Free Blinded by Travis Thrasher Page A

“She’ll call soon.”
    “She called me.”
    The redhead takes a sip from her glass and doesn’t look
    worried. “J is a drama queen. They need to do a reality TV show with her.”
    You see assorted pictures of Jasmine around her kitchen. All placed for show, not tossed up on the fridge with magnets. Jasmine in a tiny bikini on the shores of some tropical paradise. Jasmine in Paris. At a bar with friends. With a good-looking older couple, probably her parents. With her arm around … Brad Pitt?
    “Ever wonder why some people are so blessed?” Amanda says, glancing at the same photos you’re staring at. “Why some people get it all and don’t even have to ask?”
    “Yeah, I think about it.”
    The merger crosses your mind again, the deal that went south, the deal that brought you here, the deal you couldn’t close.
    “Why is it that women like Jana can get men to do almost anything?”
    Her tone is different suddenly. You look at her and watch her drain her martini the way a college student might pound a beer.
    “Tell me something,” Amanda says, walking up close to the counter you lean against. “Would you be looking all over the city for me?”
    There is a glint in her eye, something you can’t necessarily place, something that makes you feel a bit nervous. “Sure I would,” you say, not very convincingly.
    Amanda picks up a picture, the one with Jasmine on a beach in her little white bikini.
    “You either have it or you don’t, you know? I am a size smaller than J and it doesn’t matter. I can spend four hours a day on myself and never even be in the same vicinity. Why does a girl that gorgeous have to have everything too? Why is that?”
    You take a sip of your beer and walk away from the kitchen, toward the living room. Canned lights illuminate the area.
    “What is this?” you ask, trying to change the subject.
    Amanda fixes herself another martini and tells you about the piece of art sitting on the end table. It looks like someone found it in a garbage heap. Next to it rest all the latest fashion magazines:
Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Elle
. The dates reveal them to be brand-new.
    “She gets those replaced every month. Sometimes when she’s bored—and
if
she’s ever here—she’ll read them. But they get replaced like clockwork. Like the milk in the fridge that goes untouched. I don’t even know why she has them put milk in the fridge because she never drinks it. But you have to have milk in the fridge, right? I mean, of course you do. Not to have it would be just that. Not having something. And Jana always has everything.”
    An iPod rests in a Bose docking station on another table. Next to it is a framed photo of a Chihuahua.
    “So, Steve?”
    “It’s Mike.”
    “Yeah, Mike. Come over here.”
    Amanda is on her second martini and sits on the couch, one long leg crossed over the other. She pats the seat next to her.
    “Look—I just want to—I’d like to know where your friend disappeared to.”
    “Did you guys get a chance to have any fun?”
    The look on Amanda’s face is mischievous and wild, almost scary.
    “Come on,” she says after your silence. “You look like you saw a ghost. Look—I’ve got a little something that can make you feel a lot better.”
    “I’m fine, really.”
    She stands and comes by you. The glass on the coffee table is empty. She twirls a finger under one of the buttons of your shirt and pulls it toward herself.
    “I won’t bite,” she says with a laugh.
    Didn’t Jasmine say that too?
    Though she looked attractive at first, this close, you see that Amanda wears a lot of makeup. Her eyes look cold and her lips fake. She’s pale and almost anorexic, and nothing about her appeals to you. She tells you to follow her and walks toward a hallway and a dark room.
    She turns on the lights and turns around, looking at you standing still in the same place you were.
    “Come on. I just want to show you Jana’s room. And what she keeps in there.”
    Really it’s