“Bree! Come on in, have a seat. Can I get you anything? Coffee?”
“Please,” I answered Chris and nodded to his secretary, Jan. I felt a quiet rush of pride at the fact that she no longer needed to ask how I liked it.
I had a standing coffee order in the office of Chris Fucking Jameson. How many people could say that?
“A couple of things have come up that we need to go over,” he said, turning to tap away the lockscreen on his computer.
“Yeah, of course,” I said. “Thanks,” I added to Jan, who was already setting the coffee cup down on the desk.
There was something odd about the way she nodded. Not at all jealous of me. It wasn’t that I liked jealous expressions — they actually made me really uncomfortable — but the absence of one stood out in an unsettling way.
“First thing’s first, the pilot came out amazing!” he said.
“Thanks! It did, right?”
It was only the proudest thing I’ve ever done. I felt like an exposed nerve every time it came up.
“You really put it all out there, honey. Powerful stuff.”
“Thanks.” I took a sip of the hot coffee, giving myself an excuse for how warm my face was.
“So, Fairmont has decided not to release the show,” Chris said, and his lips kept moving for a while afterward, as if those were words that could be digested on the fly, with room for more.
“Wait, what?” I interrupted him, probably for the first time ever.
“What now?” he asked, forcing me to point out the important part of what he’d just said.
“We’re not picked up?”
“They did decide to go a different direction with their final lineup,” said Chris.
“But… but you said it was a done deal,” I said.
“Yeah, I know, it’s a bitch,” he shrugged easily.
“So… but… so what does that mean?” I asked. “Are we looking at other studios?”
“Oh, no, no, Fairmont’s still technically picking up the rights,” he explained, “they’re just shelving it as a tax write-off and suspending further production indefinitely.”
“Suspending,” I repeated. “So, there’s a chance they might still…?”
I couldn’t get out any more than that through my collapsing throat.
Chris shrugged with what might have been a tiny flicker of pity. Or maybe it was just impatience. “That’s the spirit. Anything’s possible. But for now, let’s look to the future.”
“Okay,” I croaked and nodded vigorously, eager to hear that I still had one of those. “Yes. Yes, please.”
“You’re a champ, Bree,” said Chris. “So, I’ve got a few exciting leads for you. There’s an adaptation in the works for that comic book with the duck.”
One side of my paper coffee cup dented inward under my fingers, pulling away from the plastic lid and spilling a trickle of scalding heat down my fingers.
“Uh-huh,” I acknowledged.
“I think you’d be great for the part of Laura. She’s kind of messy, fun, free, right up your alley. She’s the main character’s stepmother, and they have this wonderfully tense relationship that evolves over two or three scenes in the current draft.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Filming starts late next year,” said Chris. “We’ll get you scheduled for the audition. It’s not an open call. You’ll probably only be up against a few dozen other candidates.”
“What’s the other one?” I asked.
Chris blinked. “The other one?”
“You said you had leads, plural?”
“Sure, sure,” he said, still looking at me oddly. “This one’s a little further down the line, which is good, because it’s apocalyptic, so it’d help your chances if you use the time to drop a few pounds.”
“No.”
The word came out so soft, so thin, and yet, it filled the entire room, imposing a silence I had never in my life prompted from Chris.
“Okay…” he finally said. He would have been giving side-eye if there had been anyone in the room besides me to give it to. “We’ll focus on the comic book movie.”
“No,” I repeated. It went easier this time, like pushing a car once it’s already rolling.
“No what, Bree?” Chris sighed.
I took a breath, preparing for another push. “A one in a few dozen chance… at a bit mom part… to start filming in a year and a half… if it even gets that far. And if it does, it might get trashed for a tax break before anyone ever sees it.”
“What can I tell you, hun? That’s just the business these days,” said Chris.
“Is there anything you can do for me sooner?” I asked.
“Anything I can do for you?” he repeated, like he didn’t supposedly work for me.
“Commercials? Anything?”
“You’re the one who decided to stop doing those,” he reminded me. “You didn’t like making commitments you couldn’t break without getting blacklisted, in case a ‘real opportunity’ came along.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. “If I could do it steady for a while—”
Chris laughed. “Ain’t nothing steady in this town. You know that. Even the TV series hire for like eight episodes at a time these days. No, I agree with you on the commercials. I think the best thing to do is stay the course. I’ll set up the auditions and see if I can’t drum up a few more—”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “The pilot was it for me. That’s all I’ve got.”
I’d been trying not to even think those words for so long, not to acknowledge the existence of any loss condition, any point so low that there was no path upward for a determined enough soul.
“I can see you’re upset,” said Chris. “I can understand that. I think we should hit pause and pick this up another day. You’re doing great, you really are. You’ve got the goods, the hunger, the can-do attitude. Something will work out. Go home, have a drink and a good cry—”
“You’re not listening to me,” I said. “I can’t keep ‘doing great’ like this. This is me all in and letting it ride. I’ve tapped out every resource I have. I’ve slept on every couch. Worn out every welcome. Maxed out every card. All so I could train and show up everywhere you tell me to, every time, can-do. I’ve put everything into giving myself the best shot, as many shots….”
Tears were trying to sneak in at the corner of my eyes, but I had learned pretty well how to control their comings and goings. They weren’t in danger of falling without my permission, not yet.
Chris’s face had hardened. His lower lip had thinned where the inner side of it had retracted between his teeth.
It was a cardinal sin to mention needing money. Suggesting that you deserved money, that was iffy enough. Sometimes it came across as confident, sometimes over-confident.
But if you needed money, that was your own unforgivably vulgar problem.
Chris pried his mouth open. “Honey—”
With one jerk of my arm — such a small, easy motion — I tossed the nearly full cup of coffee in his face.
“What the fuck?!” he screamed. At least, I was pretty sure that was what he was screaming. It was mostly just sounds of shock and rage.
He looked so far away, cursing and spitting, gripping his face with one hand and groping blindly for his desk tissue box with the other. His aim was off by about a foot.
I didn’t help him.
So, this was how my life ended.
There was a laugh, a laugh, nudging feebly at the underside of the thick numbness in my chest, because all I could think about was how, at least, I’d never have to hear Chris Jameson call me ‘Honey’ ever again.
I stood up, letting the chair scrape the floor, and was out the office door before he could get his eyes open again.
I never said goodbye to Jan.
#
I’d rideshared to the office, not knowing at the time exactly how I was going to get back. I set aside the idea of “back” and just walked along the cracked, crowded sidewalks of Hollywood — well, technically Toluca Lake — until I found a slightly less-traveled overpass.
It wasn’t over a freeway. No drivers to traumatize or inconvenience. Just the currently empty concrete trench of the LA River some forty feet below.
I put my hands on the railing, feeling every edge of the peeling band stickers that coated the rough metal. When no one yelled at me, I whipped my legs casually up onto the railing to sit.
I could just sit right here, until the moment felt right, and then the rest would be instant.
“It’s a hot one today.”
I yelped and gripped the metal beneath me in surprise, as the woman who’d spoken leaned both her forearms against the railing next to me.
She looked to be in her early thirties, maybe a shade younger than me. Stray lines of tattoos I couldn’t see in their entirety swirled across her dark skin, peeking out from under the collar and long sleeves of her leather jacket. Her hair was short and asymmetrical, tinted with the remains of several different colors. Her huge, bright eyes and magnificently sharp jaw were altogether unfair to exist on the same face. An hour ago, I would have been annoyed to see someone with such a natural gift of a face waste it with career-killing body mods, but given where my years of doing everything the right way had led, what did I know?
“The ice cream shop over there is doing a half-priced scoop happy hour thing.” The woman nodded toward the other side of the street. “And they’ve got air conditioning.”
I hadn’t had ice cream in five years. And now I couldn’t afford it anyway.
“I’m good, thanks,” I said.
The woman didn’t move.
“Really?” she asked, tilting her head toward me and raising an eyebrow. “You’re good?”
Those eyes were tough to look away from.
“No,” I admitted. “Not really.”
She nodded and patted the guardrail, sending a vibration down the line under my thighs. “Is it as bad as this?” she asked.
I felt a flicker of embarrassment at how obvious my intentions apparently were. The trapped laugh bubbled up weakly through my numbness. “It’s pretty bad.”
“How urgent?” she asked.
I let out an inarticulate “Huh?”
“What’ll happen if you don’t check out today?” she asked. “Someone coming for your family?”
The question sank in slowly, and I shook my head. “My family’s in Ohio. And not talking to me.”
“Cool. So, what, then?” the woman asked. “Unbearable cancer pains? Irresistible urges to send embarrassing texts to your ex?”
“Um… I might get arrested.” In spite of myself, I started taking stock of the situation I’d had my heart set on not sorting out. “And I definitely can’t go home. My roommate won’t give me any more credit when she finds out I’m not….”
“…Gainfully employed?” the woman pieced together.
I nodded.
She clapped her hands once, pleased. “Fantastic. That’s the easiest one to fix.”
I stared at her blankly. She looked far away, too, and just barely interesting enough to keep squinting at.
“When did you lose your job?” she asked.
I had no desire to explain to her that I’d never really had all that firm a grip on it in the first place. But she seemed to be able to hear something in my silence.
“Ah,” she said. “What were you? Musician? Actress?”
“Actress,” I admitted.
What I was.
“How far did you get?”
I swallowed. “Union,” I said. “Dozen legit credits or so. Big-time agent, who I just… fired.”
She nodded along. “Tough break. Bet they had it coming, though.”
Another laugh chipped its way out of me, dragging a shrug with it. “I don’t know. I might have just been shooting the messenger.”
The woman mirrored my shrug. “Well, either way, I’ve got a job I could really use some help on. It pays, you can stay with me, and no one has to know where you are, law enforcement included. Might be a good chance to think things over. When we’re done, if you still feel the same, I’ll drive you back up here myself. What do you say?”
I looked back over the edge of the overpass, at the hard, gray finality below. No worries. No hopes.
It wasn’t going anywhere.
“What kind of job?” I asked.
“Does it matter? You were going to throw that time in the trash anyway.”
“It’s mine to throw,” I said. “If you want it, give me the pitch.”
She smiled. Apparently, she was of the, it-shows-confidence school of thought. “I need someone to go to a party and pick up a package,” she said. “It’s not legal, or safe, but it’s a whole lot safer than what you had planned for this afternoon. One night’s work. Two nights’ lodging, five hundred bucks.”
Five hundred. Enough for an apology to my roommate. And maybe one last scoop of pistachio ice cream for me.
I pulled my legs back over onto the walkway side of the railing, one at a time.
The woman held out an arm for me to steady myself with. “I’m Webster, by the way.”
“Bree,” I said.
Webster jerked her head toward one end of the overpass and stepped toward it, walking backwards until she was sure I was following her. She tapped a key, and a perfectly generic black hatchback, low-end but new, beeped as it unlocked.
I slid into the front seat, feeling strangely small there, even though Webster was shorter than I was sitting down. She shifted into gear almost as soon as her ass touched the driver’s seat.
“Are you one of those bait girls?” I asked.
“One of those what now?” she asked.
“One of those ladies of the night who make out like they’re independent and successful, but they’re really just selling an illusion to recruit for some pimp?”
She smiled grimly. “You’ve been sold a lot of illusions, haven’t you?”
I just waited for a real answer.
“No,” she said. “That’s not what we do. Not mainly, anyway. And no one’s expecting you to fuck anyone you don’t want to.”
“We?” I asked.
Her smile warmed and widened. “We’re a select group of individuals with loosely like minds and unlike skills.”
#
Webster took us to one of the back streets of dilapidated mansions, surrounded by equally dilapidated tenements. The tenements were clearly still occupied, but the mansions — well, I guess no one who could afford this much square footage this close to Hollywood wanted to live with shattered sidewalks and hundred-year-old plumbing.
No one except… Webster?
No, she probably didn’t own it. Maybe didn’t own it. I wasn’t sure which raised fewer questions, honestly.
She led the way right up between the Grecian columns of the porch and opened the door, without needing a key.
“Hey, team!” she shouted. “We’re back!”
Three people glanced up from their spots sprawled out around the large, sparsely furnished front room.
“This is Bree.” Webster clapped me on the back.
“That was quick,” said a young woman with feathery pink tips to her dark hair, studying me from behind her laptop.
“Bree, this is Christina.”
Webster pointed to the woman who’d spoken.
“Liam.”
She indicated a solid wall of muscle and stubble who waved and then returned to scratching behind the ears of a tiny tabby cat — or maybe the cat only looked tiny in his arms.
“Ken.”
She had barely finished the one syllable of his name before Ken crossed the room and shook my hand.
He was Asian and a little older than me, with the grip of a salesman but a surprisingly genuine-looking smile.
And a gun. Just casually hanging there in an armpit holster.
He followed my gaze downward and laughed apologetically. “Sorry, you caught me coming in from my other job.”
He unfastened the top few buttons of his collared office shirt, slipped off the holster, and walked it over to a safe with handle like a ship’s wheel, retrofitted into the brick of the wall. He turned the wheel to show me it was latched, and I smiled at him, since I was obviously supposed to be assured by this.
“I don’t mean to put you out,” I told him. “I won’t be here long.”
The room suddenly filled with knowing smiles, like I’d said something adorable and childish and wrong, something that had sent everyone into fits of nostalgia for their own ignorant pasts.
“Of course.” Ken nodded. “But we’d be bad hosts if we didn’t make you comfortable. For however long.”
“Right…” I said. “So, anyway, is it a good time to ask again what exactly you want me to do?”
“Oh, it’s a fun one,” said Ken. “You just have to go to a fancy Hollywood party and steal a picture.”
“A picture?” I asked.
“It’s a framed picture, probably of a woman, or a couple,” Christina took over, her attention suddenly shifting to the conversation as the topic turned this way. She set her laptop aside and tented her fingers in front of her, gazing at me over the tops of them. “It should be on a desk in the upstairs office, third door on the right. Just get in, get it, and get out.”
“Oh, uh, okay…” I said, reminding myself that I was already probably wanted for a worse crime than burglary. “What if someone asks who I am?”
“Just try not to draw attention,” said Webster. “The party’s going to be packed with people who are trying to talk to somebody who’s somebody, and nobody there knows your face, right?”
Great. The one role someone was willing to cast me in was “invisible person no one talks to at a Hollywood party.”
I shifted my weight, trying to shake off the hurt. “Sure, but what if? Who am I? Who invited me? Why am I going upstairs?”
“You’re whoever the fuck you want,” said Christina. “You’re crashing, just like half the other people there. You’re going upstairs to do something other than steal a picture from a scumbag. Sound good?”
“Not much of an actor’s director, are you?” I asked.
She stared at me, her expression blank with a hint of annoyance. Anyone would think I’d begged to be here.
“Never mind,” I said. “I’ve got it.”
She nodded. “Good. Eight o’clock tonight. Be party ready.”
I glanced around at my total lack of possessions and transportation. “I mean, I’ll be here. The rest is kind of up to you guys.”
Webster put a hand promptly on my shoulder and escorted me up to one of the bedrooms. It was unfurnished except for a cot and half a dozen boxes of clothes, most of which had definitely never been her own. There were all different sizes and styles, every piece crumpled and bearing a faint, musty odor. I picked out a beaded purse, a slitted skirt, and a simple blouse with the fabric flatteringly gathered on the sides, which disguised the wrinkles nicely.
When I’d settled on all that, she walked me back downstairs, where Liam was scooping scrambled eggs and hotdogs onto mismatched plates.
He handed me one without a pause, and I wasn’t too proud, or too principled, to take it without bringing up that I had brought nothing to contribute.
The eggs were perfectly fluffy. Not bad at all for a bonus meal.
“Hey, Christina!” Ken called. “Meatspace check-in time. Running on low battery, yet?”
Christina sniffed the air and glanced down, as if only just then remembering that she owned a stomach.
“I could use a top-up,” she admitted.
Christina’s edgy focus aside, the niceness of these people was intoxicating and unsettling, like the unnamed strain of weed my cousin used to grow in his closet.
They seemed to know what they were doing, and yet there was an optimism to the mood in here that couldn’t possibly exist without a hefty dose of naivety to keep it alive. There had to be some horrible disappointment looming over the lot of them, waiting to crash down, and the thought of that happening to them gave me no satisfaction whatsoever.
My nerves surprised me when they arrived, as the sun went down and the party approached.
That was the first thing I’d learned in my first ever acting class. Nerves mean that you care.
Fuck.
#
Webster dropped me off a quarter mile away from a massive house in the hills, even bigger and, of course, a whole lot more polished than her own base of operations.
The steep walk gave me plenty of time to think about why exactly my anonymity was so important. What had Webster and the rest of them done that they couldn’t go unnoticed in a place like this just as well as I could? Who were they afraid of being seen by? Who was I about to be seen by, if not necessarily noticed?
What the hell had I gotten myself into?
They were right, though. No one gave me a second glance as I maneuvered my heels up the crystal stepping stone walk and through the solid hardwood front door.
Up the stairs, third door on the right. Get in, get it, get out.
I moved just slowly enough to look like I was mingling, just fast enough to be difficult to actually mingle with, as I picked my way along the course I’d been given.
The hallway at the top of the stairs forked at odd angles, not the clear left and right I’d been expecting. I took a guess, opened one possible “third” door, and shut it quickly again on a vocally annoyed couple who were making use of an ornate four-poster bed.
Maybe the directions were only a guess, based on the style of house. Maybe there was no office and no picture frame. Maybe this was all just a bizarrely intricate random prank.
I was just deciding that this was probably the case when I reached the other possible third door and opened it to find an office, a picture frame… and a woman holding that picture frame over a bulging duffle bag.
She looked up at me, frozen, wide-eyed, and then wiped a mascara tear-track furiously off on the back of her hand.
“It’s mine,” she said, ferally defensive. “It’s my house. My stuff.”
“Okay,” I said, raising one hand over my head, then adding my other one as soon as I’d finished closing the door behind me. “It’s your house.”
She held the picture out toward me, not quite within reach, keeping her death grip on the frame. “See? That’s me.”
It took me a moment to see it. The woman in the picture was about ten years younger than the one in front of me, and beaming with joy as she hung off the arm of a man with a tailored suit and a streak of gray along each temple. Her blonde hair was shiny and glowing in the sun, rather than hanging over her face in stringy tresses. But the eyes, the brows, the nose, they were all the same.
“Sure is,” I acknowledged. “So, I guess you’re the one I should be thanking for your hospitality?”
She scoffed. “Yeah, sure, you’re welcome. I’m sure you were so excited to meet me when a friend of a friend offered to let you tag along here. You definitely didn’t come here to fuck my worthless husband, just like everybody else!” she shouted, with a fresh spill of tears.
“I really didn’t,” I said, grabbing a rolling chair and sitting down without taking my eyes off her.
She regarded me with a sort of suspicion that I was much more used to wielding than facing.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Who, indeed.
“A disgruntled wash-out,” I answered.
Good acting comes from a place of truth.
“Oh.” She lowered the picture. “Well, do me a favor, and let me finish grabbing my stuff before you trash the place.”
“You came here to save a picture of yourself with someone you hate?” I asked.
The woman looked down at the picture in her hand like she might spit on it, but didn’t loosen her grip.
“You came here to judge my grief process?” she fired back.
“No,” I said. “I guess I came here to figure out mine.”
The woman sighed, stumbled to a four-legged chair that looked like it hadn’t been used since someone decided the room needed one, and sank into it, resting her head back against the wall.
“Well,” she sighed, “if you were hoping for a direct confrontation, I’m sorry to disappoint you. He’s in Vegas. Even if he’s already noticed the flood of party Instagram posts coming from downstairs, and decided that he cares, it’ll take him a few hours to get here.”
I nodded and tried not to look relieved.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She laughed bitterly. “Of course, why would you know that? I was only married to him.”
I shrugged sheepishly, as if I obviously knew his name.
To be fair, I probably did know his name, just not his house or his face.
“Melinda,” the woman finally answered.
“And what’s her name?” I asked, skipping quickly over my own. “The one he’s with now?”
She snorted. “The current one, as far as I know? Alina. Is it wrong that I wanted it to be more clichéd, like Candy or something?”
“Would that make it easier to pretend she’s not human?” I asked.
Melinda’s eyes registered hurt, but did not close. “I’m not the same as her,” she said. “He was single when I met him.”
“Yeah, that is a difference,” I said.
She let out a long breath, staring at the ceiling until her lungs came up empty and filled again. “I really thought he was going to have my back. I thought he was talented, and special, and I thought he thought I was too.”
Chris Jameson’s voice floated through my head.
You’ve got something, kid.
“I thought that too,” I said.
Melinda’s eyebrows drew together.
“I haven’t fucked your husband,” I clarified quickly and sighed. “I haven’t fucked anyone in a long, long time. I got my heart broken like a goddamn professional.”
Melinda snorted, but relaxed.
“Have you evened the score at all yet?” I asked.
“What’s that?” her head snapped up to check my face for context.
“I mean, your husband broke your agreement,” I said. “If nothing else, that frees you from it, right?”
She looked like she hadn’t even thought of that. Her tired but still lovely face recovered quickly, compensating with a too-knowing look. “Is that an offer?”
I’d be lying if I said there was no calculation in the coy smile I gave her then. Any turn in this conversation that took her attention away from that picture frame would make my job easier. But there was truth, too. The interest I projected was authentic and rooted all the way down through my body.
The room seemed to have gotten warmer.
I was suddenly ravenously horny, or maybe I had been for a while and just hadn’t realized it until noting my life’s long dry spell out loud.
Much like on the bridge, I was vividly aware of every sensation — the friction of my toes against the front of my shoes and my forearms against the padded armrests of the desk chair, the sterile scent of the air in a home that someone was paid to clean, the raw sight of Melinda, disheveled and alive and present here in this particular, extra-bright moment of her life.
Her skin was flushed, and I could already tell it would feel deliciously warm against mine.
“Hell yeah, it’s an offer,” I said.
Melinda laughed, a bright, sharp gale. She set the picture frame down on top of her duffle of things and tumbled across the room to me like an avalanche gathering speed.
It was awkward for a second, when this woman I’d met minutes ago straddled me in my swiveling office chair, kissing me deep and heavy, but I leaned into it, pulling her closer by the small of her back, diving in deep with my tongue, nipping lightly at her lower lip with my teeth.
My skin instantly heated up to match hers. I smoothed her tangled hair behind her ears with my fingers and stroked my way up and down her back, inching closer to the soft swell of her hips and the sides of her breasts with each pass.
She reached back and grabbed my hands, pressing them hard into place over the softest parts of her.
I genuinely hadn’t given any thought over this past day to the fact that I might never have sex again, but now the thought was so grim that I couldn’t believe it hadn’t bothered me.
Maybe it was because I hadn’t actually been this alive in a very long time. If I’d been feeling like this on a regular basis, maybe I would have had reason to be careful, careful enough not set my life on fire.
Then again, maybe careful and alive didn’t go together at all.
I probably could have had plenty of hookups over the past few years if I’d made it a priority. I could have gone to parties with people I actually knew and liked. I could have danced, hiked through the wilds, gone to carnivals, and watched old movies that had nothing to do with professional research.
But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done anything at all without thinking about how fast I could wrap it up, go home, practice a monologue, and get into bed in time to wake up for my next call.
Every second, just like every penny, had been scrimped and planned and budgeted to best support the future I’d thought I was building.
I was here to work tonight, technically, but there was no structure, no schedule, no other task in the queue that this one was dragging me away from.
I could just stay here with Melinda for as long as it kept feeling good to us both.
Were there other people who felt like this all the time?
“What do you like?” Melinda whispered in my ear.
I liked a lot of different things, but there was a particular spice I wanted to mix into as much of this encounter as I could.
“I like whatever it is he didn’t do enough of for you,” I said.
She didn’t have to know that I was pretending “he” was Chris Jameson. There probably wasn’t a whole lot of difference. The rich industry men in this town were mostly peas in a pod.
Melinda’s face lit up, and her smeared mascara suddenly looked like relic of a million lifetimes ago.
She kissed me again and got up to unzip her pencil skirt.
“That would be everything,” she said. “But in particular….”
I knelt down in front of her, hugged her around the hips, and pressed my lips to her still-clothed pelvis, breathing deep so she could feel me.
“This? I figured,” I said, tugging her skirt and panties down to her ankles.
She lost her balance slightly, arms windmilling to right herself and then clinging to my hair for stability.
I shuffled on my knees to back her up against the desk, and she hopped up to sit and spread her legs.
I kissed her along her inner thighs, along the inner joints of her hips, along the lips of her pussy, and finally right over the hood of her clit. She took in a blissful breath and pulled me closer by the back of my neck. I took the hint and increased the pressure.
“Your husband is a fucking idiot,” I breathed against her. “He has no idea what he’s missing.”
“He wouldn’t even if he were here to see it,” she said bitterly, but with a nice hint of petty joy.
I dug in a little deeper, with a still-soft tongue, circling all the way around her clit, in between her lips. She moaned without any attempt to be quiet, and I paused for a moment, sure someone was going to burst in on us, but after a moment’s thought, I kept going with that same steady pressure, drawing out more lovely, joyful sounds.
So what if someone did hear us over the noise of the party below? If anything, it would probably make them more likely to leave us alone, the way I would have left that other couple if they’d been a little louder. And if someone did burst in, who would know or care who either of us were?
Let the whole world watch a nobody fuck the wife of a somebody. So the fuck what?
Melinda held me tightly by the hair, guiding me to increase the pressure at exactly the pace she needed.
And the pace she needed was pretty quick, it turned out. She was dripping steadily onto the desk, and I could feel myself mirroring her under my slitted skirt, my long-jammed floodgates cracking open and jamming that way instead.
Melinda knocked a cup full of pens off onto the floor as she braced herself harder against the edge, hooking her legs hard behind my back to hold me still. She screamed something that might have been words, might even have contained a vicious pronunciation of husband’s name in there somewhere, but I didn’t catch it well enough to repeat it.
I stayed where I was, as her breathing slowed and her smooth, soft legs relaxed around me. If her husband hadn’t done this for her often enough, I figured it was a safe bet he hadn’t often taken her for a second round, even when the first one was this easy.
Long before she stopped shivering enough for me to dare touching her sensitive spots again, though, she whipped one of her legs over my head and planted her still wobbly feet on the ground.
“He doesn’t do this for me, either,” she said, grabbing me by the back of my blouse and pulling me up from my knees with more strength than I would have expected her to have access to yet.
She bent me forward over the desk, stepped around behind me, and touched the hem of my skirt.
“Yeah,” I giggled. “I’ll bet he doesn’t.”
“I want to make you feel something,” she said, pulling the skirt up over my hips. “I want to do that. Not lie back and wait while you do it yourself.”
“Show me what you’ve got, then,” I encouraged.
She tucked my panties to the side and ran her full hand over my pussy, nuzzling my shoulder from behind and smiling against it as she found my heavy wetness.
Two fingers probed gently for my opening, then plunged in hard, hitting against the dense nerves at the front of my inner wall.
I cried out, not even thinking about the possible listeners until the sound had already left my mouth.
Melinda braced her hand against her pelvis to strengthen and synchronize her motions as she thrusted into me, hard and quick. I could tell that she was imitating her husband, of course, flipping the script on him with me as his surrogate, testing out what it would feel like to be rough and as far from passive as possible. But I was also willing to bet I was getting a better deal than the real thing.
Maybe it was just how turned on I’d already been by the time she put her hands on me, but every pound of her fingers was a fresh thrill, a rush of tingles, a flash of anxiety over whether I could handle the next one, followed by the victorious confirmation that I could.
With her other hand, she pawed at my ass and pulled her way forward, wedging her palm between me and the desk and pressing it to my clit.
“Oh god,” I found myself groaning out loud in time with her thrusts. “Oh god, god, fuck….”
“You couldn’t ignore me right now if you tried, could you?” Melinda asked. “You couldn’t forget that I’m here.”
“No way,” I confirmed.
“You wouldn’t want to, either.”
“No,” I said. “Please, don’t stop.”
She pressed me hard from both sides, pinning my nerves in a vice of her attention until they sparked and bubbled over. My screams had no words, nothing but ecstatic, savage feeling.
Melinda had the patience to hold me for a minute or two, long enough that she could disentangle herself gently, leaving my sensitive skin to bask and glow uninterrupted.
No longer, though. She gave my ass a parting pat and promptly reclaimed her clothes and returned to gathering her things.
“Hey,” I put a hand gently on her shoulder and took my shot. “How about you don’t give him a way to keep torturing you from afar?”
I gestured down at the picture frame already tucked back under her arm.
She looked down at it for a long, slow, sad moment of consideration, and finally nodded.
I reached out a hand, hoping to ease the picture out of hers, but she broke away and stormed through a different doorway from the one to the hallway I’d entered from. I followed along behind her, finding myself in a stark bedroom, with furnishings as simultaneously lush and sparse as those in the office itself.
I had a strangely sad image of someone moving back and forth between that bedroom and that office, alone, for days at a time, doing nothing but crunching numbers and talking to no one but other number crunchers. But the thought dissolved quickly as I reminded myself that Melinda’s husband was not here. He was in Vegas with a mistress.
Melinda strode over to the flap of a laundry chute and, before I could say another word, tossed the picture down it.
She turned to me, free and proud, and I pushed my face into the encouraging smile she needed.
“Thanks for your help,” she said. “And for a good time.”
She pecked me on the lips one more time and headed for the door, her step noticeably lighter than when I’d first walked in on her.
I hung back and listened until the sound of her movements merged into the rest of the party below. My heart was thumping, reminding me second by second of its existence and function.
After a minute or so, I stuck my head out of the office door and over the stairway railing, trying to chart the geometry of the house and guess at where the laundry chute might let out, but the thickness of the crowd below put me off the idea. That would be a lot of elbowing and talking my way past people for every foot of ground I wanted to explore.
I went back to the bedroom, took a deep breath, and stepped one foot, then the other, into the laundry chute, sitting on the edge of the opening. Carefully — there I went, caring again — I braced my legs against the sides of the shaft and shuffled my way down into the dark.
Holding all my weight between my forearms and ankles, I slid down, inch by halting inch.
Something was squeaking below me.
Were there rats down here? In this ostentatious mansion? Really?
My skin crawled, and I tried to shimmy my way back upward, but scrabbling as hard as I could against the dusty walls only gained me back a few inches. I gave in and continued on the path I’d committed to, sliding my way down until my feet finally touched a mass of jumbled cloth — with one hard ridge. I reached down, found the shape of the picture frame, and clutched it to my chest, absurdly relieved to have this silly little object in my possession.
It wouldn’t have surprised me at all if Webster only wanted to hang it on her wall as some kind of trophy, but damn it, I had been given a job, and I was going to do this one thing right.
The squeaking noises continued, but so far, nothing was nibbling on my ankles.
I stumbled my way forward in the pitch black, waving one arm in front of me, until it slapped a dangling chain.
I caught it, pulled, and let out a yelp when the sudden light from the dangling bulb above me reflected back at me off of dozens of shiny black eyes.
I panted and blinked, taking in what I was seeing.
The squeaking animals were not rats, and were not running wild through this pristine estate.
I was surrounded by tiny cages full of brightly colored birds, small mammals I wasn’t sure of the names for, and even a couple of frightened-looking monkeys.
“What the hell…?” I muttered, sidestepping through the maze of exotic specimens.
I turned a corner and saw a column of a different color of light, a streetlight from outside.
The room I was in was mostly underground, but there were narrow windows near the ceiling, and I was able to reach one by standing on a massive bin of what sounded like kibble when it shifted.
I pulled open the latch, shoved the window outward, and crawled out onto the house’s front lawn, picture frame clutched tight in one hand.
Apparently, this was just strange enough to draw the attention of the drunken crowd milling about in the fresh air.
“Hey,” said a young man, shaking the bleariness from his eyes and crouching down next to me. “Hey, are you okay?”
“I think so,” I panted, kneeling up and shaking the dew from my blouse. “But he has… his basement… I had to get out of there!”
I decided less was more, shoved my way upright, and took off down the street before anyone could detain me for any kind of a debrief. With even a little bit of luck, somebody was going to check out whatever shady shit was going on behind that window. It might not stand up to whatever lascivious guesses were now running through people’s imaginations, but as long as the night ended with cops checking out that basement, I’d be more than happy.
Take that, Chris Jameson.
…I mean, Melinda’s husband.
Dirty, freshly fucked and sprinting through the Hollywood Hills with a stolen family photo, I found myself cackling with stunned triumph. I had it. I’d done it. And before I could go back to questioning why and whether it actually mattered, Webster was already pull up along the side of the road in front of me, not ditching me to my fate at all.
I hopped into the front seat of the hatchback and was almost embarrassed to have a thick, unmarked envelope handed to me right there, without any excuse or waffling.
I thumbed my way through the cash inside, not just counting it but feeling the texture of it, smelling the unique odor that rose from it when disturbed.
“Something wrong?” Webster asked.
“No,” I answered. “I just… I didn’t expect this part to actually happen. Or like, I thought it would, but at a point in the future that’s always the future and never the present. Or maybe it would become the present after I’d already spent this much or more chasing it.”
“You do know that most jobs actually pay you for your time, right?” said Webster, with an arch of one eyebrow. “Not this well, of course, but like, at all?”
A different, weaker laugh slipped between my lips. “I guess I’ve been in the wrong business.”
Webster pulled a window breaker out of the car’s central console, slid the blade of the seatbelt-ripper into a seam along the edge of the picture frame, and cracked it apart much too easily for something that had come from a house that rich.
She held a hand under the crumbling pieces of gilded plastic, shaking them until she found the particular fragment she was looking for.
“Is that a data chip?” I asked.
“Yup.” She slipped it into the back of a USB adaptor and dropped it into her jacket pocket. “You just saved a lesbian superhero movie that got shelved for ‘quality issues’ after rave critical pre-reviews. We’re going to leak it.”
“You’re pirates?” I couldn’t disguise the distaste in my voice — or the interest.
“Selective pirates, among other things,” said Webster. “Look, we’re not the ones who decided to stop the artists from making money off this thing. Some executive in a skyscraper did that. At least now people will get to see it, and when it becomes an underground hit, the studio might feel pressured to release it themselves. Even if they don’t, that young director will have something on her resume besides a big fat ‘what could have been.’”
A rush of affection for Webster bloomed upward through my chest and down my arms, making my hands shake.
She seemed to understand at a glance what I was feeling.
“I told you we were of like mind,” she said.
“Yeah,” I sighed, drumming my fingers on the envelope of cash. “Anyway, thanks for… an interesting day.”
Webster snorted and stacked the pieces of the broken picture frame neatly on the back seat.
“You know, without even knowing what this was, you were awfully amenable to stealing it for a bunch of weirdos you’d just met,” she said. “I’d say too amenable for someone who’s not looking for something better to do than die.”
The bluntness of the word, finally spoken aloud, hit me like ice water, and I felt myself recoil.
“We’d love to keep you around,” she said, just as bluntly.
I clutched the envelope, the repulsive yet hauntingly real evidence of a transaction inside it. Stale, day-old tears finally spilled onto my face in rivers.
“For now, you would,” I choked. “Because I was lucky enough to get you what you wanted. But what happens when I’m not lucky? When I do everything you tell me to, but your investment doesn’t pan out?”
Webster put a hand on my shoulder, as tentatively as she seemed to be capable of moving. “That’s not how we operate,” she said. “That’s not how we think.”
“Oh, yeah, sure.” I wiped my nose shamelessly on this scratchy, gauzy blouse. “You’re all one big family here, right?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know that’s hard to believe right now.” She rubbed warm circles into my shaking back. “Will you give us a chance to prove it to you?”
The tears just kept coming, drowning out answers of any significant length or complexity.
I shrugged my shoulders helplessly under her hand. “Like I said,” I sniffed. “It’s not like I’ve got something better to do.”
***
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