by Jesse Jordan
“Who?” I whisper to Joey, who chuckles and leans back in.
“He's a Chicano rapper originally from Mexico City who moved to Los Angeles a few years back. Maria's liked him for a while now. Let's go say hi, maybe you can score an interview for your blog,” Joey whispers back. We go over, where Maria tries but fails to contain her excitement.
“Oh, my God, I'm like such a big fan!” Maria giggles, trying to shake his hand. Brown Boy smiles and shakes, listening as Maria babbles for a minute so quickly that even I can't understand her. Finally, he tilts his head, holding up a hand.
“Lo sentimos, pero no sé lo que estás diciendo. Te importaría desaceleración? Ah... slow down please?”
Maria blushes, and stops, looking at Joey who laughs. “Sorry, my sister gets excited. I'm Joey Rivera, this is my sister, Maria and my girlfriend, Andrea. Nice to meet you.”
“Joey Rivera?” Brown Boy asks in heavy accented English pronunciation, then his face brightens. “Los Fragmentos?”
“That's me,” Joey admits, shaking hands. “You know our work?”
“Yes, my sister like you very much. She will be muy triste you have a girl. Nice to meet you though.”
The conversation continues, Joey helping me with translation from time to time as we exchange information. Maria switches totally to Spanish, her voice lilting and musical, and even Brown Boy is smiling when Maria goes on for a minute, she sounds so sweet and innocent. I even get a promise for an interview with him after Joey explains the purpose of my website and blog, confident that if anything I can get Maria to act as translator for us. After we say our goodbyes, Maria's practically glowing, and that more than anything helps Joey as we finish up the exhibit, heading out to the car.
When we get close to the exit, Joey stops, putting a hand on our shoulders. “Wait a minute, guys.”
“What's wrong?” I ask, and Joey turns, pretending to be interested in a piece of artwork in the corridor. We turn, and while we're turned he points with his right hand held against his body.
“That guy, over by the poster for the music exhibit, I think I've seen him before,” Joey whispers. “He looks like the guy I chased out of the parking lot yesterday at Gashouse. The one I told you about who was poking around and taking pictures of the cars?”
“Jesus,” Maria whispers, fear in her voice. “How'd he get here?”
Joey shakes his head slightly, still studying the art in front of us. “I don't know. Maybe I'm just being paranoid. Still, isn't there a back door to this place?”
I look at the museum guide, nodding. “Yeah, over on the other side of the place. It says employee exit, but I bet if we say that a famous rock guitarist is being perved on by an obsessed fan, they'd let us slip out. What do you say?”
Joey gives me a tight grin, nodding. “I always knew you were smart. Devious, too? Sexy as hell.”
“Get a room, you two,” Maria jokes, her fears assuaged for a little bit. “Oh, wait. You've got one. A whole garage.”
“Yeah, yeah. Come on, we can loop through the exhibit and try to make sure he doesn't follow us,” Joey says, leading us away. As he does, he raises his voice. “No Maria, I'm serious, I am sure that was Ritchie Valens' actual guitar, not a fake!”
Maria catches on, giving me a wink. “No way, that went down on the plane with him!”
We loop through the exhibit, ducking out the side exit without being stopped, the sunshine feeling wonderfully freeing as we step outside on the other side of the museum. “So, what now?”
Joey thinks, then points to a park across the street. “Now, we chill. If he was trying to follow us, I don't want him thinking we knew about him and got spooked. So, let's kill some time. What do you want to do?”
“Hey guys, I'm starving, as weird as that sounds. Joey, do you mind if we go eat soon?” Maria asks as we cross the street to the park. “I promise, nothing too expensive.”
“Sure,” Joey says. “What do you want?”
“How about the food truck over there?” Maria asks. “We can enjoy the park after that.”
“Sure. Here, take forty and get whatever you think we'll like,” Joey says, peeling off the money for Maria and handing it over without a care. Maria squeals and runs off across the park's parking lot, Joey watching her before putting an arm around my shoulder. “Thank you, love. You broke our bad mood perfectly.”
“And you handled the creepy guy perfectly. Besides, I just wanted you two to feel better. I love you both. Joey, can I ask you something?”
“Sure, it'll take Maria a while to get the food,” Joey says. He's a little less stiff as we go climb the steps that lead to the park, but he's still slower than normal, and we pause at the top, sitting down on the concrete steps. “Remind me, no more dumbass workouts like yesterday. Or at least none without a hot tub and a rub down from you.”
“Rubbing you down was exactly what was on my mind last night,” I joke, rubbing his knee. “But you were in too much pain to do much more than lay there in bed. But I was wondering, that talk with Brown Boy, it got me thinking.”
“What's that?”
“Well… where do you see yourself in five or ten years? The idea's been on my mind a lot recently.”
Joey hums, thinking. “Honestly? I like where I am career wise. I don't want to be a solo act, I like Ian and Rocky even if I appreciate the little side project that Cora recorded. They're family to me. We're doing what we do best, make good music. Is it always going to be pure rock? Probably not, but I'm fine with that too.”
“I can tell,” I reply, leaning against him. “You spent just as much time listening and jamming to the other stuff as the rock.”
“I know. So, what about you? Where do you want to be in five or ten years, career-wise?”
I shake my head, taking Joey's hand. “That's hard for me to figure out, Joey. I mean, two months ago I was totally single, and comfortable, if not exactly happy in my job. My biggest worries were telling Chad off and trying to get out from under my father's thumb. Then a month ago I meet you, and it has been very West Side Story in some regards. I've never imagined that I would fall in love with someone so hard, so fast.”
“Do you want to slow down?” Joey asks. “I know that living in my house makes things weird to some people. I bet if you asked, Rocky and Cora would be willing to let you crash in their spare room. Hell, Rocky's mom would probably let you sleep in his old bedroom if you wanted.”
I shake my head, smiling at his sweetness. “No, actually I've never been happier in that regard. Every day, spending time with you, with Maria, with Teresa, and Angel, I'm discovering new depths to the meanings of the words family and love. But when it comes to my work, I've been torn.”
“How so?”
“On one hand Joey, every day I feel afraid. I'm afraid that my blog is going to fail, that my reader list is going to be in the single digits and nobody's going to give two craps about what I have to say. I worry that I wasted the hundred and ninety-nine dollars that I spent to get the upgraded user interface and server size for hosting my site. But then I think of all the freedom I've had the past couple of weeks since moving in with you. And I don't mean anybody bugging me about when to get out of bed, but the freedom to tell the stories that I want to tell. To be able to make some connections, to stand on my own. Before I was ANDREA COATES, put it in bold if you want. Now, I'm Andrea, and that feels good.”
“What about the Coates part?” Joey asks, and I can hear a bit of nervousness in his voice.
“It's my name, but nothing more really,” I reply. “I'll use it to maybe help open doors, but I want to stand on my own, to be my own woman.”
“Stand on your own?” Joey asks. “And if someone, say, wanted you to stand with him?”
I glance over at Joey, who's looking more nervous than ever, and I squeeze his arm. “Joey, are you asking if I want to stand without you?”
“I guess I'm just asking if you'd like to…” Joey says before Maria interrupts us, bringing over two pap
er bags of food.
“Come on guys, I found this great spot we can sit down and I bet you can see the whole city from the picnic tables!” she says, grinning. “It'll be great!”
She walks away again, and I look back to Joey, who's using the handrail to pull himself up. “Joey?”
“Never mind, I was just being silly,” Joey says, shaking his head. “Come on, let's eat lunch.”
“Wait,” I say, putting my hand on his arm and stopping him. I look up into his eyes and give him a hug. “Joey, I love you. I love you, and I love living with you. And I love your family. Okay?”
Joey looks into my eyes for a moment, then nods, smiling. “Okay. I guess that answers what I was going to ask you. Come on, let's go eat before Maria noshes it all.”
Welcome to Andrea Loves Rock Cocks! Home of the music's world's biggest, dirtiest slut!
This isn't what I put on my website, and as I read the text, my face gets hotter and hotter as I try and figure out who the hell would do this to me. Check that, I know who did this to me, or at least I can narrow it down to one of two people who hired whoever did this to me.
“Chad,” I grumble under my breath, trying to log into my administrative panel. My password fails, and I blink, pissed. “What the fuck?”
Maria comes in, looking over my shoulder at the mess that's been made of my blog page. “Damn... you've been hacked.”
“Yeah, looks like it,” I sigh. “Glad I never did that sex tape the guy who I think hacked me wanted to do. But I can't get into my admin panel to fix it.”
“Whoever hacked you probably changed your password,” Maria notes. “At least, that's what I'd do if I got access to your system. I had a customer whose smartphone was ganked, she said that whoever did it changed her PIN code to totally fuck with it for her. She had to go to her service provider with like, five different pieces of ID just to get them to blank the whole thing and reset the PIN for her. Does your site host do the same thing?”
“I don't know, I can give them a call,” I say, reaching for my phone. “Thanks for the idea.”
“I want to help you interview Brown Boy, I figure the best way to do that is to help you get this site fixed,” Maria says with a smile. “Thank you, it was fun today.”
“You bought the food, so thank you,” I quip back. “Now, pass my apologies along to Teresa, I said I'd help her cook dinner, but...”
“But you've got a website to de-hack,” Maria finishes for me. “No worries, hermosa. I'll make sure if it takes a long time to get with the site guys, we'll keep something ready for you.”
'A long time' ends up being two hours as I call my website host, go through three levels of administration, waiting on hold each time as they wait to get their supervisor, each time giving my security information. At the third one, I finally lose my temper a little. “Listen buddy, I've been on hold with you guys for forty-five out of the last sixty minutes, and for most of the time I've been talking with your company, I've been recounting my name, my birth date, the phone number I used to register my site, and my security question, which by the way, again, the answer is Hawkgirl. Now, are you going to get your supervisor and risk my wrath, or are you going to actually help me fix my damn website?!”
Joey comes into the living room, chuckling as he sets a bowl of rice with some sort of gravy and vegetables down next to my laptop. “Risk my wrath?”
I chuckle, okay that was a bit over the top, and I cover up the mouthpiece on my phone and shrug. “Hawkgirl was my favorite cartoon character growing up, she kicked ass in Justice League. She tended to talk in that sort of language, so it put me in the same mood. Now... oh, you're back? You're going to reset my admin password. Okay, that's a start, now stay here and walk with me through resetting all my pages.”
I can't just reset my website, apparently, my cache was totally shredded by the hackers, whoever did it knew what they were doing. Thankfully I'd saved most my work as documents that I can cut and paste from. Joey sits on the end of the sofa, watching me quietly as I work furiously, copying and pasting my pages back together from data saved on my laptop.
“Remind me, I've got to get an external hard drive to save information if my host isn't going to keep this better,” I mutter to thin air, but Joey just hums, taking out his phone and typing away for a moment before putting it away. “And I might want to get a better host.”
“I understand,” Joey replies, typing on his phone again. My comment frightens Keith, the website server host on speaker who's been on the phone with me, and he squeaks.
“Miss Coates, please, we don't need to be hasty. Here, I'm adding in our Platinum Protection Plan to your website free of charge for the rest of the year. It has a couple of nice features that will allow you to prevent this in the future.”
“Like what?” I ask as I keep cutting and pasting, the main page is almost complete now.
“Eternal page memory for one,” Keith says as he gives me the details.
“There's a chance you might keep my site then, Keith,” I growl, finishing my home page. Great, now on to my biography page, which currently has several crude personal attacks. “If I need to call back, I'll ask just for you.”
I hang up and get back to work, going over every aspect of my site. Joey just stays by me the whole time, reading to Angel when it's time for him to get ready for bed, but other than that not interrupting me as the hours drag on.
The hard part is that, while I have a lot of my work saved as documents, there's still stuff I have to retype from memory. My biography and contact info have to be re-done. However, this time I take the time to save them as documents before I upload them. The clock in the kitchen chimes midnight softly when I finally get things uploaded, and I start the double checking everything, making sure all the pages are working, my hotlinks go where I want them to go, that my layout is exactly like I want it to be.
“Thankfully, my videos are hosted on YouTube under a different password,” I say to nobody, seeing that my interview with Ian is still untouched, although the comments section's become a total cesspool. I delete and disable comments on all my videos until this is figured out, then re-launch my website.
“There,” I huff, leaning back. My eyes burn, and my lower back is killing me from sitting hunched over for so long, the living room coffee table is just a few inches too short for me to sit comfortably. “Now let's double check social media.”
My Instagram is good, I'd made sure to list all my things as comments restricted, but Facebook's a total quagmire. The hackers were smart, instead of spamming my actual page they spammed each of my posts. Now, I have to go through each of the posts one by one, editing and deleting them as I go. It's nearly two by the time I get it locked down again, and I stretch my shoulders both popping. I look around, and see that Joey's stayed by my side, a book in his hands as his head's fallen back, snoring lightly in the light that the lamp next to the sofa throws.
I watch him quietly, moved by his dedication, and at the same time, I'm pissed off, not at him but at the situation. After the time at the museum, and the way things went last night at the Marine Corps Ball, all I've wanted is to find some private time with Joey, to make love with him again. Instead, we got home at two or three in the morning, crashed, and now it's two in the morning again, and I can barely keep my eyes open.
Still, I need him this morning, even if we can't make love. I shake Joey's shoulder gently, and he moans before his eyes flutter open, and the first thing he does is smile. “Finished?”
I nod, yawning before smiling. “Just now. I'm sorry I wrecked our evening.”
Joey shakes his head and sits up. “It's okay. So, what now?”
I bite my lip and take his hand. “Can I... can I sleep with you? Not sex, just sleep?”
Joey nods sleepily, getting to his feet and leading me to the garage. The heating sucks here, and even though it's Southern California, at two in the morning the garage is chilly here a week before Thanksgiving, but that's okay. The bed is soft and
the blanket is thick, and when Joey gathers me into his arms, both of us still in our t-shirts and clothes from earlier, the warmth of his arms and body comforts me as I drift off to sleep.
Joey
Waking up, I'm in a fantasy world again, feeling Andrea snuggled against me. She's snoring lightly, her head resting on my arm as she sleeps deeply. I let her sleep, taking my arm out carefully and whispering in her ear when she groans and shifts around, her hands reaching for me. “I'll be back in a moment, I just gotta pee.”
“Mmm-hmmm. Love you,” Andrea mumbles before dropping back off, snoring again even before I cross the room and go into the kitchen. Mama's there, dressed for church, sipping a coffee before she gets ready to leave.
“Good morning, Joey,” she says softly as I close the door. “Did Andrea finish her website repairs?”
“Yes, Mama. It took her until about two in the morning though. I thought I'd let her sleep more.” I feel weird that Andrea slept in my room, but at the same time, I don't. It's where she belongs if that's where she wants to be. Mama sips her coffee, and I leave the kitchen to go use the toilet, coming back just as she finishes her cup.
“I'm going to go to Mass, Maria is taking Angel with her to a babysitting job. Apparently, someone has tickets to the Rams game today.”
I nod, reaching out to hug Mama. “Okay, Mama. When you get back, how about we work on the last of the paperwork together? There can't be much left.”
“Just some of the last of the inspection papers. With the changes we made to the garage, I need to update some of that,” Mama says. “You're a good boy. Enjoy your time with Andrea, I hope she sleeps well. And I was thinking, if she'd like, maybe it would be okay if she shares your room? We can use that back bedroom as a full-time office then. Or maybe Angel would like his own room instead of sharing with Maria all the time.”
I nod, hugging Mama tighter. “You're a wonderful woman, Mama. We'll see what Andrea wants to do.”
Mama leaves for church, and I check in on Andrea, who's still sleeping peacefully. I want to go to her, but I know if I do I'll probably wake her up, and she needs rest. Instead, I leave the door open and turn around, going to the kitchen where I find the flour, baking powder and butter, and I start making biscuits. I don't get a chance to make these often, my family normally eats Puerto Rican or Mexican food, but for some reason, I'm motivated to make buttermilk biscuits for Andrea. While they're baking, I can mix up some sausage gravy, I know I have some good sausage in the fridge right now.