She decided to test it. “You agree with me, right?” she asked him.
“No,” Mick said honestly, confirming her suspicion. “I didn’t tell her I was going to pay her. I asked her to dance. She could have said no. Or at the very least she could have asked for clarification. She didn’t.”
“But you have to understand how she feels. You have to put yourself in her shoes. We thought this might be our second chance. She thought she was auditioning for somebody with some clout. How would you feel if you did all of that dancing for nothing? Not even for consideration of a part. For nothing. How would you feel?”
Mick didn’t know how to answer a question like that. He knew she wanted him to show some compassion. To empathize with her friend. She wanted him to be that sensitive man women supposedly craved. But she had the wrong one if she wanted any of that. “I wouldn’t give a fuck,” he said.
But when he saw that alarmed look in her eyes, he did something he rarely ever did: he softened. Why he cared confounded him. “But I’ll pay her for her time and effort.”
Roz was surprised. She smiled. “Thank you. Wow. You’re not as bad as you pretend to be.”
Mick didn’t pretend shit, but he didn’t let her know that. For some reason she interested him. For some reason he felt an odd connection to her. “So what’s your game plan?” he asked. “Going to keep plugging at it?”
Roz exhaled. “I don’t know. I have a couple auditions already lined up, but if those don’t go anywhere either I’m, I don’t know. I may call it a day.”
“You’re going to throw in the towel?”
“Right.”
“You’re going to quit,” Mick said, and the way he said it struck Roz. It even angered her. Why was he being so cruel?
“If you want to call it that,” she said.
Mick saw the hurt in her big eyes. He could tell her journey on the road to stardom had not been an easy one, and she hated to be reminded of that fact. But truth always needed to triumph. He leaned toward her. “The cruelest thing of all,” he said to her, “is to face a lie and call it truth.”
Roz looked at him. Her heart suddenly hammered against her chest. “What do you mean?”
Mick wondered if she could take it. But people going easy on her was probably why she was still in a game she’d already lost. He didn’t know how to go easy, and he wasn’t about to start now. “You’re an actress,” he said. “The early success you had is proof enough. But maybe you are not a natural. Maybe it is not the ones with the educated, technical ability, but the ones with that natural, God-given ability, that rises to the top.”
Roz didn’t know what to say. Did this man just sum up in a few sentences what she had been unable to figure out for years? Could he be that insightful? She decided that he couldn’t. For her sake, for the sake of the very foundation of her existence, she decided that she couldn’t deal with that right now. “Finally I know who you are,” she decided to say. “You’re Mick the Soothsayer.”
Mick laughed.
“You’re the man with the remedy for all that ails us.”
“Yup, that’s me,” he said with a smile. “What can I say?”
What he knew was that he liked this girl. She was pretty, that was for damn sure, and had a rocking body that he had every intention of fucking. But what was it about her that possessed him to tell Barry to bring her and her partner up to this room? What possessed him to climb those stairs and come up here himself? He had yet to meet a woman he was willing to go all out for. This move wasn’t exactly going all out, but it was far more than he usually did. What troubled him was that he didn’t understand why.
“So what exactly is this about?” Roz asked him. “It doesn’t feel like an audition.”
Mick shook his head. “It’s not,” he admitted.
“What is it then?”
Mick could hardly verbalize it himself. “I saw you and your friend dance. I told the director I wanted to meet you.”
Roz considered him. “Why?”
“Is it so odd that a man would want to meet a lady?”
“Yes, when there were fifty ladies he could have met. Yes, when he had my friend dancing her ass off as if this was some kind of audition. It suggests, not the traditional mode of a man meets woman scenario, but it’s more in the mode of a man concealing real reason for meeting woman.”
Sharp too, he thought.
“Why did you want to meet me of all people?”
“I wanted to meet you.”
“Why?”
Mick gave in. “That’s not a question I can answer,” he said.
Roz was surprised, but pleased by his level of honesty. She didn’t think he had that degree of openness in him at all. “I see,” she said.
“Does that response meet with your approval?”
She smiled. “Yes. And I would thank you for choosing me, but I’m not yet sure if being chosen is a blessing or a curse.”
Mick laughed. “A curse of course. Run while you still have time!”