by DC Thome
Mr. Creighton wanted? Of course Lara had set out to be in The Rotation, but a part of her hoped Clay had other ideas.
Candy continued. “Anyway, what we need to do today is fairly perfunctory. Standard procedure for any girl who joins The Rotation.”
Gina had warned Lara that women entering The Rotation would likely have to sign a nondisclosure agreement. She felt pretty sure of this because thirty-eight women had passed through The Rotation without any of them writing one word about it except for sycophantic guest spots on Clay’s blogs. “What are the odds of that?” Gina had said with a sneer.
Even though she was prepared for what was about to happen, Lara worried about reneging on a signed contract. Gina assured her that HardCoreGrrrls would pay for her defense and let Lara retain the book and movie rights that would inevitably come her way. Still, Lara dreaded the moment when she would have to put the pen to the paper.
“Please, have a seat.” Candy motioned them all to a C-shaped pit group in the corner of the room.
Lara sat in the middle as Tiffany brought in a pitcher of jasmine-scented iced green tea and a set of the hand-painted hula-dancer tumblers that Lara recognized from the ICE House.
“So, Rafe,” Candy said, filling the tumblers, “would you like to begin?”
A slight man, Rafe had a big presence. Maybe it was his broad shoulders. Or his impeccable attire. Or his shiny, slicked-back, dark, curly hair.
“We’re not going to get it all done today, obviously,” he said, “but we’re going to be spending a considerable amount of time together developing your brand.”
“I have a brand?”
Lara knew that whatever “the girls of The Rotation” were like in real life, precious little of it showed through in their public personas. “They have people whose job is to craft a personality for each woman that fits the Fast Lane ‘mystique,’” Gina had said. “When they ask you about yourself, just tell them about your life. There’s too much chance of stumbling over details if you make stuff up.” Lara didn’t think her life had been interesting enough for Fast Lane, but Gina said her movie industry background and knowledge of auto racing would provide plenty of grist for the highly paid corporate spin doctors. One thing was sure about Clay Creighton’s consorts: None of them were dull.
“You don’t have a brand yet.” Rafe put a hand on Lara’s knee. Doesn’t anyone here respect personal boundaries? “We know a little about you already—your previous marriage, your career in the film industry.”
“I just wrote publicity pieces for my husband’s—my ex-husband’s—production company. I didn’t even get paid.”
“Ah, but you see, that is something we can use. You’re a team player. Loyal. That kind of devotion is hard to find these days.”
I was more like a towel boy, but it sounds better than saying a conniving son-of-a-bitch profited from my ignorance while fucking every two-bit, size double-D slut in the San Fernando Valley.
“So that’s what we’re going to do first.” Lara found Rafe’s confidence reassuring. “Brainstorming. Riffing, more or less, on…whatever. Your experiences. Your likes and dislikes. Your childhood. Hobbies. Favorite music. Dark secrets.”
His eyebrows rose and he moved in toward Lara when he said “dark secrets.”
“Dark secrets?”
“That kind of thing.”
Lara nodded.
“I’ll be in on those discussions, too,” Meilani interjected.
“Yes, she will be in on the discussions.” Rafe sighed and took his hand off Lara’s knee.
Meilani focused on Lara. “You’ll have your own blog, of course, and a Facebook page. And you’ll be tweeting two or three times a day. More, if you like.”
“Sounds like I’ll be busy.”
“Oh, don’t worry—my staff will take care of all that. We just need to know where you’re coming from.”
“Your staff will write my blog and tweets?”
“Oh, yes. They’re very good.”
“When it comes to new media.” Rafe straightened his tie.
“So, you two work together?” Lara asked.
“Actually—” Meilani began. Rafe cut her off.
“To a degree. My staff will develop the overall Lara Dixon marketing plan.”
Meilani looked at Rafe with her eyelids at half-mast.
Candy jumped in. “Okay, so that’s something you have to look forward to, Lara. We have more immediate business to conduct.”
She stood and moved to her desk. “I know you two won’t mind,” she said without looking at Meilani and Rafe. They got up and left.
“I’m sorry you had to see that.” Candy poured herself another glass of iced tea. “While we try to maintain a familial corporate culture at Fast Lane, ego sometimes infects matters. Rafe’s never been happy Sushma created a separate department to handle new media, much less hiring a twenty-three-year-old to run it.”
“I can see that.”
Candy checked something on her phone. “Do you think you’ll have a hard time working with a twenty-three-year-old?”
“Why would I?”
“Your age is kind of a delicate issue.”
“There is nothing delicate about it at all,” Sushma said as she strode into the room. “It is, in fact, very straightforward: The women in Clay’s Rotation have always been much younger.”
“Much younger? How old do you think I am?”
“We know exactly how old you are.” Sushma poured herself a glass of tea.
“We?”
“Our researchers.”
“If you wanted to know my age, you could’ve just asked.”
“The average age of the previous girls was twenty-two and four months,” Sushma said.
“And they all got along with the new media coordinator?”
“Touché.” Candy put her phone down.
“Are we dueling?” Lara responded to Candy, but looked at Sushma.
“Events of the last week have been highly unusual,” Sushma said. “There is no precedent for the way you came to be in The Rotation, and that sends up a number of red flags at the corporate level.”
“Maybe it’s just a sign that Clay’s growing up,” Lara said. “He is, after all, thirty-nine years old. A man might be satisfied with twenty-two-year-old girls when he’s twenty-two, or even thirty-two, I suppose. But he’s—”
“You have made your point,” Sushma interrupted. “And it could very well be a good one. Still.”
“Still, I didn’t ask to be in The Rotation.”
“Not directly, no,” Sushma said. “But you are saying the thought never entered your mind?”
Lara hesitated. Walking on thin ice. “Look, I know who Clay is. Who doesn’t? But when Anton invited me to the party in Malibu, I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll go to see what it’s like.’ I might never get another chance.”
All eyes in the room moved to Sushma.
“You never had chances like these when you worked in the motion picture industry?” Sushma said.
“You know what kind of movies my ex made. It’s not like I hobnobbed with Brad and Angelina.”
“If it’s all right,” Candy said forcefully, “I’d like to get this other stuff taken care of. It’s not my place to judge what, if anything, is going on between you and Mr. Creighton. I just need these documents signed.” She took three stacks of documents bound by metal clips from a folder and laid them out neatly, side-by-side. “Do you have an agent?”
“An agent?”
“Most of the girls who enter The Rotation either have an agent or hire one,” Sushma said. “If you don’t know any, I can suggest a few.”
“No.” Lara shot Sushma an icy look. “I can do this right now.”
Candy handed her a pen. A really nice pen. Sleek and perfectly weighted. Ignoring Sushma, Lara scanned the top document, then put the pen on the dotted line and signed her name in one bold stroke.
* * *
When Lara finally got back to the Oasis, the waterfall s
ounded like a thousand angels sent to drown out the noise of the day. Someone had hung her new clothes in the closet, so Lara sat at the edge of the bed and looked over her copies of the papers she’d signed with such furious intent.
One said Lara did not have representation and was acting as her own agent. Another bound her to wear clothes and shoes from merchants that had merchandising deals with Fast Lane. Another, to attend events Fast Lane scheduled for her.
Lara also had to acknowledge that she understood she would be receiving a stipend instead of a salary. Gina had prepared her for this. “They’re going to say it’s a stipend and not a salary because paying women to fuck Clay Creighton would piss some people off—including a few in the district attorney’s office.”
And then came the nondisclosure agreement. A sheet of paper, nothing more. And yet Lara kept staring at it. She had come in believing she would disclose the truth about Clay Creighton. But the better she got to know him, the less sure she was about the truth. How could a man who could treats a woman so well be associated with something like The Rotation?
Then again, Kyle had seemed like a pretty good guy. For a while.
Lara put down the papers and massaged her temples. Maybe it’s not too late to call the whole thing off with Gina.
Lara’s phone rang. It was Gina.
“Can you talk?” Gina asked in hushed tones.
“Yes. I’m alone.”
“It’s all over the Internet that you’re in The Rotation,” Gina said, still whispering.
“You can talk normally.”
“You totally rock, girl,” Gina said so loudly that Lara had to move the phone away from her ear. “You totally rock!”
“I do?”
“Getting in was the hard part. Now all you have to do is hang around and wait to see things almost no one gets to see.”
“Yeah. Pretty cool. I’ve been thinking…”
“Uh-oh. I hear ellipses.”
“You hear what?”
“That hitch in your voice says doubt’s creeping in. Do not let it happen. Do not permit yourself to start any sentence with ‘I’ve been thinking dot, dot, dot,’ or ‘it’s just that dot, dot, dot,’ or ‘anything dot, dot, dot’ when you’re talking to me—or anyone else. You got that?”
Lara stood and walked to the glass wall. It had been pitch black the night before. Mysteriously, invitingly dark. Now a pool party was in full swing. Topless women and bottomless margaritas and men with rippling pecs batting beach balls into the air like lottery balls in a see-through tank. Lara’s eyes followed the balls without really seeing them.
“Lara?”
“It’s just that—”
“What did I just say?”
Lara paused. “I’m not so sure Clay is what I thought he was.”
“Of course you’re not sure. That’s part of his game.”
“But—”
“He manipulates women—and he makes his living teaching men the tricks of his trade. You said so yourself.”
Lara looked blankly out the window as a particularly well-endowed blonde on the diving board, a goddess who already lacked the upper half of what was, according to her tan lines, an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny bikini, slipped off the bottom and snapped it like a rubber band to a group of slobbering males in the water below.
“I signed all the papers,” Lara said.
“Good. Then everything’s still on track?”
Lara opened her mouth to reply, but stopped as the blonde turned to wiggle her bare backside, causing her worshippers to thrash spastically in waves of foam. A spiky-haired man wearing nothing but skin appeared on the board and struck a Scarface pose. Lara didn’t have to be a lip-reader to know he shouted, no doubt with Al Pacino brio, “Say hello to my little friend,” which he then graciously pointed out for anyone who might be oblivious to his cleverness. He cupped his hands in front of his crotch to approximate a large-caliber rifle and proceeded to shoot at the blonde, who, much to the delight of the faithful, grabbed the place on her chest where the bullets would supposedly have entered, then took a header into the frenzy below.
“Lara, remember: Clay Creighton’s a—”
Lara turned away from the window. “Don’t worry, Gina. Everything’s still on track.”
“That’s my grrrl,” Gina said. “Keep fighting the good fight. Call whenever you think you need to. Remember, I’m behind you. Me and umpteen million women. We all want you to succeed.”
Lara hung up and sat back down at the edge of the bed.
She stared into the waterfall’s veil of mist and thought about how telling her life story to the marketing gurus was more grueling and invasive than she could have imagined, about how signing the papers had made her intentions seem even more underhanded. She approached the cascade and stuck out her arm. The water felt welcoming and warm, as if it could wash away her doubts and fears.
The phone rang again. Clay. Seeing his name on the screen made her heart flutter. Just like a seventh-grader getting a call from a boy in biology class—again!
“Hey,” she said. She couldn’t help sounding tired.
“I understand you had a big day.”
“Your people certainly know how to keep a girl busy.”
“They’re your people now, too, you know.”
Lara hadn’t really thought of it like that, especially since no one seemed to be on her side. “So what’ve you been up to all this time?”
“I had to take care of some things at the Rev office, then they whisked me over to the ICE House.”
Lara wished she were at Clay’s love pad, on the bluff where she could hear the ocean and breathe in the salt air. And feel Clay’s arms around her. “Is that where you are now?”
“Yeah. I’d rather be in P.S. with you, but Sushma’s worried about all the things that have to get done tomorrow.”
“I’ve been filled in on the schedule.”
“It’s not all that bad. We hook up at eleven.”
“Hook up?”
Clay laughed. “I didn’t mean—it’s just that, there’s a photo shoot—” He paused. “You know, we could try to sneak off.”
Lara laughed. My god, he’s acting like a middle-schooler, too. “We could. Think about it, I mean.”
“Yeah, we could. Think about it.”
Lara bit her lip through a long silence.
“In the meantime,” Clay finally said, “how ’bout I hang up and you turn off your phone and get a good night’s sleep?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“It’s going to be hectic the next few days,” he said. “Just remember, I’m behind you.”
“Great.”
The room was again quiet except for the rushing water. Heeding its siren call, she turned off her phone, stripped off her clothes and let the water work its rejuvenating magic.
11
Lara slept dead to the world, buried in the heavenly featherbed, when she swore she heard a bird peep. Directly into her ear. Her eyes blinked open to someone—bending over her!
And peeping!
An explosion of adrenaline blasted her out of bed. Lara shook as she struggled to maintain her footing and figure out what the hell was going on.
“Oh! Miss D! I’m so sorry.” Tiffany’s voice came from the floor on the other side of the bed. Her head popped into view, a deer-in-headlights look on her face.
“What are you doing here?” Lara clutched a giant, overstuffed bed pillow to her body like a shield.
Tiffany climbed back to her feet, clutching her phone to her chest. The candy striper look was gone, replaced with a hipster vibe that included a day-glo pink romper customized with hand-painted skulls.
“I did not mean to scare you,” she said. “Really. I’m really, really, really sorry.”
“Okay, apology accepted. Now tell me why you’re here at—” Lara looked around, but couldn’t see her phone or a clock. “What time is it?”
“Five-thirty.” Tiffany sounded a little sheepish, and a little pe
rky. How is that even possible?
“In the morning?”
“Yes.”
“Five-thirty.”
“Ms. V said she talked to you about today’s schedule.”
Lara’s arms ached from holding the pillow so tight. As she put it down, she thanked her lucky stars she had decided not to sleep in the nude. “I remember talking about the schedule, just not anything about getting up at five-thirty.”
Tiffany pulled the phone away from her chest and scanned the screen. “We’re scheduled to take Elway to the Malibu house for a series of shoots with the other girls, then it’s—”
“Wait.”
Tiffany stopped and looked at Lara expectantly.
“Two questions.”
“Okay.”
“Actually, it’s more like three questions, since you never answered my first.”
“Okay.”
“Elway?”
“The Rotation’s helicopter.”
Right. Fast Lane owned four helicopters, each named after a famed NFL quarterback: Favre, Montana, Brady and Elway. In his blogs, Clay referred to trips in them as “air strikes” or “going long.”
“Oh, Elway,” Lara said. “Like the quarterback.”
“Wow—you follow football?”
“Kind of,” Lara lied. “Everyone knows Elway.” I think.
They blinked at each other, Tiffany wide-eyed and waiting, Lara with sleep still tugging on her lids.
“So,” Lara finally said, “what else?”
“Um…you said there were more questions?”
“Oh, right. You said ‘we’ are going to be flying to Malibu.”
“That’s right.”
“We?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, that would make sense, right?” Tiffany nodded.
Lara flicked her tongue behind her bottom front teeth.
“Oh!” Tiffany said. “I thought Ms. V told you.”
Lara waited a moment for the rest, then said, “Told me what?”
“I’m your P.A. now.”
Lara did the tongue thing again.
“Your personal assistant? On account of how we hit it off the other day?”