Carmen was beautiful, and I couldn't keep from glancing at her from time to time in dismay as she and I got ready for our big night out.
She was a tall woman – easily surpassing six feet. And, do you know how some really tall women walk hunch-shouldered so they think they won't appear so tall? Well, that wasn't Carmen, and she didn't do that. No, she embraced herself, and her full height. She even wore stiletto heels, and fuck anybody who she towered over, woman or man.
She was something of a bombshell too. She currently had bleached-blonde hair that she wore in a cute pixie cut. Her makeup was heavy and immaculate, like she had a makeup artist always at her beck and call. Her nails were painted a deep, dark purple, except for her ring fingers – those nails were poison green.
"Would you stop acting so...so damned depressed?!" Carmen lamented as she dug around in her suitcase and tossed several scarves at me. "Hold these up one by one by your neck. One of these will work...trust me."
I rolled my eyes, ignoring her, because this was never going to work, no matter what Carmen said. Me trying to accessorize with her colorful scarves was like trying to pretty up a stick by rubber banding a flower around it. It just didn't work.
I wasn't built like a stick, however. I had an administrative assistant job that kept my plump butt firmly in my uncomfortable office chair for 8 hours out of every work day. By the time I got home every evening I was too mentally tired to work out so I'd given that up several years ago and my waistline had paid the price.
"If you would work out for a half an hour every day, Kiki," Carmen once had told me, "even if you walked for 15 minutes at lunch and then 15 minutes when you got home from work, you'd slim right back down!"
I didn't fault Carmen for trying to help. After all, it was part of who she was. She had probably popped out of her mother dressed in running shoes, showing off her kickboxing skills with the delivery nurses and doctor. I however, was born holding a donut.
Nearly an hour had passed since this had all started, and after all the work Carmen had done on me, my god, I still looked a mess. Nothing I had in my closet passed the Carmen test, so, as a last resort, when she suggested I try on the tan, thigh-length knit dress that Carmen had worn here on the plane, I had laughed. How would that fit me?? But amazingly the dress did. It came up to my neck and fell to the top of my knees, and unless I was mistaken, it had stretched out a bit as she'd worn it so that it now hugged my thighs and my waist and my breasts like a second skin. We both let out a whistle when I turned to face the mirror.
"This looks..." I'd begun.
"Perfect," Carmen had finished.
I had laughed again. "I was going to say 'way too tight and inappropriate'," I'd confessed, but Carmen had just shaken her head. True the dress covered me from neck to knee. But it was skin tight. I was not a skin tight clothes kind of girl.
"No. It looks great on you! Who would have thought? I mean, let's spray it with Febreze in the underarm area because since I work out so much you know I'm a hard sweater."
"You don't think It's too slutty?" I'd asked her.
"Uh, no? It comes up to your neck," she'd responded.
"Yeah, but it hugs me like a wet blanket."
Carmen had just winked. "You want a guy on you tonight as tight as this dress. I think with this look, you just might get it," she'd said.
But I still sighed as I looked at myself. My hazel eyes were alright – I always considered them my best feature. It was too bad that they were so small. I mean, if my legs had been long and sexy, at least legs you can see on a person from far away. But, no, you had to get past the rest of me first to even get to my eyes. I was on the heavy side, and I had boring brown hair that went down my back, almost to my waist. No matter what I did to it, it frizzed like a shrubbery in the slightest hint of humidity, and I'd threatened to shave it all off more than once.
Carmen, however, had brought along a special curling iron for me. It was as thick as a soda can and she used it to curl my hair into these huge, long ringlets. I had to admit, thanks to her know-how, my hair looked...for once, really great.
I let out a huge puff of air as Carmen tried to do a "smokey eye" on me. Of course it looked fabulous on her – sexy, mysterious, and trendy. On me, it was starting to look like I'd been in a fist fight. "It's just hard for me. It's so easy for you, Carmen," I told her.
She stopped blending colors on my eyelid and looked at me quizzically. "What do you mean, easy?" She said, with an edge to her tone that let me know I'd just stepped in it.
I flushed scarlet when I realized what I'd just let slip. "Well, I don't mean it's been all easy for you," I mumbled. "But -"
"Kiki, my mother died when I was in middle school," she said, one hand on her hip. "How has any of this been easy for me?" She asked, waving her hands around.
"No," I said, quickly backtracking. Carmen and I had been friends since high school – her mother's death had set off a chain of events that had eventually led to her dad remarrying and them moving three states away and settling just three houses down the street from me and my family.
"I'm sorry. That was a thoughtless thing for me to say. You've been through a lot of shit...I don't know why I said that. That's not what I meant," I said.
"Okay," Carmen said slowly, her eyes narrowing. "So, what did you mean?"
"I mean, look at you, Carmen!" We both looked at each other in the big wall mirror I had. "You're gorgeous! I know you've had to overcome a lot of crap in your life, but you're just...everything that I'm not. You're pretty, and thin, and you've got an outgoing personality that makes everybody love you," I paused, taking a great breath. "But...ultimately...you're beautiful. And I -"
"Just need a little more styling," she said.
I laughed. "Yeah. Styling. And I need to get a personality replacement because I'm too serious and boring. And you - you've always been beautiful. Plus, you don't ever seem to age," I said, touching the missing laugh lines that should have been around her eyes as they now were around mine.
"Botox," she said quickly. "Okay, that, and facial peels," she rolled her eyes with a grin.
"And your body and your perky little boobs-"
"I only eat a tiny bit once a day and it all goes to my tits," she laughed out loud.
I couldn't help but chuckle at that. She ate a helluva lot more than one meal, and we both knew it. She ate like a man calorie-wise. But she had a great body because she was a "personal trainer to the stars," as she always liked to say. She spent her time running and lifting and circuiting and jumping and stretching alongside her clients. Her "trainer to the stars" used to be kind of an inside joke between the two of us, since she used to mostly work with stay-at-home-moms or with guys after work trying to ditch their dad bods. But once she moved to Los Angeles and started working at a new and up and coming gym there, things had changed, and so had her clientele.
I mean, she told me about her clients all the time, and it wasn't like she trained Chris Hemsworth or Jada Pinkett Smith. So, so far I'd never heard of any of the people she trained. But she took selfies with them: before and during and after photos. She added them to her website and social media accounts and...well, she worked with some of the most beautiful people I'd ever seen. I'd never tell her, but some of them were even better looking than she was.
Her clients might not be on any A-list actor's party lists, but she kept the kind of people fit who used their bodies as she did – as elements of their jobs. She had trained a few former navy seals who were now personal bodyguards. She'd had a gay porn star as a client that though he didn't swing my way, I knew a beautiful man when I saw one. He even had full, colorful sleeve tattoos that ran up and down both arms.
Oh, and also, she trained models.
She worked with some of the best goddamned looking models I had ever seen.
Carmen had flown in earlier in the day, and we had drooled over her new website clientele just as soon as Carmen had stowed her bags at the far end of my couch, which would be her bed here for the entire next week. We'd stared at length at one man who had something brooding about him. He was gorgeous. So gorgeous, he was painful to the eyes. So good-looking, he looked almost fake.
"Is he smeared with oil?" I'd asked with a scowl.
"He's sweaty, dear heart," Carmen had said. "He had just finished with his jump rope routine and was nice and warm and moist."
