Bend

by K. Bromberg

  He leans back. “Fort Lauderdale. The bank can’t do without you for a few days?”

  I shake my head. “No, they can’t. Why Fort Lauderdale? What do you do there?”

  “I sell boats.”

  God, this guy is a regular chatterbox. I let my eyes float over the suite, the dining room table we seem more likely to fuck on over eating at, the watch draped over his wallet, a brand I don’t recognize, but one I can guarantee is worth what I make in a year. “You sell boats.”

  He chuckles. “Yes.” He slides over, pushing his tray forward, so close to the edge of the bed that I watch it nervously, my attention redirected when his lips close over my neck. “Stop thinking,” he whispers, taking another taste of my neck, this one more aggressive, one that will probably leave a hickey. Super classy, Riley. My mother will be thrilled. I close my eyes. Lean into his mouth. Let his arms slide me up the bed and roll me atop him.

  “I was overdramatic last night. What I said to you. About owning you.”

  “I figured it was for effect.”

  “But this isn’t something I do. I don’t make a habit of fucking strangers.” His words tumble awkwardly over the expletive, as if he isn’t used to swearing.

  “Neither do I.” Hell, I live in a town where strangers don’t exist, and I still haven’t done any fucking. Shows what happens when I try to brave life outside of our dirt roads.

  “What are you doing next weekend?”

  “Nothing.” The lie comes out convincingly. Kasey Craig, my second cousin on some distant family member’s side, is actually having a baby shower on Saturday. Her fourth one in the last six years, yet there will be serious repercussions if I am not present. It is the South, after all. Not to mention, I also have plans to spray the garage for bugs. Super important stuff that my lie pushes to the side. I want this man. I know little-to-nothing about him, but I crave something outside of my world. I’m sick of pantyhose and mutual funds. Potluck dinners and familial obligations. This weekend is the most alive I’ve felt in a decade. Part of it is the location; the majority of it lies atop me. Had moved inside of me. Had woken me at four AM begging for five minutes inside of me, then blessed my world for twenty.

  I am thirty-two. I am not dead. I am not in a relationship. I am bored. I am tempted to say, had he asked me to pack up my house and move to Florida right now, I would say yes.

  “See me next weekend. I’ll send you a plane. It won’t be the jet you girls flew in on, but it’ll get to Lauderdale easier than commercial.”

  I look at him. “How do you know what we came in on?”

  “Don’t get too excited. I was at the private airport when you arrived.” He runs a hand through my hair. “Pretty blondes always catch my eye.”

  I let out a huff of air. “We’re almost all blondes.”

  He smiles, that grin tugging hard at my vulnerable heart. “You leave them all in the dust.”

  The blush hot on my cheeks, I lift my mouth, stopped from a kiss by his hand on my chest. “Next weekend?”

  I smile. “Next weekend. I’m not promising anything more after that.”

  My words may not have promised, but my heart? It is toast. It is already booking wedding venues, picking out baby names, tying unbreakable knots in the bond between his heart and mine. I feel his hand relax, the resistance gone, and he closes the distance between our lips. Surrendering myself to him, I feel the crush of our souls, as our touches say what our lips are not ready for.

  I came for vacation. I found, in those hours, the other half of my soul.

  The End

  Still is, in this anthology, a novella. But it has big plans. To grow legs and stretch into a full-length novel. There is so much ahead for this couple. Heat, fear, love, and deceit. My image for their story… it’s insanity. I have no idea if the final book will stick to the vision I have for it – my stories rarely end up how I picture them finishing. But either way, I promise, it will be a sexy wild ride. Stay up to date on the progress of this book, and any others, by joining my mailing list. Any new subscribers in the month of May and June will be automatically entered to win a signed paperback. Ten winners will be drawn, so you have a good chance of winning. Loyal readers, feel free to re-subscribe.

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  beg.

  Songs of Submission - Book One

  CD Reiss

  Copyright © 2013

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental

  Cover Art designed by the author

  one

  At the height of singing the last note, when my lungs were still full and I was switching from pure physical power to emotional thrust, I was blindsided by last night’s dream. Like most dreams, it hadn’t had a story. I was on top of a grand piano on the rooftop bar of Hotel K. The fact that the real hotel didn’t have a piano on the roof notwithstanding, I was on it and naked from the waist down, propped on my elbows. My knees were spread further apart than physically possible. Customers drank their thirty-dollar drinks and watched as I sang. The song didn’t have words, but I knew them well, and as the strange man with his head between my legs licked me, I sang harder and harder until I woke up with an arched back and soaked sheets, hanging on to a middle C for dear life.

  Same as the last note of our last song, and I held it like a stranger was pleasuring me on a nonexistent piano. I drew that last note out for everything it was worth, pulling from deep inside my diaphragm, feeling the song rattle the bones of my rib cage, sweat pouring down my face. It was my note. The dream told me so. Even after Harry stopped strumming and Gabby’s keyboard softened to silence, I croaked out the last tearful strain as if gripping the edge of a precipice.

  When I opened my eyes in the dark club, I knew I had them; every one of them stared at me as if I had just ripped out their souls, put them in envelopes, and sent them back to their mothers, COD. Even in the few silent seconds after I stopped, when most singers would worry that they’d lost the audience, I knew I hadn’t; they just needed permission to applaud. When I smiled, permission was granted, and they clapped all right.

  Our band, Spoken Not Stirred, had brought down the Thelonius Room. A year of writing and rehearsing the songs and a month getting bodies in the door had paid off right here, right now.

  The crowd. That was what it was all about. That was why I busted my ass. That was why I had shut out everything in my life but putting a roof over my head and food in my mouth. I didn’t want anything from them but that ovation.

  I bowed and went off stage, followed by the band. Harry bolted to the bathroom to throw up, as always. I could still hear the applause and banging feet. The room held a hundred people, and the audience sounded like a thousand. I wanted to take the moment to bathe in something other than the disappointment and failure that accompanied a career in music, but I heard Gabrielle next to me, tapping her right thumb and middle finger. Her gaze was blank, settled in a corner, her eyes as big as teacups. I followed that gaze to exactly nothing. The corner was empty, but she stared as if a mirror into herself stood there, and she didn’t like what she saw.

  I glanced at Darren, our drummer. He stared back at me, then at his sister, who had tapped those fingers since puberty.

  “Gabby,” I said.

  She didn’t answer.

  Darren poked her bicep. “Gabs? Shit together?”

  “Fuck off, Darren,” Gabby said flatly, not looking away from the empty corner.

  Darren and I looked at each other. We were each other’s first loves, back in L.A. Performing Arts High, and even after the soft, simple br
eakup, we had deepened our friendship to the point we didn’t need to talk with words.

  We said to each other, with our expressions, that Gabby was in trouble again.

  “We rule!” Harry gave a fist pump as he exited the bathroom, still buttoning up his pants. “You were awesome.” He punched me in the arm, oblivious to what was going on with Gabby. “My heart broke a little at ‘Split Me.’”

  “Thanks,” I said without emotion. I did feel gratitude, but we had other concerns at the moment. “Where’s Vinny?”

  Our manager, Vinny Mardigian, appeared as if summoned, all glad-handing and smiles. Such a dick. I really couldn’t stand him, but he’d seemed confident and competent when we met.

  “You happy?” I said. “We sold all our tickets at full price. Now maybe next time we won’t have to pay to play?”

  “Hello, Monica Sexybitch.” That was his pet name for me. The guy had the personality of a landfill and the drive of a shark in bloody waters. “Nice to see you too. I got Performer’s Agency on the line. Their guy’s right outside.”

  Great. I needed representation from the The Rinkydink Agency like I needed a hole in the head. But I was an artist, and I was supposed to take whatever the industry handed me with a smile and spread legs.

  Vinny, of course, couldn’t shut up worth a damn. He was high on Performer’s Agency and the worldwide fame he thought they would get us. He didn’t realize half a step forward was just as good as a full step back. “You got a crowd out there asking for an encore. Everybody here does their job, then everybody’s happy.”

  I listened, and sure enough, they were still clapping, and Gabby was still staring into the corner.

  two

  Darren took Gabby home after the encore, which she played like the crazy prodigy she was, then she blanked out again. Her depression was ameliorated by music and brought on by just about anything, even if she was taking her meds.

  She’d attempted suicide two years before after a few weeks of corner-staring and complaining of not being able to feel anything about anything. I’d been the one to find her in the kitchen, bleeding into the sink. That had been terrific for everyone. She took my second bedroom, and Darren moved from a roommate-infested guest house in West Hollywood to a studio a block away. We played music together because music was what we did, and because it kept Gabby sane, Darren close, and me from screwing up. But it didn’t even keep us in hot dogs. We all worked, and until I got my current gig at the rooftop bar at Hotel K, I had to give up Starbucks because I couldn’t rub two nickels together to make heat.

  Because Spoken Not Stirred had drawn more people than the cost of our guaranteed tickets, we’d made three hundred dollars that night. Fifteen percent went to Vinny Landfillian. Sixty-eight dollars paid for Harry’s parking ticket because he figured if he was loading his bass and amp, he could park in a loading zone on the Sunset Strip before six o’clock. We split the rest four ways.

  Hotel K was a spanking new modernist, thirty-story diamond in a one-story stucco shitpile of a neighborhood. The rooftop bar thing in L.A. had gotten out of hand. You couldn’t swing a dead talent agent without hitting some new construction with a barside pool on the roof and thumping music day and night. The upside of the epidemic was that waitress service was the norm, and tall, skinny girls who could slip between name-dropping drunks while holding heavy trays over their heads without clocking anyone were an absolute necessity. The downside for someone tall and skinny like myself was my replaceability. You couldn’t swing a tall, skinny girl in L.A. without hitting another one.

  Darren and I had taken too long discussing who would watch Gabby. He convinced her to stay at his place for the night, though “convinced” might not be the word to use when talking about someone who didn’t care about where she slept, or anything, one way or the other.

  I ran from the elevator to the hotel locker room, the fifty bucks I’d made for holding a hundred people in my palm light in my pocket. I peeled off my jacket and stuffed it in my locker, then pulled my shirt off. I didn’t have a second to spare before Yvonne, who I was relieving, started chewing me out for stranding her on the floor. I yanked a low-cut dress that showed more leg than modesty out of my bag and wrestled into it.

  “You’re late,” Freddie, my manager, said. He stank of cigarettes, which I found disgusting.

  “I’m sorry, I had a gig.” I kicked off my shoes and pulled my pants off from under my dress. I had no time to worry about what Freddie thought of me.

  “Bully for you.” Freddie crossed his arms, scrunching his brown pinstripe suit. He had a mole on his cheek and wore a puckered expression even when he looked down my shirt, which was almost every time we talked.

  I didn’t wait to argue. I slipped back into my shoes, slapped my locker shut, and ran toward the floor.

  “Yvonne!” I caught her in the back hall as she folded a wad of tips into her pocket.

  “Monica, girl! Where were you?”

  “I’m sorry. Thanks for covering my tables. Can I make it up to you?”

  “I don’t get home in time, you can pay the sitter an extra hour.”

  “No problem,” I said, though it was a big problem.

  “Jonathan Drazen is at your table.” She put her hand to her heart. “He’s hot, and he’ll tip if he likes what he sees. So be nice.” She handed me the tickets for my station.

  Drazen was my boss’s boss. He owned the hotel, but we’d never crossed paths. Apparently, he traveled a lot, and he spent little or no time on the roof when he was in town, so we hadn’t met. This development was more annoying than anything. I’d just gotten the ovation of my life at a really cool club and was bathing in the warm validation. I didn’t need to prove myself all over again, and based on what? If it wasn’t my music, I didn’t care.

  The place was packed: wall-to-wall Eurotrash, Hollywood heavyweights, and assorted hangers-on. The pool was a big rectangle in the center of the expanse. Red chairs surrounded it, and a large cocktail area with tables and chairs sat off to the side. Little tents with couches inside outlined most of the roof, and when the curtains closed, you left them closed unless someone looked as though they’d taken off without paying.

  I stood at the service bar, flipping through my tickets. Five tables, two with little star punch-outs in the upper right hand corners. Put there by Freddie, they meant someone important was at the table. Extra care was required.

  My first tray was a star punch-out. I put on a smile and navigated through the crowd to deliver the tray to a table in the corner. Four men, and I knew Drazen right away. He had red hair cut just below the ears, disheveled in that absolutely precise way. He wore jeans and a grey shirt that showed off his broad shoulders and hard biceps. His full lips stretched across flawless, natural teeth when he saw his tray coming, and I was caught a little off guard by how much I couldn’t stop looking at him.

  “H-Hi,” I stammered. “I’ll be your server.” I smiled. That always worked. Then I thought happy thoughts because that made my smile genuine, and I watched Drazen move his gaze from my smiling face, over my breasts, to my hips, stopping at my calves. I felt as if I were being applauded again.

  He looked back at my face. I stared right back at him, and he pursed his lips. I’d caught him looking, and he seemed justifiably embarrassed.

  “Hello,” he said. “You’re new.” His voice resonated like a cello, even over the music.

  I checked Yvonne’s notes and picked up a short glass with ice and amber liquid from the tray. “You have the Jameson’s?”

  “Thank you.” He nodded to me, keeping his eyes on my face and off my body. Even then, I felt as if I were being eaten alive, sucked to fluid, mouthful by mouthful. A liquid feeling came over me, and I stopped doing my job for half a second while I allowed myself to be completely saturated by that warm feeling. In that moment, of course, someone, a man judging from the weight of impact, pushed or got pushed, and my tray went flying.

  For a second, the glasses hung in the air like a ha
ndful of glitter, and I thought I could catch them. I felt the sound of the impact too long after three gin and tonics splashed over each guest. I was shocked into silence as everyone at the table stood, hands out, dripping, clothes getting darker at crotches and chests. A collective gasp rose from everyone within splash distance.

  Freddie appeared like a zombie smelling fresh brains. “You’re fired.” He turned to Drazen and said, “Sir, can I get you anything? We have shirts—”

  Drazen shook a splash of liquid off his hand. “It’s fine.”

  “I am so sorry,” I said.

  Freddie got between me and my former boss, as if I would beg him for my job back, which I’d never do, and said, “Get your things.”

  three

  Fuck it. Fuck that job and everything else. I’d get another one. I promised myself I was going to make it big, and when I did, I would come in here with my freaking entourage and Freddie was going to serve me whatever I wanted for no tip at all. Not even a cent. And Jonathan Drazen was going to sit by me and look at me just like he did before I spilled gin and tonic all over him, but like I’m an equal, not some little piece of candy working for tips.

  I slammed my locker shut.

  I had to find another job soon. I always paid my housing expenses first, but we owed the studio money, and I couldn’t take another dime from Harry.

  Freddie strode down the dim hallway, toes pointed out and walking like a duck on a mission.

  “Fuck off, Freddie. I’m leaving, and by the way, you’re an—”

  “Mister Drazen wants to see you.”

  “Fuck him. He can’t summon me. I don’t work for him anymore.”

  Freddie smiled like a sly cat. “Sometimes he gives the short timers a severance if he feels bad. Nice chunka change. After that, you can get the hell out if you don’t want to sleep with him. I’d like to see him not get laid for once.”