“This is the cutest place,” Aunt Kit exclaimed as she moved from Temple’s small entry area into the living room.
“Your mini Flatiron building in Greenwich Village isn’t anything to whistle Dixie at,” Temple said.
“Yes, but the whole interior has been renovated. This is the real schlemiel, as they said on Laverne and Shirley. Oops! I’m dating myself, aren’t I?”
“Aunt Kit, you will never date, only improve with time,” Temple said. “The couch unfolds into a bed.”
“That big thing? I don’t need a bed in your living room. At my height, the sofa will be as comfy as a cradle.”
“At our height,” Temple said ruefully, watching Kit kick off her four-inch heels and bump hips with a lounging Midnight Louie as she claimed the sofa for her own.
It’ll be an interesting bedtime around the Circle Ritz tonight, Temple thought. “I’ve got the Porthault sheets ready,” she said, kidding. “You can use the sofa open or closed.”
“Mr. Big Boy and I can share just fine,” Kit growled in a super-satisfied Mae West voice. “I’m sure he’ll come up and see me sometime. In the night.”
Every naughty implication in the phrase was punched out perfectly. Kit wasn’t an ex-actress for nothing.
“You’re sure I’m not intruding?” her aunt added, pushing her large-framed glasses atop her head.
“No,” Temple said without thinking.
“No, you’re not sure I’m not intruding, or no, I’m not intruding?”
“No, you’re not intruding,” Temple said firmly. “I imposed on your hospitality in New York last Christmas.”
“You did not impose, my dear. Midnight Louie did, as I recall. But we are old friends now, eh? And happy to cohabitate. Right, Chief?”
Louie’s green eyes had become narrowed slits in his handsome head. He didn’t like humans to speak for him. Kit ran her long painted fingernails along his whisker-stubbly chin and down his chest hair.
He rolled over like a kitten.
Temple beamed on this happy domestic scene. Having her aunt here was amazingly comforting. She was bewitched, bothered, and bewildered at the moment, which she might confide to Aunt Kit later, when there weren’t feline eavesdroppers around.
They had a microwave dinner and luxuriated their bare toes in the faux goat-hair rug under the coffee table. Louie had taken himself off somewhere through the open bathroom window, fleeing the girly ambiance.
Their wineglasses were on the third refill.
“So.” Kit was settling into her confidante mode. “How’s your tall, dark, and handsome fella?”
“Not fine! A wishy-washy answer if I ever heard one.”
“Max has . . . a lot of issues.”
“Family?”
“In a way.”
“Work then?”
“In a way.”
“Why can’t you say in what way?”
“Because . . . his life is a secret that could get other people killed.” “He’s mob?”
“No, he’s hero, which is much tougher.”
Kit kept silent for a bit. “What’s with keeping the blond hair?”
Temple shook herself upright. Blonde was a badge of courage, in this instance, from going undercover and nailing a killer.
“I don’t know what to do. If I dye it my natural Little Orphan Annie red, the dye job will fade as the roots grow out and I’ll have to redye it all to match. If I don’t dye it red, I’ll have crimson roots and glitzy platinum hair. Going completely white at the roots might work best, but not all of my brushes with crime and murder have scared me that much so far. No roots are showing yet, so I have a couple weeks to decide. Besides, I may discover I like being a blond bimbo.”
“Temple! This is the little scabby-kneed roller-skating niece I knew and loved in Minneapolis?”
“This is my glamorous Aunt Kit, who came to the family reunion picnic at Minnehaha Park with her boyfriend with the sexy convertible and the ear stud?”
“You still remember that?”
“The handsome boyfriend?”
“No, the sexy convertible.”
“Nobody in Minnesota drove convertibles. Too cold and too many mosquitoes when it was warm.”
“Morgan,” Kit recalled.
“The car?”
“No, the boyfriend.”
“How come you never married?”
Kit sighed. Set down her wineglass. “My era. Liberation. Independence. A career. The big city. Sex and the City. Enough success to become a carousel. Some great guys, always moving on and upward. Getting ‘too old’ for acting when I was thirty-five. Finding I could write as well as act. That was a woman’s world. Any guys I met after that were all unhappily divorced. All needed shoulders and understanding baby-sitters. My time was past. And . . . I did what my stars allowed. I was always more, or less, Me, not Somebody’s Wife or Somebody’s Mother. But—” Kit smiled at Temple. “I have always been excessively proud to be your aunt.”
“Kit. I . . . have a marriage proposal.”
Kit’s hands clasped at her breastbone, the universal theatrical gesture for joy. “Max has proposed? I knew it in New York! I feel like a mother hen whose chick has landed in her own safe little nest!”
“No. Not Max. Matt.”
“Matt?”
“You remember. You saw him when you were out here for the romance writers’ convention.” Temple had not sounded very sure.
“Matt.” Kit was visibly gathering her improvisational skills. “Ah, yes! Blond, dreamy. Ah . . . I thought he was a friend.”
“Where do you think proposals come from?”
“I don’t think. Temple, I’m sorry. I’m in a fantasy fog most of the time. Acting, writing. Not reality. I do indeed remember Mr. Caramel Smoothie. Frankly, I’d assigned you to Max and felt free to . . . well, appropriate Matt for one of my books. So. He’s proposed. Isn’t he . . . forbidden fruit, somehow? I remember importing him as the luscious and of course forbidden first cousin in . . . er, Bayou Bewitched, a Louisiana-set romance.”
“ ‘By you bewitched’? Quite the obvious pun, Auntie.”
“You’d be surprised how many don’t get it. How old are you anyway?”
“Thirty,” Temple announced in tones of doom, not mentioning that thirty-one was just around the corner, suddenly next summer, like July.
“A chick fresh out of the egg.” Kit frowned. “But it’s true. I followed my acting career just long enough to lose out on the first round of romantic link-ups.”
“Women,” Temple quoted a magazine article, “who don’t marry by thirty-five are unlikely to.”
Kit winced and drank wine. “I can’t deny it. So. You wanna get married?”
“Actually, no. I mean, I would, but mainly I want a guy who loves me and vice versa, who I can trust and try to get through this mess called Life together with. That’s awful sentence construction, isn’t it?”
“Horrid. But the sentiments are pretty universal. I did like Max.”
“So did I.”
“Did?”
“I thought he was Mr. Right, like there is any such mythical beast, but . . . it’s not that he doesn’t want to commit, he can’t. Not with his job history.”
“And Matt can.”
Temple nodded. “Now. Except that he comes with all these religious strictures that aren’t mine.”
“You’ve always liked him.”
Temple rolled her eyes, Mariah style, left over from the Teen Idol competition. “Ye-es”
“Maybe some of those strictures have something to do with that.”
Temple nodded. “He’s so honest you sometimes want to kick him in the shins. He really does care about what I think and feel. He’s willing to sell himself down the river if I’ll give him a shot, though he didn’t tell me that part. I figured it out. And he’s really hot for me, but he’s aggravatingly able to control it.”
“Grrrrowl. Take it from Auntie, that is not a problem when it comes to female satisfaction. Would that they taught that in high school instead of abstinence and friends with benefits.”
“What are friends with benefits?”
“Are you out of the talk show circuit! Girls are preserving their virginity, all right, but by giving out oral sex to boys as a substitute. Can we say ‘not a fair trade-off’?”
Temple couldn’t say a thing. Girls always lost something, somehow, in the dating game, and she was very glad not to be the mother of one. Yet. Maybe she could become a Red State conservative and marry Matt yet. She and Kit finished their wine and conversation, yawned, and hugged each other good night.
Temple’s mind and emotions were in turmoil despite several glasses of wine. A woman’s future options were much rockier than she’d suspected. Her own immediate options made her stomach churn with an unhealthy surfeit of emotion and indecision. Max. Matt. Matt. Max. It was coming down to a duel in the sun. Her heart and libido were giving her emotional whiplash. She took a Tylenol PM to help her to sleep, and so to bed.
It was past two in the morning, so Max did the Midnight Louie trick. Push, bounce, click and the left French door from the balcony let him into Temple’s living room with barely a sound.
Unlike the White Rabbit, who was too late to say hello/good-bye, Max was the black cat burglar. He knew it would soon be too late to say hello/good-bye/good night, so he wanted to explain himself to Temple before he became entangled in the inexplicable again. Perhaps for a good long time.
The parking lot lights cast shadows over the living room’s familiar topography: potted Norfolk pine in corner, pale sofa grazing like a White Buffalo in the middle, and various tricky tables and lamps to tiptoe around.
Max was almost around the sofa when it sat up and took notice.
“Ahhh!” it said, switching on the floor lamp at its right end.
There was Max, in the spotlight again.
He blinked to see a pale imitation of Temple: small, indignant, red hair faded to strawberry-blond in the bright light pouring down on it. What was she doing sleeping in their living room? Temple’s living room?
When the glasses appeared and pasted themselves to the bridge of her nose, he realized that this was not Temple. She wore contact lenses now.
“Max!” Not-Temple exclaimed in a hushed, hoarse voice.
“What are you doing here?” they each intoned like a chorus of two.
“You remember me,” the woman said. “Aunt. New York. I’m the one who stuffed my sexiest nightgown into Temple’s overnight bag for your Manhattan reunion. Like it?”
“It didn’t survive the reunion. That nightgown was yours?”
“I’m flattered, however vicariously. I haven’t lost lingerie to an encounter in twenty years. Remember, it comes with full visitation rights.”
“Never forgot that for a moment. So is Temple here?”
“Inner sanctum. Midnight Louie’s out and prowling. Your path is unobstructed.”
“Except for you.”
“Oh, don’t let me stop you. Not that I think I could. Or would. I’m an ex-actor. We all shared close quarters in my heyday. Want me to yell hey when the day is dawning?”
“You are an unnerving woman.”
“Thanks! Now I need my beauty sleep, which you won’t notice the results of unless we meet in daylight. Ta-ta.”
The woman stretched out an arm to turn off the lamp and roll herself into the sheets. Max was now night-blind. Again. He felt his way to the bedroom door, which was indeed shut, and eeled inside.
Temple was asleep. His frazzled nerves suddenly smoothed out. She always loved being awakened in his own special way.
He slipped into the sheets beside her, managing not to awake her. His fingers barely touched the familiar contours of her face. It turned toward him, in her sleep, the way a sunflower follows the sun that names it.
She was rousing now. In the sense of awakening.
“Max,” she muttered.
“Yes,” he said. “Shhh”
“I had a dream. You were falling!”
“Falling here. Into your arms.”
“No! A long, long way. Max!”
She was way too lost in some nightmare. He pulled her into his arms, but she was still falling, her arms and legs jerking and flailing.
“We’ll crash,” she cried. Under his fingers, her face was a spasm of furrows.
He couldn’t erase them. Eradicate the dream. Overcome her fears with the mere nearness of his presence. Not anymore. His fingers felt her eyelashes batting like bird wings.
She struggled up in the bedclothes, sitting.
“Max? You’re really here?”
She still sounded drugged with sleep.
“Really.”
“There’s something I’ve got to tell you. What? Oh. Yeah. That white witch is at the New Millennium.”
“White witch?”
But he knew whom she was referring to, and he had known for some time that Shangri-La had hooked up with the Cloaked Conjuror, although their professional alliance hadn’t gone public.
Temple just didn’t know that Max knew so much more than she did about Shangri-La. Another thing he knew: Shangri-La hated him for some unknown reason. A lot of women seemed to. The late Kathleen O’Conner, Molina. Thank God for Temple.
“CC calls her ‘Shang.’ ” Temple yawned. “Thought you’d want to know. I can’t seem to reach you anymore.”
He leaned back with her, against the pillows, uneasy about carrying a concealed load of knowledge and keeping it from her. “It’s okay. I know now.”
She was still murmuring sleepily. “Shoulda grabbed her by those horsey locks and demanded my ring back.”
“She can’t give it back. Molina has it now, remember?”
“Right, Molina. Another wicked witch. Don’t let the wicked witches get you, Max.”
“Speaking of locks, aren’t yours a whiter shade of pale?”
“The teen reality TV show mavens made me dye it platinum. What started as an undercover job stuck me with a dye job.”
He chuckled as she nuzzled into the pillow of his chest, drifting off again.
“I want a different dream, Max. No falling . . .”
So did he.
Temple tossed and turned onto her side. Away from him. Still stressed in her sleep. Dreaming disaster. Hurting.
Max felt his jaw clench. Pushing anything physical now wouldn’t be sexy, but intrusive. When she’d needed him lately, he’d been committed to his various secret lives. Now that he was here and ready, she’d obviously been up late drinking wine with her aunt. Maybe talking about him. Complaining. One sure thing was that he’d lost his last magic midnight touch. He didn’t want to be her bogeyman. And he sure as hell didn’t want to be her sleeping pill!
Max slipped away, like the dead part of night. He even made it past her guard dog of an aunt undetected this time.
He still had his skills, if not his will for using them.
He’d gone over to the Dark Side. For the time being. Best to leave the creatures of light and hope to themselves.
He’d phone Temple tomorrow. In daylight. Maybe. If he had time. Meanwhile he had other promises to keep. Bad ones to dark forces. All in the name of ultimate light.