And he could take it away just as easily.
Something occurred to me, looking at Jasmine luxuriating on the sofa. “What are you going to change into?” I asked. She was in jeans and a sweater—not her usual going-out attire.
“Oh, it’s in here.” From her purse, she pulled out a wad of black fabric no bigger than my hand, then let it unroll. “Ta da! What do you think?”
“Where’s the rest of it?”
“It’s stretchy,” she told me defensively. “It looks bigger on.”
“Uh-huh. Well, I’m going to take a quick shower. Make yourself at home.”
In the shower, I turned the temperature up to almost scalding and the force up to the “Massage” setting, hoping that it would help unkink my back. I did that a lot, after a hard day playing. I liked to imagine that it was a big, blond guy with huge biceps massaging me. In my mind, his name was Sven and we sat in his cabin in Sweden looking out at the pine trees while he worked oil into my back.
It occurred to me that that was a lot of detail to get from a shower setting. Maybe I did need a boyfriend.
Connor swam up into my mind and I yelped in shock, turning and catching the spray right in my face. When I’d stopped spluttering and the jet was safely hammering away at my stomach, I carefully allowed myself to go back to the thought.
What was he doing in my brain? I wasn’t interested in Connor—in fact, he was the exact opposite of everything I was interested in. If I was going to date, they’d need to be reliable, and serious, and…safe.
Why did my list of requirements for a guy sound like a Volvo commercial?
Connor didn’t have any of that going for him. He didn’t have anything going for him, except for his looks.
If you’re into that sort of look, I told myself quickly. Which I’m not.
I realized the shower was turning into an epic, so I cranked off the water, toweled off and padded through to the bedroom to find something to wear. I knew Jasmine wasn’t going to let me out of the apartment in my jeans and sweatshirt, but my wardrobe was…limited. I finally found a dark red blouse and a black skirt, and pulled out the one pair of heels I dared to wear. They were only a couple of inches high, so I could walk in them. Just.
I found Jasmine in the kitchen, wearing the dress and making a sandwich. Only that doesn’t really describe the scene.
The dress…it looked as if someone had drawn a line across her breasts a millimeter north of her areolae, drawn another line across her thighs a hairs-breadth below the bottom of her ass cheeks, then colored the space in between with a black Sharpie.
The dress, though, paled in comparison to the sandwich. It started off normally, with bread and then ham, and then cheese, and then another slice of bread. But then it seemed to forget to stop, and there was a layer of lettuce and some bacon strips and tomato and then more bread and some cold chicken and pickle and…I watched as Jasmine emptied a bag of chips to form the top layer and crunched a final slice of bread on top. The thing was a foot high.
She turned around as she heard me and beamed, then looked guiltily down at the sandwich. “Um…this is okay, right?”
“Of course!” I sat down at the table and watched as she worked her way through the thing. She ate breathlessly, as if she hadn’t had food in a month.
“Jasmine….” I asked slowly, when she was done. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing!” She licked mayo off a finger. “I was just hungry.”
I wasn’t great at social stuff, but I wasn’t stupid either. I gave her a look.
“Okay, I skipped lunch,” she told me.
I kept looking at her.
“And breakfast.”
I sighed. “I know you’re busy with auditions, but you have to make time to eat. I know you think I’m boring, but—” I saw something in her expression. “What?”
She stared at the table.
“Jasmine, do you not have money for food?!” I asked, horrified.
She raised big, guilty eyes to me. “It’s not like I spent it on booze and weed,” she told me. “I just—I don’t make much, and I had three auditions this month, and all of them were way across town and I had to get a cab for one of them because it was nowhere near the subway and none of them panned out so they just soaked up money and my landlord’s an asshole and—” She stopped and took a deep breath, and I could see the beginning of tears creeping into her eyes.
“Stop,” I told her. I shook my head in dismay. “Idiot.”
She sniffed. “For running out of cash?”
“For not telling me.” I went to my bedroom and dug for the little tin box in the bottom of my underwear drawer. I didn’t actually have that much money—yes, my father paid my rent and bills, but I didn’t see any of that money and he didn’t let me have a part-time job, so cash was tight. He gave me an allowance to live on—enough for groceries and the occasional item of clothing, if I was careful. I’d been eking out the money each month and squirreling away what I could, and had saved three hundred dollars towards a TV.