Palm Springs Heat

by DC Thome

  “He’s right, honey,” Corynne said. “Don’t do anything rash.”

  Lara’s vertigo returned when she moved her eyes to Corynne.

  Clay addressed the room: “Has anyone called a doctor or 9-1-1 or anything?”

  “I’m on it.” A dutiful assistant whipped out his phone.

  “A doctor?” Sushma interjected. “What would be the purpose? She merely fainted from the lights.”

  “Yeah, how ’bout that, Spike?” Clay said. “I told you to cut back on the candlepower. She’s probably got sunstroke.”

  “Oh, dear,” Spike said. He looked at Lara like she was the corpse at a funeral. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

  “Spike,” Clay said, “look at me.”

  Spike kept right on babbling.

  “Spiker!”

  Spike stopped and looked at Clay.

  “Turn off the goddamned light!”

  Spike stood frozen and muttering. A gaffer cut the switch.

  “So, should I call 9-1-1 or not?” The assistant with the phone looked from Sushma to Clay.

  “I’ll be all right.” Lara had to close her eyes to sit up. “I just need some air.”

  “Everyone out!” Clay commanded. “You’re using up all the air!” It was as take-charge as Lara had ever heard him be.

  “I’m going to take that as a ‘no.’” The assistant with the phone looked back as he followed everyone else out of the room.

  Pretty soon, Lara and Clay were alone. Except for Sushma. Lara could focus now—enough to be able to detect not even a hint of compassion on Sushma’s face.

  “Um, Shush,” Clay said, more sweetly than Lara thought Sushma deserved, “when I said ‘everybody,’ I meant everybody.”

  “As chief operating officer, I have every right to be here.”

  “I didn’t say you didn’t have the right.” Clay didn’t utter another word, but his puppy-dog eyes said please as clearly as if he had shouted it. Sushma glared at him, then huffed, turned abruptly and left.

  * * *

  Lara nestled against Clay with her head on his shoulder. He brushed her forehead with his other hand, following the line of her upswept hair.

  “I don’t think that was in the script,” he said.

  “There was a script?”

  “You gave everyone a scare.”

  “Everyone? Even Sushma?”

  Clay smiled.

  Lara massaged her forehead. “She doesn’t like me.”

  “Who says?”

  “We’ve butted heads.”

  “She butts heads with everyone. It’s her thing.”

  Not the way she butts heads with me. Lara looked down and saw Clay’s slippers. “Why are you wearing slippers?”

  Clay chuckled, but stopped when Lara’s face remained serious. “No big deal,” he shrugged. “Just part of the Fast Lane lifestyle. Be comfortable. It’s one of the Cardinal Virtues.”

  “The Fast Lane lifestyle? You mean business as usual?”

  “Well, yeah. What else?”

  Lara pushed away from him, dropped her feet over the side of the bed and forced herself to stand. She was woozy, but managed to right herself before Clay sprang to his feet and grabbed her arms.

  “Maybe we should call a doctor,” he said. Lara could see genuine concern in his eyes.

  “Right before I blacked out, I heard something like…” Lara looked Clay in the eye. “Am I ‘business as usual’?”

  Clay’s face went blank.

  “The War Room,” Lara continued. “Rev. The salt flats. The waterfall. All business as usual?”

  Clay’s lower lip quivered. “Oh, no. Not at all. I mean, now, here…the video, and all…yeah. But, there’s business, and then there’s…”

  “What?”

  “Um…”

  Lara could feel Clay’s hands get clammy. “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I’m trying to think what to say.” He looked around the empty studio. “What an idiot. I mean, I give men advice on…you know…things with women.”

  “Maybe you’d better sit down.”

  “No.” Clay held Lara more firmly. She liked how strong and powerful he felt. Assured. Assuring. “No, you are not ‘business as usual.’”

  “I’m not?”

  “I—I don’t…You’d think I would know what to say.”

  I know what I want you to say.

  Saying nothing, he pulled Lara to him and kissed her. Lara recognized it as a delay tactic, but she didn’t resist; it made her heart beat faster and cleared the clouds from her mind.

  The door opened and Tiffany fluttered in. “Um, Ms. V is wondering how Miss D is—oh! Oh!”

  Tiffany turned away and held her hand up as a blinder. Lara and Clay looked like a couple of thirteen-year-olds caught necking.

  “I’m fine, Tiffany,” Lara said. “Tell Ms. V I’m ready whenever she is.”

  15

  The subsequent shooting of the intro video went smoothly. Lara talked about her life, which made her glad she and Gina had rejected the notion of concocting a designer past.

  The designer past in Sushma’s folder, though, still weighed on Lara’s mind hours later as she stood on her deck, sipped wine and watched the sun sink behind Point Dume. While Kyle hadn’t been big on love, he did have a fondness for kink. He especially liked sharing fantasies populated by real people. To please him, Lara made up stories about being with his friends or a pizza delivery guy. Kyle talked about actresses and set decorators he worked with. But Kyle’s fantasies turned out to have contained more fact than fiction.

  Kyle had told Sushma’s investigators that Lara had “slaked her rapacious sexual appetites” by indulging in sexcapades with not only his friends and a pizza guy, but also his dickhead brother. Kyle said “rapacious”? Lara shuddered and cringed. Just the thought of sex with Drake Lobo turned her stomach. But a scumbag like Kyle understood lack of proof was no problem; gossip could be deadlier than actual indiscretions. No one expected the women of The Rotation to be virgins—hell, they were supposed to be experienced—but the notion of a slut who cheated on her husband with his brother would not fly in the Fast Lane universe. Once tagged to a man, a woman was supposed to keep her panties on tight unless he demanded otherwise.

  If Sushma kicked me out of The Rotation, would I be off the hook with Gina? Would it matter? Lara gazed at the sky, but the colors were invisible. No, I have to confront Sushma. In private. Make her see reason.

  Or, at least, challenge her to come up with more proof than just the word of that fucker Kyle.

  Thinking of Gina reminded Lara of the voicemail message. She rested her wine glass on the railing and opened her phone.

  “You are not going to believe this, but things just got a lot cooler.” Gina sounded like a little girl at Christmas. “I got a major publisher to agree on a book deal, a long-form version of the article you’re doing. We’re talking seven figures. Seven fucking figures! They want all the dirt, and by all, I mean all. Names. Places. Pornographic details. So take good notes.”

  If things get any cooler, I’m going to die from the heat.

  Heat. Lara thought about the waterfall. She could feel Clay’s fingers massaging her hair.

  “Hey.” Clay’s voice came from behind Lara as she snapped the phone shut. Jolted, she fumbled the damn thing to the deck and kicked it through the railing. It bounced onto the deck below, then skittered through that railing and plummeted so far she couldn’t even hear it smack the rocks.

  Lara looked over the railing, fruitlessly scanning the murky shadows of the jagged wave-washed terrain.

  Clay sidled up next to her. “I’m sorry. That was my fault.”

  “Oh, well. Just a cheap, stupid phone.”

  “Could be a big deal to some people.”

  It could be a big deal to me. “I’m not really a big phone person,” she said with a shrug.

  She looked at Clay out of the corner of her eye. Can he tell I’m trying to con him? “I mean,” she contin
ued, “it’s not like I can’t live without it.”

  “Really?” Clay turned her to face him. “Is there something you can’t live without?”

  You take the lead.

  Instead, he kissed her.

  Nice, but not what I hoped for.

  “It’s been an amazing week,” he said.

  The understatement of the year.

  He continued: “The night we met, did it even cross your mind that you might be living here? And so soon?”

  That was the plan. “Life can be unpredictable.”

  “There’ve been women all my life…” Clay faltered.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been surrounded by sexy, smart, exciting women all my life.” Another pause. “But you’re not like the others.”

  “Oh?”

  “In some ways you are. The part about being sexy, smart and exciting.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  Clay hesitated again. “I think about you and—the company be damned.”

  “I see.”

  “I know. That sounds lame.”

  “No it doesn’t.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “No.”

  “What I mean is…what I want to say. Ah, here I go again.”

  Lara put a finger over his lips, then pulled him close and kissed him.

  “We have all night to talk,” she said. “For now…” She tugged on his arm, but he didn’t move. He looked sheepish.

  “What?”

  “I can’t stay here tonight. I have a previous commitment.”

  Lara frowned.

  “And here I was just going on about ‘the company be damned.’”

  Lara tried to mask her disappointment. “Hey, it’s a previous commitment. I understand.”

  “Tomorrow night,” Clay said brightly. “I’m free then.”

  “No ‘previous commitments’?”

  “I just made one, didn’t I?”

  They kissed again, and then Clay scrambled up over the roof and disappeared into the night.

  Lara went to the railing and gazed upon the moonlight shimmering on the water. She couldn’t stop herself from looking again for the phone, but all she could see were blackness and foam. Not an ideal send-off to bed. But for now, she was comforted by the sound of the ocean in her ears and the taste of Clay on her lips.

  * * *

  Lara woke up early the next morning rested and ready to rumble. After having breakfast on her deck, she hit the gym. Thinking while on the elliptical trainer about what she would say to Sushma and anticipating every possible objection to her arguments about Kyle’s bogus “information,” she hammered away, breaking her personal record for calories burned in half an hour. A good sign.

  Wearing the carbon gray Armani business suit Chartre had picked out for her, Lara felt pumped when she entered Sushma’s ICE House office.

  “I’d like to speak to Ms. V,” Lara said to the assistant. She had never been told to call Sushma “Ms. V,” but since everyone else in the organization did, Lara thought it would be good to act as though she thoroughly belonged.

  “Oh, good,” the assistant said. “Then, you got my text?”

  “Text?”

  “I know, I sent it kind of late. But since you’re here, it’s cool.”

  The assistant hit a button on her phone. “Miss Dixon is here.”

  “Send her in.” Sushma managed to sound cold even through a speakerphone.

  The grim décor spooked Lara. The desk looks like a casket, the chairs like instruments of torture. And that painting looks like the aftermath of a nuclear bomb. No wonder she’s always so grumpy.

  Sushma remained seated and focused on the desktop monitor. “Good morning, Miss Dixon.”

  Not a smidge of warmth. “Good morning.”

  “Have a seat. Would you like tea?”

  “Thank you, but I’m not—”

  “It is Tieguanyin,” Sushma said, finally making eye contact with Lara.

  Lara waited for more information as Sushma calmly poured herself a cup of a liquid that, when sunlight passed through it, took on a deep amber hue.

  “I take it you do not know about Tieguanyin?”

  Lara shook her head.

  “Smell the leaves,” Sushma said, pointing to the box. Lara leaned forward and saw that the box, which appeared to be quite old, held a ceramic bowl full of tea leaves, a wooden scoop and a bamboo whisk.

  “Pick up the bowl and hold it close to your nose.”

  Lara carefully raised the scoop to her face and took a whiff. It had a strong, flowery aroma.

  “Interesting,” Lara said.

  “I would say so.” Sushma sipped her tea. “This is spring Tieguanyin, fully baked in accordance with very ancient and strictly guarded traditions. It is one of the rarest teas in the world, and it costs one thousand, five hundred dollars per pound.”

  “Oh!” Lara put the bowl down reverently.

  “Do not tell me you are worried about what might happen if you dropped it.”

  “At fifteen hundred dollars a pound, I’d rather not find out.”

  Sushma picked up the bowl, took two steps to the deck and committed the tea leaves to the wind. “Fast Lane,” she said, “can afford to lose a few paltry measures of tea.”

  Nice display, but I won’t be so easily intimidated today.

  “Tieguanyin is named after a Buddhist deity.” Sushma sipped from her cup. “The Iron Goddess of Mercy. Are you sure you do not wish to try some?”

  “I’m sure. Look, the reason I came here—”

  “The reason you came here is that I sent for you.”

  “I never got a message.”

  “I see. Then, please, by all means, tell me why it is that you came to my office.”

  Lara moved back in the chair and placidly smoothed out wrinkles in her skirt.

  “It’s about the…material…you showed me yesterday.”

  Sushma looked at her without expression.

  “I assume you were trying to…warn me…about something that might be a cause for concern.”

  Still no hint of emotion.

  “I thought you’d be interested in hearing my side of the story before you made any judgments.”

  Sushma took another sip of tea.

  “My ex-husband is not what you’d call a…reliable…source of information. At least, not about me—and certainly not about our marriage. He tried to pull something like this during the divorce, but backed off because he was afraid of a little thing called perjury.”

  Lara wanted to say more, but the divorce had taught her to offer only as much information as was absolutely required.

  “Is that all you have to say?” Sushma asked.

  Lara nodded. Sushma put down the teacup and stood up.

  “Once a woman is officially brought into the organization, she will never be left wanting again.” She looked at the blank wall and paced, very slowly, behind her desk. “If she wishes to drink the best tea in the world, gallons of it will be provided. If she desires to own a thousand pair of shoes, they will be delivered to her door. If her dream is to produce movies or to create a charity that will feed a million people, she will have access to the best contacts and all the capital such undertakings require. I am talking about lifetime privileges. This is true for anyone who has sat in your position.”

  She stopped, turned on her heels and looked at Lara. Directly. Accusingly. “Members of The Rotation are royalty in the eyes of the company.”

  Now Lara sat expressionless. Where is this heading?

  Sushma turned toward the window and resumed pacing. “What the company asks in return is that you meet certain standards. Do not use illegal drugs. Do not become involved in embarrassing public scenes. Refrain from excessive partying and carrying on. Do not do anything that would harm the functioning of the company.”

  She stopped. “Or its image.”

  Okay. I get it.

  Sushma turned to Lara. “Your entrée to The Rotation w
as exceptional. In every other instance, candidates were thoroughly vetted before being invited to join us.” She paused for a long time, keeping her eyes trained on Lara. “May I ask why you believe I would be concerned about the…material…as you call it?”

  “You’re worried people will think I won’t be faithful to one man,” Lara replied. “The whole idea of The Rotation works only if people believe all these women are devoted to Clay while he remains free ’n’ easy and…and in charge.”

  Sushma nodded. “Again, you demonstrate that you are at least not stupid.”

  Lara ignored the left-handed compliment. “That’s not what concerns me, though.” She rose to her feet. “What concerns me is what that lying S.O.B. told you is simply not true.”

  “You are certain of it?”

  “Of course.”

  Sushma opened the top drawer of her desk, took out a slim remote control, aimed it at the ceiling monitor and clicked.

  Grainy video footage, obviously shot with a security camera in insufficient light, appeared on the screen. A naked woman, blond hair hanging down over her face, on all fours. A man entering her from behind. The woman sweeping her hair to one side. The man leaning over to fondle her breasts.

  Lara’s jaw dropped. What the fuck?

  The man: Kyle’s brother, Drake. The woman: Lara.

  Sushma did not watch the monitor. She kept her eyes on Lara. “You are certain of it still?”

  Lara felt woozy. She fought off panic. No way I’m passing out in front of this bitch again.

  “This is wrong,” Lara said, her throat tight.

  “I am glad to hear you acknowledge it.”

  “That’s not what I mean—and you know it.”

  “So, first you are telling me there is something that I do not know, and now there is something that I do?”

  “This is fake. I don’t know how…but it’s fake. I would never—” She looked up at the screen and grimaced. Her stomach turned—from stress and from the very thought of having any part of Kyle’s slimy brother inside her.

  “I am not an expert in such matters,” Sushma said as she clicked off the video. She opened the drawer again and pulled out a sheet of paper. “However, I have an affidavit signed by your ex-husband which attests that what you have just seen has not been altered or manipulated in any way. A legal document.” She thrust it toward Lara. “Would you like to examine it?”