Page 83 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
I reach Leo, who, other than the drying vomit splattered on his tuxedo pants and dress shoes, looks like he just stepped away from a dinner with an ambassador. And then I drop down to a knee and gently rouse Maddie.
“Your nanny threw up on my shoes,” says Leo, unnecessarily.
“Childcare provider. Where is Junie?” I ask Maddie, who’s just opened her eyes behind her fake glasses. They are a shock of green in a world of cool shadows and golden streetlights.
Maddie manages to look scornfully defiant as I help her sit up—an impressive feat, truly, to still look like a czarina while reclining on a sidewalk—and I notice that her red lipstick is still immaculate when she replies, “She left me on the sidewalk because Gatsbys and Mothmen don’t get along.” She pronounces this statement with great import, like she’s preambling a talk on bipartisanship and trade agreements.
Something dangerous rolls through me at the admission that she’d been left alone, a spill of red ink in clear water, and I bite back the words crowding behind my lips, piling on my tongue. I don’t roar at the sky. I don’t threaten to handcuff her to my bed so she can’t go wander down dark, cold streets drunk and alone.
But, oh god, I want to.
“You were going to chase after Mothman,” Maddie says to Leo, the suspicion as heavy in her words as alcohol. She’s pointed a finger at him—or at where she seems to think he is, but it’s currently pointed at a clump of frat boys who are dressed as different Dolly Partons. “That wasn’t nice of you.”
“I thought I’d say hello to Junie,” Leo says, the neutral words layered with cool indifference. Maybe a graze of malice.
I meet his eyes, which are suddenly the dangerous silver of my high school bully. Of Junie’s high school bully. There are a lot of years between that Leo and the Leo of now, but when it comes to Junie Ellis, I don’t know that there will ever be enough.
“Okay,” I say. “We’re done here. Maddie, can you—no? Okay.” I help Maddie to standing, my hands wrapped around her shoulders to keep her from toppling over. I grit my teeth when I feel how cold she is through the thin fabric of her turtleneck.
“Thank you for staying with Maddie until I got here,” I tell Leo.
Leo lifts a shoulder, expression bored.
“And keep away from Junie Ellis,” I add.
His beautiful mouth twists into something bitter, but he doesn’t speak, only inclines his head in the way of someone acknowledging something has been said. And then he leaves, all wide shoulders and tailored wool and platinum hair, vanishing into the bustle and crush of the party.
“He even makes—hic—an exit like Gatsby—hic—” Maddie sways and I help her navigate the sidewalk until we get to the end of the block and past the pedestrian barricades. We get to my car and I help her inside, not waiting for her to try to buckle herself in before doing it myself, and then slide behind the wheel.
I take a deep breath before I start the car. I have never felt like this.Ever. I don’t know what to do with all these wild instincts, which belong in a 1940s pulp fiction novel andnotin a present-day, non-romantic, sex-based, 1099-implicated relationship.
We drive the seven blocks home in silence. I park and turn off the car, and then help her out of the passenger’s side and up the porch steps. I stop her just inside the front door to kneel and remove her high heels. She has a small blot of pinkened skin on the side of her thigh with pinprick specks of blood trying to bead through. A scrape.
“Madelyn,” I say calmly. “Have you seen what that sidewalk has done to you?”
Maddie blinks down at me and then narrows her viridian eyes. “You sound excessively judgmental right now,” she says with disapproval in her tone. “That sidewalk was very good to me.”
She hiccups, loses her balance, and then grabs onto my shoulders for support.
I finish pulling off her heels and set them to the side. And then I stand up, staring down at her, making a decision.
“To the shower,” I say, and start guiding her to the stairs.
“Ooh, sexy,” she says. “But wait, don’t you want to screw me while I’m wearing these thigh-highs?”
I do want to screw her while she’s wearing those thigh-highs. And that turtleneck, which clings deliciously to her pert tits and then the curves of her waist and belly. And that skirt, which starred so naughtily in that very improper selfie she sent me.
“You need a shower, Ms. Kowalczk, and then water, and then bed.”
She looks back at me over her shoulder as we go up to my floor. Even soused, she manages an expression of such unutterable disdain that it nearly knocks me back.
Until I remember how cold her arms and feet had been when I’d touched her. Until I remember the scrape on her thigh.
“Up,” I say sternly, and her disdain immediately melts into a pout.
“You’re somean,” she mumbles as I herd her over the top of the steps and down the hallway, into the bathroom.
“I am going to undress you,” I tell her as I close the door to my en suite. “I’m going to make sure you don’t have any more damage from the sidewalk, which was very good to you. And then I’m going to wash you. Is that okay?”
