Running Back (New York Leopards 2)

But maybe I was just being judgmental?

Mike jumped into the silence with a smile. “Everyone in New York wants to come to Paris.”

The girl darted a glance at him from under her long, spiky lashes, and then she smiled. For the first time she looked like a teenager, shy and cheeky. “Then they will all have to like me, because I have already lived here and can tell them all the best places.”

Mike laughed. I tried to, but didn’t get more than a dry huff. “What do you want to do when you grow up?”

Her eyes brightened. “I want to be like Tamara. I want to be the most beautiful model in the world, and to wear all the best designers and to marry a prince.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say. Anxiety and confusion and weirdness muddled around in my belly.

Carl coughed for attention, and then nodded to the girl and started on his way. Like a dazed child, I also nodded and followed him off, Mike beside me as we headed for the elevator.

“Mlle. Bocharov!” The girl’s young voice piped down the hall. “Can I have your email?”

Carl turned and barked down the hall, “Leave the mademoiselle alone!”

She ducked her head. I swallowed, trying to decide whether to say anything, and then the elevator arrived and Carl ushered us inside.

Back on the first floor, he led us deeper into the building, and I followed, lost in my own mind’s maze, until I realized we were standing in an airy space, with mirrors and tools and sprays. It smelled like hair and product and I stopped without telling my feet.

Carl went toward one of the stations but I remained in my door. Mike ran his hand up my arm. “You okay?”

I shook my head. “Remember when I said your mom must feel like she was in a fairytale, meeting all those people and seeing places she’s only heard stories of? It’s the same for me here. I feel like I fell into one of my mother’s stories. Like I’m not in reality anymore.” I reached up my palms to frame his face. “Except for you. You are the one real, true thing here.”

Mike regarded me seriously. “I wanted you to come here because it helped me so much when you made me face my own mother. But we don’t have to stay.”

I brushed my lips feather-light across his. “Thank you. But I will.”

Carl had waited—not patiently—for Mike and my moment to be over, and as soon as it was, he gestured at one of the seats. “Please.” He didn’t sound like he was begging; it sounded more like a reprimand.

First, he brushed back my hair until it lay tight against my skull, and then wound it all up at the crown of my head. Then he tilted my head back until it touched the wall, had me close my eyes, and had at my face with brushes and sponges and who knew what else.

It didn’t feel so bad. Kind of like going to the hairdresser, where the hair washing felt almost like a massage. Here he rubbed on the moisturizer, the base, all the time keeping up a running patter about my mother. I interrupted at one point. “But was she happy here?”

He paused. “She used to dance in the halls. She was popular with the other girls. She was a hard worker.” He teased almost absently at my hair. “She laughed so much I still remember when she did not, when she talked about her family, who she sent her money to. She was so grateful she could do that.”

I’d never thought about her being grateful. When she talked to or about my grandparents, who had moved to Florida after she moved to the States, it was always with a high degree of irritation.

I’d never thought about her laughing.

Carl’s torture of my eyes was the worst. I stared up into the ceiling light as Carl poked at my lower lid so much I thought I might cry. “The light bothers you?” he asked at one point. I said yes, and he made a hmmph, and didn’t change anything.

“Fini,” he said with satisfaction some time later, and turned me towards the mirror.

I looked like her.

Some of it was just tricks—the streamlining and darkening of my brows, the highlighting of cheekbones until they looked sharper than usual, the pink gloss on my lips, when I only ever wore nude and Chapstick. But mostly it came from the way he’d done my eyes, just like he’d done my mother’s eyes, when she was even younger than me. They looked the same, heavily done up in black, the lashes sooty, the shadows silvery. My eyes were huge in a face that looked poreless: huge and strange and familiar. With so much liner surrounding them, they seemed separated from me—this all seemed separated from me.

I spun my chair to look at Mike.

He looked back steadfastly. With anyone else, I might have made a joke about looking ridiculous or how a football player was probably used to glammed up model makeup.

With Mike, I just offered a small lift of my shoulders.

And he smiled that perfect crooked smile. “You look like the goddess of wisdom and war.”

Some strange, deep emotion welled up, something I couldn’t name but that stirred in my chest and made the back of my eyes feel bright with almost-tears. Warm wind seemed to brush the back of my neck.