The Movie (9 page)

A quotation from the Bible floate’d into her mind: To him that hath, more shall be given; and to him that hath not, even the little he hath shall be taken from him.

‘Congratulations,’ she said, as brightly as she could. ‘Who’s going to be Your agent?’

‘Oh, I’m not gonna bother with an agent,’ Jeanne said loftily. ‘Why should some jerk take twenty per cent df

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what I make? I got this part myself, I guess I can get other

ones, too.’

Megan was too weary to argue with her. ‘OK,’ she said.

‘Hey, Megan, maybe you should send your script back

to SKI,’ Jeanne said, with the generosity of the fortunate.

Megan shrugged. ‘Thanks, Jeanne, but I don’t see the

point. If they wouldn’t readit the first dine, I don’t see why they’d change their minds just because I repeated the process.’

‘Jeanne heard some girl at the casdng saying that SKI are suddenly desperate for scripts,’ Tina butted in.

‘It’s a real hot rumour,’ Jeanne confirmed. ‘That

Artemis are looking for a vehicle for this new star they’ve figned.’

Megan laughed. ‘But that would only work if my script

was suitable for this star.’ She thought about her screenplay, the labour of love that took her less than a fortnight to finish off. God, the way the words had just tumbled out of her head, so quickly she’d been scared she might not be able to type fast enough to get them down. The movie had written itself, playing in her head as clearly as if she was sitting in some darkened theatre with a bucket of Butterkist. The bittersweet story of a young musician and how fame warps him on his way to the top, only for him to be rescued in the third act by the girl he’d previously cast aside. It had sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and mad passionate love too. She’d been so proud of it, so fdled with certainty that it was her ticket out ofnowheresville.

Certain enough to draw out her entire meagre savings account from Wells Fargo and get on a Greyhound bus. Certain enough to risk everything she had. And, it seemed, to lose it.

‘But it’s totally suitable,’ Jeanne said. ‘I guess, anyway. If

he doesn’t mind being typecast.’

‘Who is this guy they’ve signed?’ asked Megan, only

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slightly interested. Like it should affect her if Tom Cruise or whoever switched agents.

‘Zach Mason,’ Tina informed her.

‘Say that again?’ Megan stammered.

‘Zack Mason. You know, he used to be a rock star. Sang in that band you like,’ Tina said. She added grudgingly, ‘I guess he would be right for your script. But I’d forget about it. IfJeanne heard, every real writer in town knows about it too, and they’re all connected. You’ll never get them to read your script.’

Megan hardly looked at her. Suddenly she knew it was going to be OK. This movie had her name on it. All she

had to do was get her script read by the right person at SKI. ‘Oh yes I will,’ she said.

‘And how are you gonna do that?’ demanded Tina nastily.

‘I don:t know,’ Megan told her. ‘But I will.’

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His cock felt like it was going to explode. It was huge, desperately thickened, throbbing with need. When he glanced quickly down, gasping with almost unbearable lust and pleasure, Howard Thorn could see the long blue vein that ran down the side of it swollen at as an earthworm. He i:ould dimly register that his cock seemed to have grown to twice its usual size when he had a hard-on. That had everything to do with the slender, perfect fingers wrapped round its stem, opening and closing in a tiny butterfly movement, then pinching him very faintly around the bucking velvet tip, just enough to stop the violent orgasm he was sure would burst out of him any second. He pushed helplessly, mindlessly, guided by instinct, rubbing his dick, wet with the juices of her million-dollar mouth, against her baby-soft skin. Not that Howard was thinking about her skin. He could hardly think about anything at all. His company, his jealous wife, his power, his receding hair had all evaporated into the mist. The universe had shrunk and contracted, until the only things that Howard Thorn was aware of were his cock and her hands and his acute need to come, to end this exquisite, torture she was inflicting on him. 1Light now, the entire cosmos was wrapped up in the nine inches of his erect, straining, pulsing dick. And the only lucid thought in his head was Roxana Felix is thefuck of the century.

‘Now?’ 1Loxana asked him, her gentle voice low and teasing, laced with a breathy sensuality that sent another

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sharp stab of pleasure right through his balls, hardened and shrunk and totally ready. Howard stared glassily at the cloud of her ultra-glossy, jet-black hair, hair he could practically see his face in. He managed to choke out the words: ‘Yes. Please, yes.’

‘Are you sure? I could last another ten minutes.’

She could last forever with ludolf Valentino here. Jesus. She couldn’t come for him if he was the last man on earth and masturbation was banned.

‘Please. Please.’ He was begging, his cock leaping at her touch, beading at the head with his liquids. He wasn’t going to last ten more seconds, let alone ten minutes. ‘I have to come. I’m gonna die,’ Howard choked.

Maddeningly slowly she lifted herself forward over his supine body, positioning herself directly above him, sliding her pussy right down the length of his shaft with immaculme timing, so that the movement from her hands to her crotch was seamless.

Howard Thorn cried out from sheer pleasure.

‘You’re not going to die, baby. But you are going to heaven,’ l:koxana Felix whispered, and then, to his utter astonishment and bliss, Howard found his cock being caressed by the inner walls of her pussy, the tight, controlled muscles of her vagina milking him out like a second set of hands, and he saw her rocking above him, her small pert breasts bouncing, her flat stomach pearled with sweat, her exquisite face contorted with the violence of her orgasm, and he erupted inside her, his come tipping out of him in great spasms of ecstasy that shook his entire body, the most incredible, intense climax he had ever experienced in his entire life.

‘My Christ,’ he said weakly.

She was smiling at him, a languorous, sated smile, like a pedigree kitten that had just been fed, and Howard Thorn, billionaire financier and Wall Street raider, felt his heart flip over like a lovesick teenager.

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‘You’re so good, baby. What you do to me,’ Roxana Felix murmured, faintly.

Thorn felt his pride swell up nearly as much as his dick had been swollen a moment ago. He felt a wash of sheer machismo roll over him, as though he were a caveman who’d dragged the world’s most famous supermodel back to his de by her long black hair, and then shown her what good loving was all about. The possibility that Roxana might have faked it never entered Howard’s typically male head. The idea that one of the most breathtaking women he’d ever seen might not go ga-ga for his middle-aged spread, beady eyes and encroaching baldness simply did not occtir to him.

‘Honey, you inspire a man,’ Howard said, smiling fady ‘at her. The little rolls of flesh on his cheeks twitched upwards in a smirk.

‘If only you were free.’ She gave a delicate sigh, glancing sadly at his wedding ring.

‘R.oxy, R.oxy,’ Howard said, patting her knee as though she were a favourite schoolchild. Damn, he was sorely terhpted to promise to give Bunny up, the dry, frigid bitch, and take this hot tamale back to Dallas with him. But he’d married in the frfties, without a pre-nup, and Bunny had raised three kids with him and been there the entire time he’d worked to make Condor Oil a reality, including the last five years, when he’d expanded into broadcasting and real estate. Condor Industries. An American colossus, and a company that Bunny might be able to claim f-y per cent of, or so his lawyers had told him. Goddamn ‘women’s movement’ with its goddamn communal property laws.

There was only one thing Howard Thorn loved more than sex, and that was money. He patted loxana Felix’s slim leg again. ‘You know I’d love to, but I just can’t do it to Bunny. We were not meant to be.’

Obviously disappointed, she turned away from him and started to dress.

to

‘But I got you those other things you wanted,’ Thorn said quickly. ‘All of them. I called Tom Goldman last night about screeningyour tests. And my guys have talked to the trades and the press. Even the New York Times. It’ll be pandemonium when you get there.’

Completely covered up in her opaque Mark Eisen scarlet shift, loxana turned back to him, her chocolate

eyes shining with pleasure. She took his breath away. ‘P,.eally? You called Tom Goldman?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Thorn confirmed. ‘Told him he better make sure everybody watched your tests and that he’d better be positive about it.’ He hoped he sounded suitably menacing. ‘Jeez, I told him to cast you, but he said it don’t work like that.’

loxana beat down a scathing retort. Howard Thorn was not Bob Alton. He had to be played carefully. ‘Why not?’ she-asked, disappointed, pouting, little-girl-lost.

Howard looked at her and felt his anger at that little kike come rushing back. ‘Christ, honey, I know what you’re thinking. He runs the damn studio. But there’s a new president appointed, a woman’ - and one who sat on a few charity committees with Bunny, he couldn’t push P,.oxy to her- ‘name of Eleanor Marshall. Seems like it’s her first project, and he can’t override her “creative control”.’ He put quotes around the phrase. The only creative control worth a damn to Howard Thorn was the kind his accounts practised on the company books.

‘Oh, Howard. I want it so much. I just don’t know what to do,’ said loxana, helplessly, her long lashes beading with tears.

Thorn looked at her, furious with Tom Goldman. If loxana Felix wanted something, by God she was going to have it. Fuck Eleanor Marshall. Fuck anything that stood in his way.

‘You just go to LA and do your thing, honey. I’ll get yo.u that movie.’

7I

‘Promise, Howard?’ loxana stood in front of him, looking up at him like a little girl looking at Santa Claus. A little girl whose gorgeous raisin nipples were winking at him through the cherry satin of her dress.

For a second, Howard Thorn thought of the risks involved in messing around with the casting of a movie. A financier like him with a large stake in Artemis Studios really shouldn’t be concerning himself with petty little things like that..And when loxana Felix was the gift he was hawking, the situation more or less invited attention. Begged for suspicion.

But then he thought of her fingers tickling the stem of

his cock, the clutching, intimate caress of her pussy, that

, superman-size hard-on she’d given him. loxana Felix had shown him things no hooker he’d ever had could even dream of. But she was no hooker, she was a world-famous supermodel. The classiest piece of ass on the planet.

For fat, plain Howard Thorn, she was a wet dream come

true.

“I promise,’ he said.

In the relaxed comfort of the ftrst-class cabin, P,.oxana Felix was doing a lot of thinking.

This wasn’t behaviour she normally indulgedin. Think’ ing was for when you were travelling by private jet, when you had time for it. VChen she was slumming fret-class, loxana treated it like a show. Every move worked out with precision: the dramatic entrance, just a fraction late, but never late enough to delay the plane - she’d decided the superbitch, primadonna image was pass these days and the sexy, stylish, never overpowering outfits she picked to travel in. Her small, dark green cases, made to order on Bond Street and so much more chic than boring old Gucci or Louis Vuitton. The gentle politeness to flight attendants. The sweet but firm requests for privacy if some

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odious businessman wanted an autograph, and the equally sweet acquiescence fib.is four-year-old kid asked for one. After all, she had a duty to her public. She was more than a model. She was P,.oxana Felix, a lady, a role model, America’s sweetheart. And you never knew who the first class crowd actually were - heaven forbid she should lose face when a Vanity Fair reporter might be taking notes in the row behind her. You might even snub that reporter himself without realizing it.

P, oxana frowned. P, eporters took themselves so seriously. Stupid writers mistaking themselves for people other people might be interested in. Look at that Norman Mailer interview with Madonna a few years back - more about Mailer than the lady he was supposed to be talking to, and all he could ask her about was why she hadn’t done beaver shots for ‘Sex’. Christ. As if anyone in the whole world gave a shit about Norman Mailer, that pretentious fat fuck.

Anyway, today she just couldn’t be bothered with reporters or kids or anyone else. She’d had her travel agent arrange for her to be seated at the end of an empty row, and the stewardesses were under strict instructions to keep the great unwashed away from her.

Incredibly, things were not going according to plan.

It had started with that call from David Tauber last week. Two days after her Chicago triumph, with the entire fashion business falling over itself to be the first to fling itself at her Salvatore Ferragamo heels. Bob Alton had melted into a seething pool of adoration and dollars as the phone at Unique rang off the hook. Guess Jeans. Chanel. The new Calvin Klein perfume. And best of all, P, evlon’s offer to feature her, alone, in a one-offlipsdck campaign - ‘The most beautiful woman in the world wears lq.evlon.’

When she read that she’d practically come. What was it Bob said? Her coronation. Right. Sometimes he was nearly worth tolerating. The Alessandro show had been

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her coronation, the apex, the zenith of the beauty tree. She, P,.oxana, had finally been crowned queen, succeeded to the throne she’d always known she was born to occupy. When she strutted into the Limelight, her favourite club in New York, the DJ had put on luPaul’s ‘Supermodel of the World’ in tribute, and the kids all applauded when she’d glided onto the dance foor.