Beautiful Liars (4 page)

Authors: Kylie Adams

BOOK: Beautiful Liars

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“She misses me, doesn't she?” Dean Paul asked.

Wearily, Finn gave him a quizzical look.

“I should've knocked it out one last time before she got married. I was her first, you know. Back in college. I popped that sweet cherry in my off-campus apartment.”

Trying to remain cool, Finn betrayed no reaction. This was new ground for himâa platonic relationship with a notoriouslystraight guy. The possibility of it developing into anything else was nonexistent. But Dean Paul's attractiveness was difficult to ignore, and when he talked about his previous sexual exploitsâwhich was oftenâFinn found himself uncomfortablyturned on.

“Your name didn't even come up,” Finn lied. The truth was, he and Lara had discussed Dean Paul for at least ten minutesduring a twenty-minute conversation.

Dean Paul groaned. “God, I don't want to go to this fuckingdinner tonight.”

“It's for a good cause,” Finn reasoned.

“What'd she say it was for?”

“Pompe disease.”

“I don't even know what the hell that is,” Dean Paul grumbled. “She drives me crazy with that shit. Even her charitydiseases have to be designer.”

Finn laughed. “Hey, you married her.”

Dean Paul did a pantomime with his hand of a gun to the head.

“Come on, are things really that bad?”

Dean shook both hands in a comical choking gesture.

“She tries to control
everything
. Nothing matters unless she wants it to matter. And even the dumbest shit gets treated like an international incident.”

“Hasn't she always been this way?” Finn asked.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Dean Paul admitted. “Don't ask me why. If it wasn't for Cantaloupe ...”

“Please. That would make two divorces. You'd be almost halfway to Billy Bob Thornton country.”

Dean Paul shook his head. “She's not comfortable with me having any women friends. And she hates my guy friends.” One beat. “Except you. Only because you're gay, though.” He laughed. “It'd serve her right if you were sucking my cock whenever we got together.”

Finn stopped breathing. He could not tell whether that was a joke or an invitation.

THE IT PARADE

BY
J
INX
W
IATT

Fill in the Blanks

Even Gucci girls fall on hard times. A certain model slash actress slash soon-to-be talk show host was in the double G boutique on Fifth Avenue attempting to buy the new top-handle bag in black patent leather. But declinedcredit cards (one right after another until she ran out of stock) prevented her from closing the deal. The Nubian princess left in tears. Here's hoping her new employer offersa pay advance. She needs all the retail therapy she can get on accountof that psycho ex-boyfriend, who just happens to be baseball's hottest outfield attraction.

Simone

It was like being in one of those big budget, loud Hollywood disaster movies. As the world fell down all around her, Simone Williams was running as fast as she could.

She burst inside her sunny one-bedroom Upper East Side apartment and flattened her back against the door, chest heaving.

The humiliation was totalâpossibly her most embarrassingmoment ever.Worse than the flat-on-her-face fall she took on the Paris runway during her first Karl Lagerfeld show. Even worse than the time she vomited on William L. Petersen when she guest-starred on
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
.

Oh, God, yes, this situation was far worse. Being denied credit on Fifth Avenue. Over and over again.

Chanel, a beautiful silver Egyptian Mau, chortled a soft melody, delighted by Simone's return. The feline wiggled her tail at great speed as she treaded the hardwood floor with her forepaws.

Simone made a direct move for the antique rolltop desk, lifting it up to reveal a disaster underneath. She fired up her sleek new black MacBook and sorted through piles of statements and scribbled Post-its in a mad search for user names, passwords, and account numbers.

With a steadily rising panic, she logged on to check her balances, card by card. American Express Optima, American Express Blue, Citi Platinum Visa, MBNA Platinum MasterCard, Capital One Visa, and so on. Every account had careened past its approved credit line.

For a moment, Simone struggled to breathe. This was impossible.How could every credit card be maxed out? An internalthunderbolt dropped. Somebody must have stolen her identity!

She retraced her online steps to check recent activity. Hmm. All of the charges looked very much like her ownâthe same restaurants, retail boutiques, and beauty outlets that Simone had frequented over the last week glowed back on the thirteen-inchmonitor.

For at least two hours, she worked the phone, enduring interminable holding spells for account managers and supervisorsin an all-out bid to have her credit lines increased. Most of them hovered around twenty thousand. Maybe that was an acceptable limit for a college student. But Simone Williams was hardly a struggling coed.

Not long ago she had been featured in the
Us Weekly
“Who Wore It Best?” contest (against Jessica Simpson). They were both pictured in the same Cavalli black paisley-print empire-waist dress. Of course, Jessica had won with seventy-twopercent of the votes. But only because she was more famousand had bigger boobs. Anyway, the point of the Cingular Wireless assault was to boost Simone's credit lines to a level commensurate with her celebrity potential.

But not a single request was granted. Apparently, the worst time to ask for an increase was when you were already over the original credit limit. Simone's frustration was total. On the final attempt with the last card, she called the American Express representative an ugly cow before hanging up.

Chanel was stretched out in grossly indulgent lazy cat slumber. Somewhere beneath her lay the calculator that could add up the debt damage. But why disturb Chanel for such a depressing task? It could be done later. Anyway, Simone knew the ballpark figure was around two hundred thousandâon her revolving credit cards. There were American Express Gold and Platinum accounts totaling about fifty thousand that the companyexpected to be paid in full.

She stared at the messy stack of suffocating bills and let out a groan. If only. If only there had been just enough room left for that Gucci bag. The one with the medium top-handle in black patent leather with zip-pocket detail, goldtone GG hardware, and detachable shoulder strap.Yes. If only that purchasehad gone through, then Simone would be content and able to deal with this crisis like a true princess warrior.

She left the financial crime scene and poured herself some Chardonnay. Followed by another. Wine could be a brilliant problem solver. By the end of a third glass, she usually had answersfor all the squabbles in the Middle East, not to mention ways Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger could get along.

Money
. So yummy. So yucky, too. It had definitely been a glorious solution and epic problem over the years, simultaneouslyproviding her great comfort and total destruction. She stroked Chanel's smooth, spotted coat, feeling the impact of the wine as the memories bubbled to the surface.

Simone grew up with money. Plenty of it. Her father had been a corporate executive, her mother a Junior League dynamo.Their only child possessed toffee-colored skin, emerald green eyes, straight hair, and a tall, lithe frame. By the time she turned three, Simone knew she was gorgeous. Everybody gushed about it, and even at that age, she had to agree with them.

In the cosseted enclaves of Atlanta's Buckhead area, Simone had basked in a privileged, preppy environment, thinking of herself more as an individual than as a member of any particularrace. The pro-black mind-set completely escaped her.Yes, Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. But Diana Vreeland, the legendary fashion editor for
Harper's Bazaar
, had epic style.

When Simone read that DV had once declared pink the navy blue of India, she considered it a vastly underreported moment in cultural study, wrote a paper on the subject for her world history class, and turned in the manifesto on pink paper. Mrs. Boozer gave her an F. That was the day Simone decided to be a model. She was twelve.

By thirteen, she was a professional poser, already the perfectsample size and modeling for catalogs and upscale retail trunk shows, in addition to commercial work, some of it national,like the Sprite television ad that had her dancing in the street with wild abandon. At fifteen, Simone was already livingoverseas without her parents.

DV had once proclaimed, “the best thing about London is Paris.” And she was, as always, spot on. Simone adored France. It was a fast lane life of go-sees, runway work, champagne and cigarettes, and modelizers on the make. By sixteen, she had made herself available as the mistress of a rich married man (for great gifts) and the girlfriend of a hot young club promoter(for great fun).

But at seventeen, she was back in Atlanta, no longer a fresh face for the Paris agencies and having offended Karl Lagerfeld by pulling a no-show at a dinner party in his honor. At the time, she had been kidnapped by her married lover, who was coked out of his mind and paranoid that she was cheating on him with his nephew. As it turns out, the club promoter
was
his nephew. Really, though, how could she have known? It seemed like everybody in France had the same last name.

Simone's homecoming was fraught with rude awakenings.In her absence, the company that her father worked for had imploded in financial scandal, wiping out retirement accountsand inciting a federal inquiry that buried top executives,including her father, in legal bills. Without Simone's permission, her parents raided her savings, depleting every dollar she had ever earned. And yet they still lost the house and were forced to move into an apartment.

Ultimately, the stress and humiliation proved too much for her father. He died of a heart attack at the age of forty-six. Her mother moved into a smaller rental unit and accepted a job behind the Guerlain cosmetics counter at Neiman Marcus. And Simone moved to New York with less than a thousand dollars to her name.

The stateside modeling opportunities turned out to be middling at best, and playing agency hopscotch did nothing to improve the situation. It was infuriating to settle for departmentstore catalog work while Queen Latifah signed on with CoverGirl for millions. Where was the justice?

On a lark, Simone had signed up for a one-day acting class taught by Pamela Anderson at The Learning Annex. It was two hours well spent.With her new thespian skills she vaulted into acting and got lucky with a semi-regular series of one-offguest shots on episodic TV shows, most of them hourlongprocedural dramas of the
Law and Order
variety. Usually, she got selected for uppity model or junior society type parts. Casting agents did not see her as the gritty prostitute, the stone-faced government worker, or the around-the-way girl with an out-of-wedlock child by an NBA star, which accounted for ninety-nine percent of available roles for black actresses.

For the past few years, Simone had been cobbling togetherincome from random modeling assignments and bit player acting jobs, subsidizing cash, lifestyle, and clothing needs with credit card accounts that seemed to grow like sea monkeys.

An envelope emblazoned with the words
YOU ARE APPROVED
seemed to arrive in her mailbox at least every other day. It had actually been good for her self-esteem. On a morning when you got passed over for Burn Victim Number Two on
Rescue Me
, sometimes a girl needed a pair of Christian Louboutin platform Mary Janes in red leather, even if they did cost seven hundred dollars.

Simone's cellular hummed to life to the tune of
I Dream of Jeannie
. Cautiously, she checked the ID screen, saw
TILLY CALLING,
and felt a moment's relief, followed by a frisson of irritation.

Tilly was arguably her closest friend, but sometimes Simone struggled to get past the fact that Tilly came from a wealthy family (that managed to hold on to their fortune), married a rich husband (who was also gorgeous), had been blessed with a gorgeous baby (with no stretch marks to show for it, thanks to obsessive slathering of belly balm by Biggs and Featherbelle),
and
earned a mint as an endorsement model for 24/7 Cosmetics, a job that required ten days of work per year at the most, five of which (all in-store appearances) Tilly refused to show up for because she hated to shake hands with strangers. It was not just an embarrassment of riches. It was obscene.

“Hi, Tilly,” Simone half-sang, half-sighed.

“We just got back from Starbucks and barely escaped with our lives. Some horrible woman touched Cantaloupe's face with her icky fingers. She seemed like the sweet grandmothertype, but she could've just as easily been a terrorist. I've already given Cantaloupe a bath. It's her third one today already. I feel like I've been assaulted.” She breathed a dramaticsigh. “How are
you
?”

“Not so good. I was sitting hereâ”

“Dean Paul's show is about to be cancelled any minute,” Tilly cut in. “Which means I'm now the major breadwinner for this family. As if I need any additional pressure! Thank God my parents bought us this apartment. Otherwise, I don't know what we'd do. Cantaloupe needs stability at this age. I couldn't bear a move right now. Are you nervous about tomorrow?”

Simone had scarcely thought about it. Her first official day to report to the set of
The Beehive
. All she really cared about was the regular income and the chance that maybeâjust maybeâit would lead to some kind of lucrative long-termspokesmodel gig, even if it was with a budget retailer like Kohl's that merchandised apparel in large sizes. “I haven't really thought about it until now.”

“Promise that you'll call and tell me
everything
,” Tilly insisted.“I want to know what she looks like without makeup. My guess is that she has bad skin like Cameron Diaz.”

Simone rolled her eyes skyward and refilled her Chardonnay.
She
was Emma Ronson, Dean Paul's most recent ex. As always,Tilly's inquiry about Simone's life really had everythingto do with Tilly.

BEEP. The sound was precisely the exit opportunity that Simone needed. “Someone's calling on the other line.”

“Oh, well, I can't talk anyway. It's time for Cantaloupe's Japanese language lesson.”

Simone tensed at the sight of
UNKNOWN CALLER
on her cellular display. She hesitated, then realized that it could be one of her credit card companies calling back with a change of heart, so she answered abruptly. “Hello?”

There was no response. But in the background she heard what sounded like bar noise.

“Hello?”

Still nothing. Finally, the line went dead.

Tears sprang to Simone's eyes as she slammed the phone shut. “Crazy son of a bitch!”

It did not matter that she had changed her number six times in as many months. He always found a way to get to her.

Damn Tommy Robb. Damn him to hell!