Never Have I Ever(38)

Roux chuckled. “I’m not after your virtue, dewy maiden. Please. I told you, I’m straight.”

I swallowed. She was close to naked herself, in her yoga togs. I took in the bare flesh of her willowy waist, her elegant breasts in the sheer top. I felt my eight pounds of leftover baby weight swelling around me. They felt like eighty as my eyes traced the faint, sleek muscles in her arms and legs, visible even in the soft curve of her abdomen. In this soft light, she looked no more than thirty again. The sight of her shoved me back in time. Toward young Amy with her hungers and her cowardice, both mossy green with age but still alive. I made myself focus only on her face. I would not see the past.

“Then why?” I demanded.

She rolled her eyes, now sounding both bored and impatient. “I need to be sure you aren’t wearing a wire.”

“A wire? So I can record this?” I said. The last thing I wanted was any kind of record of our conversations.

“People do,” she said.

She stepped to a battered glass-top end table and picked up an iPhone. She fiddled with it, shutting off the jazz. I heard a voice coming out of it, tinny and far.

“—never meant to lie. I didn’t remember that I was driving. Not at first. I never meant. I never meant. I swear to God.” The voice shook and quavered, both foreign and undeniably mine.

“But you killed her.” Roux’s recorded voice unspooled a foot away from her closed mouth.

“Yes,” my voice said. Just one word, but it was enough.

She stopped the playback. For a single, shocked second, I felt a coiling in my body. I would leap at her, wrest the phone from her fingers, smash it, ruin it, make it gone.

Roux saw it in my eyes, or else she expected it, because she was already talking, “This app backs up into the cloud.”

“Oh, my God,” I said softly, shaken in spite of my resolve.

“Taping conversations is a good idea, Amy,” she said, setting the phone back down. “I need to make sure it isn’t one you had. Because we’re about to have a real-ass conversation.”

“Is that legal? Taping me like that?” I asked. As if this mattered to her. She was smack in the middle of blackmailing me, after all.

“It’s called single-party consent, and it’s legal in thirty-eight states.” She smiled. “I told you, I sleep with a lot of lawyers.”

That landed, in spite of my shock. She’d been talking about lawyers, at my house, before her bullshit claim that she was Lolly Shipley. She’d gone on and on about it, sex with lawyers, but then she’d changed directions. I could almost see it, why this mattered. My gaze skipped around the ugly room, then back to Roux herself, shiny and expensive-looking.

“Hurry up and strip,” she said.

I lost my train of thought, my arms still crossed defensively over my body, my mind still reeling from hearing my own confession. There was no way in hell I’d let Roux’s doctored, lineless eyes peruse the little roll at my waist, the old silver stretch marks on my thighs and belly. I had some newer ones now, too, redder and more visible, that Oliver had gifted me.

“You can play that tape on Good Morning America before I’ll take my pants off,” I told her, fierce, and to my surprise she threw her head back and she laughed.

“I think you actually mean that. Damn. I have to say, you aren’t what I expected.” Well, neither was she. We stood there at an impasse until she blew out an exasperated breath. “Fine. A compromise. We’ll do this the old-fashioned way.”

She came back around the stroller as if it were another table, not even glancing at my sleeping baby. She paused just shy of touching me, eyebrows raised. I made myself breathe and dropped my hands at my sides. She took it as permission. She started in my hair, the pads of her fingers running across my scalp, sure and thorough. She checked my ears and my neck, pressing the seams of the dress’s collar.

I did not want her hands to move lower, to outline every imperfection in my body. It was work to hold myself still.

I focused my eyes over her shoulder, staring at the fireplace. It was ugly brown brick, flanked by built-in bookshelves. It reminded me of Char’s before I’d helped her paint it white, and then I understood the déjà vu. This house was Char’s. The exact same floor plan, only backward. To my right was the hallway to the master suite, and opposite that an arch led to the kitchen beside switchback stairs.

But this was a shabby negative of Char’s crisp white walls, Colonial blue-and-yellow prints, and breezy sheers. Roux’s furniture was covered in a dull, durable weave, and her bookshelves were mostly empty. A stack of old board games had been crammed onto the lowest shelf, and the top shelf held a vertical pile of tattered mass-market paperbacks; I suspected that these, like the ugly furniture, came with the house. The only thing that might be hers was a small framed picture propped on the mantel. It was a simple line drawing of a naked woman flopping on her back, legs akimbo. She had both her eyes on one side of her face like a flounder, her wonky breasts pointing in odd directions. It was signed. Picasso.

“Is that real?” I asked.

Roux paused to glance behind her, her hands on my shoulders like we were slow dancing, middle-school style. “Of course.”

“So you moonlight as an art thief?” I meant it as a dig, but she shook her head, as if it had been a real question.