Hard Rock Improv

by Ava Lore

  He laughed. “Way more than she bargained for, probably,” he said.

  I had to smile at that. “Yes,” I admitted. “Way, way more.”

  His body relaxed further and he sagged into the soft fabric that cradled us. “So you don’t know anything about me?” he asked.

  I tried to shrug. “Just what Rebecca’s told me about you. I think I knew you grew up here, or something. I must have read it a while ago, otherwise I wouldn’t have guessed.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  I blinked. “I dunno,” I said. “I just...don’t think of people as being from Hawaii. This is like some other world. I might as well believe that aliens exist.” I tried to laugh to make my silly observation less embarrassing, but it didn’t work. My cheeks colored anyway. God I hated my blushes. They just never seemed to stay under control.

  Then Manny’s hand left my hip and drifted to my face, and all of a sudden I loved my blushes, because they had brought the blood to where Manny’s fingers were, and I was on fire again. Ripples of pleasure spread across my face, up and over my scalp and down my throat, and I had to close my eyes and turn my head into his gentle touch.

  “I was born in Hawaii,” Manny said suddenly, “but I left because there was nothing here for me.”

  I blinked, slow and stupid. “What?” I asked. “Really?”

  He smiled. “Do you think there’s a big music industry scene here?”

  I frowned, and then nodded. “I guess not,” I said. “I forget that not everywhere is LA.”

  “And thank shit for that,” Manny said, some of his customary humor returning to his voice. “What I mean, though, is that I couldn’t pursue my dreams while I was stuck on the islands.”

  There was a strange note of anger and frustration in his voice that I had never heard before. With the greatest of efforts I forced my half-closed eyes to open and take in his face, but he was staring off into the distance. He blinked, then focused back on me and gave me a silly half-grin. “It’s like living in a tiny little town in the middle of the ocean,” he said. “Everyone knows everyone else, and there’s lots of drug use and no one feels like they’re going anywhere because you can’t go anywhere unless you take a five hour flight to the mainland...it’s just not the right place for anyone who wants to do anything with their life, you know?”

  I nodded, even though I didn’t really know, and he knew it, too.

  “Rebecca said you grew up in a little town in Oklahoma,” he said suddenly. “Was it like that there?”

  I felt my brow draw down as I tried to remember what it was like to live back in Oklahoma. I had fled as soon as I had turned eighteen, but my memories were still of long, dull days, and nights filled with all sorts of stupid things that bored teenagers get up to, things I never did because they could have compromised my escape. “Sort of,” I said. “But you could get out of there by car. Four hours and you could be in Dallas. Which wasn’t really an improvement to be honest.”

  Manny grinned at that. “How far did you have to go to get away?”

  I just shrugged. “All the way to California. You have to go to the coast, or maybe up to Chicago if you want to get rid of all that stuff.”

  He nodded. “It was just like that,” he said. Reaching up, he pulled the blanket higher, and I realized, peeking over his shoulder, that the ocean was now a dark, midnight blue. “So I left. Off to LA to make music and fuck bitches.”

  Jealousy flared in me. “And did you?”

  He chuckled. “I did one of those things. But until you? No one.”

  That sounded like a line. “No one, really?”

  “Nope. Turns out I don’t like casual sex.”

  The implications of this slowly dawned on me. He didn’t like casual sex.

  But he wanted to be casual with me...right?

  I had to know. I summoned all my courage. “So...why did you do...do that?”

  “Do what?” he asked. He was almost asleep.

  I took a deep breath. “In the parking lot. Why did you do that?...To me?”

  He didn’t even open his eyes, but he smiled. “Because you were so fucking sexy I had to have you any way I could.”

  His words sent bolts of pleasure and need straight through me, but I wouldn’t be Rose Alton, Master Lawyer (Recently Fired) if I wasn’t the world’s leading expert at asking too many questions. “But why?” I wanted to know.

  His eyelashes parted, revealing golden slits. His mouth twisted. “LA turns you into an asshole,” he said, “but you weren’t. You were one of the first people I’d seen in months who acted generously and kindly to someone who desperately needed it. And I looked at you and saw how strong you were, and I thought I’d never seen anyone so beautiful.”

  My head spun. “But—”

  He kissed me.

  My brain shorted out.

  There was nothing but his lips on mine, his long, hard body against my own, and as he leaned into me I felt, against my hip, the hard swell of his cock, ready and waiting for me to open up and let him in. I wanted to. I wanted to so badly.

  But Manny Reyes was not part of the Plan. And that was the trouble—deviating from the Plan had put me in this position.

  My hands on his shirt twitched, itching to ball into fists and pull him close, but with a supreme effort of will, I kept them limp and uninviting.

  Manny stopped kissing me and drew back, and on his face was a look of hurt so strange and profound that I suddenly realized that I had wounded him somehow, very deeply, by not deepening the kiss, by not pulling him to me, and I felt my mistake like a slap across the face.

  Then his smile suddenly fell back into place, and I realized that the happy-go-lucky Manny, the free-wheeling persona he wore, was a façade. His humor, his laughter, his teasing, his devil-may-care attitude—it was all armor.

  “Manny...” I began.

  He grinned at me. “You’d better get some sleep,” he said. “We have to be up at five thirty tomorrow to film the video.”

  Stung, I bit my lip, but I refused to show it. Instead I hid my face in his shoulder and stared out at the darkening sky. “What’s it like to film a music video?” I asked him, for want of anything else to say.

  He chuckled. “Just you wait,” he said. “It’ll be the thrill of your life.”

  Chapter Seven

  Fifteen hours later we were running from the cops.

  ...No, wait. Let me back up. Thirteen hours later I was bored out of my gourd on the set of The Lonely Kings’ new video for their latest hit single “Atlantis.” I’d heard it on every radio station for months, over and over again.

  I loved the song, to be honest, and I had loved to listen to it, because it had a sadness to it, a defeated feeling that I related to far too well. Now, however, watching the video get made was hard, mostly because it was sucking all the joy out of the original song by going over it, again and again and again..

  I watched as the cameras zoomed in on Sonya, who was dressed in beautiful Greek clothes, her red hair shining like flame in the sunlight, and the sound system delivered the lyrics she needed to mouth. She stared off into the distance as someone held a giant reflective surface next to her to light her from multiple directions. The music clicked on again, and she opened her mouth and sang along with her own angelic voice as she walked along the beach, her feet in the water.

  “Under waves,

  In the dark,

  The bells are ringing,

  When the storms

  Toss the waves,

  We walk the watery roads,

  And we climb over the stones

  Of our city’s broken shell

  And we face the thundering waves

  To defend the walls that fell...”

  The music cut off, just before the chorus, and I wanted to scream. I loved this song, and it was getting ruined. Sonya seemed equally annoyed.

  “If I get a sunburn because you can’t film a good scene,” she sniped at the director, who was some big name in videos that
I had never heard of before, “then I’m going to sue you for skin grafts, and I’ll take them from your ass!”

  “Okay,” he said, as though he hadn’t heard her, “now this time look more wistful and stare into the sky. We need you to look as worried as possible. Can you do that?”

  “Of course I can,” she griped. “My skin is bubbling and you don’t care. I’m worried I’m going to turn into a lobster.”

  I heard the director sigh and saw him signal to the small gaggle of makeup artists standing off to the side, clustered together. One of them darted forward and began applying gobs of sunscreen to Sonya’s pale, luminous skin. She took it with bad grace, but didn’t complain out loud.

  “Okay!” the director said. “Again!”

  The speakers clicked as the sound guy rewound the music back to the beginning of the song, and I tried not to tear my hair out as Sonya began to sing again.

  “Under waves, in the dark,

  The bells are ringing...”

  “I can’t take this anymore,” I muttered to myself, and stood up, brushing the sand from my legs.

  “Where are you going?” Rebecca asked. She had been sitting next to me and we’d both been sunning our legs. I felt I had better legs than Rebecca, but Rebecca was curvy in the right places while I was a founding member of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee. Rebecca had no such problems in that area, and sitting next to her was making me feel uglier than normal.

  “I’m going to go see what the boys are doing,” I said. “This is stressing me out.”

  “Yeah,” Rebecca said. “At least you aren’t in the video, though. It could be worse.”

  I suppressed a glare. She had been in one of the Lonely Kings’ videos back when she and Kent hadn’t even been a thing, and I didn’t want her to know how blazingly jealous I was. I wanted to be pampered by hair stylists and makeup artists and all that junk, but I wasn’t about to let her know that.

  Feigning indifference, I stretched and padded off through the sand toward the set up further down the beach where Carter, Kent, and Manny were playing instruments as the tide splashed around their legs. It pained me to see those instruments getting wet and ruined, but I was fairly certain they’d been bought specifically for the purpose of getting ruined. They were probably used or something, no more than a hundred bucks a piece.

  As I approached the other set up, I heard their voices rising as they joked back and forth to one another between takes. Manny, it seemed, was the only one having a good time. Kent was glowering and Carter was convinced that he had a fish in his pants.

  “I feel it,” he was saying as I pulled up behind the cameras. “It’s wiggling in my asscrack. I swear it is!”

  “Shut up,” Kent told him.

  “You should pull it out and put it up on the beach,” Manny said. “We could fry it up when we go back to the house.”

  “I don’t think it’s that big,” Carter told him as another wave ran into his back. This time he stumbled and nearly dropped his guitar. “Besides,” he said as he recovered, “who wants to eat something that’s been in my butt?”

  “We’d fry it,” Manny told him. “Kill the bacteria. Fish swim in the sea, anyway, the whole sea is full of shit.”

  “Shut up,” Kent repeated.

  “You shut up,” Manny replied.

  “No, you,” Carter said.

  “All of you cram it!” This came from the harassed-looking young woman who seemed to be in charge of this section of filming. The assistant director. She was pretty and young, but there was already a semi-permanent crease between her eyebrows, and I had the distinct impression that she was not enjoying her job. “Now start playing. We’re getting into the chorus here, and I want to see you put some heart into it. And not like that!”

  Carter was strumming his guitar and mouthing lyrics like a drunk at a karaoke contest, miming the music in the most obnoxious way possible.

  I put my hand over my mouth to suppress a giggle. I knew very well how hard it was to get people to do what you needed them to do, and I didn’t want to make the assistant director’s life any harder. Over at the sound table, this sound guy queued up more music, this time stripped of vocals, and played them.

  I watched the guys mime their parts as the waves crashed around them. This was going to be a beautiful video, I could tell, but it was like sausages in a way—wonderful at the end, but you didn’t really want to see them made. I was never going to be able to take this song or video seriously after watching this.

  Carter and Kent were fingering their parts on their crappy instruments, their eyes closed and their faces frozen in a Rock Scowl. Normally their resemblance as brothers was fairly passing, but their expressions were so similar it was clear they were of the same blood. I wondered if Manny ever felt left out, but, then again, I supposed that was why he and Sonya were best friends.

  I almost didn’t want to watch Manny, to be honest. We had fallen asleep last night in each other’s arms, and when we had woken in the morning I had felt more rested than I had been in a long time. Unfortunately, the distance that had bloomed last night was still there, sitting uncomfortably between us, and the rest of the morning had felt awkward despite Manny’s happy, easy-going manner and his attempts to set me at my ease.

  The whole band had eaten breakfast together, although to be fair most of them were so tired that there was little conversation, only grunts and gestures as they lined up at the coffee pot and poured enormous mugs of caffeine. Manny had offered to remake last night’s meal, but the denial had been near-unanimous. Manny had laughed at everyone’s refusal to eat more Spam, but now I had to wonder if he wasn’t just hiding his hurt feelings behind his laughter. Personally I had liked his Spam dish, but after last night’s kiss I didn’t feel brave enough to tell him. It would have sounded insincere.

  We’d all taken the van to the filming site. The trailers had already been set up, and Sonya and Carter had gone first, then Manny and Kent. It hadn’t taken nearly as long as I thought it would, but then again, these were professionals. I had sat on the beach and watched the waves, occasionally checking my emails and voicemail in the hopes that someone had called back with a job for me. That would have been the best ending to this little vacation I could have thought of—relax in Hawaii, and then return to LA to a job and, eventually, a place to live.

  But of course there was nothing.

  Now I stood in the sand and watched Carter and Kent go through the motions. They were clearly tired, and I didn’t blame them. They’d been standing in the warm water for a couple hours, the waves washing around them, and I had to think that their legs were exhausted from holding them against the tide.

  Manny, of course, got the best end of the deal. He was sitting down, banging away at his drums. I watched him from the corner of my eye, not wanting to act too interested, even though I was very, very intrigued.

  The few times I’d spoken to Rebecca about the band she had raved about each member and how talented they were. It was interesting to watch them now, but I knew I wasn’t seeing them in their natural habitat since they were just miming their parts. I wanted to see them play for real.

  I wanted to see Manny play for real. Rebecca had said that he’d played drums like no one else she’d ever seen.

  I risked a glance at him.

  His head was thrown back, his eyes closed, a faint smile on his face as he basked in the light of the sun. One of the cameramen was circling around them with a free held camera on his shoulder, zooming in close to their faces, bobbing in and out, weaving through the waves and then retreating. I hoped he got a good shot of Manny.

  “Cut!” The assistant director’s voice rang out across the beach. Almost immediately Carter and Kent stopped, dropping the Rock Star persona and becoming themselves again, but Manny kept drumming, his movements strangely lazy and unhurried.

  “Cut!” the director snapped again, and this time he opened his eyes and stopped, blinking. I realized he had been caught up in something inside his
head.

  I desperately wanted to know what it was he had been thinking about.

  “Is it lunch time yet?” Carter asked. “I’m starving.”

  The assistant director gave him a sardonic look. “It is, actually,” she told him. “Let’s all take a break. Back here in an hour. We’ll do some scene setting shots while you guys grab something to eat.” She pointed back down the beach toward the trailers. “Food’s there. Enjoy.”

  “Woohoo!” Carter whooped. He tore his guitar off over his head and went splashing through the waves and eddies onto the sand, his jeans soaked through with salt water.

  Kent went with more dignity, but he, too, seemed relieved to be out of the water. I watched as he kicked off the heavy black boots he’d been wearing, peeled off his soaked socks, and padded up the beach after his brother, his feet leaving heavy prints in the soft sand.

  Then Manny came out of the waves, twirling his drumsticks between his fingers like batons. Behind him stage lackeys were grabbing his drumming set-up and dragging it back to shore so it didn’t get washed out to sea, but Manny wasn’t even looking at them.

  He was looking at me and singing the next verse of the song.

  “There was no

  Place to hide

  When Death came walking,

  And we left

  All our dreams

  Like bones in the sand...”

  My heart flopped over. Stupid heart.

  “Well?” he said as he pulled up next to me. “Enjoying the show?”

  I cast about for the right words, not wanting to insult him. He’d said it would be the thrill of my life, after all.

  Before I could say anything, he laughed and stuffed his drumsticks into his back pocket. “That bad, huh?” he said. “Sorry you have to sit through this. I mean, you could stay at the beach house, like I said...”