“That movie was their big break.”
“Yeah. What the guy described was exactly their sound, so I sent him their CD the next day. He called Newell, mentioned my name. They got the job. Ended up with a recording contract. Their big song from the movie won Best Song; they mopped up at the Grammies. And you know the rest. My part was really not a big deal. I knew somebody who knew somebody. But they were grateful. When I called Newell about the wedding—on a long shot—they were going to be in Austin for a few weeks between studio recording and going back on tour next month.” He shrugged again. “They said yes.”
Ali tried to wrap her head around this story. Tried to picture what Ben’s life was like. He calls a big name band, and they not only take his call, they use their downtime to do him a favor. He casually calls Newell Tremont by his first name. Not name dropping but because they’re friends. Not exactly like life in the teachers’ lounge between fifth and sixth period.
Ben nudged her out of her thoughts, pointing to Bree who was motioning them onto the dance floor. He took her hand and spun her around and back into his arms.
“Show off.” His only response was a chuckle before he pulled her closer.
Forty-five minutes later, winded and thankful for a slower song, she breathed in slowly. “This must be different from the parties you’re used to.”
He leaned back to look at her when he answered with a question. “The real ones or the fake ones?”
“There are fake parties?”
“More fake ones than real ones.”
“And what’s the difference?”
“Real parties aren’t that different from this. Or maybe six or eight people having dinner together, cooking burgers, catching a no-name band, playing Trivia. Fake parties are where you go to see and be seen. Screenwriters are C-listers if we’re lucky—or broody or eccentric. Maybe you get to a B-list party if you’re presentable enough to be tapped as a plus one for some up-and-comer. It’s all for the cameras.”
“But it looks so glamourous.”
“Nah. Occasionally you get to meet someone you’ve admired. Even talk to them for a while, but it’s mostly tedious and generally boring. Not the most fun part of the job. But I’m not complaining about what I do. Besides, all jobs have boring parts. Doesn’t yours?”
She thought about it. “Rarely boring. Frustrating, aggravating sometimes. I’m not a big fan of paperwork.”
He spun her around again, catching her with her back to his front, wrapping their linked hands around her waist. His other hand, on her hip, moved to splay open on her stomach, pulling her back against him. “I’m having teacher fantasies. You at your desk in horn-rim glasses, grading papers.”
“I don’t wear glasses.”
He chuckled. “Don’t mess with my fantasy.”
Dipping his head, his lips barely touched the side of her neck, and she was breathing too fast again, but not from dancing. When he brushed a light kiss under her ear, she shivered. And swallowed. And tried not to squirm. As the song faded out, instead of letting her go, he pulled her tighter. She was so over her head here.
Looking over to their table, she noticed Bree and Josh sitting down. “I’d better go check in with Bree.”
He didn’t let her go, but whispered, “Or what? You’ll be like the Maid of Dishonor?”
Impossible not to smile. “Bridesmaids, Chris O’Dowd as Nathan the cop. I love that movie.” His arm relaxed, but he didn’t release her hand as he led her to the table. She and Bree talked through a couple of songs before heading to the ladies’ room.
Walking back in, she saw Ben and Josh in what looked like a serious conversation. She couldn’t see Ben’s face, but Josh’s expression was thunderous. Only a couple of steps from the table she caught a few of Ben’s words, “…never hurt…respect.” His voice rose as he spat out three more words, “Leave it alone.”
At that moment, Ellie Grantham, a friend of hers and Bree’s since elementary school stopped them to tell Bree how wonderful the wedding had been and to give her version of Bree’s expression when she realized that Steelhead Trout was actually playing. “Priceless.” The three women visited a little longer, talking about mutual friends and who was having babies. Ali didn’t have much to add to that.
When she turned back to the table, Josh was sitting alone. Looking around, she located Ben talking with Cyndy—aka Sin—at the bar. Should she wait for him at the table or go to the bar? At that moment, Cyndy saw her looking that way and moved closer to Ben, putting her hand on his arm, her expression a challenge. That tore it. Ali walked toward them and was only a step behind Ben when Cyndy focused on him and asked, “Do you still live in that cute, blue bungalow? We had so much fun there.” On the last words, her hand began stroking his arm as she looked at Ali with a condescending smile.
“No. I bought a place five years ago.”
Ali could feel her face flush and was about to turn around and go back to the table where she should have gone in the first place when Ben looked over his shoulder and saw her. His quick smile just as quickly turned thoughtful, probably wondering if she’d heard Cyndy’s remark.
The other woman was locked and loaded and not deterred in the least by Ali’s presence. Why would she be? Ali was out of her league. Cyndy’s next exclamation was almost a purr. “Ohhh, I’ve gotta get myself back out to LA and check out your new place. See what fun we can have there.”
Ben didn’t respond to Cyndy, just took Ali’s hand as the band started a new song and said, “This is the last song on this set. Ali and I have some things to do if you’ll excuse us.” He was walking away and tugging her along before Cyndy could say anything else.
Clearly Ben had done a lot more than “keep up” with an old high school friend. If he’d moved five years ago from the house Cyn remembered, it had been a while. It shouldn’t matter, but around girls—women—like Cyndy, Ali never fit in. Kinda like the world is a tuxedo and she’s a pair of brown shoes. Odd that in high school she hadn’t cared. So why did she care now?
Ben’s hand moved to her back, and he steered her to the dance floor. If she were cool, she’d make some clever but ladylike remark about what a bitch Cyn was, but at the moment not one cool, clever word came to mind. And the words that did come to mind were definitely not ladylike. She peeked at Ben’s face and could see his jaw twitching. Then he was pulling her away from the dance floor and toward the hallway leading to the club offices. As soon as they were away from the crowd, he turned her around to face him.
“Ask me.”
Chapter 8
Ask him? She wasn’t sure if he meant ask about Cyndy or ask him why he’d downplayed their relationship earlier. But she recognized his angry tone. “It’s not any of my business, Ben. I’m sorry I interrupted your conversation.”
“That wasn’t exactly a conversation.” He was looking at her with such intensity that she glanced away but jerked her head back to face him when his voice softened. “What if I want it to be your business?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I didn’t lie to you, Ali, but…it wasn’t the truth either. God, what a cop out.”
“Then why are you angry with me?”
“I’m—ah, shit.” He looked up at the ceiling like he’d find an escape hatch. Then he reached over and squeezed her hand before stepping back and leaning against the wall.
“I’m not angry with you. I’m angry with me because it’s something I’m not proud of. It’s embarrass—”
“Ben, you don’t need to explain.”
“Yes, I do. She was rude to you, and I—I should have called her on it. I’m sorry I didn’t, but it’s just…it’s just that in spite of how things turned out, I treated her like crap, and I couldn’t think of anything to say to her back there that wouldn’t have been putting her down, and I won’t do that again.”
“I can’t imagine you treating anyone badly. But whatever it was, you don’t have to tell me about it.” At first, she thought he was going to accept the out she offered, but instead
he started talking.
“You’d imagine wrong then. It was a long time ago. Seven years, but I was a world-class dick, and I doubt I would have ever told you about it if she hadn’t put it out there between us. Two years after college, in June, I ran into her at Jack and Hannah’s wedding. She’d just finished her MBA and was moving back to Houston to start a job, but she was going to be in Irvine for six weeks, training at the company’s headquarters. That’s about an hour-and-a-half south of where I lived then. She…asked me out. That first Friday night she was in town, she arrived at my house—with a suitcase.”
Ali tried to mask her surprised reaction, but probably wasn’t successful. She didn’t want to know the answer, but she asked the question anyway. “You lived together?”
“No. Well…” He looked away then back at her. “She came up every weekend.” He closed his eyes for a second. “Girls like Cynthia Crawley didn’t even know my name in high school, other than ‘Josh McKenna’s friend Ben.’ So—that may have been the reason, but it’s not an excuse. I should have been over high school long before then, but I guess I wasn’t. Even if it didn’t mean anything, I was flattered by her interest. Vindicated. So I took what she offered even though we had absolutely nothing in common. I knew by the end of that first weekend that she was thinking relationship, but I…it stroked my ego that she wanted me, and I let it go on.”
He shook his head. The light was dim, but Ali thought he was blushing. She waited for him to say more.
“I lived in a guest house on this estate in Hollywood Hills. Had a job as a driver, and that blue bungalow she mentioned came with the job.”
“A driver? But you were working for a studio right after college.”
“I was. The driving was barely part-time. I got free rent for driving Tibbs, this French bulldog, to-and-from doggy daycare when his owners—really owner, he was the wife’s dog—were out of the country. Which they were a lot. Tibbs had his own suite at the house, but he got lonely at nights and on weekends, so he usually just stayed out in the bungalow with me.”
She liked hearing about his life but wasn’t sure what this had to do with Cyndy. “Tibbs, the dog, had his own suite.”
“Yeah. Old Hollywood money can be pretty crazy sometimes. The dog’s name was actually Jean Thibodeaux, but I called him Tibbs.”
“As in ‘They call me Mr. Tibbs’?”
He smiled. “Right. In the Heat of the Night, Sidney Poitier, Virgil Tibbs.” The smile broadened into a grin then faded, and he ran his finger along Ali’s jawline. “You know, she never did get that.”
Ali could see him thinking about what he wanted to say. “Earlier you said in spite of how things turned out.”
“Right. Karma, payback, whatever it was. She wasn’t a big fan of Tibbs, hated the way he’d forget to keep his tongue in his mouth. And she may remember that place as ‘cute’ now but she asked me once how long I planned to live in the servants’ quarters. It was a nice place. A hell of a lot nicer than the crappy apartment I’d lived in since junior year, and I was saving a ton of money for, basically, having a dog. She never out-and-out said it, but the fact that I wasn’t making much money bothered her. Even more so that success as a screenwriter was a real longshot. At least success as she defined it.”
He stopped to breathe in and exhaled slowly. “The last weekend she was in town, she was talking about getting together in Houston when I came to see my dad in a couple of weeks. I’d convinced myself that breaking it off when I was there was a good way to end it. Sort of an it’s-not-you-it’s-the-long-distance-thing.”
He cleared his throat. “She told me she’d set it up with her dad to talk with me while I was there because he was always looking for ‘bright, capable people.’ She didn’t spell it out, but I knew she was trying to find me a better job.”
“Wait. I thought Cyndy’s dad was a real estate developer.”
“That’s right.”
“What kind of work would you have done for him?”
“I guess push papers around, do deals, make money. Hell, I don’t know what real estate developers do. But that was the point. It hit me like a runaway train. She might have liked the package I came in then, but that was it. She didn’t want me—she couldn’t. She didn’t even know me. No more than she had in high school.”
He shrugged. “It certainly wasn’t some grand passion on my part, but I’d been feeding on her attention. I was deflated, felt as invisible as I’d been in high school, and that pissed me off. And I was pissed at myself for how I’d used her. We fought, and I—you know, she always had a big group, a crowd, the In Crowd, the It Girls, but I’d realized as we spent time together that she didn’t really have friends.”
Ali glanced at the door leading back to the bar and dance floor and tried to keep a neutral expression, but Ben saw it. “I know. There’s a reason she doesn’t, but…she’s really not a bad person. I’d been a dick for weeks, but that afternoon I was just flat-out cruel, pointing out stuff like her having no friends. And truthfully she’d never been anything but honest about what she wanted. It escalated into a war of words, and she was outgunned. She left in tears.”
Standing up straight, he pushed away from the wall and stepped in front of Ali, absently running his hand up and down her arm. “It was weeks before I could look at myself in the mirror. It’s been years now, but I’m never going to forget what I did. And the moral of this story, boys and girls, is that if you’re a dick to someone—and I was—then you shouldn’t be surprised when it comes back on you. I’m just sorry you were in the crossfire tonight.”
Ali pictured the look Cyndy gave her, daring her. “Sounded like she’s forgiven you, wants to give it another chance.”
He shook his head. “It took me a week or two, but I called her, emailed, texted, sent flowers…she wouldn’t answer. I owed her an apology, but she wouldn’t give me a chance.” He shrugged. “I even wrote an actual letter, but I doubt that she ever read it. I think this was about making trouble for me. But it doesn’t matter what she wants. There’ll be no sequels for that story.”
In spite of his self-deprecating grin and attempt at humor, Ali caught a glimpse of his shame, but also the hurts he remembered. Cuts heal, scars fade to nothing more than fine silvery lines, but they’re always there to remind us. “You hurt someone, learned something about yourself, never ran from the regret. The whole being human thing sucks sometimes.”
“I doubt you have a matching story.”
She scrunched up her nose to keep from grinning. Remembered the girl Ben took to prom. “Oh, I do, but you’re never going to hear it.” She covered his hand with hers, lacing her fingers through his. “If Cyndy didn’t know you—in high school or that summer—it was her loss, Ben. Both times.”
One second he was frowning, looking at her with that same intensity she’d seen when they first came into the hallway. Then the next second, he clasped her hand and walked her back until she bumped against the wall. He pushed her hand over her head, and with the other he fisted her shirt and pulled her against him. His mouth on hers was almost painful, crushing, demanding that she let him in. Only when she opened for him did he gentle the kiss. Exploring, tasting. He dropped her hand to his shoulder, and both his arms wrapped around her, squeezing her so tightly it was hard to breathe. Her hands went to his face, framing it and controlling the kiss, her tongue exploring his warmth. And when his hand slid over her backside, she felt his heat in her core. She wasn’t sure what just happened, but she was positive she didn’t want it to end.
Chapter 9
Her words were so simple. So accepting. She hadn’t let him off the hook for what he’d done, but she hadn’t judged him.
It was her loss. So sweetly telling him that even if he’d been wrong, she didn’t think less of him. This wasn’t a game, some kind of let’s see where this thing goes. This was everything. She was everything. Always had been.
The feel of her body pressed against his, the sweet exploration of her tongue—he was tre
mbling with the need to have her right then. In the hallway, a club full of people only twenty feet away. He took one more taste and eased away. His voice was hoarse when he said, “Later. We’re going to finish this later.”
She nodded, but her eyes were glassy; her need matching his. Bit by bit, the sound of Newell’s voice registered, not singing, but telling the crowd they were taking a short break. Ben took another step back.
“Right now—” He cleared his throat. “Right now, we need to get back out there. Can you go find Bree and Josh, give it five or six minutes then bring them back to that room to meet the band?” He pointed to the door closest to where they were standing. “I need to take care of one thing and get the photographer back here.”
“Okay.” The shakiness in her voice almost undid his resolve. If it hadn’t been for needing to handle things for Josh, he wasn’t sure he would have walked away.
The band was leaving the stage as Ben and Ali re-entered the club and split off in opposite directions. He looked for Cynthia and saw her still at the bar with another drink and another guy, someone he didn’t know. He was pretty sure she’d had one too many when she made her earlier remarks. He looked around for someone to keep an eye on her and saw Chase on the fringe of a group standing around talking.
“Collins.”
Chase turned at his name, surprised. With comic exaggeration, he looked around where Ben was standing like he was searching for something then put his hands up, palms out. “I don’t have her. I swear it.”
Ben just shook his head. “I know where she is. I could use your help with something.”
Oughta Be a Movie: a Sugar-&-Spice romantic comedy Page 6