Keeping Secrets in Seattle - By Brooke Moss Page 0,10
was out of energy from chasing Kim around the table. I had no more fight left in me. “Fine. No phone. Are you happy now?”
She shared a grin with Betsy and handed me the BlackBerry. I looked at the screen and groaned. “My mother?”
Betsy raised a pierced eyebrow at her girlfriend. “Well played, babe.”
“Someone had to do it. Violet is becoming a shut-in. Like the writer in that one movie…” Kim snapped her fingers a few times.
“I know which one you’re thinking of.” Betsy reached over and adjusted one of Kim’s peacock feathers. “The one where she is obsessed with soup…”
“Yeah, that one.”
“What was that called?”
“I dunno.”
I scowled. “I’m not a shut-in.”
Kim led me away from the table with a knowing smirk across her glittering face. “No, really, you are. Now go get in the shower, and for the love of heaven, shave your legs.”
By the time we left for the club, I was dressed in vintage tiger-print cigarette pants, a form-fitting black sequined tank top, black platform heels, and had the sash from my favorite bathrobe pinned to my butt. Kim had teased my hair into wild spirals all over my head and pinned tiger ears to the top of my ’do. I’d painted stripes across one of my cheeks. I looked like a tiger of the night. Yeesh, for a woman on the rebound, I was going all out.
When we arrived at The Lotus, the crowd spilling out onto the sidewalks was fascinating, to say the least. Dozens of species of animals as well as scattered handfuls of people in normal clothes milled around. All the staff members were walking around carrying plastic whips and wearing T-shirts that bore the words ZOO KEEPER on them.
We danced our way through the thick crowd to the pulsating beat of the techno music and approached a corner booth upholstered in deep-purple velvet. A group of Kim’s and Betsy’s friends were waiting for us. As introductions were called back and forth, I greeted a pig, a duck, a goldfish—this girl achieved the look with the use of a heck of a lot of yellow plastic wrap—and what I was fairly sure was supposed to be an elephant, but the paper trunk hadn’t survived the Seattle drizzle.
I fell into the booth, squished between Kim and the duck, who immediately pointed out his boyfriend, a tall man across the dance floor dressed as a dinosaur. “They were all out of animal costumes,” he said, laughing. He took a drink of something bright red and fizzy and waved happily at the dino. “Oh, well, there were dinosaurs around here at one time, right? That still counts.”
Guess I won’t be making out with Kyle tonight. I scanned the dance floor for what appeared to be a single male.
As if reading my mind, Kim shouted over the music, “Hey, everyone. We need to find Violet someone to get her freak on with.” Everyone immediately lifted their drinks in an impromptu toast, causing my face to heat up underneath the tiger stripes. “Someone hot, cool, and not engaged. Oh, almost forgot—he has to be a straight male.”
The goldfish girl put her drink down and booed.
We spent the next hour or so dancing to the thud, thud, thud of music and downing multicolored drinks served in test tubes. I cheered wildly when Kim won second place in the costume contest. She was edged out by a woman dressed as a unicorn wearing nothing from the waist up but body paint and a foam horn. I excused myself to find the restroom right as the floor opened up for a couple of Dalmatians to do some old-school break dancing.
Bumping my way through the thick herd of dancers, I headed toward the back of the club where the bathrooms were. I checked my pocket for my BlackBerry but came up empty.
It’s time to meet someone else. I nodded at a random man dressed as a giraffe. This was going to be a baptism by immersion.
As I walked around the end of the bar, my cool, sexy persona disappeared as my feet slid on some spilt beer underneath me. Yelping loudly, I skidded across the floor and landed on my rear against the men’s room door with a thud.
“Whoa. We’ve got a tiger down,” a cheerful voice called above me. “I repeat, a tiger down.”
Before I could process what was happening, a strong pair of hands had gripped me under the arms and pulled me back to a standing position. I pushed