Nobody's Hero

by Melanie Harvey

  He shook his head.

  “Not even — ”

  He kept shaking his head. “Already did. Twice. Now, Zeus is coming to Cleveland.”

  “You make that sound bad.”

  A carriage passed by, the horses’ hooves beating a rhythm on the pavement. Rick watched it turn the corner before he spoke. “You don’t call your boss into your office. It ain’t like I can’t make it down there, but he just says he’s doing this, and he don’t say why.”

  “Does it have to be negative?”

  “Even if it wasn’t, which I doubt, it’s only half the problem. Because Zeus ain’t hanging around some hotel in Cleveland away from home, from the rest of his work? He gonna want to get home, and I’m a get rushed.” He grimaced. “That ain’t what I need right now, not now. Because if this one ain’t … a lot better … then … ”

  A Town Car pulled up to the awning and the doorman hurried out. Again, Rick watched until the people disappeared inside, but this time he didn’t continue.

  “I don’t understand,” Carolyn said.

  “My manager be talking about how after this record somebody else gonna pick me up. But what he only mentioned twice — and never again, unless I asked, and I quit asking — was that Carnage don’t seem to feel too … anxious … to be negotiating their option to extend my contract through a fifth record.”

  Carolyn took a second to process through the explanation. “You think they’re going to drop you?”

  “Ain’t worried about losing me. And nothing in the contract says they even have to distribute this album.”

  It had to be perfect. “Well, sure, everyone gets stuck with that kind of pressure.”

  Rick’s eyes flew open in a double take of intense amusement. “Carolyn!” He let go of the post and spread his arms. “I was a fucking battle rapper.”

  You know what 60 seconds is? Sixteen bars. Just two guys and one microphone and all you have to do is come up with it, better than the other guy, win the crowd and don’t screw up.

  She couldn’t even imagine.

  “It ain’t pressure,” he said. “I don’t know what it is. All I know is if I’m taking sardines into the studio next week … ” He grinned. “So like I said, I probably shoulda kept that number.”

  “Well, if that’s what’s really important.”

  He responded to her tone with an equally sarcastic snort.

  “So what if — ”

  He shot her a sharp look, then shook his head. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

  She almost didn’t anyway, but he nodded. “Octavia Butler, the writer I was — ” he nodded, quickly, so he remembered. “She wrote about writer’s block once. They say every writer experiences it, I assume you’d count.”

  “So the good news is, we got a name for what’s killing you.” His grin at his joke grew wider when she put her hands on her hips. “You’re being serious.”

  “I wasn’t finished.”

  “Well, when you do finish, could you — ” he gestured to her hands on her hips. “Kale’s wife do that to me when she catches me sneaking candy to Kevin and Kiara.”

  “Maybe that’s because you won’t take her seriously either.”

  “They like candy.”

  When she opened her mouth, he interrupted her.

  “Really, though.” He nodded at her hands still on her hips. “Don’t do that.”

  When she dropped her hands, she didn’t know what to do with them, so she just started talking. “Octavia Butler said whenever she got stuck in a story, it was always because something had gone wrong somewhere.”

  Rick had stopped grinning and started listening. “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that something she’d written before had gone off track, and she couldn’t keep going until she went back and fixed it.” She couldn’t read the expression on his face. “There might not have been anything about tracks. It’s a complete paraphrase.”

  His eyes narrowed. Paraphrase. She started to speak, but he held up his free hand.

  “I was just preoccupied.” Then he added, “In your own words.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but not for underestimating him. “I don’t — I mean it’s not like I have a clue what you’re going through.”

  Rick seemed confused by that for a minute. Then he lifted his chin. “What was you reading that for anyway? Writer’s block. Stories.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  Carolyn waved him off. “Just playing around.”

  “You should quit playing. If it’s what you really want.” He swung away from the post, his arm fully extended, and stopped himself right next to her.

  She took a deep breath, which was a mistake since he was so close to her. “You better not either.”

  “I ain’t quitting,” he said. Cocky again. “But come on, even if I did, what difference would it make?”

  “Oh, no!”

  He jumped and looked at her with wary eyes.

  Like when she was angry. “I am not mad.”

  He grinned. “You know, Carolyn, when people don’t use contractions — ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’? Usually means they’re lying.”

  “Then I am mad. No contractions there, either.”

  “All right, be mad.”

  “You can’t think like that!”

  “Oh, hell I can’t. I ain’t putting it on my resume, but there’s another one right behind me, and a shitload in front of me — ”

  “But none of them are you.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “Don’t ‘whatever’ me.”

  He shrugged instead, but she knew he didn’t believe it. She’d used too many variations of that defense mechanism herself.

  “Look,” she said, “I don’t know why guys like Guillotine get played on the radio every ten minutes — ” he raised his eyebrows, but she pushed on “ — and maybe millions of people would be just as happy if nobody ever recorded another rap album.”

  He grinned. “Sounds like a Senate hearing in the making.”

  “You’re being facetious again.”

  “I got that one already.” He tapped his finger to his temple. “Gimme a new one.”

  Her hands went to her hips, and he swung away on the pole.

  “But,” she said. “I don’t believe that a single one of those people ever heard you.”

  He looked straight at her, frozen on his return swing, no more than a foot away.

  She felt her hands shift to twist the hem of her shirt. “I can only speak for myself, of course.”

  Rick’s gaze darted away, then back to her. Her grip tightened on her shirt. She didn’t know why. His lips pressed together, then twisted, but not into a smile. She heard the slightest huff of air, an unvoiced ‘huh’ as his eyes turned into something she couldn’t read at all.

  Then the movement of his hand caught the corner of her eye, and she braced herself for the touch that would dissolve her last shreds of resistance.

  It didn’t come. His right hand closed into a loose fist and moved, not in her direction, but his. He bumped it against his own chin, then straight out, stopping the fist between their faces, the difference of inches split neatly in half.

  She saw the ‘G’ on his skin the moment before the knuckle of his index finger grazed her chin. She barely felt it, and it still sent her heart pounding in her ears.

  Last night. They’d both done that on the stage, Rick first, then Guillotine. What did it mean? She started to ask, but he was swinging away, dropping off the post of the clock and nodding at the front door of her hotel.

  “Better get in there,” he said, moving … away from her? “It’s getting late.”

  He tilted his head toward the hotel door, and Carolyn felt the air rush from her lungs. He walked backwards a few steps toward the corner. Then he stopped to consider her for a second. “Can I call you tomorrow?”

  She could only manage a small nod.

  He shoved both hands in his pockets. “A’ight.” />
  She thought she could read her own confusion on his face as he took a few more steps away. He lifted his chin. “Was there vodka in that OJ?”

  “What?”

  “Instead of ‘was that OJ you was drinking’. Was there vodka in that OJ? Ain’t you heard my CDs?”

  She grinned at the tone she’d imagined when she read it. “You’re editing?”

  “Well, the point was that it wasn’t just orange juice, I don’t know if that was clear.”

  “It was. And you’d lose the thinking-drinking rhyme from the line before.”

  “Got that one memorized already?” She couldn’t deny it, and he kept going. “You know vodkas?”

  She shook her head.

  “Me neither, I know whiskeys. Put a brand name in there, maybe. You can get paid for that shit.”

  “Sellout.”

  Rick laughed. It might have been the most incredible thing she’d ever heard.

  “Don’t be standing around out here,” he said, with a slight jerk of his head toward the semi-tranquility of Fifth Avenue across from Central Park at midnight. It felt safe, or it had been when he was there. But he was walking away, and she didn’t want him to go.

  No. That was not true.

  She reached the edge of the awning and turned. He was almost to the corner, watching for her to make it inside. He lifted his eyebrows.

  Carolyn cupped a hand to her mouth. “No number eight?”

  She heard it again, an actual laugh over the traffic.

  He cupped his own hands to his mouth. “I’m testing out a new theory.” She covered her face so he couldn’t see her embarrassment, but she still heard the laughter in his next words:

  “Just goin’ hang around ’til you forget you don’t want me.”

  She didn’t have time to wonder if he’d really missed how much she wanted him, because when she looked up, he pointed at the hotel behind her.

  “Inside.”

  She went inside. Smiling.

  20: Pour Me Another

  Rick stared at the whiskey as if it might start telling his fortune. Which he didn’t need; he needed a reverse crystal ball, tarot cards that dealt out backwards, anything to explain what the hell he’d been doing half an hour ago. A long swallow ran like fire down into his stomach, and he’d still lost his mind. Oh, he had a phone call coming to him tomorrow. Don’t forget about that.

  Everything was right on the surface with her, he knew the second — he could still feel it — the second he didn’t have to ask. He hadn’t known his hand moved until it was over. Maybe Terrance was right. Maybe he did have control problems.

  Rick drained his drink and dropped the glass on the bar. The bartender raised his eyebrows. Sure, line them up. Five more at least, that’s what it’d take to erase the image that jumped to his mind that second. All the faces that hadn’t held a hint of anger before, during and immediately after the fucking. Just because he meant it when he said he wanted them to leave. Sometimes their rage amused him, sometimes it pissed him off. Mostly it just bored him.

  Imagining that look on Carolyn’s face made him want to vomit.

  He shook his head at the bartender, pulled out his cell phone, and hit Terrance’s voice-mail wall again. All he wanted to tell him was that he’d actually witnessed an intentional walk, because even baseball was better than this. But Terrance was unavailable. Rick shoved the phone in his pocket, dropped a ten on the bar and stood up.

  “Hey, Ricky.” Her low voice was as seductive as the bare leg crossed over her knee. “Where you off to?”

  The nut house, not that it’s any of your damn business. And nowhere, now, because she planted the sole of her high heel on the edge of the stool he’d just vacated. Trapping him between the bar and one very long, very smooth, very pale leg.

  She took a sip from a frozen margarita. Salt crystals clung to her lips, she licked them off with a sleek pass of her tongue. She smiled as her knee moved, clearly pleased with herself for accomplishing the Herculean task of resurrecting an erection that had been running somewhere between fifty and a hundred percent since yesterday.

  Congratulations. You jammed your knee in my dick. Guess you win.

  If she hadn’t trapped him here, he would have laughed. Take it or leave it. Or pick it yourself. He almost did laugh when she swept her hair back with her free hand. Her hair was orange, red, whatever … almost exactly like Mary’s.

  Rick glanced at the other drinkers and turned toward her to change the look of the scene she’d cornered him into. “You gonna let me out?”

  She moved her foot down to the rung of his stool. Rick leaned against the bar and shook his head.

  Her eyes were pale blue. “I’m not playing your games.”

  “I noticed.” Rick glanced at the leg blocking him, then back to her hair.

  “I don’t think I need to.” Another sip of margarita, another tongue flick to clear the salt. “If you don’t want me, it’s your loss.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so.” She ran her knee against his thigh. “So, you really going to pass?”

  She stretched her left ankle to the side of his right. The charge was instantaneous, standing between legs opened for him, right where he’d wanted to be the whole damn day.

  Almost.

  He’d never believed the shit he’d heard, because men lie and — if they’re lucky — rappers get paid for it. At first he thought it was some coke-induced hallucination. Every woman that came on to him was willing, a little reverse paranoia that turned out to be … what did they say?

  Just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean her hand ain’t wrapped around your dick.

  Then he’d thought that the upside to getting that phone call in Miami from Mary was that he didn’t have to resist it. He was twenty-one years old, and it might never happen again. He’d really thought that, too — for about as long as he thought the word ‘upside’ belonged in the same fucking language as the words ‘phone call in Miami.’

  It happened again. And again. He didn’t know where they came from, tried not to think about where they’d been, and didn’t care where they were going. Just glad they were stopping by on the way. That lasted until a month before he told the Park Lane desk clerk that his name was Jack Diamond.

  He remembered the heat most from Kansas City, some kind of mutant wave going through in May. He’d gone back for a desperately needed shower after the show, and told Terrance he didn’t want to be bothered. Three months on the road was wearing on him; he wanted some sleep. Then he couldn’t, because the motel air conditioner was too loud. But not loud enough.

  He’d yanked open the door. “Did she just say she’d fuck you — first?”

  The bitch called him an asshole when he asked if they were supposed to pay for it, too. He hadn’t really heard her, because he saw the truth on Terrance’s face. Just because he would never take it didn’t mean they hadn’t offered. In thirteen years they’d fought more times than Rick could count, but he’d never been this furious.

  He slammed the door shut on the girl. “How you don’t tell me this shit?”

  Terrance dropped into the stained chair by the window that held the rattling air conditioner. “Why would I?”

  “Wrong question. Why the hell wouldn’t you?”

  Terrance’s voice was as calm as his face. “I ain’t your fucking lie detector.”

  “The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “Means what the hell you so pissed off about? You the prize, Rain.” Terrance closed his eyes and leaned back in the orange chair.

  “So it ain’t about telling me the truth, it’s about your ego?”

  “Fuck you, Ricky. You don’t want to know the truth anymore.”

  Rick refilled the plastic cup from the bottle on the dresser. “Wouldn’t have nobody to tell me if I did.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it. You ain’t listening.”

  “Oh, I’m listening, T. You ain’t talking.”

  Ter
rance didn’t bite. The only thing Rick heard besides the damn air conditioner was the bass that started pounding through the wall from the next room. It felt like a memory he couldn’t grab hold of.

  “It’s four in the morning,” Terrance finally said. “I’m tired and you’re drunk.”

  “I ain’t too drunk for this.”

  “You sure about that?”

  Rick wasn’t sure about anything, except they finally turned up the volume next door. Maybe he was drunk, because it wasn’t until Snoop started bow-wow-wowing and yippee-yo-yippee-aying that Rick’s brain clicked in. The soundtrack was slightly ironic, being told he was wasted to The Chronic.

  Terrance didn’t look like he’d appreciate the joke, so Rick didn’t point it out or answer the question, which he’d forgotten anyway.

  “A’ight,” Terrance said, but he didn’t sound like he thought it would be. “The truth is you’re drinking too much, and as far as I can tell, too much ain’t gonna be enough for long.”

  “What the fuck’s that got to do with anything?”

  Terrance lifted his eyebrows. “Thought you was listening.”

  Ain’t listening to this. But that was pretty much the same thing Terrance had said, and Rick was too pissed to give him the satisfaction of proving his point. So he just stood there, listening to the damn A/C and Dre and Snoop rapping through the wall.

  “The truth is,” Terrance said, “you don’t see what you don’t want to see. The truth is, it ain’t about my pride. I give a shit if some skank ho offers to suck my dick so she can get her mouth on yours?”

  Rick wasn’t too drunk to hear Terrance turn it around. He raised his cup. Here’s to pride. Terrance watched him drink.

  “Ricky, I ain’t arguing with you,” he said finally, still in that dead calm voice. “Because that ain’t what’s killing you anyway. What’s killing you is that you know the only reason they want you in the first place is because you the one shitting into the microphone. And if you don’t figure out why that even fucking matters to you — ”

  “Bullshit.” He reached for the bottle.

  Terrance nodded. “Maybe have another. I hear it makes the bullshit go away.”