by Julia Kent
“You’re Mr. Abundance Mentality. Maybe you decided the universe was safe enough to put someone’s dick in your mouth.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Neither does your scarcity mentality bullshit. Plus, you really do sound like you’ve got a ball rolling around under your tongue.”
“I had a cavity filled an hour ago.”
“Anal or oral?”
“Oral, of course. And speaking of oral –”
“You’re seriously offering to go down on me with a novocaine mouth, Trev? Your tongue’ll end up in my belly button and a pool of drool will settle in my butt crack. No thanks.”
“You’re so romantic.”
“Says the man offering to go down on me with a mouth so loose, it might as well be a rubber chicken.”
“I was thinking about receiving oral. From you. From your non-novocained mouth.”
“Oh.” She let out an aggrieved groan. “You’re changing the subject! Damn it, Trevor.”
“Not on purpose. I’d just rather talk about sex than the band.”
“And I work for the band, so I have no choice. You really can’t perform that weekend?”
“I really can’t.”
“I love you, Trevor Connor. I love that you are there for your brother and you take being in charge of him so your parents can get a break so seriously. I do. But you are an asshole.”
“Call and ask to change the weekend, Dar –”
Click.
CHAPTER TWO
DARLA
That fucker. That positive-thinking, everything-will-work-out, don’t-borrow-trouble, smug-faced asshole.
Guess what?
I called the booking manager at the Vegas resort. I sure did, loathing every second as the phone rang, knowing Trevor was about four minutes from being sent into the third circle of hell.
By me.
Seeing as I had no choice, I suffered through the wait, getting the guy’s voicemail. Like a fish on shore, my mouth opened and closed as I listened to his message. What in the hell did Trevor expect me to say?
“Excuse me, Giles. I’m calling because we need you to move our performances. That’s right. The opening band, low man on the Totem pole, is making a request that you –”
I didn’t even need to finish my imaginary message.
Because the voicemail would cut me off, laughing. That’s right – even machines and pieces of software know better than Trevor that you don’t go asking for something like this.
You just don’t.
“Hello?” The booking manager’s light French accent, all too real, cut into the line. “Giles speaking.”
“Fuck,” I gasped.
That wasn’t part of any message I planned to leave.
“Excuse me?” His voice hardened.
“For...give me. Hey, uh, Giles. It’s Darla Jennings. Manager for Random Acts of Crazy.”
“Darla!” His entire tone changed. “I was just about to call you!”
“You were?” People like me – bands like Random Acts of Crazy – are bottom feeders. Trevor and Joe aren’t wrong. I do settle for whatever I get, because I know my place in the hierarchy of any given social situation. Always. It’s a skill you develop when you grow up poor. Don’t ever, ever make the mistake of thinking you’re higher up that ladder than you really are, because if you do – someone will kick you right back down.
Sneering and laughing the whole time, shaming you, because what made you think you were important enough to go that high?
So.
“Yes! We had a last minute change in our line-up, and I was hopeful your band could move your performance up one week.”
The world turned into a giant gong being hit by a mallet made out of my head. “Huh?”
“I know it’s a lot to ask,” he said, using this weird, self-deprecating tone that sounded kind of snivelly. “You’ve already made travel arrangements, changed schedules, perhaps rebooked or even cancelled other performances.”
I’d done, uh, absolutely zero of that.
“Right,” I replied, the gong still ringing.
“And of course we’ll pay for any change fees required as a result of shifting your schedule.”
GONG!
I was struck mute.
“Darla?” Giles sounded increasingly alarmed. The man had no idea that a small Tibetan monastery lived in my head right now, so I couldn’t blame him.
“Yeah?”
“Given your response, I take it this will be a hardship for the band.”
“Uh...” Shit. I knew what was coming next. He was about to cancel on us. Trevor was so fucking wrong. Why did I let him talk me into making this phone call at all? The minute we got on Giles’ radar, we were a target. Prey. That’s how it all worked, and –
“In light of the change, we can increase your rate by ten percent. That’s as high as I can go. Ten percent and change fees for travel. I’ll add it to the contract. What do you say?”
I say Trevor is a motherfucking leprechaun-skin-wearing unicorn who needs to buy one hundred lottery tickets right now.
Except, thank God, I didn’t actually say that.
“That sounds acceptable,” I muttered through a numb mouth. Wouldn’t your mouth be numb if your face had been used to strike a metal bowl? Even metaphorically?
“You drive a hard bargain. I see why they hired you to manage their band.”
They hired me because I’m fucking forty percent of the band, I thought but didn’t say.
“Forty percent?” he responded.
Ah, damn. Apparently that one slipped through aloud.
“Yes.”
“Why so few?” Giles asked, his words like butterflies of sensuality, consonants softened, voice husky in that delightfully mature French way. At least, to my hick ears, it sounded sophisticated. Plus he was asking why I wasn’t a whore who let all the guys plow me, if I was understanding him right. I had to latch onto something good about his voice.
“Excuse me?”
“Why not fuck all of them?”
I love French people.
“I –”
“Because that is how most of the band managers I work with are. I am surprised you haven’t tasted each and every gorgeous man in that band, Actes Aléatoires de Démence.”
“Uh...” An image of Liam and Sam playing Fart Wars after eating a bunch of cauliflower pizza shot through my mind like, well – like sugar-free gummi bears blowing through a digestive tract. And Frown? Me, get a taste of Frown? That silent, brooding, tatted-up man probably tasted like disappointment and Fritos.
Not, you know, that there was anything wrong with Maggie wantin’ herself some of that.
But seriously? Liam, Sam, and Frown? No. I’d fuck them the next time the train to Nopeville stopped at the corner of Hellnough and Never before heading out to Areyafuckingkiddingmeham.
“Tell me,” he said, his voice going low to a conspirator’s hush. “Joe, the bass player. How available is he?”
I sat up in my chair so fast, I got a rug burn on my neck from the upholstery. “Not! He’s not!” Even I heard the hysteria in my own voice.
“Oh.” Giles sounded so disappointed. “I was hoping. Is he one of yours?”
“You know, Giles, I’m not sure how much personal information I should be giving to you. I don’t want to seem unprofessional and all.”
“You told me you were fucking forty percent of the band, Darla. You were the one who chose to make this personal. Besides,” he said in an airy, devil-may-care tone, “personal, professional – don’t be so uptight. When you come to Vegas, let us all party together. I’ll supply the drugs, you supply the men.”
“But –”
“And the chicken.”
“What?”
“I have to draw a line somewhere. I know that Trevor is attached to his Mavis, but I cannot be caught in this town condoning bestiality.” Papers shuffled in the background. “Although it is convenient that an animal fetish convention is in town
during your new tour dates.” He made a noise deep in this throat, a huff that came out of his nose, the sound of surprise tinged with intrigue.
“Trevor’s not – he –”
Giles’ laugh was sharp and smooth at the same time, like a slab of polished granite cracking in half. “I know you have to say he does not fuck the chicken, but that’s public relations.”
The man’s wink could be felt through the phone.
“What you say to the press is very different from what you do in the bedroom. Or,” he added with a laugh, “the chicken coop.”
“You seriously think Trevor is fucking chickens when we’re having sex?”
“Ah, so he is the other one? I wondered. Do you have an arrangement?”
“An arrangement?”
“With the two. Do you sleep with them separately, or together, or does the chicken get to orgasm first? I would hope that ladies really do come first, Darla. Wait a moment. Is Mavis a female chicken?”
I used to think that having your cellphone stuck in your vagina like Amy did would be the worst thing ever, but it’s looking like a fabulous alternative to this conversation.
“Mavis is not the topic of this here conversation, Giles. How about I ask you a few questions about your sex life?”
“Oh, how fun!” Was he actually clapping?
Oh, shit.
“I don’t really have any questions about your personal business.”
“I am gay. I like dominant twinks. This is why I am so attracted to Joe.”
“Joe is not a twink!” I pause. “What the hell is a dominant twink? That’s like calling me a taciturn loudmouth.”
“And I like a little puppy play, though I draw the line at hummus spreading.”
My stomach crawled up my esophagus, wiggled into my brain through one nostril, and was trying to exit my skull through my left ear.
One part of me was just a big old screaming mouth in my brain, nothing more, nothing less. The other part – the sliver of me that ran on pure instinct – opened my mouth to reflexively ask what the hell hummus had to do with puppy play.
What actually happened next, though, wasn’t reflexive at all.
My ears started ringing, the sound like a thousand wine glasses filled to different levels and played by five hundred people with wet fingertips making the glasses sing. Cacophony never suits me, so the result was an instant splitting headache right at the bridge of my nose, a piercing nerve pain that made it hard to talk.
“Darla? Hello? Are you there?”
My mouth opened to answer him, but the thousand ringing glass circles filled my head with pain as the vibrations took over and a mental image of what, exactly, Giles would do with a dominant twink in charge of puppy play with a tub of hummus made my brain explode.
Like, not literally, ‘cause I do know the difference between figuratively and literally, but it fucking felt like my brain actually shattered into a thousand chunks of grey matter, one piece landing neatly in the center of each of those thousand ringing wine glasses.
Ker-plunk.
“I’m here,” I said, airy and splattered all over those singing glasses. My words were a lie, but when faced with a truth that involves hummus as a sex toy, I want to be a confabulation.
“Darla, I have another call. I’ll send the paperwork,” he said in a satisfied tone, as if he’d just orgasmed and was sucking on a Camel.
Not literally.
I mean smoking a cigarette. For fuck’s sake, we’ve got enough fetish and kink going on in this conversation. Don’t need no more.
“Thanks,” I said in an octave a soprano couldn’t reach, and I hung up. Ending that phone conversation felt like being submerged in an outhouse at a family reunion where someone brought tainted meat, and two hundred aunts and cousins just shat their brains out in the privy, and you slipped and fell in.
You’re relieved to break the surface, but holy shit.
I’d just been out-Darla’d.
I spent the next ten minutes just staring at the blank white wall in front of me.
Until Trevor walked in.
TREVOR
Darla’s natural state of being is motion. Mostly her mouth in motion, talking up a storm, but it’s not just that. She’s beauty in motion, the definition of energy and vitality, always processing or analyzing, experiencing or reacting.
Whether she’s talking or giving me head, naked or clothed, laughing or crying, she moves.
Walking in on her staring at the wall isn’t normal.
“Darla?”
No answer.
“Honey?” I don’t call her by terms of endearment, so I was desperate.
No answer.
Alarm flooded my body, blood starting to pick up its pace, my legs tingling. “What’s wrong?”
She inhaled slowly, almost mournfully. Some part of me relaxed and snapped at the same time.
“Darla, please tell me what’s going on.”
“They moved the concert date in Vegas.” Her head turned, eyes slowly creeping up after it like an obedient little dog. When she looked at me, the blankness of her eyes made a cold fear course through me. “But I had to talk to a gay man about his hummus fetish in order to get it done.”
Believe it or not, that wasn’t the weirdest sentence ever to come out of her mouth. But it was close.
“Why were you talking to a gay man about sex?”
“It was an accident.”
“He accidentally started talking about sex?”
“No, I did.”
Patience is one quality you have to cultivate when you love Darla.
“And you brought up sex because..?”
“Because my mouth and my brain don’t always connect. Sometimes the tethering rope just up and snaps.”
“Right.”
“And it turns out the booking manager has the hots for Joe.”
“Joe?”
“Yeah.” Bleak eyes met mine. “I know, right?”
This was not the time to ask why the guy didn’t have the hots for me. I was a little offended. Hurt, even. I’m way hotter than Joe.
“But hold on.” I backtracked mentally. “They changed the date?” I felt my eyebrows raise and my smile spread across my mouth as if a puppeteer did it. Self-preservation told me to stop, because Darla was going to lose it if I rubbed her nose in the fact that my abundance mentality turned out to be for the best.
But how many twenty-something guys in rock bands do you know who are experts in self-preservation?
Or being humble?
“I was right!” I declared, fists pumped in the air, biceps flexing like I was Rocky Balboa winning a championship.
“Yeah,” she said, like a balloon slowly losing its air.
“Wait – who was the creeper asking about Joe and our sex life? He actually told you – what?”
Her hand came up and gave a wave, as if shooing a fly. “That part was fine. I’m more bothered by the fact that it was so damn easy.”
“What was easy?”
“Asking for what I want and getting it.”
A kick in the gut never comes with a warning, does it?
My instinct was to rush in and assure her that she could always ask us for whatever she wanted, and most of the time Joe and I would give it to her. We can’t always manage it, but we certainly will try.
Darla’s reaction here struck me as something deeper, that kind of internal emotional Tetris we all experience when confronting something new that touches the old inside. And if I rescued her from this, papered over it with all the conventional words and do-right assurances, it’d just hurt her in the long run.
One thing Darla’s taught us all: don’t hide from reality.
And from the looks of it, she was getting a big load of it right then.
“You asked and they said yes?”
She just nodded.
“Isn’t that… good?” I ventured.
Nod.
“So you got what you want! I can be with the band. We ca
n do the gig!”
A few blinks were her answer.
“Isn’t that what you wanted? I don’t understand. Why aren’t you happy?”
“Happy,” she repeated dully. Her eyes darted left and right, but she made no other motion. My balls started to tighten, a thin line of nerves along my jaw firing with expectation.
“Yes… happy. We can still do Vegas! You can brag to your mom. Call her and give her the great news.”
“She always wanted to go to Vegas,” Darla said in that flat voice.
“Maybe we can bring her there.” I’d met Cathy a few times. Liked her as much as you’re supposed to like your girlfriend’s mom. She was kind of scary, frankly. Blunt to the point of making my ’nads crawl into my groin, and always a little angry, but not toward me or Joe. Just angry. Like she’d spent so many years being upset at the world that even when life turned a corner and became better, her face muscles hadn’t quite caught up to the new truth.
“Mama won’t go nowhere without Calvin.” Darla’s voice and face looked like, well, her mom.
Irritation started to rise in me, like bile only more bitter. Nothing I said seemed to shake Darla out of whatever this was, and a guy could only try for so long. “Whatever. We’ll deal with the question of your mom later. But I don’t get you.” I planted my hands on my hips, knowing the aggressive stance would piss her off but unable to stop myself.
Darla looked up slowly, nodding and blinking. “I bet you don’t.”
There is a moment when the shift from being certain about a relationship to being uncertain happens, and it always sucks. Tiny fractions of seconds tick by and the world tilts a little, like someone gave it a good shove. It’s not the same as those moments of conflict where you’re fighting. Those uncertainties come with big warnings, red flags and alarm bells that tip you off about entering Something Is Very Wrong territory.
This kind of interaction was the former.
“You think I don’t get you… ever?”
“Not on this issue.”
I crossed my arms. I couldn’t help it. “What, exactly, is the issue?”
“You were right.”
“You’re mad that I was right?”
“Not mad.”
“Then… sad?”
