Prep work

by PD Singer

  Tommy patted my ass, then squeezed, turning once again to lie on his back. “I’ll get some fresh wellies for tonight.” Those blue eyes made some sideways promises that I wouldn’t be around to help him keep.

  There was no good way to break this news, and I hadn’t been exactly clear last night. “My plane leaves Heathrow at noon.”

  The way he folded against the mattress wasn’t satiety this time. “I knew this was too good to last. No—” He squeezed my arm when I started to protest. “You didn’t make any promises. I’m the one who just assumed you’d be in London for a while.”

  How could I change this? The whirl of thoughts kept me silent. He took it for agreement and tried to get up. “It’s all right. I know you’ve got a life and obligations back in America.”

  “That isn’t it at all!” I scrambled to my knees and found myself talking to his back. “I could get sex anywhere in the world, that isn’t—” Wrong thing to say. I knew it the minute it came out of my mouth, and even without that, he’d bolted to the one closable door in the studio. I caught the door full in the face and sacrificed a couple of toes to keeping it from closing. “Ow! Damn it! Give me a minute to think here!”

  “Don’t worry about the pretty words.” His voice was flat, his face expressionless. “You can have first wash.” Tommy leaned into the tub to start the water. “It’s all right, Jude, you’ve fucked the ‘fanboy’, and now he’ll be the perfect one-night stand. No whinging or anything awkward.” The sincerity quotient of Tommy’s smile was in the negative range, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I’ll even make you a cup of tea before you go.”

  If I knew what I needed to say, I might have gotten something intelligible out, but I was still standing there, the rushing of the water making more sense than the rushing in my brain when he flipped a towel through the door. “Don’t waste the hot water, Jude; I’d like some,” he said, and closed the door between us.

  I did get in the tub, thinking the water would help me form the right words, but all that happened was that I scrubbed his scent and our fluids off with no plan for getting more on me. My phone shrilled from my pants pocket, lying on the floor where they’d been abandoned in such a hurry last night. Marcie or Sam, no doubt, wanting to know where the hell I was, what the hell I thought I was doing, and telling me to get back to the hotel now, damn it. The phone stopped ringing before I got out of the tub.

  Tommy had slid in and left a toothbrush for me, making him less perfect one-night-stand material and more just perfect. Breezing into the bathroom as I came out, he passed me a cup of tea and disappeared behind the shower curtain without a word. If I pulled the curtain aside to talk, assuming I could get the foot out of my mouth or speak around it, he’d probably turn the spray on me. Besides, I didn’t deserve another look until I made this right.

  “Tommy?” I tried from the doorway.

  “Can’t hear you over the water!” he called back, and that was my cue to pat my pockets, because anything I left here, I couldn’t return for.

  He appeared moments later, his face utterly shut off, his words brittle. “I’m off to the market, Jude. Have a nice flight.” He locked the door behind us, and without lifting his face for a kiss or any other clue that we might have been intimate in any way, Tommy gave me that “So long, amigo” tip of the head and was gone.

  The stairs were steeper coming down. Maybe it was me walking with one foot so far in my mouth it was kicking tonsils.

  Once on the street, I took a good long look around. It had been dark when I’d arrived, and only the lights and motion inside had lured me into the pub. Now I looked up at the sign to see where I’d been. “The Good Man” stood in gold script against a black signboard, but no cheerful bit of folk art or heraldry went with it. No swans, oaks, elephants, castles, harts, gryphons, or tradesmen, as might have swung before any other pub, just “The Good Man.” And he was. And I’d hurt him. If anyone painted me a pub sign, it would have an ass on it.

  The hotel was only a few blocks over, and when I let myself in, it was to see Sam and Marcie clattering around, packing.

  “For someone who’s been out catting around all night, you certainly have a long face,” Sam observed. “Or did you just drink yourself into a stupor and spend the night in the gutter? You look too tidy for that, but still….”

  Okay, that had happened once, and I did manage to wake up with everything but my watch. In no mood to hear about other mistakes I’d made, I sat heavily on the edge of the bed that wasn’t tumbled, and barely avoided rolling backward into the dip. The flailing spoiled the intended dramatic gesture of putting my head into my hands.

  “We had that problem, too,” Marcie chirped. “Good thing you didn’t come home. We ended up using your pillows to fill in the sag.”

  “Great, like I’d want to rest my head on the same thing you’d propped up your ass with and probably—” I stopped, not liking where that was going. “I feel sorry for whoever gets this room tonight.”

  “Hah!” Marcie whapped me with a towel she’d picked up off the floor before hanging it.

  “And I was not out catting around.” But Tommy might not see it that way.

  “So when’s the wedding?” Sam had to stick his two cents in.

  We’d established two continents ago that he was enough bigger, stronger, and heavier than me that only really dirty fighting would let me prevail, and I just didn’t want to go through all that trouble to slug him once. “Fuck you. I need to stay in one place long enough to even get to ‘I love you’.”

  “Oh darn.” Sam started to warble “Strangers in the Night.”

  “Shut up.” That was in stereo—Marcie didn’t like his singing, and I didn’t like his song.

  “Staying in one place is not an option. We need to catch the train for the airport shortly.” Marcie zipped up her suitcase. “Are you going to change or go like that?”

  “I’m staying like this.” Clean clothes would be nice, but I was wearing the cleanest I had already.

  “Then you won’t mess up my not-so-careful packing. You could have done your own, if you’d been here.” I’d heard the nasty edge in her voice before. “You can zip the case yourself.”

  “I mean, I’m staying.” Tommy could direct me to a laundry.

  “You can’t stay; we have post-production for the episodes we just filmed,” Marcie pointed out.

  “And we need to storyboard out the next trip.” Sam pushed the box of camera equipment forward. “Come on; give me a hand with this.” He’s a strong guy, but the camera case was awkward, and the hotel didn’t have an elevator. Wheeling the camera case out the door, Sam headed to the stairs. Thumping down two floors—tell me again why I think this is the third floor but it’s referred to as the second?—wasn’t good for the equipment, so I followed, grabbing the handle on the back for the journey down.

  A black cab stopped for Sam’s outstretched hand. We loaded the case in the back, and when I turned to go inside, planning to negotiate another night in the room, Marcie blocked the door.

  “Load this.” She swung a case at me. “You could have been in a world of hurt if your clothes had beaten you to the airport. Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

  “Because I didn’t want to have this discussion while I was having a more important discussion,” I snarled and didn’t grab the case.

  Sam did, shoving it into the trunk and smacking my back from behind, not so much a blow as a reminder. “Talk nice to Marcie and get in the cab. We need to catch the Heathrow Express out of Paddington.” He steered me to the rear door and guarded it until Marcie came back out. With three of us and the luggage, it was a tight fit. Marcie had to lean over Sam for shoulder room.

  “The Central American trip is a done deal, but after that, we don’t have plans.” I found enough breath to make a sideways assault on my guardians. “We can do pub food. Good, bad, gastro, you name it. I have a guide, I think, maybe….” Tommy had to know the best places to get any sort of dish, and if he didn’t
want to be involved, he’d know someone who would. I shouldn’t make assumptions about what he’d be willing to do. I wasn’t even sure he’d talk to me.

  “We can talk about it, sure.” Sam gave Marcie a hand out of the cab and gave me the beady eye until I got out too. “On the train. Give me a hand with the camera case.”

  The express train to Heathrow wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes, and damn Marcie for not booking us on a train that stopped along the way. Unable to simply escape, I renewed my pitch.

  “Pub food isn’t going to run more than a couple of episodes, Jude,” Marcie pointed out.

  “That’s hardly the only kind of cuisine available.” Why did she have to fight me on this? “There’s Indian and Pakistani food. We can talk about how it’s changed from its roots, and besides, I love Indian food. Or the great restaurants. I have some friends here on the high end of the business.” Oops, wrong tack: Sam and Marcie delighted in putting me in some humiliating position, choking down things to make the home audience wince. Pitching anything that would make me happy from the start wouldn’t appeal to them. “Or the chain restaurants. There are a few that are legendary for awfulness even here. That should be suitably horrible. Really, the series will have a huge variety, and you’ll have the next best thing to a vacation once we finish the Central American trip. I will have done all the legwork.”

  I searched their faces for something sympathetic and didn’t find it. “No doubt I’ll get food poisoning somewhere along the way, and you can have all sorts of fun with me and that purple crêpe-y toilet paper.” No agreement from either of them, though Marcie looked thoughtful, probably gauging the degree of grossness they could sneak into the show. They’d filmed me crawling across a floor in agony once when something cooked in too much dendê oil got the better of me.

  “We can make this work for the show, Jude, but it isn’t going to happen today. We need to get back to New York.” Sam could shoot me down now, but I was going to have the last word, just not here. I shut up until we were in line at the airline counter.

  “I’m going to change my ticket,” I told them, and shouldn’t have.

  “Oh no, you’re not,” Sam snapped. “You’ve got a contract.”

  “Be reasonable, Jude. You need to come back to New York.” Marcie pushed between me and the camera box. “Plan ahead, then take a few days and come back.” That was Marcie all over. Plan ahead, have the ducks as much in a row as possible. It worked with hotel rooms and guides, but not for this.

  “There won’t be anything to come back to.” We shoved the baggage forward step by slow step, and I dug in my computer bag, making sure I had the converter I’d need to keep my computer running. It was essential for my plans. I didn’t, but Sam did. I fished it out of a zipper pocket on his suitcase.

  “Sucks to be you, doesn’t it?” Sam slapped my hand away from the coveted silver box.

  I slapped back and dared him to take it away—the bared teeth should have been a hint. “I need to charge up before we take off, asshole.” The pungent language drew us some looks from others in line.

  I did my best to look sad but compliant right up until we reached the head of the line at the ticket counter. The next agent opened up. I let Sam and Marcie go in front of me, and I waited. The next agent, blessedly on the other end of the counter, motioned me over. I scurried, wanting this to be a done deal before my keepers, er, my production crew, noticed the perfidy.

  “I’m terribly sorry, but I need to rebook this for the seventeenth of next month.” Offering my printed ticket, my passport, and a credit card, I smiled my most winsomely and was rewarded with much tapping of keys and a new itinerary. I left the counter with my baggage and hope, only to run smack into Monster and Sadist.

  “Why do you still have your suitcase?” Marcie demanded.

  “I might need a change of clothing in the next month?” I hazarded. “The ones I’m wearing could get pretty ripe otherwise.”

  “You changed your ticket, didn’t you?” Captain Obvious didn’t quite shriek. “You have post-production in New York!”

  “You have post-production; I have voice-over, which is about six hours at most.” I’d thought about who did what, and this would work. “If you don’t have enough of my babbling on tape already to piece together anything we need, I’ll do it over the phone.”

  “This is a pretty one-sided thing to do to the team, Jude.” Sam would side with Marcie in this.

  “You don’t have any room to talk, friend.” I moved us out of the flow of travelers on their way to security. “Did I ever mention to the top brass that you went on that two day bender in Sydney?” He and Marcie hadn’t been getting along so well, and he thought drunk surfing was a fine way to prove his manhood, thus stranding the team and putting us behind schedule while we found new local hosts for two segments. “Your lords and masters still don’t know about that, but they would not approve. And even after that dumb-ass stunt and all the scrambling, I still didn’t make you eat the witchetty grubs with me.”

  A year later, I could admit they tasted okay if one didn’t think about exactly what they were. Sam had to use the tripod to film, between his residual hangover shakes and the dry heaves that started when our host brought out the plate. His gorge rose visibly now.

  I was merciless. “They serve crickets with guacamole in Oaxaca, Sam. Aren’t we going to be in the vicinity?”

  “No. Absolutely not.” His color fast approached that of my bowl of soup last night.

  “‘Absolutely not, you aren’t going to share my dinner’, or ‘absolutely not, we stay the hell out of Oaxaca’? If you do the storyboarding without input on every single step from me, you might avoid that. Typing over the Internet and all.” I offered him a carrot to go with the stick.

  “We’ll be in Oaxaca.” Marcie’s serene smile translated to Jude will get an extra helping of crickamole for reminding us of that crappy week.

  Actually, I wouldn’t. I’d made my mind up a long time ago what to do if we had a repeat of the toasted little snackies with too many legs in Thailand. “Fine, but get it on one take, Marcie, because anything disgusting that requires retakes because you can’t get it right, you two get to share.”

  “Oh hell no!”

  I suddenly feared she was going to puke on me—she’d filmed the witchetty grubs incident reasonably well considering she’d refused to look.

  “You’re the talent, that’s your job.”

  “Right, and your job is to help me do my job. So you’re going to make it really easy for me to stay in London. No arguments, lots of assistance. I’ll be available to you, phone, Internet, and maybe even at hours that approximate daylight on your end. But I’m staying here, because I screwed things up royally this morning, and if I fix it right now, I have a chance. If I wait, I don’t. And he’s—” Remembering Tommy’s broken joy and determined nonchalance, I lost my words. “He’s worth the effort. And he may not want any part of me now anyway.”

  Marcie broke character, meaning she acted human for the first time since I’d walked through the hotel room door. “You have it bad for this guy, don’t you?”

  “You could call it that. What I know is that I left him unhappy, and I hate that. We had a really good time—”

  “Whoa, big guy, TMI!” Sam interrupted me.

  “Shut up, you ass!” Barking at Sam earned me a double glare and a probable extra take of eating something weird, but I’d had enough. “You two think it’s just fine to tell me you fucked on top of my pillows, but you don’t want to hear that we cooked some food together. I have never had a better time making eggplant parmesan and my mother could have watched us do that!” The rest of his assumptions were probably right, but I didn’t care. I was on the attack.

  “I have been the third wheel on what amounts to an extended honeymoon for you two, and now when I need to do something for me, that doesn’t affect the show, all you can do is give me shit about it!” I probably had enough adrenaline going to take Sam down with o
ne blow, but didn’t get to use it.

  “You’re right, you’re right.” Both hands up, palms out, Sam tried to appease me. “Relax, Jude, I’ll shut up.”

  Sam wasn’t much better than me at being polite—that was as close to an apology as he’d offer, but I understood the code.

  “Eggplant parmesan?” Marcie sort of understood the code, but she also understood my cooking tastes. I’d do vegetarian better if it contained some pork.

  “His kitchen, his customers, his menu.” I didn’t relax an inch. “And I am going to go back and see what, if anything, he’ll let me help him with tonight.”

  “And later?”

  “I’ll be back in New York two days before we leave for Cancun. I’ll need a different wardrobe and the brass can see that their star is intact and ready to roll before sending us off. That’s the best you’re going to get.” If Tommy wanted me gone before then, I could probably find something to do besides throw myself in the Thames.

  Wearing that faraway look that meant logistics would soon be conquered, Marcie acknowledged that I’d outflanked them. “Okay then. I’ll email you the rough cuts.” She hugged me hard. “See you in a month.”

  “Less if he decides you’re an ass.” Sam flapped my worst fear at me. “Good luck. See you.” One sideways fist whacked his version of goodbye on my shoulder. “Hope it works out, Jude.”

  “Because I film better when I’m happy?” I didn’t trust the good wishes after all the grief.

  “You do, but”—he divided his smile between me and Marcie—“you deserve to be happy.”

  “Thanks.” I watched them march off to security, headed back to the train station, and turned my thoughts to Tommy.