The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (31 page)

He turned me over with a gentle-but-firm instruction to get on my knees. Then he said, “Your dreads aren’t extensions, right? They’re real. If they’re real, you’ve made my night, my month, my whole year.”

“They’re real,” I said, confused. “But why does it mat—”

He entered me and, without warning, yanked my hair. Hard.

It was completely unexpected, and so freaking hot I nearly came right there.

“Your hair is beautiful,” he said. “Long enough to pull, but I don’t have to worry about pulling it out.” He held on to my dreads, seeming to know instinctively when to pull them and how hard for maximum pleasure.

Fourth of all, there was the tracking of my orgasm. “Are you close?” he asked me a few times. “Tell me when you get close.”

There were some false alarms, a few times when I thought I was moving close to the edge, but then Mike would do something different …

Fifth of all, Mike was a very distracting lover. Sex with him didn’t resemble anything I had ever experienced before, so I had trouble concentrating
on making sure that I got mine. But in the end, I didn’t even have to tell him when I started getting really close, because he seemed to know.

He pulled out and flipped me over. It was a simple missionary, nothing new, but the way he slow-grinded into me, hitting my clit every time he came to the top of the circle, you would have thought he reinvented the position.

My breaths started coming out in short bursts. And I could feel the orgasm rising up in my pelvis like a storm.

And that’s when he finally kissed me. Connected his delicious lips to mine and rode and rode me until I was screaming into his mouth with pleasure. It had never been like this, shouldn’t be like this. It was too much. And when he came, it was like he pushed a button and flooded me with a wave of pleasure so strong that there was no afterglow, just aftermath: me pressing my face into his shoulder and crying, and him comforting me like he had accidentally hurt me as opposed to gifting me with the best sex of my life. I felt like somebody else, an entirely new person. So very, very good!

I meant to say “Thank you,” but I felt too weak to speak. So instead I held on to him, while Mike whispered into my ear, “It’s all right. That was intense, huh? But it was good. We were good. I really enjoyed that. Don’t worry about crying. Just feel it, okay?”

I nodded, not seeing how I had much choice but to feel it.

Eventually, he moved out of me. “I’ve just got to get rid of the condom,” he said.

But then he came right back and pulled the covers over both of us. “One last position,” he said. “Turn on your side, away from me.”

To my surprise, he wrapped me in his arms, spooning me from behind. He smoothed my hair and said, “Let’s try to go to sleep, okay?”

Going to sleep was pretty easy this time. I closed my eyes, the sex still swirling around inside of me, and the real world faded away, giving way to dreams tinted purple and hazy with the emotions that Mike had stirred up, Caleb far from my mind.

It was waking up the next morning that was hard.

Because as soon as I opened my eyes to the harsh morning light, I no longer felt warm and sensual. No, in the morning I remembered how brazen I had been, how I had stripped for Mike Barker, Tammy’s ex-boyfriend, like a groupie. What had I done? Shame washed over me in bigger waves than my climax had the night before.

We had fallen asleep with him wrapped around me, but we had drifted over to separate sides of the bed during the night. So with one last fleeting look at Mike, who was lying on his back on the other side of the large bed, I ran out of there. I slowed only to grab the sarong that he had discarded near the door and wrap it around my naked body before running into the hallway.

I should have been looking where I was going, but then again, how was I supposed to know there would be a middle-aged woman standing on the landing with a tray of food?

I tried to stop but it was too late. I ran right into the woman, smacking into her so hard that we were both head-butted backward and the tray of food went flying over the railing.

“What the …” The poor gray-haired woman sat up, dazed and confused.

And I groaned, cupping my nose. It wasn’t broken or anything, but man did accidental head-butting hurt.

“Are you two okay?” Mike asked.

I looked up to see him standing above us in the doorway of his room, dressed in nothing but a pair of hastily thrown-on gym shorts. So much for the stealth getaway.

“Michael, I was bringing you your breakfast, because Frederic had already dished it up and you hadn’t come down. I thought you were having a lie-in. Is this your guest?” She glanced over at me, but then looked away again so quickly that I didn’t have to be told that Mike’s sarong hadn’t stayed closed after the collision.

Sure enough, I looked down to see that I was pretty much naked from the waist up.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, covering myself up. “I didn’t see you when I came out.” I scrambled to my own feet as Mike helped the woman to hers.

“Thursday, this is my personal assistant, Harriet Murphy. Harriet, this is Thursday.”

“Oh, you’re Thursday, the woman who has been giving Michael so many problems with his biopic.” Harriet’s lips set and I could tell she was recasting me from clueless hussy to stubborn-brat hussy.

“I’m just going to go now,” I said, really wishing that I’d had the courage to throw myself over that railing yesterday.

“Wanna have breakfast?” Mike asked.

Harriet glared at me. “Yes, we can ask Frederic to whip up a whole new breakfast, since you ruined the first one.”

As lovely as that sounded, I said, “Um, no, I think I’ll go. Thanks, though.”

I gave a little wave, and beat a hasty exit down the stairs.

Back in the pool house, I had to sit on the bed and hyperventilate for a little bit. This was terrible. What had I done? Betrayed my dying friend, and for what? Just to feel better about myself for a little while? I had suspected that I was starting to lean toward the wrong side of selfish for a while now, but this had confirmed it.

I felt horrible, dirty-in-a-bad-way to my very core. And not even the ice-cold shower that I took in the outdoor fixture behind Mike’s pool house made me feel clean again. I had to get out of Mike Barker’s house, I realized while drying off back inside the pool house. But I didn’t have any money to get out of his house. Without the twenty thousand that he had promised me for a finished script, I would be stuck in this pool house for the conceivable future. But I couldn’t get the twenty thousand without a script.

I looked at the messenger bag that held my laptop, then toward the small wooden desk sitting underneath the pool house’s one window and made a decision. I fished out some sweatpants and one of my purple NYU T-shirts from my suitcase, put them on, and started writing.

It was like riding a bicycle. Well, a rusty bicycle. It definitely felt strange to open my screenwriting program, Final Draft, for the first time in over three years, but after a few starts and stops it all came back to me, and I managed to clock twenty pages before my stomach switched from mildly asking to full-on demanding that I eat something. I didn’t want to go back into the main house, but I also didn’t want to faint, as my body was threatening it would do if I didn’t get something to eat soon. In the end, I decided to risk it, promising myself that I would go and get a microwave and a bunch of non-perishable groceries as soon as I finished the day’s writing.

I knew that the chance of Mike or his hostile personal assistant being in the kitchen at three in the afternoon was little to none. Still, I felt rather unsettled as I made my way back into the house. And it wasn’t just because of the possibility of running into Mike again. It was the screenplay, which was already sort of getting away from me. I had opened my version of the Rick T biopic with scenes from both my mother’s and my father’s lives. Juxtaposing my mother’s upbringing in the Marcy Projects of New York with six brothers and sisters against my father’s suburban life in upstate Connecticut as the only child of a solidly middle-class preacher and his kindergarten teacher wife.

It was meant to show what a fraud Rick T was, but instead, when he and my mother met at an awards banquet for Columbia University scholarship winners, it read more like a great love story. Opposites attract and all of that. Like they both had something that the other needed. And the montage that happened after he discovered her journal of poetry was feeling less like watching a poser try to be something he wasn’t and more
like a genuine transformation of a formerly middle-class kid into a political dynamo.

Rick T wasn’t coming off as a saint, but he definitely wasn’t the villain of the piece, as originally intended. At least not yet, I reminded myself, coming in through the kitchen’s back door. The screenplay might not have started off as strong as I wanted it to, but Rick T would definitely get his before the end.

I opened the refrigerator door and found nothing but an assortment of juices, milk, salad ingredients, and fresh vegetables. Ugh, Mike was obviously one of those health nazis. I closed the fridge and grabbed an apple out of the fruit bowl (by far the sweetest thing in the entire kitchen) and took an unsatisfying bite.

Apple in mouth, I looked through the cabinets and, after a protracted search, found some shredded wheat. Shredded wheat and skim milk didn’t sound like the best lunch ever, but it would do until I got to the grocery store. So I fixed myself a bowl of cereal and poured myself a cup of grapefruit juice. Then I gathered it all up to take back to the pool house. But just as I was nearing the door, someone said behind me, “So you’re going to sneak out without talking to me?”

I nearly dropped the bowl and the glass, I was so surprised to hear Mike’s voice. I turned around to see what I had missed when I came in. The kitchen wasn’t a rectangle, but a backwards L. And if you were distracted, it was perhaps easy to miss the other half of the kitchen around the corner from the fridge, where a large breakfast nook could be found with what looked like a genuine diner booth, big enough to seat six.

Mike was sitting at the booth with an iPad in front of him.

“Mike,” I said. “I didn’t see you there.”

He gave me a look like,
Sure you didn’t
, and stood up. “We need to talk,” he said.

“Actually, I’m on a writing roll with this Rick T script, so I should really be getting back,” I said.

“Thursday.” And that was all he said, but the look on his face said the rest. I didn’t know how to feel at that moment, torn as I was between guilt and the determination not to get sucked into his charm trap again.

“My shredded wheat is getting soggy,” I said. “Can we talk later?”

I didn’t wait for him to agree, just opened the door with my free hand and backed out of the kitchen. But his eyes were on me as I left, hot and steady and all-knowing. Like a wolf sizing up its prey.

There is a story that screenwriters love to retell, and it goes like this: Sylvester Stallone wrote the screenplay for
Rocky
in three and a half days.

That’s it. Pure and simple. But it’s the biggest and most enduring screenwriting legend in Hollywood, the one repeated by the most writers and in the most screenwriting books.

There had been a lot of back and forth throughout the years about whether this story was fact or fiction. And to my knowledge, no one had ever asked Stallone publicly whether he rewrote before actually showing it to anyone. But the legend endured, a shining beacon to all would-be screenwriters, its promise oh-so-alluring in its ease. And deep down every wannabe writer wanted to think up a story so good that a concise one-hundred-and-twenty-page script could come tumbling out of her or him in eighty-four passion-fueled hours.

Well, I was ready to call bullshit on that legend. Unlike Stallone, I actually had an MFA, experience writing, and a laptop as opposed to a typewriter. And it still took me no less than five days of barely eating or sleeping to write the Rick T biopic. Then it took me two more days of editing to make the thing comprehensible.

But when I was done, Stallone was all I could think about. Was this how he had felt when he finished
Rocky
, buzzed up with the adrenaline of a story that needed to be told, wanting to show it to everybody and nobody at the same time?

It hadn’t turned out how I expected. I had put everything I had known about my father’s career and my parents’ relationship into the screenplay, including the mistress-turned-wife and the real story of my mother’s suicide. Some ugly, ugly stuff made it on to the page. But then there was also the good stuff. The years when MTV was playing his singles, the spate of black nineties movie soundtracks that had included his songs. And the whole thing ended with him getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame back in 2008.

That had been the last invitation I had received from Rick T, and it went unanswered. But I had watched the rebroadcast on VH1 and had been struck by how well he still performed, how he delivered on stage, but also how he seemed to realize that this supposed honor marked the end of an era and made him the last of a dying breed of rappers who actually had something worthwhile to say and could make money saying it.

The final scene in the script was the speech he made at that ceremony about the responsibility of musicians to leave behind some information for future generations, to make an impact while they could. “Because no one listens to you when you’re old. So if you’ve got something to say, say it now and say it bold. And if everything you have to say has already been said before, consider doing us all a favor, and keep that noise to yourself.”

Classic Rick T. A few younger rappers had made comments about him being old, about him being jealous because he never had their kind of record sales, even at the height of his fame. Maybe they were right. But maybe Rick T was right, too.

I was so tired, I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong anymore.

I typed Mike’s e-mail address into a new message window, attached the script, and in the subject line wrote, “Let me know when I can pick up my check.”