Chapter 63
“I’m think I’m in love.”
Dee stopped, mid-sip of vodka soda, and searched Tara’s face for a sign that she was kidding. No way in hell this woman — who had cut a wide and impressive swath through the FitFams coach community and helped many a married client indulge her bi-curious fantasies (forever ruining them for cunnilingus from their husbands) — was in love.
“Are you serious?” Shelly asked, her feet tucked under her tush on Dee’s cream-colored, three-piece B&B Atoll Soft sofa designed by Antonio Cittero and placed under a window in her sunny New York City apartment.
Tara, sitting on the edge of the couch with her elbows on her knees, looked at her hands as if ashamed. “I know. It was a surprise to me too.”
Dee couldn’t quite identify what she was feeling. There was a twist in her gut. Was this betrayal? Like maybe Tara had been lying all these years, when she promised that her loyalties would be to her friends and her friends only?
Hook-ups were supposed to be a hobby. As teenagers the girls had considered making a blood pact — no marriage, no kids, three amigas forever — in Tara’s backyard. They’d crawled into her old, spiderwebbed playhouse and huddled around a ceramic kitchen knife, planning to drag it across their palms the way they’d seen in so many movies and shows. But one little nick on Shelly’s hand sent her into overdramatic spasms of pain, so they’d ditched that plan and swapped spitty handshakes instead.
“Wow,” Dee said, flatly.
Tara ignored Dee’s tone, or didn’t hear it, and went on to explain what had happened: She’d gone on a typical Audition and Training trip to Needham, Mass., rounding up the usual assortment of lithe and limber models and failing the veteran coaches who were paid too much or had put on weight or both.
“The models were all hot, of course,” Tara said. “But Fiona was … different.”
Dee pictured Tara with cartoon hearts for eyes that sproinged from her face with the sound, “a-wooga!”
Blecch.
“How was she different?” Shelly asked, eager, like a teenage virgin at a cool-kid’s sleepover party.
Tara, running her hand through her peacock-blue hair, droned on and on about how Fiona was some kind of alabaster-skinned, ultraflexible, quirky, intelligent, Irish goddess. A perfect paradox who loved dogs but was allergic, hated potty humor but loved Will Ferrell movies, a model who railed against society’s impossible beauty standards. Fiona’s dream was to become a water acrobat with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas but she didn’t yet know how to swim.
Dee’s mind wandered. She and Tara and Shelly had all planned to grow old together like the “Golden Girls,” with Tara functioning as their Blanche, fucking the life back into all of the widows in the old-folks’ community. Shelly was going to be Rose, always deferring to her friends on where to eat, what to wear, and who to accompany to the early-bird fish fry. Dee was going to be their Dorothy — resplendent in caftans and still tough on the outside but slowly, carefully softening at her center as she aged.
Now Tara had derailed those plans. It wasn’t like Fiona could be their Sophia.
“I don’t get it,” Dee announced.
On her phone Tara called up a sun-drenched photo of Fiona in a flowy yellow sundress, one strap lazily falling off her shoulder as she lay in the grass and smiled up at the photographer, who was likely straddling her during the shot. Dee half-expected the image to white out and then fade in on Fiona slow-motion traipsing through the field, looking back over her shoulder and laughing, her hand trailing through tall wildflowers while John Mayer’s “Your Body is a Wonderland” played.
“You don’t get why I’d be in love with her?” Tara asked, incredulous. “I mean, look at her. And that’s not even the best thing about her.”
Dee snorted as she took a big sip of her vodka soda.
Tara looked wounded. “This is funny?”
Dee kept on drinking.
“You can’t just be happy for me?” Tara asked, quietly.
Dee placed her thick tumbler down on her Bast Metal Coffee Table, its army of black, diamond-shaped legs like an imposing mountain range beneath the glass top.
“This just doesn’t sound like you,” Dee said, fake-smiling. “I mean, do you even know how to be faithful?”
Tara pressed her lips together. “I see. OK.”
“What?” Dee asked, testing Tara’s limits.
“I just —”
“What? If you have something to say, say it,” Dee challenged.
Tara looked ready to unleash some seriously bottled-up feelings, then appeared to reconsider and swallow them further down.
“It’s fine,” Tara said. “You’re right. It probably won’t work out. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“I just don’t want to see you get hurt,” Dee said. “That’s all.”
“Thank you,” Tara said, looking at her hands again.
Good, that was settled. Things with Fiona would inevitably fall apart and Dee and Shelly would be there to tape Tara back together with a mix of vodka, workouts, and meaningless matches on Tinder.
“So,” Dee said. “There have been some developments, in terms of figuring out who’s targeting me.”
Shelly shifted on the couch and turned her rapt attention to Dee. “Ooh, do tell.”
“Jimmy thinks he may be able to figure out the IP address of the person who started the FitFamsFraud account on Instagram, which means we’d unearth the ringleader,” Dee said. “I’ve also decided to bring back that Fixer guy.”
“Isn’t he … dangerous?” Tara asked.
“He can be, if we want,” Dee said. “I’m mostly interested in scaring these people into stopping their campaign of hate and disinformation. I’m tired of trying to sort through all of the drama they’re creating out of thin air. The same thing is happening to the other women in my #girlboss group. No one wants to see us succeed. The haters just cannot stop smearing me; it’s like a compulsion. FitFams is a woman-friendly, empowering company, and anyone who says otherwise is just jealous.”
Shelly nodded emphatically. “Absolutely, 100 percent.”
Tara didn’t say anything. She just refilled her glass, this time with no ice.