Hard Rock Improv

by Ava Lore

  Manny was quiet, and I had to admit that when I said it out loud like that it really did sound like a raw deal. On the other hand, I’d truly enjoyed my job. I’d loved being a lawyer. I loved solving the puzzles it gave me, searching for the right loopholes in a contract or the key to a case, proudly serving up a file that would be used to assist a high-profile client. And the cocktail parties hadn’t been all that bad either, even though I never drank.

  I cleared my throat. “Anyway, the point is, at some time the firm becomes your life, so everything gets transferred over to it. All your friends are there. Your desk has all your pictures, and your apartment doesn’t have any decorations at all. It’s just the place you go every day and sometimes you stay there overnight and you do the work and hope you get noticed.”

  Manny let out a long, low whistle. “Wow,” he said. “You sound like you were a dedicated lawyer. Why’d you want to be a lawyer in the first place?”

  I sighed. “Because I’ve always been good at following rules and seeing how far I could bend them,” I replied. “So I made my Plan, and I followed it, and I found myself in entertainment law, and I loved it.”

  “...So what happened?”

  I closed my eyes. “I got noticed,” I said.

  Tears pricked behind my eyelids, and I hated the hot, stinging feeling. Hated how weak I was.

  One gentle hand stroked through my hair, lifting it away from my face. “And who noticed you?” he asked softly. There was no judgment in his tone. Just...desire to know.

  “One of the junior partners,” I said. “His name was Clint Campbell. He was...” I trailed off.

  “Handsome?” Manny said.

  “Yes,” I replied. “I suppose so. In a doughy sort of way.”

  “Rich?”

  “Very.”

  “Smart?”

  “Too smart for my own good.”

  He was quiet for a minute. “But none of those are the reason you decided to let your guard down for Mr. Clint Campbell, Esquire, are they?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “If you want to know the truth...” The fucking truth. I hated it.

  “I do,” Manny said. “Tell me the truth.”

  “The truth is...” I took a deep breath. “The truth is that I didn’t really like him much at all.” I smiled ruefully. “There. That’s the honest truth. And yet I...we...got involved.”

  “Because he was so handsome?”

  “No,” I said. “I wasn’t really attracted to him.”

  Manny inhaled. “Then why did you get involved with him?”

  I shrugged. “Lots of reasons. I was lonely, for one. I needed love. Companionship. He expressed interest and I thought, hey, it wouldn’t be so bad...The fact that he was a junior partner didn’t hurt, either. I thought he might help my career out at some point.” I gave a bitter laugh. “And I guess the thrill of the forbidden, of breaking rules—like, really breaking them—got me off.”

  I heard the smile in Manny’s voice. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  I pinched one of his nipples. Hard. He gave a yelp. “Ow! What was that for?”

  “Because you already get me off by pushing the boundaries of proper conduct!” I said. “You know, the whole going down on me in the parking lot, doing it in some stranger’s backyard while the police are looking for us, banging in the jungle...You know. The stuff we could get arrested for?”

  “I can think of quite a few other ways to break the rules, Rosa. Now that I know, prepare to be surprised.”

  I snorted. “You can’t prepare to be surprised. If you prepared, you wouldn’t be surprised.”

  He laughed at me. “You really are a lawyer, aren’t you?”

  “And don’t you forget it,” I said.

  “I’m not. So what happened with Mr. Not-Very-Handsome Junior Partner?”

  “We started sneaking around. After hours, and then during hours. I think he got off on fucking on company time, too. It was so wrong, but I was so starved for someone to love me that I just...gave in. He could have fit into the Plan, too, if he’d liked me at all. It was just lust on his part, though. He was suitable husband material. I guess that’s why I fooled myself into breaking the rules for him. I’d never fucked with the Plan before that.”

  “Suitable husband material,” Manny said. “Riiiight. You weren’t even attracted to him.”

  “I was, sort of. It wouldn’t have been a chore to sleep with him for the rest of my life.”

  I felt him shake his head. “Jesus, Rose. That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  I scowled. “There are plenty sadder things, so don’t go trying to make me feel like shit just because you don’t like the way I chose to live my life.”

  But even then I realized I’d said chose. Not choose. Past tense.

  Involuntarily, I snuggled down further into his arms.

  He was quiet for a moment, tense beneath me. “You’re right,” he said finally. “Sorry. Please. Tell me what happened. Why did you get busted for sexual harassment?”

  I clenched my teeth. “Because we got caught.” God, I’d been so stupid. “Usually it was Clint who initiated our, um, on-the-job indiscretions. He’d stop by my desk and tap on it, telling me he had something we needed to talk about. Sometimes we’d do it in his office, or in one of the closets. But this time I was the one who came on to him and...we got caught.”

  Humiliation burned through me, just remembering. We’d been in his office, his immaculate office, with all its dumb awards on his desk and his stupid degrees and certificates on the walls, all the law books on his bookcases that I don’t think he’d ever cracked. I’d been in there on perfectly legitimate business concerning one of our clients, but I’d been up until two the night before working on another contract, had slept maybe three hours, and then wound up back at the office.

  Even in Manny’s arms I could remember the tension coiling in me, the stress of a job that had taken over every aspect of my life. I’d loved it, but I needed human contact. And that morning I’d stared at Clint and his pretty face, somewhat soft with too much rich food and drink, and thought how much I needed to be touched.

  So I’d given him a wicked little smile and sashayed around his desk.

  It was so unlike conservative little me to do something so forward that Clint had thought I’d lost my mind. He’d frowned at me. “What do you think you’re doing?” he’d demanded.

  I’d grabbed his tie and pulled him toward me, hooking one leg over his hip, my knee sinking into the soft leather of his oh-so-expensive office chair. “I’m taking a fuck break,” I’d said. “What does it look like?”

  And then the doorknob had turned.

  “You got caught?” Manny’s voice dragged me back to the present, and I realized I’d stopped breathing, lost in memory. I sucked air through my teeth.

  “Yeah,” I said. “In a really compromising position. I was practically straddling him in his chair when his secretary walked in. Looking back on it I think she must have suspected and wanted to catch us in the act. And she did. So...that was that.”

  “But he was just as complicit, wasn’t he?”

  I snorted. “You think a lawyer is going to get caught like that and not figure out how to weasel his way out of it?”

  “Well...you didn’t,” Manny pointed out reasonably.

  “Yeah, but I was clearly the instigator. He looked like he’d just been sitting there when I decided I had to have his cock. His secretary was just standing there, with this weird look on her face, like she was shocked but also like she was happy, and then he said...her name was Sarah, and he said, ‘Sarah, please help me.’ And he said it in this really desperate voice, like he didn’t know what to do with me. But you know, he just said that for show.

  “Next thing I knew his hands were on my arms and lifting me bodily out of his lap, and he was telling me how inappropriate my actions were, how he didn’t appreciate being treated like a piece of meat, all this shit, like I’d been coming on to him
and he didn’t want it, like he hadn’t been banging me in the fucking copy room the day before.

  “In the end he filed a complaint against me, accusing me of sexually harassing and assaulting him, and then we had to have internal hearings and a bunch of old men went over the texts I’d sent him, even though he’d been texting me back the whole time...It was awful. No formal charges, it was all taken care of in-house naturally, but of course I was told that I had better not ask for a reference when applying for new jobs¸ which just fucked me over even worse...”

  My hands balled into fists at the memory. Even now there was a rage at the injustice of it all boiling at the base of my spine. It was over and done with, and yet all I wanted to do was punch Clint in his stupid pudgy face and not stop until he’d lost all his perfectly white capped teeth.

  Fuck. Tears of impotent fury prickled at the corners of my eyes.

  Then Manny’s fingers closed around the hand I had laid on his chest, and I realized I was clenching my fist so hard that I had almost broken the skin on the palm of my hand. Emotions coursed through me at his touch—need and lust and gratitude and so many other things that I couldn’t even name—and I found my breath trapped in my lungs as he brought my clenched hand to his lips and began to kiss it.

  Dizziness assailed me as his mouth massaged the skin of my hand, sucked on the sharp peaks of my knuckles, nibbled at the tender pulse point on the inside of my wrist. My whole body was melting, dissolving as he coaxed me out of the past and into the present, banishing the memories with the deft application of his kiss. I watched his handsome face as he seduced my clenched fist into an open hand; his eyes were closed, long lashes lying softly against the crest of his cheekbones, his sharp nose and full lips intimately engaged with my skin, tasting, touching, scenting...

  “Oh, god...” I said. It came out as a breathless sigh, and I knew if he kept it up I was going to pass out.

  To my relief—or possibly to my disappointment, it was hard to tell—Manny opened his golden eyes and raised them to mine, a sweet smile playing on his lips as he guided my hand back down to his chest. I let it fall there, open and willing, and I felt the rhythmic tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump of his heart against my palm.

  “Better?” he asked me.

  Dumbly I nodded. What was it about Manny that made me forget myself, that made me abandon all my plans and become so irrational? Was I just as desperate now as I was back then, changing myself to suit a man? Or was there something more between us, something that I had no name for, something so rare and beautiful that it could never fit into any plans?

  I’m not a romantic. I’m not. But Manny made me want to become a romantic.

  “Thank you for telling me your story,” he said suddenly, pulling me out of my reverie. “I appreciate your trust.”

  I nodded again, not sure what to say, so I gave him an uncertain smile.

  He smiled back. “There we go. I hate to see you sad.”

  That made my smile spread out and become solid and real. For a long moment we stared at each other, as though each of us were trying to memorize the exact color of the other’s eyes.

  Of course, underneath all that I was struggling to come up with a good way to segue into the burning questions I had about Manny’s past, about the men who had come to see him today. As I did so, I bit my lip, and then Manny’s gaze flickered to my mouth and the spell was broken.

  “I suppose,” he said slowly, “that I now have to tell you my deep dark secrets.”

  “Only if you want to,” I murmured, trying not to sound too desperate to know.

  A faint smile twisted his lips. “It won’t be as special. The band already knows the story, so it’s not like it’s a secret.”

  “It doesn’t have to be special. I’m just worried about you.”

  His eyes returned to mine, and for the space of ten heartbeats he held my gaze, his golden eyes searching mine, as though trying to peer inside my soul, to see if I had any sort of hidden motive. What he saw must have satisfied him, though, because he broke eye-contact and leaned back into the hammock, staring at the ceiling above us as he formulated his thoughts. I let him think and spent the time watching his face, trying to memorize every perfect line.

  “I always wanted to play in a band,” Manny said abruptly, breaking the silence. “I always wanted to play in a band and tour and sing and dance on stage and all that shit, you know? I can’t remember ever wanting to do anything else. You know how kids are always like, ‘I wanna be a fireman,’ or ‘I’m gonna be an astronaut,’ or whatever? I would always tell people I was going to be in a rock band when I grew up.” He smiled. “Drove my mother crazy. She thought I should set my sights a little lower. Maybe go to engineering school or something. But I wouldn’t listen.” He shrugged. “My dad got me a drum set for my fifth birthday and that was that.”

  His eyes grew unfocused and dreamy as he stared off into the past. I held my breath, waiting to hear how things had gone from loving and supporting parents to...well, to what I’d seen today.

  Finally he licked his lips and continued. “Anyway. When I was fifteen I tried out for one of those reality shows. You know, one of those Let’s Manufacture A Band shows? This was back when reality TV was the biggest thing since John Lennon was the biggest thing since Jesus. Remember?”

  I nodded. I remembered. It wasn’t much better now, but back in the last decade producers had been throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick, coming up with crazier and crazier ideas hoping to have the next Survivor or American Idol.

  “This one was on one of the exclusive music networks and was called Making It. Stupid pun. Basically a bunch of teenagers and teen drama interspersed with cutting each other’s throats for a chance at signing with a record label. That’s where I met Sonya.”

  Surprised, I blinked. Sonya? I’d had no idea they’d known each other that long. I’d never even heard of Making It.

  “She was the youngest person on the show. Fourteen and she was training in opera, which isn’t the sort of thing you’d usually associate with a band, whether it’s pop or rock or whatever, but...” He trailed off and shrugged, a little half smile quirking at the corner of his mouth. “You know. You’ve heard her.”

  Yes. I had. She killed me inside, even if her outside intimidated me beyond words. “Yeah.”

  “So there we were, Sonya and me. She and I became friends, and we were aligned against the rest of the cast. But you know how that sort of thing goes, you know?”

  “Kind of?” I guessed.

  He shrugged. “We were eliminated in the middle of the season. The problem was that my parents were killed in a car crash after the first episode aired...”

  My breath caught and I imagined fifteen year old Emmanuel Reyes, alone on the west coast of the mainland receiving the word that his parents had died...

  Christ. What would that have been like? I hadn’t lost either of my parents, and I couldn’t even imagine...

  Beneath me, Manny shook himself, and I blinked and refocused. Right. Here and now.

  “The network milked that for all it was worth,” Manny said, then laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Shit, you better believe it. My dad had sent his brother—my uncle Turo—to watch over me during filming, since my dad had a job and my uncle didn’t, so when my parents died he was perfectly positioned to swoop in and take over. He didn’t give a shit about me, but he gave a shit about all the money I could make for him and his deadbeat kids. We used to be so close...”

  He trailed off, then snorted and spat over the side of the hammock. “I have no problem supporting family,” he said, “but I do have a problem with family exploiting me.”

  I felt him shake his head and I raised my face to his. I saw that he was staring off into the distance, somewhere out of this world that had disappointed him so. I watched as his golden eyes focused on somewhere on the horizon.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said at last. “It’s just water under the bridge. But a few years la
ter, just as I was about to turn eighteen and break free my uncle managed to get me drug tested. I tested positive.” He gave a laugh, as though this were some great irony, although I supposed the only irony was that he would be the only one in the music industry who would be punished for using drugs when everyone else did.

  “They managed to convince a judge here on Kauai that I was mentally incompetent. My uncle has my medical power of attorney. They don’t have full power over me, but they know how to pull the strings to get me to do what they want...”

  He trailed off and sighed. “Every few months they shake me down for cash. I usually just give it to them to make them go away. They put me in a mental facility the last time I wouldn’t, so...there’s that. Want to know something, though?”

  Mutely, I nodded my head.

  “They have no idea how much money I have. They think I’m poor, or signed a bad contract. It drives them crazy since they don’t have full power of attorney and can’t renegotiate. But the secret is that I’m rich as hell, just like everyone else in the band, but everything I own is in Sonya’s name.”

  I gasped. “Are you serious?”

  He laughed. “Yup. Didn’t know we were that close, did you?”

  I couldn’t help the swift swell of jealousy that welled up in me. I tried to shove it down. “No, I didn’t.”

  I was so lousy at hiding my feelings. “Aww,” Manny said, rolling to the side to look down at me. “Don’t get all upset. Sonya and I are like siblings. She looks out for me. I don’t get money directly wired to me, I take checks only and sign them over to Sonya. She gives me cash from my secret bank account whenever I need it.” He grinned. “Although sometimes she tells me I’m wasting my money. She was not thrilled with the car purchase, for example.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  He snickered. “I don’t know what she’s complaining about, the credit card’s in her name so she gets all the points for it.”