AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 13

Harlot swept into the SoundSync reception area with the energy of an electric eel.  Hi-Tech office.  Hi-Touch woman.

“Where is he!” she shouted down at Kitty the receptionist.  Harlot didn’t stop walking to wait for an answer, but strolled briskly past beside the desk toward the door leading to the studios.  Behind Harlot, Billy-Bull (her bodyguard) took up station just inside the tinted double-glass doors.  The man was bearded and beefy, smartly dressed in suit and tie.  Just outside, the long pink limousine idled; Oscar the driver waited beside the passenger door.

Kitty froze up.  She was a terminally-cute secretary-receptionist, established with a year of tenure in her toehold in the recording business.

“Where is he?” Harlot asked again, instantly giving up.  “Guess I’ll just hunt the man down, then.”  Her hand slammed into the swing door leading to the inner hallway, and she charged right through.  In her other hand she had four copies of the trendy Scamp magazine with the ‘New Harlot’ on the cover, and she wanted to show Reed.  She knew Reed was here somewhere because his car was out front.  Nobody else around LA drove an old hopped cherry Corvette rag top, with a 12-coat, Fifteen Grand flaming bright orange paint job on the sucker.

After the fact, Kitty recognized Harlot.  “Bizotic.”  Where were the thirty kilograms of junk jewelry usually hung all over the peekaboo navel-displaying semi-obscene thrift-store bustier?  Where were the pink and orange streaks in the once long jet-black hair?  Where was the cracked black leather miniskirt, ripped open at the hip; or the wide red belt slung down super-low with the big gold letters on the buckle that spelled out G-Spot?  And where were the garters that ought to hang down a couple of inches below the mini to hold the tops of the raunch fishnet stockings?

Instead, Harlot wore a cool-blue summer nylon dress of elegance and simplicity, accented with only a few Neiman-Marcos jeweled accessories.

Harlot barged into Reed’s office at a bad time for him.

Reed’s accountant had pointed out to him this morning that SoundSync was going to run out of money to finance the new construction of the New York branch.

San Francisco SoundSync barely broke even; it had always been a big disappointment.  Minneapolis SoundSync was beginning to fall off in profits.  The LA studio was the big moneymaker that was picking up the tabs, and keeping the other studios running with the best new equipment even during slow times.

But Reed was using Studio B in LA pretty heavily for his own projects.  Also, he had wiped out much of SoundSync’s cash reserve by upgrading some equipment in A Studio.

He was faced with the problem of owning two top-flight recording studios that were not pulling their share of the load.  One was losing money, and the other wasn’t really worth the trouble.

Concentrating on finances was difficult.  His heart hurt for lack of Courtney.  Last night he had mooned over her in his den, and in a flash of inspiration he had taken pen to paper.  Suddenly, the words had flowed out fast, hot, and inspired.  They seemed to lay out his soul raw, and say exactly how he felt, hard and beautiful.  He knew that he would never come up with anything better.

But worse, Tina Sherman’s call this morning had gone afoul.  He had tried to find a way to tell her it was over.  But she had burst into a crying jag, and told him she was quitting the tour to fly back to see him in LA.

Reed got her to calm down long enough to put Lenny, her road manager on the line.  He gave Reed Tina’s concert dates, and he warned that she would be wiped out financially if she didn’t finish the tour.  Reed realized that if he broke up with Tina now that it would kill her tour, she would never finish it.  So Reed got Tina back on the line and talked her up enough so that she would finish the third Kansas City date, that night.  He made her promise to finish the tour.

So Reed was sitting there behind the big desk, in the big office with the gold and platinum records on the wall feeling morose.

His door opened.  “Yoo-hoo!”  And Harlot sprang inside.

She kicked the door shut behind her, stepped in a step, and twirled around for him.  “Part-moll, part-Marilyn!”

Reed could feel the blood already rushing to his groin.  He smiled.  “Dizzy bitch.”

“They said that too!  Here, look.”  She put the Scamps down, except for one, and started rifling through the pages to find it.  “Here.”  She came around to show him.  “‘The new Harlot is stoked and sexy, but still slightly dizzy.’”  She dropped the magazine, open, in front of him.

“Slightly?”

Harlot punched Reed’s shoulder like a man, dragged his executive chair out away from the desk a little, and then sat on his lap.  “Is this seat taken?”  She kissed him quickly, and then looked around his office, while tickling his neck.

Harlot was not beautiful.  Not in Reed’s eyes.  (A hundred million world citizens would give him a hell of an argument about that!)  Her new, short, curly blond hair made her look odd.  Her figure was nothing spectacular.   But there was something about her . . .

He thought: Christ, she walks in and I get a hard-on.  I don’t even like the girl!

“What’s this?” she asked, picking up Reed’s poem.  “Lyrics for my new album?”  She read it, and tweaked her nose at it, plainly unimpressed.  She tossed the page aside and it fluttered down onto the thick rug.

“Darling,” she whispered, squirming on his lap, “I’ve got to have another triple-Platinum album.  They pulled it.  My movie wasn’t even in the theaters three weeks.”

She stopped whispering, but there was real pain in her low voice.  “The rushes, on the film I’m doing now, God, I don’t know.  How can you know?  I don’t think it’s any good.  If my next movie bombs . . . I need, like, insurance, ya know?  Reed . . .”

Reed shut her up with a savage kiss, and even fiercer foreplay.

He lifted her up and placed her on the edge of his desk, and explored under her dress with one hand while he held her in place for kissing with the other.

Was she smirking while she pulled at his clothes?

OK, so don’t get wet, you bitch.

But she was getting wet, and quickly.  She was obviously excited by what was happening.

She eased up, and he removed her plain panties.

Amazing.  He didn’t have to fight through multi-layers of bizarre contraptions, he wasn’t getting tangled in beads or belts, he wasn’t drowning in Bordello perfume; just unadorned white silk sliding down clean tanned legs.

She tried to direct his head down between her legs, but Reed would have none of that.

His shoes were kicked off, his pants down and cast aside, his underwear pealed down, allowing his erection to spring free.

And that look on her face!  Exultant.  Triumphant.

He fumbled in his desk drawer for a condom, and wrapped that rascal.

He tried to maneuver her back on the desk, but she fought him down onto the chair with sudden windmill energy, slapping his neck and punching his chin, and then she took hold of his cock, carefully aimed her body, and slowly climbed aboard.

But she moved slowly and dreamily, her legs awkward, astride the chair’s arms.  She looked sharply aside, her attention held by his wall of Industry awards and plaques, as if she was now bored: ‘So come, already.’

Dizzy bitch!

He picked her up, and stood up, still inside of her.  She clung to him, every muscle suddenly straining as though she was trying to hold him in an exact, precise spot inside her vagina.  She was now a fierce bundle of female, crisply sensuous and alive.

Reed’s eyes were wide, and his breathing was labored.  His mind abruptly screamed: What the hell am I doing?!

Then, with a sultry moan she squirmed in his arms or squeezed or Did Something, and he came.

Piff, piff . . . puh.  A heartbreakingly timid misfire.  Three minor little tweaks.

“Aawwww . . .”  All the passion, all the glorious intoxicating sensations dumped right out of him.  “Shit.”  He sort of crumpled down to the carpeting, agonizingly slow, with her still supported in his arms.

She cuddled on top of him, as happy and satisfied as a girl just back from a multi-orgasmic holiday.  She started softly humming the bars to the chorus of her all-time hottest hit.  The single that Reed had produced for her first album, that had started the whole Harlot-craze.  Baby Maker.

Reed straightened out his knees, relieving the unbearable agony, and at the same time slipping out of her.

His left heel crunched down on a piece of paper.  He knew it was the love poem he had written to Courtney.

The thought of Courtney was a stab of actual pain, straight into Reed’s heart.  Guilt twisted the knife.

“Mmmmmm . . . When do I lay down the vocals, Darling?” Harlot purred.

COURTNEY, Chapter 14
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47