Then she would take back her life. She would do what she’d promised George she would do, what she owed Nicki. That work would consume the rest of her life, and she looked forward to it.
But she could have the smallest bit of joy for herself. Couldn’t she?
“I would think that would make it weirder. How do you go from The Club to the office?” she asked, not able to quite cover the giggle that came from the vision.
“You think that because you don’t take sex seriously,” Michael replied. “You see it as something that should be hidden. I’m not saying everyone should have public sex or talk about it at a dinner party, but shouldn’t there be places where it’s all right to do whatever you want to do? Without judgment?”
“There’s always judgment.” Now he was the naïve one.
“Is that what you’re worried about?” Michael sat up and leaned over, coming closer to her. “You think you’ll walk in there and people will talk about you?”
“People always talk about me.”
“They won’t at The Club. Not in the way you think.”
That was where he was wrong. She already caught people talking about her. Sometimes the room she would walk into went silent when the people there realized she’d joined them. It was why she tended to stay in her office. “I assure you they’re already talking. I was surprised Julian found someone willing to work with me. The only reason he tolerates me being there at all is because of his wife.”
Michael’s handsome face turned thoughtful. “I don’t think that’s the only reason. He liked your sister quite a bit. I’ve talked to him about her since he thinks you will likely have the same issues.”
“Issues?”
“Your sister explored the lifestyle because she had a terrible relationship with her own sexuality,” Michael explained and then frowned. “Maybe you should talk to Julian about this.”
“I won’t.” She couldn’t see herself sitting in a room with Julian and talking about her sister. Not when she wasn’t sure he didn’t have something to do with covering up her death. Even then, she wasn’t sure she would be able to open up to him. “And I would like to know everything about Nicki. She talked a little with me about it. She said she felt free when she was at The Club. And I know about her struggles. We grew up together. My mother was very religious, and not in a good, happy way. She wasn’t the kind of religious person who helped the poor and needy. She thought if you were poor, you probably deserved it. If you were a woman and poor, then you were probably a slut who deserved it. She liked to use that word a lot. And I won’t go into her views on any sex that occurred outside of a marriage between one righteous man and one righteous woman.”
Michael winced. “Yes, I got that feeling. Your father believed that, too?”
“My father walked out on her to find himself and never came back. I was five and Nicki was eight. Up until then everything was somewhat normal. We went to a regular church and had fun. We had a nice house. When Dad left, we lost the house and moved, and Mom found a crazy-pants church and got old and bitter very quickly.” This was something she’d dealt with a long time ago. At least she had on the surface. “She solved every problem we had by telling us to be more modest and to expect less from the world. You can imagine how my announcement that I’d found a modeling agent and was heading out to Hollywood went over.”
“Not well, I suspect.”
“She told me that if I went out there, I was never to come home again.” She could still see her mother standing there in her buttoned-up dress and plain shoes, her hair in a severe bun as though she had to control it the way she did everything in her life—painfully and with no room for movement. “A lot of people say that in the moment, but she meant it. It was five years before I saw my sister again.”
“She stayed with your mom after she was out of high school?” Michael asked.
“Mom paid for college but only if Nicki followed the rules. She’d recently started college when I dropped out of high school to pursue my dreams,” she admitted. “I was discovered at a modeling competition my mother didn’t know I was entered in. I was seventeen, and the agent I was with got me emancipated, and I never talked to my mother again, even though I tried. She died of cancer a few years back, and I was not allowed at her funeral. Nicki wasn’t either. By that time, my sister had started working for Dani, and my mother didn’t approve.”