“What do you call this look? Holiday hussy?”
“I’m the customer here. Why don’t you put on your cute-little-clerk hat and show me whatever overpriced joke my mother saw so I can reject it and go shop in a real store.”
“From where I’m standing, which is right next to the cash register, in the handful of times you’ve been in Moonspun Dreams you’ve never bought a single thing. So you’re not a customer. You’re a loiterer.”
Lilah responded with a haughty look. She’d never bothered with her frenemy act before. Probably because she knew that Pandora would see right through it. Instead, the brunette leaned both elbows on the counter and bent forward to say under her breath, “You’d know crime, now, wouldn’t you? What was it you were busted for? Something to do with drugs? Or was it lying?”
The only thing that persuaded Pandora to unclench her teeth was the fact that she couldn’t afford to get them fixed if one broke. Instead, she turned on the heel of her own unslutty boots and retrieved a blown-glass peacock, each feather shimmering delicately in the light.
Before she’d even set the piece on the counter, she could see the covetous spark in Lilah’s eyes. But instead of saying she liked it, the other woman turned her nose to the air and gave a sniff.
“It’s okay. Just the kind of thing I’d expect to find in this dingy little store.”
“The artist is one of my mother’s clients,” Pandora said, surreptitiously scraping the sale sticker off the price tag. She’d be damned if Lilah was getting thirty percent off. “Her work is currently in the White House and was recently featured in a George Clooney movie.”
Drool formed in the corner of Lilah’s heavily painted mouth. Her hand was halfway to her purse before she thought to ask, “How much is it?”
The desire to make a sale warred with the desire to kick the bitchy woman out of the store. But responsibility always trumped personal satisfaction for Pandora. Which was probably why women like Lilah, and Cassiopeia, Fifi and even old Mrs. Sellers, had a lot more fun that she did.
With one unvarnished fingernail, she pushed the price tag across the counter. Lilah’s eyes rounded and her lips drooped.
“Will you hold it? My mother hinted that she’d get it for me as a Christmas gift.”
“You want me to hold an overpriced joke?”
The woman’s glare was vicious, but she jerked her chin in affirmation.
Hey, that was fun. Maybe all Cassiopeia’s lectures about karma were true.
Before Pandora could decide whether to go for gracious or gloating, a loud roaring rumbled through the air.
She and Lilah both stared as a huge Harley slowed down, the helmeted rider turning his head to stare into the store. A shiver skittered between Pandora’s shoulder blades. Another out-of-towner? Usually tourism went dry in Black Oak between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s. It was probably someone visiting Custom Rides, the motorcycle shop that backed up to Moonspun.
“Company?” Fifi speculated, coming in from the café to stare, too.
“Must have heard about the yippee-skippy you’re offering up,” Mrs. Sellers predicted, heading out the door hand in hand with her tottering hunk of afternoon delight.
As one, Pandora sighed and Lilah sneered.
“That’s disgusting,” Lilah muttered.
“What is? The idea of two people enjoying each other’s company?”
“You know they’re sneaking off to have sex,” the woman said, hissing the last word as if it were pure evil. The over-blown brunette averted her eyes from the elderly couple as though she was worried that they wouldn’t hold out until they toddled all the way to their love nest, instead giving in and doing the nasty right there in the doorway.
“And sex is bad… Why?” Pandora put on her most obnoxious, innocently sweet smile. “From what I heard, you were having it a couple nights ago. Wasn’t it in the backseat of an old Nova parked behind Lander’s Market?”
Fifi
Donald Luskin, Andrew Greta