Chapter 8

It took several days of calling, but I finally heard from Eric. He returned my call late one night, or early one morning, and it was a voicemail. That's not the most romantic thing for a girl to get, in fact it was almost insulting. But it was contact.

Over the next couple of days we traded text messages and voicemails. I gradually mapped out his schedule, and soon had an idea of when he was in class, and when he should be in his dorm room studying.

Part of the problem was that Eric was an engineering student, and they carried a fairly heavy class load. There were the core courses of his major, but there were also ones surrounding it such as physics and math, and they consumed a lot of time. One of the engineering students I'd met told me he shut off his phone just to keep from being interrupted. I had to assume Eric was doing that, too.

Of course this begged the question of Wesley. We had been sort of dating for more than a year, and I wondered if I would choose him if it came down to it. Eric and I had to have grown apart. But maybe we could rekindle things.

That summer ironically found Eric working for a petrochemical company in Dallas while I worked in Ft. Worth. That was too close to ignore, and so we didn't. I didn't party while in Ft. Worth, so Eric and I could only fool around a little. My roommates understood, they had boyfriends, and there were a couple of times I got told pointedly that everyone was going to be away if Eric and I wanted some time alone.

In a way it was like old times. We connected in bed, though we'd grown to like each other outside of it. I couldn't help but compare it to Wesley, whom I hadn't had sex with, as difficult as that is to believe.

In one sense, all guys feel more or less the same, but that's if you only go by physical things. Sex is a lot more than just the mechanical putting in and taking out, though guys don't seem to realize that. A girl invests her emotions in her bed partner, even if it's for just a few minutes one Saturday night, and that is the difference in partners. That's why a girl might describe a guy's physical attributes, but only briefly. She'll tell her girlfriends how he made her feel, language any girl picks up on right away.

Eric and I did spend a couple of afternoons renewing our acquaintances. It was fun, and reminded me of when we were younger. And it opened the whole question of what I was doing by seeing Wesley. Was I comparing the two, one versus the other? Was I holding a competition? Just what was I doing? And was it fair to either man.

A lot of questions can go through a girl's mind when she's in bed with someone.

Fortunately, I had work to absorb me. I wasn't a younger teenager obsessing about the hard dick I was getting from time to time. I saw that in one of my roommates. She was having her first sexual experiences, and they were not what she expected. I didn't care for the guy—Eric didn't either, and I'd learned something: guys can tell if another guy is a jerk or an asshole, girls can't—and I used that to try to clew Miiriam in. She wasn't listening, of course, when a girl gets wrapped up in a guy, megaphones and billboards don't get through, let alone words from a girlfriend. Of course sometimes the opposite is true, and a girl will listen to her friends, seeking validation for what's going on in her life, only to have everything spoiled by someone who has problems of her own and is taking them out on someone else.

So, while that domestic drama played itself out in our apartment—Mirriam got her heart broken—I struggled with my feelings for Eric and Wesley. I didn't come to any conclusion, so I took the easy way out: I resided in the moment.

Sometimes you do that, taking things one step at a time. You try not to, but in too many cases it appears to be the only option. Fortunately for my peace of mind, Eric was in and out of town a lot as the petro company sent him around to "gain experience".

My own job kept me busy. They did move me into the news division, where I discovered that we did in-depth segments, usually timed at 18 minutes, on news makers. This meant I was at one remove from the rough-and-tumble of daily politics. That was a good thing. Exposing a young person to the partisan way politics was played now was too great a shock. I'd likened it to a sewer. It was worse than that, it was what crawled along the bottom of the sewer.

Part of the problem was that there were a few people who played politics beyond the accepted rules. It's one thing to defeat your opponent, they wouldn't be happy with anything short of outright physical destruction of their foes. If someone opposed them, they wanted that person arrested and thrown in jail. If we were like the old Soviet Union they would have demanded that person be shot.

That's not how American politics are played, and yet there it was. The internet gave these people a way to get their message out, and a couple of our background pieces exposed that. The reaction of those people was to file lawsuits seeking to have all of our corporate assets removed and everyone connected with the show arrested for libel, or worse.

In some states that might have worked. There were a few places where the lunatic fringe still had acceptance, but Texas wasn't one of them. Anyone can file a lawsuit, but Texas, in a rare fit of legal sanity, had set up a panel of retired judges to decide if a lawsuit had merit and should go forward. In these cases they came down hard on the plaintiffs for wasting the court's time. We had only used things we could document, and the judicial panel recognized that.

It was a sobering lesson to me on how my private life could get exposed. That made me wonder if my chosen aims were all that possible, or would someone run to the press with "scandalous behavior" stories.

I was in the middle of thinking about that—my sister will tell anyone that I take my time when thinking to make sure I had things right—when Eric came back to town after a week on an oil rig.

Apparently the testosterone flowed rather heavily out there, and we spent a very entertaining evening at his place. He was more vigorous than usual, which made me think good thoughts about the future. But he was only in town for a few days, and then he was off to someplace in West Texas to do something at a site there.

Then one of the girls came down sick and had to be taken to the hospital. I was transferred from making documentaries to helping with our soap opera.

Actors.

Never have I met such a whiny, self-centered group of people. This story arc was supposedly set at a beach resort, and so there was a lot of skin. All that skin meant a lot of oil. We actually had someone whose job it was to oil up every actor and actress. It was sort of like the fluffer girl who kept guys hard between shots when we did sex scenes.

I had to handle a lot of complaints about people with cold hands applying the oil. Then it was the wrong oil, or it hadn't been applied recently enough. Those were just some of the things I heard. Tyra, the director, fielded endless complaints about lighting angles, screen time, and the way he shot the scenes.

The two of us commiserated over cappuccino and croissants during a break. "They're driving me to distraction, Amber."

"I thought there were only a couple more weeks left in the shooting schedule."

Tyra warmed her hands on the cup, scowling into it. "There are, and then it'll be someone else's problem." She sighed. "If you read of an actor or two getting murdered before then..."

"You'll have to stand in line. Have you heard their latest demand?"

"What now?"

"The girls want guys who have more variety in their lovemaking. The boys want girls who aren't so skinny and show more curves."

"That sounds like something that'll be handled by Personnel."

"You may have to stand in line if it comes to murder."

"What was that ditty?

"Lizzie Borden took an axe

"And gave her father forty whacks,"

"And when the job was nicely done," I finished,

"She gave her mother forty-one.

"We used to skip rope to that when I was a little girl."

Tyra laughed. "Me too. It's tempting, and I'm sure the scriptwriters could work it into the storyline."

I traced some circles on the tabletop. "You know, we could probably do something with the whole idea."

"You mean a director and Assistant Producer do in their entire cast out of sheer frustration?"

"I've heard worse plot lines. The one we're shooting comes to mind."

Tyra got this thoughtful look on her ace. "You want to work something up, or me?"

"Why not do it together. Two can feed off of each other better than one."

Thus was formed Lunch Room Enterprises, a production company that was just the two of us. Oh, eventually we had a lawyer draw up the actual document, but we started with that one idea. In time we added others, someone to do research, someone to do the actual scriptwriting, but they were minority partners. Tyra and I came up with the ideas, pitched them to management, and reaped the financial and critical awards.

We never did get an award for our work, but the money rolled in, and suddenly the rest of my college experience was paid for, as was quite a bit else. I had an old clunker of a car that one-lunged its way up and down hills; it got traded in for a car in much better mechanical condition, though the body still needed work. And I bought a few nice things for myself, especially a dynamite pair of shoes that I got in Baton Rouge later that year.

That was the future, though. In the meantime we still had shows to work on. I got loaned out to this project and that one, mainly because I didn't act embarrassed about seeing naked bodies having sex.

There are some things my social life have ill-prepared me for, and one of them is why I should feel upset, embarrassed, or ashamed of seeing people have sex. Everyone is a little voyeuristic, some more so than others. Some nights I think half of the pleasure of a party is in watching. And after a while you just accept what you see as the way things are. I'd see a girl, naked of course, with her legs wrapped around some guy's waist as she pulled herself up on his hardness. Everything was visible, including the most intimate places on her body, and I really wouldn't pay that much attention. Okay, she's a girl. Every girl has those places, especially that place. So what?