Happy Birthday Lytton! Here is your embarassingly bad fic!
What can I say that hasn't already been said? Happy birthday times a million to an awesome girl that I am fortunate to call a friend. ^_^
Now here is my pitiful contribution to your chocolate, coffee, and sex-filled day! Enjoy my pitiful attempt at your request.
Title: First Attempt
Pre-Econ
The street was empty, but she gripped the wad of bills in the pocket of her coat anyway. The night hung heavy, and this street skirted the edge of a place where you didn’t want to find yourself after the sun set. Or when it rose. Actually, it was probably never a good idea to be this far north other than to look for something to forget the circumstances that would bring someone to their current location. Mina gulped and stepped to the chipped curb, praying and hoping that a desperate cabbie was brave or broke enough to come to her rescue. She was in luck: the twin glare of headlights rolled towards her, and she stuck her hand out to wave it down.
The car slowed to a stop. It was neither yellow nor sporting a light on its roof, or looked like it could contain more than two passengers. The windows were almost completely tinted. Mina let her hand fall to her side; there was no mistaking this car.
The passenger window rolled down. “Get in.”
“How did you--?”
Darien’s eyes were gleaming with barely repressed fury. “Doesn’t matter, and I’m not going to tell you anyway. Get in.”
The leather seats of the Ferrari cupped her body like a glove; clearly this vehicle was worth every penny spent on its opulence. “Buckle your seatbelt,” Darien ordered, and stomped on the gas. Mina was thrown back in her seat from the sudden acceleration, and her ire was rising with the speedometer.
“Who told you where I was?” She tried her best to snarl, but the late hour was catching the words in her throat and spitting them out in a strained whine. “Why are you here?”
Darien blew through a red light the way only reckless drivers of expensive cars could. “I told you it doesn’t matter.”
His tone raised her hackles. “Darien, you’re not my father, so save the lecture for someone who cares.” They were approaching an intersection. “In fact, let me out. I can get a cab from here.”
“Mina.” His voice was a frozen anvil. “You’re not going anywhere. Now please,” he turned to her with gritted teeth. “What. The. Fuck. Were you thinking?”
“I--” She snapped her mouth shut and felt the burning rise in her face. What the fuck had she been thinking? The electric bill, for one, since her lights had been off for a week and her refrigerator was running off of several extension cords that snaked down the wall and across the alley into a seldom-used outlet at the Chinese restaurant next door. She had covered it with trash and boxes and hoped that the restaurant owners wouldn’t notice for another month, and painted by candlelight and bathed in tepid water. That length of industrial cord was in her mind when she got the phone call, and when she accepted, and when she dressed and painted her face with a flashlight, and when she stepped to the curb and hailed a cab with the last of her cash. She was still thinking of that stupid, grimy extension cord and its filthy orange plastic casing when she shrugged off her coat in a mid-star hotel room for a stranger and danced for him on the bed. The room was too small for a dining table.
She fingered the bills in her pocket. “You know why. I needed it.”
“Then you ask me for it.”
“No!” She was done with that, with depending on a man to carry her through life. “I’m not taking your money.”
“Mina, shut the fuck up. Stop pretending.”
She slumped against the door and tried not to let the tears win. Too much makeup was at stake. “I’m not pretending, Darien! I’m not some stupid little girl that needs rescuing. I know what I’m doing.”
“Oh, you know what you’re doing?” He nearly hit a parked car as he downshifted, furious. “You know what you’re doing, Mina, that’s good to hear. Tell me, how many people knew where you were tonight besides me?”
A tear escaped and slipped down her face, but her voice remained steady. “No one.”
“No one, that’s perfect, that’s just peachy. Were there any cameras in the room?”
Her blood ran cold; she hadn’t even considered that. “I don’t think so.”
“Good. Another plus. Now tell me, who was this guy?”
Mina made her mind up to jump out at the next red light and run for it. She’d risk death to get away from this humiliation. “He said he was a fan and got my number from Amber Leigh. He didn’t want to--do anything. He just wanted to see me dance.”
“What was his name? Where does he work? Does he have a record? What car does he drive, where does he live, what’s his wife’s name?”
“I don’t know.” She was crying now, her mind still on that stupid extension cord. This is what her life was coming to: a crumbling studio apartment, a jar of pickles and some stale bread in her refrigerator, parents who were kept clueless and a brother she couldn’t keep in the dark for much longer. The possibility was still there, remote as it was, that she could change everything; that she could go back to him, but she couldn’t forget the painting, her painting, with his name on it, gracing CD sleeves and promo posters. Her work; his glory. “Just take me home. I’m tired.”
Darien drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “You could be a Sugar again. I could do it. Or something else. You want to go solo? I can make it happen.”
She let a short laugh slip through. “I’m not doing that again.”
“You could just get a freaking job, you know.”
Another laugh. She had been fired from her last job for breaking the eight-hundred dollar espresso machine. “I am working.”
“Fuck you!” Darien suddenly burst out. The scenery was flashing by: the building were getting cleaner and shinier, and the taxis more frequent. “This is not working, Mina, this is putting your fucking life at risk because you’re too proud and pigheaded to ask anyone for help. Just tell your fucking brother that you need help!”
“I’m not telling Jason! He can’t know about this.”
“Fine then. He’ll just have to find out what you’re doing when he gets called down to the morgue to identify your headless body when some creep hacks you up and throws you in a dumpster, and I’m sure that’s much less traumatic than hearing that his sister needs money.”
She was crying now. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Something changed in Darien’s face, something like concern, but that would be crazy, because this was Darien. “Because--” he started, then tried again. “Because even though you don’t think so, people care about you, Mina.”
“Do you?”
He drummed a finger on the steering wheel. “Of course.”
Mina wiped her face with a trembling hand and wished wildly for a Kleenex. “Thank you. You can take me home now.”
He took her to his place instead, a glittering penthouse uptown with floor-to-ceiling windows. It was dark and empty. “Where’s Trista?”
“In Montenegro.” He flicked a light switch in the kitchen and illuminated an industrial-sized stainless steel refrigerator that her own could probably fit in. There was no orange extension cord snaking out of the window of this one. “Hungry?”
She was. Darien threw extra bacon in the carbonara, probably reasoning that she could use the calories and protein. She could. The first plate was cleared within minutes.
“You’ll get fat if you keep eating that way,” he quipped as he popped open a bottle of wine.
“Screw you,” she said around a mouthful of pasta. “When did you learn to cook?”
“You must not know me very well; I’ve been cooking since I was seven.” He set out wine glasses and poured her one. “Granted, my first attempt nearly burned down the trailer, but I got the hang of it eventually. Couldn’t afford to waste food.” The wine swirled in the glass as he brought it to his nose. “Good legs on this. Anyway, that’s why I can’t stand pasta; I ate way too much cheap spaghetti back in the day. Spaghetti noodles and ketchup. And grilled government cheese on Wonderbread. I have a friend who--get this--grew up loaded, but loves Wonderbread. I want to throw up when I watch him eat it.”
Mina swallowed and tried to imagine the man in front of her as an impoverished child. It was hard to do, with him swilling thousand-dollar wine. “I didn’t know that.” Darien shrugged and refilled her plate. “I guess I don’t know you very well.”
When he turned back to her, his expression had softened. “Would you like to?”
“What, like, be friends?”
“Yes, be friends. What did you think I meant?”
Mina glanced around the dark apartment, which despite housing a couple seemingly in love, was devoid of any excessive decoration or personal touches. It looked like a model home. “Well, Trista’s not here, I thought you meant sleep with you like you did with Raye.”
Darien shouted incoherently and tossed the pasta tongs up in the air behind his back. “What the fuck! She told you?”
“Of course. I’m her best friend.”
He slammed his palms on the counter and heaved a sigh. “When did she tell you this?”
“The day after it happened.”
“That little--! She told me she wouldn’t tell anyone! Jesus Christ!”
“Darien--”
“You can’t let--”
She knew what he was going to say, so she decided to change the subject. “She even told me how big your dick is.”
A few heaving breaths, and then he was smiling. “So she told you about the pants-monster? Did she mention it’s the size of fire extinguisher?”
“I think her exact words were ‘birthday candle’,” Mina giggled. He started laughing, too, until they were both red in the face, and poured more wine.
“Are you still determined to do what you’ve been doing?”
“I--” she swallowed. “I don’t know. I can’t...I can’t work right now. Every time I try to draw, it just comes out... wrong. It feels wrong. I feel wrong.”
The silence hung heavy for a moment. “You just need time. You’ll get it back.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you’re too talented not to.” He set his wine glass down and looked her in the eye. His eyes were so blue, Mina thought. Like deep oceans, or clear skies. She could get that color by mixing deep cobalt with a touch of hunter and titanium white. “Look, if you insist on continuing this...enterprise, I’m changing your business model. You don’t take the calls, you don’t set anything up. I do that. I will only do it for people I know, and only after I vet them anyway. I’ll call you and send a car, and the car will wait until you come back. You will have your phone on you and turned on.
They get an hour. They don’t touch you. You will only meet at places where I have contacts and eyes on the inside. You will never spend the night. You will call me when you get in and confirm that you are safe. If you don’t come back to the car after the hour, or if I call and you don’t answer, I come up and get you with my Beretta. Understand?”
“Darien.” She stopped and thought. “Thank you.”
“Or you could just TAKE MY FUCKING MONEY!”
“I’ll take more wine?”
He glared at her and uncorked the bottle.
Darien waited until she was asleep in the guest room before making the call. The sleepy voice on the other end answered on the second ring. “It’s three in the morning. You’d better be in jail, you cock.”
“Nice to see you haven’t lost your delicate feminine charm, Raye.”
“Whatever. What do you want?”
He glanced in the direction of the bedroom and turned back to the window. The city glittered with a thousand lights. “Another round?”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m just kidding.” He ran a hand down his face. “It’s Mina. She needs help.”
While Jason was carrying her bags down to his car, Mina pulled the extension cord out of the wall and tossed it into the alley. It landed on a heap of garbage bags, and she never gave it a second thought.
Six months later, Darien called his best friend on his birthday. “You sure you don’t want to go out?”
“I’m sure. I’m beat.”
“You’re an old fucking man, bro. Well, what do you want instead? Right now, if you could have anything.”
The gruff laugh on the other end of the line was heavy with exhaustion. “To take off my shoes, and a hot blonde in garters.”
“Done!”
“Wait, Darien I was kid--” Darien hung up on him and started dialing.
Now here is my pitiful contribution to your chocolate, coffee, and sex-filled day! Enjoy my pitiful attempt at your request.
Title: First Attempt
Pre-Econ
The street was empty, but she gripped the wad of bills in the pocket of her coat anyway. The night hung heavy, and this street skirted the edge of a place where you didn’t want to find yourself after the sun set. Or when it rose. Actually, it was probably never a good idea to be this far north other than to look for something to forget the circumstances that would bring someone to their current location. Mina gulped and stepped to the chipped curb, praying and hoping that a desperate cabbie was brave or broke enough to come to her rescue. She was in luck: the twin glare of headlights rolled towards her, and she stuck her hand out to wave it down.
The car slowed to a stop. It was neither yellow nor sporting a light on its roof, or looked like it could contain more than two passengers. The windows were almost completely tinted. Mina let her hand fall to her side; there was no mistaking this car.
The passenger window rolled down. “Get in.”
“How did you--?”
Darien’s eyes were gleaming with barely repressed fury. “Doesn’t matter, and I’m not going to tell you anyway. Get in.”
The leather seats of the Ferrari cupped her body like a glove; clearly this vehicle was worth every penny spent on its opulence. “Buckle your seatbelt,” Darien ordered, and stomped on the gas. Mina was thrown back in her seat from the sudden acceleration, and her ire was rising with the speedometer.
“Who told you where I was?” She tried her best to snarl, but the late hour was catching the words in her throat and spitting them out in a strained whine. “Why are you here?”
Darien blew through a red light the way only reckless drivers of expensive cars could. “I told you it doesn’t matter.”
His tone raised her hackles. “Darien, you’re not my father, so save the lecture for someone who cares.” They were approaching an intersection. “In fact, let me out. I can get a cab from here.”
“Mina.” His voice was a frozen anvil. “You’re not going anywhere. Now please,” he turned to her with gritted teeth. “What. The. Fuck. Were you thinking?”
“I--” She snapped her mouth shut and felt the burning rise in her face. What the fuck had she been thinking? The electric bill, for one, since her lights had been off for a week and her refrigerator was running off of several extension cords that snaked down the wall and across the alley into a seldom-used outlet at the Chinese restaurant next door. She had covered it with trash and boxes and hoped that the restaurant owners wouldn’t notice for another month, and painted by candlelight and bathed in tepid water. That length of industrial cord was in her mind when she got the phone call, and when she accepted, and when she dressed and painted her face with a flashlight, and when she stepped to the curb and hailed a cab with the last of her cash. She was still thinking of that stupid, grimy extension cord and its filthy orange plastic casing when she shrugged off her coat in a mid-star hotel room for a stranger and danced for him on the bed. The room was too small for a dining table.
She fingered the bills in her pocket. “You know why. I needed it.”
“Then you ask me for it.”
“No!” She was done with that, with depending on a man to carry her through life. “I’m not taking your money.”
“Mina, shut the fuck up. Stop pretending.”
She slumped against the door and tried not to let the tears win. Too much makeup was at stake. “I’m not pretending, Darien! I’m not some stupid little girl that needs rescuing. I know what I’m doing.”
“Oh, you know what you’re doing?” He nearly hit a parked car as he downshifted, furious. “You know what you’re doing, Mina, that’s good to hear. Tell me, how many people knew where you were tonight besides me?”
A tear escaped and slipped down her face, but her voice remained steady. “No one.”
“No one, that’s perfect, that’s just peachy. Were there any cameras in the room?”
Her blood ran cold; she hadn’t even considered that. “I don’t think so.”
“Good. Another plus. Now tell me, who was this guy?”
Mina made her mind up to jump out at the next red light and run for it. She’d risk death to get away from this humiliation. “He said he was a fan and got my number from Amber Leigh. He didn’t want to--do anything. He just wanted to see me dance.”
“What was his name? Where does he work? Does he have a record? What car does he drive, where does he live, what’s his wife’s name?”
“I don’t know.” She was crying now, her mind still on that stupid extension cord. This is what her life was coming to: a crumbling studio apartment, a jar of pickles and some stale bread in her refrigerator, parents who were kept clueless and a brother she couldn’t keep in the dark for much longer. The possibility was still there, remote as it was, that she could change everything; that she could go back to him, but she couldn’t forget the painting, her painting, with his name on it, gracing CD sleeves and promo posters. Her work; his glory. “Just take me home. I’m tired.”
Darien drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “You could be a Sugar again. I could do it. Or something else. You want to go solo? I can make it happen.”
She let a short laugh slip through. “I’m not doing that again.”
“You could just get a freaking job, you know.”
Another laugh. She had been fired from her last job for breaking the eight-hundred dollar espresso machine. “I am working.”
“Fuck you!” Darien suddenly burst out. The scenery was flashing by: the building were getting cleaner and shinier, and the taxis more frequent. “This is not working, Mina, this is putting your fucking life at risk because you’re too proud and pigheaded to ask anyone for help. Just tell your fucking brother that you need help!”
“I’m not telling Jason! He can’t know about this.”
“Fine then. He’ll just have to find out what you’re doing when he gets called down to the morgue to identify your headless body when some creep hacks you up and throws you in a dumpster, and I’m sure that’s much less traumatic than hearing that his sister needs money.”
She was crying now. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Something changed in Darien’s face, something like concern, but that would be crazy, because this was Darien. “Because--” he started, then tried again. “Because even though you don’t think so, people care about you, Mina.”
“Do you?”
He drummed a finger on the steering wheel. “Of course.”
Mina wiped her face with a trembling hand and wished wildly for a Kleenex. “Thank you. You can take me home now.”
He took her to his place instead, a glittering penthouse uptown with floor-to-ceiling windows. It was dark and empty. “Where’s Trista?”
“In Montenegro.” He flicked a light switch in the kitchen and illuminated an industrial-sized stainless steel refrigerator that her own could probably fit in. There was no orange extension cord snaking out of the window of this one. “Hungry?”
She was. Darien threw extra bacon in the carbonara, probably reasoning that she could use the calories and protein. She could. The first plate was cleared within minutes.
“You’ll get fat if you keep eating that way,” he quipped as he popped open a bottle of wine.
“Screw you,” she said around a mouthful of pasta. “When did you learn to cook?”
“You must not know me very well; I’ve been cooking since I was seven.” He set out wine glasses and poured her one. “Granted, my first attempt nearly burned down the trailer, but I got the hang of it eventually. Couldn’t afford to waste food.” The wine swirled in the glass as he brought it to his nose. “Good legs on this. Anyway, that’s why I can’t stand pasta; I ate way too much cheap spaghetti back in the day. Spaghetti noodles and ketchup. And grilled government cheese on Wonderbread. I have a friend who--get this--grew up loaded, but loves Wonderbread. I want to throw up when I watch him eat it.”
Mina swallowed and tried to imagine the man in front of her as an impoverished child. It was hard to do, with him swilling thousand-dollar wine. “I didn’t know that.” Darien shrugged and refilled her plate. “I guess I don’t know you very well.”
When he turned back to her, his expression had softened. “Would you like to?”
“What, like, be friends?”
“Yes, be friends. What did you think I meant?”
Mina glanced around the dark apartment, which despite housing a couple seemingly in love, was devoid of any excessive decoration or personal touches. It looked like a model home. “Well, Trista’s not here, I thought you meant sleep with you like you did with Raye.”
Darien shouted incoherently and tossed the pasta tongs up in the air behind his back. “What the fuck! She told you?”
“Of course. I’m her best friend.”
He slammed his palms on the counter and heaved a sigh. “When did she tell you this?”
“The day after it happened.”
“That little--! She told me she wouldn’t tell anyone! Jesus Christ!”
“Darien--”
“You can’t let--”
She knew what he was going to say, so she decided to change the subject. “She even told me how big your dick is.”
A few heaving breaths, and then he was smiling. “So she told you about the pants-monster? Did she mention it’s the size of fire extinguisher?”
“I think her exact words were ‘birthday candle’,” Mina giggled. He started laughing, too, until they were both red in the face, and poured more wine.
“Are you still determined to do what you’ve been doing?”
“I--” she swallowed. “I don’t know. I can’t...I can’t work right now. Every time I try to draw, it just comes out... wrong. It feels wrong. I feel wrong.”
The silence hung heavy for a moment. “You just need time. You’ll get it back.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you’re too talented not to.” He set his wine glass down and looked her in the eye. His eyes were so blue, Mina thought. Like deep oceans, or clear skies. She could get that color by mixing deep cobalt with a touch of hunter and titanium white. “Look, if you insist on continuing this...enterprise, I’m changing your business model. You don’t take the calls, you don’t set anything up. I do that. I will only do it for people I know, and only after I vet them anyway. I’ll call you and send a car, and the car will wait until you come back. You will have your phone on you and turned on.
They get an hour. They don’t touch you. You will only meet at places where I have contacts and eyes on the inside. You will never spend the night. You will call me when you get in and confirm that you are safe. If you don’t come back to the car after the hour, or if I call and you don’t answer, I come up and get you with my Beretta. Understand?”
“Darien.” She stopped and thought. “Thank you.”
“Or you could just TAKE MY FUCKING MONEY!”
“I’ll take more wine?”
He glared at her and uncorked the bottle.
Darien waited until she was asleep in the guest room before making the call. The sleepy voice on the other end answered on the second ring. “It’s three in the morning. You’d better be in jail, you cock.”
“Nice to see you haven’t lost your delicate feminine charm, Raye.”
“Whatever. What do you want?”
He glanced in the direction of the bedroom and turned back to the window. The city glittered with a thousand lights. “Another round?”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m just kidding.” He ran a hand down his face. “It’s Mina. She needs help.”
While Jason was carrying her bags down to his car, Mina pulled the extension cord out of the wall and tossed it into the alley. It landed on a heap of garbage bags, and she never gave it a second thought.
Six months later, Darien called his best friend on his birthday. “You sure you don’t want to go out?”
“I’m sure. I’m beat.”
“You’re an old fucking man, bro. Well, what do you want instead? Right now, if you could have anything.”
The gruff laugh on the other end of the line was heavy with exhaustion. “To take off my shoes, and a hot blonde in garters.”
“Done!”
“Wait, Darien I was kid--” Darien hung up on him and started dialing.