His face flushed, frustration twisting his insides. “Jesus, Charlie. Do you ever stop to think about what you say before you say it?”
“Of course not. What would be the fun in that?” She made grabby hands toward him. “Okay, enough about you. Let’s talk about me.”
He rolled his eyes. “You really need to stop mixing your Adderall with your chardonnay.”
She scoffed, one hand clutching her metaphorical pearls. “How dare you? Do you think I could tolerate my mother without pharmaceuticals? Or your mother, for that matter?”
He shrugged. “That’s fair. Why are you here?”
Her voice took on a high-pitched whine. “I need you to do me.”
Wyatt blinked at her. “What?”
“Do me! My makeup. My hair. I got a callback on my audition and I can’t get in with Kristiane until next week and I need to look like theingenuethat I am.”
Wyatt threw a look toward the closed door as if Linc might linger on the other side, listening through the keyhole. Not that there was a keyhole. Or any reason for Linc to spy. At all. He was probably up to his well-sculpted ass in lavender-scented dish bubbles.
Wyatt sighed. “Fine. Sit. So, what are we talking about here? My-parents-stockpile-Bibles-and-guns fresh-faced or I-have-Daddy-issues slutty?”
She tapped her nail against her veneers. “Somewhere in between those two would be perfect.”
“Brooke Shields inBlue Lagoonit is.”
His stomach swooped as he gave one more nervous glance toward the locked door. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t want Linc to know about the makeup. But he only shared this part of himself with the people he trusted, which at twenty-two years old was comprised of two people, Charlie and Graciela.
He busied himself pulling various palettes and brushes from drawers as Charlie ignored him, rapidly firing off texts to her mother and her agent. By the time he flipped on the white lights surrounding the vanity mirror, upbeat music spilled from the speaker of Charlie’s phone. He’d learned long ago that the key to shutting the girl up was to give her a song to sing, and he just didn’t want to talk about Linc anymore. “Okay, phone down.”
Charlie complied, letting her eyes fall shut even without him asking. As stupid as it sounded, the two of them had been doing this for so long, the ritual almost felt sacred. Charlie understood what makeup meant to Wyatt, more than anybody. Sure, there was an artistry to it, but there was magic in it as well. Makeup concealed, it transformed, it could make people see things that weren’t there and hide things that were. It was as close to sorcery as Wyatt was ever likely to get, and he gave it the reverence it deserved.
They fell into a companionable silence. When Wyatt went to work on Charlie’s hair, she switched the music so she could practice for her rehearsal. He parted sections of her hair as she flawlessly belted out numbers from theHamiltonsoundtrack. Wyatt tried not to be jealous of her talent or her freedom, but it was hard. For as much as Charlie’s mom was a “stage mom” she was also fiercely protective of Charlie… and even Wyatt, to an extent. A former beauty queen who’d married a hedge fund manager, she often lamented about how she’d wished for a gay son.
Wyatt tried not to dwell on the life he could have had with Charlie’s accepting parents instead of his hateful father and his uninterested mother. There was no use crying over bad DNA.
When he finished with Charlie, he misted a setting spray over her face and shellacked her hair in place with a bit more flourish than necessary. “Okay, I hereby declare you just slutty enough for your callback.”
Charlie bounced off the chair, snagging her phone as she gave herself a cursory once-over. “Oh, it’s perfect. Somewhere between scream queen and drag queen. Once again, your genius astounds me.” She snagged her enormous bag from the bed, settling it in the crook of her arm before she stopped in front of him, narrowing her eyes. “You’d tell me if you weren’t okay, right?”
Adrenaline shocked through his system at her sudden change in tactics, his heartbeat tripping. “What?”
The corners of her mouth tugged downward, her heart suddenly bleeding from her big blue lemur eyes. “You don’t look good.”
Something twisted behind his ribcage. “Well, fuck you very much.”
She wrapped her hand around his forearm, her talon-like nails digging into the skin there. “I’m serious. You have that same hollow-eyed haunted look you had just before we went to Barbados that summer… the summer you came back from—”
“I remember,” he snapped. He softened his tone at her wounded look. “I’m fine. I just had a little too much to drink last night.”
Her expression went from piteous to murderous in a moment, her voice dropping to a hissing whisper. “Drink? You’re on house arrest for a DUI.”
He rolled his eyes, waving his hand dismissively. “Do you see a car in here?”
“Don’t do that. This is serious.” He let his gaze drift to a spot over her shoulder, trying to mentally shield himself from her words. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself. You have to get out of here, away from your father, from this place. It’s not good for you.”
Wyatt forced a brittle smile onto his face. “Hah. Let she who is without prescription pharmaceuticals in her Prada cast the first stone. You can’t even get out of bed without amphetamines.”
She sucked in a breath, her voice raising an octave. “I have a legitimate diagnosis, dickhead. You’re mean when you’re hungover.”
He pulled a face, crossing his arms over his still-damp t-shirt. “And you’re no fun when you’re preachy, so I guess we’re even.”
