Not In My Wildest Dreams (Dream Series)

by Isabelle Peterson

  I ran my hand over my jaw. I didn’t need to shave. I still had a baby face without facial hair to speak of, a Stevens family trait. Not very masculine when half the guys I saw were sporting a full mustache, and many had beards to match. But it allowed my good skin to show. I was lucky to have avoided acne, making it through my teen years with only a zit or two, but nothing major.

  I smiled, nodded, and jacked up the radio. Donna Summer was belting her hit Hot Stuff. Yes. Yes I am, I thought to myself and headed home.

  Two hours later, I had pulled all of my money out of my bank account that I was saving for college, a rather impressive four-thousand two hundred and eighty dollars, and told my parents I was going to New York. I think they thought I was kidding. Like the time I was going to start my own car fixing business after I was successful at getting my F-100 up and running. Or the time I was going to be a fitness trainer. I dropped the ball on both of those things. Hell, they probably just didn’t care. Same for most of my brothers and sisters. Mike gave me a hundred dollars and told me it was for gas, not hookers. Laura, my closest sister, in both age and relationship, tried to stop me. She said that running away from my problems wasn’t the answer. Only thing was, I wasn’t running away from my problems. I was off to bigger and better things. Good money so I could go to college. Had to be better than stocking shelves for Mr. Thompson. This was fate.

  CHAPTER 2

  Two and half days of driving and sleeping in my beat up truck, I finally reached New Jersey. I was almost there! I saw a billboard for a hotel comparing their rates to New York City room rates and did some quick math. I’d never been good in school, but $35.00 a night here, or $85.00 in the city, and I knew I didn’t have a choice. I’d already blown through a $118 on gas and food.

  Knowing I probably smelled worse than a steer in the heat of a summer day, I stopped at the place advertised on the billboard, which was in Hoboken, New Jersey. I booked a “residence room” which meant there was a kitchen. Well, not a kitchen exactly. In the corner of the room was a tiny fridge, a sink, a few mismatched dishes in the cupboards, and a little counter, which had a small hot-plate. The fake wood walls were probably the nicest feature, but the leaky faucet was going to drive me nuts. I’d have to check with the front desk about getting that fixed. The room was disgusting compared to my room back home, but I needed a place to sleep.

  After I took a shower, I smiled at my reflection and practiced what I thought would be good poses for a modeling company. I laughed at myself and put on my best jeans and T-shirt, locked up my new ‘home,’ and climbed into my truck to go find this Ford Modeling company.

  Driving in New York City was insane. The place was so fucking huge! And crowded. And busy. I found the address after nearly crashing half a dozen times from checking the map and not seeing the yellow taxis who had probably gotten their licenses out of a box of Cracker Jacks.

  The giant building, where the company was located, almost sent me packing. I was actually intimidated. And what was I doing here to be a model anyway? This was stupid. But I found myself in the elevator and going up before I knew it. Yeah, I was an impulsive one. Always had been.

  The girl at the front desk had me drooling. She was hot. In fact, looking around the place, all the women were hot. Okay, so maybe this wasn’t so stupid after all.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, snapping me out of my drooling stage. She was completely unaffected by my looks, which hurt a bit. Back home, my whole life, people were always checking me out.

  “Uh, yeah.” I pulled Penny’s business card out of my back pocket and showed the girl, her large green eyes making my knees weak. “I’m here to see Penny Paulson.”

  “Uh-huh. You and a dozen others,” she said, nodding at the bank of chairs behind me. I turned and looked. Sure enough there were about a dozen people sitting in seats. There were a number of drop dead gorgeous women, and about an equal number of guys, sitting there; everyone was dressed much better than I was. “Take a seat.”

  I shoved the card back into my pocket and went to take a seat next to a blonde. Right away I pegged her as a bimbo as she sat there popping the fruity gum she was chewing. Her over-glossed lips turned up in a small, conceited smile as I sat down. I started checking out the other guys. Two guys had that goofy Marlboro Man mustache look. Okay, I was slightly jealous of those guys again. One guy, it seemed, thought he was John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever, decked out in a white disco suit. I looked at my jeans and rubbed my chin, feeling wildly out of place. Everyone had photos in their hands, many had fancy leather cases to showcase them. One guy was holding a leather binder and he was flipping through it. I saw that they were all pictures of himself that looked like they were already ads in magazines. I was nothing like these guys.

  I was just about to get up and leave when the door behind the girl opened and Penny Paulson stepped out. Everyone looked at the door; two guys stood up.

  She had a couple of words with the green-eyed girl that was guarding her door before she scanned the group. A huge smile burst onto her face when her eyes came to rest on me.

  “Jack Stevens! I can’t believe you came!” she said, her eyes bugging out.

  “Well, you said—” I said, glancing around nervously, noticing that everyone’s eyes were on me.

  “Yeah, yeah. Please, come on in,” she said, waving me into her office.

  The guy that was paging through his binder snapped his book closed and leaned back and muttered under his breath, “Fuckin’ A!”

  The gum popper that I was seated next to said, “I knew you had the look the second you stepped through that door. Good luck.”

  I stood and wiped my sweaty hands on my jeans and turned to the gum-snapper. “Thanks,” I said and walked over to where Penny was waiting, passing the two other guys who were still standing, and I noticed that I was taller than them.

  “You should have called first, but I’m so happy you came,” Penny said, closing the door to her office.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I was just—”

  “No problem, no problem,” she said, sitting behind her large white desk. “Sit, sit.”

  She motioned toward an orange chair, so I sat, and she was a flurry of activity and words. Shuffling papers, making calls to guys named ‘Pierre,’ and ‘Miguel.’ Then I signed some provisional something-or-other and the green-eyed girl was called into the office.

  “Denise, can you please walk Mr. Stevens down to the studio for test shots?” Penny asked.

  “Of course, Ms. Paulson. File?” She extended her hand over the desk, jangling an armload of silver bracelets. Penny handed her a file with the papers she’d filled out while we talked and the papers I had just signed.

  Five minutes later, I was standing in front of a white back drop and some guy named Pierre, who acted a lot like a girl, was literally gushing with an accent about my ‘glorious height’, ‘fabulous hair’, and ‘stunning bone structure’. He was snapping shots at me with a fancy looking camera, in between fussing with my hair and calling over his shoulder to another guy about lights and panels and stuff. And then he had me stand one way and then another. Having me pretend a few emotions. “You’re thinking about your girlfriend and you can’t wait to have her in your arms.” “You see the most gorgeous woman across the room.” “You’re hanging with the guys, watching a sports game.”

  “Darling, would you mind taking off your shirt. We need to get a few shots of your physique.”

  “Um, you want me to take off my clothes?” I asked, stunned.

  “I’ve seen it all before, sweetheart,” he cooed, rolling his eyes.

  I looked at the other people standing around. They all looked completely bored. I pulled my shirt out of my jeans, yanked it off, and handed it to the assistant who stood with his hand impatiently held out to me.

  “Oh my,” Pierre sighed. “Okay, I’ve seen a lot. Now I’ve seen it all.” I felt really self-conscious as Pierre’s eyes raked over my pecs and abs. I was proud of my six-pack, but to ha
ve another guy eye me like the girls did was not why I did two hundred sit-ups every night. Pierre shook it off and lifted his camera, clicking a few dozen more pictures, having me turn this way and that.

  When we were done, the assistant tossed me my shirt and started turning all the lights off. Pierre packed up his camera and went about his business. Denise was back at my side, and we were headed back to elevator.

  “I think Pierre got a lot of great shots back there,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “It was the strangest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “Well, you were a natural. Then again, Penny’s got an exceptional eye. She knows.”

  We stood awkwardly for a minute. She pressed the down button, not the up button to go back up to Penny’s office. “We should have the test shots back in a couple of days. It’s already Thursday, so I wouldn’t expect the test shots back until Monday. Penny will look them over and we’ll give you a call. Your number is—” She opened the file and looked down the sheet where Penny wrote down all my info. “Two-oh-one? Oh, Hoboken,” she grimaced, wrinkling her nose. Jeez, I thought. I knew it stunk there, but hell, I didn’t have much money.

  “Yeah, for now. Staying at a hotel there. But I didn’t know it would be so far. Know where I could find a cheap place to stay in this town?”

  “Town?” she giggled, making me feel even more stupid than I had since arriving here. “This is a city. And nothing is cheap. You’re better off in Hoboken.” The elevator dinged and opened. I stepped back so Denise could step in. “No thank you, I’ll be going up.”

  “Right. Sure. Of course,” I nodded and stepped into the elevator, then pressed the button for the lobby.

  I left the building in a daze. I’d just driven for three days and nearly two thousand miles on some wild goose chase, and I was given the bum’s rush. Did I get the job or not?

  I spent the next couple of days playing goofy tourist which would have been more fun if I was with someone. I saw the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty. It was weird having read about those places in school and not giving two fucks about any of them, and now I was walking around looking at them all.

  However, through the excitement at the famous stuff I was seeing, I was kind of missing home. People were just plain rude here. I was missing the midwestern manners. You know, like when someone bumped into you, they should apologize. Here someone would bump into me, and then they’d look at me like I was diseased and had gotten in their way. As annoying as a small town could be with everyone knowing everything about you, and everything you did got back to your parents before you got home, being somewhere where no one knew who you were and didn’t care was rather lonely. I thought it would be liberating, but I just felt blah. But I couldn’t go back home now. Now I had something to prove.

  CHAPTER 3

  Tuesday rolled around and I pulled out Penny’s business card and dialed the office.

  “Ford. Penny Paulson’s office. This is Denise.”

  “Um, hi, Denise? This is Jack. Jack Stevens.”

  “Jack. Hi, how are you?”

  “Can I talk to Pen – er – Ms. Paulson?” I asked.

  “She’s in a meeting for the next couple of hours. Can I have her call you?” she offered.

  “Sure. The number I gave her last week is good. Do you know when I’ll start working?”

  She was quiet. “Look, clearly you don’t know how this business works. You need headshots, pound the pavement, put in your dues. You don’t just show up and work in front of the camera.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Look,” she interrupted. She must be a New Yorker. Rude. “You’re hot. You have a chance. Want some advice?”

  “Yeah. Please,” I begged, spotting a cockroach squeeze under the baseboard in the shit hole I’d been living in for the past few days. Fuck! I left a clean home for this. No job and a roach infested hell.

  “Get a job. A flexible job, like waiting tables. Hit up all the agencies. Not just the big ones. You’ll need to get experience in the smaller ones first. And even those are a bitch to get into. You need headshots. I’ll talk to Penny about letting you use the test shots. They turned out well.”

  She stopped talking, but I had only just started to process what she was saying. “So, I’m not going to be working for Ford?”

  “It’s not my call. It’s Penny’s, but I’ve been sitting at this desk long enough—”

  “But she said that the company was looking for more male models with my kind of look.”

  “I’ll have Penny call you.”

  The line went silent. Fuck! I’m thousands of miles from home. Running down my college savings. And unemployed.

  Get a job. I heard Denise’s words echo in my head. A flexible job.

  I walked down to the front desk of the hotel, slapped a quarter down on the desk and took a newspaper back to my room. I spent the next hour combing through the classifieds, the whole time willing the phone to ring with Penny on the other end telling me that I was in.

  But that call never came. By the week’s end, I had spent a thousand dollars of my four grand. Most of it shelled on actual living expenses, and a stupid amount on damn pay-per-view porn. And I had to learn how to do laundry. Shit.

  The drip in the faucet only added to my frustration. I went to the front desk expecting to see the bald guy I had seen there all week. Instead there was a hot babe sitting, staring into a small TV wearing a name tag that said ‘Stephanie’.

  “Hi, Stephanie. Who do I talk to about getting the faucet fixed in my room?” She laughed at me without looking up.

  “Honey, this ain’t the Ritz Carlton,” she said in a nasally, conceited tone.

  I cleared my throat and she glanced at me through her clearly fake lashes. I flashed her my best smile and said, “Can you point me to the wrenches maybe? I can probably get it fixed in five minutes flat.”

  Her mood seemed to change and a coy smile spread across her face as she started to fluff her hair. “You can fix stuff?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Sure. Shouldn’t be a problem. I’m pretty good with my hands.”

  “I bet you are,” she whispered, her eyes roaming over my chest without trying to hide it. “Come on. I’ll show you where the maintenance closet is,” she said, slipping out from behind the desk.

  She led me down a hallway, shaking her fine ass, barely covered by a pair of jean shorts like the ones that Daisy Duke wore from that new show The Dukes of Hazzard. An image of me and Stephanie all tangled up in the back of the Plymouth Road Runner that Daisy drove in the show ran through my mind and I was hard as a rock. Sex in cars was the hottest thing. Okay, maybe not the hottest, but up there. Moments later, Stephanie opened the door to a closet, purposefully pushing her gorgeous tits into me, which were barely covered by her plaid shirt unbuttoned and only tied in the front, another Daisy Duke fashion statement.

  She glanced down to my jeans, and my tent didn’t go unnoticed. “Is there anything you see that can help you?” She slowly blinked her bright blue eyes at me.

  What can I say? She asked for it. A second later and I had her pressed up against the wall. One hand swiftly pulled the shirt open and pinched her already taut nipple. The other hand had efficiently unbuttoned her barely-there-shorts and I drove a finger into her dripping slit.

  “Mmmm,” she groaned in my ear. “You are good with your hands.” She pressed her chest into my hand, and tilted her hips into my other hand.

  “Are you just as good with your mouth?” I asked back.

  She gasped and pushed me off of her. Before I could register what was going on, she slapped me. My cheek burned.

  “Jackass!” she said pulling up her shorts and fixing her top. Seriously? That name again? “When you’re done, replace the tools,” she barked. I watched her march down the hall swinging that sweet ass at me. She shot back one last glance, and I would swear on a stack of bibles she was smirking. She was one hell of a dick tease.

  I
fixed the leaky faucet in my room with a wrench and some plumbers tape.

  The next day, when the hotel’s manager found out about the repair, he offered me a job as a maintenance man in exchange for the room. The work was flexible, and easy enough, from repairing holes in the walls and broken windows, to fixing faucets and getting air conditioners to work. And staying for free, I was saving $225 a week.

  Stephanie quickly became my biggest fan. She wasn’t a dick tease for long. A couple of days after our first encounter and her prancing about, wearing low cut tops and scraps of cloth for shorts, she came knocking at my door.

  I opened the door wearing nothing but jeans, just out of the shower, toweling my hair. Stephanie leaned on the door jam and her jaw literally dropped. Loved that reaction when chicks got a good look at my cut biceps and washboard abs. Made the hours of sit ups and push ups worth it. Bet she was wishing she’d let me finish what we’d started back in that maintenance closet.

  “Um, Sal wants you to fix something,” she mumbled.

  “Oh yeah?” I asked, casually flexing my biceps as I continued to rub my hair with the towel.

  “Yeah, only I forgot what it was.” She stepped inside and closed the door.

  “Well, I’m pretty sure my room’s all good.”

  “Things do look good here,” she said, standing a few inches in front of me. God, I was so hard. My dick’s had nothing but my hand for the past few months and I wanted to sink it into that sweet pussy I’d gotten a nice feel for a few days ago. But she had called me a Jackass, and that hurt. It was my turn.

  “So where do things need fixin’?” I asked in a low voice.

  “I guess it’s me. I’m sorry for last week,” she said leaning up against the wall. She bit her lip in a classic come fuck me way. Oh, how I wanted to.

  I tossed the towel on the bed and placed my hands on either side of her head against the wall she was leaning on. “You don’t say?” I replied, playing her little game.