by CD Reiss
I pulled away. He took the side of my face and yanked me back toward him. A second went by, his green eyes black in the night. His intentions were broadcast through his posture, his energy, enfolding me inside it.
If I ever had a real actor this close, I’d never trust him. But this wasn’t acting. Or if it was, I was fooled. I swallowed and pressed my lips together.
“We’d better get to it,” he said with a smirk.
How could I be relieved and disappointed at the same time?
I stepped back, picked up a tennis ball, and threw it east toward the practice court. It didn’t clear the length of the roof. It bounced off another ball and flew sideways, disrupting the pattern and sending a bunch of other balls skittering.
“Told you I wasn’t an athlete!” I cried, laughing.
Michael shot two over the roof, and I heard them plunk onto the court. “Put your back into it, Laine. Throw it like you mean it.”
I grabbed one in each hand and threw them. They barely cleared the edge of the roof, but I put up my arms and cheered, claiming victory.
“Faster!” Michael said, lobbing a blitzkrieg of tennis balls.
I scuttled along the roof, knees bent, chucking balls and laughing as I tried to keep up with him and failed. I didn’t know if we were even making a dent in the roof’s tennis ball population. I didn’t even know if half of mine were making it to the court. I started throwing balls to Michael, and he caught them and lobbed them. He picked up more between my poorly aimed tosses, moving his body like an instrument.
I moved back toward San Vicente, conscious of the edge of the building. I was high on the rhythm. I couldn’t disrupt his poise, even when my toss was so bad I didn’t think it would reach him. We were laughing so hard I was blind and barely able to walk and throw at the same time. He lunged, caught a ball, and I stepped back. My foot landed on top of a tennis ball, and it rolled. I lost my balance.
The ledge of the roof was only two feet high, and as I tried not to fall, my body was pitched left with the torque of my shoulders. If I’d have been on the ground, I would have taken a step left and taken a deep breath before I stood straight. But I didn’t have the ground under me, just a two-foot-high ledge I was about to fall over.
The wind dropped out of my lungs as I was yanked back. Michael pulled me straight, his grip definitive and almost painful. I steadied myself on him, gulping for air.
“You really aren’t an athlete,” he said.
He still smelled like cinnamon, and I had to know immediately if he tasted of spiced cider.
I didn’t wait for him to move or even breathe. I put my hands on the sides of his neck and pulled my face up to his, smashing our lips together in the most graceless, artless kiss in the history of kisses.
I was so clumsy, I kissed his teeth, and it took him a full century and a half to align his mouth to mine, putting lip to lip, skin on skin, slipping his tongue to mine. Oh, yes, he tasted like sunshine and smelled like cinnamon. Like a different world. The other side of the city. Deep brown and layered in cardamom. Drenched in sepia. His tongue filled my mouth like a flood, and my belly twisted with a rolling current.
It was better than I’d ever hoped. More intense than I’d imagined. More real than the roof under my feet and more divine than the heavens above.
He stopped, putting his nose astride my nose, and I thought of that pause as my last chance to save my career.
Screw the pause. Screw the career. Screw Michael Greydon.
We kissed again with renewed passion. I threaded my fingers through his hair, and he moved his along my back. He drew the pin out of my chignon.
“That hair,” he groaned before putting his lips to mine again.
His erection pressed on me, and my knees went jelly. He pulled me to him, holding me close to keep our lips together. My body overrode every firing neuron in my brain. That erection was mine. I owned it. I wanted it to be a part of me, moving inside my body with gentleness and violence and everything in between. Him. I wanted him, with his hands slipping around the side of my dress to touch my breast and his hips pushing against me, with the taut body I stroked under his jacket, with the motions of a man on the edge of losing control.
I didn’t even have a brain. I was simply a velocity. A direction. Zero to desperate for him in three point two seconds.
I would have let him take me on that roof, though I didn’t know if that was what he had in mind. I would have gone home with him or taken him back to my loft. I would have given him every inch of my body without a hope of seeing him again. Stupidly. Definitively. Recklessly.
But it wasn’t to be. A light flashed, diffused to orange by my closed eyelid. Then another. Though I couldn’t hear past the white noise of the busy street below, I knew that each flash had a click to accompany it, and each click was a hammer on a nail on the coffin of my dead career.
I believed love was forever. I knew people should always choose love over a job, but this wasn’t love. This was a set of circumstances that led to real heat between two people. I wasn’t choosing between two worthwhile objectives.
At twenty-five, I’d been a photographer for almost a decade. I’d done nothing but work. I’d had a bad few years with men after leaving Breakfront, then I had a sprinkling of short, unsatisfying romances I didn’t take seriously. I lost my virginity just to get it over with. The only thing I’d ever cared about was taking pictures, and giving it up for a moment’s pleasure didn’t seem like something I’d be happy about in the long run.
I mean, we existed in the world. On a rooftop surrounded by lost tennis balls and a good fifteen minutes of laughter, I might have felt as if we were the only two people in the universe, but the fact was, we weren’t an island. If we were ever destined to become a unit, to fall in love or even some half-shaded version of it, we had to exist in the larger world together first.
And that wasn’t going to happen.
Not with the paparazzi dog pack huddling on San Vicente like, well, dogs. As soon as we stopped kissing and stood there staring at each other, they started calling our names, because sure, he was famous, but they all knew me.
“Just say this wasn’t your plan the whole time,” he growled.
“Go to hell.”
I pulled my hand back as if I was getting ready to slap him, and he held it gently. He must have felt me shaking or seen the tears welling in my eyes, because his suspicion disappeared.
“It’s going to be fine,” he said, touching the side of my face.
Even as my mind told me that he didn’t know what he was talking about, my heart was soothed. It was going to be fine. I believed him.
He didn’t look down at the paps, but in that moment of confidence, I did. I saw Jerome and Terence, Raoul with his bald head and chunky gold chains.
I pushed Michael away.
“Listen,” he said, putting his finger up as if he was going to school me on how to handle a crowd of paps.
I couldn’t speak to him about anything that mattered. I couldn’t even form words. I felt slapped repeatedly by the shutters.
“I didn’t ask for this,” I said.
I turned and walked to the ladder, kicking yellow balls. He grabbed my arm when we got to the edge. We were still visible from the street, and the photographers had moved down the block like a school of fish.
“Let me go,” I said.
“I’m going first so if you fall, I can catch you. Now you can either wrestle me to the ladder first and give these guys more to shoot, or you can let me go first and give them nothing.”
My face screwed up as I realized what he was saying. We would get shot going down no matter what, but what we gave them was up to us. I was frozen.
He took me by the shoulders and looked me in the eye, but all I could see in my mind was the angle of the cameras below, what we looked like together and what would sell. I couldn’t think past that.
“Laine, listen.”
I couldn’t even look at him. I only had eyes for
who was in the street and what they were getting.
“Look at me.” He shook me almost imperceptibly, and I turned enough to put him in my field of vision.
He leaned in, one eye clear jade in the streetlight, one dark in the night, his mouth set to make a point. The little pepita of a hairless spot on his chin was a comfort, a memory of times “before.” I breathed once, then again, focusing on him. I would have told him he was beautiful if I hadn’t been somehow cleared of any kind of rational thought.
“Just follow me,” he said. “Don’t look at them.”
The desire to look down was overwhelming.
“I’m going to go first,” he said, “but I’m going to be with you the whole time. Right?”
I nodded.
“Just look at me, Laine. When we get down, I’ll show you the way out.”
Like a poke in the pride, what he said woke me.
“I can get out without you,” I said.
“Challenge accepted. Now come on.”
As soon as he put a foot of distance between us, I felt the loss of his presence. He stepped onto the ladder, and I watched him, unmoving, until only his chest and head were visible.
He waved me over. “Come on. Don’t look. Just come here.”
Carefully keeping my dress over my legs, I stepped onto the ladder. He was close to me, too close to look up my skirt. I had a hundred wisecracks at the ready that I couldn’t utter, because he was blocking me from the lenses, and I needed him. In three steps, we were below the hedge, blocked from them completely. We got to the ground seconds later.
Michael took my hand and headed for the court and the front door.
I pulled back. “I’m going this way.”
“There’s nothing that way.”
“Michael, in about a minute, they’re going to put holes in that hedge big enough for their lenses. We need to be on opposite ends of the city by then.”
“Come out with me. We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
“That’s too late. I’m sorry. I’ve worked too hard.” I let his hand go and stepped backward.
“Where are you going?” He looked like a man slapped in the face.
I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t even think it was possible.
“I want you to know,” I said, “I’ve never been kissed like that.”
Before he could respond, I ran into the trees.
Chapter 15
Laine
When I’d gotten to my car the previous night, I had two choices: see if I had any tips on my phone or sit there and cry. Crying wasn’t an option. I didn’t cry over anything, especially not some guy and a pack of stinking paps, so I checked my texts.
I’d had messages from all over the city. The last one came in seconds earlier and was close enough to the loft that I could grab my spare rig. So I did that without thinking about a thing. I went to the Starlight, put the camera to my face, and realized I’d only checked the camera for battery power.
There was a reason it was a spare: it was busted. The shutter was broken.
I’d stood there in my evening dress and pumps, ignoring the jibes from my peers as I tried to get the shutter to snap. I’d chased like a dog but missed the shot of Thomasina Wente leaving the club with a broken heel. I went back home and fell into bed, still feeling the press of Michael’s lips on mine and the ache of longing between my legs. It was a living thing, buzzing for attention, taking blood flow and fluid. When I slipped my hands beneath my underwear, I was soaked and my clit was hardened to a furious stone.
So I did what millions of women had done and would do—I rubbed myself to orgasm thinking of Michael Greydon. Finding that wasn’t enough, I did it again, until I stiffened from toes to throat, thinking of nothing, feeling everything, lost in him. I fell asleep cursing his name and breathing deeply of his cinnamon scent on my hair.
I woke up to the phone ringing and his spicy scent still in my nose. I’d wash my hair, for sure. Just as soon as I answered the phone. Or maybe tomorrow.
“Hello,” I mumbled without looking at the caller. I’d left the blinds open, and the morning sun punched me in the face. I rolled over.
Tom said, “What the heck, Laine?”
“It’s nine in the morning. What the heck is right.”
“Michael? Michael Greydon? Really?”
I groaned. The pictures must have gone up. I had no idea what Tom was doing up so early, but the first thing any pap did in the morning was look at the gossip sites to see what marks were doing, who’d gotten the shots, and what were trending subjects. Tom, as much as he denied being a pap, did it every day.
“We happened to be at a party together.”
Why was I lying? Not to protect myself but to protect Michael. Stupid and pointless.
“Laine, it’s all over the feeds.”
I jumped out of bed, flipping back the covers. I scuttled to my desk, still in my fancy black underwear. I knew what Tom had seen. I knew exactly what those pictures looked like, but I couldn’t go another second without seeing them.
“It’s not a big deal,” I said, sitting down.
“If you say so.” His tone said he didn't believe the words or the woman who uttered them.
I found the pictures immediately. They were exactly what I thought they’d be, from the angle to the strength of the flash. Rows of consecutive frames of us kissing on the roof, and me turning so my face was toward the cameras. I couldn’t deny it. I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t me. And of course, no one could pretend it wasn’t Michael, because the public had memorized his face long ago. I felt an odd ownership of it, as if they were sharing something of mine without my permission. It was an ugly, jealous feeling.
“Shit,” I grumbled.
“He’s got his hand on your ass.”
I scrolled down. They’d all sold it. From Raoul with his blown-out strobe to Terry who couldn’t frame to save his life, and each photo made my thighs quiver with the memory of how every nerve ending from my waist to my knees had been on fire. That kiss, hand on ass or no, had been worth recording. I couldn’t stop staring at the angle of his chin against mine, and his fingertips pressing into my biceps as if he wanted to crawl into me. My hand inside his jacket, feeling for the hardness of his body.
My phone buzzed in my ear.
“I have to go.” I clicked off with Tom and checked my called ID. “Pheebs, don’t get on my case.”
“Michael Greydon? Michael freaking Greydon? The most gorgeous—”
“Really? Pheeb? Really?” If Phoebe’s clients heard the way she spoke about celebrities, they’d never guess she was a lawyer.
“—unattainable—”
“Stop.”
“—talented—”
“It’s not that big a deal.”
“—charming—”
“I’m going to hang up.” I scrolled down my computer screen. DMZ had drawn hearts and camera flashes all over us.
“Gorgeous. Okay, that’s the last thing I’m saying.”
“Here’s what I’m saying, and I quote, ‘Michael Greydon, the prince of the Hollywood system, caught kissing the lady frog and known paparazzi, Laine Cartwright, on a rooftop at the Breakfront School. Who will photograph the wedding? And with paparazzi on the invite list, how much of Hollywood royalty will attend?’” I read.
“What was it like? Kissing him?”
I leaned back in my chair and put my bare foot on the desk. “Like kissing any guy.” I flexed and released my knee so I rocked in the desk chair. “Kissing any guy who’s the best kisser in the world.”
“Oh, God.” Phoebe was swooning. I knew the swoon. She swooned like that over a cycle of ten actors, some dropping out so a new one could replace him. “How did it happen? Tell me everything.”
My phone vibrated again. I looked at the screen quickly and put it back to my ear. “I can’t. I have another call. Two, actually.”
“Call me later!”
I had Irving and an unknown number. I picked up the unknown n
umber. Maybe it was a tip, and I’d have an excuse to run out the door without brushing my hair. “This is Laine.”
“Hello, Laine, this is Brenda Vinter from the LA Post Almanac section. How are you today?”
How was I? I’d been fine, very fine, excellent even, until a reporter called. I’d worked with the Post often enough but only with editorial acquisitions. Never reporting.
“What can I do for you, Ms. Vinter?”
“Well, as you know, we’re an old-fashioned paper, so though we can’t catch stories as quickly as you can, we have the ability to put together meatier pieces, so—”
“You’re comparing what you do with what I do?”
Was I being hostile? Yes, I was being hostile. I didn’t even know what I thought that would get me, but I was watching my life get pulled away from me. Being hostile seemed like the only way to get it back.
“Do you have time for a few questions about these pictures on the roof last night?”
“The Almanac section is industry news. How is who Michael kisses industry news?” I asked.
“He’s kissing the industry. You’re a star in your own right.”
No, I wasn’t. I was a frog, and she was stroking my slick green hide to get me to jump.
“Thank you for calling,” I said. “I have no comment.”
I hung up as if the phone were on fire, and in a sense, it was. I was in way over my depth, and a buzzing sense of disorientation deafened me to any other thoughts. The only way to quiet it was to pace my loft, saying what I always said when I felt unsure, but I felt like a liar for the first time.
I own this city.
I own this city.
I own this city.
Chapter 16
Michael
I slept on the couch when I slept at all. Most nights though, I didn’t sleep well, and I could be found in the big empty room in my guest house, watching movies.
