Some Velvet Sin by Heather Crews

Author:Heather Crews [Crews, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-17T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

1958

The town teemed with activity when Victor pulled up in front of the ice cream parlor on Saturday. Clothes were freshly pressed, chrome gleamed, and all the shops had their best items displayed in the windows. He couldn’t help feeling optimistic as he watched families stroll up and down the sidewalk, laden with shopping bags, stopping every now and then to greet each other. It was a world he saw all the time but never really entered. His ma had still been asleep when he left. She hardly ever woke up before noon because of her late shifts.

His eyes traveled down the road to the vacuum store. He knew that had been his father’s market once, before the forced relocation during the war. As a half-white child, Victor had been lucky to stay with his ma during those years he barely remembered, and she’d given him her last name as an extra precaution. The Satos, on the other hand, had all three gone to an internment camp, like thousands of other Japanese-American families. Where Mr. Sato’s nursery had once stood at the end of Main Street there now was a car dealership.

Both men had eventually left the camp, but they’d lost their businesses—many families had lost everything. Mr. Sato had later succumbed to a heart attack, and Victor’s pa had been killed in a car crash after drinking too much; he’d been a man of excesses, according to his ma. That was why she always cautioned Victor, but at the same time she knew he chafed against authority, and so she allowed him a good deal of freedom.

He climbed out of the car and glanced across the street at the hair salon. Even though he didn’t see Cyn, his heart started beating faster. Nothing was going to dampen his mood today.

With a grin of anticipation, he turned away and walked toward the ice cream parlor, strutting a little, if he was honest with himself. He sidestepped a group of kids’ bikes lying in a pile outside the drugstore and winked at a woman carrying a tiny dog, who blinked in confusion at him. At the ice cream parlor he held open the door for a group of young girls on their way out. They all glanced at him with round eyes before running off in a fit of giggles.

A brown-haired girl in a big pink skirt stood at the counter, chatting with the blond boy who worked there. The boy gave him a wary glance but said nothing as Victor took a seat on one of the stools to wait for Cyn. Through the large window he could see the hair salon’s door. He watched for her, astonished at his own anxious delight.

He’d never felt this way about a girl before. Sure, there was the excitement of getting laid, but this was different. This was about Cyn herself, her prickly moods, stubbornness, sticky fingers and all. It didn’t matter that he barely knew her. The point was wanting to know her.

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