Preternatural

Hammered shit, her Aunt Lydia used to say: I feel like hammered shit. The image made Tessa snort giggles through her nose until that hurt, too. Unlike the rest of the McGills, Aunt Lydia had steadfastly refused to accept Jesus in her life, and remained irreverent to the end, saying exactly what was on her mind until she turned fifty-three and went down to uterine cancer in less than a month, which was probably what had made her feel like hammered shit all those years. Oh, my aching head! Tessa thought. I'm two years up on Aunt Lydia and I feel like hammered shit. I'm going to need all my crystals this morning!

She squeezed her eyes shut and listened while Eddie rummaged through the papers piled on her vanity until even that much noise was more than she could stand. "Eddie, for goddess' sake, focus and click! What do I pay you for?"

"For washing your panties, obviously!" Eddie sniffed and stopped rummaging, still twirling the ice-blue bikini on his finger.

Tessa pulled herself upright in the bed. "I mean, seriously! Carole Somebody from Warner's. You think. What did she want?"

"Something about you reading a part for Larry Koster," Eddie said, and went tootling off with the bundle of lingerie, probably to hand-wish it in the sink in his own bath downstairs off the kitchen.

Tessa sighed with the weariness of lifetimes and ventured one small white dancer's foot out from under the duvet onto a very cold parquet floor. What the hell kind of headgames was the building management playing this morning, and where the hell was the heat? By law every building in Manhattan was supposed to have heat by six-thirty, and here it was nearly nine. In Washington Heights they'd have heat, but in this seven-figure luxury dump...

Feeling like Bette Davis, or maybe Albee's Martha, Tessa trailed into the master bath in her slip. What the hell had she done with last night's dress, or had Eddie spirited it off to the cleaners' already? She took her crystals out of their case, setting one at each of the four cardinal points of the shower stall; then she hung the mother crystal on its thong about her neck so that it dangled precisely between her breasts. She ran the water in the shower which, mercifully, was hot. Her crystals, the hottest water the building management could muster, and she might be human by the time Carole Somebody called back. Then she would politely tell her to go to hell. Larry Koster wanted Tessa to do a guest-spot on his prime-time cop show and, except for the occasional charity telethon or Starstudded Special, Tessa didn't do television.

Besides, Tessa also didn't work with any actor she'd slept with, which for a while had made her choices pretty narrow. If Larry had asked her way back when she'd have advised him against squandering his Shakespearean talents on the small screen, but Larry hadn't asked her - about that, or anything. Which was why, Tessa thought wryly, Larry was a megamillionaire, whereas she was -

Whereas she was, come to think of it, she decided as the steam rose to the ceiling and the water streamlined her face and made tendrils of her wild gypsy hair against her neck, going to skip Carole Somebody entirely and call Larry at home as soon as she got out of the shower. Assuming he hadn't changed the number again. There'd been a point in his paranoid life when he'd changed his number every month, acting all sorts of defensive if a friend of a friend gave it to anyone he hadn't authorized to have it. Poor Larry! Tessa thought, realizing she hadn't seen him, except on-screen, for at least a lifetime.

#

Laurence Koster had been born swaybacked, and there was nothing he could do about it. No matter how much he'd worked out in his youth, building himself up from a seven-stone weakling living on fruit salad because it was all a starving actor could afford, to a fine specimen of manhood whose directors always let him take his shirt off for a role, he remained convinced this congenital condition made his broad ass jut out unnaturally. It humiliated him. These days, between pictures and careless about his weight again, he felt as if his ass was almost as wide as the quarterhorse's he rode in on.