Talking After Midnight

She was like Bruce Lee with a pair of nunchakus. Daryl from The Walking Dead with a bow and arrow. Phone sex operators throughout the land should all cower in fear when LaDawn broke out the flyswatter.

It was really just an audio prop for her BDSM clients to hear over the phone, but she fooled them into believing it was a flogger every time. For her birthday, they’d collectively had a real flyswatter bronzed with her name on it, which she proudly displayed in her office on her desk.

Dixie rolled her eyes at Em. “First off, not a chance we’d let you go this alone. There’s nothing like some love and coddlin’ when you’re so sick. Second, you hush, Em. I’m not saying that at all, and you know it. I love our Marybell—even today, nose redder than a tube of crimson lipstick and eyes drippin’ from behind that mask like a leaky faucet.”

Marybell took the tea with a grateful sigh, still keeping her eyes semiaverted over the rim of the china. “I think what Dixie’s saying is, I’m not Caine’s type.”

That was okay, too. She was no one’s type, and that was just as well. Buried in small-town Georgia, she’d never have to worry about the temptation of finding someone whose type she was.

There were few available men in town, anyway, but the men here liked women who wore pretty dresses, the proper-height heel for the appropriate time of day and subtle makeup. Their hair was always long and flowing, or up and smooth. It wasn’t riding a colored line along the tops of their heads, and they certainly weren’t wearing clunky black work boots and leopard-skin leggings slashed as if a knife had been taken to them.

LaDawn sat down on the chest, scooting the Crock-Pot to the side, tilting Marybell’s chin upward to look her in the eye. Well, as much as her cooling gel eye mask allowed, anyway.

Her heart stopped cold for a moment, her fingers trembling on the handle of the teacup. Caught. She was caught. They knew who she was and her safe, quiet, if not terribly exciting life would be over.

That clawing anxiety, usually reserved for late-night insomnia and mentally backtracking every move she made, pushed its way to lodge in her raw throat.

LaDawn’s lips, the color purple meant to match her nails, turned into a smile. She plucked at a strand of Marybell’s now drying, shoulder-length hair “As I live and breathe. You’re a natural blonde, aren’t you? How do you get all that red-and-green gunk in your hair every day? You know, I’d hate you if it wasn’t for Brugsby’s Drugstore and Miss Clairol.”

Marybell gulped before she forced a smile, praying she could stare LaDawn down without looking away. “It’s a spray. It washes out easy. And you’d love me any ol’ way, LaDawn. Who’d bring you those frosty pink doughnuts and coffee from Madge’s on the night shift, if not for me? Not even Doc Johnson does that. I’m forever your girl.”

LaDawn’s eye grew critical, though it still twinkled beneath her purple eye shadow and glittery gold eyeliner. “And when did you stop shavin’ half your eyebrow off? Next thing you know, you’ll be pluckin’ ’em into a fine arch like the rest of us ninnies. Why, if this keeps up, you might even wear a dress. Now, wouldn’t that be somethin’? Our Marybell in anything other than ripped-up or spotted with some kind of animal-print britches?” She chuckled deep and rich.

Conformity. Blessed be.

Em rubbed Marybell’s arm and smiled before pulling her frozen fingers into her hand and warming them. “Never you mind LaDawn and her teasin’. I think you’re hair’s pretty as a picture. All that natural curl leaves me with ugly envy in my heart. I don’t know why you hide it behind black eye shadow and all those colors and hair gel. It looks like it takes an awful lot of work to get it to stand up straight like someone scared the life outta you, but I don’t give a fig either way. I like the way you stare society and all its preconceived notions right down, look ’em square in the eye, and dare ’em to say anything. I like it especially when you do it to Louella Palmer. It always makes me giggle till I swear I’m gonna wet myself when her eyes are forced to give you the look of disdain and you growl and snap your teeth at her.”

Rage against the machine.

Marybell squeezed Em’s hand. Her snarling at Louella Palmer, the most hateful woman she’d ever encountered, was all part of the act to keep everyone she didn’t allow into her circle at bay.

Marybell lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I have a gift. Some people paint. I snarl. If I didn’t have my hair gelled up like I’d been scared half to death, she wouldn’t be afraid of me. Louella fears what she doesn’t understand. Besides, you just like when I growl at her because it keeps her too busy tanglin’ with me to hatch another plot against you and Dixie,” she quipped, accepting the dose of thick emerald-green cold medicine LaDawn handed her, chugging it down like a shot of tequila.

“You’re a wingman for the ages, MB. No doubt,” Dixie assured with her familiar warmth, rubbing her arms and shivering. “So explain to me why it’s so cold in here? Surely this isn’t on purpose, is it?” Dixie’s brow creased, her pretty face lining with concern. “Are you conserving heat for budgetary reasons? I won’t have it with it being so cold out and you ragin’ with flu, Marybell. A raise—I’ll give you a raise,” she offered, pushing through her purse to find her phone and make a note of it. “Em, turn up that heat while I let Nella know, would you?”

Dixie in a nutshell. Generous, funny, gorgeous and loyal to the core. Plum Orchard legend had it back in high school she was once feared for her horrible pranks.

Yet she’d come home just a few months ago, emotionally broken and cash poor only to turn around and win, in what the folks of Plum Orchard called the “phone sex games,” the entirety of the company Marybell worked for.

Since then, Dixie’d redeemed herself for the most part with nearly everyone who’d once held a grudge against her—well, everyone except the snotty Magnolias, the group of women who considered themselves the backbone of fine Southern breeding and ran Plum Orchard as if they were the mob.

Though, the people of Plum Orchard still didn’t love that not only did she own a phone sex company, but she consorted with her employees on a regular basis. Some of them still made no bones about sayin’ so.

Oddly, those same people who frowned upon her and the wicked women of Call Girls sure didn’t mind Dixie and her fiancé, Caine Donovan, funneling their alleged ill-gotten gains into town functions and fund-raisers for the elementary school.

Either way, Marybell didn’t give a hoot about the things Dixie had once done when she was just a teenager. Not a one of these set-in-their-ways folk were above making mistakes. Small towns had a way of holding a grudge the likes of which she’d never seen.

But Marybell had liked Dixie from the moment she’d been assigned by Cat as her guide to the world of the phone sex industry. Dixie had risen above ridicule and cruel attacks, and she’d defended the women of Call Girls right in front of God and man. Now, several months later, Marybell liked her even more.

And she didn’t want to lose Dixie, or any of them, on the chance they might recognize her. Knowing who she really was would create an invasion the likes of which Plum Orchard had never seen. But it wouldn’t just invade her life; it would invade the women’s lives. Women she’d come to care a great deal for, and she’d die before she let that happen.

Her gut tightened with the fear of loss in that way it always did—uncomfortable, choking her from the inside out. The fear that almost never entirely went away—even after all this time.

Always. It was always with her. Sometimes the panic muted, became a dull roar, but it never truly left. It hovered around the fringes of her life, poking at her like an animal in a cage, reminding her.

Em’s voice interrupted her private misery. She stood over the thermostat, studying it. “It says it’s eighty-five degrees in here, Dixie, but that can’t be right.” Em had a gift for most things DIY. Except anything electrical, as evidenced by the enormous hole Jax Hawthorne had in his backyard gazebo when she’d decided it would be pretty to put in a paddle fan with a light.

“It’s broken,” Marybell croaked, her nose itchy and raw. “And put your bags of money away, Dixie Davis,” she teased on a cough. “I don’t need a raise. You pay me just fine, thank you. I just forgot to ask Miss Carter to fix it with the warm spell we had not long ago. Leave it be, Dixie. I’ll have it taken care of when I’m better.”

She loved the basement apartment she’d rented from Blanche Carter. This apartment was the first place she’d called home in four years. It harbored all the things she’d lovingly collected when she finally decided it was safe to stay in Landon’s, and then Dixie’s, employ. But it was mighty cold in the winter.

Dixie planted her hands on her hips. “I can’t, in good conscience, leave you here to freeze to death. Blanche is in Atlanta till Tuesday and the weatherman said it’s going to be down in the thirties this weekend. With you so sick, it’ll just make it worse. I won’t have it.”

The cold medicine was beginning to work its magic, leaving her too exhausted to fend Dixie’s mothering off.

Suddenly Em was digging in her purse, too, pulling out her phone, her beautiful blue eyes lit up by the face of her phone. “Oh, I know! I’ll call Jax’s brother—he’s a licensed electrician. He’ll come take a look. If he can’t do it today, then you’re comin’ home with me until he can, MB. Hear me? Or maybe with Dixie. Sanjeev’ll take fine care of you.”

The cold meds LaDawn had given her began to affect her train of thought. Was it irony she could pound down a half bottle of vodka shots with the best of them and not feel a thing, but give her a cold remedy meant to help you sleep, and she was a goner?

Words became hazy, her fear of exposure growing dull. She realized her head was falling back to the couch, yet she had no energy to stop it. Hands comforted her, moved over her to lift her feet up on the couch. Dishes clanged in faraway tones and then someone with warm fingers brushed her hair from her face, pressing a heating pad to her chest and dropping a kiss on her burning forehead just before she succumbed to the quiet of her stuffy head.

Though she did remember to do one thing before she allowed her drug-induced haze to take over. It was as important to her as her “people shield” and had become almost a superstition of sorts. Or maybe it was just a stinkin’ crutch.

That’s probably what a therapist would say. Be it crutch, superstition, good-luck charm, whatever, no matter where Marybell Lyman was, who she was with, before she laid her head on a pillow and closed her eyes, she said a quick prayer just in case the universe really was one big ball of positive thinking. It was the prayer she said every night before she went to sleep.

Thank you for all these wonderful blessings, for food to eat, for my friends and for my job.

But please, please don’t take them away.

Two (#ud1e22c0a-4216-524a-b0b5-be1f303da6e6)

More banging on her door. Loud. Obnoxious. Heavy-handed.

Gravy sakes, could a sick woman just be left to die in splotchy, ugly red runny-nosed peace?

Not if Emmaline Amos and Dixie Davis are your friends, Marybell. With friendship came a certain amount of invasion of privacy, she’d learned. Still, she was going to kill them for waking her again, and just when she’d found a bit of sleep without the threat of coughing her left lung to implosion.

Muddled and fuzzy, Marybell sat upright, her head pulsing its angry protest, making her reach for another tissue. The last time she’d looked at the clock while the girls were still here, it was five in the afternoon. She’d slept for three solid hours.

Pulling herself to a standing position, she shivered as she left behind the warmth of the heating pad and made her way to the front door, jamming her hands into the deep pockets of her favorite, albeit ratty, flannel bathrobe.

She began to open it with a moment’s hesitation, warding off another coughing spell. Then she caught hold of her runaway fears, forcing herself to rationalize through the thick haze of cold meds. Clearly, her friends hadn’t made the connection to her past, and they’d already seen her. So seeing her twice without her makeup and hair gel wouldn’t change anything. What was done was done.

Still, Marybell kept her eyes averted—in hindsight, she’d wish her tongue had done the same. She yanked open the door, her eyelids at half-mast. “You know, you three are like havin’ really annoying sisters. Maybe akin to the stepsisters in Cinderella, only nicer and with smaller feet,” she grumbled, sneezing into her tissue. “How will I ever nab the prince if you pair of mother hens won’t let me rest? Would you have me search for my Prince Charming lookin’ like this?”

A delicious man with hair the color of a dark, exotic wood, worn just long enough to brush the collar of his black sweatshirt, partially covered by the navy-blue knit hat he wore, smiled a smile surely carved with the tool of a god. “Wow. Prince Charming’s a lot of pressure, don’t you think?”

Her breathing stalled while her heart crashed against her ribs and her eyes swiftly hit the floor.