The Duet
Chapter One
“Mama is gonna get laid tonight!” I sang out while shimmying my shoulders from side to side. I puckered my lips in front of my bedroom mirror and attempted to apply another coat of bright red lipstick, which was impossible in the dress I’d chosen for the night. I couldn’t actually move in it- per se. I had to bend my neck down at an awkward angle and contort my arm to get the lipstick tube in contact with my mouth. To be honest, the dress was most likely made for a petite doll— as in, Barbie’s little sister. Damn you, Skipper. I was neither petite, nor a doll, but the night called for extreme measures.
“Ew. God, stop. You can’t call yourself ‘mama’ if you aren’t actually a mother. And as your sister, I’d like to pretend that you don’t have a sex life at all,” Cameron said, holding her hands over her ears as she chastised me from across the room.
I laughed and dropped the tube of MAC lipstick back into my acrylic make-up tray. When I spun around to face her, she was still holding her hands up in warning.
“Cammie, my sweet, innocent little sister,” I said, walking toward her on my four inch Jimmy Choos. “When you’re twenty-seven, if you’ve gone a whole year without having sex, I will personally take an ad out in the newspaper for you and it will say: Cammie Heart will put out for nearly anyone. Age not important. Job unnecessary—”
I didn’t get the chance to continue my joke because Cammie reached forward and covered my mouth with her hand.
“No need, sissaroo, because I had sex just last month.”
She was full on gloating. What a dirty hooker. You don’t gloat about having sex to someone during her dry spell. Had I taught her nothing?
I peeled her hand away from my mouth so I could respond. “What?! With who?”
She shrugged as if it wasn’t that big of a deal. Who knows, maybe it wasn’t. “It was just this kid in one of my architecture classes. We were studying together and I wanted to blow off some steam.”
I laughed as the wheels started spinning in my mind. “Oh I bet you blew off some stream, all right.” That joke may have been accompanied by a crude hand gesture near, or around, my mouth. Depending on how delicate your sensibilities are.
“Brooklyn! You perv!” Cammie said, pinching my arm before I could step out of her reach. She was a couple of inches shorter than me, and five years younger, but she was scarily scrappy.
A knock on my condo door distracted me just before I could retaliate.
“Ms. Heart, are you girls ready? I’ve just pulled the car around,” Jerry, my driver, called through the door.
“Yes! Thank you, Jer-Bear. We’ll just be another second!” I yelled back, widening my eyes at Cammie so that she’d know to hurry up.
Cammie scrambled toward my closet, no doubt in search of a pair of shoes that she’d “borrow” for the night and then conveniently forget to ever give back to me. I once thought I’d had a Chanel bag stolen from me in France, and then three years later Cammie waltzed into my apartment with it on her arm. We’d settled it with an old-fashioned duel. (i.e., I sat on her until she begged for mercy).
“Can I wear these white Manolo Blahniks you got from that magazine shoot?” she asked as I spun in a circle to inspect my miniscule dress one last time. Seriously, I feared that the seams might pop at any moment, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. If I didn’t get laid that night, I’d no longer be held accountable for my actions. I can only go so long living the life of a nun. Abstinence is not always the way. It makes you moody, and I swear my road rage had really kicked up a notch over the last few months.
But it’s not as easy as you’d think. It’s not like I could just zip-off to the club and have a one-night stand whenever I wanted. The paparazzi would be all over my ass and the story would end up on every newsstand by the following morning. So, to ensure that my PR team didn’t rip my head off, I tried to play it cool. I dated off and on and I kept my distance from the standard Hollywood crowd. Who needs booze and blow? No thanks. All I wanted was a good ol’ fashioned, wake the neighbors, scratch marks down his back orgasm.
“Did you just say ‘all I want is an orgasm’?” Cammie asked, coming out of the closet looking like a million-bucks in my high-heels. I already knew I’d let her keep them. They looked better on her anyway. The white suede material set off her tan and complemented the royal blue dress she’d also pulled out of my closet earlier. Her brown hair was styled in loose waves and she had this jeweled headband across her forehead— a look that a cool twenty-two year old could pull off flawlessly, whereas I would have just looked like a weird gypsy.