The Producer, page 9
I watch him as he goes around the car and gets in without saying a word. The trip home is full of silence, and the embarrassment makes me curl up in my seat. I study him from the corner of my eye. His hands clasp the wheel so tight that his knuckles turn white, the only indication that he is furious. His profile is impassive as always. He’s handsome enough to take your breath away and entirely out of my league. Why the hell did I make a fool of myself jumping him?
When we arrive in front of the house, he lets me out of the car and drags me by the arm toward the entrance.
“Slow down. These shoes are killing me,” I complain.
He stops, looks at the impossibly high heels I’m wearing, then takes me in his arms like a gentleman this time, and takes me into the house. I tie my arms around his neck for support, look at his face a breath away from mine, and get lost in that square jaw and perfect features.
He walks up the stairs without ever putting me down, effortlessly, as if I didn’t weigh anything, then gently places me on the bed. As soon as I put my head on the pillow, I close my eyes and enjoy the soft sheets. In a state of semi-unconsciousness, I realize that he is taking off my shoes and a lament of pain escapes from my lips when he pulls them off. I hear him murmur something incomprehensible and then feel a slight burning in my feet. It lasts very little and gives way to a pleasant feeling of freshness.
***
I open my eyes and realize that the sun is already high. My head explodes, and when I finally focus on my surroundings, I realize I am in my room. On the bedside table is a glass of water and two pills of analgesics. For a split second, I wonder who put them there, then Aaron comes to mind, how he dragged me out of the Mystique and put me to bed. I also remember how I made myself a fool trying to seduce him and then vomiting in his car. How the heck did he find me?
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” I cover my face with my hands, trying to hide the embarrassment, even though I’m alone in the room.
I sit down and rub my sweaty hands over the clothing I wore last night. At least he didn’t undress me once he dumped me in bed. I notice, however, that I wear a pair of black cotton socks, too big to be mine. I take them off, perplexed by such a singular choice by my boss. When they fall on the floor, I realize there is white ointment now clotted around the wounds on my feet. After weeks of torture, they seem almost healed. Did he put a healing cream on my feet? A smile tugs on my lips for the sweet gesture, but it’s promptly replaced by a frown when I think about how wasted I was last night.
“I hit on him!” I cringe when the image of how I clung to his tie comes to my mind.
I grab my phone from the bag on the floor and I notice three things: I’m utterly late for work, there’s a message from the production assistant telling me to get well soon, and I have a credit card balance of one thousand two hundred dollars on the card I left at the venue.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” I open the door wide and run down the stairs to the kitchen to put something in my stomach before taking a shower.
I’ve never been late for work, not a single time. I have always been on time and professional, even on those days when cycle cramps make me almost bend in two from the pain. I arrive at the kitchen and stop on the spot when I see Aaron leaning against the marble counter, sipping coffee. It’s ten in the morning. He should have been at the studio hours ago. Instead, he looks at me sternly, dressed in a pair of Chinos and a white shirt. He is even barefoot.
“I called the producer of your show this morning and said that last night at dinner, we ate something that gave us food poisoning. Shooting will resume tomorrow,” he announces with such seriousness that it seems almost a funeral announcement.
“Thank you… I…” The words die in my throat because what can you say to your boss who just lied to the whole production team to cover your mistake?
He approaches, gives me a cup of steaming coffee, and studies me for a long moment.
“I have no idea why you insist on going out with that girl, but this is the first and last time I do something like this to save your ass. At the next bullshit, you’re fired.” His tone is so low that it vibrates in my bowels. He’s not joking.
“She’s the only friend I have… she’s the only one who doesn’t try to stab me in the back,” I whisper, more to myself than to him.
Aaron stops, looks at me for a few moments, then barely shakes his head.
“Are you sure about that? Because I discovered from her Instagram stories you were drunk in that club. If you consider her your only friend, I’m sorry to give you the news so brutally, but you’re alone under the hot Hollywood sun,” he says before leaving and locking himself in his office.
I sit at the kitchen counter, look at my phone, and at the one thousand two hundred dollar charge from the Mystique. I had time to drink only one cocktail. How did they spend one thousand two hundred dollars in one night?
Aaron’s words dig a hole in me I can’t fill. Still, the thing that most devastates me about this whole story is seeing the disappointed expression on the face of the only man who, despite everything, continues to give me second chances.
Karthik, the head of the accounting department of the streaming division, has been rattling off numbers and budgets for hours at our monthly meeting. Usually, I would ask about every single number, every budget overrun, and every penny lost or earned. It’s my job, I want to be aware of how my company is doing, and I want to know if we are in deep trouble so that we can make any drastic decisions in time before sinking.
This is not the case today. The whole week was unlike any other because the image of Dakota in that club, with a top and a skirt that left nothing to the imagination, occupies my mind twenty-four hours a day. The way she touched my lips, how she stuck her thin fingers through my hair, how she approached sensually, and how her nose touched my skin, fueled my erection until it was about to explode. I’ve never had so much trouble holding back in front of a woman in public.
The only thing that stopped me was the fact that she was drunk. When I sleep with a woman, I want her uninhibited, consenting, and above all, completely controlling her mind and memories. But if she had been sober, I would have dragged her into one of the small closets and fucked her until she shouted my name loud enough to hear it over the deafening music of that place. To hell with her age, to hell with the fact that I am her boss and in a position of power. I would have blown up my entire career just to sink between her thighs and enjoy an orgasm that would have given relief to the solid rock erection inside my pants.
She was excited, attracted to me, and entirely out of control. The thought alone makes me so confused that I don’t even know where to start convincing myself that thinking about her is a bad idea. I always thought she found me vaguely interesting but not the forbidden fruit in which to sink her teeth and damn her soul. I’m old. She’s always considered me old. Pleasant to the eye, perhaps, but still ancient in comparison to her.
I am the living cliché of the thirty-six-year-old infatuated with the twenty-three-year-old. I’ve always thought that old men alongside girls in their mid-twenties were ridiculous, and here I am pumping my ego because a young woman made a move on me.
“Aaron,” Karthik’s firm voice makes me look at him.
“Pardon, what were you saying?” I ask, trying to get my wits together when he caught me daydreaming about a woman I can’t have.
“Your phone has been ringing for several minutes,” he tells me, embarrassed.
I realize only at this moment that the phone in front of me is lit with a notification that I hope never to see in my life.
“Holy shit.”
“Problems?” he asks, raising a perplexed eyebrow.
“It’s the fire alarm in my house.”
The news makes him scramble for his phone.
“I’ll call nine-one-one.”
I wrinkle my forehead as I scroll through the alarm system app and realize it’s just the kitchen.
“No, don’t worry. Surely someone from the security company went to check. Possibly they have already called for help.”
What puzzles me is that it’s just that room. If it were a full house fire, the security system would have isolated the upstairs rooms that contain the most expensive artwork. And then I am reminded of the message from my driver who drove Dakota home an hour ago, and anger rises from my stomach. She’s probably smoking in my house with that friend of hers that I can’t stand. Maybe weed, given her predilection for illicit substances.
“Do you want to go home to check? We are almost finished.”
“Something I should be aware of?” I ask, just to be sure.
He smiles and shakes his head as he closes his laptop. I think he wants to go home to his family, too.
“No. Nothing relevant. We tackled the tricky part at the beginning, and there are no particular variations from last month on what is left.”
I sigh in relief and get up with him to walk out of the office. When I get in the car and slip into Los Angeles’s slow traffic, I curse my decision not to hire another driver when I let Gaspard drive that infuriating woman around. The one who is now soaking my house with the smell of Marijuana.
“Are you going to move? It’s green!” I’m glued to the horn earning a nice middle finger from the guy in front of me who shows no sign of moving his car despite the clear road.
Finally, an hour later, I cross the threshold of my house, stomp like fury toward the kitchen, and I am disoriented by the chaos in front of me. It looks as if a bomb exploded in here. There are dirty pots everywhere, remnants of vegetables on the white marble counter and on the floor, and Alexa repeating a recipe for a filet mignon that no one listens to.
“What the hell…?” The words stick in my throat when Dakota dumps the pot she was scrubbing inside the sink with a deafening noise. I startled her.
When she turns, her hair is gathered in a messy bun over her head, her eyes are red, and I think there is broccoli stuck to her T-shirt with the print of some cartoon. She looks so innocent and fragile that the only feeling in my chest is tenderness.
“I wanted to make you dinner to apologize for vomiting in your car, but it caught fire when I poured the Cognac into the pan with the steak. And while I was looking for a fire extinguisher in this damn house the size of a mall, the vegetables in the oven started to turn black. So I panicked and tried to pull it out but got burned, dropped the baking dish which broke on the floor, and I made a mess.” She sobs, trying to explain why the kitchen looks like a battlefield.
The only reaction that comes from my chest is a laugh which I can’t control. I thought she was here smoking a joint with those degenerate friends of hers, and she was panicking in search of a fire extinguisher. The relief that opens in my chest is so great that with two huge strides, I reach her, take her by the arm, and draw her to my chest for a hug. She clings to my waist, her hands still wet and the sobs shaking her.
“I’m dirtying your shirt with broccoli,” she complains between hiccups as I stroke her head to calm her down.
She was afraid to set my kitchen on fire, and I feel a little guilty. I’m so strict and jealous of my space that she probably thought I’d be barking at her.
“Don’t think about the shirt. I’ll wash it, and it will come back as new,” I whisper as I hold her tight.
“I ruined your pots… and the furniture is blackened where the fire has almost burned them.”
“The furniture can be cleaned, and the pots replaced,” I whisper as she continues to sob.
“I was terrified. When I saw the flames, I was terrified,” she whispers.
And that’s what I thought. She’s not crying because of the mess but because she really thought she’d set the house on fire. And to think that, like a perfect asshole, I immediately thought about the art upstairs when instead she was the one who could have gotten hurt.
“I know, but now it’s all over. Nothing irreparable happened,” I try to console her. “How about you go upstairs and take a shower while I clean the kitchen? I’ll order a pizza in the meantime.”
“So, let me get this straight. I didn’t prepare dinner, so you are starving. I set your kitchen on fire, but you’ll clean the mess I made and also pay for the pizza? I don’t know how you can run a production company. You suck in negotiations,” she mumbles while I free her, and she tries to remove the broccoli stuck to my white shirt, making a much bigger stain than the one already there.
I burst out laughing. Her lack of filter between brain and mouth is so ridiculous that it only makes me laugh.
“Go upstairs before I change my mind.”
She doesn’t let me repeat it twice, and I watch her, amused, as she runs up the stairs. But when I look at the disaster in front of me, the smile dies on my lips.
***
I am just putting the pizza and silverware on the table when Dakota comes downstairs and frowns as she watches me.
“Ok, I accepted many of your rich man quirks, but the pizza on the plates with cutlery… No. Just no,” she snaps when she reaches the table.
I look at her with a raised eyebrow. She is very wrong if she thinks I will eat pizza from the box.
“You are still wearing your suit. Go change, and I’ll prepare dinner.”
“I see your fear has died down and given way to the flippant teenager,” I provoke.
She’s nothing like a teenager, tucked into a pair of blue shorts and a top of the same color as her naked belly. She is beautiful enough to take your breath away with her wet hair that descends down her back.
She beckons me with one hand to go upstairs to change, and I can’t help but smile and shake my head. Either I accept her like this, or I will choke her.
When I finally go down to the living room, I can’t find her, so I venture a look toward the pool and find her there, sitting on the deck chair with the pizza box between her legs, sipping a soda.
“Don’t even think about it. I don’t eat pizza with my hands,” I tell her when she sees me coming and starts separating the slices with her thin fingers.
“Can you stop acting like an old man and start relaxing?”
There it is again, her definition for me that I missed.
I sit astride the deck chair in front of her and watch her pick up a slice of pizza and put it in her mouth, savoring it with her eyes closed. A drop of grease slips from the side of her lips and, with all the ease of her twenties, cleans it with the back of her hand. I don’t think I ever made such a gesture even when I was five, but my childhood was not exactly like that of my peers.
I grab a slice from the cardboard box and bite in despite my body’s almost physical protest.
“See? It wasn’t that difficult,” she tells me with a full mouth and then smiles, nodding at the sweatpants I’m wearing. “So you don’t just have elegant clothes. You also have something like us mere mortals in the closet.”
“It’s not that I’m an alien. Every now and then, I enjoy a little rest and do it with something comfortable,” I object.
She raises an eyebrow to call my bullshit.
“Really? When have you had a moment of rest since I came to live here?”
“Tonight?” I admit with a half-smile. It’s not that I have many opportunities to wear these clothes.
“As I thought.” She smiles at me.
The silence lasts for a few minutes. It is not one of the embarrassing ones. In fact, it is almost relaxing. When I open a can of soda I took from the fridge, I’m almost tempted to go back to get a glass of wine, but then I change my mind. Drinking before her and telling her that she should not get drunk sounds a bit hypocritical.
“Why did you decide to save my career?” she asks me out of the blue.
I observe her for a few seconds and try to decipher the expressions that cover her face. Worry, embarrassment, and maybe even a little humiliation, but at the same time, curiosity.
“Money,” I answer without too many words.
I notice her surprise. Perhaps she tried to give an answer to this question herself, so I explain it to her.
“Hunters of Shadows is the most important show in the broadcaster’s streaming division. The sponsors are breathing down our necks because of your out-of-control behavior, but at the moment, they have not yet come to close their wallets. I had two choices, get you on track and continue with a show that keeps the whole company afloat or decide to fire you and, in fact, shut down the show before even shooting the fourth season. I have chosen the money I need to continue the streaming project.” I am brutally sincere with her. She is not dumb. She is far from it. Coating the pill or belittling the problem is not helpful to either of us.
She looks down, clearly ashamed of the situation. She is young. She made a mistake, and she will learn from it.
“I’m sorry. I don’t do it on purpose to end up in the newspapers… I mean, I don’t do it because I want to be a diva. I wanted you to know,” she whispers, and I can feel all the guilt that permeates her words.
“May I know why you get drunk when you go out and know you’re going to make the front pages of the newspapers? You are not stupid. After the first time, you should have learned.” I’m sincerely intrigued by this behavior which seems completely unusual compared to her personality.
She looks up and blushes.
“Alcohol helps me relax enough so that I’m not a total disaster when I have to interact with people.”
I dwell on her words, but I cannot understand them. “Are you shy? Is that you can’t talk to someone?”
