Lark put her nail polish brush back in its bottle and looked at Shane. “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she said.
Shane focused on her, looking confused. “Yelled at me?”
“Earlier,” she said. “In the bathroom.”
It took him a minute. “Oh,” he said, remembering. “No, whatever, that was my fault. I shouldn’t have barged in on you.”
“You were upset about the website,” Lark said, excusing him.
“Oh, God, that fucking website!” Shane exclaimed. “And Whitney Eros isn’t answering my fucking calls. And my best friend is a fucking asshole. Fuck!”
He reached for the whiskey bottle again, unscrewed its cap, and took a long swig right from the bottle.
Lark didn’t like it when guys were angry. It reminded her too much of Jimmy. Anger made her shrink. Made her want to find a way to disappear. She didn’t know what to say or do, so she didn’t say anything.
Shane grimaced and put the bottle down. “Do we have any coke?” he asked.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Lark asked quietly. “It’ll just...excite you.”
“I’m not excited. I’m pissed off,” said Shane. He dug a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. “I feel like nothing’s going right.”
Lark wished the chair she was sitting in would swallow her up. She wished she could just go away until Shane was done being angry. She worried, seeing him like this, that maybe he was this angry a lot. He hadn’t been angry ever before, but Jimmy had seemed so normal in the beginning.
Shane crossed the room to where Lark was sitting. Instinctively, she flinched away from him. She wasn’t consciously frightened of his hitting her, but...
Shane noticed. He stepped back. “Are you okay?” he asked, and it was as if all the anger had drained out of his voice. He only sounded concerned. Lark felt stupid.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m really fine.”
Shane didn’t move for a second, not saying anything, as if he was debating what to do. Then he sat down next to her in another chair. “Were you afraid I was going to, like, hurt you?”
Lark half-laughed and looked away. “Of course not,” she said.
He reached for her hand. She pulled it back.
“My nail polish,” she said. “It’s not dry.”
He hesitated again, but then he grabbed her hand anyway. “You can redo it later,” he said.
His hand felt good around hers. Strong. Warm. But she couldn’t meet his eyes. She looked everywhere else. At the table, at the nail polish, across the room at the whiskey bottle.
“Look at me,” said Shane. Slowly, she did. “Listen,” he said, “I know we don’t talk about certain things with each other. Like, the past and stuff. So. I don’t want to talk about something you don’t want to talk about, but someone used to hurt you, didn’t they?”
Lark guessed she didn’t care if Shane knew. She guessed it didn’t matter. It was over anyway. Jimmy was dead. She nodded.
“A guy?”
She nodded.
“An ex?”
She nodded again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wouldn’t ever do that to you.”
Of course he wouldn’t! God. “I know that,” said Lark. “I do. I know that.” But suddenly, she was crying. Tears were spilling down her cheeks and she reached up to furiously wipe them away. Stupid. She didn’t need to cry about it. It was over. It didn’t matter anymore. But she couldn’t stop herself. She was crying. And to her horror, words were spilling out of her mouth. Things. “His name was Jimmy. He wasn’t like that at first. I know that’s cliché, but he really wasn’t. One day, it was as though he went absolutely insane. He started to be very violent. He beat me up with a baseball bat once. And he threw me down the stairs once too. And he got weird sexually too. He used to force me to—”
She managed to break off the flood of words. She switched off the tears too. Done. Done. Done. She didn’t think about Jimmy anymore. She definitely didn’t talk about him. She sniffled. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
Shane nodded. “It’s okay,” he said. He paused. “Um, so, I mean, is that you don’t want to...um...because if it was, that would totally make sense. And I would absolutely be okay with that. I mean, I’m not trying to pressure you or anything.”
What was he talking about? Lark was concentrating so hard on keeping herself under control that she didn’t think she could quite make sense of his rambling. “I don’t know what you mean,” she managed.
Shane took a deep breath. “I mean, is that why we haven’t...had sex?”
And then, he actually blushed. Lark couldn’t help it, she giggled. He blushed. Shane Adams, the lead singer of The Wrenching, blushed when he was trying to talk to her about sex. She arched an eyebrow. “Do you want to have sex with me, Shane?” And she laughed again.
Shane made a confused face and laughed too, but in the way someone does when he doesn’t quite get the joke. “No,” he said. He laughed again, a little more honestly. “I mean, yes, but I don’t mean—”
She cut him off by putting her mouth against his. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do until she did it. She moved onto his chair, straddling him, her robe coming half open, but she didn’t care. For a few minutes, she was a little worried. After all, it wasn’t as though she hadn’t had sex since Jimmy. She’d had sex with men on the tour—lots of men. But, in some ways, it hadn’t been exactly as though she was having sex. It had been more like they—the guys—were having sex. Having sex on her. Using her body. But she hadn’t been there. Not exactly. She’d sort of turned off. So, in some ways, she hadn’t had sex since Jimmy. Not sex where she was really there. It had been her experiences with Jimmy that had taught her how to switch herself off. To let her body be there, but to take the rest of herself away, somewhere else. So, she was a little worried. She didn’t know if it would bother her.
Shane seemed a little hesitant too. He was responding to her kisses and holding her against him, but he was being, well, careful with her. Still, she was sitting against him, nearly naked, their bodies pressed against each other. And she felt him respond in a way she guessed he couldn’t quite control. She felt his body harden, thickening against her.
Something about that, about feeling Shane’s hard-on, made everything easier. Shane was just a guy. She was just a girl. She didn’t have any more doubts. She wanted Shane so bad, suddenly. It was like something pent-up and tied-down in her body was released. It overflowed into her, Shane’s body was like air or water or something else she needed, had to have, to survive.
She opened her robe all the way, moved his hands inside the folds of it, to touch her skin. As his fingertips brushed her, they both sighed. Shane’s hands slid up her torso, cupped her breasts, and she began to writhe against him.
She couldn’t stop herself. Whatever had been unleashed inside her was a force, out of her control, and before she knew it, she was shrugging out of her robe. Shane was murmuring things to her, things she couldn’t quite understand, that she was beautiful, and he was pulling her tight against him, so tight, and she wanted him to pull her tighter, she wanted to melt into him. She was clawing at his shirt, then, pulling it off, exposing his bare chest. Shane Adams’ bare chest! She had seen Shane without a shirt in pictures before, once had a poster of him bare-chested, hanging on her wall, and she was touching that chest now. She was touching Shane Adams, and he was telling her that she was beautiful! Her fingers traced his tiny dark hairs that accented the places where his muscles fit together.
Need exploded within her. Now, now, now, it urged. Now! She reached between his legs, fumbled clumsily with his belt for several agonizing minutes, but then she freed him, touched him. Her hands closed around his hardness, and he made a growling sound in the back of his throat, and she couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t wait anymore. She had to—
—and then he was inside her. And the world seemed to disappear. She knew that she was kissing
Shane. She knew that he was kissing her. She knew that their hands were roaming frantically over each other’s bodies. But beyond that, there was nothing. As far as Lark was concerned, nothing else existed in the world except her and Shane and their bodies.
Which was why it was disconcerting when there was a knock at the door.
It took her a moment to even make sense of the sound, another to remember that things like doors even existed. She pulled back and looked at Shane, confusion and irritation all over her face.
“We’re busy,” Shane yelled.
She laughed. Kissed him.
But then the doorknob turned.
“Didn’t you lock the door?” she hissed at Shane.
He didn’t have time to answer, because the door was opening, and someone was entering, someone who was talking...
“Shane, I just needed to come by and apologize—”
It was Chris. He took the scene in quickly, and then he looked down. Away. He laughed bitterly. “I thought you weren’t fucking her,” he said to the floor, and then he stalked out.
Shane’s penis had shriveled away from her. She slowly moved back. Stood up. They looked at each other for a few seconds.
“Um...” said Shane. “Maybe later, we could...”
“Yeah,” said Lark. She pulled her robe back on.
* * *
The limo ride to the MTV Movie Awards was tense, and not even the champagne they were all drinking could alleviate the atmosphere. Chris was stony and silent. Lark felt ridiculously embarrassed. After all, Chris had seen everything. He’d walked in on her riding Shane like he was one of those coin-operated horses outside a K-mart. Shane wasn’t talking either. Even though the rest of the guys in the band and their girlfriends or wives or groupies or whatever-the-hell-they-were seemed in fine spirits, drinking and laughing and chatting, the other three of them sat in awkward and terse silence.
When they arrived at the venue, Shane tried to talk to her in whispers. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s not like Chris has never walked in on me before.”
Lark nodded. “I’ve been walked in on before,” she said. In fact, there was this one time, on the tour, when she’d been really wasted drunk and on about three pills of X, and some guy had walked in while she and Matt were doing it. And Matt had told the guy that he could wait his— She shut off the memory. It had never bothered her before, but now, it really did. It was as though opening up the way she had with Shane had unleashed emotions she didn’t remember that she had. They were annoying. They were painful. “It’s just that Chris hates me so much, and—”
And there were cameras in their faces. They were stepping out on the red carpet. Women in sparkling dresses shoved microphones at Shane. They rained questions on him. No one paid any attention to Lark, and she was glad of it. She liked feeling anonymous. It was safer and easier. Only once on their trip up the carpet did anyone acknowledge her. One of the women, a cheery celebrity journalist that Lark vaguely recognized, noticed Lark while she was asking Shane about which designer had made his suit.
“Who’s your date?” she asked brightly, pushing the microphone at Shane.
“This is my girlfriend, Lark,” said Shane, and Lark got shivers listening to her name and the word “girlfriend” coming out of Shane’s mouth in one sentence. He caught her eyes for a second, and they grinned at each other like fifteen-year-olds.
“And who’s she wearing?” asked the journalist.
“She’s wearing her,” said Shane. “Lark designed this dress herself.”
“Oh,” said the journalist, smiling.
“She’s amazing, isn’t she?” said Shane.
The journalist eyed Lark’s dress closely, which was a full-length black gown, held together at the shoulders by several rows of safety pins. “Actually, she is,” said the journalist. “You have a website, Lark? I’m sure Wrenching fans would be interested in seeing your clothing.”
“N-no,” gasped out Lark.
“Not yet,” said Shane.
Lark glared at him.
They finally made it up the red carpet and got inside. They were seated at a table with all the members from the band. The show wasn’t scheduled to start for at least another hour, so there was more drinking. Shane pulled Lark into a bathroom with him once or twice to snort coke, which terrified Lark. They were on MTV, for fuck’s sake. If anyone found out they had drugs...! But Shane said it was no big deal. Everyone was doing drugs here, according to him.
Shane was neither presenting nor performing this year. “My publicist won’t let me get on national TV, because she’s afraid I’ll tell the fans to stop following the band.”
“Well, you would, wouldn’t you?” Lark said.
“Yeah,” said Shane. “So?”
Finally, the awards show started. It seemed interminably long. There were tons of hip-hop performances, a few lip-synching dance acts starring aging teenagers, and a bunch of awards that were given out. Finally, the awards show was over.
Randy, the bassist, asked where the after-party was.
“Well,” said Kirk, the drummer, “we’ve got options. One is the official MTV bash, where there will be cameras. The other is to go back to our hotel, where I am absolutely certain something is going to be happening.”
“We have to put in an appearance at the official after-party,” said Shane. “Besides, Lark’s never been. I wanna take her.”
“We don’t all have to do the same thing,” said Kirk.
“We should,” said Chris. “It’ll look weird if we aren’t all there. They’ll ask questions like, ‘Where’s Randy tonight?’“
“Yeah,” agreed Randy. “And once the tabloids get hold of that, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to a story about me, transvestite strippers, and crystal meth.”
Lark wrinkled up her nose. That sounded like a very strange story indeed.
“So we all go to the after-party, then,” said Shane.
“Yeah,” said Chris, his tone laced with sarcasm, “for Lark.”
“Dude, I thought you said you’d back off,” said Shane.
“Whatever, man. You think that bitch is not after you for your money, you’re insane,” Chris said.
“She’s sitting right here,” said Shane. “Right exactly here. She can hear you.”
“Dude,” said Kirk. “Calm down, Chris.” To Lark, “It’s cool. We like you. You get Shane on stage on time.”
Both Kirk and Randy cracked up. They were a little drunk. Lark tried to smile.
“Shane, you’re my best friend,” said Chris. “I have to look out for you.”
“Shane’s a big boy,” said Randy. “Let it go, Chris. Let it fucking go.”
“No,” said Chris. “I can’t. I won’t.” He looked at Shane. “So, while you guys were screwing like rabbits this afternoon, I guess she insisted you wear a condom, right?”
Kirk stood up. “We’ll meet you in the limo,” he said, reaching for the hand of his date. Randy and his date stood up too. They walked away.
“Fuck you,” said Shane, as soon as they were gone. “First of all, that’s none of your fucking business, and second of all, don’t say vulgar things like that about her, okay?”
“Shane, it’s okay,” said Lark.
“No,” said Shane. “It’s not okay. He needs to respect you.”
“You weren’t wearing a condom, were you?” said Chris.
“You fucking dickwad,” Shane said, standing up.
“Shane,” said Lark.
“When she tells you she’s pregnant, I’m going to remind you that I already told you she was a whore,” Chris said.
And then Shane punched Chris in the face.
“Stop,” said Lark, but Shane didn’t hear. And soon, right on the floor of the MTV Movie Awards, Shane Adams and Chris Dearborn were having a fistfight. For everyone to see.
* * *
Whitney slid into the booth at the restaurant, dropping her purse next to her. “Hi Tim,” she said. A large lamp hung low over th
eir table and the seats of the booth stretched high on either side.
Tim looked up. “Hey,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.” Then he went back to the menu.
Whitney was confused. She’d thought that when Tim told her that he was done with the article, that the two of them wouldn’t be talking or meeting anymore. Actually when they’d been working on the article, they’d never met. They’d done all they’re communication over the phone. So, it made absolutely no sense that he’d called her out of the blue and asked her to dinner. “Listen, Tim,” she said, “this isn’t like a date or something, is it?”
Tim’s head snapped up from the menu. “No,” he said.
“Good,” said Whitney, feeling embarrassed. She’d had to ask.
“I mean, I guess it could be,” Tim mused. “I never really thought about you like that, but you are Whitney Eros, and I do like talking to you.”
“No, it’s fine,” said Whitney. “Because I’m obviously not over Ryan in any way yet. I’m a mess, and I wouldn’t be able to... Which was why I asked, because I wanted to make sure that you understood that I’m not emotionally available or whatever.”
Tim shrugged. “Cool. Yeah, I haven’t dated much since the divorce, even though it was a year ago. Feels weird, you know?”
Whitney nodded. “I guess so.”
“So,” said Tim, “I’m thinking about having the salmon. You ever eat here before?”
“No, I never have.”
“Dammit. I could ask the waitress, but people who work in restaurants are never honest about the food. She’ll tell me it’s great. I really like salmon, but I hate it if it’s too dry. And a lot of places have dry salmon. You think I should chance it or just get steak?”
“Um...” Whitney was still thrown from the very weird dating conversation they’d just had. If Tim hadn’t asked her here for a date, why had he asked her here? The two of them had never talked about anything other than the article and their relative relationship woes.
“What are you having?” Tim asked.
“I haven’t really had a chance to look at the menu,” said Whitney.
“Oh. Well, sorry. I won’t talk at you. You look.” Tim paused. “I am unemployed, so if we could go dutch on this that would be cool?”
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