MY ROCK #7
Chapter One
Elly
I don’t know how long I stood there, leaning against that bus in the rain. I zoned out for a while, feeling sorry for myself and wondering why I attracted men who wanted nothing from me but sex. Did I give off some kind of slut vibe? My ex, the one who died, he was the only one who ever talked about forever, and look how that turned out. The son of a bitch found the pills more attractive than a life with me and then he left me all alone. After that, while I was trying to deal with it with my own substances, I had a short, but torrid affair with a guy who had never been anything but my friend, Cole. The thing about Cole that was so comforting to me was that we both knew it would never go any further than sex. We knew so much about each other and we knew that a relationship between the two of us would never work. I finally got cleaned up and I haven’t seen him since. I was a little sad to have lost the friendship, but it was better to just make a clean break after we’d crossed that line.
After doing well on my own for a while…I went and hooked up with Tristan. That was supposed to only be about sex, too. It was supposed to be about satisfying a fantasy I’d had since I was a kid. Stupid, stupid me! I let myself start feeling things for the bastard and there I was, standing in the rain, feeling like a fool. Maybe I was a slut.
Then, of course, there was still Jake. The uber wealthy record producer, show producer, CEO, and my boss who very casually offered to get you whatever I need if I was willing to sleep with him. The bastard! The one thing I always thought for sure I was doing right was my job. I guess that was not really true though—I slept with Tristan when I wasn’t supposed to and got myself fired for it. Jeez! Jake only confirmed that I was only good for one thing where men were concerned. He’d built me up and made me think I was so good that he wanted to recruit me for his team—his team of chicks that warmed his bed on the road, I guess.
I finally pulled myself together enough to walk my wet ass back to my own bus. Of course, two of the other girls were still there.
“Oh my God, Elly! What happened to you, honey? Here, let me get you a towel.” Hannah, one of the nicest of the show’s production crew jumped up to go get a towel. Tammy, the girl who I’d walked out with that night was staring at me.
“What?” I said, maybe a little too bitchy.
She had the decency not to smile, but I saw her lips twitch. She continued to stare at me while I dried myself off with the towel Hannah brought me. Finally she said, “Elly, we all know about you and Tristan. I know you were going to hang out with him tonight. It’s okay, we all think he’s hot and we completely understand what you see in him. But, you don’t look like you had much fun tonight. You want to talk about it?”
I glanced at Hannah and she smiled reassuringly. “Whatever you say is staying right here between us, hon. I’m not a gossip and neither is Tammy. Sometimes it helps to talk about it. Sometimes it doesn’t. It’s entirely up to you.”
I broke down then and started sobbing. Sweet Hannah, not even worried about getting all wet, put her arm around me and pulled me into her shoulder. I cried again in big, heaving sobs. It was ridiculous. I was not a crier, at all, yet this was the second time that night I turned loose with the water works.
When I could finally speak I said, “Shit! I’m so sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Tammy said, “Tell you what, go put on some dry, warm comfy clothes and I’ll make us some hot chocolate. That’ll make you feel better.”
“Aren’t you guys going out?”
“Nah, I was planning to stay here all along. It’s too wet out there, I’m not that desperate,” Hannah said with a laugh.
Then Tammy added, “I am that desperate, but lazy. So I decided not to go, either.”
That made me laugh. I agreed to change and have hot chocolate with them. I went in and put on a green velour jogging suit and blow dried my hair. I pulled it into a pony-tail and, now fresh-faced and warm and dry, I went back out where the girls were.
Tammy handed me a cup and I saw that there were mini-marshmallows floating on top and a stick of cinnamon inside the cup. It was just like my mother made it for me when I was a kid. I almost started crying again. I must have been hormonal
“Thank you, Tammy. It looks yummy.” I sat down with them and after taking a sip and letting the sweet, warm liquid get into my veins and take away that deep, bone-chill I said, “I feel like a fool.”
“What did he do?” Tammy asked.
Hannah sat down across from us. She looked so genuinely sympathetic that I didn’t want to look at her. I was afraid she’d make the tears flow again. I looked at Tammy instead and said, “You guys are right…but you know that. I am still seeing Tristan. Worse than that, I was letting him stay with me. We decided to be exclusive a few months ago. I thought things were going good until a few days ago when I found out he’d lied to me about something pretty important. I don’t want to say what that was, it’s his business to tell, but I was hurt. After a couple of days, I decided to suck it up and be the bigger person. I went to him and I actually apologized for accusing him of lying…although I know he lied. I’m an idiot.”
Looking confused Tammy said, “So is that what you’re upset about tonight?”
With a sigh I told her, “No, it gets better…or worse, I guess. I forgave him and we were supposed to hang out tonight. When I got there and walked in he was sitting in a chair in nothing but a towel—with a very naked Brooke in his lap.”
Tammy raised her eyebrows. “Brooke? Contestant Brooke? That Ho!”
Tammy was obviously not a Brooke fan. Hannah looked thoughtful and said, “You said he knew you were coming? Why would he be messing around with her when he knew you were going to walk in?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Either he’s that arrogant, or that stupid, or I am. Maybe he thought if I’d forgive him for lying, I’d forgive him for anything. Maybe he was just so horny he didn’t even consider what I might think or how I’d react. Brooke knew about us a long time ago. She tried to get in his pants and he said no. She threatened to tell and get me fired…that was before I did get fired. Anyways, if he can sleep with her after all that, he doesn’t care about me at all.”
“Or, Brooke showed up to seduce him….” Hannah said before Tammy interrupted her.
“But he was in a towel…and Brooke was naked….”
“What did he tell you happened?” Hannah asked. I took another long drink of the hot chocolate. It felt good as it burned all the way down.
“He says nothing happened. He says he told her to leave and she wouldn’t.”
“And why was he in a towel?” Tammy asked.
I shrugged. I hadn’t really asked him. Brooke could have shown up as he got out of the shower. But why was she naked and why was she on his lap? “The bottom line here, I think, is that Tristan’s a lot bigger and stronger than Brooke. If he didn’t want her on him, fighting her off should have been easy. Why would he let her get in his lap? He had a tent underneath that towel, too, the bastard!”
“Well, that probably means he didn’t fuck her,” Tammy said, searching for the bright side.
“Yet,” I added. “And if he had no intentions to screw her, why was his dick as hard as a rock?”
“Well, he is a man,” Hannah said. “He had a naked girl, who is pretty hot, in his bus. Then she sat right down on his lap…an erection is to be expected. If this was Brooke’s plan, she knew it, too.”
“Why are they all like this?” I asked. I didn’t expect an answer. It was a rhetorical question and they both knew it. We sat there quietly for a while, drinking our hot chocolate and mentally commiserating about men when, suddenly, before I thought it through, I said, “Jake hit on me last night.”
“Jake our boss?” Hannah said, with wide eyes.
“Yeah, him,” I said.
“He’s a perv,” Tammy said.
“Has he hit on you too?” I asked her.
“No, he likes the petite ones like you. I’m too much woman for him,” she said with a wink. Tammy wasn’t fat by any means, but she was a big girl. At nearly six foot tall and a hundred and ninety pounds, at least, she cut an imposing figure.
I laughed and said, “You’re probably right. That and I’m starting to feel like I give off some kind of slut vibe.”
Tammy laughed at that, but Hannah said, “Oh honey. Don’t think that way about yourself. He’s the one that there’s something wrong with. He’s your boss for crying out loud. He should know better. There are rules against it even.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s too much like sexual harassment,” she said. “Don’t let him make you feel bad about yourself.”
“It’s hard not to,” I told them. “I was feeling so good about the job I was doing and now I just feel like he hired me because he wanted to have sex with me.”
“Oh no! Don’t feel like that, please,” Hannah told me. “Tammy’s right, he really is a perv. I think if he didn’t appreciate your work and he only wanted to sleep with you, he would have used the thing with Tristan against you. If the rumors are true, he sleeps with half the staff. You at least had the integrity to say no.”
Tammy had her eyebrow raised. I knew what she was thinking. “I said no,” I told her. She grinned and said,
“I didn’t doubt it.”