Excerpt: Her Holiday Song (#NSFW)

Hello there!

I just turned in a long novella for a collection of holiday-themed short stories and novellas that will be coming out this fall / winter.  Other authors in the collection include lesfic best-sellers like A. E. Radley, Giselle Fox, Nicolette Dane, Em Stevens, Miranda MacLeod, and a handful of others whose names you will probably recognize if you’re a regular reader of lesfic.

I’d asked my newsletter subscribers if they would like to help beta read my contribution for the collection, but alas, I found myself up against a tight deadline and never managed to provide beta copies.  To make up for it, I’m posting the first three chapters here.  Warning:  It’s #NSFW, which means there’s a bit of steaminess and a few bad words contained within this excerpt.

PS:  Almost every chapter in this novella is based around a song.  I’ll put all the songs in a separate post shortly.  In the meantime, you can find the playlist on YouTube here.

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Her Holiday Song — Blurb

Being a pop star isn’t exactly what Hope Caldwell thought it would be.  She loves being a performer; she loves her fans; she loves the way her wealth can help the people she cares about.  But most of the time, despite all the attention and fame, Hope feels profoundly alone.

When tragedy strikes at one of Hope’s big concerts in Chicago, she does something she didn’t think she’d ever do — she goes back home. 

Hope’s return to their hometown is the last thing Julie Aron thought she wanted.  After all, Hope has made a habit of breaking Julie’s heart over the years, and Julie has finally found a more-or-less happy life with her girlfriend Karen.  And Karen hates Hope with a passion.  But Julie would never turn her back on Hope when Hope needs her most, not even if it means turning her own life upside-down.

Her Holiday Song is a novella about music, love, and reconnecting our hearts to what matters most.

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1

June:  “Turn the Page,” Bob Seger

HOPE CALDWELL

[ FIRST VERSE ]

There are three main things no one ever tells you about being a pop star, three things you only learn as you go and which sometimes make you wish you’d never picked up a guitar or sat down on a piano bench to begin with.

First:  Once you make it big — and I mean really big — sell out stadiums, play the SuperBowl halftime show big — you will never have a moment to yourself ever again.  Your life becomes a parade of people:   managers, publicists, assistant publicists, make-up artists, assistant make-up artists, hair stylists, voice coaches, personal trainers, massage therapists, back-up singers, back-up dancers.

Morning, noon, night.

There’s a novelty to it at first, a kind of thrill when you realize that you’ve become someone who has an actual entourage.  I didn’t even notice it had happened to me until about five years ago when I was backstage in Detroit.  There were two hours to go before a major concert, and the hallways buzzed like an irritated ant hill.  Dancers crammed themselves into costumes, musicians checked and double-checked their instruments, singers pressed fingers in their ears and hummed to themselves with their eyes shut, and stage managers in headsets and carrying clipboards rushed around shouting orders and answering questions.

I froze in the middle of it all.  Shocked.

They were there because of me, I realized.  Because of my music.  Music I had written.  And recorded.  And made famous.  Music that an enormous quantity of people in the English-speaking world, along with quite a few in the non-English-speaking world, had heard at least once.  Music that got played on radio stations and at baseball games, backyard barbecues, birthday parties, grocery stores.

That night in Detroit, after so many years of toil and failure and frustration, it finally dawned on me that I was living out my girlhood dreams.  In less than one hundred and twenty minutes, I would walk out onto a stage surrounded by a crowd that sounded like an ocean, each wave beating out a single sound, a single syllable — my name.

“Hope Hope Hope Hope Hope…”

And when they saw me, when I stepped into the blinding beam of the spotlight and the ocean became a roiling black silhouette made out of the shapes of tens of thousands of indistinguishable faces, my name would splinter into a cacophony of cheers and shouts and whistles and airhorns, and I would spread my arms wide, like Jesus granting his benediction, and the ocean would carry me away.

But that brings me to the second thing no one ever tells you about being a pop star.

You can be surrounded by an entourage, you can have your name chanted by a crowd of fifty thousand, you can be as recognizable in Bangkok as you are in Los Angeles, but none of it stops you from feeling more alone than you ever have in your life.

The third thing they don’t tell you is that there’s no going back.

#

Knock, knock.

The door to the adjoining suite squeaked open.  A round face appeared in its crevice.

“Hey,” Charles said, and the deep rumble of his voice was a comforting, familiar sound in this unfamiliar city.  “You okay in here?  I thought I heard something.”

The television screen lit the room with undulating white light, and for a moment, I was reminded of what the lake looked like back home when the moon was full and the sky was clear, the way the silver moonlight would bounce off the black surface of the water and cast everything with a magical glow.

I nodded.  “Yeah.  It’s fine.  You probably just heard the television.”

And as if to underscore the point, Hollywood provided a deep space CGI explosion on the extra-large plasma screen TV hanging on the wall.  I grabbed the remote and thumbed the volume down before the surround sound   system could send the tumbler of bourbon sitting on the end table next to me rattling again.

“See?” I said to Charles.

His concerned expression softened, and he grinned at the TV set.  “Outer space, huh?  And here I was worried that your stalker had somehow gotten past me into your room.”

Affection surged in my heart for my burly bodyguard.  Charles could be as overprotective as a mother hen sometimes.  It made me want to jump up and hug him.

“Come watch with me, if you want,” I said.  “Aliens invade and the President fakes a diplomatic mission so he can plant a nuke on their ship.”

“I think I saw that one,” Charles said.  He held up a phone through the half-open doorway.  “And I’m on the phone with Margie.”

“Oh,” I said.  Then yelled, “Hey, Margie!  I’ll have him home to you in a week, I promise!”

I heard a faint, tinny laughter coming from Charles’s phone.  It made me smile.  I liked my bodyguard’s wife almost as much as I liked him.  And once Charles had convinced her that I’m only interested in women and we weren’t ever going to have a Whitney Houston, Kevin Costner situation on our hands, she proved herself to be every bit as sweet and big-hearted as her husband.

“Have a good night, Hope,” Charles said, and the door to his part of the hotel room started to close.

“Charles?”

The door opened again and he gazed at me expectantly, waiting.

I hesitated.  What I really wanted was someone to keep me company, to watch this stupid movie and make fun of it with me, but of course I couldn’t ask for that.  Or I could, I supposed, but I didn’t want to be that pop star.  The obnoxious, spoiled one who thinks that money and fame gives them the right to ask more from the people around them than they really should.

“Would you mind bringing me my guitar?” I said instead.  “The old acoustic one with the stickers all over the case?  I think they left it with some of the other luggage in your room.”

“Sure,” he said.

I muted the television set a few minutes later, sat forward in the overstuffed hotel chair with the guitar in my lap.  On screen, the U.S. President was crawling through an air duct on the alien ship, communicating via headset with the Vice President back in Washington.

I strummed a chord, humming.

Just me and my guitar.  It was like that, in the beginning.  Before there were back-up dancers.  Before there was Charles, before there were hotel suites with multiple rooms.  In the beginning it was just me on a makeshift stage in a dingy coffeeshop just off campus, guitar in my lap.

I leaned forward like I was talking into a mic.

“My uncle taught me this song,” I said softly into the pretend microphone.  “He and my aunt, my mom’s sister, they raised me, and my uncle was the one who taught me to play guitar.”  I strummed another chord.  “I don’t know what happens to a person after they die,” I said.  “But Uncle Billy, wherever you are, this one’s for you.”

I started in on the old Bob Seger song as quietly as I could, not wanting to disturb Charles’s conversation with Margie in the other room.

Out there in the spotlight you’re a million miles away

Every ounce of energy you try to give away

As the sweat pours out your body like the music that you play

I thought of stadiums as I whispered-sang, stadiums filled with a roiling ocean of silhouettes, each one of them wanting something from me, each one of them hoping I would fill something inside of them that they hadn’t yet filled for themselves.

Later in the evening as you lie awake in bed

With the echoes from the amplifiers ringin’ in your head

You smoke the day’s last cigarette, remembering what she said

I thought of the lake, walking distance from Uncle Billy and Aunt Tina’s house, and of dark summer nights lit only by the moon.  I thought of the canoe, and the girl who sat in it, and how she pulled her paddle from the water, and how it thudded when she dropped it onto the canoe’s bottom.

I closed my eyes as I sang, remembering the way the canoe rocked as she leaned forward, cupped my face with gentle hands.

Ah, here I am, on a road again

There I am, up on the stage

Here I go, playing the star again

There I go, turn the page

Tears rolled down my cheeks as I reached the chorus.  I didn’t know who I was crying for, exactly.  For myself?  For Uncle Billy?

For a girl.  A girl in a canoe on a summer’s night in Georgia, cupping my face with gentle hands in the seconds before she kissed me for the first time.

“I love you,” her memory whispered into my ear.

There I go, turn the page

2

July:  “32 Flavors,” Ani DiFranco

I tapped on the mic, waited for the crowd to calm down, waited for my breath to come back.  I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my wrist.  My makeup people had gone too heavy for this muggy summer evening, and melting foundation and mascara ran into my eyes.

“We love you, Hope!” someone in the audience shouted, and I laughed — a breathy, staticky sound that echoed back to me through the speakers despite the earplugs I had in.

“I love you, too,” I said, and the audience responded with a mixed wave of laughter and affectionate cooing.  “No, but really.”  I glanced to the side of the stage, caught one of the prop manager’s eyes and nodded.  He hustled out with my old acoustic guitar, handed it to me.  I strummed a couple of cords.

And I meant it — I did love them.  The Nevada women’s music festival was my kind of gig, the kind of show I’d dreamed of playing when I was a kid, the kind of show that my record label wouldn’t usually let me play anymore because the small, grassroots organization couldn’t afford a big-ticket name like mine.  But I’d insisted on this one.  These were my people:  Crunchy hipster granola girls with nose rings and shaved heads, tatted-up women my own age who remembered me from back in the days when I was nothing more than a YouTube channel and a coffee shop player with a handful of hardcore fans.

Playing this festival felt like getting back to my roots.  Which was why I felt like I could get away with:

“I know you probably came expecting me to play all my big hits.  And I did just give you one of them,” I told the crowd.  A handful of them cheered.  “But you know what nobody ever tells you about winning Grammies?  You get so sick of playing your, like, four biggest songs that sometimes you wish you’d never written them in the first place.”  Laughter.  I strummed the guitar a few more times, almost as a reflex.  “But some of you have probably followed me long enough that you remember me from before I was a pop star.  ’Course, some of you weren’t even born before I was a pop star.”  Some of them cheered, some of them laughed; I laughed with them.  “Back in the day, I didn’t feel like my own songs were good enough to record — ”

“You’re a genius, Hope!” someone shouted.

“Thanks,” I said.  “But you know, the truth is that everyone struggles with feeling good enough, even famous people.”  I chuckled at my own joke, even though the laughter of the audience had mostly trickled away.  I had their attention now; they knew I was trying to say something serious.  “Anyway, back in the day when I was just starting out, I was too scared to play my own stuff, so all I played were cover songs at little bars and coffee shops in Athens, Georgia, where I was a freshman in college at the time.  And the song I’m about to play for you now, it always made my set list.  I guess it made me feel powerful at a time in my life when I thought I was powerless.”

I played the first few cords of the melody; the band behind me started in on the accompanying percussion.  The women in the audience who recognized what I was about to play, the ones my own age and older,  immediately went wild.

“It’s a song about being yourself,” I said.  “A song about doing your own thing and feeling good about it, no matter what anybody else tells you.”

I closed my eyes and started to play, humming along to my guitar.

And the moment my eyes shut and the crowd disappeared, I was back there, playing The Old Coot in Athens, the uneven legs of my chair rocking back and forth as I worked the guitar.  And I looked up, and there she was, the girl from the canoe, the ghost who always haunted my quiet moments.  She sat in the front row, elbows propped on her knees, chin propped on her clasped hands.  She smiled at me, giving me the encouragement she knew I needed.

“I love you,” her eyes said.  “I believe in you.”

Squint your eyes and look closer

I’m not between you and your ambition

I am a poster girl with no poster

I am thirty-two flavors and then some

And I’m beyond your peripheral vision

So you might want to turn your head

’Cause some day you are gonna get hungry

And eat most of the words you just said

That night at The Old Coot, Julie didn’t yet know I was cheating on her.  How could she have even expected it?  We were in love — so, so in love.  She couldn’t have expected it, because I hadn’t expected it.

I needed to tell her.

I couldn’t bear to tell her.

How do you tell your girlfriend — your high school sweetheart who’d held your hand as you both came stumbling out of the closet together — that you’d met someone?  A male someone?  And how did you tell her that, without really meaning to, without really thinking you were going to do it, you’d slept with him, not once but several times?  How did you tell her that you thought you wanted to leave her, even though you still loved her?

How was it possible to love someone and still want to leave them?

And I’ve never tried to give my life meaning

By demeaning you

And I would like to state for the record

I did everything that I could do

Back at the Nevada women’s music festival, my eyes burned with tears when I finished the song to the sound of the audience’s enthusiastic clapping.  They probably couldn’t see me cry from where they were, even the ones who’d pressed their way to the front of the crowd.  My manager had insisted upon a buffer zone between them and the stage, because it was hard for Charles — or anyone else — to protect me up here on this makeshift platform, and I’d been getting death threats from my stalker again.

I would associate that song with Julie forever.

I sniffed wetly when I finished — and that they’d be able to hear, even if they couldn’t see the tears.  I used the need to hand the acoustic guitar back to the stage manager as an excuse to turn my back to the audience and wipe the moisture off my cheeks.

“Thanks,” I told the audience with a big smile when I turned back around.  “I’m glad you liked it.  That was Ani DiFranco, of course, for those of you who didn’t know.  My idol when I was eighteen years old.  Now — are you ready for something from my new album?”

They went wild.

Of course they were ready.  They could be patient with a single Ani cover, but this was why most of them were here, after all.  For me.

It was laughable.  If they knew who I really was, beneath the glitz and music awards and magazine covers, if they’d known the way I broke the heart of the only girl I’d ever really loved, they wouldn’t shell out their hard-earned money to see me, to buy my music.  They’d rip me down from their pedestal and throw me into the heap with the rest of their broken idols.

#

I drummed my fingers on my desk as the phone rang.  I’d dialed the number on a whim, and now I realized I didn’t know what I would say if she actually picked up on the other end.

Three rings went by.  I debated whether or not to leave a voicemail.

“Hello?”

“Oh — hi,” I stammered.  “Julie?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Hope.”

There was a long pause.  A very long pause.

“Julie?”

“I’m here,” she said.  “I just… wasn’t really expecting to hear from you.”

I let out a nervous, high-pitched laugh.  “I can’t imagine why you’re surprised,” I said sarcastically.  “But, uh, how are you?  How’s things?”

Ugh, I sounded like a freaking idiot.  Worldwide music phenomenon reduced to mushy ineptitude by an old flame.  A flame that hadn’t burned for  half a decade.

“Things are… good,” Julie said.  A beat passed.  “Hope, why are you calling me?”

“I, um…”

I stood up from the desk and paced behind it, gazing out the big plate glass window that overlooked the infinity pool in the backyard.  It was good to finally be home, to be in my own study, to be looking at my own backyard.  Given my summer tour schedule, I’d spent so little time at home lately that it didn’t even feel like home.  It felt like someone else’s big ol’ Southern California mansion in.  Its sheer size made me practically agoraphobic, so since I’d gotten back, I’d spent almost all my time in this study, at this desk, overlooking the pool while I tinkered with new songs.

While my mind kept going back, for some reason I didn’t understand yet, to Julie.

I couldn’t explain any of that to her, so I just said:  “I know we haven’t talked in a few years.  But you’ve been on my mind lately and… I don’t know, I just got to missing you.  So I picked up the phone.  Is that alright?”

A couple of seconds passed, long enough that I pulled the phone away from my ear and glanced at the screen just to make sure that the call hadn’t dropped.

I was about to say, “Jules?  Are you still there?” when she answered.

“Yeah.  It’s alright.  It’s kinda strange, actually, because I was thinking about you just the other day.  Your cousin texted me a link to an interview you’d done.  Entertainment Weekly, I think.”

“Melody?” I said, surprised.  “Melody texted you?”

“Yeah, she did,” said Julie.  “I mean, we text every week.”

“You text every…?”  My surprise had morphed into confusion.  “Why?”

“To confirm appointments, usually.”  Julie paused.  “I started training her and Andrew recently.  She didn’t tell you?”

My cousin, who, because I’d grown up with her, was more like a sister, and her husband, who was like my brother-in-law, were now the personal training clients of my ex-girlfriend.  A barrage of questions came into my mind all at once:  How long had Julie been training them?  Why hadn’t Mel said something?  Had they talked about me?  Why did Melody text her a link to my EW interview?  What had Julie thought about it?

I stumbled through a response that managed to sound like I wasn’t shocked.  “She, uh… I’ve been on tour most of the summer.  We haven’t talked all that much.”

“Oh,” Julie said, but I could tell by her tone that she was as surprised as I was that Mel hadn’t said anything.  “Well… yeah, I’ve been working them out two or three times per week for a little while now.”

Another nervous giggle bubbled out of me.  I wanted to kick myself for it.  “They both probably need it.  Are they losing weight?”

“She said she’s going out to visit you in August,” Julie said.  “You can give me your verdict then, tell me if she should keep paying me.”

God, I’d missed Julie’s voice.  That cool, easy confidence that seemed so effortless for her.  I used to fall asleep to that voice.  To write music to that voice.  To let the sound of that voice wrap around me like a safety net.

I stopped pacing, sat back down at the desk.  “So who else are you training these days?”

I’m not saying that I’m a saint

I just don’t want to live that way

No, I will never be a saint

But I will always say

 

3

August:  “Bad Romance,” Lady Gaga

I sat down in the pool chair next to Melody, rubbing the sweating plastic bottle of cold water across my forehead before I twisted off the cap.  She sunbathed beside me, overlarge sunglasses hiding most of her face.  Her three kids — Max, aged eleven; Gigi, aged nine; and Thomas, aged six — chased each other in little dog paddling strokes around my infinity pool.

I liked watching the kids enjoy themselves.  I’d come to think of the pool as a decoration and had nearly forgotten it was something that one could swim in.  The kids provided a contrasting, harmonic counterpoint to the emptiness that normally occupied my house, and I reveled in their presence.

I glanced over at Mel, trying to determine if she was awake or asleep.  “So,” I ventured, “you look like you’ve lost weight.”

She shifted, tipped her sunglasses up so she could look at me.  “You really think so?  I’ve gone down a dress size, but I don’t feel like it’s noticeable yet.”

“I think it is.  Have you been hitting the gym?”

She flipped the sunglasses back down.  “Kind of.  Andrew and I hired a personal trainer.”

“A personal trainer?” I said, feigning surprise.  “In Calvin?  I didn’t know there were any trainers so far out in the boondocks.”

Melody hesitated.  She would confess to me any moment now.

“Technically, our trainer lives in Suwannee,” Mel said.  “She makes a special exception for Andrew and me — drives all the way out to our house.”

I gave a low whistle.  “That’s some special exception.  An hour round-trip for her.”

“She’s… like family to us.”

I hadn’t been angry before, but now I started to burn.  Julie was like family to Melody?  But I kept my tone cool and controlled.  “Oh yeah?  Anyone I know?”

Melody took the sunglasses off and sat halfway up.  She studied me for a second before she said, “Promise me you’re not going to flip out.”

“Flip out about what?  The fact that you hired my ex-girlfriend to train you?  Or the fact that you’ve been keeping it from me?”

She didn’t answer right away.  “Hope.  I wasn’t… keeping it from you, exactly.”

“No?”

“No.  I just wanted to tell you in person, when I came out here.”  Mel cocked her head to the side.  “How did you know she was training us?”

“We’ve been… talking again.”

Melody sat up straighter.  “You have been?  Since when?”

“Since a few weeks ago, when I first got home from my tour.”

“Really.”  Mel lifted both eyebrows.  “Huh.  Well, she didn’t say anything to me about it.”

“Now you know how it feels.”  I took a swig of water.  “So why didn’t you tell me?”

Mel glanced at the pool.  “Gigi!  Stop dunking your brother,” she called.  “If he asks you to stop, you stop.”

“Sorr – rrry,” Gigi answered.

To me, Melody said, “I think you know why I didn’t say anything.  I didn’t want to upset you.  Especially not while you were on tour.”

She lowered her sunglasses and laid back down on the recliner as if she was satisfied that the matter was resolved.

But I wasn’t resolved.  “Why would it have upset me to know that Julie was training you?  I’m sure she’s good at what she does.  I mean, you look great, Mel.  Honestly.”

Melody turned her head and studied me from behind her sunglasses for a long moment before speaking.  “You said you’ve been talking with her since you got home?”

“Yeah.  Four or five times, I guess.”

Six or eight times was more like it.

Once Jules and I had gotten past the initial awkwardness of five years of silence between us, our old patterns had fallen into place with surprising ease.  I called her Tuesday and Thursday afternoons around three, the sleepy, lazy, slow part of the day for me, the end of the work day for her.  We chatted thirty or forty minutes each day, about everything and about nothing.  She told me about her day, her clients, her efforts to open her own gym; I told her about my day, the songs I was working on, the concerts we were planning for later in the summer.

It made me smile to think of her, but I hid the smile by drinking again from my bottle of water.

“So I guess you already know about Karen, then,” Melody said.

Karen?

“Thomas!” Mel shouted suddenly.  “Do not hit your brother.”

I barely heard her.  And when Max stuck out his tongue at his younger brother, it hardly registered.

Karen?

Mel turned back to me.  “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you I’d been working with Julie,” she said.  “The last time you saw Jules with a girl… you kind of lost it for a while.”

I waved a dismissive hand.  “That was five years ago,” I said, as if those days were long gone.  Those jealous, grieving days when seeing Julie with someone else reminded me of everything I’d lost.  Everything I’d broken.

But who was this Karen?  And why hadn’t Julie said anything about her to me?

Because she knew how you’d react, said a voice in the back of my head.  Because she knows you’ve never been capable of being “just” friends.  Not with her.

I drank the rest of my water.

I didn’t call Julie that week.  I told myself it was because Mel and the kids were in town.

But the Tuesday after Mel left, I didn’t call her, either.  Thursday rolled around, and when Julie called around three o’clock, I let it go to voicemail.

Busy, I texted.  I’ll try you next week.

But next week came, and I didn’t call.

Karen.

#    

“Here,” I said to the twenty-something girl we’d just hired as my latest personal assistant the week before.  “Have more champagne.”

We sat in a private corner of a hotel restaurant, the warm colors of mahogany and candlelight wrapping around us.  I tipped more champagne into her flute without waiting for an answer, and she looked up at me with skittish, embarrassed eyes.

Hazel eyes.  Julie had hazel eyes.

The girl’s name was Marissa.  Twenty-three and only her second job out of college.  She’d been a lucky find, highly recommended by a rich friend of mine who knew her father.  The day after we hired her, I’d left for my next batch of summer concerts, bringing Marissa with me.  It was sink or swim, throwing her into the mix like that so quickly, with so little time to prepare.  But so far she’d been swimming, and I was impressed.  That was why we were having dinner tonight — I was treating her as thanks for work well done.

“You should have the rest,” she said.  Her cheeks were already flushed an apple-red from the champagne she’d drunk so far.  “I’ve already had almost half the bottle.”

I smiled.  “And I had the other half.  So we’re even.”

We sat next to each other in a semicircular booth, and she was close enough that I could feel body heat coming off her in little waves.  I patted her knee, then set my hand between us.  Close enough that the rough fabric of her skirt brushed against my little finger.

“You were telling me a story about your dad,” I said, reminding Marissa of the conversation from before the champagne interrupted us.  “Why don’t you finish?  I want to hear it.”

“I don’t know why you’d be so interested in me,” Marissa said.  “You’re the one who’s had a fascinating life.”

I raised one eyebrow.  “Is that right?  What’s been fascinating about my life?”

She gave me a look that bordered on incredulity.  “You’re Hope.”

I shrugged.  “I’m not that special.  I worked hard and I got lucky.  That’s all.”

She shook her head forcefully.  “No,” she said.  She shook her head some more.  “No, it’s more than that.  You’re so talented.  You know they call you the greatest talent of your generation, don’t you?”

“Some people do,” I said.  “Some people say I’m nothing more than the latest fad, someone in the right place at the right time with the right sound and the right look.”

“Some people don’t know what they’re talking about,” Marissa said derisively.  She shifted in her seat so she could face me, and with the hand that still sat between us, I felt the bare skin of her thigh rub against my hand.  “I didn’t tell you this before, because I didn’t want to go all fangirl on you, but… your first album?  That was what made me fall in love with music.  That was why I decided to work in the music industry.”

She probably didn’t realize how many albums I’d put out before I ever signed with a major label.  She was too young to remember the days of CDs, too young to imagine me burning copy after copy from my dusty old desktop computer, cutting out the jewel case album covers by hand.  Too young to imagine me selling — or trying to sell — those albums out of a big plastic crate I carried with me to all of my shows.

Too young.

Too much champagne.

I wondered with detached curiosity what direction this evening would take.  But I had a hunch I already knew the answer to my own question.

We chatted more; we ordered more champagne.  She finished the story about her father, told me another one about her college boyfriend.  I listened attentively, moved the hand that sat between us to her thigh.  Then her knee.  Then place where her skirt ended and her skin began.

Marissa sucked in a shallow breath.

I leaned closer to her.  My head swam with the pleasant buzz of my half of the champagne.  “Can I change the topic and ask you a personal question, Marissa?”

She took a moment to answer.  “Of course.”

“Are you sure?  It’s pretty personal.”  I liked doing this, drawing the moment out, building up the anticipation.

“You can ask me anything,” she said, and it seemed she leaned closer to me, too.

I traced a light circle on her bare thigh.  “Have you ever been fucked by a woman before?”

I was guessing she hadn’t.  She had that straight-laced straight girl smell about her, the “I grew up riding horses and taking my summer vacations in Europe with Mommy and Daddy and my Polo-wearing little brother before I went off to my Ivy League college” smell.

I was almost always right about these things.  And sure enough, she shook her head weakly in response to my question.

“No.”

“Would you like to be?”

She gazed at me uncertainly.  I might’ve been a little drunk, but I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t know what she was thinking.  I knew she wanted me.  But she was weighing her decision.  Trying to decide if she should or shouldn’t.

Would I regularly demand sexual favors as a condition of the job?

Was she cheapening herself by giving in to me… or was she putting one hell of a notch in her belt by bedding the best-selling female vocalist since Lady Gaga?

And, perhaps most importantly, was she brave enough to sleep with a woman?

I lowered my voice.  “I hired you for your brain, Marissa.  Not your cunt.  That’s not going to change in the morning,” I said, and I meant it.  “So it’s completely up to you.  I’m only interested in a bit of fun.  For both of us.  Okay?”

“Okay,” she said.  She nodded.  “Okay,” she said again, this time with more conviction.

She got up and followed me out of the restaurant, up the elevator, into the penthouse suite.  Charles had been sitting a couple of tables away, and as we left, he followed us at a discrete distance and disappeared into his own rooms once we got to the top floor.

Charles understood exactly what was going on.  Marissa wasn’t the first assistant I’d hired who had hazel eyes.

#

It is a dangerous thing to have one’s every whim satisfied.  It transforms a person into something insatiable, something always eating and never full.

And it had been years since I felt full.

We didn’t even make it as far as the bedroom.  We stumbled through the door to my suite and fell, rather than laid, onto the pristine, cream-colored sofa that dominated the anteroom.  I knocked the remote control off the sofa with an irritated swipe of my hand, stripped off Marissa’s shirt and then my own and tossed them without caring where they landed.  One draped on the glass coffee table between the sofa and the plasma screen television mounted on the wall; the other landed on a plush white-and-grey area rug.  Everything in the suite was white or black or shades of grey, a cold advertisement of luxury that made the walls feel like they were closing in on me.

Marissa provided just the splash of color I needed.

She pulled me closer to her by the front of my bra, licked the top of my breast as soon as she got close enough.

“I’ve been wanting to do that since the moment I met you,” she said.  She was panting, breathless, like we’d taken the stairs instead of the elevator.  “You’re the first woman I ever fantasized about, ever since I — ”

I kissed her hard to silence her, because I didn’t want to hear about her fantasies of Hope the musician, Hope the pop star.  I had my own fantasy to focus on, one that involved the hazel eyes of a girl long gone, and I didn’t need Marissa to spoil it for me.

I didn’t lay Marissa down onto the sofa just inside the entrance to the room; I shoved her.  And for her part, she didn’t kiss me when I got close enough; she bit me.  She bit my jaw, she bit my neck, she bit any patch of exposed skin she could find.  She was moaning before my lips even made it to her body.

“Jesus God,” she whispered.  “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this turned on before in my life.”

I kissed the space between her breasts, pulled down on the loose blouse and the bra beneath it until her nipples appeared.

“That’s good,” I said, “because it’s about to get a hell of a lot better.”

I opened my mouth wide, put as much of Marissa’s left breast into it as I could fit, and sucked and licked and sucked and licked.  My right hand moved south, finding its way between her legs, up her skirt, moving there back and forth.

Marissa addressed God, Jesus, and Christ so many times that I thought for a minute we might be at church.

She was already damp at the crotch of her underwear.  I pushed the fabric aside, ran my fingers through her folds.

“Can I touch you?”  I pressed my tongue into her ear.

Marissa shivered beneath me.  “Yes,” she breathed.  “If you don’t touch me I think I’ll die.”

I moved my lips down her jaw while my fingers slipped inside her.

“I’m going to fuck your brains out,” I told Marissa.

“Please,” she said between gasps.  “Please do.  Please fuck me.”

I want your drama, the touch of your hand

I want your leather-studded kiss in the sand

I want your love

Love, love, love I want your love

Lady Gaga said that “Bad Romance” was about being in love with one’s best friend.  That had happened to me once.  But it was a long time ago, and I’d been wrong to think I could get her back.

I didn’t have a best friend anymore.  Charles, maybe.  But it wasn’t him I thought about as I pressed inside my new personal assistant.

I want your love and

I want your revenge

You and me could write a bad romance

I want your love and

All your lovers revenge

You and me could write a bad romance