Re: second floor ; smoking
"Habit." She was in the habit of hiding things, and she was in the habit of only letting what she wanted to show. She put on her persona like she put on a Max Factor blush in the mornings. It was the way of the screen, to be something you weren't. Louis B Mayer wouldn't have hired a little girl from nowhere special. He wanted a platinum starlet with deep eyes and a smile like bedroom promises. "In my world, you have to hide the real things," she said with too much experience. "In return, I get stoles and pearls and a handsome man's arm to hold onto in the evenings." Most of that rang true. Maybe the bit about the arm to hold onto wasn't true of her life off this liner, but it should have been. "Why don't you like the attention? Does it make you uncomfortable?" If there was one thing she'd never been, it was uncomfortable in the spotlight. She'd been born for center stage.
Blindness was a cultivated art. She couldn't afford to be sick, and so she wouldn't be. It was a small thing. It would pass. It wasn't even real, and somehow she knew that in the aching pit below her navel. She would much rather focus on his statement about vulnerability, because that spoke to something deeper inside her than the phantom ache that didn't physically belong to her at all. "Being genuine is nothing but vulnerability," she agreed. "Women love Casanova because they think they'll be the one to make him fall. He'll fall in love with them, or so they think. There's nothing worse than a rake, bello." She sounded like sage knowledge inside the body of someone too young to be sagacious. "I want someone who isn't scared to adore me. I want to be first, and not just because I have nice legs and don't wear undergarments." There was tease in her words, but there was truth as well. "Does being vulnerable frighten you?" she asked. "It frightens most men of my acquaintance. But I prefer fear to disinterest. Nothing stings like disinterest," she said with a candor that felt foreign on her tongue, but not in her mind.
"Money can't cure every ill," she pointed out in return. She didn't point out again that it was nothing, because nothing was becoming harder to believe as the night wore on. Her arms felt cold, and her legs felt weak, and that sickly sweet scent on her breath had wormed its way into her pores. "There's always dying for love, remember?" she asked him, and there was something new and somber in the words, some knowing that hadn't been there before. The change of subject that followed was welcome, and she grasped it eagerly. "Why wouldn't she want to be found by the likes of you?" That love was not always returned was a truth she knew well. "Have you ever told someone you missed them, or do you expect them to know without you telling them?" she asked with curiosity.
"Are you going to convince me that men are as a loyal as lapdogs?" The question came with a smile and a laugh. "What does that make women, I wonder?" She was almost sorry she'd asked about his family, and she lamented the loss of his easy laughter. "I'm sorry. I don't have any family," she explained, though that was wrong. She had a mother, but she didn't take the words back. The world blurred, but she kept that to herself too.