I stepped away, unwilling to taint this beautiful moment with fist pumps and whoops of success no matter how badly I wanted to celebrate that small victory. I’d take it. Victories were good no matter how small.
Dixie had really put Reyes to work. He was busy rearranging her office, the hussy, and I worried about his wound. About his darkness. And about the kiss I’d given him. Was he really frozen in time like everyone else? Was it all just an act? I would die if it was. I’d crawl under the table and wither away. I’d professed my love. Said I’d loved him for a thousand years. How amazingly lame was that?
I totally needed a girl’s day. Cookie would understand. She was psychic, after all. Surely I could tell her about my… gifts. Surely she could help advise me on what to do with Mr. V. With his family. With Reyes.
I mean, I knew what I wanted to do with Reyes, but maybe she would know what he was.
Please don’t be evil. Please don’t be evil. Please don’t be evil.
Thankfully, the cops hadn’t taken my tip money as evidence. I took out my day’s earnings to see how much I could spend and how much I needed to set back – that phone wasn’t going to buy itself – and found the hundred nestled among the smaller bills. I fished it out, planning to break it, but realized it had writing on the other side. Someone had written across it in pencil, so light I could barely read it, so I raised it to the sun streaming in the window again.
There, written in French, were the words Je t’ai aimée pendant mille et un. –R.
I stilled. Read it again. And again. Je t’ai aimée pendant mille et un. –R.
I’ve loved you for a thousand and one. –R.
I spun around, rushed back to Dixie’s office, but he was gone.
12
Signs you drink too much coffee:
Your eyes stay open when you sneeze.
—INTERNET MEME
Cookie and I did get pedicures and mucho grande mocha lattes. On her, though. She’d insisted. I wasn’t sure I’d ever had one, but I knew damned well a pedicure was going to become one of my weekly routines. The phone might have to wait. Apparently I was made to be pampered.
After my toenails turned a pretty shade of Mocha, which bizarrely matched Reyes’s eyes, we drove to the Rockefeller mansion. We’d been talking about going out there for two weeks, but the mansion only opened at certain times during the year. Thankfully, Cookie got us on a list, and when the caretakers were giving a special tour to a group of third graders, they’d called and invited us to join them.
Cookie was a little worried about the kids, but they were third graders. I assured her I could take them if it came to that. And I was certain I could. As long as they didn’t gang up on us, we were good.
The mansion itself, a National Historic Landmark, was absolutely stunning. The Rockefellers had completed construction of Kykuit – Dutch for “lookout” – in 1913. Sitting north of Sleepy Hollow, it was a sprawling, forty-room stone mansion with gorgeous architecture and incredible gardens. Every room we entered wrenched a tiny moan of ecstasy out of me.
Thankfully, the kids were great. Besides a few odd looks, and one kid informing me that he knew how to satisfy a woman – Seriously? That shit started in the third grade? – we had a wonderful time looking at all the furnishings and artwork.
“I have to start saving my tips,” I told Cookie. “I want this.” I raised my arms and indicated my surroundings with the gusto of inspiration.
“You want this bathroom?” she asked me. We were in the bathroom at the time. “I know a good decorator. He could make your bathroom look like this one.”
“No. I want it all. Someday.”
“Right? This would rock, but I’m not sure it’s really your style.”
“Why not? You think I don’t have enough blue blood?”
She crinkled her nose in thought. “I think you don’t have enough of a competitive spirit. Or enough arrogance. I heard that John D. Rockefeller Jr. built it only because his brother built a 240-room estate nearby.”
“Oh. I might have agreed with you if not for the pedicure.”
She chuckled as she powdered her nose. “The pedicure?”
“Yep. You’ve spoiled me, introduced me to the finer things in life. I need to be pampered. To have my nails done by someone else. To have my feet massaged.”
“I think I know someone who would massage your feet free of charge.”
A tiny thrill laced up my spine at the thought. “I don’t know, Cook. I think he’s pretty hung up on his ex.”
“I get that, but he is so into you, it’s unreal. Surely you can see it.”
“Sure I can, but that doesn’t make him any less hung up on his ex.” I leaned closer to the mirror, wondering where the dark circles came from. Probably a product of my night in a car. With a cat. And Reyes’s jacket. So it wasn’t all bad. “I’m hoping she was an absolute bitch. That way he can get over her faster.”
She shook her head and snapped her compact closed. “Okay, I am as hot as I’m going to get for the moment.”
“Which is smoking.”
“Aw…” We high-fived, ignoring the girl washing her hands who wore enough makeup to go clubbing with us.
“Are you sure these kids are in the third grade?” I asked Cookie.
“That’s what they told me.”
“Okay. Just checking.”
“So, what now? I’m famished.”
We’d finished up the tour and were about to head out. “Food good,” I said, doing my best Neanderthal impersonation. “I just need to make pee-pee. I’ll be out in a sec.”
“You got it. I want to snap a shot of a table I saw in the great room. I’ll meet you outside?”
“I’ll be there with bells on.”
Cookie left, and I entered one of two stalls they’d set up to accommodate the tourists. I couldn’t imagine the Rockefellers had needed stalls.
When I stood to pull up my jeans, something nudged me. I fell back onto the toilet with a squeak and looked up into the mouth of a horse. I gasped as it pushed farther into the stall and nuzzled my neck. It was a gorgeous tan with huge brown eyes and eyelashes as long as my pinkies.
“Oh, my goodness,” I said, petting its nose and hugging it to me. “Aren’t you a pretty” – I looked out the slit on the side of the door – “girl? Yes you are.”
She whinnied and nodded her head. “Yes you are. I’m going to pet you and nuzzle you and take you home. I have a ball of fur just vibrating with energy that would love to meet you.”
I realized at that moment that there was a girl in the next stall.
“Misty,” she said, talking softly as I kissed the horse’s nose, “I think the lady in the stall next to me is talking to her vagina.”
I sucked in a horrified breath. “Did you hear that? She called you a vagina. That’s just wrong. So, so wrong.”
She nodded in agreement again, huffing out a puff of air as though disgusted. She was absolutely adorable. And she was my first departed horse.
“Okay, I have to pull up my pants now.” Standing in a tiny stall in which a horse was taking up the majority of the room was easier said than done. I finally got my jeans fastened and opened the door, where I came face-to-face with, you guessed it, a headless horseman.