by CD Reiss
Like heat.
And lust.
And the feel of a man’s body through his shirt.
And the way the whole of your consciousness can be focused on the way his thumb cruises the ridge of your breast and every thought in your head comes out your mouth in a groan.
That blast of a bullhorn woke me from the dream sleep of the kiss.
“Mister Greydon.”
Michael seemed unperturbed. He turned and looked behind us, where a park ranger stood with a red bullhorn. Michael waved.
The ranger put the horn to his face again. “I didn’t say you could climb the letters.”
“I’m in trouble,” he said, but he was smiling. “Come on, let’s go back to reality.”
He got me down from my pedestal against gravity and let the park ranger give him a hard time. It was obvious he’d been there before and that he’d never brought a guest.
It wasn’t until we were headed back down Deronda, and Michael had put the top back up, that I kicked the bag with the replacement rig and realized I’d left my camera at the loft.
Chapter 23
Laine
We went back down the mountain, the pressure of the city growing heavier as we descended. I got caught up on the lives of my old tormentors at Breakfront, his first few movies, and his tennis injury. I hoped I caught it all, but it was hard when he touched me and my skin became a net of electrical currents.
“Where did you land after Breakfront?” he asked.
“Oh, see that church over there?” I said. “It used to be a Ralph’s.”
“No.”
“Yes, look, it’s got an oval sign, and there are pictures of vegetables pressed into the concrete.”
“Holy crap, you’re right. I’ve passed that a hundred times,” he said.
“And that over there? That little strip mall? That building used to be a fire house. You can see the holes where LAFD used to be nailed in.”
“Are you avoiding the question? About what you did after I left?”
“You never told me what happened with Lucy,” I said. “I really thought you were going to marry her.”
“So did I.”
“What happened?”
“You didn’t read it in the papers?” He glanced at me sidelong while changing lanes.
“I didn’t want the CliffsNotes version.”
“We were a perfect match,” he said then paused. “Her parents loved my parents and vice versa.”
“Did I tell you I’m a huge fan of your mother’s?”
“You mentioned that.”
“She’s amazing. She’s a goddess. Okay, go ahead. Lucy.”
“We looked good in pictures together,” he said. “I mean, I know that sounds ridiculously shallow, but half the people rooting for us only knew us from pictures, and at that age, there’s no such thing as perspective. So, I mean, we were from the same universe. We had everything in common. We made sense. But I went to college on the east coast, and things got different.”
I craned my neck around. “Different?”
“I met people. I expanded, I guess, and it just died.”
“No CliffsNotes.” I was, of course, guilty of much worse, but I justified it by saying that no one would continue to want me if they knew the full version of my past. I was scared as hell to lose those borrowed moments with Michael.
“Lucy was like a stepsister. I liked talking to her, and we had a lot in common. I thought that was all we needed, but it wasn’t that thing. You know? That thing?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“What’s that mean?” he asked.
“It means nothing. So you stayed friends?”
He stopped at a red light and turned toward me. “Tell me about the first boy you ever loved.”
I opened my mouth and snapped it shut. Was this more embarrassing than anything I’d done with Jake and his friends? Maybe. Maybe I’d die of shame.
“Besides you?”
“Someone who didn’t ditch you before you kissed him,” he said.
“The light’s green.”
“No CliffsNotes, Laine.”
Cars honked behind us.
“Go!” I said.
He put the car in park. Someone yelled and honked, but our eyes were locked.
“I’m not going,” he said.
I swallowed. Why couldn’t I tell him why I’d never felt anything after him? That I’d been taken by men I barely knew, men who shouldn’t have touched me? That I’d been bruised, called names, been one body in scenes with many others? I’d wanted to believe that those were acts of love, protection even, because Jake was there setting boundaries. His boundaries, not mine, but something.
Behind us, a car door slammed.
“You have to go,” I said. “They’re going to recognize you.”
“So I’ll take a few pictures on Western and Olympic.”
I felt pressure to answer, and pressure to not answer, and pressure from the ticking seconds. Michael could have sung “The Star-Spangled Banner” and kept the pressure on with just his posture and his eyes. Damned actors.
Even when the rap of knuckles on his window should have jarred us, he didn’t move. The guy looking in the window behind Michael had a beard and slicked back hair. He looked like a few of the guys whose names I forgot, who I hadn’t been in love with, all those years ago.
And Michael knew damn well he was there, but he kept his eyes on me, waiting for an answer.
“Besides what I told you in the loft, it just hasn’t happened,” I said.
“You haven’t dated?”
“It’s not that I haven’t dated. I had one thing last five months. Two things, actually. A cop and an insurance adjuster. It’s just, you know, I’m busy, and I bore easily.”
I was telling the truth. Two relationships of about five months. Both had bored me into an emotional coma.
“Hey, you asshole!” said the guy at the window, rapping on the glass. “We missed the light!”
“There’s more to this,” Michael said.
There was more. Plenty more. There were more men than I could even recall.
“I can’t,” I said. “Not yet. Don’t make me talk about it.”
Michael’s face changed, and I couldn’t get a read on it. The bearded guy banged on the window, and Michael turned around to face him.
“Dude!” he said, pointing. “You’re Michael Greydon.”
“Shit,” I mumbled, sliding down in my seat.
The bearded guy turned back to his car. “Earl! Check this out!”
“He’s reaching for his phone,” I said.
Michael turned back to me. Maybe it was my boneless posture, low on the seat, as if I’d been poured out of a jar of jelly, or maybe it was the fact that the light changed back to green, but he jammed the car into drive and took off.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” He turned on Olympic and headed downtown.
“I don’t mind a little fast driving.”
“That I tried to get you to talk about stuff you don’t want to tell me. I can see you’re not ready. I’m sorry. I was… sometimes I feel closer to you than I’ve earned.”
How could a person stand up under the weight of such kindness? Especially knowing we couldn’t last? That he was the opposite side of my coin, always parallel, never meeting but by some chance bending of the universe? I looked straight ahead as the streets became my own with their worn billboards and cracked sidewalks. The body shops and convenience stores gave way to punk graffiti and hipster conveniences.
I must have looked as shattered as I felt, because he squeezed my hand.
“You all right?” he asked.
“You don’t have to explain why you feel that way,” I said, “but if you want to—”
“I didn’t know what I felt for you. It was new and irrational. I couldn’t even process it. And with Lucy and me leaving and everything else…”
“Me not having a family.”
&nb
sp; “Everything,” he said. “I spend a lot of energy worrying about what people think. It’s in the job description. But what I felt with you was real, and I didn’t have it with Lucy. So I thought I’d just move on and find it with someone else.”
“Someone with parents?”
“I was eighteen.”
I wasn’t trying to press him or make him feel guilty. I was doing worse than that. I was using him as a bludgeon against myself, getting him to list my shortcomings so I didn’t have to.
He continued, “And you were barely fifteen.”
“I told you my birthday?” I hadn’t. I knew I hadn’t. He’d known I was fifteen, but if he knew my birthday, then he knew that I was even younger than my classmates.
“Matter of public record.”
“Screw the public record. You know too much about me.”
“The feeling’s mutual.”
I didn’t know whether to tickle him or punch him. Along with half the world, I knew too much about him because of the choices he’d made. Were we about to get into the age-old argument about the ethical and legal angles of his stardom and my job? Because even though I wasn’t as educated as he was, and even though I was starting to cringe at the bitter taste of a life without privacy, I’d wipe the floor with him.
I looked forward to it, because that argument meant we were invested in fitting together. That thought, once it entered my mind fully formed, excited me more than chasing down a mark or getting a once-in-a-lifetime tip. Were we going to have some kind of relationship? Were we going to sit over breakfast together and discuss politics and movies? Could my job coexist with his if we kept it quiet?
He smiled a little, and I knew he was still in good humor. I was building a case in my head and calling up the rulings decided in the paparazzi’s—my—favor, when I saw the blue Corolla parked on my block. Then Renaldo’s SUV.
“Don’t turn into the lot.” I shrank in my seat.
“What?”
“They’re all over. Left, go left.” I peeked at the rearview.
“They don’t know this car,” he said.
“Thank God. Listen.” I shook my head as if trying to loosen something. I closed my eyes and visualized a city block. “My building is connected to the one next door. It shares parking spaces with the Whole Foods.”
“You’re telling me to go to Whole Foods?”
“Yes.”
“Are you nuts? Do you want to be in the paper again?” he asked.
“Trust me.”
We made eye contact, and his lips pressed together in a smile. “It’s not ever going to be boring with you, is it?”
“Not peaceful either.”
“Let’s go.” He went into the underground lot at Whole Foods.
“Park in the back, by the car detailers.”
Way in the back, four guys washed and detailed cars, like little scrubbing gremlins, while shoppers spent their pretty pennies at Whole Foods. Michael pulled up next to a soaped-up Jaguar.
I got out, grabbing the blue bag with my new camera. “Hey, George,” I said to the short guy with a grey widow’s peak, “can we use your door?”
“You wash car?”
I snapped Michael’s keys out of his hand and gave them to George. “Yeah. But the outside only.”
He looked Michael up and down suspiciously. “You’re Michael Greydon. Loved you in Sunday Kill Machine.”
“It’s not him,” I said.
“I get that all the time,” Michael interjected.
I took Michael’s hand and pulled him through the heavy white door. The windowless closet stank of soap and chemicals. Bottles of fluid were stacked from floor to ceiling. I opened another door, leading to a stairwell. I ran up it, Michael behind me, to another door with an emergency exit sign.
“Wait!” Michael said.
I slapped it open. “What?”
He laughed a little. “Never mind. You have this under control. I can see that.” He took the camera bag from me. “Let me be a gentleman.”
“Just this once.”
A decrepit elevator door sat at the end of a short concrete hallway. The doors opened right away. I punched my floor, and when the doors closed, I knew I was going to kiss him. But I didn’t realize what kind of kiss I would get. It wasn’t a sweet brush of the lips but a groping, hungry meeting of bodies. He pressed his hips against me, and when I felt his hardness on my thigh, my body lit on fire from spine to navel.
“I hope you don’t have any plans,” he whispered as he put his hand up my shirt. “Because once that door opens, you’re mine.”
His hand went up my back, slipping under my bra. I shuddered and tried to speak, but my lungs had nothing in them. Certainly not the word no. I would be his as soon as I could. He ran his hand over my pants and pressed at my crotch.
“Oh, God.”
“I want you,” he said into my ear. “And when we get back into that apartment, I’m taking you.”
I pushed against him in answer, jerking my hips against the flat of his fingers. Yes, yes, and yes. Everything, yes. Months of longing, years of forgetting, and a few days of reawakening were culminating now. He buried his face in my neck, and I reached down to feel his rock-hard dick. His breath got heavy against me, and I thought of him again, over me, lost in pleasure.
Yes, yes, and yes.
The doors sprang open. The distance to my loft was forever with this painful ache between my legs. My floor. My hallway. The open window at the end of it, right by my door. And the huge guy, backlit by the window, recognizable even in silhouette.
It all crumbled.
“Laine?” he said.
Michael turned and got between me and the big guy in the Black Flag T-shirt. I knew him. He looked exactly the same as he had when I knew him between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. Navy bandana too low over his brow. Scraggly hair tied in knots. Maybe his hairline had moved back a bit, and maybe he had a touch of early grey in the beard he tied with rubber bands. He still had a carabiner of keys and rabbits’ feet attached to his belt loop.
I’d had an idea, seconds before, that Michael and I could figure out how to be together, but no. I was who I was, and nothing could change that.
“Foo Foo,” I said, “how are you?”
He craned his neck to see around Michael, smiling. “I’m good. Still got Gracie.”
“Your Harley?”
“It’s vintage now. She’s so sweet.” He shook his head is if pleasantly surprised by something. “You look—”
“What do you want?” I said.
“You should really lock your door.” He indicated it with an apologetic nod. He was a two-hundred-fifty-pound cupcake who had no problem pulverizing smaller men over a deal gone bad.
“I’m surprised you’re not on my couch,” I said, arms crossed. Why was I even engaging him?
“Seemed rude, you know.”
“You need to go,” Michael said.
Foo Foo looked at Michael, then at me, then back to Michael. “I remember you from Toledo Spring Break. Heh.”
Michael’s character had gotten the crap beaten out of him in that story, and no one in that hallway was under the delusion that Foo was talking about any other aspect of that stupid movie.
“No,” I said, pushing past Michael. He held my arm so I didn’t get any closer to Foo Foo. He was really getting on my nerves. “He just looks like him. I’m sorry, Foo.”
“You were just in the paper with him, sweet angel.”
“I was on my way somewhere. Was there something you needed?”
“It’s been so long, Laine.”
“There are a hundred good reasons for that.”
“Jake wanted to say hi.”
“So he sent you? And you came like his little lackey?” I shook off Michael and approached my front door, which I hadn’t locked in my rage about the loud guy upstairs. Stupid.
“Come on now, there’s no reason to get nasty. He saw you with this guy.” He waggled his finger as if to say he
knew damn well my companion had been in Toledo Spring Break. Each knuckle had a faded blue letter tattooed on it. Left hand RIDE. Right hand KILL. “He—well, we both, Jake and I—we were kind of impressed how you moved up.”
I was about to give him a piece of my mind. The piece where I told him to get the hell out of my face, leaving me the piece that wanted to cry.
Michael got between us. “It’s time to go.”
“Hey, man, I was just saying ‘hi.’ It’s nothing.”
“You said hi. Now you can go. And don’t come back.”
Foo pointed his finger like a gun, creasing the K in KILL, his fingertip an inch closer to Michael’s face than it should have been. “Hey, I don’t care who you are. I will mess you up.”
Foo outweighed Michael by fifty pounds of muscle or more, and all I could see in my mind was an incident a decade earlier. Foo had kicked a decent-sized guy down a flight of stairs because he’d stolen a bunch of drugs. I didn’t remember the details, only the bloodied condition of the thief’s face as he rolled.
I got between them, because Michael wasn’t getting kicked down a flight of stairs, and his face was not getting bloody. Not if I could help it. But I was too late. They’d decided in man-language that shit would go down.
Michael acted first, pushing me out of the way firmly but gently, so that he could move a step closer to Foo.
Foo hadn’t gone to private school or served on its board before he was thirty. He hadn’t played varsity tennis or flown private jets. Foo grew up sleeping on the floor in a one-bedroom apartment in Westlake. Foo ate cans of beans for dinner, and was spending his days on Sunset Boulevard by the time he was eleven.
Foo punched Michael in the face so fast and hard it didn’t make more than a pop sound, and the camera bag dropped to the floor.
“Foo, you asshole!” I yelled.
Michael didn’t waste a second. He acted as if he wasn’t hurt at all, as if getting punched in the face by a two-hundred-fifty-pound biker happened all the time. He lunged for the guy, and I thought that he would die today, because just going for a monster like that, well, it was the best way to get your ass kicked.
