The Blessed - By Tonya Hurley Page 0,21
embarrassment than hurt. “You used me. I believed you.”
“No, actually, I didn’t get the chance to use you, remember?”
“So maybe if I would have slept with you, you might have cared? What a joke,” she nearly growled, gripping his arm with force.
He shuffled around, pouting in place with his head down for a second like a little boy, waiting for his time-out to be over. She released his arm and pushed him away from her.
“I almost died for you,” Agnes said.
“I almost waited for you,” he said.
As if they were of equal importance.
7 Lucy was immediately ushered into the VIP area, as usual, at Sacrifice, the afterhours DUMBO club. Both bridges—the Brooklyn and the Manhattan—illuminated the dark space, creating auras around the celebrity guests and patrons. She was wearing rhinestone drop earrings with several gold spikes radiating out of the bottom of each. Her hair was freshly colored blond—sleek, straight, and shiny. She was wearing a short gray couture tunic dress with fox fur sleeves dyed royal blue. Her suede stilettos were dyed the same blue, with gold spiked heels to match the ones coming out of her earrings.
It is amazing, she thought, how quickly you can become accustomed to A-list treatment, whether you deserve it or not, or to ultimately losing it. Everyone did at some point. It was like death. Always looming and eventually your fate. Even more amazing was the short ride from getting it to demanding it to needing it. It was as addictive as any drug.
As she looked around for someone she really knew well, there were few hellos. Just stares from underage insiders with fast-food opinions, Botoxed curiosity hounds, and surgically rerouted Joker faces with etched bellies, unnaturally arched brows, and swollen lips framing tight, twisted-up smiles impossible to discern from frowns. Digital attention-seekers all, with a million questions they were dying to ask, the answers to which they were dying to sell to the highest bidder. It was a cage match of ambition more intense than the climb up any corporate ladder or high school hierarchy. A bloodsport that smelled more like expensive perfume than perspiration.
The competitiveness was palpable, viral. She recognized it in others because she was one of them, one of the afflicted. Riding any wave that would take them to the golden shore of their Fifth Avenue fantasies. It didn’t matter whether they caught a clean one in or tumbled and crashed on the sand, they were there just the same. Different day, same night. All the same.
Jesse was ensconced in his dimly lit booth, alone, by choice, observing this mini-universe unfold like a pocketsized Hubble telescope. He was perched in a primo spot with a bird’s-eye view—the lit-up city and bridges, his backdrop, and an even more appropriate garbage barge passing behind him down the East River. He was dressed all in black, as usual, which made it easier for him to disappear into the background, except for his eyes, which were always watching, and his hands, which were always typing, looking like the Invisible Man in reverse. She caught his eye and turned away just as he raised his finger to his brow and pointed at her in some kind of obnoxious salute. She wasn’t sure whether it was a creepy acknowledgment that she’d arrived or that he was there. Either way, he was the last person she wanted to see.
A high-pitched but aggressive voice Lucy didn’t recognize cut through the thump of the DJ’s bass speaker, coming at her from her blind side.
“You bitch!” the apoplectic socialite screamed, slapping at the air around Lucy’s head. “You ass-covering sellout!”
Lucy had good peripheral vision and even better survival instincts, and easily sidestepped the raging junior leaguer. But the girl was quick and determined. She turned around and caught a few strands of Lucy’s locks in her manicured claws, tugging her hair over her eyes and her head forward. She couldn’t see a thing, except for the girl’s copper glittery stilettos driven into the stained red indoor/outdoor carpet beneath her, illuminated by electronic flashes from cameras and cell phones. Lucy grabbed for the girl’s legs and took her down at the knees, driving her onto her back to woots and screams, mostly from the guys who took all the panty shots as fan service. Oddly, of all things, Lucy was most worried about her bracelet. That it might get damaged.
Security arrived before a full-on girl fight could break out, and the two VIPs were involuntarily separated. Lucy finally got a