Page 29 of Melt With You

Dori shook her head.

‘Rocky Horror,’ Nina announced, grinning broadly.

‘You all still go to that?’ Dori was surprised. She remembered attending Rocky Horror shows at The Majestic in high school, but she didn’t recall ever seeing any grown-ups in the crowd. She must not have been paying attention.

‘Of course,’ Nina said. ‘We get dressed up, drink a little. It’s a blast. What else are you going to do at midnight in this small town? Hit the Creamery? No offense to Gael, but that’s not much of a night.’

Well, yeah, that’s what Dori’s crowd generally did. Hung out at the Creamery until show time, and then went to Rocky Horror at midnight. She recalled exactly how ancient she’d felt when Rocky Horror had been re-released on DVD in honor of the 25th anniversary. Many of the actors had been interviewed for special features on the disc, and she was horrified at how dignified they all looked. Barry Bostwick with his silver hair and Tim Curry looking more like a lawyer than a lover. Damn. The man should always wear fishnets, in Dori’s opinion. It should be law. Or, at least, he should in her fantasies.

She realized that Nina had moved onto a new subject. ‘Do you have a favorite character? You must go as Frank-N-Furter, right? With your big eyes, full lips, dark hair …’

Dori nodded, thinking since that’s who she had dressed as in high school, why stop now?

‘I’m usually Magenta,’ Nina said, patting her beehive hairdo, ‘and Bette likes to switch.’

‘You bet I do,’ Bette agreed, coming in from the back with a cardboard tray of coffees.

‘We were talking about Rocky Horror characters.’

‘And I was talking about something else entirely,’ Bette grinned, giving Nina a kiss on the cheek and making Dori’s eyes widen. There was a whole world that she’d never known about when she was a kid, a whole level of sexuality that she’d never even considered, like an electric current running through the conversations all the time. Bette should have a neon sign hanging over her head that flashed SEX, SEX, SEX. ‘Are you coming with us Friday?’ Bette asked, as she handed Dori her coffee.

‘Nina just told me. I’m sure I can find something to wear,’ Dori said. She was extremely excited at the thought of hitting The Majestic as a grown-up. The theater had a bar in the front, and she and her friends had occasionally scored drinks with fake IDs. But this would be the first time she could drink there as a grown-up.

Except, she couldn’t exactly flash her ID, could she? Her driver’s license had been issued in 2006. That might cause some consternation, right? The worst fake ID of all time, one printed with a year two decades in the future. But why worry about being carded? She glanced at her reflection in the mirror behind the counter and, although she looked good, she felt every single day of her thirty-eight years.

‘I’m going to be Columbia this time,’ Bette said, breaking through her thoughts. ‘You do my make-up?’

‘Of course.’

‘And mine?’ Nina asked.

She nodded. This was one thing she had no worries about. Putting on make-up always soothed her. Which was a good thing, because as she was retouching her own make-up in the back room, she heard Van arrive.

‘Where’s the new kid?’ he called out, and her hands started to shake.

Dori hadn’t been much into sexual experimentation, ever. Not even in college, when her friends bounced around from boyfriend to boyfriend as if each man they met had an expiration date stamped on his ass. Dori had always been on the lookout for the next real love of her life. The next long-term boyfriend before she found the final one. That’s what Bryce had been – or so she’d thought, anyway. The one. Mr Right rather than Mr Right Now.

Where Dori had bounced around was in college. She’d started at UC Santa Barbara, but couldn’t focus. So she’d transferred to a junior college, trying to appease her parents, who weren’t pleased with the thought that she wouldn’t have a four-year degree. And then finally she’d said ‘fuck it’ and did what she’d wanted to do from the start. She entered beauty school, got her license, and started doing make-up. She’d had a friend who worked behind the scenes on movies and Dori began hanging out with her on sets, filling in when Joelle was swamped, and soon people saw that Dori could handle the hectic schedule on her own. She was in demand right away. But while her professional life seemed almost cosmically blessed, her love life didn’t follow suit. At least, not until she moved to New York and met Bryce.

Then everything seemed to fall into place.

Van found her in the back and he wrapped his arms around her slim waist.

‘Last night was incredible,’ he said, nuzzling the nape of her neck.

She was surprised by the warmth of him, by the way her body naturally responded to his touch. It hadn’t been that long since she’d been with someone. Not counting Luke. She had lived with a man for two years, had been granted access to his body whenever she wanted. But this felt different. Maybe it was because of her current predicament, her feeling of being an alien from the twenty-first century. But while she craved human contact, Van craved something else. Or something more. And what Van craved right now was a quickie in the backroom.

‘No.’ Dori shook her head quickly.

He took her head in his hands and made her nod instead, as if he were a puppet master and she was his marionette.

‘You’re not serious,’ she added.

‘We can’t do it here because there’s only the one bathroom. People are always knocking.’ He seemed to be speaking from experience. ‘But the stockroom …’

Dori looked at him in the mirror. Being up nearly all night hadn’t affected his looks at all. He’d pulled his long hair back into a ponytail and, with the hair off his face, the striking blue of his eyes stood out even more than usual. He had a cocky, I-am-so-good-looking-how-could-you-possibly-think-of-resisting-me? expression on his face. Inside, she was sixteen again. But maybe she always was. Maybe even in 2008 she still felt like a teenager trapped in a grown-up’s body. She wondered if other people felt the same way, wondered if that was what Luke had meant the other night. That there was no such thing as growing up. Your exterior might change – hair turn gray, wrinkles pull at the corners of your eyes – but the core remained the same. For him, still the high school stud. For her, the wallflower.

But she wasn’t a wallflower now. Not with Van scooting her out of the bathroom and up the narrow flight of stairs to the stockroom above the salon. And just as the scent of her home had brought her back to childhood, the medley of smells in this room called her back to the years she’d spent working at the store. An uncanny fragrance of sawdust from the unfinished walls combined with perfumes, hair spray, and nail polish from a broken bottle. She’d spent hours up in this tiny stockroom, organizing lipsticks and eyeliners, mascaras in multi-hues. The music reached them, and the heat rose. There was a ceiling fan going all the time back here, the whirr-whirr soothing to her.

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