Mick was impressed with her. She had decency to recommend her, and that fact alone elevated her in his eyes. Her body didn’t hurt her cause either, as he glanced down the length of that body. Her legs were now crossed, but suddenly he felt an urge to uncross them, to open them, to taste that sweet silkiness between them. “Spend the night with me,” he said without hesitation. “I want to fuck the shit out of you.”
That kind of in-your-face language was always a turn on for himself and the women he propositioned. They’d blush or smile or just throw themselves on him right where they sat. But however they responded, they would always end up spending the night with him and he would always end up fucking the shit out of them.
But Roz looked at him with an expression in her eyes he couldn’t even read. Was it happiness? Was it anger? Was it fear? All of the above? None of the above? Was she turned on too?
No. She wasn’t. Roz felt more turned up than turned on. She felt a profound sense of disappointment in him. She thought they were making one of those once-in-a-lifetime beautiful connections. Why did he have to go and cheapen it with talk of sex? And to be so graphic about it! As if she was cheap too. And it angered her. That was the expression he couldn’t read. Her anger. “Don’t confuse the fact that I’m out here struggling,” she said to him, “with my being down for whatever. I’m not down like that. I want to be an actress, not a whore. Don’t confuse the two.”
Then she rose. She couldn’t get away from him fast enough.
Mick was stunned. He didn’t mean to insult the woman. But apparently he had. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his thick wallet. When Roz saw what he was doing, she was even more appalled. Was he going to offer her money to sleep with him? Was he going to twist that knife again? She’d never met a man so brutal!
“What is the going rate?” he asked her.
Roz’s big eyes went narrow. And she almost saw red. But she contained herself. She didn’t have enough information to fly off the handle, but that frown on her face made it clear that she was poised to. “The going rate for what?” she asked him.
Mick looked at her. “Dancers such as your friend,” he responded.
Roz almost smiled. She had forgotten all about his promise to pay Betsy. “Oh,” she said, calming back down. “It depends on the part.”
He pulled out a hundred dollar bill. “Will this do?” He held the bill up between two fingers.
A hundred bucks for a few minutes work? Roz nodded. “It’ll do.”
Mick handed it to her. “I’ll give it to her,” she said, and instead of trying to pretend he didn’t proposition her for sex just a moment ago and was really just a nice guy in spite of it all, she went by the side wall, grabbed her satchel, and left. She didn’t look back.
Mick put his wallet back in his pocket and sat there. Still unable to fathom it. He tried to recall the last time a woman turned him down that decisively. But he kept drawing blanks. Because no woman had ever turned him down in any way. Not ever. No woman had ever dared.
CHAPTER THREE
Roz had dared, but her triumphant getaway was short-lived. The rains came during her audition, and by the time she made it outside the downpour blanketed the landscape in sheets of slanted precipitation. She stood under the theater’s portico, as the few folks willing to brave the weather hurried pass, and wondered what in the world was she going to do. It was already getting dark, it looked as if it could rain all night, she had no umbrella, and the subway was four blocks away. She could try to catch a cab, but she wasn’t about to pay that much money to some New York cabbie who was going to try and swindle her anyway. She didn’t have that kind of cash to lose. She was screwed.
And then, to add gasoline to the fire, Mick Sinatra, the man she was triumphantly getting away from, came strolling out of the theater, lifting his collar and buttoning his suit coat. What a day, she thought. What a day!
Mick didn’t expect to see her standing there either. But a part of him was pleased that she was. He thought she could handle it. He thought a woman with her looks and bravado would be far more experienced sexually than she apparently was.
He walked up beside her under the portico and leaned against the wall, his hands in his pockets. He stared out at the pouring rain. After a moment, he spoke. “Not accustomed to a guy coming onto you?” he asked her.
Roz looked at him as if he was adding insult to injury. Now she was some idiot because she turned him down, was that what he was implying? “That’s not it,” she said and then shook her head.
“Then what is it?” He asked the question with such concern in his voice that it threw her. But she wasn’t so thrown that she could forget those disrespectful words he had said to her. She looked away.
“Tell me what the problem is, Rosalind,” he continued. “I obviously offended you. Why? Is it because I have a thirty year old virgin on my hands?”
He didn’t have anything on his hands. What did he mean by that? “Thirty-two,” Roz corrected him.