Page 72 of Pierced

“Me? No. I don’t work with them. I just…” I shrug. “Hang out with them, I guess. When I was growing up it made me sad to see them working. I didn’t like it. My father would take me on set when he was training them for movies and I’d watch him. Whole summers, sometimes. But I never wanted to make them do things.”

Our eyes meet. I look away first.

“I mean, I never wanted to train them. I just wanted to know them. They were like friends to me when I was a kid.” I chance a look up at Pierce and he’s nodding.

“OK,” he says.

“I didn’t have a lot of friends as a child.”

He squints his eyes at me. “Honestly, I can’t even picture that. You’re so… intriguing.”

“Not back then I wasn’t.”

“No? What were you like?”

I suck in a deep breath, so uncomfortable talking about this stuff.

“Were you… quiet?” he asks.

I nod. “Very.”

“And shy?”

“Right again.”

“Did you read a lot?” When I look up at him this time, he’s smiling. So I look away and don’t answer. “I did,” he says. “I mean, probably not a lot. But enough. I was a little quiet at times too.”

I chuckle, can’t help it. “You? Quiet? Ha. Nice try, but I’m not falling for the old we’re-the-same routine. I picture you in your royal sailor suit”—he guffaws—“running around expansive green lawns trimmed so well you could bowl on them, smacking things with a croquet mallet.”

“Close.” He laughs. “But I was… an outsider, I guess. Too much of everything. Too loud one minute. Too quiet the next. Too tall, too skinny, too smart, too hungry, too satisfied. All the toos. That was me.” He moves to the next picture and I inch along with him. It’s of me. Sitting on the back of a lion holding a balloon. “I was all the toos. This is you, right?” I nod. “How old?”

“Mmmm… four, I guess.”

“Were you ever afraid of them?”

“I was too small and too innocent to be afraid.”

“So we have something in common then.”

“What?”

“You were all the toos too.” He smiles at me. And then his smile falters and he’s frowning. “I’m here because I wanted to come. And you did promise me a reward.”

“We’re not going back down there and that’s the end of it.”

He inches closer to me. I glance down as he places his hand on my hips, fingertips spread out across the light blue silk jacquard pattern. His chest presses up to my back and his head dips down until his mouth is on my neck. “We could just… stay right here, if you want.”

My eyes dart to the little girl in the photo in front of me. And I wonder, not for the first time in my life, just what the hell I’m doing.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - PIERCE

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“I dunno,” I reply. I feel a twinge of guilt, lying to her. But it doesn’t matter. Because we both know what I’m doing. It is of no consequence whether I admit it or not.

“Why?” she asks.

I maneuver her around to face me. Corseted and tall and lithe, as she turns she calls to mind one of those music boxes with the ballerinas that spin in a perfect pirouette. Ceramic or porcelain or whatever they are. Beautiful and ever there when you summon them to dance.