My Rock #6 (2 page)

“I’m pulling for you, man. I think you’ve got a lot
of talent.”

Shit! The guilt trip…. “Thanks, Buck. I’ll see you
around.”

“Yeah, take care,” he said. I’m sure he was
thinking,
‘I’ll see you in court.’

I took the long way around again on the way back to
Elly’s place. I took the I-10 and got off on the exit for Malibu. I rode my
bike and parked it down near the pier. I was feeling anxious again. I was going
to have to tell Elly if they took me to court. There was no way I’d be able to
keep hiding that from her. I guessed if she threw me out during the tour, it wouldn’t
really matter; I’d still be put up in a hotel on the show’s dime. The problem
was that I was getting attached…to Elly.

When looking for just a pier without the hubbub of a
ferris
wheel or the line that constantly seems to be
snaking out of Bubba Gump's on the Santa Monica pier…Malibu is where it’s at.
It’s just pure beauty and relaxation. No noise, no crowds; if you want to hear
your thoughts, you can. I wasn’t interested in hearing mine right then…I just
wanted to find a sense of peace. Since I stopped using, I’d only been able to
do that two ways: with Elly or on the beach. Elly could work wonders on my
anxiety but she’d also ask questions, none of which I wanted to answer right then.
So instead, I stood against the guard rail and looked out over the ocean. I
blocked all the shit out of my mind and listened to the water crash against the
rocks and the cry of the seagulls fighting over food off in the distance.

I don’t know how long I stayed on the beach. I
wandered up and down the pier for a while and watched the old fisherman reel in
their paltry catches, then I took off my shoes and walked on the beach for a
while. I finally convinced myself that I couldn’t stall forever and headed
back. When I got back to the apartment, I let myself in with the key Elly had
made for me. I could hear her and Susie in the bedroom talking about girl stuff
and giggling. Susie already had a temporary roommate lined up for while Elly
was gone. She couldn’t afford to pay for the place alone and Elly didn’t want
to have to worry about it while she was gone for almost a year. So, she was
packing all of her personal stuff to store until she got back so the new
roommate could use her room.

I dropped my stuff down next to the couch and sank
down into it. I thought about going in there and telling her about the
apartment…I really did. I just had a feeling that I should. But I talked myself
out of it again. I didn’t want to do it in front of smart-ass, nosey Susie. In
her defense, I was a smart-ass to her, too. Still, I didn’t like people to know
my business.

I sat there for a long time, almost an hour, and I don’t
think they even knew I was there. I could have been the fucking Son of Sam and slipped
in there and killed them before they knew anything was going on. They were
talking the whole time. How do women find so much to talk about? I finally
pulled myself up to go in and kick Susie out so I could talk to Elly. As I
stood up, my phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Ethan, the runner up from the
show. He said the tour contestants were going out to dinner and he wanted to
know if I wanted to meet up with them. I figured it wouldn’t hurt…besides, it gave
me an excuse to put off telling Elly about my living situation, again.

CHAPTER
TWO

ELLY

It was after four in the afternoon and I was still
packing. I didn’t even realize I had so much crap. I didn’t want to leave any
of my stuff out, though. I wasn’t overly possessive, but Susie’s friend that
would be staying with her was a guy. I doubted he wanted frilly stuff in his
room.

“So where do you guys start out?” Susie asked. She
was sitting on my bed…supposedly helping. Mostly, she was just getting in the
way.

“Las Vegas—MGM Grand,” I said with a smile. I’d
never been to Las Vegas I was excited about it like a kid on Christmas.

“Cool,” Susie said. I love Las Vegas. Will you guys
have time to do anything while you’re there?”

“Not a lot,” I told her. “I think we stay one night
and then move on.”

“And then you just keep going east?”

“Yeah, we go east and then south, I think. I know we
have a show in Texas and one in Florida, too. I’m hoping while we’re in Florida
we can go to Disney World.”

“Cool. I haven’t been there since I was a kid. You
got really lucky getting this job,” she said.

“Especially considering they fired me,” I told her
with a smile.

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you….you think that hot
executive Jake guy wants to fuck you?”

“Susie!”

“I’m just saying…he hired you back after the other
producer fired you and he’s kind of had his eye on you from the start…don’t you
think? It seems like he’s trying hard to get close to you. Isn’t that unusual
for an executive and an intern?”

“I guess it’s not the norm, but it happens. Are you
saying that you don’t think it’s possible for me to just be really good at what
I do?” I knew it was silly, but I was kind of hurt. It was as if she was saying
I couldn’t possibly be so good at my job that he was genuinely impressed with
me.

“Of course not. That’s not what I’m saying at all,”
she said. “I know how awesome you are. I just know how men are. They think with
their dicks. Usually when you think they’re doing something nice it’s because
they expect something in return.”

Susie was very cynical for a twenty-two year old. She’d
been in more than one bad relationship. She was attracted to older guys, and
more than one of them had turned out to be married. Susie dumped them as soon
as she found out, but it left scars. She wasn’t nearly as trusting as she used
to be.

“I don’t think they’re all like that,” I told her. I
liked to not judge any one person by my past experiences with others. “Jake
hasn’t been anything but professional and a gentleman. I might be tooting my
own horn here, but I think he really likes my work. Even when all the crap was
going on with Tristan and me sneaking around, I think I stayed pretty focused. The
other girls get all
ga-ga
when he walks in the room,
but I’ve never even flirted with him. Maybe he finds that refreshing. I think
if he was going to give someone the job just to get a piece of ass out of it,
it would have been one of those girls.”

“Or, maybe he finds it hot…maybe he thinks you’re
hotter than those other girls,” she said with a grin.

“Shut up!” I threw a pillow at her, “I want to
believe I got the job on my merits.”

Turning serious she said, “I’m sure you did. I’m
just being cynical because I hate men right now.”

“Boo!”

Susie and I both screamed. Tristan had stuck his
head around the doorframe and yelled at us. I hadn’t even heard him come in.

“And I rest my case!” Susie said, holding her heart.
“Hey, jerk! You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

Tristan shot back, “If you haven’t had one yet
looking at that face in the mirror by now, I think you’re safe.”

“Fuck you!”

“Okay, you two knock it off.” Sometimes I felt like
I was the mother of two adolescents…maybe even pre-adolescents. They bickered
like children, always trying to one up each other in the insult department. The
funny part was I thought they really did like each other. It was how they
showed it.

“Are you still packing?” Tristan asked. It was a
rhetorical question, I’m sure. One look around the room and it was obvious that
I was still packing.

“You don’t even try to sound smart, do you?” Susie
said. She liked to tease him about being dumb and he teased her about being
ugly. He wasn’t dumb and she wasn’t ugly, but for some reason that was the
relationship they’d settled on.

Tristan ignored her that time and said, “I’ve been
here for an hour, listening to you talk about me.” I tried to remember what
we’d been talking about and then I saw him grinning and knew he was full of
shit. He told me then, “Ethan texted me, he said that he and the other
contestants are going over to Sal’s for dinner. You want to go?”

I did need some time out and getting to know the
people I was going on tour with couldn’t hurt. “What time are they going?”

“Now.”

“Oh. No, I can’t. I have to finish this. I don’t
want to leave it a mess.”

He looked around and grinned and then said, “Alright,
I’m going to take off then. Just make sure you have the bed cleaned off when I
get back. That includes Susie, too. I don’t want to bump into that in the
middle of the night.”

“You know you’d give your right arm for all this,”
Susie told him.

Tristan snorted and said, “I’d tear off my right arm
to beat it away from me.”

I rolled my eyes and tried not to laugh. It was
mean, but funny. His personality was showing through more since he wasn’t numb
all the time—or pissed off. I kissed him good-bye while Susie rolled her eyes
and then I asked her, “Are you going to do something to help me or are you just
going to sit there?”

She pushed herself up off the bed with a tortured
sigh and said, “Sure, you don’t defend me when your boyfriend insults me, but please
do let me help you.”

“Shut up! You give as good as you get. You don’t
need me to stick up for you.”

“True,” she said with a grin. “I could outwit him
seven days a week and twice on Sunday. I’m not sure what you see in that
Neanderthal anyways.”

“Stop it!”

“Sure, he’s good-looking in a cave-man kind of way…”

I laughed, “Knock it off. That’s my boyfriend you’re
talking about.”

“You poor thing,” she said, still grinning. “I think
we should celebrate your last night here…even while we’re packing. How about
you go open us a bottle of wine? I think it would help me pack faster.”

“You’re hopeless,” I told her, shaking my head. “Not
only are you not doing anything, you want to distract me with wine.”

She picked up a shirt and folded it and said,
“There, I did something; now get me some wine.”

I rolled my eyes; she really was hopeless. I went to
get the wine, though, just as she knew that I would. I wasn’t just a pushover
when it came to Tristan—it was how I lived my life. As I walked by the couch, I
saw Tristan’s duffel bag and a canvas bag just dumped next to it. I sighed and
shook my head. He acted as if he had maid service or something that was going
to come along cleaning up behind him. I guessed it was a man thing; my dad used
to do the same thing and my mother and I would go along picking up after him.

I went over and picked it up to put it in the
bedroom; when I did, a thick pile of paper work fell off the top. I bent down
and picked it up. I hadn’t ever been to court for anything, but my late
boyfriend had…plenty of times. I could tell from where I stood that it was
something official. I sat down on the couch and looked at them. They were legal
papers, and as I flipped through them, I saw that he was being sued for back
rent. I sat there and read where it said how much he owed and how long he’d
owed it. According to these papers, he was evicted sometime during the summer.
He’d been staying with me for three months and he owed for the three months
before that. That son of a bitch had never said a word. What the fuck? He’d
been lying to me the entire time?

I dropped the papers and the bags back down where I
got them and went into the kitchen for the wine. I opened the bottle of red
wine that Susie and I had chilling in the fridge and took a swig of it right
out of the bottle. Then, I took it and two glasses back into my room. I sat
them on the dresser and collapsed down on my bed, somewhat dramatically.

“What happened?” Susie said.

I wasn’t sure if I should say anything or not.
Tristan hated for other people to know his business. I trusted Susie, though, and
I really wanted to talk to someone about it, so I said, “Apparently my
boyfriend is broke and has been for a while. He was kicked out of his apartment
a few months ago, just about the time he showed up on our doorstep with his
suitcase. He’s also being sued for back rent.”

“I knew he was a bad seed,” Susie said with a grin.

Her grin didn’t sit with me well at the moment and I
lashed out. “Shit! I’m glad you find it amusing.”

“I don’t, I’m sorry.” She sat down next to me on the
bed. I could tell she felt bad for making a joke and I felt bad for snapping at
her.

“The least he could have done was tell me,” I said. “Three
months, Susie! He’s had three months to tell me. You think there would have
been one moment when he could have brought it up in conversation, or even in
one of his groups at the rehab. He never even told his therapist he got
evicted…at least I don’t think that he did. I’ve been there for almost all of
the meetings.”

“You’re right, he should have told you,” she said,
cautiously. I had the feeling she was about to tell me something I didn’t want
to hear. Hopefully she wasn’t going to defend the lying S.O.B. I didn’t want to
hear that right then. She finally said, “But, think about it….you’ve been
supporting him, Elly. It wasn’t really hard to figure out that he didn’t have
any money. I mean, you knew he didn’t have much money, right?”