Rock Me (New Adult Rockstar Romance)

This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, events, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons--living or dead--is entirely coincidental.

Rock Me copyright @ 2013 by Evelyn Glass. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

CHAPTER ONE

The alarm goes off and a crackly voice blasts out of the radio: “Welcoooooome, everybody, good morning, good morning, good morning! Wake up, New York City! Let’s get this day going!”

I open my eyes for the first time and am promptly blinded by the sun pouring through the holes in my raggedy curtains. Rolling over to get out of bed, I get tangled in the sheets and fall to the floor with a thick
thud
that rattles everything on my bedside table. There’s a lot of me.

“A woman and a half in every direction” is what my friends used to say.

My mother would’ve preferred the phrase “fat slut.”

She’s rail-thin, always has been, and the sight of my jiggling curves never failed to bring a condescending sneer to her face. She made sure I knew I was big, every single day of my life. “Whale of a daughter” and “giant pig” were another two of her favorites.

From my sprawled position on the floor, I take a bleary-eyed glance around my apartment. It’s a cramped cube, sparse and decrepit. Sometimes I feel like the filing cabinets at work are bigger than the shithole in which I live. The white paint on the walls looks as if it was splashed on haphazardly by an apathetic subletter, failing to cover the dark splotches of what I pray wasn't the blood of a former tenant. Knowing this part of town, though, that scenario isn’t too unlikely. It sucks. But hey, it’s the only place I can afford.

Heaving a sigh, I drag myself to the “bathroom,” a sink and toilet stashed behind a changing screen. I wash my face, rake a toothbrush across my teeth, and try to arrange my long black hair into some semblance of a professional style.

I don’t have time to shower – I have to be at work in twenty minutes.
Where is my uniform?
I wonder, peering through the piles of clothes strewn around the room. I find it and lay it on the bed, trying to smooth wrinkles out of the crinkly polyester polo with the grocery store’s grinning pig logo printed on the chest.

Squeezing myself into the shirt and a pair of khakis, I grab my keys and hustle out the door.

Down on the street, the sidewalks are churning with people. Housewives walking their dogs, children with backpacks, men in crisp suits.

Every now and then I glance back and see one of those men staring at me with a peculiar hunger in his eyes. I swear one of them licked his lips once.

I cut through the crowds, lumbering towards the corner store where I work, the fabric of my khakis heating up as my thighs rub together. The weather has cooled down since summer ended, but I’m still sweating by the time I make it inside the door. The bell clangs, announcing my entrance, and I quickly scurry back behind the counter to clock in.

***

I’ve only been here for three hours, but it feels like centuries have gone by. Working at a grocery store is monotonous – the same fake smile, the same banal conversation, over and over and over again. My feet are aching from standing up for so long. The only way to cope with the boredom is to slip off into dull unthinkingness.

The bell rings at the door for the thousandth time today and I prep my welcoming smile, though my thoughts are cloudy and distant. A blonde girl wearing tight jeans and a flowing silk shirt, wanders inside. We make eye contact and suddenly I realize that I know her.

“Sarah?” I ask.

She looks up and her eyes widen. “Jodie Sutton! Oh my god, girl, where have you been? I haven’t seen you in ages! You’ve been seriously M.I.A.”

I smile sheepishly. Working two jobs in a futile attempt to stave off student loans, all while trying to finish my class work and graduate, has made me somewhat of a ghost, especially in the last year.  I don’t even remember the last time I went out to socialize. Sarah, though, used to be a good friend way back in freshman year when I was still buzzing with the high of escaping my mother’s abusive clutches.

“I’ve been working a lot,” I say. “Trying to pay for things.”

“That’s understandable,” she replies, smiling and nodding as if to express her sympathy. “But you should come out with us one of these days! You gotta have some fun, at least before college is over.”

I smile and nod as the conversation goes on, but I’m not really paying attention anymore. Lately, I have found myself retreating into my head whenever I interact with people, hiding behind a façade of smiles and “mmhmm” and “of course,” anything to make the conversations end. I am vaguely aware of promising to call her later, something about a concert  and a hot lead singer. She leaves.

I feel like I’m asleep all the time, like I’m stumbling through my motions in a daze. I wonder if I’m ever going to wake up. I wonder if I am even capable of awakening myself.

Sleeping Beauty had a prince to kiss her. But I have no one.

***

I catch a glance of myself in an oil slick next to the bus stop as I wait to catch the shuttle downtown. In the puddle, I study my features carefully, scrutinizing the familiar flaws. My black hair cascades down, finger-tooled waves winding over my shoulders.
Too thick.
My smooth and buttery skin glimmers in the wetly reflective surface.
Too black.
I flash a quick smile, admiring, for just one self-conscious second,
how white and straight they look against my plumb lips. I close my mouth quickly.
Just not pretty enough.
I close my eyes and rest my head against the plastic pole supporting the bench. I can feel the fog drifting over my thoughts again, separating me from the shriek of car horns and the dizzying lights of neon signs all around me…

***

“Jodie, you disgusting pig, come clean this up immediately!” my mother barked, her tiny wrist quivering like a javelin as she points to the stack of dishes in the sink. I try protesting to her – “They’re not mine!” – but her quick backhand makes my jaws clack together.

I immediately resume silence, head spinning, the stinging red shadow of her left hand branded across my face. By the time I turned ten, she had stopped taking her rings off before she slapped me. She would always claim that I couldn’t feel any pain “through all my blubber, anyways.”

Silence was the easiest way to cope. The less I said – the more I just accepted her taunts and her strikes – the less frequently she paid attention to me at all. I decided long ago that it was better to be ignored than abused.

To a certain extent, though, it didn’t matter. The very sight of me sent her into apoplectic rages. She was the vainest of women, my mother, the kind who spent hours in front of a hand mirror going over every newfound gray hair and freshly formed wrinkle. I couldn’t help that I was bigger than her. I wasn’t even fat, really, just curvaceous – voluptuous, you could say. Still, it infuriated her. She hated me.

By the time I was fifteen, I was wearing DD cups. The snickers and side glances from boys in my class invariably made my cheeks burn not with pride but with embarrassment. My mother’s abuse had trained me to stay out of everyone’s sight. As a result, I never had boyfriends when I was growing up.

Instead, I spent many, many nights under the covers, exploring my own curves, my own sensations, dipping my fingers into secretive places.

It took almost twenty-one years on this planet before I lost my virginity. It happened with a bland looking boy who lived down the hall of my dorm. We went on a few dates, and after one of them, I let him take me to a lookout point a few miles west of the city. We kissed in his backseat for a long time.  I remember his hands scrabbling to unhook my bra. The look in his eyes, though, when my massive breasts were freed from the restraining fabric, lit a fire somewhere deep in me, a tiny flicker of recognition that maybe I wasn’t as vile as my mother accused me of being. I let him bend me over the hood of his car that night, thinking the whole time as he slid into me from behind that maybe I could find a man who would make me feel wanted, who could make me feel as sexy and feline as I did during those long nights under the covers, alone…

***

I startle myself out of my reminiscing. The bus is at the curb and passengers are disembarking. I stand up, grab my purse, and board, dropping my change in the receptacle on my way to a window seat.

The city passes by the window as we pull away from the curb and headed down the avenue. People, storefronts, streetside vendors hawking their wares – everything is whirling vivaciously, the whole world contorting and glistening, just on the other side of the glass.

On my side, in the stale frigidity of the crosstown shuttle, the only sounds are senile murmurs and the grating buzz of overhead fluorescents.

I flip open my cheap cell phone to check my voicemail.
You have one new message,
it chirps in my ear.

“Ms. Sutton, this is Charles Barelle with University Financing, Inc.” His voice is curt, patriarchal, like he knows everything about me and disapproves. “You are in danger of becoming delinquent on your student loan payments. Please give me a call back immediately and we can discuss your options. My phone number is –” I hit delete and his voice cuts off.

I can’t think about everything swimming over my head right now. I’m hustling to make ends meet, but every day, I stumble across a new threat of eviction. I have to constantly scramble to pull together enough funds to stay in school. The only people who call me anymore are debt collectors. The temporary secretary job to which I am heading is the only thing keeping me from full-on homelessness.

The bus screeches to a halt in front of a skyscraper – my destination. I step off, cross the street, and push through the gold-lined doors. A famous insignia is splashed across the glass front, huge curly initials – CB.

Cyrus Bellamy.

The whole building operates with a hushed silence, as if Bellamy’s infamously grim persona weighs down on everyone who steps inside. Icy blond women in four-inch heels and pencil skirts that cling tightly to their razor-thin hips glide across the lobby with determined expressions on their faces. The tapping of their stilettos on the marble floor rings out a harsh staccato rhythm like a machine gun.

I’ve been working here for three months and I still get intimidated everyone time I walk through the lobby to the glistening bank of bronze elevators on the other side. Gulping, I stare at the ground as I move silently forward. The goddesses pirouetting around me with military precision make me feel meaty, thick. Their bodies swerve gracefully from expensively-implanted breasts down to the waist and hips of eight-year olds. Looking down at my own curves, I can’t help but seem inferior by compare.

An elevator opens up as I arrive. All of its occupants but one shuffle out, leaving behind a leggy blonde who surveys me brusquely as I enter. I don’t make eye contact, but I can feel her stares sweeping up and down my body, from my corpulent ankles, up the bulge of my khaki-encased calves, past hips that swell wide and breasts that threaten to explode from the silk button-up I wear for the secretary job. Her gaze is coldly clinical.

“What floor?” she asks, words dropping from between her pursed lips like ice melt.

“Tw-twenty, please,” I stutter awkwardly. She presses the button with a manicured nail.

We lurch upwards, gathering speed until I reach my floor. I step out, still feeling her eyes on my back.

The floor onto which I’ve walked is classily furnished – mahogany desks arranged in a labyrinth across the slick concrete floor, neat stacks of paper and shining new computers adorning every countertop. I walk to my seat in the back left, set my purse down on the table, and fire up the computer to check my email and get busy with my work. Mostly I file, though occasionally I run errands for the temp supervisor, a busty brunette named Carla. Ten minutes after I’ve sat down, she strolls over to my desk with an assignment.

“Good afternoon, Jodie. I need you to postpone whatever you’re currently doing so you can type up these meeting minutes. Bring them to me as soon as you’ve finished – Mr. Bellamy wants them right away,” she says.

A knot forms in my throat at the mere mention of his name. It cuts through my mental fog like a blade.