by Willa Okati
“I ‑‑”
The door to the writer’s room banged open. “Whoa! Holy crap!”
Harper jerked away from Rory, heart hammering against his ribs. “You just about gave me a heart attack, Lisa! Knock first!”
Lisa stared at them, eyes wide, white showing around her hazel irises.
A horrible thought occurred to Harper. “Lisa, can you see him?”
“I can see a lot of him. Who is he? Hi. Who the hell are you?” Lisa fumbled for the cigarette pack outlined in the hip pocket of her jeans. She blinked and shook her head and snapped a rubber band around her wrist. “Harper, what the hell?”
“You’re a little more freaked out than most people who walk in on someone,” Rory observed, sitting back more firmly on Harper’s knees. He arched an eyebrow. “Hey, wait, you two aren’t ‑‑”
“No!” Harper said hastily.
“God, no!” Lisa said, nearly in unison.
“Then why ‑‑”
No way was Harper going to let Rory start in on the questions with Lisa. “It’s okay.” He patted Rory’s forearm, praying to anyone or anything who might be listening that Rory would take the hint and zip his lips. “He’s cleared to be here. This is Rory, my new, um, P.A.” He nearly sagged with relief at having come up with a hopefully decent cover story without thinking. Maybe there was something to having a muse around. “My personal P.A.”
“Uh-huh. Why am I just now hearing about this?”
“Lisa ‑‑”
The dark look she shot Harper warned him that he’d get the grilling of a lifetime later. “Janie wants to see you. Her office, double-quick-time. A couple of the actors got wind of some fake rumors about character arcs and they’re pitching a fit.” She grimaced when Harper groaned. “I know, I know.”
No better method had ever been devised for killing an erection. “Get off.” Harper pushed at Rory, who, this time, let him go, sliding off Harper’s lap and offering him a hand up.
Harper brushed it aside. “Lisa, don’t get pissed. Please?”
“Who’s miffed? Not I. You know damn well how much grass our asses will be if you’re doing something as stupid as this looks, sneaking a boy-toy into work, and I know you do. Men. Always thinking with their dicks. So that whole song-and-dance about ‘who’s this naked guy in my apartment? Help, help!’ was a big ol’ joke, huh? Sheesh.” Lisa tapped her foot. “Gotta admit, though… if you were going to sling your ass on the grill for a piece of ass, he’s worth the risk. Hotcha.”
Rory leered at her and waggled his eyebrows. “I like this one.”
“Right back at you,” Lisa said without missing a beat. “You can’t keep me, so don’t even ask. And find yourself a P.A. badge before you go anywhere on set. Capiche?”
“Roger that.” Harper snuck a look at Rory out of the corner of his eye. Rory was mussed, dark smudges already forming on his throat, marks no one in their right minds could mistake for anything but love bites. Harper would bet half a week’s pay that if he had a mirror to look in, he’d see he appeared no less fucked-out.
The close call made his overheated blood run cold again. Lesson learned.
“Harper!” Lisa clapped her hands. “Seriously, snap out of it. Go find Janie before she burns the joint down to flush you out.”
Rory sniggered. “Burn the joint,” he said under his breath. He coughed. “Sorry. Lead the way, boss.”
“After you,” Harper hedged, waving Lisa out. “I’m right behind you. Cross my heart. Just have to have a word with Rory here first.”
She snorted. “Yeah. If you’re not out in five, I’m coming in with a fire extinguisher.”
The writer’s room door banged closed behind her.
“Now that’s a woman,” Rory said with awed respect. His clothes reappeared, smooth and unmussed. “Sweet and wacky, yet she’d rip off your balls quick as a wink if you made her mad. Feisty, not afraid to speak her mind. Good character archetype. You should add one of her to the lineup.” He thumbed his lip, slightly swollen from kissing. “You could learn a thing or two from that one.”
“Excuse me?” Harper halted in his reach for the door latch.
“You heard what I said.” Rory appeared between Harper and the door, where he hadn’t been a half second ago.
“How do you do that?”
Rory stood his ground and refused to veer off topic. “I see it now. A big part of your problem.” He poked Harper’s forehead. “Indecision. You know what you want, and you’re good for it, but then you think ‘Oh, hey, maybe this is better’ or ‘Maybe I shouldn’t go with my gut,’ and you know what? That’s bullshit. Take a note from the pistol who just shot out of here. If you think something’s right? Make up your mind, grow a pair, and do something about it.”
Harper’s mouth hung open. The nerve of this guy ‑‑
Rory turned smoothly, more fluidly than a human should be able to move, maybe out of spite or maybe to drive home his differences for a change, reinforcing how he knew some of Harper’s tangles inside and out. “Three minutes and counting. She’ll honest-to-Dog show up to hose us down if we don’t show, and I think there’s a lot more I need to know about the soap opera biz now that I’m a P.A. Move out.”
He wrenched the door open and strode forward, head held high. Harper gaped after him, offended. Who did Rory think he was, anyway?
Oh, right. A muse. On the loose in New York. On a sound stage.
Crap. Harper hurried to catch up.
Chapter Four
By the time Harper reached Rory, he’d earned a few curious glances for his flurry from the tech crew milling about, but nothing more than mild interest at a writer acting nuts. Rory stood as if he belonged there, and they accepted him as easy as a snap of the fingers.
He looked over his shoulder at Harper, and for once Harper was the one who could read Rory’s mind: Take a stand, and see how easy it is?
It was, Harper, thought, completely unfair.
He crammed his indignation and aggravation in a small knot and buried them. Rory had the right idea in shaking off the tension. Besides, if Harper didn’t dive into something else right now the odds were good he’d tackle Rory, make him cry uncle, and end up having angry sex under the spotlight gels.
He’d love to see Janie’s reaction to that. Or not. Definitely not.
“Are you coming?” The faintest of smirks tweaked Rory’s lips.
“No. And yes.” Harper scanned a nearby table for any kind of label. He found a marker. “Give me your hand.”
“Treating me like a lady now?” Rory asked. He let Harper take him by the wrist. “Careful with the knuckle-kissing. I chafe.”
“Very funny.” Harper uncapped the marker and scribbled over the back, in large, bold letters: P.A.
Rory studied them upside-down. “P.A. Personal Assistant, huh? Jeez. It’s like you just hung a bell around my neck.”
“Don’t start, Rory.”
Rory, predictably, ignored him. “Unclean! Unclean! Or maybe it’s more like ‘Do not taunt the P.A. Do not walk on the P.A. Never get the P.A. wet and never, whatever else you do, never feed the P.A. after midnight.’“
“Rory ‑‑” Harper cut himself short. “If you don’t like it, tough. No one’s allowed on set who hasn’t read them, signed them, and had them notarized.”
“Yeah? Security at the door and all?”
“Supposed to be. He wanders off sometimes.”
“And Janie hasn’t fired him, why?”
“She does. At least once a week. Some bigwig’s his uncle and to be fair he does have the body mass and sunny temperament of Bluto. He makes sure the main doors are locked, sticks around during call times, knows our faces, and keeps out anyone he wants out.”
Rory, attention diverted, scratched the ink with his thumbnail. “And this ink’ll convince them that I belong here, how?”
“It won’t, if they look deeper than the surface.”
“Huh,” Rory grunted.
“What’s that suppo
sed to mean?” Harper speared his fingers through his hair. “I’ll do some creative recordkeeping later. When there’s time. Right now, this is all I can think of, and this is how it’s got to be. If you don’t like it, either inspire me with something else, or the door’s right over there.”
“Aren’t you the grumpy one?” From the bounce in Rory’s step, no one would ever know he’d been cock-blocked like a champ bare minutes ago. Apparently, muses bounced back well when taking on new challenges, or maybe that was just Rory.
He clapped Harper on the back, alight with interest and the rising surge of his usual enthusiasm. “Where do we go first? I wanna check everything out, really get my hands dirty, y’know?”
Seeing the glow in Rory’s eyes, Harper swallowed back a lump of regret and told himself, in no uncertain terms, that it was relief instead.
Business as usual. Good. Better than taking chances.
“Where do you want to start?”
“Lay of the land, I think.” Rory rubbed his hands together, smudging the black ink.
“Okay, can do, but first things first. You’re right about the ink not being enough.” Harper snagged a junior P.A. ‑‑ Shelly, he thought her name was, a perky blonde who might have had her headset surgically implanted, since he never saw her without it. “Got a second?”
“Give me five,” she addressed her mouthpiece, and looked up at Harper with nigh-blinding, toothpaste-ad enthusiasm. “Hi! What can I do for you?”
“Coffee,” Harper said on impulse. “A big cup.”
“Sure thing!” Harper remembered now that Shelly tended to talk in exclamation points. Sometimes two or three at once. “And for your friend?” She craned her neck. “Oh, hi! You’re a new P.A.? I hadn’t heard! Awesome!”
Shelly was a microcosm example of how pretty women turned Harper into a blob of wary jelly.
“New P.A.,” he answered, trying not to step back, tactfully or not. “Yep. Mine.”
Rory chuckled under his breath. “Possessive now, are you? My, how the worm has turned.”
“As the World Turns?” Shelly cocked her head to a side. “We’re Twilight Rising. It’s okay! I got confused too when I started. Don’t worry! You’ll have it all figured out in no time!”
“With a lady like you to show me the ropes, I have no doubt I will.” Rory caught Shelly’s hand and kissed the back of her wrist.
Shelly swooned.
The hairs on the back of Harper’s neck bristled. “Rory, flirt on your own time.”
Rory flashed Harper a quick smirk. Jea-lous, he singsong mouthed.
“Sorry!” Shelly chirped, missing the byplay. “All yours! Do you want that coffee now?”
“I think he might have had enough caffeine for one day, actually.” Rory winked at Shelly. “Tell you what’d come in real handy, though.” He showed her his ink. “Got kinda crazy this morning ‑‑”
“When doesn’t it?” Shelly giggled. “It’s so wild working on a real daytime drama set! I had no idea!”
Harper gritted his teeth. “Shelly!” Sometimes you had to fight enthusiasm with enthusiasm. “We need a new P.A. badge for Rory. He, uh, lost his.”
“Aww, too bad! I don’t know where the digital camera is, but if you hold still ‑‑” Shelly fished a cell phone out of her pocket and aimed it at Rory. “Say cheese!”
“Gorgonzola!”
Shelly snapped the picture and dissolved into giggles. “I like you, Rory!”
“Right back at you, sweetheart.”
Everybody loved Rory. Looked like he loved them, too. Harper’s jaw ached from clenching and his temples pounded. Why should he care if Rory got his groove on with a willing woman? Jesus, he ought to be dancing if it got Rory’s insatiable libido pointed in another direction.
Oughtn’t he?
He grabbed Rory’s arm, perhaps more roughly than he should have, and jerked him away. “We’re done here. Shelly, put the ID on my desk when it’s ready to go.”
“Thanks, cutie!” Rory called over his shoulder, hurrying to keep up. He bumped hips with Harper. “So, I’m yours, all yours, huh? I like.”
“Shut up,” Harper growled.
“Caveman influences, too. Better and better. I should get you riled up more often.”
“Do you want this tour or not?”
“Tone down the shouting, would you?” Rory waved to a tech guy who’d abandoned any pretense of working to stare at them. “I’m getting vibes here telling me this is way out of character for you. Don’t wanna get people thinking you actually are nutso.”
“The jury’s still out on that one.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know I’m real, so cut the crap.” Utilizing his freaky stop-motion powers, the wet flick of Rory’s tongue under Harper’s ear came and gone without Harper seeing him move. “Real enough to get you so hot and bothered you were five seconds from bending me in half. Don’t think I’m letting up on that, and not just because I wanna take a bite of your sweet ass. You need to get fucked within an inch of your life.”
Harper tried his best not to stagger, not even a little bit, and failed. He licked a faint trace of sweat off his upper lip. “Is that true, Rory, or do you just want it that badly?”
“Six of one, a half dozen of the other.” Rory shrugged. He’d acquired a clipboard somewhere, jammed with dog-eared pages. A précis of In Outré, notes scribbled in the margin, was on the top. He ran one finger under each line as he skimmed. “Huh. Uh-huh. Okay, helpful. In Outré. Stories about the beatniks, postapocalypse-style. Bohemians. Quirky yet likeable types. Human like the rest of us ‑‑”
“Most of us,” Harper mumbled.
“Shut up.” Rory scanned a wardrobe invoice. “Looks like they wear a lot of hemp. Location, a Village-type section of a big city. Mary-Sue much, New York boy?”
“Hey!”
“No, no, it’s cool for now. Write what you know.” Rory flipped the page and came across a printout of an e-mail. Harper recognized the sender’s address as his own, reading his private notes over Rory’s shoulder.
“That’s personal. Where did you ‑‑ give me that!”
“Too slow, bucko. Too bad, so sad.” Rory dodged Harper’s swipe at the clipboard and walked backward, still reading.
“To Lisa, CC to Janie, from Harper. Ahem. In Outré is meant to tell the story of an underground networking of telepaths and magic practitioners, etc. etc. etc., taken prisoner, yada, yada, freedom fighters who specialize in working with the strange and unusual,” he quoted.
“What d’you think?”
“Huh. Not sure. Let me finish.” Rory flapped the papers. “A tarot-reader who was missed in the internment drives when written off as a fraud discovers she’s actually got the gift. What does she do with it? What happens if she uses her powers for evil instead of good thinking it’d be okay in the short term because it’s to help someone? What if someone who could use that against her saw or found out? What if that person told another person who decided to play the heavy and use her as a tool? And so it goes.”
Rory tapped his chin with a red pen, also seemingly snatched out of the air.
Harper could smell a critique coming. He stopped walking and waited for it.
“Not bad,” Rory said.
The breath whooshed out of Harper’s lungs. “You think so?”
“‘Course I do. Muses don’t lie. We drive writers up the effing wall, we’re so honest.” Rory batted his eyelashes at Harper.
Harper thought he should be offended. He wasn’t. More like tempted to smile again. “It’s not perfect.”
“Hell no. Nothing is.” Rory chicken-scratched a few notes of his own on the page. “I said it was ‘not bad,’ not ‘it’s great.’“
“Oh.”
“Chin up. Fat lady hasn’t sung yet.” Rory snagged his new P.A.’s badge from Shelly as she passed, very much not looking at Harper. He got the distinct impression that he’d just been snubbed. “Cute kid. Lots of personality. And hot? Damn. Seriously impressive rack.”
“I actually hadn’t noticed,” Harper fibbed. A prickle of, okay, jealousy needled at his spine.
Rory snorted. “Sure.”
Harper’s face warmed. “So maybe I have. They don’t do anything for me.”
“Didn’t figure they would. No harm in general observations, though, is there?” Rory scribbled a line, frowned, scratched it out, and bit the tip of the pen. “Tell me more. I need some context. What’s up with In Outré that goes deeper than the surface? What makes it such a big whoop?”
“Outside of making or breaking my career?”
Rory jabbed the pen at him in warning.
Harper threw up his hands. He brushed off the edge of an empty countertop, one of the set pieces yet to be placed, and half-sat, propping up his weight. “You’re exhausting to argue with, you know that?”
“Yep, and I always win.”
“I’m starting to get that. Fine. Okay.” Harper rubbed his face. “What makes In Outré different? The whole dark, gritty look and feel I’m trying to dig my way to. Some gay characters, some lesbian characters, too. Not that the one implies the other, and we have straight folks, too, but heavy duty on the nonvanilla sex of all flavors. As well as sword guns, electro-nun chucks, and secret police.”
“Sexin’ it up, huh? Naughty.” Rory leered. “I like it better already. Keep going.”
Harper warmed to his topic, gestures growing animated. “They like the concept. That’s all well and good. The writing, though. If I don’t have at least three months of scripts completely nailed ‑‑”
Rory’s eyebrows headed for his hairline. “Three months?”
“-- and so well planned that no one could possibly poke holes in my stories or do a better job, I’m shunted to the side and someone else takes the reins for my baby.”
“That sucks.” Rory winced. “No wonder you’re wound up tighter than a Slinky.” He produced a pencil and handed it to Harper. “Bite. Ruins your teeth, helps your jitters.”
Harper took the pencil, surprised to see familiar-looking gnaw marks on the length. “Where’d you get ‑‑ never mind.” He gripped the comforting Faber, thumb over its #2, and let go. “That’s what I’m up against, and with writer’s block and a fried hard drive…”