LIKED - A Dark Romance Novel (Story of Dangerous Obsession and Lust) (3 page)

Gia pushed him up against the divider across from her. He spread his
hands out to brace himself and keep his balance. Don’s finger tips hit the
toilet paper roll spilling a streamer of it out onto the tile under them.

“This is so stupid,” he growled. He refastened his belt.

She hiked one leg up onto the edge of the toilet seat. It flushed again
and she felt droplets hit her ankle and her cheek. She tried to ignore it.

Gia took one of Don’s hands from his belt and fed it up under her dress.
“Make me feel good, Don.”

His lips pulled back in his odd smile again. His eyes seemed focused, but
he didn’t exactly look happy. His fingers brushed over the material of her
thong between her legs and she gasped. He rubbed up and down and she shifted
position slightly. The toilet flushed and she felt the drizzle on her exposed
skin that came with the deafening roar of the water echoing off the marble tiled
walls.

His fingers curled inside her thong and teased her flesh to flesh with
his knuckles. She bit her lip and closed her eyes as he pressed in deeper.

His face moved in close to hers and she tilted her chin up. As he spoke,
she felt his lips brush against her neck and the warmth of his breath on her
skin.

Don whispered, “Does that feel good?”

His fingers slid through the full length of her wetness. The toilet flushed
again roaring at them and sprinkling her.

She breathed out. “Yes.”

He grabbed his phone out of her cleavage and pulled his hand away from
her out from under her dress. She opened her eyes to see that he was already
scrolling as he walked away from the stall.

“Grow the hell up, Gia.”

“Are you kidding me?” she said.

He stopped at the sink and washed the hand he had used on her. Don looked
at her in the mirror as he pulled a paper towel out of the dispenser. “I’m
getting my dinner delivered and I’m going home. You are welcome to stay and eat
alone or come home with me, if you can behave yourself. I’m getting too old for
this Hollywood bullshit.”

She stepped out of the stall and there was one more flush behind her. Gia
spoke above the roar. “You are all in the bullshit, Donald. It’s just got to be
all about you.”

“Call me when you get over whatever has got you in this mood,” he said as
he walked toward the door.

“Pay me for acting in your stupid, fucking movie, you deadbeat.”

“Wow.” He shook his head without turning back toward her. “You are a
piece of work since you got a little bit of attention thanks to me.”

“How about you get me a ring for our engagement too?”

He opened the door. “Let me make some calls and earn some damn money
then, you psycho.”

As the door swung closed, she screamed, “Fuck you!”

Her voice split the air in the bathroom. It was a sound that would have
challenged the editors of one of her scream queen classics. She had a technique
for bringing the noise up from her diaphragm to keep from hurting her throat.
She had not used it for her scream in the bathroom though. That had been all
raw anger and her throat hurt making her swallow over and over to soothe it.

By the time she returned to the table, he had left. Don had paid, but he
had left both meals. Whatever he was having delivered, it was not the meals he
had bought for their wonderful engagement dinner. She boxed them both up and
called for a ride.

***

Gia stood on the curb in the same silver dress from the Hellmouth premier
holding her two Styrofoam boxes. Sunlight cut at a harsh angle along the
buildings across the street. Photographers snapped pictures of her as she
stared forward trying to pretend everything was fine. Even they got bored of
waiting and turned their attention to other people.

A silver Prius pulled up and Gia narrowed her eyes. She climbed into the
passenger’s side balancing her trays and closed the door. It was the same girl
from the previous night. She had her auburn hair in two cute pigtails that made
her neck look skinnier. She wore jeans and a faded t-shirt from a band that Gia
didn’t recognize. Sound May Suffer was printed over the distressed picture of
the band. Gia wasn’t sure if that was the band name or the album name. The
jeans were just plain, faded denim. Gia thought they might even be boy’s jeans,
but on the girl’s thin legs they looked like skinny jeans. She wore leather
sandals with her toenails painted black.

Gia sighed as photographers brought their attention back around to snap a
few more shots. She bet that this girl never got turned down for blowjobs or
left at restaurants.

She pointed to the seatbelt buckle beside Gia’s seat. Gia fought to
balance the food on her lap as she reached for the belt. The girl reached out
and held them in place, so that Gia could use both hands to buckle in.

Gia took back hold of the trays. “Thank you.”

The girl smiled and took hold of the wheel with both hands as she pulled
away from the restaurant. “No problem. This is nicer than the parking lot
behind the bodega. Moving up in the world?”

Gia laughed and adjusted the strap of her purse on her shoulder. “More
like moving sideways … or in a vicious circle.”

She said, “Back home this time?”

Gia looked forward and sighed. “Yeah.”

“Did you have a bad night or evening or afternoon, I guess? It is still
daylight so it can’t be that bad already, can it?”

Gia shook her head. “I crash and burn fast. Plenty of time to go home and
eat two dinners.”

“See. You got two dinners out of the night. That’s something.”

Gia slid her phone out of her purse. There were already tweets and grainy
pictures of her going into the men’s room. Half of them said she had banged Don
for an hour. The other half said they had fought and stormed out separately.
Instant media was a fickle “frenemy.”

“I’m Gia, by the way.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m Susan.”

Gia looked at the girl driving for a while, but her eyes remained forward
on the road. Gia asked, “Do you recognize me then?”

Susan gave a slight wince. “Nothing personal. I have your name from the
Uber call. You could have gotten my name from there too. I’m sure you are great
in whatever you are in.”

“Yeah, okay.”

There was already a blog post on the Horror, Whores, and Fandom site. It
had a picture of her climbing into the Prius with the headline “Trouble in
Paradise?” Gia exited the site without reading it. That dude did not like her
or her work. She had not even seen him tonight. He had thick eyebrows and
always wore purple.

She scrolled through her messages. The bottom tray was burning her knees
through the Styrofoam. Don texted to apologize and said to call him tomorrow.
She rolled her eyes and shook her head.

“I’m going to end up marrying the jerk anyway,” Gia whispered.

Susan laughed. “I wouldn’t put that in the vows.”

Gia saw a message from Jack the Liker and her thumb hovered above the
button for the thread. “He doesn’t find me funny. That line would probably fall
in that same category.”

“You should find a guy that appreciates you,” Susan said.

Gia tapped the button and saw the message: You look good. I’m not
stalking. There are pictures online from you going to the restaurant with your
fiancé. That’s the perfect dress for any occasion. Enjoy your night. You
deserve it.

Gia blinked to keep tears from rolling down. She said, “I’d just be
satisfied with a guy that pays me on time.”

Susan laughed. “Oh, it’s like that, huh?”

Gia lifted her eyes and looked out at the road as she thought about what
she had said, “No, not like that. My fiancé was the director of my last movie …
so I guess it is almost exactly like that. And I will probably marry the jerk
anyway.”

Susan made the next turn. “Well, you have your vows half written at
least.”

Gia looked back down. She typed: I’m in a weird place right now and in a
weirder mood. I want to do something crazy. Do you want to play a little game
with me, Jack?

She added a purple, horned devil. If she could find one with thick
eyebrows, she would have used that emoji. Her thumb hovered again and she
prepared to backspace to delete the whole comment.

“What did he do to upset you tonight?” Susan asked.

Gia paused for another beat and sent the message. She slipped her phone
back into her purse. “He wouldn’t stop looking at … ugh, he wouldn’t pay
attention to me. I started teasing him and he got shitty about it.”

Susan pulled up to the curb and Gia climbed out. She paused staring up at
her second floor apartment thinking about the hat. She smelled onions and had a
strong urge to ask Susan to come up and eat with her. Between inviting a potential
online stalker into her life and inviting an Uber driver stranger up to eat
with her, it was like she was trying to get herself killed. Still, eating alone
was no fun.

Gia turned around and leaned into the Prius. Susan smiled. “You are all
paid up. Good luck with your jerk. I have to get to another pick up.”

Gia nodded. “Thanks.”

She closed the door and the Prius hummed away.

***

Gia punched the code, but was one button off. She nearly dumped both
dinners trying to pull the handle to the locked door. She growled at it and
punched the code again. When she wasn’t thinking about it, she got it right.

She climbed the stairs and braced the dinners between her body and the
wall as she dug her key out of her purse. Inside, she set the dinners on the table
and kicked the door closed behind her with her heel. The apartment did not have
the onion smell, but it was stuffy. She went into the bedroom and pulled the
window open accepting the smell in exchange for a cooler breeze.

She stepped back from the window and set her open purse on the vanity.
Her phone slid out at an angle. Gia slid her arms out of her dress and pushed
it down past her hips to the floor. She stepped out of it wearing just her
silver thong and bra with high heels. She unhooked the bra in the back and let
the straps hang loose at the curve of her shoulders with the cups barely
covering her nipples as she faced the window.

She thought that if any of the photographers had followed her Uber home
they might get some nice shots now. Gia muttered to her apartment. “No bad
publicity – just Hollywood bullshit.”

She wondered what the purple devil with the eyebrows would title the
picture and post, if he got a shot of her now. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be
flattering.

She looked down in time to see that a line of text had lit up on the
screen of her phone. It vanished before she could read it or identify it. She
slid her phone out of her purse as her bra slid down to her elbows exposing her
breasts. It was nothing people couldn’t pay a few bucks to see in the theater
or to own at home.

She pressed her left thumb to the button at the bottom of the phone and
the device prompted her to try again. She switched for her right thumb and the
icons jumped up in a rainbow wash of colored squares with curved corners.

“Don’t want to hurt anyone with a sharp corner, right?”

Her bra dropped down around her wrists and made her think of having her
hands tied in one of the scenes from her movies. She had done that more than
once. Never in real life though.

Gia scrolled through text messages and saw that Don had added nothing to
his brief apology. She tapped through social media not finding what had
prompted the notice. Then, she saw a red dot on the thread from Jack. She felt
like she should have known that was who it would have been. Her fiancé had left
her buzzing and alone. Now she was standing in her apartment by an open window
in nothing but a thong and heels and she had messaged a drooling fan to
proposition him. But proposition him for what exactly?

Gia let her bra fall from her wrists to the floor.

She tapped the screen and realized she was excited to read Jack’s
response. She whispered, “What’s wrong with me?”

Her empty apartment had no answer for her.

Jack’s message read: “What did you have in mind?”

She shook her head leaning over her vanity staring down past her hard
nipples at her phone. “Congratulations, Gina from Dark Orchard, Kentucky, you
have managed to make your stalker fanboy seem like the sane one. Unlock the ‘all
new low’ level.”

She lifted her fingers into the air above the screen and they danced just
above the little grey letters on the virtual keyboard. It was as if her fingers
desired to type something. She knew she was going to answer one way or the
other, but she was afraid to discover what, so she left her fingers in the air
away from the letters for a moment longer.

She asked herself the question to see if she had answer. “What do you
have in mind, Gia?”

***

Bad Day on the Slut Set

“Reset,” the assistant director growled. “It looks like we are filming a
tampon commercial in the sun. Fix the lighting like I told you.”

Gia could see the crew ready to tear into the man like a pack of zombies.
This seemed to be how second unit was going and unfortunately more of her scenes
were getting shot second unit. If she had any doubts about how far down the
cast list she was, having her calls end up on second unit drove that home.

As she watched the exchange, someone from make-up came by and sprayed her
with a film of gel that made her look sweaty. She wasn’t sure why her real
sweat wasn’t doing the trick, but now she felt sticky and gooey.

“We are outside in the sun, sir.”

Now it was the A.D. that looked like he was ready to tear into someone.
“You can use reflectors to change the quality of the light to give me what I
need for the scene. You know. Like the way you are supposed to do … for your
job.”

“Reflectors will add light. We are using natural light. If you want it
darker, we need to be inside or wait for the sun to start going down or filter
it in editing.”

“Everyone break for a few minutes while I explain to the crew what I need
and why they need to give it to me.”

Others hollered back the order for a break even though everyone had
already been fully focused on the unprofessional behavior and heard it. Gia was
pretty sure taking this project was a mistake. It was probably a coin flip
whether she was getting paid for this either and she was taking the film
because she needed to get paid. It was definitely a step down even if her
popular horror work was considered a step up by some standard. Big budget
pictures were not knocking down her door, so she could keep pretending to be a
rising star as she starved to death, if she wanted to.

Gia moved off away from the set and sat down in the open door of a
cabinet that was rebuilt to look like an outhouse for another setup earlier in
the day. It had the crescent moon cut into the door and the amusement park
weathering on the boards around the sides. She wasn’t sure how it looked on
camera, but it looked cheesy as hell in real life.

The movie had the working title of
Southern Sluts vs. the Lizard Kings
of Hillbilly Creek
. The script was put together with the same ham-fisted
care that the outhouse had been made. It felt like a title the writer/director
and roommate of the asshole A.D. had lived with for a while and wouldn’t be
convinced to change. The movie was destined to go straight to Blue Ray followed
by straight into the bargain bend along with her career. That was if the movie
didn’t end up straight to YouTube.

She probably shouldn’t have been hanging out in a set piece. Even if
others were unprofessional, she should keep her own standards, but she didn’t
have a trailer or even a tent canopy for shade, so she had claimed her spot.

***