Chapter 6-1
1092 Words
Chapter 6
“Why did you leave? Where did you go?” Bill had finally chased Perrin back to her lair in the store. It had taken three days, but he’d done it.
She’d done more than leave for the few minutes after she’d transformed his children into operatic wonders, perhaps to do some busywork in the front of her shop. In the days since then she’d become invisible. Arriving at rehearsals mere minutes before they started, departing immediately after they ended.
She’d delivered the children’s costumes to Jerimy. The photographer had been thrilled and photographed them with Renata the Empress for the publicity campaign. Perrin hadn’t shown up for the photo shoot.
And the opera had gone crazy. Okay, no crazier than usual, but he’d been unable to get a single minute to track Perrin down in three days.
Carlo’s girlfriend Melanie had gone to Paris for a fashion shoot. Carlo, while not dumb enough to begrudge her career, was now impossibly prickly about everything that wasn’t absolutely perfect.
Lord spare Bill from opera-sized egos. Geoffrey Palliser threw a fit about not yet having a costume so he couldn’t be on the advertisement. Pointing out that his contract had f*******n the use of his image on precisely such promotions did little to mollify him.
Voice lessons with Tammy had taken another chunk out of his afternoons, though under the Chorus Master’s guidance she was coming along wonderfully, showing some real aptitude for the small role. Jaspar wasn’t interested in the singing, but did listen carefully when the director provided stage directions.
Twice Bill had come by Perrin’s shop only to find it closed and dark. She clearly wasn’t a morning person.
It was now early evening on Friday. The last of the light was bleeding out of the Seattle sky. The scent of early flowers in small planters outside her shop hovered on the still air. Jaspar was at a friend’s and Tammy was at the library for some schoolwork. With his single stolen hour, he’d walked into Perrin’s Glorious Garb and barely nodded at the clerk before breezing into the kitchen space and through the accessories display in the old freezer and into the design studio.
Perrin had flinched when he walked in. So, he’d sat down quietly across the cutting table and waited for her to settle before repeating his question.
“Why did you leave?”
She began fiddling with the drawings spread across the table. The only light in the room was the worklight directed at the table’s surface. She was little more than shape and form, though her hands were caught by the light. Just a glance revealed the drawings of the rest of the cast, but he forced his attention off them knowing if they went down that path, they might lose track of the present one. He’d promised to pick up Tammy in an hour. It was all the time he had to fix whatever this was.
His eyes were adjusting enough to see that Perrin wore a form-fitting silken turtleneck as black as her hair, and wool slacks almost as blond as the stripe that still remained in her hair. Simple, chic, and a real pleasure to look at.
“Why are you avoiding me?”
“It looked like a great family moment. I didn’t want to… ” She wouldn’t face him.
“Didn’t want to what?” Bill wanted to lump this in with his usual job of coaxing along crazy artists, but it didn’t feel that way. The dozen drawings spread across the cutting table proved that whatever she needed to create her art, it wasn’t coaxing. She’d done them impossibly fast. And if they were even half as good as the first ones, they’d be the finest costumes Emerald City had put on stage in years.
She stood and began gathering them up. “Let’s just say that it wasn’t my place to intrude and leave it at that.”
He stood up and circled the table. When he reached for her hands, she pulled them back.
“Please don’t,” the sad-eyed girl was back, clutching her drawings as if they were all that anchored her.
He let his hands fall to his sides. “Did I do something wrong? One of the kids?”
“God no!” That snapped her attention to his face. “They’re wonderful! And you’re so good with them. I didn’t belong. It was your moment. So I left.”
“A moment you created.”
“I didn’t belong. That should be enough for you,” she insisted, then moved over to the next table and slipped the drawings into a portfolio. She held the closed case out as a barrier between them. “Since you’re here, you can take these to Jerimy.”
“Don’t you need them to build from?”
“No, they’re in my head once I draw them. But it doesn’t matter, I was only hired as a designer. There are just a couple designs missing. I’ll send those over as soon as I figure them out.”
“But you built the first three, I thought you’d want to do the other major costumes. And you know that your contract has a clause paying you more if you do so. I also thought you’d want to maintain the quality of—”
“Here!” She slammed the portfolio flat against his chest so that he had to grab. “You’ve have them. Now just go!”
She turned her back on him and retreated into the darkness, making it only two or three steps before she ground to a halt.
Idiot! Bill shouted at himself. There was something far bigger going on here than any lousy set of drawings. He’d been so slow to see it, that he’d probably just made bad matters worse. He set the portfolio on the table and moved up behind her.
He placed his hands on her upper arms.
She shrugged him off angrily.
He did it again and held on this time. When she didn’t protest anymore, he turned her slowly clockwise so that the blond stripe climbed upward across her hair as she came to face him.
“Why can’t you accept that you didn’t want me there?” she asked as soon as he had her fully turned.
“But I did.”
“You i***t!” She shoved him hard in the center of his chest, forcing him to stumble back a step. He regained his balance just before he ran into a clothing rack. He’d expected to find her weeping, instead he was facing the Empress brought to life.
Perrin stormed several paces away from him until she was blocked by her sewing machines. Then she stalked back toward him, stopping close in front of him in the narrow aisle between the cutting table and a wall of fabric folded onto shelves.
“Those kids!” she jabbed a finger in the direction of the changing corner where the kids had been. “They’re precious. You can’t have them imprinting on me. You can’t let them. Please, Bill, for their own safety, you can’t let them. That’s why I walked away. So that you don’t connect them to me.”
“Are you so awful?” He said it as a joke. It was totally ludicrous for her to think so.
- Writer
