Something Fierce (5 page)

“Not bad,” she said, taking in the cherry cupboards and granite counters.

“I’ll show you the rooms we didn’t defile after breakfast.”

“Defile?” she said. “You mean
christen
.”

“Yeah. That’s what I meant to say.” He added food from the pantry and refrigerator to the bowls and utensils on the counter. He turned then to see her studying him. “What?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Why would a man leave the City of Angels for…the Mistake by the Lake? It has to have something to do with a woman. Right?”

“It had to do with a lot of things.”

“So tell me the story.”

“For an artist, Los Angeles is a big, sexy city and pure heaven if you know the right people and get the right breaks. Otherwise, it’s being trapped on a stair climber…in hell.”

“Sounds a little overly dramatic, Professor.”

“That too,” Seth said, pouring a cup of milk into a stainless steel bowl. “Anyway, L.A. had lost its shine for me about the same time my publisher told me that a community college in Ohio had begun using my novel in their classes and wanted to know if I’d consider being a guest instructor for a year. And here I am.”

“That’s not a story. That’s a synopsis. I want the story. And don’t even think about leaving out the woman part.”

“No, no. A gentleman does not—”

“A gentleman?”

“That’s right. A gentleman does not talk about another woman to the one he’d spent the night making love to.”

“Ooo, making love? I thought we were fucking.”

“The two have been known to overlap.”

“Uh-huh. Quit stalling and tell me the story.”

He picked up the spatula and said, “Do you need a spanking before breakfast?”

“I always need a spanking. I’m a very bad girl.”

“There’s little doubt about that,” he said and told her how he’d moved to Los Angeles after being hired by an independent film company to adapt
The Fourth Option
into a movie. The company went bankrupt before shooting started and he saw only a tiny fraction of the money he was owed for months of hard work. “I’ve always believed that things happen for a reason,” he told Kerri, hugging a bowl against his hip and mixing the pancake batter with a large wooden spoon, “so I didn’t get too worked up about it because I figured that I must have been led to L.A. for something else.”

“Which was?”

“Haven’t figured that out yet. But at the time, I thought it was because I was supposed to meet the woman who’d been hired to direct the film.”

“Enter the woman,” Kerri said. “I knew it. And her name?”

“Why do you want to know this?”

“Because you’re interesting. Besides, I did all the talking last night.”

“You did not.”

“I did. I blabbed on and on and you were too polite to tell me to shut up already.”

“Not true. I enjoyed hearing about your life.”

“So let me enjoy hearing about yours. The director’s name was…?”

“Megan.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Yes. She was pretty.” He and Megan had hit it off immediately. Both dreamers with working-class backgrounds—she from Long Island, New York, he from a small town in western Pennsylvania—they had plans of hitting the big-time. After moving in together, it soon became apparent that two dreamers in one household was at least one too many. “Someone needed a real job,” he said, “and Megan decided that it should be her because she needed a whole production company with access to millions of dollars to get a decent shot as a director while I only needed my laptop and time.” Sooner or later, Megan was sure, Seth was bound to write something Hollywood wanted to buy and then they’d be in the door. She took a job in the human resources department of a film company, which allowed her to make connections in the business while still earning a paycheck.

Seth put the batter aside and laid two frying pans, one large and one small, on the stove. Kerri listened intently as he told her how hard he’d worked cranking out script after script, as well as treatments for film and television and how he’d learned to reduce an entire movie down to a logline or a one-minute pitch. “Creating the stuff was just the first step. Then you had to get the right people to read it or at least listen to the pitches. We didn’t know the right people. So Megan suggested that we start crashing parties to meet them. She was good at working the room, finding out who could and couldn’t open doors. I wasn’t. I hated it. It was awful. I did get some meetings though and had a couple close calls, but like the lottery, a ticket is worth millions or nothing at all. I was trying so hard to come up with the right number that my writing was turning to shit. Living in the city was expensive and Megan wasn’t making much. Financially, we were barely surviving. It was tough. Put a huge strain on our relationship. By the time we were actually getting invited to the occasional networking party, I was pretty discouraged and we weren’t getting along at all. I just couldn’t do the parties anymore.”

“Why didn’t she go to these parties by herself?”

“She did. And a few months later, she met a rich producer who was looking for a young, unknown director to do a movie in Barcelona.”

“Did she get it?”

“Eventually,” Seth told Kerri as she hopped off of the stool and poured herself another cup of coffee. “At first, she figured he was just hitting on her. I mean, who is going to hire an HR girl to direct his film? She called him ‘the Eye Doctor’ because every sentence out of his mouth started with ‘I’ and went on to tell an anecdote starring himself and some famous actor or director. This was exactly the kind of guy that made those parties unbearable for me.”

“Was he hitting on her?”

“Of course. We were living on soup and crackers and he was taking her out to L.A.’s trendiest restaurants. Business dinners, of course.”

“Except they weren’t.”

“Hell, no. I told her what he was up to, but she didn’t believe it or didn’t want to believe it. This was her big shot. Her once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And she did get the job. Filming started right after their honeymoon.”

“What a bitch.”

“Nah,” he said, adjusting a small flame under each of the pans. “I’m sure I was no picnic to be around at that time. The Eye Doctor played it well. He got a damned good director and a good-looking wife. She’ll eventually see him for who he is. And by that time, she’ll have a couple movies under her belt. I wish her the best.”

“But you still miss her.”

He cracked eggs into a fresh bowl. “Can we talk about something else now?”

“It’s okay. You can tell me. I understand.”

“Yes. I still miss her sometimes.”

“Do you think you will get back together with her someday?”

“Nope,” he said, beating the eggs with a fork. “Our time has passed. She made her choices. I made mine. That’s that. Life goes on.”

“That’s sad.”

“It wouldn’t have worked between us anyway. She loved L.A.; her future was there. I hated it; my future wasn’t there.”

“So where is your future?”

He shrugged, emptying the eggs into the small frying pan. “I have a job here till May, then…no clue.”

She grinned at him. “You’re having a blast here, aren’t you?”

“Making you breakfast?”

“Being the
jewel
of Northeast.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, please! The students love you. Your novel is required reading in two courses and everyone thinks it’s great. And let’s not forget all those cute little co-eds who refer you as Professor Hotness.”

“Professor Hotness?”

“Like you don’t know.”

“That’s news to me.”

“Well, maybe so, but don’t even
pretend
you don’t know the girls are all gaga over you.” He couldn’t help but smile and she pointed her finger at him. “Look at you! You love it!”

He laughed. “It’s fun.”

“I can’t believe that last semester was the first time you ever taught; you’re really good at it.”

“It doesn’t feel like work. Not the lectures, anyway. I show them what I love about a piece…or if they hate it, I invite them to tell me what they hate about it and—”

“And you dare them to stay disconnected.”

“I do?”

“Totally. You challenged us to say we’ve never been in love or at least wanted to be. Never done something crazy or felt whatever we were reading about: hate, embarrassment, anger, confusion, hope, depression, whatever. And,” she continued, “you reminded us that writers didn’t write this stuff to get famous or to have it picked apart by professors and students, but because they were caught up in some serious shit and writing about it was the only way they knew to get through it. Which, of course, made us want to write because, Lord knows, we were all going through our own serious shit.”

“I’m not as calculated as you seem to think,” he said, stirring the eggs, adding pepper.

“Not calculated. Honest. You wake people up. Make them aware of themselves. That’s your thing.”

“It is, huh?” Seth poured enough batter into the large pan to make a monster pancake.

“Totally. I’ll never forget the second day of class when you caught that dude
sleeping
and asked him what the hell.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Why not? You woke him up. Literally and figuratively. When he said the only reason he was in college was to keep his parents off his back, you told him he might as well be in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”

“That was over-the-top.”

“It was great,” she laughed, “when you opened the door and told him to make a run for it!”

“That could have backfired. Big time.”

“But it was obvious that you meant it. You weren’t the least bit condescending.”

“I should have let him sleep. He never shut up after that.”

“That’s what you get,” Kerri said, running her hand along the smooth counter, exploring the kitchen. “Waking people up can be dangerous.” She pulled a butcher knife from the block and looked at her reflection in the blade. “Have you slept with a lot of beautiful women?”

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“A legitimate one.” She thrust the knife back in its home. “You fuck like a guy who’s had a lot of practice.”

“My fair share, I suppose.” He divided a generous portion of scrambled eggs between two plates. “It’s never been about seeing how many I could get.”

“Of course not. You run deeper than that; definitely not that one-night-stand type. The protagonist in
The Fourth Option
is you when you were younger. Right?”

“He is a fictional character that I created when I was younger.” He narrowed his eyes. “Didn’t we already have this conversation?”

She closed her eyes. “‘He learned that happy hours were some of the saddest places on earth,’” she said, quoting him, “‘and that a night spent with a stranger was little more than assisted masturbation…two people trapped inside their own minds using the other’s body to get whatever they desperately needed at that moment. He wanted more than that…’”

“You weren’t kidding about the photographic memory,” he said, flipping the pancake and wondering where she was going with this line of conversation, pretty sure that it had something to do with those four little words she’d mumbled in her sleep when he had covered her up this morning.

“I’ve always felt like that,” she said. “Like I was trapped in my own mind. It didn’t matter who the other person was. Just that there was someone there and he was into me. Last night was different. It was hot and wild but…it was more than that. It was special.”

“I thought we were just ‘fucking?’” he said, flipping the first golden pancake onto one of the plates and handing it to her.

She grinned. “There might have been a little overlapping going on.”

He nodded toward the table. “Please start,” he said. “I’ll join you as soon as my pancake is done.”

She sat down and started to eat. “This is delicious. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said and joined her several minutes later with his own plate of food. He smiled at her. She smiled back and the guilt rose up in him again. She was so young; he didn’t want to hurt her.

“I made you uncomfortable. Saying last night was special. Didn’t I?”

“No,” he said. “It was special. Is special.”

“But…?”

“But…we barely know each other, Kerri.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know where this is going; I don’t know if there’s anywhere it
could
go.”

“Yesterday you were rescuing me and today you are protecting me. Do I really appear that fragile to you?”

“No, not at all. But I want to be up front. While I am having a great time with you, I feel…a little overwhelmed…off-kilter.”

“It’s funny,” Kerri looked down, “but you make me feel exactly opposite.”

“I didn’t say
you
were making me feel—”

“I don’t expect anything from you,” she said, plucking a napkin from the holder in the center of the table and wiping her mouth. “Really, I don’t. Would I like to see you again? Of course. I’d love to have more talks with you. More sex with you. To just be around you, really. But if this is all there is then it’s all there is. Like I said in the email, I’m not a child. I know the risks.” She gathered their plates and carried them to the sink.

“That sounds all cool and convincing,” Seth said, “but…feelings are…you can’t control how…I mean, you might say…”

“I was awake this morning when I told you I loved you,” Kerri said from the kitchen. “More coffee?”

Seth opened his mouth and closed it. This girl who seemed to be chasing him was suddenly ahead of him, waiting for him to catch up.

She brought the coffee pot to the table and refilled his cup. “And I meant it.” She looked down at him and into his eyes. “I do love you. But I loved you before I had sex with you, even before you kissed me at the stoplight. You are not responsible for that. You’re not under any obligations.” She went back to the kitchen, shut off the coffee maker, rinsed the pot, and said over her shoulder, “I think I loved you the moment you walked into room 121.” Rejoining him at the table, she added, “Surely a romantic like you believes in love at first sight.”

He didn’t know if he did or not, but in that moment, he realized that he did believe love—in all its incarnations—was something people were entirely too stingy with. Hadn’t all of his love affairs been—to varying degrees—
love
affairs? And if he hadn’t been afraid of the possible consequences of those words this morning, wouldn’t he have been warmed by them, wouldn’t they have touched him deeper than he’d been touched in a long time, wouldn’t there have been a natural desire to return that love?