.

“Hand me that tea towel, Cassie,” Angela said when I returned. She was wiping the extra frosting off the platter with her finger. “Would you mind putting out the little plates? They only had blue ones, but that doesn’t mean she’s having a boy. I hope people don’t think that she’s having a boy. I mean, we don’t know what it is. I should say something. Do you think? Or just leave it. I’ll just leave it.”

It was sweet seeing her flustered. She was usually so in control. She was a good friend to Tracina and clearly wanted to make her baby shower perfect. In that moment, I was truly happy that Tracina had a friend like this, since I certainly had been no friend to her. Between my unwillingness to cover for her absences and my stupid dalliances with Will, which still remained secret, thank goodness, my presence in Tracina’s life had only added complications. While placing a big yellow bow on a box of newborn diapers, I vowed to be a better friend to her and the baby, regardless of my feelings for Will, a vow made a lot easier by the presence of Jesse Turnbull in my life. That was his last name, I’d learned—Turnbull—a small fact that went a long way towards making him seem more real to me.

Since our first date, which had ended in my bedroom, we’d seen each other twice more—once for a matinee, where in the back row he had astonished me by putting his tongue in my ear and his hand down my jeans, making me quietly, oh so quietly, come. Afterwards, he kissed my forehead on the sidewalk outside and left to pick up his son. The other time we took a trip to Metarie to look at a motorcycle he was thinking of buying. He’d pulled me down a nearby alley and ravaged me against the cinder-block wall of a garage. All of our encounters were hot, brief and sweet, and each time I felt that if I never saw him again, I wouldn’t be surprised. He was like a friendly tomcat, one that’s genuinely happy to see you, to be fed and caressed by you, but that can easily survive on its own.

While I tossed a salad, Kit carted several TV trays into the living room and set them up in the corners for the finger food and candy. It was just the three of us for a spell, so we naturally launched into S.E.C.R.E.T. chatter.

“It’s a lot of money to just give away,” Kit said to me. “But the Committee voted this morning. It was unanimous.”

“Fifteen million down the drain,” Angela said, with a whistle.

Kit smacked her arm. “You voted yes.”

“How could I not, after Matilda’s impassioned stance against ‘accepting money from an inveterate misogynist.’”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s time we did more for women than just improve their sex lives.”

“Are you complaining?” asked Angela, holding the carrot she was peeling directly in my face.

I bit down on it and smiled. “Nope.”