Kiss & Makeup. Alison Kent

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      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      1

      TO SHANDI FOSSEY, THE SKY was the limit. And if there was one thing she missed about Round-Up, Oklahoma, that was it. The sky. Pinpoints of white light twinkling in an inky black bowl. Cotton-ball clouds scooped high on a pale blue plate. Butter spreading at dawn. Orange Julius at sunset.

      The sky above Manhattan was about wedges cut between buildings, streetlights reflected in windowpanes and flashing neon colors—or so it seemed, sitting as she was, cross-legged and lights-off in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of her sixth-floor West Village apartment at three-thirty in the morning.

      But that was okay. The wedges thing. Really. Because there were lights a whole lot brighter and much more meaningful here in the Big Apple than found anywhere in the sky over Oklahoma.

      And that was why she was here, wasn’t it? For the lights on Broadway as well as those off. The theaters and cabarets, sets and stages and clubs. All of those myriad places offering canvases for her work.

      Eyelids and lashes and lips. Brows and cheekbones. The slope of a nose. The line of a jaw. These were the landscapes she transformed, shaping and coloring and creating, turning the ordinary into the fantastic with her brushes and sponges, her pots and tubes and jars of colors and creams.

      She leaned her upper body to the left, stretching dozens of muscles as she draped her right arm as far as she could over her head and down toward the floor. Her shift as bartender at Erotique in the hotel Hush meant long hours on her feet at least five nights a week, many times six.

      Afterward, unwinding beneath her own personal wedge of what sky she could see had become her routine. She enjoyed the silence, the dark, the sense of so much life teeming around her—even though what life she could see from here was so very, very still.

      She imagined patrons talking long into the night, discussing and arguing over the shows they’d seen. She pictured the ushers, hostesses and attendants waiting for the venues to empty so they could kick off their shoes, along with their frozen smiles.

      She thought of the actors easing out of their roles much as she eased from hers when she sat here each night, leaving behind the Shandi who mixed martinis and margaritas for Erotique’s sophisticated clientele and slipping—reluctantly? regretfully? naturally?—back into the role she’d lived so long.

      That of a long-legged, willowy cat’s tail of a filly from Oklahoma—the description she’d been tagged with by the beer-and-whiskey crowd at the Thirsty Rattler, her family’s bar in the small town of Round-Up.

      One of these days she would figure out which of the two women she was, whether she needed to make a choice between them or combine them. Had she left Oklahoma to encouraging farewells instead of predictions that she’d return in six months, her tail tucked between her legs, she might find that integration a whole lot easier.

      As it was, there was a big part of her that just couldn’t let СКАЧАТЬ