It was the only way it could work.
* * *
ON FRIDAY MORNING, when Kacey came to his office after her class, Mike was waiting for her. He had a lunch meeting with a client after picking Willie up from school and dropping him at the Stand, so that gave him about half an hour with Kacey. He had to make it count.
“How was class?” he asked first. With the struggles she was having herself, teaching a class about the benefits of looking good had to be a challenge.
One Sara Havens had said, in their staff meeting, that she believed Kacey was up to. And added that it would also help in Kacey’s own healing.
“It was good,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes as she set down a box, plopped into the seat she normally occupied during their Friday morning chats and put her feet up on his desk.
She’d worn skinny jeans and a long-sleeved black sweater that met her waistband. When she moved, in any direction, he caught glimpses of her pale skin. The whole modesty in dress thing...he could argue either way. Kacey didn’t dress to flaunt. Her clothes were all part of her style.
And in Southern California, they were appropriate, too. Women wore less. All sizes. All ages.
“I’ve heard it said that we teach what we most need to learn,” she was saying, watching him.
Daring him? To what? Tell her he didn’t want to have sex with her? Or tell her he did?
“Today was an example of that. I look at the women in my class and I know so clearly, believe so fiercely, that if they take care of their hair, make the most of their features, dress in clothes that make them look good, then they’ll feel better about themselves, which in turn will give them confidence, which then will change how they act with and react to, others.”
He almost smiled. Except that this was far too crucial to make light of.
“And?” he asked. He knew there’d be more. That was Kacey’s way. Get something...and then apply it.
“I have some work to do.”
He waited.
“I mean, I can’t just know this and then feel good about my sexuality. It got me attacked, Michael.”
“No. Whatever was wrong with those teenagers is what got you attacked.” He knew she’d been told the same thing many times over the past weeks. Also knew she didn’t believe it yet. And from what she’d been told, that was normal, too.
“I feel like, if I’d looked less...inviting...I would have been less likely to be attacked.”
“So you think if say, a forty-year-old woman who was a little overweight was walking alone on the beach that night, that those boys, with evil on their minds, would have walked right by her?”
She looked up at him. “What if the way I was dressed put evil on their minds?”
“That’s impossible. Boys are exposed to female sexuality from the time they first watch television,” he said. “It’s even in cartoons. It’s all over every ad, the Super Bowl halftime show, on billboards, on movie posters. Every single time he walks through the mall, or goes to a big-box store, he’ll be exposed to images of nearly nude women modeling bras or panties. And here in Santa Raquel, as you well know, pretty much every woman on the beach is wearing little more than thick underwear.”
“During the summer, yes...”
His gaze was steady, assessing. As though he was waiting for her to hear what he’d been saying.
“You really don’t think it’s my fault?”
“I do not.”
“Do you have any idea how it feels to be a woman—any woman—and know that the body parts she was born with can bring out the beast in a man who is, by the nature of biology, going to be bigger and stronger than she is?”
“I do not.” He swallowed. “And as a man with female siblings and a female best friend, I can tell you that it’s a fact that makes me uncomfortable.”
“Has it always?”
He shook his head and sat on the corner of his desk, his knee not far from her thigh. “I’m ashamed to say that until your attack, I’d given the matter almost no thought at all. I mean, working here, you’re aware of women being more vulnerable to violence, any violence. And I made both of my sisters read Lemonade Stand literature and take a self-defense class...but overall, I was pretty sure that everything would be fine.”
“I took a self-defense class. Lacey and I both did. Advanced classes. Our parents insisted on it...you know...because of the business we were in.”