Strummed

by Heidi Lowe

“Don't be such a prude. Now, are you sure you'll be all right here, all on your lonesome? Colin's cousin's in town for the weekend; we could do a double date thing if you're interested.”

  “Didn't we agree that you would never set me up on a blind date again, after the last time?”

  “Oh, come on, it was fun. So you both ended up in a jail cell for four hours; but you can't deny it was exciting.”

  I glowered at her, the wounds of my unfair arrest still sore. Against my better judgment I'd agreed to go out with her client's son... The biggest mistake of my life. The guy was insane, and super paranoid. Ended up attacking a valet because he was convinced the man was trying to steal his car. I still shuddered to think about that evening – the whole awful experience had left a bitter taste in my mouth, and had made me wary of the dating scene.

  “I'll find my own date, thank you very much.”

  “Suit yourself.” She slipped on her heels and grabbed her jacket. “If all goes well you won't see me tonight.”

  Everywhere I turned it seemed sex was the topic of the day. Or could that have been my secret preoccupation with it that made me think everyone was talking about it?

  Barely five minutes had passed since Jessica's departure, when I picked up my cell phone to order a pizza. As I went to punch in the number, the phone started buzzing in my hand, startling me. Autumn's name and number flashed on the screen. My initial response was to freeze and hold my breath, imagining a myriad of reasons for her call.

  “Answer the goddamn phone, would you!” I scolded myself, figuring that she'd probably dialed me by accident.

  “Uh, hello...”

  “What are you doing?” She didn't even let me answer before she added, “It doesn't matter. I need you here.”

  No hello, no good evening, no sorry to bother you on your Friday night. Talk about rude. Still, none of this shocked me. I'd grown accustomed to her discourtesy, and I'd known going in that being an assistant, especially to someone like her, was a job without time off. When you were Autumn's assistant you were always on call.

  “How can I help you, Miss Anders?”

  “The promoter didn't show, and I'm not prepared to sit here eating alone. So drop whatever you're doing and get your virgin butt here.”

  “I'm not dressed –”

  “If you wanna keep your job you'll put something on and get here. And don't take all evening.” She put the phone down before I could put up a fight.

  Of course the thought did cross my mind to stand her up, switch off my cell and let her sit in a fancy restaurant all on her own while people gawked at her. I would have actually paid money to see that. But then I remembered that I wouldn't have any if I lost my job, so I dressed in a hurry, throwing on the only thing in my closet that didn't make me look like I was on my way to work. If she didn't reimburse me for the cab, I vowed I would make her morning coffee with rat poison.

  “You took your time,” was the first thing she said when I found her at her table at the back of the restaurant, having been escorted there by the maitre d' himself. She looked me up and down with contempt as she sipped from her wine glass.

  “I got here as soon as I could.” Half an hour, from the end of her call to arriving at the eatery; I'd never gotten dressed so quickly before. But expecting some gratitude from her for the effort was too much.

  Around me the restaurant bustled with energy, as members of the top echelon of society dined in style, away from the common folk. My paranoia set in almost instantly, the moment their eyes fell on our table as I sat opposite Autumn. I felt as though they were questioning my suitability to dine in a place like this. I'd left my apartment feeling reasonably dressed. Within seconds of sitting down I felt like I was clothed in rags. A strong drink would have gone down well, but I wasn't about to drink on the job. Besides, Autumn looked as though she was drinking enough for the both of us.

  “I hate this place,” she grumbled, and threw back her drink. “Always have. I hate any place where you can spend several hundred bucks on a meal and still leave hungry.”

  “So why did you choose to come here?”

  “For prestige, obviously. People love to be wined and dined here. It's where you take someone to get something you want out of them.” She poured herself another glass of wine. It smelled wonderful, and made my mouth water. She offered me none of it. “And where you go to be ogled by people who think they're better than you. You fit right in in a place like this, Little Miss Snobby.”

  Well, that was a slight improvement on being called – and thus reminded that I was – a virgin. She narrowed her eyes at me, the tiniest smirk on her lips, as though waiting for me to defend myself, answer back. I didn't.

  Then it hit me that it wasn't me they were looking at, but her. Someone who'd opted to wear a leather jacket, cropped top and jeans to a five-star restaurant was asking for attention, whether they wanted it or not.

  “It's Friday evening. Why weren't you out getting wasted like all kids your age?” she asked eventually. “I was extremely disappointed when you told me you weren't dressed. I totally wanted to ruin your evening.”

  Bitch! And just because I wasn't out getting drunk, drinking my weight in alcohol, didn't mean she hadn't ruined my night. They were showing back-to-back episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, for God's sake!

  “Unless, of course, you were undressed because, finally, you were getting some action.” She did something with her tongue that suddenly made the room feel hotter, stuffier than it had before. I looked away before she could link my blush with the thing she did with her tongue. “But who am I kidding, you're never going to get lucky. I mean, look at you. You look like you're about to do my taxes. Would it hurt to wear your hair down once in a while?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I hate seeing the same thing day in, day out.”

  “My hair being up doesn't affect my ability to do my job.”

  “How about if you don't let it down I'll fire you?”

  I gawped at her, mouth wide-open. “What, right now? Here?”

  She nodded, grinning fiendishly, daringly. Was she bluffing, or did she really expect me to take my hair out in the middle of the restaurant? I decided that calling her bluff wasn't worth the trouble. It was just hair, after all.

  I pulled the hair tie out and let my brown tresses fall around my shoulders, dreading to think what it looked like. I'd had no time to brush it before leaving home that evening. I kept my eyes down, too embarrassed to look at her. There was something about letting my hair down that made me feel vulnerable, and I didn't want her to see that.

  When I didn't hear anything from her, not even a cackle, which I'd been expecting, I looked up. She sat across the table, just staring at me, sort of quizzically. Never in all my life did I want to read someone's mind more than I did hers right then. Her expression gave nothing away. In the six weeks that we'd known each other she'd never looked at me that way before.

  Then she retrieved her menu, breaking eye contact, and mumbled, “I don't want to see you wear your hair down again.”

  Thrown, flabbergasted, more confused than I'd ever been, I picked up my own menu and tried to decide on a dish, now too distracted to think straight. None of her actions had ever made sense, but this reaction to something she'd ordered me to do... I genuinely believed she was cuckoo.

  Once we'd made our orders, me having ordered one of the most expensive items on the menu, I decided to ask her the question that had bugged me since receiving her call.

  “Why did you call me? I'm sure there are a thousand people who you would have preferred to join you here.”

  “Don't flatter yourself, I intend to consume my weight in alcohol tonight, and I'd rather not drive myself into a wall.”

  “So I'm your designated driver?”

  “You're everything I need you to be,” she answered simply. “I'm the one paying.”

  “So you're effectively paying someone to have dinner with you?”

  She glared at m
e, clearly having taken my comment in the offensive way it was intended. “Maybe I should stop paying that someone, huh? Because that someone can easily be replaced.”

  She was like a broken record. Threatening to fire me, and talking about the lack of sex I was having, that was all she had on me. And although finding another job wouldn't have been a cakewalk, it wouldn't be nearly as difficult as she was making out. She must have thought she was the only employer in town. For a moment I wondered how she'd gotten like this, and then I remembered. The memory didn't stay away long. Heartbreak.

  “From what I heard, you had a lot of trouble finding assistants who stuck around before me.”

  “Are you talking about those troublemakers from your agency?” She cackled. “What did they tell you about me? Let me guess, that I made them clean toilets? That I forced them into orgies?”

  “Something like that.” Exactly that, I thought. How did she know about the accusations?

  “When you get to my level of fame, you attract a lot of hate. People make it their duty to sully your name, never mind the fact that it's already filthy.” Her laugh was humorless. “Do you really think I would force someone into an orgy?”

  “The first thing you did when we met was invite me to join one, so...” I shrugged. “But, no, I don't believe you would force someone.” Well, that wasn't entirely true. I could see her putting someone under duress, with the threat of losing their job if they didn't join in, but I never said that to her.

  “That's not my style.” She sipped her wine, a pained look on her face.

  “I know that.”

  Once again, her eyes were on me, staring deep into my soul.

  “You know all about me, and I sure as hell know all about me, so let's talk about Virtuous Virgin Elle.” She leaned forward, eyes glistening with cruel excitement.

  “There's really nothing to talk about.” Why had the conversation suddenly moved on to me, and why was she interested in my boring life anyway? “I grew up in a small town called Ferndale, about forty-five minutes south of Helena, Montana. My parents are devout Catholics, both teachers, and they teach at my old high school. Yes, you can imagine how awful that was for me.”

  She laughed! She actually laughed, and not in a spiteful way. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

  “Schoolteachers? That explains a lot.”

  “Erm, I was a Brownie for a little while, until the lady running it got the death penalty for murdering her husband.”

  Another laugh, this time louder than the last. I could feel eyes on us, but it didn't bother me. In fact, I welcomed the attention, wanted the world to know that the plain girl from Montana could elicit this kind of laugh from the world's most difficult celebrity.

  “How did she do it?”

  “Poison, I think. If my parents were overprotective of me before, you should have seen them after that. They thought everyone was a murderer, didn't let me go to sleepovers, things like that.”

  “Now it all makes sense.”

  I frowned. “What does?”

  “Why you're the way you are. You had a sheltered upbringing because your Brownie guide put her husband down. So tragic it's funny.”

  I wished I could have said that was the case, but in truth my parents had sheltered me long before that unfortunate incident.

  “Since birth they've been that way. I was a miracle baby, born after the doctors had told my mother she couldn't have children. If I got even the smallest scratch they rushed me to the hospital.”

  “So they never let you grow up. You're a girl when you should be a woman.”

  I sighed. “Please don't start with the virgin talk again. I get it.”

  “I don't think you do. You live in a fantasy world, where people wait for the love of their lives, and then they show up, and they live happily ever after.”

  “And what's wrong with that? What's wrong with wanting to be in love? To love someone so deeply that if they leave the room for even a second, I can't breathe. That waking up every morning, knowing that no matter what the day brings, I've found my soul mate, so I will always be okay. To feel whole, realizing that all the time you spent without them you were only one half of that whole. What's wrong with wanting that?”

  Although a million different noises filled the restaurant all around us, a silence fell on our table, and soon the external sounds were drowned out by it. I know she heard the silence too, I could see it in her eyes when she looked at me. She'd heard every word I'd said, I could see that too. I hadn't meant to go off like that, in a daze I often fell into when I spoke of my romantic dreams, staring off into space as though visualizing my future.

  “No one finds that kind of love,” she said, seemingly in a daze of her own.

  “You did.” It was out before I could stop it. My stupid mouth. I thought for sure that even an inadvertent mention of her lost love was enough to send her into a rage, flying across the table with her hands clawing for my neck.

  “Past tense,” she said stiffly. I couldn't believe it; this was the first time that I'd ever known of her to acknowledge Nancy since her death. I'd read that on the evening that it happened, when she found her at the bottom of the stairs of the home they shared together, she'd been unable to provide any information to the police or the paramedics, falling into a brief dissociative state. And then not talking became her choice. If you didn't know about her past beforehand, you would never have known there had once been a person in her life she loved more than herself.

  “You think you can't again, but you can, if you want to.” I was stepping into dangerous territory, and I knew it, as attested by my pounding heart which threatened to come crashing through my chest.

  “I don't want to,” she said through clenched teeth, refusing to meet my gaze.

  So that was it, she didn't want it. She was actively trying not to feel that way again, possibly because the first time had ended so tragically. For the first time ever I saw her as just a frightened woman who'd spent eight years guarding her heart so that it never got broken again; hardening it, and in turn hardening everything else about her to the point of becoming obnoxious.

  She took a breath, I watched her chest rise and fall, and when she finally looked up, her melancholy had vanished, and the woman I knew returned. A pretty waitress brought my meal over, and Autumn's eyes were glued to her. They exchanged flirtatious smiles and hellos.

  “She must be new,” Autumn said, eying the girl's butt as she sauntered away to fetch Autumn's meal.

  I sighed, for some reason angered by this change of topic, just when we were getting somewhere, when I was on the verge of viewing her as something more than a bad-tempered harlot with only one thing on her mind.

  “How do you know?” I didn't really care but asked anyway.

  “Haven't seen her here before. I would have noticed.” She swept her blonde mane to one side, unaware of how sexy it was when she did that. Or perhaps she was fully aware. “I think I'll take her home with me tonight.”

  “Does she have a say in it?”

  “Of course she does. But she's going to say yes.”

  She would, we both knew it, and Autumn wouldn't even have to do much to get her to come along.

  “How do you know she's gay?”

  “I don't, but when has that ever stopped me?”

  When the waitress returned, she drew out her presence as long as she could, fixing things on our table and asking if she could do anything else for us, addressing only Autumn, as though she sat alone at the table. By now I was used to it; whenever I accompanied my famous boss anywhere it was like being invisible.

  “What time do you get off?” Autumn asked.

  “A couple of hours,” the girl said, eyes sparkling with hope. She couldn't have looked more desperate to become another notch on Autumn's bedpost if she'd had Take Me Now written across her forehead in red ink! I chewed on my food with disgust, the food tasting as bitter as I felt about the female race at that moment.

  “See if you can g
et off early, then come find me.”

  “I will.”

  And just like that Autumn Anders secured her night's entertainment.

  One of the few perks of working for her was getting to drive her Aston Martin Rapide S, a car whose price tag was more than five times my yearly salary. It was one of several cars she owned, but my favorite. Whenever she handed me the keys I had to stop myself salivating.

  This wasn't the case that night, however. Escorting a drunk Autumn home was one thing; I'd done that more than once. But a drunk, horny Autumn accompanied by an equally drunk young waitress with stars in her eyes, was nothing short of galling. The loud, breathless kissing coupled with the noisy fumbling in the backseat, and accidental kicking of my seat while I tried to concentrate on the road, went on for the whole twenty-minute drive. Have you ever tried driving without using the rear-view mirror? Because that was what I did, having seen way too much flesh the first couple of times I'd glanced at it.

  I must have run at least one red light in my desperation to get to the mansion. The kissy noises, the heavy breathing, and the waitress's childish giggling were vomit-inducing.

  “Maybe she should join us. She's cute,” the waitress whispered, though not very quietly, as we congregated in the entrance hallway of the mansion. Autumn had a lazy arm flung around her neck, and was planting stealthy little kisses in the crook of it.

  She gave a croaky laugh. “Unfortunately she's a frigid virgin who can't stand human contact.”

  I glared at her, which only made her laugh more.

  “No way!” The waitress turned to me. “Are you really a virgin? I didn't think there were any virgins left in San Francisco.” Now she was laughing at me. “What do you like, guys or girls?”

  “I don't think that's any of your business,” I said.

  “Oh, she's as straight as a ruler. Probably too conservative to do anything nice to her own vagina let alone another woman's,” Autumn said.

  “You don't know me.” My anger only amused them both. It had never occurred to me that Autumn thought I was straight, but now it made sense. Whenever she brought up my lack of a sex life, she spoke only of male suitors. This bothered me more than it should have, that her only reason for assuming I was straight was because she perceived me to be conservative.