Say You Love Her, An L.A. Love Story (21 page)

“Usually I stick around after everyone leaves the studio.”
 

“But do you sleep here at night?”
 

I was trying to evade the question the first time she asked it. If I say yes then she may take it as an invitation. If I say no, then that would mean that I’m lying because I don’t trust myself around her. “Yeah, I sleep here.”

“Where?” Her voice is high with curiosity.

“In one of the rooms in the basement.”

“Oh…” She smirks and actually slips her fingers in her pussy as she lotions her thighs.
 

I don’t need the temptation right now, so I get up. “Have a good swim,” I say.

“You’re leaving.”

“Yeah, I’m going back in the studio pretty soon.”

“Where are you going now?”

I pretend I didn’t hear her and walk away. It’s been too damn long since I’ve banged a chick. This is the longest I’ve ever gone without sex. I’m being faithful to someone who doesn’t want to see me right now. But shit, I still can’t cheat on Angelina. Since our parting is my fault, I owe her loyalty until she decides what to do with me.

The days merge into one long period of time. Another guy named Lee and I are the only two musicians left at this point. Whenever Jacques needs us to replay something, Lee takes care of the horns and I’m strings and percussions. I’m in the studio more than out of it. I’ve become addicted to the process. Plus it helps control my urges. At this juncture, I simply want to fuck Angelina. Get it out of my system and then she can continue ignoring me until the next time we fuck. It’s been almost two months. She might have moved on.

But now I’m faced with a new problem. Jacques had to call Mita Capelli back to revise some of the cello parts. She’s taken that other room on the basement floor. It’s been three days, and I’m playing with fire. She walks by my room a lot, most of the time nearly naked.

It’s two o’clock in the morning, and she just walked past again on her way back from the bathroom. She gave me a crooked smile, and I let my eyes venture down to her tight shorts and up to the tiny white towel she’s using to cover her tits.

As soon as she’s gone I get up to close the door. It’s time to bring this game of peek-a-boo to an end. I stretch out across the bed and punch the pillow to soften it before I rest my head on it. I’m due back in the studio in six hours. Before I can close my eyes, I hear soft rapping on the door.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who’s knocking. I stay still, thinking maybe she’ll go away. She knocks again and calls, “Charlie, are you sleep?”

“Shit,” I mutter as I remember the way she looked walking past my door a few minutes ago. Fucking her would be a great start to getting back in the game, and I have thought about it.

“Charlie?” she says as she cracks the door open.

I prop myself up onto my elbows. “Yeah?” It comes out a croak.
 

“You want some company?”

I remember that I didn’t bring any goddamn condoms. Shit, her tits are exposed, and she’s wearing skimpy white-lace panties.
 
She’s definitely ready to bone.

“I don’t need any company,” I say, but it’s a strain.

“It doesn’t look like it.” Her eyes are pointing at my raised dick.

Here she comes. She seems possessed by the fact that my dick wants her. I can’t do it without a condom. I scoot over as she stretches out beside me. Her hand massages my dick.

“You’re so hard,” she whispers.

I lay back and close my eyes. “What are you doing?” I whisper.

“I’m doing what you want me to do.”

The fact that I’ve never gone this long without fucking and her rubbing me is making me want to blast one off.
 
Then she straddles me and rubs my dick against the crotch of her panties. It’s hot and damp.
 

“Knock, knock, who’s there? Charlie’s thick, hard, long bludgeoning dick,” she sings. “You want to come in?”
 

She’s stopped rubbing me, and I’ve lost the sensation. She’s waiting for an answer. This chick is a talker. Do I want to go in? I don’t know. I thought I did. Then she puts her mouth on mine. Our tongues meet. She’s rubbing my dick again as we kiss. The taste of her tongue, her ass in my hands, her nipples against my chest, none of it feels right.

“Mita, listen,” I say, pushing her away. “I’m tired. Had a long day.”

Suddenly the walls of her pussy swallow my dick. “Shit.”

 
“Ah!” she moans and rides my dick as if she’s on a mechanical bull. Damn it, I’m going to blow. I take her by the arms and roll her over onto the bed. She murmurs something about how good it feels and jabs me with her hips to thrust me deeper inside of her. I can close my eyes, keep going, and pull out when it’s time to come, but I’m sick to my fucking stomach. That’s why I pull out of her now, and she whimpers as she squeezes her tits. The sight of her doing that should turn me on, but it doesn’t.
 

“Fucking Angelina!” I shout and flop onto my back.
 

“Who? Wait.” She pants while pausing to think. “Are you talking about Angelina Blanchard?”

“Shit!” I leap to my feet, and she scrambles to sit up on her knees. “You know Angelina?”

“She’s Jacques’s daughter. So yeah, I know Angelina.” She snorts cynically. “That explains why we’re just now fucking.”

“We’re not fucking. That was a lapse of judgment on my part.” I tuck my now-limp dick back into my boxer briefs.

“She has a reputation,” Mita spits.

 
“What kind of reputation?”
 

“She’s a man-eater, and you must be her dinner,” she snarls.

“I wish,” I mutter. I really do. Mita’s pussy has done nothing but make me want Angelina even more.

“So you really want to stop?”

“I really do.” I’m positive about that.

She snickers bitterly as she stands. “Email me when you’re over Angelina because she’s done with you already, and it seems you haven’t gotten the memo.”

She slams the door on the way out. Maybe Angelina is done with me, but I’m not like the other guys she has supposedly “eaten up.” I’m family. I’ll see her again. I’ll take solace in that fact until I figure out how to get over her.

Chapter 15

The Amends Maker

“That’s it!” Jacques announces.

Ludlow, Lee, Matt, John, Thurston, and I clap. Thirteen straight hours of work and we’ve just finished watching the entire movie with the soundtrack laid. Ludlow is going to take it back to re-lay some of the voiceovers, but that’s all. In other words, it’s a wrap.

To celebrate we go out for drinks at a bar on Melrose Avenue. A friend of Ludlow’s owns it. The place is packed for a Thursday night. But then I remember that the night industry people like to hang out and do their own brand of networking in the guise of “having drinks.” Since Jacques Blanchard and Ludlow Dean are in the vicinity, I’m able to sit alone to nurse my gin and tonic. I’m worried about the brief encounter I had with Mita last night. There will be hell to pay if Angelina ever gets wind of it.
 

“So what’s next?” Jacques says as he coolly takes the empty stool beside me.

He’s been making rounds through the bar, talking, laughing, and shaking hands.
 

“I’m all out of ideas,” I say.
 

He holds up a pack of cigarettes, showing it to the bartender, who reminds me of a real-life Dirty Harry.

“Does anyone care if Jacques blows a lung?” he asks the room.

There’s a chorus of no’s and the like.

“Shit, since you put it that way!” Jacques tucks the cigarettes back into the inside of his jacket. He ignores the laughing and elbows me. “I have another project coming up in two weeks—interested?”

I
tsk
at the obvious. “Hell yeah.”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

“Me too.” I take a celebratory swig of my drink.
 

“You haven’t asked me about Angel once,” Jacques says.

I cough, nearly choking on what I swallowed. “No, I haven’t,” I strain to say. “How is she?”

“Angel is Angel. She auditioned to play a dancing hooker in a parody of Humpty Dumpty. I didn’t know who to call to make sure she didn’t get the fucking part.”

“You probably should’ve tried Jack.” I’m being cynical, but he probably knows somebody who knows somebody who could’ve made sure Angelina was passed over.

Jacques narrows an eye as though he’s offended. There has to be something about Jack he just doesn’t like.
 

He shakes his head. “I could’ve gotten her a part in
Kinky Boots
,
Lion King
,
Chicago
, you name it. But she chooses to dance in front of a cardboard box junkie that loiters on a wall somewhere in Harlem.”

I chuckle. Angelina is definitely the kind of woman who marches to the beat of her own drum. “Remember when you told me that she’ll pull me close but will remain a million miles away?” I ask.

“And I meant it.”

“She’s only a million miles away. She’s through pulling me close.” My throat gets tight just thinking about it. Am I supposed to fucking cry or something to get over her?

“You haven’t heard from her?”

“I haven’t spoken to her since May.”

“What the fuck did you do?”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“She wouldn’t tell me. She likes you too much.”

I grunt. Shit, she sure has a funny way of showing it. “I fucked up. You want to hear it?”

“Nope. I like you, but I love my daughter.” Jacques pats the pack of cigarettes inside of his jacket. “I got to get the hell out of here. I have a plane to catch in the morning, but one more thing.”

“What is it?”
 

“If Angelina didn’t say anything to me about whatever the hell you’ve done, then that means you’re closer than you think.” He winks. “I’ll give you a call from Paris. The next gig is in New Orleans.”

That catches me off guard. “No shit?”

He smirks. “Yes, shit.”

That and hearing Angelina may not be through with me makes my night. After Jacques leaves I finish my drink. There’s no use in sticking around now that he’s gone. I step off the stool and turn around.

“Hi, Charlie Lord.” I stop. It’s the girl I had sex with at the W a few months ago. Her name is on the tip of my tongue. “Lilac?”

“Ha,” she scoffs. “You remembered?” I can see the pure hate she has for me in her eyes. And the only reason I recall her name is because of Angelina. I’ll never forget the fact that we both thought “Lilac” resembled Pocahontas.
 

“I do,” I say. It’s evident that she expected me to still be the asshole that might call her Lily or Lisa.

“Well, I lost my job because of you,” she says.

She’s trying to lay a guilt trip on me, and it’s not working. She’s an adult. She chose to stay and fuck, thinking she was going to get a part in a Hollywood movie out of it. But I did dangle the plastic carrot. I knew there wouldn’t be a role for her. I just wanted to make Monroe jealous, and as soon as I got the reaction I wanted, I tossed Lilac to the side. Who knows how far I would’ve taken it if Angelina hadn’t been there. Shit, if it weren’t for the forces of circumstance that brought Angelina to that trailer that day, then I wouldn’t be standing here at this very moment. There would be no Jacques or movie scoring. I would’ve definitely abandoned
The Great Dame
by now, but then what?
 

“I’m sorry that you lost your job,” I say, and after an on-the- spot attitude adjustment, I really mean it.

“You were such a dick. Great in bed, but a fucking dick.”

“You’re right.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not. I wish I could go back and do things differently, but I can’t.”

She narrows her eyes to slits and then looks down at my cock. “So are you leaving here alone?”

And this is my problem. It’s always been too damn easy. She lost her job. I embarrassed her. Disappointed her. Yet she still wants me to take her somewhere and bang the hell out of her.
 

“Why would you want to have anything to do with me?” I ask out of curiosity. What do you have to do to a chick to make her realize that you don’t give second chances to guys who treated them like I have?

She shrugs coyly. “I don’t know. You said you were sorry. Were you lying?” The anger is back on her face.
 

“No. That’s why I’m leaving here alone. I’m not going to let myself do that shit to you again.”

She grabs me by the shoulder before I’m able to walk off. “So that’s it?”

I take her hand off of me. “That’s it.”

Damn, that felt good, as if I finally did something right for a change. I feel like I’m walking on clouds. The L.A. night is warm, and the air is stale. And yet it’s another best night of my life. I get in my car, which is parked along the curb across the street from the bar. I plug my cell phone into the amplifier because I have a call to make. There was a time in my past when I wanted to change the course I was on. I lifted a pamphlet from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on 48
^th
Avenue in Manhattan, which listed the twelve steps to sobriety. I read down to the step regarding making direct amends and then crumpled the pamphlet and tossed it in the gutter along with the other trash. I didn’t get it then, but I sure as hell get it now. I feel vindicated, and since I want to take this feeling and run with it, I make the call.

One ring and Monroe says, “What, Charlie?”
 

“I have something to say to you. Are you busy?”

Her voice is silent, but her thinking is loud. “What do you want?”

“Just to talk.”

She snickers facetiously. “Now you want to talk?”

I sigh with regret. “Shit, I’m sorry for not calling you back. I just finished a job.”

“Yeah, I know you’re working with Jacques Blanchard. How close did that get you to fucking his daughter?”

“Ouch,” I say because hearing that stung.
 

Monroe blows a forceful breath. “Damn it. That was mean. I apologize. I’m trying to find my happy, and I can’t do that if you’re around.”

I shrug as I watch two women walk past. One waves, and I gaze past her. “I understand. Good night, Monroe.”