by Rosie Danan
“It’s not a zero-sum game. Acknowledging your pain doesn’t take away from anyone else’s.”
“Thanks, but enough about my pain.” He smiled to let her know he wasn’t fatally wounded. “That’s my cap on feelings for one night.” He balanced his plate on his thigh and reached for his comic book on the coffee table. “I’m going to spend the rest of the night with the X-Men.”
Clara scooted closer. “What’s going on there?” She pointed at a panel.
“Mystique is about to steal Forge’s interference transmitter.”
A moment later, she stopped his progress with a hand on his arm. “Wait, I’m not done with that page!”
Tingles raced toward his shoulder. “More exciting than work, huh?”
“I feel like I’m going cross-eyed trying to find something interesting in all those files. Ever since Jill hired me to work on Toni Granger’s reelection campaign, I’ve been trying to combat the fact that I’m completely unqualified with a rigorous dedication to research. Granger’s office delivered like thirty boxes of these documents for us to go through to help craft our PR angle. Lawyers love paperwork.”
“I’ve heard that,” Josh said. “If I help you look through these boring files for let’s say, thirty minutes, would you be allowed to take a break and watch a movie? I’m worried about your big brain combusting.”
“Oh my gosh. That would be amazing.” She handed him a huge pile. “But who gets to pick the movie?”
“Obviously me.”
“Why obviously you?”
“Because I’m the one saving you from early-onset cataracts.”
“Fine.” She resumed reading. “But can we please watch Speed?”
His eyebrows sank together. “You like Speed?”
“No.” She highlighted something on the paper. “I love Speed.”
“You mean you love Keanu Reeves?”
“Are you trying to minimize my excellent taste in movies to a mere celebrity crush?”
“Oh no. I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Good. Because I’ll have you know I am a dedicated and lifelong fan of the action movie genre.” Clara reached for a set of documents at her feet. “I actually wanted to ask you about one of these.” She handed him a file. “Does the name Black Hat mean anything to you? I thought I came across the name in one of those articles that popped up when I Googled you.”
He wanted to tease her about reading his press coverage, but the quip died as he paused on the third line. “Wait a minute . . .”
“What is it?” Clara leaned to read over his shoulder. Her tits brushed against his shoulder and he almost yelped. He definitely needed to lift his embargo on masturbating to the thought of her. He couldn’t risk even platonic touching until he got his rocks off again. Josh would have called one of his regular hookups—hell, he’d even considered driving by Naomi’s place—but he knew his strike would last longer if he avoided people in the business who would tell him to suck it up and get back to work. A little intercourse hiatus wouldn’t cause any permanent damage. Probably.
Josh could feel her breath against his neck. He turned his head only to find their faces closer together than he’d anticipated. Clara had something shiny on her lips, making them pinker than normal. He found himself staring at them, imagining them wrapped around his . . .
“Do I have a booger?” She rubbed her nose. “If I do, you have to tell me.”
“Relax. Your nose is as clean as a whistle.” Josh directed his eyes back to the page in front of him.
“Did you find something in there? From what I read at the office, Toni’s a good lawyer with a solid case record, but so far nothing has jumped out as headline fodder.”
“I need my glasses.” Josh returned from his room a moment later, bespectacled. “Okay. Yeah. Look at this.” He ran his finger below where he wanted her to follow. “Toni Granger didn’t just mention Black Hat, she wrote a whole paper about them.”
As Clara reached to take the doc from his hands, the sweatshirt she wore fell off her shoulder. “Where did you get that sweatshirt?” He knew she hadn’t gone to Berkeley.
“Oh, um.” Clara tugged at her fallen collar. “It’s Everett’s. All of mine are in the wash.”
Josh ground his teeth together. Everett. Again. He kept letting himself conveniently forget her lifelong crush. “It looks like she wrote this when she was applying for the assistant district attorney’s office.” She flipped a couple of pages. “Hey, what’s Big Porn?”
“It’s like Big Tobacco. Black Hat is the largest distributor of pornography in the world. They own three of the five major streaming sites, more than a handful of big studios, probably a bunch of other stuff I don’t even know about. Their reach is long.”
Clara’s eyes widened as she took in more of the position paper. “It looks like they completely decimated the structure of the porn industry in a handful of years. Toni argues that their end-to-end distribution model creates a dangerous power imbalance, with their workers paying the cost. You know these people?”
“Sure. I mean, everyone knows Black Hat. They’re hard to avoid. I don’t deal with corporate directly, they usually go through Bennie, but their holding company controls the studio that holds my exclusive contract. They’ve invited me in for meetings a few times over the last couple of months, but I’d rather gnaw off my own arm than listen to businessmen talk about synergy.”
“This is serious.” Clara skimmed her finger underneath a new paragraph. “She’s implying wrongful termination, unsafe working conditions, sexual harassment. This place sounds like a disaster. She could have demanded they improve their policies during her first term. Why isn’t Granger’s office prosecuting on any of these violations?”
“My guess? Not enough witnesses to testify.” Josh needed a beer. “My contract might be a raw deal, but when it comes to porn, the performers are the lucky ones. I’ve got an agent, arguably some market value to trade on. But the directors, the crew, the people emptying the trash cans? They can’t afford to risk their jobs to take down a corporation with this much power and influence.”
“Well, someone should do something. I can’t believe the press isn’t talking about this.”
“Really? You’re shocked that Hollywood isn’t in an uproar because someone might be getting mistreated in the porn industry? Nobody outside our bubble gives a shit.”
“Well, somebody does. Toni obviously—”
Josh scoffed. “Toni wrote that five years ago so she could follow in the footsteps of countless politicians before her who have made a career out of demonizing sex workers. What has she done since then?”
Her silence sat heavy between them. Clara put down the papers and straightened her stacks.
He adjusted his tone. “I hate to break it to you, but the government and the porn industry don’t exactly see eye to eye.”
“Toni’s not like that. I grew up in a family of local politicians and other influential people and I’ve never seen one of them speak with the same unwavering dedication to civil reform as she does. She cares.”
Josh’s face curled with exasperation. “You don’t think she’s like that because you don’t have a clue what it’s like to live in the real world. You’ve spent your entire life in fancy schools. I bet you never learned how to do laundry because you could always pay someone to do it for you. Out here not everyone gets taken care of. You think all of us have rich family members handing out jobs like peppermints?”
Clara winced and hauled a pillow to her chest, refusing to look at him.
“I’m sorry.” Josh softened his voice. Their discussion tonight had stirred up so many painful memories. But that was no excuse. His stomach sank. “Clara, I shouldn’t have said that—”
“No, you’re right.” She met his gaze with her big doe eyes. “I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I’ve always known that.
This is my first foray into the real world and I’m stumbling. I don’t know what it’s like to do what you do.” She frowned. “Or apparently how to wash different types of fabric. I’ll be the first one to admit I’m a bit of a mess.”
Josh ignored the way his stomach flipped over at her raw admission of vulnerability. “We’re both on uneven ground here. Will you please forgive me?”
Her eyes dropped to his lips and he found himself breathing more heavily.
“If I say yes, can we watch Speed?”
He needed to find a way to get his attraction to her under control. She wasn’t fuel for his fantasies and she definitely wasn’t a whipping post for all his personal failures.
“We can watch Speed,” he conceded.
* * *
• • •
IN TIMES OF turmoil, some people turned to a pint of ice cream, and others ran a hot bath. When Clara needed comfort, she put on an action movie.
Despite Josh’s apology, awkwardness hung heavy in the air. Clara knew the palpable weight of words left unspoken. She’d spent a lifetime tiptoeing around a household teeming with words people wanted to say but never dared.
“Shouldn’t someone with a fancy degree in critiquing old paintings prefer grainy documentaries and foreign films with subtitles?” Josh eyed her from his end of the couch as the opening credits of Speed rolled across Everett’s flatscreen.
“You think I’m way more highbrow than I actually am,” Clara said, cutting the slice of lasagna she’d retrieved into neat bite-sized squares. The recent strain about their socioeconomic status and upbringing reinforced the fact that Josh would never look at her as anything other than his pampered roommate. She didn’t need to guard her emotions against him because the world provided ready-made barriers to any future between them.
Still, whether it was because he wasn’t working and didn’t have anything else better to do, or because he found her odd, Josh paid her a surprising amount of attention. If he were any other man, she might have squirmed under the scrutiny.
He was the most charming person she’d ever met. She had no idea how to navigate the minefield of their day-to-day interactions. With Everett, at least she’d had home field advantage when it came to trying to win his favor: hard-earned years’ worth of studying his likes and dislikes to ensure that their interactions always went down easy.
Josh studied her like a slide under a microscope. “What about period pieces? You know, lots of ruffled collars and weepy-eyed longing. I bet you go for those.”
Clara gracelessly bit off a long string of cheese from her fork. Thank goodness she didn’t have to bother trying to impress Josh with her table manners.
It was kind of nice, actually. The lack of romantic expectation let her relax. Someday she’d look back on this summer with fondness and laugh.
“I do like a good Regency drama, but I also like Keanu Reeves running hard toward danger in a tight T-shirt to save the city of Los Angeles with nothing but his bare hands and his mettle.” The sauce needed more basil. She added the herb to her mental grocery list. “My personality contains multitudes.”
Keanu Reeves’s character, Jack, came on screen and Clara emitted a happy little hum. That man sure knew how to wear a pair of cargo pants.
“Ohhh, I get it.” Josh slumped back against the couch. “This stuff makes you hot.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You get off on the heroics.” He gestured to the TV, where the characters attempted their daring rescue mission. “Look at you. Pink cheeks, wide eyes, breath coming out in little puffs. Those are classic signals.”
Her heart pounded unnaturally. She supposed having sex on the brain was an occupational hazard for Josh. What was her excuse?
“First of all, stop watching me and watch the movie. Second of all, you’re confusing lust with wholesome excitement.” She moved so one of the throw pillows blocked his view of her face, just in case. “They’re climbing into an elevator shaft. This is a suspenseful situation. I’m worried about the well-being of the hostages.”
Josh lowered the pillow and shot her a filthy smile. One that worked so well that for the first time in her life, Clara had to temper down the impulse to purr. “Oh please. Wait until Keanu slides under the bus to dismantle the bomb, I bet you go nuts.”
That moment did make her swoon. “My devotion to Speed is not motivated by anything remotely carnal.” At least, not entirely. “This film is a triumphant celebration of the human spirit.”
“You’re reaching,” he said, stretching his arms above his head until his shirt lifted high enough to reveal his lower stomach.
“I’m not.” She folded her arms to cover her duplicitous nipples. “Speed is about rising to the occasion. About average people like Jeff Daniels and Keanu and Sandra Bullock who are good and noble, and yes, hot, but in a soft, restrained way.”
“Restrained, my ass. You don’t get biceps like that without extensive personal training.”
Clara ignored that impertinent comment. “Speed is an action movie for the female gaze. Do you know how you can tell? The heroine has got on sensible shoes.”
Josh squinted at the screen. “So you identify with Sandra Bullock’s character?”
“I wish. Keanu falls for her as soon as she takes the wheel. I, on the other hand, would never recover from the embarrassment of Keanu calling me ma’am.”
Clara dabbed a napkin at a drop of sauce that had landed on the sofa. She never should have eaten dinner in front of the TV. She’d started picking up bad habits from her new roommate.
Josh fetched her a wet paper towel to better attack the burgeoning stain. “What’s wrong with ma’am?”
“Ma’am is so sexless.” She pouted. “The word tastes like sawdust in my mouth.”
“Aha! Sexless. Implying that you’d like for him to call you something sexy. You totally wanna do the horizontal mambo with Keanu.”
“The horizontal mambo? Seriously?” She threw the balled-up towel against his chest. “No one says that.”
He jump-shot the towel into the trash can. “Don’t like that one, huh? How about ‘buying a ticket to pound town’?”
Clara wrinkled her nose. “No, thank you.”
“Crashing the custard truck? Engaging in a little gland-to-gland combat? I can keep going.”
“Please don’t.” She sank down in her seat, trying to hide how even those ridiculous names somehow made her want to drape herself across Josh’s lap.
“Suit yourself.”
“I’m not denying the hunk factor here,” she conceded, “but there’s so much more to love about Speed.”
Josh pretended to cough into his hand. “Speed is a poor man’s Die Hard.”
Clara clutched her heart. “How dare you.”
He chuckled and reached for her empty plate.
Clinging to the edge of it, she tilted her head. “What are you doing?”
“Tidying up?” He tugged on his end until she let go.
“Oh. Thank you.” He’d taken to mirroring her behavior as if they were a team. A team unfit to accomplish anything, surely, but still, she appreciated the effort.
“Die Hard is a masterpiece. I’ll give you that,” she said when he returned from the kitchen. “But Speed has a uniquely endearing ensemble. There’s that nerdy tourist in the blazer, you know? I relate to him. I, too, came to L.A. with big dreams only to wind up circling the airport on a bus with a bomb.”
Josh raised his eyebrows as he returned to his seat.
“A metaphorical bus, obviously.”
“Wait.” He frowned and paused the movie. “Am I the bomb?”
“Don’t be silly.” She grabbed the remote and hit resume. Josh was absolutely the bomb. He was a big tangle of hormones trying to lure her to an untimely end. A bomb masked by cheesy jokes and kind eyes. One that could blow up her w
hole life if triggered at the wrong moment.
She tucked her legs underneath her with her knees pointing away from him. Best not to dwell. “Which character do you identify with?”
Josh chewed on his bottom lip. “I guess the bad guy.”
Clara made a dismissive huff through her nose.
“Well, I’m not Keanu, that’s for sure. I’m not saving anyone. I see that first bus blow up and I’m running in the other direction. There’s no movie with me as the lead.”
“Stop it. You’re nicer than you give yourself credit for. You’re helping me learn to drive out of the goodness of your heart.”
“Only because you remind me of a wounded woodland animal.”
“Thanks,” Clara said, the word dripping sarcasm.
“See? I’m totally the villain. Disillusioned and angry. Drunk on self-importance.”
“You are not Howard Payne.” Yesterday, she’d caught him trimming their elderly neighbor’s hydrangeas.
“Is that his name? Talk about on the nose. You know, if you flip the script this is a story about a broken system of law enforcement that abandons an officer disabled in the line of duty. Maybe he wanted to draw attention to the crumbling infrastructure of the LAPD.”
“Josh. Howard murders a bunch of people.”
“Yeah. That’s not cool.”
She tossed a pillow at him. “Pay attention.”
The rest of the movie passed in companionable silence. At the climax, Clara tried to wipe her leaking eyes without drawing attention to herself.
“Are you crying at Speed?” Josh sounded both amazed and appalled.
“Keanu is so sweet here.” Clara hiccuped. “He knows they might die and he sits on the floor with Sandra Bullock and holds her. He doesn’t try to grab her boob or kiss her. He wraps her in his arms, providing a shallow sense of safety. Isn’t that what all of us want deep down? Someone to hold us at the end of the line?”