The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [56]
Stepping from the Greyhound bus terminal in Los Angeles, she found herself spending the first handful of months in this new world of sorts in a no-tell motel with cash stolen from her bastard stepfather. Meeting people and then some, she eventually graduated to apartment life with an occasional roommate, an occasional boyfriend and soon after, landed a job at a local library, living paycheck to paycheck.
Then one day, certain employees of the library were cordially invited to a writer’s convention at L.A.’s Bonaventure Hotel.
The day Jessica went to the convention was the day she met Ralston Cooper.
It was just like meeting an idol, a rock star idol.
Throughout most of Jessica’s life, she had envisioned writers (ignorantly enough) as whimsical introverts or housewives with bottle glasses sporting turtleneck sweaters or stodgy blouses or stressed newsroom types with frenetically loosened ties, heralding from upper/middleclass preppie families in American Suburbia, or as wealthy drunkard yacht cruisers of the Mediterranean, or for that matter demented hermits from Maine.
Ralston Cooper left this vision in downright, pitiful desolation. He was reckless, handsome, occasionally innovative, kickback and sly, and utterly cool. He dressed well, the way (in Jessica’s eyes) a successful mid-twenties celebrity should. He was a show-off, which at times had its downfalls, but he was definitely not reclusive or nerdy or eccentric and he was never immersed in his work. He knew how to show a woman a good time. And his woman... hell, as far as good times could go, Ralston knew who he was with and how to treat her, which was more than any man she ever knew.
Except for a few unspoken, questionable episodes. At parties, during get-togethers, whenever.
So what: women wanted him. Jessica had a right to be jealous. But Ralston would always have the last word, the concluding explanation.
The fact of the matter was, Ralston Cooper was her solitude, her shoulder to lean on, her sanctuary. He had money, he had love, he had status, and he was the man.
That’s right, girl.
And he was interesting, provocative, mysterious.
He had people working for him, under him.
Like his agent, William Behn, that slob sonofabitch of a man who bore a hard-on for her the size of Alaska. Like that genuinely introverted recluse-of-a-misfit Andrew, who edited and did who-knows-what with whatever project Ralston was working on. Like the movie-makers and production teams who produced and created the mega-movie-made-for-TV-mini-series off-shoots of his famous novels.
Ralston was standing now, having ingested the Rock Island Line of speed from the hand mirror he’d just then set back down upon the dresser. He approached the bed where Jessica lay and she raised her gaze toward him, expectantly, almost, almost beckoningly except for the newfound energy and temptation to rise from the bed and meet him midway.
He towered over her, lowered himself onto her. Skin against skin, pushing, retracting. Her legs wound about his.
Pushing....
Pushing the manuscript of The Everborn aside, pages sliding, falling across the bed, onto the carpet.
Pushing...pumping....
16.
The UFO Detective
-August 28th, 1994—
The forthcoming of rain heralded across the late morning skies and the heavens were like a vast celestial canopy tainted with a mirk and gloom which stretched across the atmosphere in a limitless barrier between unseen endless universe and the world below. It was a foreboding forecast in itself, this display of mounting storm, though in much the same manner its shifting menace paralleled an even more profound and impending destiny for Maxwell Polito. It was an omen, a foreshadowing which, like the sky, could only be seen as a massive grey area of the unpredictable certainties of things to come.
An alien grey area.
Max had eased his pale-brown Mustang over the blistered erosion of parking space asphalt only minutes ago, had silenced his car’s engine and stepped out, emerging to fully face the dormant neon structure