“Damn Devin Black, anyway,” Pagan whispered back. “I know I’m single. Why don’t I feel that way?”
“Have you heard from him since Berlin?”
“Not a peep.”
She’d been kissed before. And more. So why couldn’t she stop thinking about him?
“I said, thanks!”
Pagan focused. Nancy was waving a 45 at her, the record Pagan had brought her as a hostess gift. Thomas had kindly carried the 45 in from their car, tucked under his arm, and she must’ve daydreamed about Devin Black right through him handing it over to Nancy. They were all now in the crowded living room with its white baby grand and Mark Rothko paintings.
“You’re going to love it,” Pagan said, gesturing at the record. “It hit the R & B charts earlier this year, but it should’ve been a huge crossover hit. She sings like nobody you’ve heard before.”
“Aretha Franklin, ‘Won’t Be Long,’” Nancy read off the label. “Let’s play this hot plate.”
She pushed through the crowd toward a huge console where they kept the record player. “Hang on, Sammy,” Nancy said to the slender man noodling on the piano. “Pagan says we need to check this out.”
Pagan shrank back a little. She hadn’t planned on her record taking over the party or interrupting Sammy Davis, Jr., at the piano. She was already infamous thanks to her drunken exploits. The last thing she needed was to upstage anyone.
But Sammy shrugged, took his hands off the keys and flashed her a grin. “Hey, Pagan, baby,” he said. “Looking good.”
“Same, Sammy,” she said, smiling back. “Sounding good, too.”
Nancy dropped the needle and stepped back. A jazzy piano riff and some cymbals ruffled over the conversational murmur in the room. Sammy nodded his head in time with the beat. Nancy followed suit.
“Baby, here I am...” A woman’s voice cut through the air like a preacher’s, lit with heavenly inspiration, except she was singing about how she couldn’t wait for her lover to return.
Nancy’s eyes widened. She elbowed her husband, and he nodded, his foot tapping. Three tipsy women sprawled on the couch stopped talking and sat up.
The beat was good, if conventional. The piano riff was catchy, and the woman’s longing for lovemaking was a tad scandalous. But that voice. It lifted everything higher and then tore it all apart, igniting a desire to move.
“Dig it!” Sammy said, and grabbed Pagan’s hand to spin her around. He had a light touch and lighter feet. Others watched as they danced in a low-key, exploratory way. The beat became familiar, and they picked up speed.
Nancy tapped her feet as she sidled up to Thomas, holding out her hand. He bowed and expertly swung her out. Her skirt fanned like a cape.
The piano rumbled with anticipatory joy as Aretha sang, “My daddy told me...”
Frank wandered in with Juliet Prowse and watched as the girls on the couch jumped up to jive. Juliet pirouetted, and Frank took her hand out of midair to do the Lindy Hop.
“Her voice—it’s like a lightning strike,” Thomas shouted to Pagan. “Or no, maybe my English isn’t good.”
“Sounds cool to me!” Sammy said, twirling Pagan as he brought her back in. They circled Nancy and Thomas, then crossed, changing partners in one smooth move on the beat. Nancy was laughing, waving at her husband, who grabbed a girl from the couch and jumped in to join the fray.
A few men in casual suits watched by the sliding glass doors, until the bikini girls from the pool noticed the crowd moving in time and stormed the living room to dance in their own wet footprints. The room filled with hoots and shimmying bodies. They were one now, connected by that clear, dangerous voice.
It reached a crescendo, crying out to her lover to hurry, hurry! The urgency convulsed inside Pagan’s heart. It became her voice, calling out to Devin Black.
The song ended and the girls in bikinis, Frank, Thomas—everyone was laughing, raising their glasses in salute, yelling at Nancy to play it again. Who was that?
But Pagan’s head was spinning. Her self-control was diffusing like cherry syrup in a Shirley Temple. She took a deep breath of the ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke. The pungent scent pushed a pang of longing through her. When she drank, cigarettes and alcohol had been twin siblings in her hands. She had a vivid memory of Devin Black handing her a pack of Winstons, and the longing for the old days before she’d become a killer, for a drink, for Devin, all tangled up into a huge knot under her breastbone.
But Devin wasn’t here. She might never see his sardonic smile again, and the martini in Sammy Davis, Jr.’s hand would go very nicely with a cigarette instead.
Who do you want to be, Pagan? After four months of daily AA meetings, weekly therapy and gratitude for every sober breath. She could be the girl who didn’t drink. Or she could be the messed-up loser who did.
“Going to get some air,” she said to Thomas, and wound her way through the bodies, out into the clear air of the arcade. The swimmers and couples drinking and talking out there pushed her farther past the lounge chairs out onto the lawn.
Peace at last. She took a deep breath, removed her heels and sank her stocking feet into the damp grass. Above, the stars were startlingly clear, and the noise from the glowing glass mansion sank away into the night.
A shadow moved to her left. She startled, spinning.
“Well, if it isn’t the notorious Pagan Jones.”
Out of the darkness beside the arcade stepped a familiar form, tall, knife-thin, with dark hair and eyes like the ocean during a storm.
Her whole body wanted to open itself, to stretch out to him. Her pulse thrummed through her veins all the way down to her fingertips.
Devin Black was back.
Chatsworth and Hollywood, California
December 15, 1961
BAILAMOS
More of a statement than a question the man asks a woman: Shall we dance?
“Devin.” She breathed it more than said it. Had she conjured him with her thoughts? She took two steps toward him, on her tiptoes. “Are you real?”
“That’s a matter for debate.” He smiled at her with a delicious fondness that sent blood rushing to her cheeks. “You, however, look very real.”
The impulse to obliterate the distance between them, to throw her arms around him, was almost irresistible. The fierce way he’d kissed her the last time they met was imprinted on her body like a brand. But something made her pull herself up short.
His gaze may have been more than friendly, but he hadn’t walked up to her or taken her in his arms. He stood at a distance, all coiled grace in his custom-made suit, keeping a good six feet between them.
It had been four months and two days since they last saw each other. Anything could’ve happened. She needed to reverse the overeager impression she’d given him, and fast.
“Delighted to see you haven’t been slaughtered in the line of duty,” she said, keeping her tone light. Years of actor training came in handy at times like this. “Last thing I needed was to be haunted by your ghost.”
He took a step toward her. “It’s good to see you.”
His natural Scottish accent, which he could turn off or on, depending on which persona he needed to be, warmed as he spoke more personally.