A/N: Sorry for the delay! Went on a trip overseas to see Cillian Murphy in the astounding Misterman at the Galway Arts Festival, and it sort of stunned me into silence. (In other words— and this will sound weird— I've been feeling too mellow to write. A most odd sensation.) Thanks for your patience. And thanks, as ever and always, for stopping by to read this stuff. (Oh, and this chapter contains a brief reference to the shenanigans in "The L Word." Just so's ya know.)
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Thank God, the vodka was good enough to make up for Rippner and Lisa's ghastly wager. For Rosemary's work in preventing the murder of her lush-life mother, Joan Colbert, at the hands of her husband-to-be, the estimable Miss Reisert had a word with the bartenders, and from then on the top shelf was Rosemary's to drain. She thought of playing a drinking game with herself. One martini for every spin on "Will you behave, Rosemary, or do we have to throw you out...?" Only it wasn't necessary. She was, slightly to her disappointment, practically as invisible as she'd first set out to be. But, contrary to Rippner's belief, she wasn't working. Not exactly. So, despite her invisibility (or perhaps because of it), a bit too unreservedly she proceeded to partake.
Which dulled her survival instincts somewhat. For the second time that night, in short order, she was snared. Larry Reisert cornered her. He had, without her asking, let alone caring, recently obtained a degree in chemical engineering. He told her so. And though that mightn't have mattered otherwise (that, and the fact that he was Lisa Reisert's brother, and hence moderately repulsive by default), as he was a strapping specimen of young American male, he had to go and gift the enthralled Miss Wheeler with an absolutely fascinating lecture about polymers. And how they were found in all manner of things you could recycle. Cans, bottles, yoghurt cups, even the bloody diaper off a baby's bum. And how they (those bloody polymers, not babies' bums) were being used to make park benches, playground equipment, and picnic tables. Right when Rosemary was feeling about in her purse for the tuck-away S.O.G. she'd brought along in case of emergency— with which to stab herself or him, she wasn't quite sure— the beautiful, delicately sleek woman with reddish-brown hair, the woman who'd kissed Rippner earlier, slipped between her and Larry.
"There you are." She kissed Rosemary full on the mouth, then beamed at her with eyes most incredibly blue. "I've been looking everywhere for you, gorgeous."
Before Rosemary could react, let alone respond, the woman hooked an arm around her waist and smiled back over her own shoulder at Larry. "Hi. You must be Larry Reisert."
"Larry—? Are you? No. I mean, yes. I, uh—"
"I'm Milla." She shook his hand. "Bashful here and I were in Lisa's sorority at FSU. Lambda Delta Gamma."
"Lisa never told me she was in a sorority."
"El-Dee-Cee. It was terrible. Shocking, really. People used to call us lesbo-dykeus-cun—"
"I'm sure Larry can fill in the rest, darling." Rosemary smiled brightly at Larry. "Excuse us, would you? Milla and I have a lot of catching up to do."
Milla threw in a wink. "If you take our meaning."
While Larry's recently degreed brain cells were still cycling, Rosemary towed her savior to the bar. "Thank you."
"You're welcome," Milla said.
They ordered drinks. Rosemary looked back at Larry, still standing stunned with the ice cubes melting in his glass. "Who the hell are you?"
"Milla. Camilla Rippner."
"God help us. You're Jackson's sister."
"That's the first time it's entailed divine invocation." Camilla Rippner looked wryly at Rosemary. "You're Rosemary Wheeler: am I right?"
"Mm hm." From over the rim of her glass, Rosemary asked: "Are you going to tell me to behave myself?"
Milla looked her slowly up and down, in a way that made Rosemary wonder if the olive from her martini had fallen into her cleavage without her noticing. "Heavens, I hope not."
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At a quiet table off to the side, away from the migration paths leading to the bar and the buffet, Jackson and Lisa sat with John and Claire Carter. A break while people chose their next moves: food, more drinks, dancing outside on the patio to the four-piece playing Porter, Hart, Kern, and Berlin, maybe a slip-away for a bit of quality time behind the closed door of a luxury suite upstairs. John surveyed the room. Joe Reisert and Ellen Rippner had finally gravitated together. Suitable, he thought. Quite suitable. Both of them were serious, sober, functionally somber. Even though they weren't exactly smiling, and certainly not laughing, their body language said they were hitting it off. An architect and a retired engineer: they'd have plenty to talk about. And then, like a turkey buzzard buckshot out of a prairie sky, Joan Colbert dropped between them.
"There is no God," John muttered.
Claire trained her thousand-league stare on the interloper. Watched, as John was watching, as that Stoli-addled beast gave Ellen and Joe each a look (Isn't it an outrage? and I'll do the talking, Joseph, if you don't mind, respectively) and launched into a harangue regarding, to the best of Claire's lip-reading skills, the reproductive intentions of the gathering's guests of honor, who were presently indulging in a bit of discreet billing and cooing to Claire's right. "What the hell is that thing?"
"That would be Lisa's mother, dearest," John replied.
"Ah. Oh." Claire looked at Lisa. "My condolences. And your father: oh, that poor man." Claire was Scottish by birth, and she'd been consuming her fair share of the bar's Hebridean offerings: at this point in the evening, the phrase burred forth as "pewer mon."
"I should be the one apologizing," Jackson said. "Thought for sure you'd be the one to handle her, Claire."
"Which is why you're the field operative and we're the ones in charge, you wee preening nit."
"Did she hit you with the 'kids' card, Claire?" Lisa asked.
"Like a fucking hammer. 'Three daughters...?' she says. 'Don't you wish you could've given your husband a son?'"
Jackson whistled. "I'm amazed she's still standing."
"I'm amazed she isn't vaporized," John countered. "She got me, too. 'All those daughters!' I told her I like girls."
"That's news." Said statement came, as if via ventriloquism, from Rosemary Wheeler. She, Paul Miller, and Milla Rippner were sitting one table over.
Claire looked suspiciously from her to John.
He scowled back at her. "No, she didn't try to sleep with me."
"She doesn't try, John Andrew, and you know it."
Now he was the one looking suspicious.
"Think I'll take a second run at the buffet," Rosemary declared, getting up.
Lisa leaned casually back in her chair. "It sounds to me like you already have."
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Rosemary heading back for seconds triggered a general rush, or re-rush, for food. Rippner found himself moving down the line ahead of Larry Reisert. He could feel the guy watching him. Hesitating. Practically shuffling his damn feet.
Finally, Larry cleared his throat and said: "No hard feelings?"
Claire, ahead of Rippner, asked as she parsed red grapes from the chopped salad: "Now, why would there be hard feelings between you two?"
Caught between a warning glance from Rippner and the desire to be polite, Larry erred on the side of alcohol. "There was a thing a couple years back. A thing with, uh—"
Rippner amped his glance to a glare. In terms of warning shots, if Larry were a destroyer, he'd already be taking on water and sinking by the head. Quite sensibly, young Mr. Reisert hesitated—
— and then, as Claire gave him a prompting look with eyes almost as intense, if not quite as weirdly blue, as Rippner's, he sputtered on: "— me and a couple of my friends and Jackson. He came to my apartment by mistake. It was poker night—"
Rippner's kept his stare locked on his adversary. "We experienced a minor misunderstanding, Claire."
"Yeah—" Larry said. He looked into Rippner's eyes and paused. Said pause was composed primarily of fear, by the look of it. But at least he shut the hell up.
"Yeah." Rippner offered Larry a perfunctory smile, turned away, and reached for the coleslaw.
"So the whole thing," Larry continued, immediately, once Rippner's glare no longer had him pinned, "Jackson being tied up, the duct tape, the strip poker: it was all a misunderstanding."
"Wait." Claire put down the serving fork. She split a look of slow-simmering conspiracy between the two of them and asked, in a whisper that might only have been heard as far as the Keys: "Strip poker?"
"It loses something in translation, Claire," Rippner said carefully.
"— and recording the whole thing." Larry shook his head as he helped himself to mozzarella and tomatoes. "Man, that was nuts. That was way out of line."
Rippner froze with a serving-spoon full of salad poised over his plate. You can die now, Mr. Reisert.
"Y'know," said Claire, musingly, wryly, "if I didn't know better, I might think you two handsome lads had made yourselves a bit of porn."
Wry-the fuck-indeed. Why had Rippner insisted on stocking the bar with Claire's favorite whiskeys? Ardbeg, Glenmorangie, bloody Talisker. If they'd stuck with Wild Turkey and Windsor, this wouldn't be happening. As it stood, he might just as well have been a bag of birdseed burst on the sidewalk: the pigeons were swarming. In his peripherals, Paul Miller stopped with a forkful of peach cobbler halfway to his mouth: "What porn?"
Rosemary shouldered in en route to the tabbouleh. "You made a porno with a group of college boys, Jackson? This I have to see."
Larry, impaired but— God damn it— not dead, continued earnestly to pave the road to hell: "No. It was— He was tied up because we thought he was— umm— dangerous, and then his briefs got cut up kinda by accident, so we used the duct tape to—"
"Duct tape—? Bondage?" Milla joined the fray. Sidled up to her big brother and smiled. "Thought you were all-vanilla all-the-time." She kissed Rippner on his burning right cheek. "I'm very proud of you, Jay."
Joe Reisert, waiting with Ellen Rippner and Lisa at the carving station, listened and frowned. "Jackson made a sex tape with Larry and his friends?"
A sinking feeling in Lisa's gut. Not unlike the melting fuel rods dropping through the floor of Reactor Four at Chernobyl. "No, Dad," she said. "No. It was a joke—"
"Honey, it's okay." Reisert chipped the flint from his expression as he looked at his girl. "And it's okay if you had other interests, too. College is a time for experimentation, right?"
"What? What other interests—?"
"Larry explained it to me."
"Explained what, Dad?"
A nightmare in four words: "About you and Rosemary."
Lisa swore she felt her heart stop. Not agonizingly, like an infarction. Mechanically, more like. Like a second-hand halting after one last tick. Her voice was flat: "What about me and—"
Rosemary, bearing a plate laden with goodies to which she had no right whatsoever, appeared beside her. Looked at Lisa angelically. Meaningfully. Squeezed her hand and gazed deep into her eyes. "Here's to the best sorority at FSU. And the most incredible sorority sister I could ever have." She smiled. "Emphasis on have, of course."
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A fermata. A stricken lacuna. The two of them, ten feet apart, alone in a crowd.
Rippner looked at Lisa. She looked back at him. Their eyes met.
Some enchanted evening. Across a crowded room. All that crap. Not quite in lockstep with the theme, but close enough, out on the patio, in the balmy Miami night, the four-piece was playing "Isn't It Romantic?"
Rippner thought that most days he had a temperature. That night, some two years back, with Larry and his buddies, and the duct tape and the beer and being tied up, he had a temper. He told himself now that Larry half-snorting booze out of his nose as he tried so sincerely to describe what really happened was payback enough. Probably something somewhere in the guide to a solid marriage about not killing your future wife's siblings out-of-hand. And about taking it all in stride when the number-two rumor at your engagement party (right behind, number-one-with-a-bullet, your having participated in a boisterous bout of BDSM with a group of frat boys) was that your future wife had been in a lesbian sorority at Florida State. Especially, after all, when your father-in-law seemed cool with the idea.
Nevertheless, he wasn't quite untempted to nod when Rosemary slipped by and murmured: "Do you want me to blow something up now?"
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Well, at least one thing turned out right.
Rosemary Wheeler usually wasn't much for nonsexual contact in bed, let alone spooning, but for once, just this once, it was okay.
I took him away from you, Reisert, you cheap little cow.
She lay pressed against Jackson Rippner's back, sleepily counting the freckles on his right shoulder blade. His skin was warm and smooth; he smelled good, too: a hint of floral musk, like violets. She recognized the scent much as she was facing the morning light: without wincing. Odd: she wasn't hung over.
Nor could she remember the sex. No surprise, there: there'd never been anything all that memorable about Mr. Earnest's carnal ministrations— as Reisert had, by now, no doubt realized.
Rosemary smiled, feeling smug if slightly unsated.
And then she thought how the pattern of freckles at the base of Rippner's neck wasn't quite right. And how his brown hair was just a shade too reddish and a bit too long.
And how her right hand, attached to the right arm she had draped over his waist, was cupping what felt very much like a woman's breast.
She drew her hand away. She edged by centimeters away from the freckled back.
"Jackson" sighed and rolled over and smiled at her. "Morning, gorgeous."
Rosemary found herself staring back at Milla Rippner.
"... morning," she echoed, hollowly.
"Sleep well?" Milla asked.
"Where are my clothes?" Rosemary heard herself reply.
Milla raised her head, looked about. "There," she said, pointing toward the window. A clothy something was hanging from the curtain rod. "And there," with a nod toward the bathroom door. "And—" —leaning for a look at the floor— "— there, and there—"
Rosemary lay back. She pulled the flat sheet over her chest and said to the ceiling: "Oh... fuck."
Milla lay back beside her. "Afraid not, toots."
"What?"
"There are rules about such things. Even for raging omnisexuals like yours truly."
"You mean we didn't—?"
"No. Except for the fondling— which was all of one tit, and all your doing, by the way— not a bit of it. I think it was the third Mexican Firing Squad that did you in."
"You need to tell me one thing. The last thing I remember was the karaoke. There was no karaoke, was there?"
"Erm, no. Not officially."
"Shit."
"Anyway, I had no idea where your room was— or even if you had a room. I couldn't let you drive. Jackson was all for tipping you into the nearest canal."
"Asshole."
"That's what I thought. So I brought you up here. Where you proceeded to paw me and tear off your clothes. All the while bellowing 'If I Can't Have You.' You made a break for the balcony. Twice."
"Christ, I didn't."
"Yvonne Elliman's greatest hit, or the balcony?"
"Either. Or." Rosemary frowned her eyes closed. "Fuck."
"Nothing happened." Milla kissed her, gently, on the lips. Added, by way of friendly critique: "You taste like a varnish factory."
"Why are you being so good to me?"
"Isn't it apparent?"
"Because Jackson asked you to." Rosemary opened her eyes, looked up at her. "Right?"
Milla looked back at her frankly. "Yes, he did. Does that make you angry?"
"You should be the one who's angry. Your own brother, pimping you out...?"
"It was more of a suggestion, actually. I showed up without a date. And I didn't have to say 'yes.'"
"But you did." Rosemary unspooled a slightly more languid look at her bedmate. Unhurried, contemplative. "I thought you were him just now. Jackson."
"I guessed as much."
"And you know what...?"
"What?"
"I don't really mind that you're not."
For a long moment, Milla looked into her eyes. Then she kissed Rosemary on the forehead, the left cheek, the right. Rosemary relaxed, closed her eyes again.
"We have two tickets for the breakfast buffet," Milla said. "Care to join me?"
"The police would have been here by now, right?"
"Mm hm. Or hotel security. Julie Weber was looking daggers at you when I hauled you out of the party room."
"Just one more thing. Why am I not hung over?"
"Applied quantum mechanics."
Rosemary opened her eyes and said, flatly: "What?"
"I'm a physicist."
"Are you going to tell me that you gave me something that altered the chemistry of my brain at a subatomic level?"
"Are you going to argue it if I do?"
"No. I think I can live with not having a skull-full-of-superheated-sawdust migraine wrapped around the urge to vomit."
"Good." Milla sat up, stretched sleep from her shoulders and back. "Actually, it's a combination of aspirin and herbs that we use when we're really burning the midnight oil at CERN. That, and about a gallon of water." She grinned. "One glass for every chorus of "Night Fever."
One last time, Rosemary muttered a "Fuck." at the white ceiling.
"Maybe later." Milla looked down at her slyly. "If you're lucky."
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Two floors above and a bit to the north, Jackson Rippner and Lisa Reisert shared their waking in a junior suite. During her years of employment at the Lux, she'd never stayed at the hotel. Not officially. Now that she'd be leaving, it had made her to-do list. She arched in a long, contented stretch against the good mattress and the cool smooth threading of the flat sheet on the king-size bed that she and Rippner were occupying like their own private Delaware and said, in well-rested summation: "Other than the fact that our unofficial co-hostess was a convicted psychopath, and everyone thinks I spent my college years exploring my sapphic side while you starred in a gay orgy with my brother, I think it went really smoothly."
A long pause. Beside her, Rippner, the back of his head resting in his pillowed hands, focused his too-clear gaze on the ceiling. A smile twitched at the corners of his lips.
"What?" Lisa asked.
"Just thinking."
"About...?"
"About you. With, umm—"
"No."
"I mean, the thought of you and Rose—"
"Don't go there."
"— it is kind of hot, if you know what I—"
"Shut up. I mean it."
"Did you ever take pictures—?"
Lisa punched him in the chest. "You are a sick, sick man."
"I know." Rippner felt his smacked pectoral. "Ouch. So, what now?"
Guilt. Lisa's expression softened with it. She moved his hand, gently kissed his chest. "We could throw my college flame out of the breakfast buffet."
"Don't think Milla's done with her yet."
Lisa propped herself on her elbow, looked at him. "Doesn't that worry you, Jackson? Seriously."
"Rosemary might be a survivor, Lise, putting it charitably, but Milla's a force of nature. They'll be okay."
"How about us? What do we do now?"
In response, Rippner shifted the last possible bit closer to her. Rolled her onto her back. Him half on top. An embrace. An adjustment of knees, of thighs and hips, of bellies and what lay— or rose— below. He nuzzled Lisa's jaw, kissed her deeply. Lisa ran her hands up his back, tangled fingers gently in his hair, kissed him in return.
When their lips parted, he smiled down at her. "Room service...?"
Lisa smiled back. "Ask me again in an hour."
Rippner sighed contentedly, closed his eyes, and let himself be pulled in for another kiss. Hell, compared to last night's party, their wedding— on a date and and at a location he might suggest they not make entirely public— was going to be a cakewalk.
Right?
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THE END