“Nothing to tell.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“Really,” I say. “It’s really just like… a facial basically. From a… beauty house. Like any other beauty house. The usual severings.”
“Severings?”
“Did I say severings? Services, I meant of course.”
Hud Hudson grins at me from his stylish shadows. “Just like a facial, huh?”
I nod. I’m getting sort of hot in the face, the way he’s looking at me.
“A facial that makes you forget you can’t swim?” he presses.
“I just… forgot that I can’t swim. Separately.”
He’s still looking at my face. I feel him taking in the skin. What is he taking in? If the mirror weren’t covered, I could see. He takes a deep drag of his cigarette. “Why am I getting… the very distinct impression… that you’re holding out on me here, Belle?”
“Why is that mirror covered with my dress?”
“It’s drying under the heating vent. Also, that mirror is hostile. Some mirrors are, as I’m sure you know.”
Hostile? He hands me his cigarette again and I take a drag, tasting his roses. Feeling Hud Hudson’s eyes watching me through the smoke. He’s sitting very close. I’m surrounded by his leather and dark woods. Deep in the stylish shadows.
“Come on, Belle,” he whispers. “Don’t you want to make me weep with envy?”
I watch the dress rise and fall against the mirror glass in the window breeze. Is my reflection beneath the dress? Is she there in the glass? I can feel her looking at me through Mother’s red silk. Shaking her head. Putting a finger to her very red lips. Don’t. No. Secret.
“Just some steam and apocalypse in the end,” I say.
He looks at me. Apocalypse?
“Eucalyptus,” I correct. Funny how those words slip and slip.
“Interesting. Because I have to tell you, it really doesn’t look like just a facial to me.”
“It doesn’t?” What does it look like?
He shakes his head. “A little more than marine algae masks going on down there in the Treatment Room, I think. Call me crazy.”
“What are you, some sort of detective of beauty?”
He smiles. “Of beauty. You could say that.” He’s leaning in even closer now. Almost like we’re fucking but we’re not, obviously. I’m here and he’s there, isn’t he? If I had the mirror, I could know for sure.
“Why do you want to know so badly?” I ask him.
Something flashes in his eyes then. Some dark emotion. A wound exposed. It’s there and then it’s gone. He smiles over it. “Because I’m just like you.”
“Like me?” There’s a word for what I saw there in his eyes, but it’s slipped my mind, filled and shining as it is with roses, slipped my tongue muffled by the red silk. “How are you like me?”
He takes my hand and places it on his cheek. Terribly smooth. Tiger grass maybe? An Orpheus flower peptide. A fermented tea elixir or some sort of moon drink. Makes me shiver. Haven’t shivered in a long time at the touch of someone else’s sin. Skin. Even my hand is shivering at the smoothness of Hud Hudson. Or is it shivering at something else?
“I told you,” he whispers, his eyes on my eyes. “I’m a fellow freak.”
He should move away from me now, he’s so close. Too close. But he just stays there. I feel his whiskey breath in my face. I smell all of his skin products—he definitely uses a cloud jelly. Or is it a snow mist? With the late-afternoon light coming through the windows, I notice there’s a long, jagged scar across his face.
“Why not just get a treatment yourself, then?” I ask him. “If you’re a freak.”
He smiles darkly now. “Because I’m not one of the anointed ones, am I, Belle?”
“Anointed ones?”
“They only seem to give them to very special people. Like you. You’re very special, did you know that?”
“Me?” In the corner of the room, the red dress waves and the roses gleam. I shake my head no, but Hud Hudson is nodding yes.
“What they call perfect. A Perfect Candidate. The rest of us bottom-feeders have to pay. Too rich for my blood, sadly. I’m a poor peasant, didn’t you know?”
I look at him, his clothes and his face literally glowing with money just like this hotel room. Not just money. Style, Mother would have said. Now that’s style, Belle. “You don’t look like a peasant to me.”