I Love the 80s

by Crane, Megan

  ‘But …’ She searched his face, and frowned. ‘Why?’

  He didn’t like the question. He reached over and toyed with a dark curl until she batted his hand away.

  ‘You can’t just go around kissing people,’ she said, her voice stronger, her frown more pronounced. ‘I don’t know what game you’re playing.’

  ‘I am not playing a game,’ he said, well on his way to being irritated. She brought it out in him. He was either awash in lust, or annoyed. Usually both.

  ‘Yesterday you’re ranting about cars and today …’ She shook her head, which made her great mass of hair shake too, and slide around and over her shoulders, cascading towards her breasts. He found the sight inexpressibly erotic, and shifted his stance to allow a little more breathing room.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Today.’

  Tommy had no idea what she was talking about, and he didn’t care. She was close enough that he could smell soap and something darker, more mysterious, that he wanted to explore. Preferably with his mouth. So he did, leaning close and kissing his way along her lovely neck, letting her warmth seep into him, and around him, until his groin was throbbing and he thought he might throw her to the ground and bury himself inside her right then and there. God, he wanted to.

  But she shoved him away again, and this time danced out of reach, behind the couch.

  As if he was too proud to leap over it. He almost did. Her face was flushed, and her chest was heaving, and he knew she wanted him. He knew it.

  ‘You want me,’ he pointed out. Unnecessarily. ‘Why push me away?’

  ‘I hardly know you,’ she retorted.

  ‘That didn’t stop you before.’ It was all right to throw herself at Tommy Seer, the fantasy, but now that she knew more about him, she had some objection?

  If possible, she went even redder.

  ‘That was different,’ she snapped. ‘What is this? I understand about last time, I guess. You thought I was a groupie. You were trying to prove a point.’

  ‘Last time I was trying to make sure you would do what I wanted you to do,’ he said, without a shred of apology.

  ‘Sure, okay, that’s mercenary at best but I’m not going to throw stones—’

  ‘This time has nothing to do with that,’ he interrupted her. Some of his frustration boiled over. ‘I want you. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but I do.’

  He was immediately aware that that was not the right thing to say. The temperature in the room seemed to plummet about thirty degrees.

  ‘How romantic.’ Her cheeks were still rosy, but her spine stiffened, and everything else was icy. Great.

  ‘Jenna,’ he began, trying to figure out a way to tell her what he meant that would lead to them writhing naked on the couch, which was something he was willing to do almost anything to accomplish, if he could figure out how to get her back to that dazed, wild-eyed state.

  ‘You don’t know why and you don’t know how,’ she continued in that same pissed-off tone. ‘Every girl’s dream.’

  ‘I’m being honest with you,’ he snapped at her.

  ‘This is why you’ve been scowling at me and acting crazy, isn’t it?’ He watched the light dawn, and didn’t like the way she stared at him. ‘Oh, and now I get it. I’m a Chevy. That’s another way of saying beneath you.’

  ‘I wish you were beneath me,’ he said, hearing the frustration in his own voice. ‘Right now. On that couch. With a lot less talking.’

  ‘How irresistible,’ she said in that same voice, sarcasm dripping. ‘For the small price of my self-respect, I can sleep with someone who thinks it’s beneath him. Who thinks that he deserves luxury cars, while I am a plodding Chevrolet.’

  He didn’t like any of it, especially the way she looked at him as if he had slapped her.

  ‘Your self-respect,’ he repeated. ‘Where was that when you threw yourself at a total stranger? At least I know who you are.’

  She flinched as if he’d hit her, and he felt about as bad as he imagined he would if he had.

  He then proceeded to feel like the biggest asshole in the world when she looked away, and ran her hand across the mouth that he still wanted to ravage. Her lips looked swollen from his kisses, and her eyes were too dark, like she was fighting off tears. He wished he could take back what he’d said. He wished he knew why he cared so much in the first place, when he hadn’t cared about much in far too long. He wished for a lot of things, none of which came true in the long, strained moments before she turned back to him.

  ‘I have to meet with Ken,’ she said, her voice even. He wondered what that cost her, because he could see the turmoil in her eyes. He still wanted to touch her, but he discovered to his amazement that his hard-on had subsided. He just wanted to hold her.

  It was unbelievable.

  It bordered on terrifying.

  A case of unusual attraction was one thing. But this … this was crazy.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she said, and he let her turn around and walk away because he didn’t know what else to do. Because she’d sucker-punched him and she didn’t even know it.

  He was still brooding about it later, ensconced in a private booth in the back of Manhattan’s hottest club. At least he assumed it was Manhattan’s hottest club – all he’d seen were the lines outside before being whisked off to his dinner of schmoozing.

  Tommy hated schmoozing.

  He also hated record-company executives, but he did not need Duncan’s glower from across the table to remind him where his bread was buttered. He knew that he wasn’t required to enjoy himself. All he had to do was sit, smile, and look like a rock star.

  ‘I don’t feel like a rock star tonight,’ he muttered under his breath to Nick, who was slumped back against the banquette next to him. Sebastian and Richie had drawn the short straws, and were seated directly next to the two fat executives with their panting girlfriends. Which meant they were the ones who had to flirt and pretend to care.

  ‘The great part of being a rock star is that it doesn’t matter if you feel it or not, you still are,’ Nick retorted from somewhere beneath the crooked fedora he wore. He tilted the hat back slightly. ‘We’re on top of the world, man. Why would you leave it? This is what we dreamed about.’

  It wasn’t the first time Nick had asked the question, or one like it. Only Richie had shrugged off Tommy’s intention to leave the band after their tour. Sebastian, naturally, had wanted to sit down and plot out how Tommy’s departure could be milked for the best coverage, the most emotion, and therefore the most money. Nick had stopped speaking to Tommy for a tense week, maybe two. Then he’d started asking questions like this one.

  ‘We dreamed about music first,’ Tommy said. He shrugged, and forced himself to smile and wink at one of the giggling girlfriends. The music was so loud in the club that he knew Duncan couldn’t overhear him, which was all that mattered.

  ‘Because suddenly you’re a purist,’ Nick scoffed. ‘Come on, Tommy. Give me a break. You can’t tell me you haven’t enjoyed what we have going on here.’

  ‘Of course I have.’ Tommy shrugged. ‘But I want to do other things, too.’

  ‘Phil Collins does solo projects and plays with Genesis,’ Nick pointed out. ‘Why do you have to break up the band?’

  ‘You know why.’ Tommy flicked a look across the table towards Duncan, who sat there with his beady gaze trained on Sebastian and Richie, like he was waiting for them to slip up and start making out right there at the table. ‘He’s had us on a leash since 1980.’

  Nick shifted in his seat, agitated.

  ‘But it’s a good leash,’ he said, his voice low and urgent. ‘So what if you have to talk in a stupid accent? So what if he’s in control of all the stupid shit? We’re rich. Famous. How bad is it, really?’

  ‘Nick—’

  ‘Do you remember where we came from?’ Nick demanded. ‘That shitty fucking trailer park. We swore we’d do anything to make sure we never went back there.’

  ‘And we
did,’ Tommy said evenly. ‘But I don’t want to be rich and famous if it means I can’t be myself. Not any more.’

  Nick shook his head.

  ‘I don’t even know who you are, man,’ he said quietly. ‘Nothing that you say makes sense.’

  Before Tommy could respond, he was climbing to his feet and excusing himself from the table. Tommy watched him go, cutting through the crowd with his fake smile firmly in place. He and Nick weren’t the same people they’d been all those years ago, true, but Tommy didn’t think he was the one who’d changed. At heart, all he wanted was what he’d always wanted – his guitar and a few words. The Wild Boys were like a fun-show detour, with so much pomp and circumstance disguising the main thing – the only thing. The music.

  He smiled again, and pretended to laugh along with some joke a record exec was telling, which he was just as happy he couldn’t hear.

  He didn’t think it was so much to ask. He was tired of the pop-music spectacle, of synthesizers, of the absurd videos that seemed sometimes to overtake the songs. He was tired of band politics, of Sebastian’s constant manoeuvring, Richie’s indifference, Nick’s anger. He minded Duncan’s leash more than he could say, and it surprised him that Nick didn’t feel that way. Tommy thought there wasn’t enough money in the world to make a cage feel like something besides a cage.

  Lately Tommy had had a recurring fantasy, and it was a simple one. A stool, a stage. Just him and his guitar and the easy, quiet songs he’d written recently and had chosen not to share with his band mates. Music that borrowed from folk, and maybe a little bit of country, and fused it all together acoustically. He refused to accept that he couldn’t have that, that no one wanted to listen to the kind of music he yearned to play.

  He had to believe that there were other people out there as sick of the smoke and mirrors of Eighties music as he was. He was tired of all the histrionics of it – the elaborate costumes, the drama of the keyboards. He craved the simplicity of a voice plus a guitar and nothing else. No embellishments.

  And he believed in himself, even if no one else did.

  For some reason, Jenna’s face swam into his mind then. Tommy smirked. Did his poor libido think that Jenna would support him in his quest for a different musical style? Yeah, sure. She wouldn’t even sleep with him when she had the chance. Twice now. It was enough to give an international pop star, named ‘irresistible’ in any number of magazines, a complex. He wondered if it was deliberate, a strategy – if she knew, somehow, that she was the first woman to turn him down in ages. Maybe ever since he’d become famous, now that he thought about it.

  He realized he didn’t care. He could still taste her, smell her. He felt himself harden slightly, and checked a sigh. The last thing he needed was for one of the record executives’ girlfriends to think he had the hots for her. Not to mention his reaction was ridiculous. He was a grown man, not a high-school kid. Why couldn’t he control this attraction? Why did she get to him when she wasn’t even in the room?

  ‘Tommy,’ Duncan said then, breaking into his thoughts with that oily voice of his. ‘Tell Rod and Jeremy what you were telling me today, about that sweet car of yours.’ He grinned at the executives. ‘A 1986 Testarossa Spider, gentlemen.’

  Tommy thrust the damned woman out of his mind. Or tried to. He smiled like the trained seal he was, and leaned in.

  ‘The Testarossa is a pain in the ass to drive around town,’ he told them, his smile widening on cue as they all oohed and aahed, ‘but get her free and clear on a highway at about seventy, and she’s like a ballerina. Maybe later I’ll take her out and show you.’

  If he had to be a trained seal, he might as well do the best tricks.

  16

  Of all the times to seriously question her sanity, lurking on a street corner, waiting for Tommy Seer to happen by and into what Jenna knew would be a near-death experience, was not that time.

  The time for questioning had long since come and gone – that had been the night before, when she’d sprawled across the futon in the bright yellow apartment, watching Moonlighting and thirtysomething and wishing that she could bring herself to hate Tommy Seer.

  Seriously.

  Because if she didn’t hate him as she should, then what was she going to do? How could she accept the fact that she wanted someone so desperately, with so little regard for herself, that even after he’d humiliated her and mocked her and made her almost burst into tears, she had still wanted him? She wanted him even now. She’d wanted to be beneath him on that couch, with a desperate ache that had only intensified as they’d stood there, and had not subsided in the slightest, hours later.

  She still felt it now, as she lurked in the shadows outside Tommy’s personal apartment, far away from the shared accommodation at the town house in the Village. She had a feeling that the term ‘apartment’ meant something different when one was a pop star of international renown and lived in a fancy building on Central Park West. Tommy Seer, she was sure, did not maintain a bright yellow studio with a pull-out futon at such an august address. She imagined he inhabited one of those absurd New York apartments that were forever appearing on shows like Law & Order or Sex and the City – all shining wood floors, high ceilings, eat-in kitchens, extra dining rooms, and several bedrooms. Jenna had never, personally, met anyone who could afford to live in or near such places, since they probably started at four or five million dollars. Which was nothing to a rock star, of course.

  Jenna had decided to watch over Tommy to see whether or not her theory was true. She’d gone over her notes again and again, and she couldn’t believe she’d never noticed it before, but there had been a pattern of incidents leading up to his death. He’d nearly been hit by a car out in front of his apartment building, and after that had had one mishap after another, all of them in the weeks leading up to that night on the Tappan Zee Bridge.

  Except, what if they weren’t mishaps? What if someone had been trying to kill him that whole time?

  What with the kissing and the whole time-travel thing, Jenna hadn’t felt she could advance this theory to Tommy. Especially not when he’d spent the day in what sounded like excruciatingly boring meetings as the band prepared for their first video from the new album. The whole band had looked frazzled and hollow-eyed at the end of the day, and Jenna hadn’t had the necessary spine to grab Tommy, inform him they would not be discussing the events of the previous night, and then launch into some explanation about why she thought he might want to be extra careful crossing streets tonight.

  Maybe it wasn’t that she lacked the spine. Maybe it was the fact that if she’d actually tried to tell him any of the things she suspected, he would no longer look at her with those green eyes so hot and intense. He would look at her like she was a psycho. Maybe the truth was that she couldn’t bear the thought of it.

  So the obvious solution was to watch out for him herself.

  Yes, Jenna was essentially stalking Tommy. Across the country in Indiana, the little girl she’d been (and was? How did this time thing work?) was no doubt weeping over her Wild Boys record collection and wishing she could be sitting outside Tommy’s apartment. Jenna remembered those tears, and the force of loving Tommy – it had taken over her whole body, like an extended flu. Jenna remembered believing with all her heart that if she could only place herself in his proximity, she could make him fall in love with her.

  But life was much more complicated than she’d understood back then. Sometimes proximity was far more confusing than it should be. Sometimes it made everything worse.

  At least Tommy lived on a convenient street. Jenna could sit across from his building on a bench outside the park and stalk to her heart’s content without raising the ire or notice of the doorman. After all, this was a public park bench in Manhattan. She was free to sit there as long as she liked, enjoying the September evening. And it might well take hours, since she had no idea what time the supposed accident occurred. She only knew it happened sometime tonight.

  It was beau
tiful out. Clear, warm, yet with that slight snap in the air that promised the coming fall. There was the suggestion of autumn in the gentle breeze that ruffled Jenna’s hair every now and again. She was comfortable in the jeans and sweatshirt she’d thrown on after work, complete with slouchy socks and Keds.

  The problem was, she had nothing to do while she sat there but think, and the last thing she wanted to do was think. Because there was only one thing to think about, and she was tired of it. Because she couldn’t seem to stop herself from fantasizing, from pretending that she hadn’t stopped him last night, from wondering what might have happened if she’d stayed silent, if she’d pulled him closer rather than pushed him away …

  The truth was, Aimee had been right. Jenna understood that now, and didn’t want to. She’d used the fantasy of Tommy Seer to keep herself protected, to hide. And the worst part was, she hadn’t just done it after Adam had left her. That was understandable. Excusable. But Jenna finally realized that she’d done it long before her engagement had broken up, too. Maybe not consciously. Not deliberately. But no real, live, flesh-and-blood man could live up to the Tommy in her head. Real people were never so understanding, so perfect.

  On some level, hadn’t she kept Adam at a distance? Always focused on what he was doing – was he going to propose? Was he coming home at a reasonable hour? Was he completely emotionally available? But where was she in all of that? Hadn’t she been hiding then, too? Intimacy was terrifying. Dangerous. Hard. Making their whole relationship about Adam’s flaws and needs and failures had, on some level, kept her heart safe. She had never let him penetrate to the secret core of her, the place where she hid the truest part of herself. She’d stayed out of reach, and complained that the man she was supposed to marry didn’t understand her, couldn’t satisfy her, wasn’t enough for her somehow. Who could be?

  And understanding all of that, however unpleasant, made her understand Adam in a new way, too. He deserved to be a necessity for Marisol, the yoga instructor. Didn’t everyone deserve to be a necessity? Shouldn’t that be the point, really?