The Doctor's Damsel (Men of the Capital Book 3) (5 page)

“What was that stunt with the guy at my door?”

“What guy?” Becca asked innocently.

“You just moved out of my place last night and already you’re banging someone else.” He shook his head in disgust.

“Christ, Chris, you moved Aria in so fast she used my shampoo!” Becca hissed. “It doesn’t even matter. We’re over. I have to go to the bar. Table six wants another mojito.” She brushed past him.

It made her feel simultaneously proud and ashamed that Chris was a little bit jealous over her. She couldn’t shake the feeling that gloating was bad for her karma. As she delivered food, took orders and chatted sweetly with customers, Becca made good tips that night. It was probably because she was in a better mood than she’d been in days, she thought. She couldn’t wait to tell Hannah that she had a real actual date with the ER doctor for tomorrow night. Not that she’d slept with him or she was engaged or any of the other antics that had given her sister such low expectations of her common sense. She couldn’t help being just a little proud of herself for taking things slowly with Abe.

By the time she got home, it was too late to call her sister. She showered and shoved her clothes in the laundry hamper, resolving to go to the laundromat the next day. As she curled up in bed, she heard a siren. It was the second one since she’d gotten home. For the dozenth time, she checked the deadbolt and chain to make sure she was securely locked in.

To tell the truth, Becca had never lived alone before. She’d gone from living at home to sharing a dorm room for the year she went to college to splitting rent on a studio apartment in the city with several other girls. As time went on, she lived with a couple of different boyfriends and one short-lived fiancé.  Then she’d found a roommate before moving in with Chris. Being alone freaked her out. She hated it. Every noise scared her. Every ding of the elevator, every scrape of a box outside in the hallway left her jittery. It didn’t help that lying on the bed gave her a clear view of the door. She would close her eyes, start to drift off, and then sit straight up and stare at the doorknob, convinced she’d heard someone try to turn it. Either the noise or the loneliness was making her wacko, she decided.

After a couple of hours of trying to convince herself she was being silly, she dragged the mattress into the recording studio and shut and locked herself in. The studio was soundproofed, so she didn’t catch the outside sirens and noises thanks to the insulation. There was also no ambient light slipping in around the blinds because it was windowless. With a sigh of relief, Becca went to sleep.

In the morning, she woke up refreshed after a good night’s sleep and gathered up her things for the first open call of the morning. Becca slipped into the bohemian orange dress she’d found at a thrift shop and wrapped a braided leather belt around her midsection. Twisting her hair up into a messy bun and stacking on some dime store bangles, she smiled at her reflection and put on some mascara. She threw the sex toys on the kitchen counter and grabbed a folder of her headshots. With just a touch of rosewater behind her ears for a sweet, feminine scent, she was off to audition.

First Becca went to the studio address she’d been texted the day before. She waited in a grimy anteroom with a score of other blonde girls, some younger, some older, some discouragingly recognizable from other commercial work. At last, her number was called and she was led into a room where three suited executives sat at a table. Standing in the center of the rather dull office, Becca launched cheerfully into the copy she’d been provided.

“Do you ever get that itchy, uncomfortable feeling
down there
?” She asked in a low, confidential tone. “There’s an easy way to find relief. Try using Jackson’s Feminine Balm, now available in original and lavender scent.”  She finished, miming the display of a tube of anti-itch crème with her hands.

The executives flicked through papers and shook their heads.

“What’s the matter with your hand?”

“I—I had to have stitches. It’ll be totally invisible in like a week. Or I could wear gloves, give it a very sophisticated, ladylike vibe,” she offered brightly.

The man grunted and she was summarily dismissed.

Off to the next audition, Becca made her way downtown to a cramped off-off-Broadway theater, where she waited about an hour before stepping out onto the stage. Becca composed herself and began, her lovely face transforming into the guileless wonder of a much younger girl, her voice low and earnest and beautiful.

“
He told me to look at my hand, for a part of it came from a star that exploded too long ago to imagine—“

Becca usually auditioned with a piece from Tennessee Williams or sometimes a little Neil Simon if it was a comedy. She reserved this monologue, Tillie’s opening from “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” for parts she really, really wanted. It was a little girl’s part—perhaps fourteen or fifteen—but it had always fit her better than any other role. Not even her critically acclaimed turn as Emily in “Our Town” (in an off-off Broadway role in a play that closed after three weeks) had ever felt so right. The stunned awareness of her own sacred magic, the coming of age into a knowledge that, despite all the adverse circumstances and obstacles around her, she was special—Tillie’s role was Becca in some small way, in that unassailable hope and belief. She even had a perfect sun tear gather in the corner of her eye from the overhead spotlight as she finished up. She felt elated, her heart full of the beautiful words she’d spoken, of her hope for herself and Abe, for a role in this play, for Hannah and Jasper to be really happy together. She smiled, hands clasped, and the tear fell.

“I would have suggested a more adult audition piece for you. We are looking for a younger actress anyhow, and your childish choice of monologue has, shall we say, made your maturity rather more glaring,” the director said acidly.

“I understand. But I assure you, I’ve read this play and I have a very deep understanding of Matilda’s motivation, her hopes as she comes to this country—”

She broke off when a stagehand motioned to her to vacate the stage. Crestfallen, she went to her third and final stop before the Laundromat. She knew she could get this part—it was a waitress, after all, and Becca was excellent at waiting tables. It was a call for extras on a cable show. She was up for the role of a cocktail waitress at a strip club who would serve the main character and his cronies during a salacious scene between the requisite shootouts.

It wasn’t her favorite kind of role—she tried to avoid the scantily clad roles because she wanted to be a serious actress. It was a shitty, misogynistic show designed as wish-fulfillment for egotistical assholes who paid for premium cable, but it was an exceedingly popular and award-winning shitty misogynistic show, the It guilty pleasure of the year. She unfastened one button on her dress to show the black lace edging of her bra and squared her shoulders.

She was in the lobby of the studio sipping tea with lemon for about three minutes before a woman with a clipboard approached her.

“You can go,” she told Becca.

“I haven’t read yet,” Becca explained. “They have two or three more girls to see before it’s my turn.”

“You can leave. You don’t fit the profile.”

“Sure I do. I have it right here on my phone. Caucasian, blonde, five-foot-six or taller.”

“Your measurements don’t fit the specifications,” the woman said, looking pointedly at Becca’s chest with derision. Upon quick survey of the other actresses, Becca realized they all had implants. Big ones. Like, Hooters would consider them to be vulgar. With a sigh, she threw away her tea and left.

As she fed laundry into the machine and slipped in a couple of dollars, she thought about her depressing morning. She was going to have to look at roles for thirtysomething actresses soon, and that was not an inspiring thought. She was officially too old to be a promising starlet. As her clothes spun their way to cleanliness, Becca focused on the fun she planned to have—good, clean fun—with Abe later. She’d promised to take him bowling, and she could bet he’d never been cosmic bowling before. There was nothing like cold beer and a blacklight to make a man cut loose, so she couldn’t wait. She couldn’t decide if she should wear a flirty sundress or her leather shorts. The leather shorts chafed a little, but they never failed to reel in even the most commitment-phobic date.

When she’d folded the last of her clothes and toted them out to the car, she blasted some Tom Petty and sang along. She’d always secretly thought that she was the good girl at the opening of
Free Fallin’,
even though she was too young and had obviously never met any member of the Wallflowers.

She was starting to wonder if she should get out of acting, take a course in restaurant management and get a real job, find a regular guy and start having the two-point-five kids, give up the struggle to be different. The very thought of it made her want to throw up, so she went to the gym instead. After a good two hours of cardio and circuit training, she showered and headed home.

She had a couple of hours to kill, so she pulled out the script for her upcoming movie audition and decided to run the lines. Unfortunately, the record function on her phone had quit working last week, so she’d have to do her best practicing with only the bathroom mirror. Unless—her sister did have a recording studio. She could surely figure out how to record herself running five minutes of script and then play it back to listen for rhythm and tone. She wanted to get the accent just right. Excitedly, she bounded into the studio and stood on the mattress, picking the simplest-looking microphone. She looked up sound boards online and found a diagram that helped her—it wasn’t exactly like the model Hannah had, but the basic functions had to be the same.

Soon, she’d figured out how to record her voice and then stop the recording and play it back. After a few takes, she thought she had the opening just right and listened to it three times in a row, satisfied that she’d nailed it. This was pretty fun, having sophisticated equipment to rehearse on. A few more takes, and she turned it off to go get ready for her date with Abe.

Wriggling into her leather shorts and a scooped neck red top, she looped a long strand of beads around her neck and bundled her golden hair into a ponytail. Scanning her reflection, she glared at the stitches on her palm, blaming them for the loss of the feminine itch commercial. If her hands had been perfect…but that made as much sense as saying if only she’d been five years younger, she might’ve had the role in the play, or if she’d invested in some double-Ds, she could have played a cocktail waitress. Right now, it was best to concentrate on the matter at hand, which was getting Dr. Harrison Abrahemson to let his guard down and have some fun. He was quite possibly the most serious person she’d ever met, much less dated. She paused, scanning the sex toys to decide which would be the funniest to flash at him while bowling. Deciding on the musical dildo, she tossed it in her purse and went to the bowling alley.

Abe was waiting at the bar, tipping a bottle of beer. His hair was damp as if from the shower, slick in the neon lights above the bar, and she had to force her hands to her sides to keep from touching him. He set his beer down and came over to meet her. He kissed her cheek casually in greeting. She wasn’t used to someone being casual and affectionate. In Becca’s experience, the men she dated either stuck their tongues down her throat in the first thirty seconds of the date or turned out to be gay, sometimes both. So she smiled up at him and said hi.

“Ready to play?” she asked.

“Sure,” he replied, looking her up and down in a way that made her glad she’d paid $79 for these leather shorts last year. Hannah had said they were stupid and slutty-looking. Hannah had always been too conservative.

They found a lane. She watched as he took off his motorcycle boots and laced up the colorful bowling shoes. He made them look funky, but without the self-conscious effort of hipsters. Never had Becca Bennett ever wanted to jump a man in bowling shoes before that moment. She selected a bright pink bowling ball and prepared to roll.

“So what’s your good luck ritual?” she asked flirtatiously.

“My what?”

“What do you do to ensure a good roll? If you want to get a strike or a spare...what do you do?”

“I try my best,” he said looking at her blankly.

“You don’t have a ritual? How disappointing. I once dated a guy who claimed he had to rub my butt for good luck.”

“Did you let him?”

“No. Obviously not. He was a creep.”

“So are you trying to find out if I’m a creep?”

“No. I already know you’re not. I just wondered if you were superstitious.”

“I’m a man of science. I’m not superstitious.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Is this your worldly-wise hooker routine?”

“I played one of those once—street-smart hooker with a heart of gold.” She smiled.

“I can see that.”

“So my sister was right. The shorts
are
slutty-looking, if you can picture me as a hooker.” She smirked.

“No, I didn’t mean that. I mean you’re versatile. I can see you making that role believable.”
“And I can see you treading water, hoping you didn’t just insult me,” she said. “Relax.” She turned and rolled the ball, knocking down seven pins and giving a little bounce of delight without realizing it, just rising up on her tiptoes and back down.

On Abe’s turn, she waited until he drew back his arm, then yelled, “Look out!” He let go of the ball, which immediately rolled into the gutter sadly. He glared at her.
“That’s cheating. You distracted me.”

“No. I shouted. If I distracted you, you’d know it,” she promised. He rolled his eyes.

This time when he rolled, she just sat back and admired the line and swell of his backside, the width of his strong shoulders, the way his waist tapered to narrow hips. It wasn’t a bad view sitting behind the good doctor, she decided. When he turned around, she smiled slowly. He braced his hands on the arms of her chair and leaned in toward her.