by Kent, Julia
What the hell was that all about?
“What the hell was that all about?” Mike demanded.
Jeremy shrugged. “You've been ignoring my texts for days, and I wasn't going to resort to,” he shuddered, “voice mail, so here I am.” For a guy who lived in thrift shop clothes, his friend was remarkably well-put-together today. His jeans were actually unstained and was he wearing socks? Unreal.
Furious, Mike lowered his tone, nearly hissing. “If you blow my cover, Jeremy, so help me – ”
“Or what? You won't take me to prom?” Jeremy laughed. “I evaded her question about how I knew Matt Jones.” Smirk. “I figured Matt's a smart guy. He can come up with an answer.”
Sigh. “You're here to make trouble?”
“I'm here to give you one last chance to go with me to Thailand. I'm booking the plane tickets for two weeks from now.”
Mike made a sound of disgust. “You know I can't go. This reality television show is still filming.” Why did Jeremy do this to him constantly? Luring him away from responsibility, dangling fun in front of him like some toy he could see but never play with. There was a strange sort of cruelty to it, even if Mike were fully aware that it was his own decision not to participate in the revelry and antics that was most destructive.
Live a little?
Not until he'd conquered the world. Or, at least, the Board of Directors.
“We could invite Lydia,” Jeremy ventured, his voice carrying a slightly lilt, as if throwing out a light-hearted suggestion instead of positing an international tour of hedonistic threesome bliss.
Mike's jaw ached from stress. This was worse than Jonah's crap, largely because this sounded like something he wanted.
“So you did come here to scout her out. Again.” Mike's nostrils flared and he kept his breathing steady with great effort. He'd decided he was done with her, so why did this bother him so much?
Narrowing his eyes, Jeremy studied him with those brown orbs that could read people like a CIA operative sniffing out a double agent. “You're falling for her!” he said loudly, slapping his thigh. “Holy shit, Mike.”
“Matt!”
“Matt,” Jeremy repeated, lowering his voice.
“She's no Dana,” he growled, his body hot with need and anger.
Jeremy stood, frowning, and help up his palms. “I can see that. And I can see you won't be joining me, Mike.”
“Matt!” they said in unison.
Knock knock. “You guys OK in there?” Lydia's curious voice made Mike glare, hard, at Jeremy, who just bit his lips to suppress a laugh.
“We're fine,” Mike shouted back. Pausing, he waited for more.
Nothing.
“You're living in some dream world, Jeremy. Give it up.”
“Give up what, exactly? The idea that you'll actually let yourself live? Stop driving yourself crazy acquiring more and more and more? How many magazine covers? And Dianes? And Lydias are enough before – ”
Grabbing Jeremy's bicep, he squeezed hard enough to make the taller man flinch. “Don't talk about her like that!”
“I didn't know you were so protective of Diane.”
Mike laughed in spite of himself, releasing his friend. “We're never going to agree on this one, Jeremy.”
“I agree she – ” he pointed to the door “ – is something special.”
In silence they both stared at the back of the door, like watching a well-formed, curvy ass that wasn't there until Jeremy said, “If you won't go to Thailand, how about Pad Thai for lunch right now?”
“Deal.”
“Was that Jeremy going into Matt's office?” Krysta asked, her voice heavy with surprise. Today she wore a bright red, form-fitting silk sweater and black pants that made her body look better than Lydia had seen in years.
“Are you losing weight?” she asked, genuinely curious.
Krysta blushed, completely distracted now. Lydia didn't want to answer her question just yet – she was still trying to figure out where to put her reaction to Jeremy in her emotional shelving system. “If I am, I don't know how much. I started swimming and biking a few weeks ago.”
Krysta was about as athletic as Honey Boo Boo's mother. “You what?”
An eyeroll greeted her. “I know, I know.”
“Some cute guy you met has you doing this?” Impossible. Krysta would have mentioned it.
Shaking her head, Krysta sighed. “No. I just decided I needed to get out more and just move. Plus,” she whispered, leaning in to Lydia's face, “it reduces my anxiety.”
Hand over her heart, Lydia smiled. “Oh, I'm so glad. I know how hard it is for you.”
Before Krysta could reply, they heard both men shout “Matt!” from his office. Exchanging a startled look, they both walked over to the door.
Knock knock. “You guys OK in there?”
“We're fine,” Mike shouted back.
“Well, excuuuuse me for caring,” Lydia muttered.
A quick glare at the door, then a look at her watch, and Krysta said, “Let's go get a coffee. Fuck him.”
“I almost did.”
“Coffee will take your mind off him.”
If she got two lattes, would it take her mind off Jeremy as well? The only way to know was to follow Krysta to Starbucks and hope.
Chapter Nine
Flying coach? He did a double-take reading his ticket. He hadn't flown coach in thirteen years. Lydia should have known better; Matt Jones couldn't fly on the corporate jet, so he'd accepted the cattle call of mass travel, but coach was its own form of hell. Business class, at the very least, was what he expected.
Snob. That was his dad's voice in his head, and he had to laugh at himself. Fair enough. For a twenty percent spike in sales he'd fly coach.
Being seated in front of the only toddler on the plane meant he got a free vibrating massage, to boot. Whee! Frequent flyer perk. He'd have to thank Lydia later. As he sank down into his seat, shoulders pinned in and muscles aching already in anticipation of the cramped quarters, he buckled his seatbelt, one of the last to do so on the overbooked plane.
And then...warmth. Wetness. A distinct sense of something seeping into his ass. Fumbling for the seatbelt, he unlocked it as fast as he could and stood, whacking his head on the luggage rack, right on the eye socket.
“God damn it!” he shouted. The flight attended eyed him warily. Great. Just what he needed. A good old visit with Homeland Security courtesy of TSA. He heard their coffee sucked, but the strip search would make any Bangkok prostitute blush.
“Sir, is there a problem? A male flight attendant appeared as if conjured from thin air. Brow furrowed, the guy was burly and concerned. Not concerned for Mike's welfare, but rather concerned for the other passengers.
The bouncer of the plane, basically.
Mike pointed to his seat. “It's soaked! There's some sort of liquid...on – ” If he were a woman, he'd have shuddered. Instead, he clenched his fists and spoke through gritted teeth. “I just sat in something wet, something I didn't put there, and now my ass is soaked.”
Eyebrows shot up, the flight attendant clearly trying to fight laughter. He reminded Mike of younger version of Dominic, but with a more metrosexual look. Like a sleek, stylish gangster. The name tag read Anthony.
“Sir, I don't know what to tell you, but we're taxiing and federal aviation regulations require you to sit.”
Private jets never had wet seats. Private jets never made him bang his head, or twist his thigh muscles into pretzels, or make him have conversations like this. Playing the role of Matt Jones was tedious enough, but now? Now he was getting angry. No cameras were rolling; the producers had simply told him Matt Jones needed to act like any other middle manager. And then Lydia booked him on this piece of shit plane.
With a wet ass.
“You're telling me,” he said in an increasingly angry voice, “that you expect a consumer to sit in a puddle of undetermined liquid, liquid that could be someone else's body fluids, body fluids t
hat could transmit disease?” A few women sitting next to small children turned and gawked, eyes wide with alarm. The word disease did the trick.
He crossed his arms and locked his jaw. No way he was sitting down again in that spot.
Anthony picked up a small walkie-talkie attached to the wall and pushed a button. Mumbled a few words. Turned his attention back to Mike. “We have no other options, sir, unless you want to go on a later flight.”
No time. “So your clean-up crew dropped the ball and you expect me to completely rearrange my connecting flights, my meetings, and for my business to lose money because your business couldn't do the most basic of tasks?” A man and a woman in suits, obviously air warriors who flew frequently, did a polite clap.
All passenger eyes were on him and Anthony now. A small child pointed to Mike's ass and said, “Mommy, did he have a problem going potty?” Titters made Mike close his eyes and breathe carefully before he turned into a raging bull.
“Give the guy a better seat!” a man called out.
Mike cheered on the inside. He knew he had the goodwill of the passengers on his side and the scales had tipped in his favor. They had to find him a new seat. Absolutely, or they’d look like assholes. This was a PR nightmare.
Anthony tried to stare him down. Mike just looked back, unwavering, with as neutral but commanding a look as he could. Narrowing his eyes, nostrils flaring, Anthony pursed his lips, cocked his head, and seemed to be thinking. He then slowly turned back to the walkie-talkie, picked it up, and put it on intercom.
“Attention please, passengers! We have a gentleman here who claims that his seat is wet, not by his own doing. We are a packed plane, there are absolutely no spare seats on the plane whatsoever, so any passenger willing to trade seats with this man in the back row, by the bathroom, please come forward. We cannot offer any compensation at this time other than our undying gratitude for your assistance.”
The titters turned to snorts, derisive sounds that all said the same thing. Yeah, right, Bud! You’re on your own! Mike’s jaw tightened, Anthony was smarter than he thought.
“Here, Sir!” A female flight attendant conjured up a trash bag; a plastic hefty that was still flat and unopened.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Mike asked angrily.
“You can put it under your... self when you sit down to protect you from whatever you... they.. someone left.” She was flustered, young, and obviously had no idea how to handle the situation.
“I would like to speak to the pilot,” Mike said.
“That would be a violation of FAA regulations, Sir. We are taxiing. You absolutely must sit down and fasten your seatbelt. If you don’t we will have to stop the plane, call an air marshal, and have you personally escorted off the plane for a discussion with TSA agents.”
Now Anthony’s voice was hard. This was more like Dom when he was pissed and protective and defensive, except Anthony wasn’t protecting or defending Mike. The other passengers suddenly turned away when Anthony said TSA.
“I’d like to escort myself off.” Mike grabbed his bags. He knew he could get a private jet within an hour and this really wasn’t worth it for the reality TV sham. Acting like Matt Jones at work was one thing, but acting like Matt Jones in real life, if it meant this? No way. He grabbed his bags and stormed down the center of the aisle.
“You can’t do that, sir! The plane is moving.”
“Then tell the pilot to stop it.” He wasn’t going to be bossed around by some flight attendant with a God complex.
A young mother looked at him, her eyes pleading. “Sir, please, I have to get on the connecting flight. My husband is coming home from Afghanistan and there’s just...please...please. Please don’t make them stop the plane.”
Mike stopped. He hadn’t anticipated this. She held a toddler in her lap, a child of eighteen months or so. A little girl with blonde curls and big blue eyes. She probably didn’t remember her dad, didn’t have any sense of the meaning of what she was doing, just knew that she was on a plane. And Mike’s heart melted. Dammit.
Gritting his teeth, he turned around, stalked back, snatched the hefty bag from the flight attendant, settled it down on the seat and plunked himself down, fuming. Tomorrow he’d buy as much stock as possible in this fucking airline and exhibit some control. But right now, he was just a piece of cattle. And damn Lydia for doing this to him.
The hotel clerk's desk was behind bulletproof glass. The last time Mike had faced a clerk behind bulletproof glass had been at an embassy. But this wasn’t a foreign embassy. Lydia had apparently booked him in the seediest hotel in Detroit, in a place called Highland Park, one teeming, (and he did not use that word lightly) – teeming with filth.
“Ooowee! Honey, I must be in heaven ‘cuz you’re an angel.” The words came out slurred, unfocused, and a little sloppy and Mike was uncertain because – was that spittle that someone had just splattered all over the back of his neck?
He turned, tensed, senses on alert, to find himself face to face – and at 6’2 there were not many people who were face to face with him – with, well... The polite term was lady of the night and the impolite term would be nasty old crackwhore. The stench was what hit him hardest, a mixture of mold, Boone's strawberry wine and Ben Gay.
As she opened her mouth to smile he realized why the stench was so disturbing. About half her teeth were gone and her smile looked like a grin from the Gollum from the Lord of The Rings Trilogy. The fact that she may have put her saliva on his skin made a thin tingle of dread form in the small of his back, trickling up into his shoulders, making him stand taller, his muscles ready for a fight he knew he could win physically but that he didn’t think was going to happen. And yet, why was his body so tense?
Tap tap tap! The hotel clerk was trying to get his attention. Mike turned, still in combat mode. “Yes,” he said tersely. “I am here,” he pulled out the printed reservations that Lydia had handed him. “I am here for my room.”
The clerk was an odd looking man, about Mike’s age, mid-thirties but looked easily to be fifty. Most of his hair was gone, skin ravaged by odd little sores that Mike didn’t quite understand and fingernails that were literally half gone and – was that a fungal infection? Mike pulled his hand back to make sure there was no contact.
“You’re stayin’ here?” the clerk asked, squinting, peering at Mike and then looking at the – well, he didn’t want to call her a woman, but the being standing next to Mike grinning madly, eyes loopy and half out of it.
“Hey, hey! Jess, go away. Leave the customers alone.”
“I’m tryna make him into a customer,” the old prostitute said. Now that Mike glanced at her again he realized that “old” wasn’t quite the right word because she probably, biologically, was about his age even though she looked to be at least seventy. Her wig traveled halfway down her back, long curls matted and – was that a cigarette butt in there somewhere? Her pale skin had a yellowish tone to it that spoke of a liver that had raised its white flag of surrender a decade or two ago. The whites of her eyes had long ago given up the battle with her liver, now the color of cigarette smoke residue on old white walls.
The clerk slid a key, an actual metal key, through the small hole in the plexiglass. It was attached to an oval made of orange plastic with the room number burned into it. Mike hadn’t touched a hotel key, a physical, pressed metal key, in a good fifteen years. Where was the coded plastic card? Where exactly was he?
“So you go, you got room 237, so,” the clerk explained, pointing. “You go past the ice machine – it don’t work 'cuz it’s been out for a long time, but there’s a pop machine next to it. It works, but no Canadian coins. We don’t take that stuff here. Then you go up the stairs, but watch out for Bernie. Sometimes he pisses in there and you just have to walk around it.”
Mike’s eyebrows shot up. He’d had quite enough of someone else’s body fluids for the day.
“Then you’re gonna go around the corner and then you’re in 237. Jus
t let us know if you find any mouse droppings. We haven’t had a problem with em for-”
“What? Say that again?” Mike stopped, interrupting him. “Mouse what?”
“Mouse droppings, you know, mouse turds.”
“You’re telling me that you’re renting me a room that may be infested with mice and that your establishment's hallway has bums in it that urinate and that I may end up stepping in this urine?”
“Well, not if you’re careful.” The clerk looked at him as if he was the stupidest human being on the planet. A hand on his forearm made him flinch, the feeling like cold lizard.
“Hey, baby, I got a better room. I can take you to a place where there ain’t no mouse turds, I can take you to some places you ain’t neva seen,” the woman crooned. “You got fifty bucks? I got heaven for you.”
Mike snatched the key, plucked the paper back, and stormed upstairs. Indeed, Bernie the bum sat in a pool of his own urine and, although Mike tried not to actually examine it too carefully, probably his own vomit. The screams of some woman in the distance behind a door pierced his ears. He heard a smack and then a scream, a smack then a scream and realized that what he was hearing was not a fight between domestic partners – the smacks were not abuse – but were some sort of sexual game. Cringing, he worked to ignore every bit of sensory input from this place, breathing now through his mouth and approaching room 237.
His key slid in the lock and he turned and found that he had to jiggle the doorknob, pulling the door slightly toward him to get the bolt to turn out of place so that he could enter. He almost wished that the lock hadn’t worked and that he hadn’t succeeded because the bolus of odor that hit him upon opening the door made him understand the phrase knocked flat on his back. Lysol combined with vomit and urine and – his eyes lit on one of the outlets – some sort of Glade product of undetermined floral origin. No petroleum product was going to overcome the biological permeation of whatever cloth fibers or polyester imitations filled the room, absorbing an olfactory history of very human deeds.
