Description: Eve takes a promenade with Deirdre and Shorty through the suburban streets of Devon, filling them in on the details of her acting lessons. Meanwhile, Sabine isn't done censuring his insolent partner.
The Miss Teenager Pageant. PART 32.
August weather in Devon was a dream. Tender winds rustled pine and oak alike as the sun, not as strong as July, touched down warm and pleasant. It was the perfect way to spend a Saturday afternoon promenading along a quiet street with Shorty and Deirdre.
Eve spilled the beans about her recent encounters and subsequent acting lessons with Glenn Sabine. Shorty and Deirdre were bowled over by the news. They had always known Eve had talent, but for someone like the host of the Miss Teenager pageant to personally choose her to mentor out of nineteen million other teenage girls in the country was simply inconceivable!
What luck she had had in the beginning, Eve told them, when he had expressed such an interest in her unseen talent, but that was when things started to get weird.
“Mr. Sabine’s real smooth and so talented,” Eve gushed. She hoped that the soft little thumping of her heartbeat wouldn’t be as audible to their ears as it was to hers and give away her feelings for Glenn. It was Shorty whom she was especially concerned about. He was gazing at her with a relatively suggestive look of jealousy.
“But that Pike Setter,” Eve continued, switching the subject away from Glenn to that sleazy smokestack that tried to grope her. “Well…”
“Well, what?” blurted out Deirdre, shrugging her shoulders with hands raised high. “What’s he like?” To Deirdre, every guy in the world was potential gawking and ogling material as evidenced by the hundreds of little photographs on her bedroom wall, like a mosaic of dreamy heart throbs. Eve had lent her a few herself since her own wall was already full up. In short, Deirdre needed details.
But did Deirdre really want to know about Pike Setter, Eve wondered? He was the last person in the world she wanted to talk about. Sure, he was quite affectionate when it came to hand gestures, but he gave her a severe case of the heebie jeebies with his arrogance and impertinence. He was always there in the background during her acting sessions, smoking up a storm and filling the room with a cloud of menacing secondhand air trash. He was like the stage hand that wasn’t really welcome in the wings but you couldn’t get rid of since he was somehow part of the production, too.
“He seems to be laughing at you all the time,” she explained, her mind drifting back to the hotel room where she had been stuck with the psychopath alone for almost twenty minutes. “Like he knew a big joke he wasn’t letting you in on.”
Meanwhile, back at the Devon House, Room 32, Sabine wasn’t finished letting the Pikester have it, reaming him out for his incivility around the otherwise talented and sensationally pert Eve Jones. Sabine fixed his Porkpie hat in the mirror before whirling around in a James Bond pose, pointing a finger that could cut through steel.
“I won’t warn you again, Pike,” Sabine blasted with saliva bursting through clenched teeth.
Pike was haughtily reclining on the bed with his head resting on the pillow. As was his habit, he was lighting up his six-hundredth cigarette of the evening.
“So I’m out on parole, huh?” he snarled like a bothered wolf in repose. As always, he took the irascible sarcastic approach. “That’s a nice cozy arrangement.”
