CHAPTER 4
EMILY
Organic, artisanal, handmade meals were catered on steam tables with a staff to spoon out salads, vegetables, high-protein lean meats, and whole-grain desserts. I was fine with that to a point.
“More,” I said to the hipster behind the chafing dish. A warehouse floor full of dancers could eat a farm-to-table establishment out of house and home.
“Give her that big piece.” Darlene pointed her fork at a giant piece of chicken. “Everything we do she does ten times.” She leaned into me. “I left a surprise dessert for you.”
“I think we need to change the opening on ‘Make Him Yours.’” I took the extra chicken and pushed it to the side to make room.
“Make it harder.” Darlene’s assistant handed her a salad with the tomatoes taken out.
“Is that a dare?”
She winked at me. She complained and begged for more at the same time. Hard work was her MO, and diva was her brand. She honored both sides, and I understood them. I wondered if I would have been the same way if I’d been the one to race in front of the pack instead of drop to the back of it.
“Yeah, it’s a dare.” She walked away to manage something for the afternoon. She’d be working on vocals until after dark, and I’d continue with the performers.
“One day, just one day.” The voice behind me was deep and resonant. I turned fully and recognized Carter before I could turn back away.
“One day?”
“One day they could have cheeseburgers. Just one day.”
He smiled at me and popped a cucumber slice in his mouth. Our eyes met for a second before his went back around the room. Scanning. I wondered if he ever looked at anything for more than a second.
I came to the pie. I loved pie. That must be the surprise Darlene had for me.
“If we fed these guys cheeseburgers, they’d be useless the whole afternoon.” I took a slice of cherry, then let my knees go weak and my eyes go half-closed to show him how we’d be on a fat-heavy lunch. “Blar blar blar.” I moved like I was drowning in mud, letting my tongue loll.
What was I doing? This wasn’t funny. And I was going to drop my pie.
Except he caught it, tilting the plate back as he steadied the edge.
I turned hot pink.
“We certainly don’t want that.” I couldn’t look at his face, so I dropped my gaze to his hand curling around the edge of his plate. It was so masculine, with veins on the back and long fingers. I had to look away from that too, only to find him watching me. I felt trapped in him, and it wasn’t at all bad.
“Do you smile?” I asked, moving down the line.
“How would it be if I asked you that question?”
“Shitty. So don’t ask it.”
He smiled, answering my question.
“Emily,” the caterer said before I took my pie back from Carter. “These were in the dessert cart. I’m assuming they’re for you.” He held up two brownies in tinfoil.
Even more than pie, I had a soft spot for brownies. Sometimes Darlene had the caterer make them for the whole team on Fridays. It was Thursday, and there were only two, but whatever.
They were rectangular, near black, dotted with walnuts and delicious-shaped.
Two desserts. A girl needs a little joy sometimes.
“Thank you.”
“Do you share?” Carter reached for a slice of apple pie. “I prefer brownies.”
“Nope.” I popped my p and went to the patio overlooking the freeways of Downtown. All the seats were taken except a small round table with two chairs. Carter surprised me by following me and pulling out a chair for me as if he wanted to sit with me.
After I sat, he placed himself across from me. This was a better surprise than a couple of desserts.
“You’re really busy around here.” His eyes kept going to the door. Normally, I’d find that insulting. In his case, I found it reassuring.
“We have a tour in a month. Doesn’t get much busier than that.”
We’d spoken a few times in the past two weeks but never with intention. We’d never sat together at lunch.
“I never asked you why you carried around a fake gun.”
He said “carried” in the past tense as if he knew I’d stopped carrying it after he attacked me in the parking lot.
“I’m afraid of the real ones.”
“You could carry nothing.”
“Protection.” Even I didn’t believe me. It was the most ridiculous reason I’d ever concocted, and I didn’t insult him by waiting to see if he bought it. “Deterrent.”
“What are you going to deter? Or is it who?” He raised one eyebrow. The arch was so perfect I was disappointed when it dropped.
“I have an ex-boyfriend who can’t take a hint or understand the big words in an order of protection.”
“Ah.” He poked his food, looking at it for the first time since he’d sat down.
“Which ran out three weeks ago. So I’ve been a little nervous.”
“You didn’t have a three-year restraining order?” He snapped up the Tapatío and slathered his food with it.
It was a simple question if you were a victim or a lawyer. The levels of protection orders became clear to me only after Vince had hit me, then stalked me. Before that, I wouldn’t have known one from the other.
“Criminal protective. Judge wrote in a year.” I pointed my fork at the red-hot sauce on his chicken. “That’s going to be really spicy.”
“It’s fine.” He put it in his mouth and didn’t even cry or scream. “Twelve months is unusually soft.”
“The judge was unusually hostile to women. Said Vince only hit me once so he’d probably forget about me in a week. No need to inconvenience him further.” I flicked a piece of salad across the plate. “And he insinuated I was going back to him anyway. Judge Croner, and I’ll never forget his name, didn’t want to ‘remove incentive for Ms. Barrett to work on the relationship as opposed to lean on the courts when things get rough.’ Which was another way of saying I was crazy enough to deserve it.”
“I know Croner. I think his wife hasn’t fucked him in a decade.”
When I was done laughing, I put my elbows on the table and leaned forward. “You know judges by name, and you know how orders of protection work. You a lawyer in your spare time?”
“Former LAPD.”
“Detective?”
“Uniform and badge.”
“Bicycle?”
“Cruiser.”
“Singing or dancing?”
“Neither. What about you?”
“Both.”
“You sing? I didn’t know.”
I didn’t talk about it, ever. But he’d told me about himself without my reciprocating, and for reasons that had more to do with feelings than facts, I wanted him to know me.
“Darlene and I came to LA together to ‘make it,’ which obviously she did, and she deserves everything she has and more. But we were on an even keel. Same auditions, same agent. Same contacts. We even did some duets with a band in little clubs and stuff. But then . . .”
Could I find a way to tell this without looking like a complete doormat?
Probably not.
“Then I met this guy. We can call him Mr. Order of Protection. You’ll remember him from two minutes ago. I must have been really weak or insecure. I don’t know. It’s embarrassing to tell it. But he got really jealous when I was onstage. Even if I didn’t dress sexy at all. He hated people looking at me. So. I kind of stopped performing. Little by little. I stopped doing the little shows and skipped auditions. I got a data entry job that wasn’t threatening. Darlene didn’t even realize what was happening until my momentum was shot. Then, blah blah blah. Darlene had me choreograph her first show, which went great, and I thought Mr. Order of Protection wouldn’t have a problem with it because it was a backstage job, et cetera, et cetera. Simon had to touch me to demonstrate a lift. He saw it. He went nuts. Yada yada.”
We ate in silence for a while. I was grateful he didn’t ask for details, shame me, or even say the usual platitudes. It was nice to just sit and eat after telling him.
“I’d like to hear you sing,” he said.
“I probably sound like a frog after so long.” I opened the foil around my brownies. “Do you want some?”
“I’ll stick to the pie today.”
I bent a corner off the brownie and ate it. It was exactly the kind I liked. Trader Joe’s in the yellow box. Perfectly moist, dense, dark.
I wrinkled my nose. Took another bite.
“What?” Carter asked. “You got a face like there’s a bug in it.”
I chewed. Swallowed.
“I think they got arty with it.”
“Two minutes!” a voice called from the dance space. If the rest of the dancers had two minutes, I had one.
“Arty? Looks brown to me.”
He was so good-looking. The parts of his face clicked together like a puzzle. I could see the sections in a way I hadn’t before. The high cheekbones. The square jaw. The full lips. Click, click, clickety-click.
“They got fancy with the taste. They put something else in it.”
“Like? Describe it with words.” He’d scoffed at the salad with his cheeseburger comment, but he speared the last flat leaf and ate it.
“Thirsty.”
“You have water right there.”
I ate the rest of the rectangle and folded the tinfoil over the other.
“No, they taste like thirsty.” He had no idea what I was talking about, and to be honest, neither did I. “But good. Really good.” I handed him the foil packet. “Not as good as a cheeseburger, but in case you’re hungry later.”
He took the foil, and I ran back to the studio.
I could hear Darlene working with her voice coach in an adjacent room as I went through the next set of moves with the dancers, chanting the counts I’d designed to help them remember the steps. I felt fine at the first break, but about two hours later, as we were doing the last of the moves for the day, Darlene got far away. I lost my connection with distance and time. My body pulled out like taffy. My stomach felt sucked in on itself and the thirsty taste took over my mouth, but I kept working, hoping I wasn’t coming down with a stomach bug.
Monty was a very good dancer. He threw himself into every step until he got it right, and in this case he threw his torso too far left and his shoulders too hard around, and he fell over.
It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, and I laughed. I never laughed at a mistake. That was rude and unprofessional. But I couldn’t help myself. I laughed and laughed until I fell down, then I laughed more. Laughing was for the sake of the laughter. Hands and heels on the floor, I wasn’t even the one laughing anymore. It was separate from me, and I was so separate from the room I had no idea what everyone else was doing. My chest hurt, and that was funny. I couldn’t breathe, and that was funny. Carter was leaning over me, and the hilarity of his concern was shattering.