Down a riser, big boy, your head will be hitting the boom mike. Yes, Mr. Fontana the Fifth or whoever, edge that boyishly lean bod over just. . . a . . . tad."
Temple felt small and vulnerable as she huddled with the other two pose-down girls in the stage-left wings. She would have liked to stay there. Her two sister models were dallying with their costumes, jerking them down from the top and up from the bottom, exactly the opposite approach Temple was inclined to take.
Quincey was gowned as an Old West saloon girl. Whether she had a heart of gold was unclear, but her deck-of-cards bustier featured the jacks of hearts and diamonds front and provocatively centered.
Her knee-length red-satin skirt was edged in black marabou feathers, which she was hiking up to high heaven on one hip and fastening there with a safety pin.
"Don't you have any underwear on?" Temple asked, following the diamondback-rattlesnake pattern of Quincey's fishnet pantyhose all the way to ground zero.
"Of course not." Quincey's tone was pure teenage disdain. "You never know what will show during one of these things, Danny said. Would you want someone out there in the audience seeing your groady old underwear?"
"Well, it might be better than the alternative." Temple tugged at her receding dress shoulders again.
"Darn. This outfit will not stay put!"
"Your boobs are supposed to hold it up," Quincey explained, rolling heavily made-up eyes.
Oh, that's the problem." Temple regarded the gown's gaping neckline. "I don't have any."
"Sure you do. Just lean way forward into the dress, then stand up again."
Quincey demonstrated with limber enthusiasm, thus revealing the tiny tattoo of a bulldog smoking a cigar that had hitherto hidden coyly behind the jack of hearts. Her mild exercise had increased her bra size by at least a letter of the alphabet. Bras were the only subject where getting Cs was better than Bs or As.
Temple, impressed despite herself, bent over, nearly cutting off the circulation in her torso, and rose again. Quincey was right, the bodice felt tighter and--oh, my--much more of her had come out to look around.
"What keeps us from falling out of these getups during the action onstage?" she wondered next.
"Nothing," said the girl on her other side, a brunette named Lacey with authentically long, burnished hair. These were mere girls so slight and young that there was no point in calling them women and looking ridiculous. "This is exactly like a real cover shoot, you know: the more provocative the better."
Oh, my ripping bodice! Temple thought. I didn't sign on to be provocative, just to snoop.
"Luckily," Lacey added, "most of these guys are pretty good, and have their own, like, routines. We'll just get together and decide whether we go horizontal or vertical, like where we wrap our legs and arms and all that stuff. You know, consult before trying it."
Did she say, "consult before dying!"
"So you've done this before?" Temple said aloud.
"Naw, I talked to a girl who did it last year. She's running the bookstore this time."
"Why isn't she modeling again?"
"Oh, she did this reeeally hot, super-steamy number with the guy who won last year, you know, an'
her folks saw it on tabloid TV, an' Skintight magazine called an' wanted her to do a, you know, really sexy photo layout and her, like, Stone-Age folks got totally bent out of shape and almost didn't let her come at all this year." Lacey's snapped gum, transmitting a tooth-decaying aroma of fruit-flavor, put a period to her endless sentence.
On Temple's other side, Quincey bent to pull a red satin garter up her thigh and snapped it into place.
Temple thought that she would do something different and simply snap. Like a twig. An overaged twig in a tempest not of her own making. But their attention was again drawn to the unknown horrors to come onstage.
"Now," Fabrizio announced during a lull. "I volunteer for sample pose-down, in case any of you guys are feeling shy."
None of the guys onstage looked the least bit shy, Temple noticed, with the possible exception of Jake Gotshall. And even he was looking, frankly, pretty hot to trot.
Nor were any of the assembled hunks swooning with enthusiasm at Breezy's self-sacrificing suggestion. Danny's head had turned to fix the Dallyin' Italian with the basilisk eye of a director sensing a mutineer.
No one directs a macho man, though, but his own ego. "Who will be Breezy's little woo-mahn for a run-through, eh?" he asked.
"Oh, this is too awesome!" Quincey murmured. "Just like one of those historical romance scenes where the women are captured and rounded up to be sold as love slaves and the handsome pirate captain picks one out. Me, me, me!"
"Wrong period, kid," Lacey said. "You need John Wayne or somebody else dead. Leave the live ones to me."
She undulated in front of Temple and Quincey to strike a pose in a harem costume apparently made from Salome's original seven veils after the moths had gotten through with it. A hand that jingle-jangled with seventeen or so thin brass bangles waved to and fro. "I'll do it, Fabrizio!"
But that would have been too easy. Too easy for Breezy, Temple muttered in her mind.
She knew what was coming. He knew from experience that she was easy to pick up. She was a marked woo-mahn. Quincey was right. Temple was beginning to feel like the much-put-upon heroine of a historical romance.
Time froze. Temple's mind beat birdlike against the confining cage bars of reality, seeking refuge in memories of a moment so like this one: a scene from one, or ten, of the historical romances she had speed-read in the past few days. She stood there, on that sandy, forgotten shore, in her disheveled finery.
"Who will be Breezy's little woo-mahn? I will run through anyone who says me nay, eh?" he demanded. Rasped. G.R.O.W.L.ed.
Captain Breezy Beelzebub "Blast" Slaughters intense eyes, bluer than all the seven seas churned together into one seething, intemperate tidal wave, raked over the captured prey, frightened booty of the good ship Windswept.
Then they paused on the frozen form of dismayed Tempest Storm, proud, Titan-haired daughter of planter Gust Storm and his lovely but frail aristocratic wife Gale, and sister of the darling baby boy Squall
. . . who would do exactly that, were he to understand his sisters vile predicament.
Stunned, Tempest heard Captain Blast's seven-league boots stomping over the stage sand toward her.
Her fate lay in this hard but handsome mans hands, and his intentions lay in the hot, burning flames of his ice-blue eyes.
She desperately tried to . . .look tempestuously disdainful, yet knowing that she must endure all that the pirate captain might do to her before a leering crew of thirty-three tall, broad men cut from the same bold, rapacious sailcloth . . .
... RUN!
But first. . .
she desperately decided to . . .
de-bend her dress bodice.
Like all gravity-defying acts, this one looked easier to do than to undo. Drat, her pose-down debut would be a sight to remember. Where was the sweet retreat of fiction when she needed it?
"Hah!" Captain Breezy stopped, took a wide stance that emphasized thighs the size of Easter Island hams, and pointed imperiously to Temple, whose only relation to any kind of Storm was as a licensed driver. Life had returned to Real Time, no matter how bizarre.
" La Rossa." He smiled. Showed his teeth. Leered. Licked his lips. Ate her grandmother. "We are already experts at the pose, no?"