I don’t know this room! Where the hell am I?
The room was painted Navajo white, much like her own walls—except you could barely see these walls. There were movie posters everywhere. Humphrey Bogart scowled at her from a poster over the couch, advertising the Maltese Falcon. Dustin Hoffman looked nervously out of a poster of The Graduate, and Kim Bassinger’s blond hair fell in a graceful wave as she surveyed the room from L.A. Confidental. There was a huge black wooden entertainment unit with a big screen TV and a bookcase full of DVDs and videotapes.
She glanced back at the couch. This was a real dog, not a movie poster. Sarah wasn’t a dog person, so she didn’t know what breed it was, but it had gently curling hair and spots and a big, pink, lolling tongue. It also looked like it owned the couch and was confident enough in that knowledge not to make an issue of it. It stared at her placidly.
“Um.” Sarah rubbed at her butt, sore from where she fell. “Well. This is different.”
“How are we feeling?”
She spun, her back protesting the sudden movement. Kit was leaning against the door frame of what she guessed was the teeny kitchen in this…
She was in Kit’s apartment.
She suddenly felt very, very aware of the fact that she was wearing only underwear and a T-shirt. She supposed she ought to be thankful for that much coverage.
“What are…dumb question. What am I doing here?”
“Sleeping it off. I see Sophie asserted herself.” He gestured at the dog.
“Sophie?”
The dog lifted her ears, then chuffed softly and settled more deeply into the quilt that Sarah herself had been buried under. “My dog. She usually sleeps in with me, but she isn’t used to company, so I guess she decided to let you know who the real woman of the house is.”
She glanced around. It was a starkly male sort of place…
“Wait a second. Why don’t I remember coming here?”
“Somebody slipped you X last night at the club.” At this, Kit frowned, unfolding himself from his relaxed slump against the door frame. He was wearing a tank top. She was surprised at the cut of his muscles.
Okay, now is not the time to be noticing Kit’s body. She yanked her T-shirt over her knees, covering all but her feet.
“What were you doing out by yourself, anyway?” His frown was deep, and though his voice was its customary laid-back semidrawl, his gray-green eyes snapped with energy, surprising her again. “Taylor and Tika should’ve known better.”
“I don’t need a keeper.”
He glanced at her, and she felt it run over her body very pointedly. She also felt the heat of her blush. He quirked an eyebrow, nodding at the couch. “Obviously.”
Sarah padded after him, the hardwood floor feeling cold under her bare feet. “What are you saying? That I tried to get high? That I made the mistake of going off by myself and clubbing without a chaperone? Do you think I wanted this to happen?” She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Well, excuse me, Mr. Clint-Eastwood-Substitute, I didn’t realize a little woman like myself couldn’t venture out in the big world without someone’s protection! I suppose I brought this on myself! How very antifeminist of me!”
The look he shot her might as well have had a subtitle. Grow up. He pulled out a box of tea. “Can I get you a mug?”
She felt infuriated, frustrated that he wouldn’t rise to the bait—that he didn’t really seem to care at all if she were being an insecure, childish twit. Which she was, and she knew it. But she didn’t want to know it.
“You really shouldn’t go clubbing by yourself.”
She sighed. “I was waiting for that. I know that, I guess.” But she didn’t.
“Why did you do it, anyway?”
“Rebellion thing?” She laughed, and sat at the ugly Formica table in his kitchen. He put a heavy white mug in front of her. The tea smelled really good…tasted good, she noted as she took a sip. “I don’t know. Martika was doing some drama thing—she wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, she just wanted me to worm it out of her. And I’ve just gotten fired from my personal assistant gig. And…I don’t know. Things just sucked. I really, really wanted things to work out, but…”
“Sarah, what are you so afraid of?”
She blinked at him. “What do you mean?”
“When I first met you, I thought you were the most afraid person I’d ever seen in my life. Pretty, but desperately scared.”
The “pretty” registered briefly, but the rest of the sentence drowned it out quickly. “Scared of what?”
“I don’t know. It’s like you’re constantly trying to get it right, have an answer, have a plan.”
“Well, I like paying my rent, for one thing,” she said. “Homeless doesn’t seem like an especially fun way to live.”
He sighed. “Yeah, but you’re going to make rent. You might not like what you’re doing, but you won’t starve and you won’t live on the street.”
She frowned. “I haven’t been all that worried about anything for the past few months. Ever since Benjamin and I really broke up.”
He sat down next to her, with his own mug. His eyes were misty—dreamy, she noticed. He seemed much less a skater-skank, she thought, then almost blushed at the uncharitable turn of her thoughts. So he wasn’t her dream man. He wasn’t as smoothly charming as Benjamin, as sensual as Jeremy, or as devastatingly handsome as Raoul.
Those might not be bad things.
“You’ve been trying to become Martika, for God’s sake. You’ve done everything but dye your hair red.”
“I have not!”
“Let’s not bullshit here. You go out to clubs because she does…you were trying to prove that you could take care of yourself just like she can.”
“I can!” Sarah said, then bit her lip. There it was again—teenage girl. Where the hell did that keep coming from?
“Again, obviously.” He shook his head. “Martika and I might not see eye to eye on most points, but I’ll give her this—the woman’s got killer survival instincts. You seem to be wearing a sign that says Rape Or Murder Me Please.”
Sarah grimaced at him. “I see. So I’m an idiot.”
“I’m not saying that.” To her surprise, he took her hand. His hand felt firm and warm. “I’m saying you’re trying too hard. You want to show that you’re this tough chick that just parties and doesn’t care about anything else, and that’s not you.”
She yanked her hand away, disconcerted, and got up. “I see. And your time behind a counter at the Coffee Shop has made you a pop psychologist now, I see?”
“Lashing out at me isn’t going to help you, Sarah.”
“Stop analyzing me!”
“Dammit, Sarah!” He stood up too, surprising her with his flash of anger. “I had to drag you over here last night—the way you were acting, I didn’t want to leave you alone and I couldn’t get a hold of Martika.”
Sarah stalked to the living room, and swept down on the couch by Sophie the Dog. The dog looked at her, barely budging an inch. Sarah rubbed at her temples. She was upset. She was ashamed. She didn’t want to be here.
“I’m sorry I inconvenienced you,” Sarah said stiffly. She looked around the room. Her club clothes—a little sundress, her big boots—were piled on the floor by the door. She started to walk toward them.
He put a gentle hand on her shoulder. She didn’t want to be so ill-mannered as to shrug him off again. Going with his insistent tug, she turned to face him.
“Dammit, you’re stubborn.”
She reluctantly looked up into his eyes.
“I wasn’t inconvenienced. I was worried.”
“I don’t want you to be worried,” Sarah protested.
He stroked her cheek with his fingertips. Her body was starting to react. Jesus, had it been that long? Was she getting that depraved…
“Then don’t make me worried. Why don’t you stop trying to figure out what your life needs, and just go with it for a while?” He chucked her under her ch
in, gently. “Then I’ll stop worrying.”
“That’s so easy for you to say.” Any attraction Sarah might have been succumbing to disappeared in a flash of anger. “I mean, what do you do? You pay for rent on an apartment with your dog. You’ve got no relationships, no career path. You live day to day. I want more than that.” Her voice was all but shaking with it. “How can you live like that…with no focus?”
He was very quiet—it was a physical sort of quiet, as if all the molecules that made him up suddenly went still for a second. “Hmm. So that’s how you see me.” He took a little sighing breath. “Well, here’s a question—what sort of focus are you looking for, and why do you need to know what you’re going to do?”
“Why do I need…” She was flabbergasted. “Well, let’s see. How about because I can’t imagine just punching in and punching out of a job I hate, and knowing that I’ll be doing it until I retire, if I can even afford to retire. Or maybe because I don’t want to be alone when I’m old—or now, for that matter. I’m sure that seems shallow to you, but when I was with Benjamin, no matter how shitty he was to me, or how selfish, or how demanding, at least I knew what I was supposed to do. To be honest, all the jobs I’ve had have been pretty much the same. I haven’t cared about any of them. Then I met Martika, and it made sense. The only focus I had was having fun, living for the moment. But even that didn’t work for me. So here I am—right back where I started. And I hate it!” To her surprise, she started crying, fat drops that crawled down her cheeks. She tried hard to prevent them. When she got more of a grip, she took a breath and said with a quavering voice, “Shit. Sometimes I feel like if somebody would just tell me what the fuck I’m supposed to do with my life, even if it sucked, I’d feel better because at least then I’d know.”
She avoided looking at his face. She didn’t know what she’d see there. Pity? Possibly. He was very compassionate. More likely it’d be his usual disdain. Obviously, if any of these things were important to him, he wouldn’t be living like this, now, would he?
She turned, heading for her dress…and there it was again, the gentle, relentless grip. She finally looked at him.
“Everybody feels like that.”
“Sorry?”
His look was one of patient blankness. “Everybody feels that way. Haven’t you noticed?”
She blinked at him.
“Martika is doing her club thing because it gives her a sense of purpose—sort of antipurpose, if you want. Your friend Judith tries to please everybody in sight—that’s her sense of purpose. Everybody thinks they’ve got the answer. If you don’t have any sense of purpose, if there’s no reason for you to get up in the morning, sooner or later you’ll find a way to stop getting up in the morning.”
She snuffled, to her embarrassment. “So…what’s your reason for waking up?”
He smiled, and it made his lean face attractive. “Writing.”
“Writing?” she asked blankly.
He nodded. “I was like you, once. I was going to graduate school—going for my doctorate in psychology, fiddled around with writing just for fun, on the side. Nobody I knew made it all that successfully as a writer, anyway. But I found myself fiddling with the stories more and more, and concentrating on the psychology less and less. I got my master’s and then I quit.”
“You’ve got a master’s in psychology?”
“Does it matter?” He shrugged, and walked over to the couch, obviously the embarrassed one now. “I moved to L.A. because I was doing a research study, and it just amazed and appalled me. I’m from San Diego—life is different down there. Anyway, it’s not important.” He sighed. “I got a shitty little apartment—not this one. I was sharing with three other guys. It was ridiculous, but it was cheap. And I started to write. Didn’t quite pay the bills—I got the Coffee Shop job to make ends meet. And I swear to God, I’ve never been happier in my life.”
“And that’s it?” She was envious…bitterly so. He sounded so happy—so directed. “You found what you wanted to do in life?”
“I think part of me always knew what I wanted to do in life. I was going full bore on a path that was wrong for me, and somehow, everything nudged me back to writing.”
He started scratching Sophie behind the ears. Sarah sat on the arm of the couch beside him—like he was a religious entity. Somebody from Gen X who had figured it out.
“Nothing’s nudging me.”
“Maybe it’s because you haven’t been listening,” he suggested gently. “Maybe you need to stop looking, and let it find you.”
She frowned at him. “You sound awfully New Age.”
He laughed. “Sorry. It’s a habit.”
She tucked her feet into the T-shirt again—this would be why Kit often looked baggy. The thing was voluminous. “So. Do you think you’ll ever be published?”
He laughed again. “Actually, I am.”
“You are?” She felt like hugging him, an emotion that momentarily covered the envy—even though part of it was magnified. “Anything I would have read?”
“Probably not.” He gestured to a corner of the room. There was a desk with papers scattered across it, a corkboard with clippings and notes pinned to it in an artistic scrawl. Nearby there was a bookshelf. “The bottom row there is what I’ve written. Only three so far, but…”
She hopped up, went over and scanned the titles. Two looked like science fiction/fantasy novels. The third was a hardback —Shaman in a Cadillac.
“That hardback is my latest.” He sounded proud and embarrassed at the same time. “It’s about when I first came to L.A., and when I was studying.”
“Can I read it?”
He got up, plucking it off the shelf. “It’s yours.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“So…you must’ve made some pretty good money on it. Do you have to still work at the coffeeshop?” She had her suspicions, but she wanted him to confirm it.
“We’ll see when the next royalty check comes in. But I’m doing pretty okay. Besides, I only work part-time, I like the owner…and it keeps me grounded.”
“That’s like winning the lottery and still working,” she said.
He put his hands in his pockets. “Well, I don’t think I’ll do it forever, but the routine helps, strangely enough.”
Sarah sighed. “I wish I had something like that. Something I loved to do.” She bit her lip. “I think the thing I’m afraid of is there isn’t anything I love to do. Maybe take care of my boyfriend. That’s a stupid, codependent thing to be good at, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. Obviously, he wasn’t saying anything more.
She looked at the book in her hands…heavy, important. Obviously, a labor of love. “I mean, what if I wait for something to find me, and it never comes?”
“Then, hopefully,” he said gently, “you won’t have wasted all your time stressing about it, right?”
She huffed. “Thanks for nothi…”
He kissed her.
She wasn’t…well, she supposed at some level, she was expecting it. But she hadn’t expected it to be like this.
It was just his lips first, gentle, almost tentative. She didn’t move. In fact, she barely breathed. But after a few minutes, he leaned forward, putting one hand up gently, cupping the side of her face.
Oh, my God.
She didn’t know how it got this way. Maybe in all her lame attempts at sexual adventures, she’d forgotten how purely stimulating—and comforting—a kiss could be. But he kissed her like they did in the movies, leaning her against the nearest wall as he gave her his complete and utter attention. She found herself clutching at his back, and he was threading his fist in the hair at her nape and stroking at the underside of one of her breasts and oh my God, she couldn’t believe anything could feel like this, hadn’t felt this way in such a long time.
It’s not love, she thought absently.
She started tugging at his clothes, yanking at his shirt but growling impatiently when h
e pulled away so she could tug it over his head. His eyes were anything but lazy now. He was tugging her somewhere—she realized it was his bedroom. She had no idea what it looked like, barely registered the bed coming up to meet her when she tripped and brought him down on the mattress with her. He laughed, breathless, and so did she. Then he tugged her shirt off, and next thing she knew they were both naked, kissing, holding each other like life preservers. And laughing when they came up for air.
He paid more attention to her than any man had, ever, in her life. He kissed her stomach, for pity’s sake. He lavished attention on her earlobes. She felt like the drugs from last night hadn’t completely worn off—everything was magnified, but in a good way this time. She did some nibbling and kissing of her own. When he finally put a condom on, she was still giggling, still nuzzling at him. When he got on top of her, he stopped, smiling down at her, his expression saying: Well, shit. Isn’t this something?
She smiled back, then closed her eyes when he entered her, slow, just the way she liked it. Isn’t that something, she thought, silently agreeing with his unspoken question. She was having sex, and enjoying it. It was something indeed.
It was late afternoon by the time she stirred from his bed. They’d been at it for the better part of four hours—not just having sex all the time. Sometimes they talked, little snippets of nothing. He’d napped for a little bit, and she’d held him as he breathed, feeling closer to him than she had to pretty much anybody in a long time.
This feels right, she thought. This feels totally right.
She felt that way now—like she’d stayed at his place forever. She looked around. More movie posters. The Princess Bride. Sunset Boulevard. The Doors. A window looked out to the street beyond.
She curled into his pillows a little more. Maybe they’d go out for dinner, she thought. She didn’t know if he was working at the coffeeshop or what, but she felt sure she’d see more of him now. That was—she smiled. Incredible wasn’t the word for it. It was somewhere between phenomenal and really, really comfy.
Which was why she wasn’t expecting him to come out of the bathroom, baseball cap perched backward on his head, T-shirt and torn jeans already on. He’d even slipped on a pair of shoes.
L.A. Woman Page 24
