She Went All the Way

by Meg Cabot

  He didn’t think for a minute she’d actually answer it. Not with him inside her, so close—though she apparently did not know it—to exploding within her. Fortunately Lou was no laggard in the climax department. She came lustily and often and never once without him. She had to have been close, too.

  And yet he saw her hand reach for the phone….

  “It’s so early,” she explained. “It’s got to be important. It could be the police. Or my dad.”

  Lou’s father was not a topic Jack wished to discuss just at that particular moment.

  Then she lifted the receiver and said, “Hello?”

  Only it wasn’t the police or her father. It was Lou’s agent, Beverly Tennant, calling from New York City, where it was almost ten o’clock.

  Except, apparently, Lou’s agent was as important to her as the police and her father, since Lou immediately got into a long-winded conversation with the woman about Tim Lord, and how Lou had to break it to Tim today that he could not, in good conscience, blow up a large chunk of the Alaskan wilderness; that this was a critical mistake on his part that was going to result in terrible press for the film and besides had all the tree-huggers in the country up in arms over the goddamn arctic foxes; that only Lou could do it, because he’d listened to her last time, on the set of Hindenburg, when he’d wanted to blow up a historic Hungarian train depot, merely because he’d happened to have the explosives on hand, and had thought the resulting flames would look good on camera.

  At least this was what Jack garnered was the crux of the conversation. He could only hear one end of it, but he had a very personal stake in it, as he could feel Lou’s growly voice all the way down her body, through the very intimate physical connection they were currently sharing.

  “Get off the phone,” Jack said eventually, when the conversation descended into what appeared to be a long-winded description, on Beverly Tennant’s part, of some Italian floor tiles.

  Lou made a face at him and hastened to put her hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver. Only apparently the gesture was too late, because Jack heard a woman’s voice demanding, “Is someone there with you? My God, Lou, who is it?” And then something about having seen a documentary on the Learning Channel about Alaskan crab fishermen and their impressive forearms and had Lou managed to reel one in.

  Jack made a move to grab the phone, intending to tell Beverly Tennant a thing or two about crabs, but Lou snatched the receiver away at the last minute, saying into it hastily, “Sorry, gotta go,” before hanging up.

  At which point Jack thought it safer to keep her out of reach of the phone, and flipped her onto her back, all without breaking their own connection….

  “I have to catch Tim,” Lou murmured—but weakly, Jack noticed—“before he leaves for the set—”

  “You have plenty of time for that,” Jack said, lowering his lips to her neck. “He can’t do anything until I get there, and I am not getting there—” he sank even more deeply into her—“until I’m good and ready.”

  What transpired after this was, in Jack’s opinion, anyway, the very definition of good sex. It was extraordinary how well they seemed to fit together, how much each of their bodies appeared to have been made to complement the other’s. He had never, not in his whole life, had a sexual experience that could in any way compare to what he and Lou shared—in heat and passion, anyway. Maybe it was because for the first time in his life, he had found a partner he was not only attracted to but actually liked, and even, to a certain extent, admired.

  Plus she had a mouth on her. God, how he loved that mouth.

  The problem, however, was that that mouth was starting to demand things of him, things he wasn’t sure he could deliver. Why couldn’t Lou be happy with the fact that he’d asked her to move in with him? Why did she have to want more? Didn’t she know that more would come naturally, if she just let it?

  No. No, she didn’t. Because she’d been burned before. She needed to hear the words.

  But those words were the ones Jack had the most trouble saying…because, of course, he’d never said them before. How did you ask a woman to be with you for the rest of her life? How did you say that you loved her and wanted to marry her and have kids and golden retrievers with her without sounding like a total bohunk? Jack didn’t know. He could have said the words if they’d been printed on a script, but he would have felt contempt for the character he was playing, the one who was saying them.

  Now, however. Now he understood those hackneyed phrases and the sentiments behind them. He just couldn’t figure out how to utter them without sounding like as big a fool as the characters he so often played.

  So he tried to show her, instead. Show her how he felt, instead of telling her. He made love to her, tenderly, he hoped, though there were a few moments towards the end there where there was nothing tender going on at all, where raw need gripped him and he slipped over the edge into fierce possessive want.

  But one of the reasons he loved Lou—and how strange it felt to use that word, love, even inside his head—was that her need seemed as all-consuming as his own. In bed, all that hard-edged toughness she’d cultivated so carefully in order to compete in what was, for the most part, still a man’s world, fell away to reveal a quintessential woman, someone who had bath beads and wasn’t in the least afraid to use them, dammit. Someone who had peanut brittle in her purse. Someone who came unapologetically but so femininely that Jack sometimes forestalled his own pleasure just for the sheer joy of watching hers.

  He did so that morning, holding back his own release so that he could revel in Lou’s. Only when the last shuddery spasm had left her body did he allow himself to take his own pleasure…but when he did, it was rich and full and left him spent, like a wrung-out sponge.

  Was that what he should say? That they had to be together forever, because she was the only woman he’d ever known who made him feel like a wrung-out sponge after sex? Somehow he did not think this would be received in its appropriately complimentary light. Why was it that for the first time in his life when it actually mattered what he said, he couldn’t think of the right way to put anything? Lou couldn’t be right. He was a lot more than just a robot who spewed out whatever was written in front of him.

  But he would have appreciated a speech writer just then, someone, anyone, who could have told him the right thing to say, the thing that would keep her exactly where she was—well, all right, maybe not exactly—for the rest of their lives.

  What was wrong with him? Millions of men did it every day. Proposed, that is. Surely he could do it, too, and without outside help. Yes, the moving in together suggestion hadn’t worked out, but Lou had tried living with a guy already, and look what it had gotten her. Maybe what she needed to hear—was waiting to hear—was something with a little more permanency, a little more commitment on his part. He could do that. He wanted to do that, for the first time in his life. All he had to do was say the words.

  “Lou,” he said. There. That was good. He’d gotten that part out.

  She opened her dark eyes and looked at him, her red hair spread across the pillow behind her like a halo. A copper halo.

  “Yes?”

  He took a deep breath. He could do this. He could totally do this. Hadn’t he won a People’s Choice Award for Favorite Actor in a Television Drama? Wasn’t he one of Los Angeles magazine’s most eligible bachelors? He was sexy. He was cool. She would say yes. All he had to do was say the words. Three of them. That was all. Three words, four or less letters each.

  “I—” he started to say.

  And that was when the hotel was rocked by an explosion that nearly flipped them both from the bed.

  “Oh my God!” Lou cried, from the tangle of sheets and limbs in which they lay. “Jack. What was that? An earthquake?”

  Jack, not too happy about having been interrupted, said, “Earthquakes don’t make that much noise. Probably it was just a sonic boom. Listen, Lou—”

  But it was too late. Lou was already shov
ing him off her. Wrapping a sheet around her nude body, she rushed to the window.

  “Jack, look at that smoke,” she exclaimed. “What do you think—My God, it’s coming from a couple of stories above us, I think. What could have happened?”

  Jack, over the initial shock of the explosion, wrapped himself in the bedspread, and sat dejectedly on the end of the bed, contemplating his failure.

  “It’s probably Melanie,” he said. “Spontaneously combusting over this morning’s script changes.”

  Lou was craning her neck to see out the plate glass window.

  “No, Jack,” she said. “I think it might be a little more serious than that. There are flames coming out the windows. Maybe we should, I don’t know. Get dressed. Evacuate. Or something.”

  Jack brightened at this suggestion. Breakfast. Yes, that was it. They could go down to breakfast, and he could propose over grapefruit and toast. Not very romantic, it was true, but he imagined coffee would fortify him. He stood up and, still holding the bedspread around his waist, began looking for his pants.

  “That’s a good idea,” he said. “You want to shower first, or should I? Or should we both hit the shower at once—”

  Voices became audible from the hallway just outside Lou’s door. Lou, struggling into the terrycloth robe, knit her brow.

  “Does that sound like my dad?” she wanted to know.

  The next thing Jack knew, Lou was throwing back the deadbolt on her hotel room door, and looking out at the chaos beyond.

  And it was chaos. Hordes of people were in the hallway, nearly all of them in some way connected to the filming of Copkiller IV, and most of them in various states of undress. Jack recognized Paul Thompkins, one of the assistant directors. Paul was wearing a pair of boxer shorts and a Knicks T-shirt, and was talking very rapidly into a cell phone.

  “I don’t know what it was,” he was saying. “But just make sure you get the damned shot lists. If those go up in smoke, we’re up shit creek without a goddamned paddle—”

  In the center of the fray was Lou Calabrese’s dad, calling for order.

  “All right, everybody,” Frank was saying. “Let’s calm down. It’s probably nothing. Probably just a transformer on the roof, or something. But why don’t we do the fire department a favor and start heading for the stairs. No, not the elevator, now, the stairs. Come on now, orderly fashion please—”

  Lou, her robe clutched tightly in front, shot past Jack.

  “Dad,” she said, rushing up to him. “Dad, are you all right? What’s going on?”

  “Oh, good morning, honey.” Frank smiled at her. He was in a blue-and-green plaid bathrobe over blue pyjamas. His white hair stood up in comical tufts from the top of his head. He did not seem at all surprised to see his daughter in nothing but a hotel robe. “Nice wake-up call, huh?”

  “Dad, what was that?” Lou looked up and down the hallway. “It sounded like an explosion. And this smoke seems pretty bad.”

  “Yeah,” Frank said, waving people from the far end of the hallway through the doors marked “exit.” “You’d think the—”

  Suddenly an eardrum-piercing alarm kicked in, accompanied by bright, flashing lights that appeared to have been built into the sprinkler system in the ceiling, apparently intended to guide people towards the emergency exits in a smoke-darkened hallway.

  “Ah,” Frank said, in a satisfied tone. “There we go. I was wondering when that was going to go off.”

  It was nearly impossible to hear anything over the fire alarm. Still, Jack was certain for a moment that he heard his mother’s voice.

  And sure enough, she appeared through the filmy gray smoke, wearing a pink satin dressing gown and matching turban, clutching Alessandro in one hand and her jewel case in the other.

  “Frank,” she called. She sounded as near to hysterical as Jack had ever seen her. “Oh, Frank!”

  Then Jack saw something extremely disturbing. Before he himself even had a chance to move, Jack saw Lou’s father actually reach out and put a comforting arm around Eleanor Townsend’s shoulders.

  Then he said to her, his lips in her turban, practically, “It’s all right, sweetheart. Just a little fire.”

  Sweetheart? Sweetheart?

  But Eleanor did not apparently hear him. Surely if she had, she’d have objected to being called any man’s sweetheart. Instead, she clutched one of Frank’s lapels, Alessandro smushed between them, and wailed, “Oh, Frank! It’s just awful! I tried to go to Jack’s room just now, you know, to see if he was all right, and it turned out that’s where it happened. The explosion! Jack’s room is gone! There’s nothing but black smoke and fire and—”

  Lou, who’d been watching this little scene unfold with a troubled expression on her face, stepped forward and said, “Mrs. Townsend. Mrs. Townsend, don’t cry. Jack’s right here, he’s fine. He was with me.”

  And Jack, wearing only the spread from Lou’s bed, was forced to wave at them, lamely, from the doorway to her room.

  “Hi, Mom,” he said.

  29

  Breakfast was not going well.

  This was probably due to the fact that a large chunk of the hotel’s tenth floor was suddenly missing.

  Still, one would have thought a simple thing like an explosion in a guest suite would not affect the waitstaff ten floors below.

  “This,” Tim Lord said, looking around the booth in which they sat impatiently, “is too much. Where’s the waiter? I have to get out to the set. I’ve got a plane to catch.”

  Lou, seated across the table from the director, said, “Tim. Listen. The plane’ll wait. I know this is a bad time, but we’ve got to talk about this blowing up the mine shaft thing. I mean, don’t you think there’ve been enough fireballs for one day? Can’t we just leave the mine the way it is?”

  Tim continued to look around the nearly empty restaurant. Most of the guests had opted to breakfast elsewhere, even though the Anchorage Fire Department had ruled the building safe to reenter only an hour after the initial evacuation.

  Still, Tim Lord was not a man who was going to let his schedule be disrupted by anything as piddling as an incendiary device being set off in his leading man’s hotel suite. He had a film to shoot, after all.

  “For God’s sake, Lou,” he said now, as he glared at the back of a waiter who was busy gossiping with a busboy, presumably over the tenth-floor fireball. “We’re already running three days behind schedule because of that little chopper incident you and Jack went through. And now you’re asking me to change the very fabric of the story I’m trying to tell—which, by the way, you wrote? You’ve got to have inhaled too much smoke this morning.”

  Lou glanced at Vicky, who was sitting next to her husband, looking, as always, angelic this morning in a cream-colored cashmere coatdress. Lou tried to make a semi-comical face at her, since Vicky looked unusually tense. But Mrs. Tim Lord wouldn’t meet Lou’s gaze, keeping her eyes on the cup of tea on the table in front of her.

  “Tim.” Lou tried again. “Arctic foxes. Cute, fuzzy little doglike creatures. They have dens in that mine shaft. You blow up the mine shaft, you leave a lot of cute puppies homeless. Is that the kind of message you want to convey to America? That Tim Lord doesn’t care about puppies?”

  “Kits,” Vicky piped up.

  Both Lou and Tim looked at her. “What was that, honey?” Tim Lord asked.

  “Baby foxes are called kits,” Vicky said, sounding a little faint now that she had so much attention being directed at her. “I think. Not puppies. I’m pretty sure.”

  “Kits, then,” Lou said. She frowned at Tim in her most schoolmarmish manner. “Is that what you want, Tim? To be a kit-killer?”

  The waiter, finally having noticed Tim’s frantic waving, came over, looking pale and excited and younger than what Lou supposed were his nineteen or twenty years of age.

  “Sir?” he asked, his voice wobbling.

  “Yes,” Tim said. “I would like the check please. And could you hurry? I have a plane
to catch.”

  “Oh,” the waiter said, looking taken aback. “There’s no charge, sir. Because of…well, you know.” He lowered his voice and whispered conspiratorially. “This morning’s disturbance.”

  Tim gave the boy a brittle smile. “Fine,” he said. “Thank you.” To Lou and Vicky, he said, “Ladies. As always, it has been a pleasure. But I have a car waiting to take me out to the airport, where I have a plane waiting, to take me out to my film set, where I have a crew waiting, and costing me approximately two hundred thousand dollars an hour. This has been, Lou, the most expensive free breakfast I have ever consumed in my life. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  Tim started to slide from the booth.

  “But, Tim,” Lou said, realizing she was losing a battle she didn’t feel she’d ever been completely equipped to fight in the first place. “There’s no reason to blow up the mine. Really, I mean, narratively. It isn’t even—”

  “Lou.” Tim had stood up, and now he reached for his coat, hanging on a peg at the end of the booth. “You know I respect you as a writer. But the American viewing public expects two things out of every Copkiller movie, as you well know. A shot of Jack Townsend’s naked ass, and a great big mother of an explosion.” He pulled on his Hindenburg crew baseball hat, which happened to be one of the most sought-after pieces of film-related memorabilia on eBay. “And I don’t intend to disappoint them.”

  Then he turned and walked out of the restaurant.

  Lou, not certain she actually believed what she’d just heard with her own two ears, looked at Vicky and said, “Well. That went well. Don’t you think so?”

  There was certainly nothing in that statement meant to engender tears from its addressee. But that’s exactly what happened. Vicky, who’d looked less than her usually radiant self—but Lou had put that down to the rude wake-up call they’d all gotten—began to cry.

  Lou blinked astonishedly at her friend. It was true that, thanks to Jack, she’d been sort of…well, self-absorbed over the past twenty-four hours. But surely if she’d done or said something to upset Vicky this much, she’d have remembered it.