F*cked Page 5

  A moment later, the tone sounded. “Hey, Cara. It’s, uh. It’s Mary. I just thought I ought to talk to you. It’s not a big deal or anything, just call me back when you get a minute. Have a great day!”

  She hit the red button and put the phone down. Once upon a time, Cara wouldn’t have missed the call. But once upon a time, a lot of things were different. Given how well Mary did on a day-to-day basis, there wasn’t much of a chance that it was a life-or-death thing. Not like the first couple of weeks clean.

  She got up and turned the television on. There was a remote for the den television, somewhere. But it wasn’t in evidence right then, and besides, there was nothing wrong with hitting the button. It got her moving. Her head hurt and her body was tightening up in spite of itself. It was better to walk even if it was only the few steps to cross the room.

  The phone buzzed, and blinked blue when she looked over at it. A message. She crossed back over and picked the phone up without sitting down. There were a half-dozen or so people who had her number and might message her. Her parents had it. They hadn’t used it. They weren’t going to use it, far as she could tell. And she wouldn’t use theirs, either. But she had it in her phone regardless.

  ‘Sorry I missed your call,’ it said. Nothing else.

  ‘No problem,’ I answered. Hit send, put the phone in my back pocket, and started to clean up the room. It was a mess. Everything always was. At some point, Pete would have to learn to clean up form his own messes. She sucked in a breath. No reason to get upset.

  The phone buzzed again in her pocket as she stood up holding a Batman action figure that would have hurt like the dickens to step on by accident. Mary pulled it out.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Just worried about a bunch of stuff.’

  ‘Worried about falling off?’

  She didn’t know. She really didn’t know at all. Which was the problem. If she was worried, she had outlets for that. She could address it directly. Or at least, she could make the effort.

  Instead, she was stuck in this halfway-worried position, where there was nothing that directly made her worried about it. Just the vague sinking feeling that things were going to go wrong because they always did when she wanted something.

  How was she supposed to explain all that? So she went with the simplest truth.

  ‘Someone from my old life showed up.’

  ‘User friend or something?’

  She took a deep breath. She didn’t know. She didn’t know the answer to any of these questions, and it felt like they were all obvious. Too obvious for her to not know a single answer.

  ‘I don’t know what he is. I don’t think he’s using.’

  The cleaning had pretty much stopped. Cara was in no hurry to reply, but Mary stood there waiting for each new message regardless.

  ‘Is he hot?’

  Mary’s eyes rolled. That was immaterial. Yes, he was hot. But why should that matter? Plenty of guys were hot.

  ‘Maybe.’

  She tucked the phone back into her hip pocket. No reason to lie right out. But now it sounded like she was… Jesus wept. She was sending as many weird signals to Cara as she was getting from Roman, and it was making her head spin. At some point, hopefully, she had to get everything straight. But for some reason it was proving to be a lot more trouble than she had really expected.

  Now if only she were aware of a single thing in her life the way that she was acutely aware of every word that she was about to say. Not that she had any more control over how she was sounding than she did over her situation with Roman.

  ‘Just fuck him and get it over with then, girl. Easiest way to get out of a hole is to fill YOUR hole.’

  Mary blinked. Read the message again. What the fuck?

  ‘Dude what?’

  She stared dumbly at the message. Her skull felt like there was a big, wide open space that filled the whole thing from front to back, top to bottom, and side to side. Her mouth opened and completed the feeling of absolute stupefaction.

  Cara’s response was short and sweet: ‘lol ;p’

  Mary read it again.

  Maybe it was bad advice. Maybe Cara was dumb. It wasn’t like she was some kind of wise monk. She was a coke-head, former or not, no better than anyone. But at the same time, maybe she wasn’t dumb. It had been more than a little while. And it couldn’t be… that bad. Right?

  Fourteen

  Roman had been angrier than this. Plenty of times. His old man was an alcoholic. You learn how to deal with people like that, eventually. When you’re young, and you haven’t got any other choice, you learn how to deal with them fast.

  It didn’t mean that it didn’t raise his blood pressure just thinking about the man after all this time. But he didn’t need to think about it any more. The old man had died of heart failure six years ago. They told him, you keep drinking, it’ll kill you. How long after did he start again? Could it have been as long as six hours?

  Roman clicked his teeth together again. There was no use picking a fight in the studio. It wasn’t just his manager that would be embarrassed by it, after all. A big, public blow-up was the sort of thing that was going to get him noticed by the press again.

  When you’re thirty-eight and you’ve been in the business since you were still too young to get laid, press that suddenly shows up is never good. It’s a guarantee that if you’re suddenly getting wall-to-wall coverage, it’s either bothering you because something great happened and they’re trying to suck the life out of it—a wedding, for example—or they’re jumping down your throat for something stupid that happened.

  Well, he wasn’t quite dumb enough to fall into that hole. At least, he thought so. He hoped so.

  “We’re just talking in circles at this point,” Roman said. “Let’s just table it, come back tomorrow, and take another look.”

  “Sure. Hey, hoss, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Good.” He hoped that the didn’t let anything on at this point. Because he was angry. And he would rather Tommy not just leave to let him cool off. “I wanted to talk to you, too.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Over dinner maybe?”

  “Sure, Tom.”

  “Usual place?”

  “Sure.”

  He shouldered his guitar case and walked out to the rental car. The drive, he made in silence. He checked the phone at every red light; not to see if there were any messages. He would have felt the ring. He wanted to feel to make sure that it was there at all. Apparently, going missing was something that his phone had been discovered to do, and it was best not to jump to conclusions.

  After all, maybe it did just get up and walk out. He looked out the window at the passing storefront shops. They didn’t get better as he drove, they got worse. They’d be in a scary part of town before Roman would pull into a parking lot. He’d been in a lot of scary parts of town. These days he had the money to avoid them if he wanted to.

  In Detroit’s case, it was something of a rite of passage for him. He wanted to be here, even if it was a bad idea. Because he liked the place, first and foremost. And because he wasn’t going to keep doing this work if he was afraid of one little spooky neighborhood. He pushed the door open and stepped inside. He’d been coming here almost ten years, and he was pretty certain that they still didn’t know precisely who he was.

  The woman behind the counter was different this time. Her lips were large, and she pursed them when she looked at him. Then she tried to make something that vaguely imitated a smile. As to whether or not it worked, Roman didn’t care a whole lot.

  There was a sign by the door. Please seat yourself. He did.

  They served Mexican food here. Not the best Mexican in town. He’d personally been to a dozen better. They weren’t particularly authentic. The cook was a big-bellied black guy named Reuben who made food that he wanted to eat.

  They were small, but they weren’t particularly chatty. Some places, the owner really prefers to talk and get all friendly. Bu
t that wasn’t Reuben, and whoever owned the place didn’t seem to want to make himself known. Maybe Reuben owned the place, frankly Roman didn’t know.

  It wasn’t really even the bar that brought him here. He didn’t drink, though they were pleased to advertise that they had the longest bar in town. That probably wasn’t true, either. He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know.

  The food was just good. And it was consistent. And it was the kind of low-profile place that nobody showed up. And they seemed to keep strange hours, that kept them up all night when Roman needed to be up all night and didn’t want fast food.

  It took Tommy a few minutes. Maybe he was fussing with that pistol in his pocket or something, like he was hoping to get mugged so he would finally have an excuse to insist they didn’t come here.

  He looked around, and saw Roman, who looked up at him with a look that didn’t have any anger in it at all. Fifteen minutes was plenty of time to cool off when you weren’t looking at the rat in the eyes and listening to him lie to you.

  “I won,” Roman said.

  “We weren’t racing.”

  “You’re always racing for something,” Roman said vaguely.

  “I guess.”

  “You’re racing to get out of Detroit, isn’t that right, Tommy?”

  He smiled, but the confusion on his face made itself plain. “Sure, boss. I don’t love it around here or anything.”

  “Hoping to get back to California, is that right?”

  “Well, you know. It’s cold up here. I have a whole part of my wardrobe that’s just so I can dress when we come up to Michigan, you know that?”

  “You could just be cold, you know.”

  Tommy barked a laugh. “Sure.”

  “And you could try better to hide your attempts to get me to leave, too.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I know someone contacted the girl. Someone who had access to my phone. Someone who deleted the message from my text log so I wouldn’t know that they’d done it.”

  Tommy stood up in a hurry. Roman pressed down on his foot hard enough that the producer yelped.

  “Sit down.”

  “Wasn’t me,” he said. “Maybe, I dunno, she was strung out or something. You know, those girls.”

  “No, I don’t think that’s the case, my friend. Maybe you ought to reconsider, before I start reconsidering how friendly we are after all.”

  The producer gulped.

  “Now, you want to try running that by me again?”

  Fifteen

  Mary closed her eyes tight again. Cara wasn’t a genius. In fact, if anything, Mary could be the one giving her advice, if that was how things were measured. But she had more experience with life, and more experience with drugs, and more experience not being on them. Right?

  So there was something to talk about, at least. But just go sleep with him seemed like it was particularly bad, even from her. But the more that Mary thought about it, the more that the advice seemed to work. At least a little bit. At least in her head. It wasn’t exactly brilliant by any stretch, but it was something. She closed her eyes and let out a breath.

  Then there was the call with Roman. Short and less than perfectly sweet. He sounded angry. But he was careful to make sure that he told her that he wasn’t angry with her. Which was good enough.

  If it were anyone else, she’d have gone over in a heartbeat if she thought that they were upset enough to do something stupid. He sounded like he was exactly that far gone, and so if he wanted her to come by, then he would get it.

  Screwing him was an option to keep in her back pocket. It wasn’t the best one, but it was one, and she wasn’t going to just tell Cara to screw off to her face. And if she could just treat him like any other person, then she could probably make that work just as well. Maybe even better.

  She knocked on the hotel room door. Roman opened it, shirtless and looking like he’d just taken a dip. His pants were a little damp, too.

  “Sorry, I jumped in the shower.”

  “Oh.”

  “I just thought it would be preferable. I’ve been up all day, hanging out in a studio, where they can pump in plenty of heat. Stewing, if you will.”

  “No, I get it.”

  “But you were a little quicker than I expected, so…”

  “What? Not done?”

  He smiled. “You’re not upset, are you?”

  “No. Go ahead. I’ll wait.”

  “Good to hear it.”

  Roman stepped back into the bathroom, and closed the door. But not all the way. In fact, she realized as she stood outside it, looking through the gap, he’d only made the most half-hearted possible attempt to close it. She could get a view of whatever she wanted to see if she just leaned at the right angle.

  His body was a lattice of tight-packed muscle that didn’t begin to make him look big. But most people who trim down to the point where you can practically use them in an anatomy textbook look small, and Roman was nothing like a small man.

  Her eyes drifted south for an instant, and she realized it exactly one moment after she’d seen his manhood. She stepped away from the door and set herself down on the couch, stripped off her coat and left it folded on the edge of the bed.

  “Sorry about this, I just have to finish up my hair.”

  “No problem,” Mary called back. Her heart was pounding in her ears. Her back-pocket ideas about sleeping with Roman were starting to look dangerously tempting. And just like everything with Roman, they were a bad idea. A delicious bad idea. The sort of bad idea that she could get behind. The sort of bad idea she needed to avoid at all costs. The sort that she’d never managed to avoid in the past, even as cheap as free.

  The water in the bathroom cut off, and his footsteps weren’t heavy, but they seemed to be sounding right next to her head, like they were speaking specifically to her. Whispering something that she couldn’t make out.

  “Have a nice shower?”

  “Sure. Good water pressure here.”

  “I bet.” The place had to be costing a pretty penny. If they didn’t have good water pressure here, she could always invite him by the house…

  No, she corrected herself. Don’t be absurd.

  “Just a minute,” he called out.

  She stood up and walked over. Bad idea, her rational brain told her. Her less-rational brain told it to shut its stupid mouth. She could feel the butterflies in her stomach that she hadn’t really felt since she was eighteen years old. She pushed the door to the bathroom open and leaned in the doorway.

  He hadn’t dressed. He held a towel, moving from rubbing one arm to the other, and its drape barely managed to cover him. He raised an eyebrow. “Problem?”

  She looked down at his groin, hidden as it was by the tip of the towel. She made a point of it, lingering long enough that he couldn’t miss it. Then she looked back up.

  “One.”

  “Oh?” His hands lowered, and then split up and went their separate ways, and she saw everything she wanted to see. “What’s that?”

  “The problem is that I can’t get a read on you, Roman Townsend. But don’t worry. I’ve got a solution.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I think you’ll be a little easier to read when you’re singing my praises.”

  “Oh?”

  Sarah pulled her shirt off. Her breasts weren’t quite as perky as they had been when she was eighteen. The cost of having a child, and the cost of living ten years, she supposed.

  “That’s what I think,” she said. And she bit her lip, as if she weren’t being straightforward enough. Maybe that would hit him over the head with it hard enough that he’d do something.

  Sixteen

  Roman’s body felt sticky with sweat, but she felt good wrapped up in his arms. As good as he had imagined.

  “So what was it you wanted to talk about?”

  Roman blinked. Talk about? Oh.

  “That, uh… thing you mentioned? And I said I
thought I knew who was responsible?”

  “The text message?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What about it?”

  “I know who was responsible.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I’ve dealt with the problem.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I reached a compromise.”

  “What’s that?”

  He let out a long breath. “I want you.”

  “Well, I guess you’ve got me, at least for now.”

  “I mean it. I’ve been looking for you for years. Not hard enough to make it count for anything, but…”

  Mary stiffened in his arms. “Why?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Then why look so hard?”

  “I just did. For now, that’s all I’ve got for you. You stood out to me.”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  “Oh, of course. That’s what half the songs I write are about.”

  “So you admit you’re just sweet-talking me?” She had a hint of teasing in her voice, but he wasn’t stupid enough not to know that he was on rocky ground even for jokes.

  “Well, to be fair, all the most recent ones were about you. The other ones were… well, those were about you, too. Just didn’t know it yet.”

  He looked down at her. She looked up at him with a dubious expression.

  “What?”

  “Bit sappy, don’t you think? Even for you.”

  “Wow. That hurts.” Roman’s smile widened.

  “I think we got off track at some point.”

  “You’re right. Off-track.”

  “So?”

  “So I found the leak.”

  “Okay, I’m waiting. You’ve got yourself a captive audience.”

  “Apparently, my manager is… concerned for my emotional well-being, I guess. If you wanted to be charitable towards him.”

  “You don’t want to be, I take it?”

  “He doesn’t particularly deserve it. I’m not aware of him ever being concerned for anyone’s anything, unless it was their money, and he was concerned that it was soon going to become his money.”

  “So what, then?”

  “He probably thinks you’re some kind of distraction is my guess. Which is why, even though I was expressly promised a break, he’s got me working again.”