“I don’t want to kiss you.”
She took another step closer. “Tell me you don’t want to hold me.”
“I don’t want to hold you.”
She came even closer, their bodies nearly touching. “Then what do you want?”
Marty looked down at the pages in his hand, embarrassed that it was shaking, and read aloud: “Logan suddenly grabs her shirt and rips it open, buttons flying, and buries his face hungrily between her breasts in a lust-driven frenzy.”
“Do it,” she said huskily, staying in character.
“What?”
“Do it.”
He dropped the script on the floor, grabbed the front of her shirt, and tried to rip it open, but the damn buttons wouldn’t tear off. He yanked again. And again. Beth began to laugh, and so did Marty.
“What did you do,” Marty asked, grinning, “weld these buttons on”
“Weakling,” she teased.
“Okay, Wonder Woman, you try it.”
Beth pushed his hands away and tried to rip open her shirt herself. The buttons wouldn’t tear for her either, which only made it funnier. Neither one of them could stop laughing.
“Maybe if I undid a couple buttons,” she untucked her blouse and opened a few buttons at the top, revealing a hint of cleavage. “Try again.”
Marty slipped his fingers between the buttons, made sure he was holding tight, and pulled as hard as he could. One, lousy button came off, the others held fast. The two of them erupted into laughter again, leaning against one another in a clumsy embrace.
“I bet Lorenzo Lamas isn’t going to have a problem doing it,” she said.
“Fuck him.” Marty replied.
“I will,” Beth smiled mischievously.
“Oh yeah?” Marty grabbed her by the front of her blouse and yanked, ripping it wide open. She drew his face to her breasts and kissed the top of his head, running her fingers through his hair.
“You’re just like an actor, Marty. All you need is the right motivation.”
CHAPTER TEN
10:20 a.m. Wednesday
Marty’s feet were killing him. He’d been walking on blisters all morning, and it was only getting worse. It was hard enough working his way through rubble, but now slogging through the muck, each step was like pulling his feet out of a bucket of moist chewing gum.
Marty and Buck had worked their way south down Vine to Melrose Avenue, where the flood seemed to have lost most of its destructive force, and were taking the street west towards Beverly Hills. Melrose Avenue was a literal dividing line between poverty and wealth, the grime of Hollywood and the grace of Hancock Park. The north side of Melrose was lined with run-down apartments, car repair garages, pawn shops, and a Ralph’s Supermarket that was surrounded by a white, wrought-iron fence and guarded by armed security personnel. Across the street, estate homes and elegant condominiums abutted the tip of the exclusive Wilshire Country Club Golf Course, hiding the perfect green grass from passing cars.
Those class differences were irrelevant now. Both sides of the street here were in ruins, the rich and the poor, identically swathed in blood and despair, huddled miserably together on the streets, the front lawns, and the parking lots, tending their wounds and waiting for the ground to stop shaking.
Over the last hour, several small aftershocks rippled through the ground, reminding Marty and everyone else the earth wasn’t finished with them yet, widening cracks, toppling lopsided homes and slanted buildings, breaking what little glass hadn’t broken yet.
It had been over twenty-four hours since the Big One, and in that time, Marty didn’t feel he’d gone very far in distance and yet, at the same time, knew he’d traveled a long way from where he’d been before. It wasn’t only his reflection in the shattered mirror that made him think that.
For one thing, Marty realized he was a stronger, more capable man than he ever thought he was. He’d rescued a child, survived a flood, and waded through an unspeakable landscape of death. He never would have imagined he could do one of those things, let alone all three. And, at the same time, Marty was ashamed to find depths of weakness and cowardice within himself he never suspected were there. He did nothing for Molly, leaving her to die, and would have done the same for Franklin, if Buck hadn’t forced him into pulling off a rescue. Somehow, the cowardice wasn’t nearly as unexpected as the heroism and endurance.
As much as Marty disliked Buck, he couldn’t deny that somehow this one-dimensional TV character, this caveman in a polyester suit, had brought out the best in him even while trying to get him killed. Yet all Marty knew about Buck was that he was a bounty hunter, drove a Mercury Montego, lived alone with a pit-bull named Thor, decorated his bathroom with cocktail napkins, and disliked women with slanty breasts.
“Tell me something, Buck. Who are you?”
The question didn’t throw Buck at all, he answered immediately, without hesitation: “Two hundred and twenty pounds of exquisite manhood, loved and worshipped by women, feared and respected by men, my towering intellect matched only by my gigantic cock. One look at me will tell you all of that.”
“What do you get if you dig deeper?”
“You get to experience it, which is different for women than it is for men.” Obviously, Buck had given this some thought. Perhaps now Marty would actually learn something.
“For a woman, it means no bullshit,” Buck explained. “I give them exactly what they want, what a man was put here to give them: good food, a solid fuck, and protection from harm. Until I get bored and find myself another woman. But I don’t give them any bullshit. When I’m done with a woman, she knows it and I walk away. They respect that, even if it hurts, which is why any woman I’ve left will always take me back to bed again. That, and the fact I’ve got a huge dick.
“Now for a guy, it depends whether you’re friend or foe. To a friend, I’m a fellow warrior, someone you know will fight alongside you to the death. A brother in blood, through heaven or hell. What’s mine is yours, and that includes my woman. To a foe, I’m pure, primal terror. I’m the big, dark, merciless motherfucker from hell who will catch you, slit you wide open, and feast on your steaming guts.”
“Steaming guts.” Marty shook his head.
“That’s what I said.”
“That’s not a description of a real person, that’s a comic book character.”
“I’m standing here, aren’t I?”
“That’s not who you are, what you just told me is an idiotic soldier-of-fortune fantasy shared by legions of minimum wage, illiterate rednecks who regret being born too late to fight in Vietnam and think Chuck Norris is a terrific actor. It’s not who you are.”
“What the fuck do you know? You’re some professional bullshit artist who spends his days watching other bullshit artists pretend to be other fucking people living other fucking lives, and you think you can tell them how to do it better because you’re so goddamn good at living a fantasy yourself.”
“Is that how you see me?”
“Isn’t that how you see yourself?”
As a matter of fact, it was. “No,” Marty replied.
Buck shrugged. “Okay, then who the fuck are you?”
“I’m just an average guy.”
“That’s it?”
“I left out the part about having a gigantic cock and eating my enemy’s steaming guts, but other than that, yeah, that’s it.”
“How would you know if you’re an average guy? What the hell is that? It’s meaningless bullshit. C’mon, who the fuck are you?”
“I’m a writer. I’m a husband. I’m a decent man.”
“Uh-huh,” Buck was silent for a moment, mulling something over as they walked. “So, what have you written?”
Marty looked away, suddenly uncomfortable. “Some scripts, some novels.”
“Any of ’em shot or published?”
“Not yet.”
“Then you aren’t a fucking writer,” Buck said. “So, how’s your marriage?”