He saw her and set down a wire cutter.
The feeling of his mouth still glowed hot on hers from the night before.
He put his hands in the pockets of his dress pants. Odd, considering how much she knew he had to do and how little time they had before the show. Then his eyes flicked down, and she realized his hands might have been in his pockets because he wasn’t sure whether to put them on her.
She caught his eyes as he looked back up, and held them. He took one step toward her. He didn’t take another one, but it was enough to tell her he was in if she was.
She kissed him as hard as when they were in the cottonwood. He held her waist, felt her body through her clothes. She held him against the trailer wall, and he shoved the empty wire frame of a pair of wings out of the way. It rattled against an age-spotted mirror.
He slid a hand under her shirt and onto the small of her back, his palm half on her bare skin, half on the waistband of her skirt. A skirt she thought she would not wear as long as she was among the Corbeaus. His fingers pressed against her escamas. As long as he didn’t look, he wouldn’t see the birthmarks. The texture of her healing body would hide them.
It hurt, his hands on her burns. It stung like a hot shower, pins of water and steam stabbing in. She was ready for it. The sting reminded her she was a body knitting itself back together. It was why she liked his hands on her. His wrecked fingers knew how to handle something ruined.
He kissed her like her lips were not chapped and scarring. Ran his tongue over the curve of her lower lip like it was soft. Like the rose and lemon oil she spread on her mouth at night made a difference. Maybe he did not feel it because his were just as rough. He and Lace were sewn of similar fabric, the raw edges of their families’ cloth.
Her mouth left a smudge of lipstick on his. She rubbed it away. He closed his eyes and held her hand there, kissed her thumb and took it lightly between his teeth, holding onto it. It trembled the veins that held her heart, that feeling of his teeth on her thumb pad and fingernail.
The feather on her forearm flared with heat.
She kissed him so hard he kept his breath still on his tongue. He left the taste of black salt on her mouth. The woody flavor of charcoal. The sugar and acid of citrus peel. The soft metal of iron.
A knock rattled the trailer latch.
“Cluck?” said Eugenie.
Lace ducked down behind a counter.
“What are you doing?” Cluck asked.
“She’s gonna wonder why I’m in here.”
“She’s gonna wonder why you’re on the floor. Just say you’re helping me fix something.” He opened the door.
Lace stayed down.
Eugenie handed him a few rolls of satin ribbon. “Closest match I could get.”
Cluck held the tail of one against another spool of ribbon. “Good enough.”
Eugenie’s eyes wandered over to the counter, her feet following. She stood over Lace, hands on her hips. She already had on a dusk-blue dress, but Lace hadn’t done her face yet.
“I lost a needle,” Lace said.
Eugenie shrugged and left her to it.
Lace tried to follow her out. Cluck shut the door behind Eugenie and held his arm to the small of Lace’s back, the same as he had in the tree last night.
He wore his loneliness like his scar. Most of the time his sleeves covered it, but when she cuffed them back, he couldn’t hide it. She wanted to tell him she was not afraid of what he was, this red-streaked thing in all the pure, perfect black. But the words dissolved between their lips like ice crystals.
She pulled her mouth off his. “I still have to put makeup on half of them.”
“You’re fast.”
“Later,” she said.
She stepped down from the trailer and left Cluck to the wings, the taste of violet-black salt still under her tongue. She made up the last of the performers, and the Corbeaus drained toward the woods like sand through fingers. Lace put away the powders and colors, cleaned the brushes, swept the flour off the wood.
A small shadow broke the light. Lace turned her head. A girl no older than five or six stood near the vanity. She had hair dark and coarse as Cluck’s, but eyes pale as dishwater.
She sipped from a plastic cup. “Will you do me next?” she asked.
Next? Who was ahead of her? The performers had gone, and no one was out here. Cluck’s grandfather was inside. Yvette had Eugenie’s younger brothers and the rest of the children in the house, cutting construction paper with craft scissors. Georgette, thanks to a heavy dose of cough syrup, was sleeping off a cold. “She chooses now to be sick,” Nicole Corbeau had said.
Lace pulled out a chair. “Bien sûr,” she said, one of two or three French phrases she’d picked up.
The girl set her cup down and closed her eyes, letting Lace give her a dusting of powder. She swung her legs, her shoes brushing Lace’s skirt. “When I’m in the show I’m going to wear a purple dress, like Violette’s.”
That told Lace what color eye shadow to use. She washed on the lightest tint of lavender.
The girl reached out for her cup, eyes still squeezed shut. Before Lace could help her get it, the girl’s small hand knocked it over. Grape juice splashed across the desk and onto Lace’s skirt and top.
The girl’s eyes snapped open. She took in the mess, and her face scrunched up. Lace knew that look from her younger cousins. It meant she had about five seconds until the wailing started.
“It’s okay.” Lace mopped up the spill. “I’ve done it a hundred times.”
The sugar soaked through Lace’s skirt, stinging the burns on her thighs.
“In fact,” Lace whispered. “How about we don’t tell anyone? I spill stuff so much, if we tell, they’ll think I did it, and I’ll get in trouble. So we won’t tell, okay?”
The girl nodded, a smile showing her baby teeth.
Lace breathed out, her shoulders relaxing. The last thing she needed was Yvette and the girl’s mother wondering what she’d done to make her cry.
She blotted the juice from her skirt, but the sugar still stung. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
The little girl nodded.
Lace went to get a clean dress from her suitcase.
The sound of arundo reed pipes echoed through the yellow trailer. They reached out from the other side of the woods like fingers. She wondered if the girl had heard them. She wouldn’t have known what they were. But they might have sounded enough like the cry of far-off wolves to startle her into tipping over the cup.
Lace peeled off the blouse and skirt, and splashed water over the stains. Happy? she wanted to call back to the arundo sounds. They’d quieted now that she was out of her skirt and top, her foolish choice. She’d put on a dress that would hide her escamas.
The trailer latch clicked, and the door opened.
She couldn’t grab her dress fast enough.
Cluck stood in the doorway. His eyes found her lower back, where the arc of white birthmarks crossed her skin. No paillettes hid her escamas now. She felt them glow under his stare.
He stepped down from the trailer. “Go inside, okay, Jacqueline?” Lace heard him tell the little girl.
The little girl skipped inside. The house’s back door fell shut behind her.
Lace pulled on her dress and followed Cluck into the trees.
“Son of a bitch.” He let out a curt laugh. “When you said you did a lot of swimming, you meant it.”
She buttoned her dress, trotting to keep up with him. “Cluck.”
He stopped. “Did your family send you?”
“No,” she said.
“Are you here to sabotage us? Or just to spy?”
“My family doesn’t know where I am.”
“Right.” He kept walking.
She got in front of him. “It’s your fault I’m here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This.” She held her forearm to his face, letting him see the garnet-colored scar. “You did this to me. You put this on me, and now my family doesn’t want me.”