Thirteen Hours (5 page)

The best way, she decided, was to keep talking about Laurel’s wallet.

Dana held out her hand. “Is your driver’s license photo as awful as mine?”

Laurel handed over the plastic card. “You tell me.”

Dana gazed down at Laurel’s small image, which wasn’t nearly as lovely as the real thing sitting next to her on the floor, but beautiful nonetheless. Not quite trusting herself to make a casual comment, she scanned the details instead. Laurel Jane Stanley. May 13, 1982. “Jesus, you’re a baby.”

Laurel snorted. “Since when is twenty-five a baby?”

“You were born in the eighties and you’re graduating from veterinary school in six months?” Dana felt simultaneously impressed and completely foolish.
And here I pretty much called her an emptyheaded bimbo earlier.

Laurel shrugged. “I skipped a grade in elementary school. So how old are you, wise elder?”

“Twenty-eight.” Dana said.

“You’re ragging on me for being born in the eighties, but you’re only three years older?”

“Those are three very important years.” Dana’s heart started beating crazily. It was so easy to talk to Laurel. To joke around, even.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had enjoyed anyone’s company so much. That thought, to put it mildly, shocked her. All of a sudden, she couldn’t think of a single word to say. She snapped her mouth closed and waited for Laurel to break the quiet.

Laurel seemed to sense her shift in mood, because her smile faded and for a few moments she stared at Dana, light color rising on her cheeks.

“So what do you think?” Laurel asked. “Is my photo as awful as yours?”

Dana willed her heartbeat to slow down. She stroked her thumb over the image. “No, you’re gorgeous.”

As she returned the license, her fingers brushed Laurel’s and they both exhaled at the accidental contact. Completely undone, Dana said, “Thanks.”

She’d never experienced a moment like that with another human being. It was an actual moment, she thought, no one could dispute that.

She wondered how exactly one was supposed to go on after a moment like that.

Apparently Laurel knew. “I have a picture of my cat,” she murmured, moving them past the fraught silence. “Do you want to see her?”

“This is Isis, right?” Dana asked as she was handed a photo of a black cat with a pantherlike face.

“Yes, tell me she doesn’t look like a creature who should have been worshipped by the ancient Egyptians.”

“Sneezing into your bubble bath is godlike?” Dana asked.
Bubble bath. Great. Right where I wanted my mind to wander.

“Not that part,” Laurel said. “She has six toes on every foot and a regal bearing.”

“Very regal. And worshipped plenty by a modern American.”

“That she is,” Laurel agreed. “She’s my baby.” She exchanged the photo for another. “This is my mother.”

Dana took in the image of a slight blond woman with an encouraging smile.

“She was my best friend,” Laurel said. “She passed away last year.”

Dana felt a lump in her throat. “Oh, Laurel, I’m so sorry.”

Laurel shrugged. “So am I. She had cancer. It was pretty bad in the end, so in a way, it was time.”

Dana handed the photo back to Laurel with silent reverence. “I still have both of my parents,” she said after a moment. “I guess I still feel too young to lose them. Even though I’m not very close with them.”

She studied her companion, resisting the urge to stroke her chestnut hair. “Are you close with your father?”

Laurel’s eyes darkened. “No.” She tucked the picture of her mother away. “He left us when Mom got sick. I got to take care of her and he got a new, young wife who probably married him for the money he took with him.”

Asshole.
Dana experienced a surge of anger that felt out of proportion with her emotional involvement in the situation. “That was shitty of him.”

“For sure,” Laurel agreed. She spread the wallet open and showed Dana the contents. “Sixty-eight dollars.” Dana watched in fascination as Laurel’s lips quivered for a moment before she broke into a mischievous grin. “Got a dollar?”

Dana blushed as soon as she understood Laurel’s joke, almost a full fifteen seconds after her companion put it out there. Sixty-nine.

Great, just what she needed to think about. Managing a shy chuckle, Dana said, “Unfortunately, my wallet’s in my office, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.” Laurel cleared her throat and flipped slowly through the plastic sleeves in her wallet. “So I’ve got a credit card…my debit card…voter registration…my library card—”

“A library card? That’s so…quaint.”

“I’m bookish like that.” Laurel offered a faux seductive eyelash flutter. “You know you think it’s sexy.”

“Oh, yes,” Dana said. “Very sexy.”

“I knew it.” Laurel put her things away in her backpack, wearing a slight smile as she worked. She offered the lesbian erotica book to Dana before stowing it. “You sure you don’t want a little light reading?”

Dana leaned across Laurel’s lap and grabbed at the Hershey’s bar on the floor. “I’d rather have the chocolate.”

Laurel slapped her away and snatched up the candy. “Maybe after that game of truth or dare you promised me.”

Her sweet, innocent smile was hard to resist. Dana knew her protest sounded feeble. “Promised? I’m pretty sure I never promised anything like that.”

“Listen, do you want the chocolate or not?”

Dana released a long-suffering sigh. “Fine,” she said. “After truth or dare.”

H
OUR
S
EVEN
—1:00 A.M.

D
oesn’t anyone clean this building at night?” Laurel asked.

Crazed butterflies had taken up residence in the pit of her stomach at the prospect of ending their game and going to sleep.

Her eyes felt heavy but her senses were restless. She and Dana had been circling around each other for the past hour, keeping their chitchat superficial. Laurel had been tempted to dig deeper but Dana was skittish, and they had to endure another six or seven hours cooped up here.

“They’re on a rotating schedule for Friday nights. Tonight they clean the carpets in the other wing.”

Laurel yawned. “Timing is everything.”

Dana cleared her throat. “So may I ask you a question? A real question.”

“As opposed to—”

“Beating around the bush.”

Dana’s eyes were close enough that Laurel could watch the faint pulse of the pupils in the emerald green irises. After hours trapped in the elevator, only a single lock of Dana’s well-coiffed auburn hair was out of place. It fell across her cheek, and Laurel wanted more than anything to reach out and test its softness. There was something indescribably beautiful about Dana. She was the same height as Laurel, with a slight fullness to her face and body that was so sensual it made Laurel weak in the knees.

Good thing they were sitting down.

“Sure, you can ask me a question.” Laurel knew what was coming.

“What do you want to know?”

“I was just wondering, why stripping?”

“I actually prefer to call it dancing.” She had her answer ready in advance. “The money is great and the hours are perfect, when it comes to juggling both work and school.”

“But…” Dana still seemed to be coming to terms with her feelings on the subject.

“It’s demeaning?” Laurel guessed. At Dana’s nod, she shook her head. “I don’t agree. I’m doing this of my own free will, I don’t let anyone do anything I don’t want them to do, and I’ve earned enough money to pay my way through college. Pretty soon I’ll be
Doctor
Stanley, and I can’t begrudge anything that helps me get there.”

“I guess it just seems like… I don’t know. You seem so smart.”

“I am smart,” Laurel said, and shrugged. “It’s a job. I’m looking forward to quitting and being a vet, but it hasn’t been that bad.”

“How long have you been doing it?”

“About six years,” Laurel said. For the first time since they’d begun this conversation, she gave Dana an embarrassed smile. “A long time, I guess.”

“So do you usually do…private performances? Like tonight?”

Laurel shook her head. “No, actually, I work in a club. Tonight is kind of a new thing.”

“How did Scott find you?” Dana asked.

“I started advertising in a lesbian magazine a couple of months ago. As a private dancer. Available to perform for other women.”

Dana’s gaze dropped to her lap. “You don’t do private dances for men?”

“No, I dance for men at the club. I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing a private show for a man.”

“Have you had a lot of female clients?” Dana’s voice sounded strained.

“You were the third,” Laurel replied. “It was just supposed to be a side thing. A little extra money doing something a bit more…fun.” She cleared her throat. Feeling a strange need to justify her new venture, she picked at the frayed edges of a hole in the thigh of her jeans. “I mean, I’ve danced for women at the club before. Women come in more than you might imagine. That’s kind of why I decided to do this on the side.”

Dana seemed intrigued, yet uneasy. “You don’t like dancing for men?”

“Oh, I don’t really mind.” It was mostly true. Dancing for men was a means to an end, and most of the time, they were gentlemen.

Laurel was long past second-guessing her decisions in this area. She had risen to the challenge when her mom got sick and her father left, and she was a stronger person for her experiences. “I mean, there are good customers and bad customers, you know? Some guys are all hands, or rude, or just generally unpleasant. But a lot of them are really sweet. I’ve got regulars who come in and just want to talk, to spend time with me.”

“Does your club have rules about how customers treat you?”

Laurel could tell what she was thinking. She’d had similar views herself when she first thought about exotic dancing, picturing taking off her clothes for the eager patrons of a seedy strip club. “There are rules. We wear g-strings at all times. No touching. Or rather, we can touch them, but they have to keep their hands off us.” She gave Dana a tender smile. “It’s really not as horrible as I suspect you think it is. I do a lot of table dances. I don’t much like doing lap dances for guys.”

“But you’re so good at them.” Dana graced her with a rakish grin.

“It helps when your client is hot.”

Dana’s grin faltered slightly, and Laurel watched a wave of insecurity flash across her face. At the same time, she could see that Dana was struggling to regroup without letting on how the compliment affected her.

“Was it hard the first time? Getting naked, I mean? Dancing in front of so many people?”

“Oh, sure. I was almost as nervous the first time I danced as I was the first time I had sex.”

Dana had nothing to say to that. Her cheeks were red.

“I cried afterward, too,” Laurel confessed. “Once I got home. My mom was there waiting for me, and I just couldn’t help but cry in her arms.” She shrugged. “That was only a few months after Dad left, though, so I was still pretty overwhelmed by everything. My mom was great about the dancing. She knew I was doing it, I mean, and she understood why I felt like it was our best option.”

“You have no idea how much I feel like an asshole by now,” Dana commented in a quiet voice. “You were nineteen, alone with a sick mother, and paying your way through college. I’m not going to apologize again, because I know we’ve forgotten about it, but I want to say something. I think you’re an incredibly together young woman. You sound like a good person.”

“Thanks.” Laurel had the impression that Dana’s judgments were more about herself than Laurel. But it was still nice to hear her acknowledge she’d been wrong. “I have to admit, I thought you were an asshole for a little while there, but I don’t anymore. I can see there’s an incredibly funny, sweet woman inside of you.”

“I’m glad you’re convinced,” Dana said. “Sometimes I wonder.”

She sounded so cheerless, Laurel wasn’t sure what to say. “You don’t let very many people in, do you?”

“Pathetic, I know.”

She looked so broken, Laurel moved to a safer topic. “Where did you go to school?”

“The University of Michigan,” Dana said. “Ann Arbor. I graduated seven years ago. Bachelor’s of Business Administration.” She paused, then added, “With a concentration in computer information systems. It was a newer program at the time, but I was interested in the technological side of business. It appealed to me more than accounting, at least, and I’m good at it. My team always delivers excellent work, usually under budget.”

“I imagine your parents are proud of you, too,” Laurel said.

“They are. We don’t talk all that often. They’re much more involved with my younger brother. He’s going to apply to law school, or so he says. I can’t even imagine my baby brother as a lawyer.”

“So why are your parents more involved with him?”

Dana pulled her knees up to her chest and rested the side of her face on them. “Because he wants that. He’s still pretty attached, being younger and all. He practically lives there on weekends. I have my own life, and I like it that way. I’m more of a loner, I guess.”

“I always hung out with my mom when she was alive,” Laurel said. “My dad… I couldn’t care less about having anything to do with him at this point. I admit I haven’t quite forgiven him for what he did to us.”

“I have great parents,” Dana hastened to explain. “I just don’t feel entirely comfortable around them.”

“That’s too bad,” Laurel murmured. “I hope you’re able to appreciate them fully while you have them.” She hesitated. “I’m not trying to be morbid or anything. I’m just saying—”

“I understand.” Dana’s eyes glowed with sincerity. Their color was the green of rolling hills in springtime. “I always assume I’ll have time to get closer to them, that it’ll happen naturally. Maybe I need to remember that I should make more of an effort while it’s still an option.”

Laurel blinked back her emotion. “I think that’s a great idea.”

“So…did your mom know about your sexuality?”

“Oh, yeah. I told her when I was eighteen, right after she was diagnosed with cancer. I’d known for a couple of years at that point, but I wasn’t out. Once I realized she was sick, I couldn’t justify hiding it anymore.”