CHAPTER TWO

BRANDON

 

Her breath came hot and heavy against the thin flesh of my ear lobe as her fingers crept their way over the shoulders of my leather jacket, and down along the lapels against my chest. I felt her breasts, heaving against my back, and with a giggle that seemed to tickle the tiny hairs leading down to my ear canal, she asked if I’d like to show her “my sword” back at her place. Why we would travel somewhere else and not up to my hotel room, I didn’t understand, and with an impatient sigh, I told her that, no, I wasn’t interested in checking out her apartment, and no, I wasn’t interested in playing Show & Tell.

“I don’t really think you have a sword,” she laughed through the however-many-drinks she had consumed. “I meant I want to see …” Her muddled voice trailed off as she made her way around my bar stool, her hands diving for the fly on my jeans.

And that was my cue.

Before her hands could fumble their way through the difficult task of unzipping my pants, I stood up from my seat, placing my hands firmly on her bare shoulders to keep her from tipping over.

“So, that’s a yes?” she asked me, her eyelids only half-open as she gazed up at me. “I’ve always wanted to have sex with the B. Davis.”

“Always, huh,” I muttered absentmindedly, fishing my wallet from my back pocket. I pulled out a few bills and threw them on the bar.

“Oh, m’God, yeah,” she breathed, her breath laced with alcohol as her eyelids folded over in a slow blink. They opened partially, gazing up at me with enough hope to break my heart. “You are the ha-hottest man ever,” she said sloppily, jabbing a finger in the center of my chest.

My eyes looked to her with sympathy, and for just a fragment of time, I gave myself permission to appreciate her beauty. A youthful face, untouched by the harsh reality of age, while her body possessed the curvature brought on by just enough maturity to make her supple and seductive. Successfully ignoring my screaming male instincts, I wouldn’t allow my eyes to make a spectacle of traveling down her hourglass figure, but I knew it was there, remembering her from earlier at the bookstore. With the amount of people I met, it was a wonder I remembered anybody at all, but I always seemed to remember the ones who found me later on. The desperate ones. The ones that needed to find themselves between the sheets of their bed or mine; it didn’t matter which, as long as that was the end result to their efforts. All of those hours spent doing their hair and makeup and picking out the right outfit, it all had to amount to something, but it never did.

It never would.

“Where do you live?” I asked, speaking slowly, and through her excitement and slurred tone, I got her address and wrote it down on the pad of paper I kept in the pocket of my jacket. I helped ease her onto the stool I had just been sitting on and made sure she was sitting steadily before removing my hands from her shoulders.

As I was busy asking the bartender for a couple cups of coffee, the blonde with perfectly tousled hair slipped a finger through one of the belt loops on my jeans and tugged in a failed attempt to pull me between her spread thighs. Her dress had gathered, putting the skintight garment just somewhere below groin level and I kept my eyes forward as I watched the bartender pour the pot of coffee into a couple of mugs I hoped were clean.

“But I don’t need coffee, baby.” She walked her fingers up the front of my t-shirt before tracing the neckline with her sharpened nails. “I just need to pull that hair and ride your—”

A welcome interruption cut in as the bartender slid the mugs over to my waiting hands. “Here you go, Mr. Davis. Can I get you anything else?” He eyed the blonde with narrowed eyes. “Security, perhaps?”

“Actually, if you could call a cab for this young lady here, I would really appreciate it. Make sure she gets in safely.” I handed him the piece of paper with her address along with a hundred-dollar bill.

“Of course, sir,” he said with a curt nod and promptly picked up the phone.

I turned back to the pouting young woman, who looked more and more like a child with the ticking of the clock, and handed her one of the mugs.

“But t-they said that you did this,” she whined, scowling up at me. “And I don’t like cof-coffee.”

“Just drink it,” I instructed, and as though I possessed the tongue of Houdini, she did as I demanded. “Who’s ‘they’?” I inquired, but I knew all too well who “they” were.

“They,” as she began to sloppily iterate, were the ones my team referred to lovingly as, The Crazies. The fans that took to the internet while hidden behind their computer screens, to blast the message boards and various social media outlets with the things they wished were true. Rumors that I was dating someone of note, or more commonly, that I had bedded a legion of fans after a signing, or some other event. These convoluted, and untrue, stories were the reason for the occasional hotel visit from a hopeful fan looking for their own bragging rights.  

“What’s your name?” I gently asked her, after she finished telling me about the women she had befriended on Twitter.

“T-Tracey,” she said in a quiet voice. The brazen vixen that previously sat there had wilted, leaving behind someone’s little girl. Her legs had closed as a hand struggled to tug the garment into a more appropriate position.

“Tracey,” I parroted. She looked up at me from her empty mug. Her big hazel eyes held an innocence that chipped away at my rock-solid heart. “I guess they neglected to tell you I like my women dressed-up like cowgirl Orcs, huh.”

She bit on her lower lip, a barely-visible line appearing across her forehead. Her chin tucked to gaze disappointedly at the skintight dress she had chosen for the night’s expedition. “You do?”

I rubbed a hand over my eyes, releasing a heavy sigh. “Good Lord … Don’t believe everything you read online, okay? I think you’re smarter than that, and I also think you’re better than this.”

“How do you know?” The shame dripped from her voice like molasses, coating and suffocating.

“Because,” I said, barely touching my hand to her shoulder, “if you weren’t, you wouldn’t have needed all that booze to come down here.”

She cracked a little smile. “So, if I wasn’t drunk, you would have slept with me?”

“Oh, hell no,” I stated incredulously and watched the fleeting optimism wash from her face. I put my own empty mug down on the bar as the bartender came over to tell us the cab had arrived. “But hey, I also wouldn’t have sat here drinking coffee with you, and I definitely wouldn’t have made sure you got home safe, so I guess there’s that.”

 

***

 

I felt a twinge of shame for my bluntness towards the girl. Tracey, I reminded myself as I walked toward the hotel’s lobby in search of the elevator. She had been young—too young—and I normally would have treated her with something resembling kid gloves, but I couldn’t shake the idea that I would have wanted someone to treat my own daughter with the same harsh crack of reality. Had I been so lucky to have a daughter. Or a son, for that matter.

Another me, another life.

“Thank God I got her home before someone else could get to her,” I muttered to myself as I passed through the lobby’s entryway. The thought of some asshole with fewer morals and a lack of self-control getting their hands on her brought me to shudder.

“Would you like me to accompany you to your room, Mr. Davis?” An older gentleman with salt-and-pepper hair and a security uniform suddenly appeared by my side.

The lines on his face had initially been deceptive as I took a brief look at his build, assuring me that, yes, he could undoubtedly kick someone’s ass if need be, and I shook my head with a polite smile.

“No, I’ll be fine. Hotels at night aren’t usually a threat. Well, unless this was the Overlook. In which case, I might be pretty screwed, right?” I waited for a laugh, or a smile at best, but he rewarded my lame excuse for a joke without so much as a twinkle in his eye. “Oh, come on, you know. Stephen King? The Shining?”

The security guard barely twitched an eyebrow. “No, sir, I’m not familiar.”

I cocked my head slightly, blinking back my disbelief. “Wow, really?”

“Yes, sir.”

The man would have made an excellent guard for Buckingham Palace, I decided, as I noticed that his face seldom changed expression and his voice remained in the same deep monotone. I was sure that he could not only kick someone’s ass, but if I had needed him to, he could have murdered a man successfully with a paperclip.

“Well, huh, I wouldn’t recommend you read it, or watch it for that matter.” I dramatically grimaced before pressing the Up arrow for the elevator. “But anyway, thank you again for the offer, but I’ll be fine.”

He bowed his head. “Yes, sir. If you do require assistance, don’t hesitate to give the front desk a call.” His shoes tapped away to continue his rounds, his hands clasped behind his back and chest puffed out.

My eyes fluttered towards the doors of the elevator. “I would not fuck with that guy,” I mumbled under my breath.

The elevator dinged its arrival, and I was about to step on when a group of guys in their early-twenties shouted for me to hold the door. They ran across the black-and-white checkered marble floor of the lobby right toward me, sneakers smacking and squeaking against the stone. My arm grew weary holding the elevator doors open waiting for them to slide their way into the enclosed space, but before I knew it, we were packed in like sardines with me manning the button panel. I caught a glimpse of the old security guard, eyeing the group of guys, almost assuredly considering the possibility that the hotel’s one celebrity and current claim to fame could very well wind up dead at the hands of a gaggle of sorority brothers. I shot him an enthusiastic thumbs-up before the doors slid closed, locking me inside with my unlikely killers.

“What floor, guys?” I asked them, breaking the rousing conversation about plans for an upcoming road trip to Comic Con.

“Oh, uh, fourteen, I think,” one kid said and reached into a pocket and then another, searching for his card key. “Here, uh … It’s twelve. Thanks, man.”

“No problem,” I said with every ounce of pleasantry I could pull together while I silently cursed slow elevators and not being on a lower floor.

The whispers began shortly after the elevator began its climb, as though my elbow wasn’t wedged between the ribs of the shortest member of the group.

“Is he … you know?”

“I don’t know, dude. Looks like him to me.”

“Ask him.”

“No, you ask him.”

“Come on, don’t be a pussy. You do it.”

The hushed exchange between two of the four friends passed until I finally took the liberty myself of turning my head and said, “Guys, I’m practically standing inside you.” I watched their expressions drop with horrified embarrassment, and I smiled. “Allow me to introduce myself.” I extended my hand to one gawking kid, and he reluctantly accepted. “B. Davis, but people who are usually this intimate with me call me Brandon, so please—call me Brandon.”

The four friends all turned towards each other, their faces taking on a shocked expression at the acknowledgement of sharing their journey in the elevator with a celebrity. As I waited for one of them to gather the courage to say something, I raised my tired eyes to the blinking numbers lining the top of the elevator doors and sighed. Floor three, eight to go.

“This is fucking awesome, Mr. B. Dav—I mean, Brandon. The two of us,” he gestured towards his short friend, “we love your books. I keep telling these guys to give your shit a chance, but they’re kinda illiterate.”

One of the other two gawked at him as he punched his buddy in the arm. “I am not, you asshole. I just have better shit to do than read.” And suddenly embarrassed, he glanced in my direction, avoiding any eye contact. “No offense, man. I’m sure your books are great.”

“None taken,” I said with a genuine smile. Honesty was better than false flattery any day. I tried turning my body more towards the two young men who were actual fans. “Were you guys at the signing today?”

“Nah, man. We wanted to, but our flight was delayed. We didn’t get to the bookstore in time to reserve our place on line,” the talkative one said, disappointment prominent in his voice, momentarily forgetting the unique position he had found himself in. And then that reality hit again as a grin spread across his face. “But dude, this is so much better. This is … it’s an honor, actually.”

“Well, hey, I can sign something now.” I took a Sharpie from my pocket, as they scrambled to open their backpacks, both of them revealing one of my books.

I asked their names and learned that Chris was the outspoken one while Rob was still silent and possibly star-struck (the two non-fans were apparently Drew and Matt), and I set to work signing their books.

Very rarely was I given the opportunity to personalize autographs; my signings were more often than not hectic cluster-fucks that required heightened security measures and a strict time table. It was often done as an assembly line – shake a hand, take book, scribble name in book, hand book back, next. I rarely got to even ask their name, let alone take the extra two seconds to scribble a nice personalized message along with my signature. Nick always told me it was better that way. He said that personalized messages caused the book to depreciate in value. “And besides,” he would say, “what if it’s a gift?” I had always understood his point, and as my agent, I normally listened. But fuck it, I thought, as I scribbled into Rob’s book.

 

To Rob – I like the strong, silent type. – B. Davis

 

These guys would have a fun story to tell their buddies and have a message in their book to go along with the memory, and if they could only get a couple hundred bucks off of it on eBay, so be it. I handed the book back to Rob, and took Chris’s from his shaking hands.

 

Chris – The honor is all mine, man. – B. Davis

 

As I passed Chris his copy, I noticed the elevator was just about to arrive at my floor, I announced that it had been fun, and meant it. They asked if they could get a picture, and while normally I would have been anxious to get the hell out of there and back into my room, I reminded myself that this was a whole lot better than worrying about a drunk girl named Tracey. I took one of their phones, extended my arm and angled the camera lens down at the five of us, and snapped the shot just in time for the elevator doors to open. I wished them all a pleasant night and listened as they all tried to get their “thank you’s” in before the doors could close and muffle their voices.

In the silence of the long repetitive hallway, I held my breath and shut my eyes, taking in the nothingness that surrounded me for the first time that day. Somewhere further down the hall came the therapeutic hum of an ice machine, and I listened intently through my meditative state, just enjoying the lack of voices. The lack of grabbing hands. The lack of every semblance that made me B. Davis. It had been a long and tiring day, and although I had another couple of weeks before the conclusion of the even more long and tiring tour, I was ready to cross the New York state line and head back to my small-town life and the house I managed to call a home. I was ready to return to my life, where nobody bothered me.

I was ready to be me.

The quiet was broken by the opening of a heavy hotel room door. With a jolt, I snapped my eyes open, hoping whoever it was hadn’t seen me standing motionless in the hallway, only to find my best friend slumped against the doorframe. His hair was mussed in a way only sleep could accomplish and his eyes, without his glasses, squinted in my direction.

“Welcome home,” he said in a drowsy mumble.

“Jesus Christ, Nick. How the hell did you know I was coming up?” I asked, startled by his apparent telepathy.

He grumbled, scratching at the fine hairs on his bare stomach. “I had gotten up to take a leak and heard some kids yelling in the hallway.”

“And if it hadn’t been me, you would have scarred someone for life with this whole Slenderman thing you have going on here,” I said as my hands gestured toward his pale, lanky figure.

“What’s a slender man?” Nick squinted at me before his face was taken over by a yawn that was indeed contagious.

After the reminder that I was running on fumes, I pushed him back into the suite, afraid that someone else would enter the hallway and be blinded by his pastiness. The door had barely clicked into place before I dropped myself onto a couch. Nick sat down at the other end and ran his hand back and forth over his short hair.

“So, you hooked up with someone?” He spoke with clarity, the sleep leaving his voice. I shook my head at the question, glaring at him through the strands of hair that had fallen out of place. “Oh, yeah? Then explain that.”

I followed his accusing gaze to the lipstick on my neck, a temporary souvenir from Tracey. I hoped she had gotten home without decorating the backseat of the cab with the night’s fruitless adventure. “One of the girls from the bookstore decided to get bold and drank herself into coming down here.”

“She got past security?” Nick raised a concerned eyebrow, and for good reason. It was a wonder there hadn’t been others getting into the hotel to track me down.

I shrugged, too tired to care. “I guess so.”

“Humph. I’ll have a word with the hotel manager.” Nick sighed, tracing the outline of the couch’s arm with his twiggy fingers. “Well, anyway, last night here, man. You could have gone with her, or I could have made myself invisible.”

“She was a kid, Nick.”

“Define ‘kid.’”

“Do you just forget that you have three daughters when we’re on the road?” I sighed with a pang of irritation that lasted only a moment as I rubbed the lipstick from the crook of my neck, its tackiness clinging to my skin. “Anyway, how many times do I have to tell you that I’m not going to just whisk them away to my bedroom simply because they’re willing? What kind of asshole would that make me?”

“The kind who hasn’t gotten laid in half a decade,” Nick said in jest, but quickly realized he wasn’t getting a laugh from me. Then it was his turn to sigh. “Hey, you’re right, okay? But it might not kill you to open yourself up to the idea of actually being with someone. And you never know when one of these girls could be someone, you know?”

“Another me, another life,” I grumbled.

“Whatever you say, bro.” Nick continued to manipulate his hair while I wondered if he ever got tired of pushing me.

Running a hand through my hair again, the long strands sliding between my fingers, I stared at the intricate design of the ceiling in the living area, decorated with white crown molding against a backdrop of light grey. Just a few feet away was the open door to my room; a lavish spread of exquisite furniture, a flat-screen TV, and a bar that was anything but mini. I pictured the en suite bathroom--with its sunken tub and spa-like shower that could comfortably accommodate an orgy—and I sighed wearily. 

I turned to Nick, my eyelids suddenly feeling heavy. Gesturing out towards the room around us, I said, “This is what they want—not me.” He looked around curiously. “Come on, Nick, you’re not stupid.”

“You’re more than just this,” he tried to reason, ruffling his hair absentmindedly. His eyes suggested he was ready to go back to his room and sleep before our three-hour road trip the next day.

I nodded slowly. “Right, but these women that you insist could be someone don’t see that. They don’t want more than this.” They didn’t want the man who couldn’t cook to save his life, or the guy who would rather eat at a diner than a four-star restaurant. They didn’t see me as a fan of rock music, a drinker of black coffee, a lover of cats, or the devourer of sitcoms. None of them have any desire to acknowledge that person could even exist under all of the glamour they see on TV, because that person was ordinary—no different than any man in any store they might bump into on any day. “They want B. Davis, Nick, because he has fancy hotels and party invitations. Why the hell would they trade that to be with Brandon, a sarcastic bastard with a cat and a Keurig?”

I wished they only wanted the sarcastic bastard with the cat and the Keurig.