Trophy Husband (13 page)

I brush last night’s solo ride from my mind
when I see him. I have to. I can’t let him see that he’s already
done so many things to me. That he’s unraveled me and I’ve come for
him. I have to back this all up and let him be my gaming tutor.

“So do you teach a lot of newbies how to
play Guitar Hero?”

“Not as much as a few yeas ago,” Chris says,
then hands me a black plastic guitar. The guitar is a cross between
a real guitar and the sort of miniature kid-size guitar someone
might give away in a grab bag at a party for musically-inclined
ten-year-olds.

“What can I say? I’m a retro-loving gal.” I
point to my flirty little vintage blue dress with a cherry pattern
on it.

“That’s a totally hot dress, and if you keep
pointing to it, it’ll make it hard for me to concentrate on giving
you lessons.”

I hide a wild grin at the compliment, as I
drop the guitar strap over my head, slinging the plastic instrument
across my belly. It’s not mere fashion happenstance that I chose
this dress. It accentuates all my best assets, and I also love it,
so I feel good when I wear it. And with his comment, I’m left to
wonder if he’s entertained after-hours thoughts about me too. How
far they went. If he touched himself, if he pictured me doing
things to him, if I made him come too. My mind is awash in dirty
thoughts that are dangerously close to making me too turned on to
function. So I shove away all the delicious images of Chris
undressed, naked, in his bed, lost in thoughts of me.

Chris turns on the Xbox and then hits the
on-button on my guitar. We’re in the former car stereo room at the
electronics store, only now it’s been converted into a sort of
gaming living room. Customers can come here and test out all sorts
of games on the various consoles. Or they can get lessons from the
master once a week.

The game whirs on, a picture of a dark pink
mountaintop, set against a black night sky, appears on the gigantic
television screen hanging on the wall in front of us. Chris moves
closer to me, taps a few buttons on my guitar to click past that
screen, then the next, then the next. I want him to touch a few
more buttons on my guitar.

He teaches me the basics,
how to play the green, red and yellow notes on the easy level of
the game. How to hit them at just the right time. How to hit the
strum bar at the same time too. I butcher my way through
Slow Ride
and
Hit Me with Your Best Shot
, getting booed at by the virtual audience, tossed off stage.
So I dig in, like a batter at the plate, eyes fixated on the
screen, feet planted firmly on the ground, index, middle and ring
finger poised over the notes. Chris walks behind me, adjusts the
strap a bit, moving the guitar a bit lower. He places his right
hand on top of mine on the notes.

Damn. There goes my concentration. His hand
feels so good. The slightest bit of contact with him turns me
inside out. I’m not used to this feeling. I don’t know what to do
with this feeling. It doesn’t fit in my life. It fits in a song,
and I don’t know how to make it fit for me.

“So this may sound cheesy, but the real key
is to let go. Let go of the need to check where your hands are, or
to look constantly at the neck of the guitar.”

I nod.

“So what I want you to do is close your
eyes.”

“Close my eyes?”

“Yes, close your eyes. I know it’s going to
be real hard for you not to be in control for one second, but trust
me.”

“Oh, ha ha,” I tease.

“Yes, McKenna. I’ve already picked up that
you like to be in charge.”

“You’re astute.”

“I am. Now do as I tell you. Close your
eyes.”

I do as he tells me.

“So you have to just
feel
where your fingers
are. So here’s the green note.” He places his finger down on top of
my index finger, playing the green note.

Mmm…

“Here’s the red.” He presses his middle
finger against mine, playing the red note now. I want to lean into
him, to fall against him, and feel his chest on my back. I want him
to wrap his arms around me, and hold me tighter as he teaches me to
play. I want to feel his touch. I want contact. I want it so badly,
I don’t know how I’ll ever play a song because I am living and
breathing only one thing right now – the wish to be closer to him,
my back curved into his front, his arms wrapped tight around me,
our bodies beginning to entwine.

“And here’s the yellow.” He
keeps his ring finger against mine, playing the yellow note. Then
he holds the note. His fingers are playing my fingers, and my
entire body feels like a tuning fork, vibrating hotly from his
touch. “So you want to
feel
the notes, not look at them. Just know when green
comes up, your index finger presses down. When red appears, your
middle finger. When yellow shows up, your ring finger.”

I played arcade games for fun when I was a
kid, for release when I was left curbside by my ex. But I have
never used video games as foreplay. I have never known video games
could be foreplay. Here with Chris in some semi-private room at an
electronics store, of all places, it feels like foreplay. It feels
like he could turn me around, place his hands on my cheeks, and
pull me in for a kiss. The kind that makes the world fall away.
That leaves you powerless to resist, helpless to do anything but be
consumed with an endless kiss. Nothing else matters, and the kiss
is all there is, all there was, all there will ever be.

Until it becomes more than
a kiss. It becomes heat in your blood, and a roaring in your ears,
and you have to clutch the guitar so you don’t turn around and show
your hand to him. Show it in your eyes, and in the way you part
your lips, and in the words that threaten to tumble from your lips.
Words like
I want you so
much
.

Words I pin down inside me so they can’t
escape.

He leans in a little closer this time and
nearly whispers in my ear. “You can open your eyes now.”

I inhale deeply and open my
eyes. I feel wobbly from the way he’s touched me, from the way I’ve
let my thoughts spin into a dark and dangerous place of
possibility. It’s one thing for me to visit with his mouth in my
fantasies; it’s entirely another to witness my thoughts spin wildly
with him inches away. He grasps my shoulders so I don’t fall. Then
I press start on Poison’s
Talk Dirty to
Me
. I hit the green notes, then the red
notes, then the yellow ones. Then the next set and the next. I even
nail a long note, then another, then a whole sequence of so-called
“star-power” notes, and I give in to the game. I channel all my
desire right now into the playing, and I am jamming here, rocking
out to a video game, the pseudo-music taking my mind off the fact
that I want Chris to talk dirty to me.

I finish my first song. I raise my hands in
the air. Victory.

Chris smiles, big and wide, the teacher
proud of his student. “Fast learner are you,” he says in Yoda’s
voice.

“You’re a
Star Wars
geek
too!”

He shrugs sheepishly. “You want to play some
more?”

I nod vigorously and then spend the next
hour knocking out several more songs and even making it through my
very first guitar battle, where I own the guitarist from Rage
Against the Machine after two tries. By the time we turn off the
game, I am feeling pretty energized. So I buy my own used copy of
the game and walk out of the store with Chris.

“Want to grab a bite to eat? I know a taco
shop around here.”

“Abso-fucking-lutely.”

So I take him to a hole-in-the-wall
taqueria, a true Mexican place, with orange Formica booths and
countertops and a menu that’s half-English, half-Spanish. We order
chicken quesadillas to share and two Diet Cokes.

“I don’t want you caffeinating alone,” Chris
says to me, as he carries the soda cans and two glasses back to the
table.

“How gallant of you.” He
pushes a can toward me. I squeal inside with delight. He
didn’t
open it for me. He
didn’t rob me of the soda-can-crack-open. He
is
gallant. I open my soda and pour
it into a glass. He does the same with his.

“Gallant McCormick, that’s what they called
me in school.”

“So where’d you grow up? Let me guess. San
Diego? Since you have the whole California surfer look going
on.”

He shakes his head. “Brooklyn of all places,
but I hate cold, so I got the hell out of town for college.”

“Where was that?”

“Stanford.”

“Stanford?”

Ha laughs. “What? Just because I’m not
wearing a pocket protector or a business suit?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I just was
surprised. I guess because you’re so laid back. You’re the video
game guy, you’re a hipster. You don’t seem like a Stanford
stiff.”

“I studied software design.”

“Wow. You know some serious shit.”

“That I do.”

“So what’d you do after college?”

“Got a job designing software for video
games,” he says. The waitress brings us the quesadillas. Chris says
thanks and she leaves. “I did that for a couple years and then
decided I wanted to do my own thing. So I started consulting, doing
business strategy and whatnot for companies in the gaming space.
Got asked to speak at conferences, then started video blogging,
then the video blog turned into a TV show. And here we are now, me
and my gaming empire.”

“And here we are now, indeed.”

“And you, McKenna Bell?”

I tell him my story, growing up in Sherman
Oaks, college at UCLA, a few years at Violet Summers, the fashion
brand, then launching The Fashion Hound with Todd’s help, then the
sale. “So there you go. You know my story. What’s yours?”

“I just told you my story,” he reminds me
playfully. Then I feel him tapping my foot once, twice under the
table. Is he playing footsie? Is this how flirting works?

My face turns red. I don’t
know what to say. I don’t even know anymore what I meant when I
said
what’s your story
. How is it I can be so good at suggesting how to assemble
outfits, but so bad at knowing how to interact with a handsome
man?

“You mean am I involved with anyone?” he
asks.

Fire engine red now. I am totally, one
hundred percent fire engine red. Was I that obvious?

“Sure,” I manage to say, but the word comes
out all choppy, as if it has ten syllables.

He shakes his head. “No.”

I fight the urge to grin broadly like the
Cheshire Cat.

“But you, you’ve got men all over,” Chris
adds.

Yes, but you’re the one I
really want to date. If only you were
twenty-three
….
Why
did I have to take that oath with my girlfriends? You can’t break a
girlfriend oath. That’s like fifty years of bad luck if you do. Not
to mention it’s against the code. I can’t go against the girl code,
no matter how much I want to forget Trophy Husbands right now, and
focus only on how the heck I can date this one guy.

“I narrowed the candidates down to about
twenty of your guys and then my brain just stopped. I couldn’t
figure out how to weed them down to some sort of reasonable
number.”

But none of those twenty are as
devastatingly handsome as you.

He shakes his head, amused at my
predicament, then lays his hands on the table. “Have your viewers
vote on the top five.”

My eyes widen. “Chris! That is a great idea.
That’s really perfect. It involves viewers more. Makes them feel
more vested in the show. Gives them a voice.”

“Exactly. They feel a part
of it. They
are
a
part of it. They will have had a role, a hand, in picking your next
mate. You can even have them decide who gets a second date and so
on. You can shoot video of the dates and post clips and let them
choose.”

“I love it! It becomes even more of an
interactive show.” I point at him a few times, shaking my head
appreciatively. “You rock,” I say, wishing he could be one of the
twenty, one of the five. And then I could date him. And dating him
wouldn’t be political, it wouldn’t be to get even, it wouldn’t be
to make a point. It would be for the simplest of reasons. Because I
want to.

He smiles back at me, his sea-green eyes
sparkling. I think again of Hawaii, of a beach, of a secluded
island cove when I look into them. For a second, I feel like I am
being hypnotized. Maybe I actually am. Because I can’t seem to take
my eyes off of him. I can’t seem to break the gaze, nor can he, and
now he’s looking at me in this more intense way, not just the
flirty way, but in a way that takes my breath away. A way that says
I wasn’t wrong, I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t delusional for thinking
there were unsaid things at lunch. He looks at me as if he wants to
know me, wants to see inside me, wants me to open up to him. And
that’s when it occurs to me. That’s when everything comes together
in one crystal-clear blaze of brilliance.

Business. I am good at business. So I keep
it on the business level.

I lower my voice. “Chris, I have a fabulous
business idea. I think you should be one of the initial
twenty.”

He laughs, kind of surprised. “You’re not
serious. Are you?”

I nod several times. “This is a business
proposition pure and simple. You’re a businessman and I’m a
businesswoman, right?”

“Right.”

“And you are trying to reach girl gamers for
your show. You said that two days ago. Well, let’s do more than a
promo. Let’s make you a candidate. You said your Wikipedia page has
you at twenty-three anyway. So you could be twenty-three, you can
pass for it, and obviously viewers will vote for you. They’ll pick
you as one of the five to date. And then you’ll be on my show in a
bigger way than just a promo. You’ll be a contender. You know as
well as I do that brand integration is the way to go.”