Submit and Surrender

chapter 5


“So you’re friends,” Lola said flatly.

“That’s what I said,” Adra said, handing the menu back to a very patient waiter. “Friends.”

“Friends.”

“Yes, friends. Why are you saying it like that?”

Lola gave her a classic “are you shitting me?” face.

“Because there’s friends, and then there’s friends, and you know the difference,” Lola finally said, turning on the waiter. The very pregnant redhead had more than the usual glow about her; somehow pregnancy had amplified both Lola’s Domme and sub characteristics. The waiter couldn’t take his eyes off of her, and it was funny to watch him try to figure out why.

Adra figured Roman had his hands full.

“What can I get you, madame?” the poor man said.

“Everything on this page,” Lola said.

The waiter rocked back on his feet.

“Madame?”

Adra stifled a laugh.

“The appetizers,” Lola explained gently. “I want them all. I can’t decide, so I won’t. I know it’s weird, but I am hungry and pregnant and I don’t care. Bring me all of them. Trust me, I’ll eat them.”

Adra decided to help the poor guy out.

“I’ll just pick off of her plates,” she said.

“My appetites are insane,” Lola sighed as soon as the waiter was out of earshot. “It’s absolutely killing me.”

“Appetites, plural?”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t believe what these hormones do to you,” Lola said. “I’m seriously pissed off at Ford for taking up any of Roman’s time tonight. Getting back to bed is practically all I can think about. No offense,” she added.

“None taken,” Adra said, trying to act nonchalant. “So Ford is taking up Roman’s time?”

Lola groaned. “Oh God, please don’t make me be tactful,” she said. “They had to talk about something, I don’t even know what.” Lola arched an eyebrow. “Possibly friendships.”

“Smooth,” Adra laughed.

“Are you going to tell me?”

“No,” Adra said. “Ok, maybe a little. We are…we did say we’d be friends.”

“You know that’s not the good part.”

“There isn’t a good part.”

“Bullshit!”

Adra sighed. She knew she wouldn’t get away with this forever. Maybe it was better to get it over with. “We had one night.”

“Oh my God, one? All of this from one night?”

“You knew?”

Lola laughed. “Of course I knew,” she said. “Adra, you know I love you, but near-sighted strangers who see you two from across the street know. There has never been anything more obvious than the sexual tension between you and Ford.”

“Don’t tease me,” Adra begged. “It’s a fresh wound.”

“Then tell me about it!” Lola said. “You keep so much bottled up, Adra. I worry about you, you know?”

Adra shook her head to keep from showing how much that affected her. It shouldn’t affect her, right? The idea of Lola worrying about her? That there might be reason to worry shouldn’t make her want to cry?

“I don’t even know what to say,” Adra said, and realized it was the complete truth. “He is perfect. Everything is perfect. Except that nothing is really perfect, you know? And I just…I know I’m not built for it, Lola. I know how it would end. And I just can’t do that again.”

“Adra…” Lola said.

Adra looked away. Just Lola’s tone of voice told her what she needed to know. Lola thought Adra was being foolish, running away from love or emotion or whatever, but Lola didn’t know. She didn’t know Adra’s past, she didn’t know Adra’s family, and she didn’t know what Adra knew. And it was impossible to explain.

And luckily Adra’s phone rang—with her sister-in-law’s ringtone.

Adra had never been so glad to answer a phone call in her life.

“Sorry, Lola, family stuff. One sec,” she said. “Nicole? What’s up?”

There was a far too lengthy pause. And a sniffle.

“Is he with you?” Nicole finally asked.

Adra’s heart plummeted to somewhere well beneath the earth’s crust. Her brother Charlie had…

No, better not to say that he’d run off yet. She didn’t know anything. It might not be that.

“No, honey, he isn’t,” Adra said. “What happened?”

“Has he called you? Do you know where he is?”

“I haven’t heard from him yet, Nic,” Adra said, trying to quell her own panic. This brought up every fear Adra had, but it was nothing compared to what Nicole must be feeling. “What happened?”

“I’m probably just overreacting,” Nicole said. “He’s probably just out late bowling or something. It’s just he’s been distant again, and he isn’t answering his phone, and…”

“I thought things were getting better,” Adra said, pulling her chair back as the hapless waiter rolled an entire cart of appetizers up to their table. Lola couldn’t hide her excitement.

“They were, for a little while,” Nicole said. “But he won’t talk to me. He gets so stressed out, and then he just shuts down, and then…”

Adra didn’t need her to finish that sentence. It sounded sickeningly familiar. She steeled herself for the next question.

“Is he drinking?” Adra asked.

“Oh God, no, he wouldn’t do that,” Nicole said. “I know he wouldn’t do that. He’s not your dad. It’s so important to him.”

It was important to Adra, too.

“Adra,” Nicole said, her voice catching. “I’m sorry to call like this, it’s just I don’t know what to do, and I just…”

“I know,” Adra said. “I know, Nic.”

And she really, really did. She remembered it very well. And maybe that’s why this was the one time when she had no idea what to say. Everyone always came to Adra with their problems, and she always knew how to help, whatever it was. She would listen, and she would comfort them, and she’d be able to see, somehow, what the unspoken issue was. And maybe it wouldn’t fix the problem, but it would help them feel better.

Except for this. This was the one thing that left Adra speechless. All she could think about was all the times she’d felt the same way, needing someone who wasn’t there and might not be coming back and powerless to do anything about it. She’d never figured out how to make that better. If she had, her life would be a whole lot different.

Lola offered her a plate of something delicious looking covered in cheese, and Adra looked up to see her friend’s worried face.

“I’ll call him, Nic,” Adra said into the phone. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m worried about him,” Nicole said softly. “I know it’s totally screwed up to be calling you about our marriage problems, but it’s not…I mean, you know it’s that I’m worried about him.”

“I know,” Adra said. “Me, too.”

“Thank you,” Nicole said. “You’ll call me?”

“Of course,” Adra said. “And you let me know when he comes home, ok? Give the boys my love.”


“Thank you, Adra,” Nicole said again, and hung up.

That was it—that final thank you. That was what broke Adra’s heart. That gratitude for something that shouldn’t have to happen in the first place. Because Adra wasn’t even worried about her brother’s physical well being, as screwed up as that was—Charlie was always fine. Instead, Adra knew what this felt like. This was Charlie freaking out. This was Charlie acting like their father.

Adra sent a simple text to her brother: “Call me so I know you’re not dead.”

It was what they used to ask their dad to do years ago. If that didn’t get a response, then there was a problem.

Goddammit.

“Adra,” Lola said.

Adra forced herself to smile. “Yeah? You gonna hog all that calamari or what?”

Lola passed another plate, disturbing the precarious balance of the mountain of appetizers between them. But she didn’t lose her focus. Lola never did.

“Adra, I really do love you,” Lola said softly. “So I’m saying this from a place of love. You don’t have to talk to me, but you’ve gotta talk to someone eventually. You can’t keep carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders like this. You have to let someone help every once in a while.”

“I know,” Adra said, nodding slowly. “I know.”

Except that she didn’t, really. It was one of those things that made perfect rational sense, and yet whenever she thought about it, her entire body revolted against the idea in a fit of panic.

And Lola was watching her try not to freak out.

“Well,” Lola said, popping a bacon-wrapped scallop in her mouth. “If you want something else to freak out about besides your reluctance to rely on your friends, I can help with that.”

Adra laughed out loud, her hand to her chest. “Please.”

Lola smiled evilly.

“I hear tomorrow you begin coaching the actual scenes? Like, scene scenes? With Ford? And your ex? In the same room?”

“Oh my God,” Adra said, laughing helplessly until a tear rolled down her cheek. “What is my life.”

~ * ~ * ~

Ford and Roman’s pool game had been ruined by a single phone call from Roger Corvis, executive producer of Submit and Surrender. It had started off badly. Ford could hear Corvis’s tone from across the pool table, and laughed when he thought about how Roman would handle the guy.

But when Roman came back, he wasn’t laughing it off. He looked serious.

“Something happen?” Ford said.

He hated the idea of the film taking over Volare, but it did give him back his friendship with Adra. He cared now. Damn it.

“Someone leaked the filming location,” Roman said, setting up another shot. “Security is going to be an issue. Corvis seemed to think it was someone at Volare.”

“Bullshit.”

“That’s what I said, in so many words,” Roman smiled. “That said, we need to cut this short.”

“Of course.”

Roman looked at his friend carefully.

“What did Claudia have to say?”

“Nothing important. She’s moving to L.A. They’ll want memberships.”

Roman raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Roman had known Ford when he’d found out that his wife had been having an affair with his best friend and colleague, Jesse Gifford, and that that had been the real root of the problems in their marriage. The games that Claudia had been playing with Ford for months while their marriage deteriorated were just about her guilt, nothing more, and that had been one last mindf*ck to add to the list. It wasn’t something Ford talked about much, but Roman knew, and that mattered. Still, there were some things even Roman didn’t know.

Like about the child. No one knew about the child.

“Ford,” Roman said, setting his pool cue down. “You know that Adra is nothing like Claudia.”

“Of course she isn’t,” Ford said. The idea pissed him off, and what Roman was getting at pissed him off even more. It wasn’t about simple parallels; Adra didn’t have to be just like his ex-wife to be incompatible with him. And Adra was the one who’d called it off. “Don’t compare them.”

Roman put his hands up. “Of course. I shouldn’t have offended Adra with the comparison.”

“No, you shouldn’t.”

“Do you know what you’re doing, Ford?” Roman asked seriously.

Ford met his gaze. It was obvious what Roman was talking about: Adra.

“About as much as you knew what you were doing with Lola,” Ford said. “She’s my best friend, Roman. I won’t let anything or anyone hurt her, including me.”

“Your best friend?” Roman said.

“Stop smiling.”

Roman only smiled again, this time ruefully. “Neither of us should be smiling. Someone leaked the location, and that might hurt all of us. We have a long night of security preparations ahead of us. That, and finding out who the leak is.”

“You got a guy for that?”

“Not in Los Angeles. Do you?”

“Yeah. Private investigator I’ve used for legal work,” Ford said. “He’ll get it done.”

Ford made the call, and then spent the rest of the night trying to figure out how to secure an entire compound from a ravenous press and a rabid fan base. By the time he drove by the Volare compound, the photographers had already staked the place out, and there was another accident at that damn stoplight involving a news van and a food truck that had shown up to feed the gathering fans.

It had taken just a few hours for the circus to start. People were going completely crazy over this movie.

And Adra was going to have to get through this sea of security risks the next morning. The studio would take care of the movie people, but Ford didn’t trust them to take care of Volare people. Which was how he ended up knocking on a neighbor’s door at about six in the morning.

***

The neighbor—Volare’s neighbor to the south, to be precise—was actually surprisingly accommodating. An older guy named Dan had owned his Venice property since the seventies, and he still surfed every day. He was friends with Thea, and was perfectly willing to let Ford hang out until Adra was due to arrive.

Just as he knew Adra would be about to get up, Ford texted her directions. “Avoid Abbot-Kinney, and don’t go directly to Volare. Meet me at 28 Altair.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“Secret’s out,” Ford wrote back.

It wasn’t until he saw her face as she stood on Dan’s front porch, waiting for him, that he realized he could have chosen his words better. She looked confused and way too anxious for this early in the morning.

Ah. She thought he meant that secret. Which now meant he was thinking about that night.

Who was he kidding, he’d be thinking about that no matter what. Just looking at her was enough to stir up those memories. He just had to deal with it.

“The press knows they’re filming the movie at Volare,” he said, trying not to smile at her nervousness.

“Right, of course,” Adra said. She bit her lip and looked down at her feet. Damn, did he want to kiss her. “So what am I doing here?”

“You’re getting sneaked in the back way,” Ford said. “No way you’re going through that goddamn gauntlet out front.”

“The back way?” she asked, eyebrow raised. “And what about Derrick and Olivia?”

“They’re the studio’s responsibility,” Ford said, leaving it unsaid what he knew to be true: Adra was his responsibility. “Follow me.”

He took her hand, and ignored the nearly overwhelming desire to take the rest of her.

Neighbor Dan’s house had a sizable backyard with plenty of pretty looking trees with decent climbing branches. Ford had no idea what kind they were, but he would have been all over them as a little boy. Volare had been careful not to screw with the Zen appeal of Dan’s garden when they’d constructed the tall wall that bounded the compound, and Dan had remained grateful. And now Ford was grateful for those trees.

“That’s our wall,” Adra said, pointing.

“Yup,” Ford said.

“And that’s a tree right next to it,” she said.

“Yup,” Ford said.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“Nope,” Ford said, grinning.

Adra crossed her arms. “Do I look like the tree-climbing type?” she said.

“You used to jump the wall every day in high school,” Ford laughed. “You told me yourself.”

“That was in different shoes.”

“Well,” Ford said, lifting himself up onto the lowest branch and then jumping lightly onto the top of the wall, “You don’t have to worry about that.”

He knelt down on the top of the wall and extended his hands.

“Just grab on and I’ll do the rest.”

Adra smiled and bit her lip again, this time with a decidedly different expression.

“What?” he asked.

“My high school boyfriend tried this once,” she said. “It didn’t work very well. He fell and broke his arm.”

“I am not your high school boyfriend,” Ford said.

Adra looked up at him.

“You most certainly are not,” she said.

Then she put her hands in his.

It was almost cheating, considering how light she was. He’d forgotten about that. He could have thrown her up in the air and caught her, just for fun, but settled for lifting her up and into his arms, balancing them both on the top of the wall.

Adra clung to him, unsure of herself in her heels. God bless women’s shoes.

That was not a friendly thought. But Ford decided to give himself some leeway when she was actually in his arms. He was only freaking human, after all.

And it’s not like they’d stopped wanting each other. He could tell, from the way she was breathing…

Damn.

“Sit down,” he said to her, holding her hand. “Put your legs over the edge.”

Adra kept hold of his hand as she lowered herself into a seated position, her movements somewhat constrained by the skirt she was wearing.

“Oh, screw it,” she said when she was seated, her legs hanging over the edge. “You are in charge of finding my shoes,” she said, kicking them off.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ford said, jumping down to the ground easily. Trail running over boulders had served him well.

When he looked up, shoes in hand, Adra was watching him.

“You ready?” Ford said.

“You know I hate heights,” she said.

“But you’re not a wimp,” he said.

“You’re going to catch me?” she asked.

“Always,” he said, grinning. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She smiled.

“You didn’t just engineer this whole thing to get a look up my skirt, did you?”

“You know I wouldn’t have to go to this much trouble to get a look up your skirt.”

Adra’s mouth dropped open in mock outrage.

“If I still had my shoes, I would throw them at you.”

“Yeah, that was a tactical error on your part,” Ford said. “Now jump before I come up there and get you.”

She bit her lip again. It was damn distracting.

And then she jumped.

And if she’d asked, Ford would have to admit how good it felt to hold her in his arms again. But she didn’t have to ask. He held on to her for just a little longer than he had to, feeling the softness of her body against his, the warmth of her hands on his chest, the little whisper of her rapid, ragged breaths.

Neither of them said anything as he helped her into her shoes. If they’d said something, that would have meant they would have to deal with it all over again. Ford remembered how much that conversation had upset Adra the last time around and so he kept his mouth shut.

Besides, they could only be friends.

He let her go.

It wasn’t until they were already inside Volare, mounting the stairs to the second floor, that Adra found her voice.

“So was all that really necessary?” she said, trying to sound light. Teasing.

“Look out the window,” Ford said.

It was pandemonium.

The police had only just arrived to try to clear the street for traffic, but it was taking forever, given the sheer volume of people who had shown up. And that wasn’t even including the press. The entrance to the compound was completely overrun.

“Oh my God,” Adra said.

“Someone leaked the location of the shoot,” Ford said. He was still pissed off about it.

“Who?”

“I have someone on it.”

“Do we need, like, security guards? What the hell are we going to do? We have the members’ privacy to think about. Oh God, and the safety issues. This is nuts.”

Ford held open the door to the main playroom and watched Adra walk through it, reminding himself that he would have to keep an eye out for Derrick's antics. They were coaching the first scene today.

“Roman’s looking to get security set up by tomorrow,” Ford said. “Today, unfortunately, we rely on the studio.”

Adra stopped suddenly and turned around.

“You really didn’t want me running through a gauntlet,” she said.

“Of course not.”

A beat.

“How early did you get up to talk to Dan?” she asked.

Ford wasn’t even surprised that Adra knew their neighbor already. She’d probably brought around a plate of cookies or something when Volare first set up shop.

“Does it matter?” he asked.

“No,” she said, her eyes soft. “I guess it doesn’t.”

“They’re all here already,” Ford said, looking over her shoulder. Olivia and Derrick were each reading from their scripts, while the director, a man who went only by Santos, paced erratically between the various play stations. It was kind of a weird sight.

Adra smiled at the floor, nodding her head. “Then we’d better get going,” she said.

Ford grabbed her arm at the last minute.

“You don’t have to take any crap from Derrick, you know,” he said.

Adra gave a grim laugh. “Let him try to give me any.” She took a step then looked briefly over her shoulder. “As if you’d let him.”