What A Girl Wants (12 page)

“T
hat's hilarious.” Suz slapped her thigh, laughing. “Cow's-eye dissection?”

“Disgusting,” Audra choked out. “We're eating here. We don't need to be discussing this right now.”

“I'm the only one
eating
, unless you want some.” Suz picked up her plate of pancakes and thrust it in Audra's direction.

Audra turned away abruptly, pulled out her compact, and applied powder over the traces of last week's hive breakout.

“I think it's hilarious!” Suz said. “
Cow's-eye
dissection,” she repeated, obviously just to be annoying.

“Reminds me I need to pick up an application for medical school,” Diane said.

Suz couldn't quite stop laughing.

“Did you hear what I said?” Diane asked loudly. “Cow's-eye dissection reminds me that I need to pick up an application for medical school.”

The table remained silent for a moment. Then Suz took the
bait. “And why would you be picking up an application for medical school, oh woman of three majors, four minors, and half an MBA?”

“I'm thinking of studying to become a doctor.” Diane ran a hand through her hair, which was beginning to resemble a bird's nest this morning.

“Do you want to be a doctor now?” Hayley asked.

“No. Maybe I should go to law school. I could do law school.”

“Do you want to be a lawyer?”

“No.”

Diane really looked miserable. “Maybe you should become Bruno's protégé,” Hayley said, forgetting that Suz didn't know she'd been to see Audra's shrink. “You seemed very comfortable in his job environment.”

Diane crumpled a bit and sighed. “I wouldn't be surprised if he refused to see even Audra again after what happened.”

Suz frowned in confusion. “Wait a minute. . . .”

Audra gasped and set down the compact. “Did he say that? Thank God I have his emergency line.” She immediately pulled out her cell phone and dialed. “This has been
such
a week of ups and downs; I'm beginning to wonder if I'm becoming a manic-depressive . . . Hello, Bruno? It's Audra . . .”

She leaned away from the table as if doing so would somehow make it a more private conversation, gushed an apology into the phone, and then hung up and glared at Hayley. “I can't believe you didn't tell me that you kicked a slipper in Bruno's face. You said he didn't make you feel better but he didn't make you feel worse. You said
nothing
about bad behavior.” She shook her head in disgust and muttered something about “
so
embarrassing.”

“I did not kick the slipper in his face,” Hayley said quickly. “I kicked it over his head. It's possible he could have interpreted it as just a reflex. You're probably okay.”

“Wait a
minute
.” Suz looked from one girl to the next. She pointed her finger accusingly at Hayley. “You went to Bruno Maffri?”

Audra's expression morphed instantly from pissed to triumphant.

Suz whipped around and glared at her. “Aha! You were just waiting for the moment to strike!”

All due respect to Audra, Hayley didn't consider the results of the past few days a triumph, per se. Well, it may have been a triumph for Audra, but not exactly for Hayley. She leaned forward between the two girls to put it in perspective before things got ugly. But Suz wasn't finished. She moved her finger under Audra's nose. “You were just waiting for the right moment to stick it to me. That's why your hives went away. You think you've bested me.”

Audra pulled back slightly and looked with masterful condescension at the finger hovering under her nose. With deliberate slowness, she opened her purse and removed a black-lacquered perfume applicator. “Would anyone like a dab? It's new. It's called Sheik Factor. The scent is supposed to conjure images of being fawned over by gorgeous men with oiled chests.”

Nobody answered.

“Oh, please.” Audra waved one languid hand in the air in her best bored manner. “I wasn't hiding anything. And did you hear me gloat? I think not.”

“It was a silent gloat,” Suz insisted.

Audra calmly dabbed a spot of perfume on both sides of her neck. “Whatever.”

Suz didn't bite back this time. She just leaned forward slightly and sniffed the air around Audra. Hayley could see that she was already forgetting to be mad as her attention latched on to the mysterious perfume bottle and the notion of oiled body parts. Damn, Audra was good.

Unfortunately, Diane's already low supply of intuition hadn't kicked in. “To be honest, I was at the Bruno session and it wasn't pretty. And you'll notice that we haven't heard Hayley say anything that would attribute success to Bruno. In fact, from the memorial service to Bruno, the whole thing's more like a giant saga of failure than anything else.”

“Jesus,” Hayley muttered.

“Objectively speaking, of course,” Diane added, as if that made it sound better.

“Not true,” Audra said. “The Bruno teachings simply haven't kicked in yet. I can't speak for the other advice she's been getting, of course.”

“Was that some sort of underhanded comment directed at me?” Suz asked.

“I can't say I know what you mean. I wasn't specifically referring to your role in Hayley's calamities,” Audra said, looking down her nose. “I'm sorry your little two-step lesson plan didn't work out, but,
really,
Suz.” The “really” part was drawn out as far as it could go.

“It's not as if your plans worked out right either, remember? Your brilliant advice lost Hayley her job in the first place.”

“That's correct,” Audra said, proudly. “I helped her lose the
old
job she didn't want. And thanks to my brilliant advice, as you so rightly call it, Hayley now has a
new
job.”

Diane and Suz gasped loudly, in unison.

“Whoa. I do not have a new job. I have a job
interview
. If I'd taken a job, I would have told you. There is a very big difference. An interview in this job market is hardly significant enough to start making excited phone calls. Not to mention, getting the interview has more to do with Audra than it does with Bruno,” Hayley said.

“Well, if you want to give me all the credit, I'm not going to argue with that. But if you think Bruno's magic hasn't kicked in yet, things can only get better.” Audra carefully put her Sheik Factor bottle back in her tote.

Diane snorted. “Magic? I wouldn't go that far. The guy's good, but it's not magic.”

Hayley agreed with Diane, but she didn't want to make Audra feel bad. The thing was, regardless of who was responsible, what her pal considered a wild success was a situation that made Hayley feel like she was well on her way back to square one.

An interview for a job at a company suspiciously similar to the last one, and no guy. Hardly the point of this rather exhausting exercise in self-improvement.

Diane must have been thinking along the same lines. “Well, it sounds like the job situation is a little more under control, but I've got to ask about this Grant guy. Suz told me you had a perfect opportunity to ask him out. He approached you. He gave you his business card. So what happened?”

“The same as always.” Hayley looked down at her latte, mumbling, “Attractive people make me nervous. You all know there's, like, this whole sphere of aesthetically pleasing people that I simply cannot deal with. Which I'm sure is the major reason I messed up my chance with Grant.”

Diane's forehead wrinkled. “I'm not sure I understand. . . .”

“
I
don't even understand it. I figure, you know, I'm above
average. I'm not saying I'm some genius supermodel who's trying to save the world, but I'm not a completely repulsive human being.” Too brightly Hayley added, “Now, give me an ugly guy any day and I'll just walk right up and introduce myself.”

“That's the part I don't understand.” Diane looked at her dubiously. “I think we've pretty much exhausted that ‘he's so attractive he scares me' theory.”

The three girls nodded and Diane continued. “To begin with, I understood Suz's exercise was designed to help you expand your horizons beyond the small circle of men who happened to approach you, to a wider circle of men, attractive or not, but hopefully attractive, whom you were mentally prepared to approach and proposition.”

“I agree,” Audra said, flashing Suz a conciliatory smile. “And I must say that I find it hard to believe that with such a small amount of time passing between lesson and practice, everything Suz taught you could go to hell in a handbasket just because the man has beautiful forearms and good teeth.”

“They're extraordinary forearms, not just beautiful. Otherworldly,” Hayley corrected. “And I've never seen teeth so gorgeous.”

“Regardless, the fact remains that, as you so eloquently put it, just the other day you dry-humped a delicious Spaniard clothed in Armani trousers in a coat closet, with no problem.
Armani
, okay? Just try and convince me this Sergio wasn't aesthetically pleasing.”

“I was completely wasted. I still can't verify his nationality
or
his pants. For all I really know, the handsome Armani-clad Spaniard might actually have been some creep from New Jersey wearing synthetic pants from Target.”

Audra shuddered. “Really?”

“Why do you always dis New Jersey?” Diane asked.

“I don't know. Probably because it's a foreign place with a bad reputation that no one from San Francisco understands or has ever visited,” Hayley teased.

Diane huffed. “I have relatives in New Jersey, remember?”

“Have you ever been to see them?”

“No,” Diane confessed. “We make them come here.”

“He wasn't from New Jersey, believe me. I was there. Although I can't speak to the pants.” Suz turned to Hayley. “You're not going to get out of this so easily.”

Audra used her pinkie to carefully tuck a few glossy strands of escaped hair back behind her ear. “Diane's right. Level of attractiveness can't possibly be the fundamental issue. When we watched that . . . that . . .
film
, you said you had a big problem. An overall problem with urban malaise. You have a problem getting yourself to make any kind of forward movement. In any scenario. Not just with men.”

“And I really thought we'd handled the guy part of that whole issue at the Beer Garden.” Suz shook her head. “It was like you regressed or something.”

“Yeah,” Diane said. “It's like that movie where they give the retarded man some pills and he gets really, really smart, but in a horrible, tragic twist, after he peaks at some genius level of intelligence, he becomes even more retarded than he was originally.”

Hayley rolled her eyes. “Yeah, it's just like that. Great. Fabulous.” She slumped back in her chair, sulking.

The three girls looked at each other over Hayley's head. After a pause Diane said, “You know, Suz is the only one who's actually seen Grant. What about this guy has you so crazy?”

Suz ran her tongue over her lips and wiggled her eyebrows.

Hayley giggled. “Well, there's that. But on the whole, it's still a bit unclear. I'll just say that up front. I mean, aside from the fact that he's good-looking, he's got an attitude thing going on. I think he knows he makes me a little off balance, and I'm not sure I want to like a guy who likes to do that.”

“Sounds like shades of the Asshole Complex,” Diane said.

Hayley sighed. “I don't know if that's quite it. He was really nice about the Fred thing that first time we met, and also he's a policeman. He's out there keeping the peace, defending our community, you know, doing those policeman things. It's kind of a mix. I don't know, whatever it is, I'm just really into it. Even the sexy pseudointimidation part.”

“Thwack! ‘Please, sir, may I have another?' Thwack!”

Hayley snorted with laughter. “Uh, right, Suz. Something like that.”

“When good girls love bad, bad boys,” Audra teased. “Really, a man in uniform. What honest woman doesn't like that? A man in uniform who obviously is attracted to you, who has just enough attitude to be interesting without being—we are hoping—excuse my French, an asshole. No contest. Seriously, though, I do wish you'd get on with asking him out, because he might have some good-looking friends for the rest of us.”

“There's no such thing as a millionaire policeman, Audra,” Diane said.

“I didn't say he couldn't be corrupt.”

Hayley tossed back the last few drops of her latte and wiped her mouth with a napkin. Crumpling the napkin in her hand, she said, “You know the thing that's really bugging me? It's the wink. What do you think that was about? And is it normal for strange men to act so cavalier about personal space? Does that mean he
likes me or he's trying to scare me? And why do you really think he came to the memorial service? Does it mean he has a conscience? Or does it mean he thinks I'm a slam-dunk? But if he thinks I'm a slam-dunk and is therefore interested, why would he leave without asking me out?”