It was like a gazelle had wandered into a watering hole occupied by lapping wildebeests.
Sherrie gripped Glenn’s arm in either excitement or trepidation, and he covered her hand with his as if they were waiting for news of plane crash survivors.
Britt surreptitiously rested her own hand on the counter because the world was dropping out from beneath her, and there were no handholds anywhere.
A ringing started up in her ears.
And when she looked at J. T., her stomach plummeted another fourteen stories, and took her heart with it.
Because he’d frozen.
His face was taut with some indecipherable emotion, equal parts fury and wonder and astonishment, all underlaid by something hard and resolute that she couldn’t read at all.
He slowly, slowly, lowered his fork.
He stood and moved in almost dreamlike silence toward Rebecca Corday. The two of them paused in what to onlookers appeared to be a moment of silent communion.
And then they both turned as one and went right out the door.
The first one to speak was Casey. “You could see her boobs right through that thing,” she said, sounding more impressed than censorious. “What there was of them.”
The next sound was the clang of the spatula on the grill as Giorgio whipped around and turned his burgers in the knick of time.
Little by little, conversations revved into motion again.
But they never really rose above a murmur.
Britt still couldn’t move. She literally felt so nauseous she nearly buckled. And she was also so surprised it was very nearly funny. Because it couldn’t be real, could it? That couldn’t have possibly just happened?
“You know that thing Kayla says she can do with a cherry stem? Tie it in a knot with her tongue?” Britt said faintly to Casey.
“Yeah?”
“I bet Rebecca Corday can do that with her entire body.”
She had no idea why this was the first thing out of her mouth after seeing J. T. disappear.
“Yoga,” Casey said knowledgeably and solemnly. “She’s probably so bendy she can kiss her own butt.”
Britt watched that door in numb shock. A great toxic soup of emotions—rage, humiliation, wounded pride, a sick fear—that never ought to mingle were now simmering in her bloodstream. “She’s almostluminescent. Like she’s an alien or fairy.” She was incensed by this.
“That’s because she’d moisturized and exfoliated and waxed to a fare-thee-well,” Casey said pragmatically.
“I hear they do shapes down there now, don’t they?” Sherrie mused, turning to Casey as the expert.
“What do you mean, shapes?” Glenn was suspicious.
“They prune itdown there. Into shapes,” Sherrie explained.
It took him a moment.
And then he was aghast.
“What, like how the shrubberies at Disney World are shaped like Pluto and Mickey, that sort of thing?”
“Probably not Disney characters. But you never know with Hollywood.” And in Hellcat Canyon, Casey was the one who passed for an expert on Hollywood. Given that she, like Britt’s sister, read TMZ the way Mrs.Morrison read her Bible.
“Why would you need to do anything but trim the runway?” Glenn was utterly baffled.