Love Me Tender Read online

  He thinks the movie is perfect the way it is and he can’t understand why anyone would want to remake it. Patton’s auditioning for the role of Duane Jackson, the bad boy played by Jeff Bridges in the original film. Patton doesn’t see himself as a bad boy. But then, he doesn’t see himself as an actor, even though he played the lead in the high school musical in both his junior and senior years. Since then, he’s been so focused on his music, he put acting on the back burner. Until this came along, he never even thought about it.

  The two men and one woman behind the table introduce themselves.

  “Begin,” Brendan Puck says.

  Leslie thinks Puck’s attitude is that of a person who has been asked to do a favor for someone and thinks he is wasting his time.

  Even though Leslie and Patton have practiced the dialogue unremittingly since they got the lines e-mailed to them, Leslie is still surprised by how natural Patton sounds when he delivers his lines. I’ll see you in a year or two if I don’t get shot. The casting agents nod like the panelists on America’s Got Talent when they aren’t sure about what they’ve just seen.

  “We’d like to hear you sing,” Puck says.

  Patton plays “Northern Lights.” He could have gone with something safer like “Love Me Tender,” but he told Leslie that whatever happens here, he wants these people to see him as himself, not as Elvis Presley.

  Patton sings alone in the center of the room, with only his guitar for accompaniment. Leslie tries to imagine that they are at home, that this is just another rehearsal. She’s beginning to sweat. This Puck guy looks like someone who wouldn’t know fun if it flew in and shit on his shoulder. This was a risk, taking Patton here, but Leslie was so sure, she is so sure that he has what it takes. He looked a little nervous at first, but now he has settled into the rhythm of the performance. But Leslie can’t relax.

  When the song ends, there is silence. Utter silence. Leslie’s heart plunges into her stomach. Patton takes a breath.

  Leslie watches the faces of the three people behind the table. Maybe she sees Patton through rose-colored glasses. Perhaps Nola was right. Maybe he isn’t ready. If this is going to be a moment of extreme humiliation, she doesn’t know how she’ll ever apologize for talking him into this.

  Still, Leslie thinks Patton sounded terrific, both his speaking and his singing voice, but she is in love with him, and that hardly puts her in a position to objectively evaluate his talent.

  The room is so quiet. Too quiet.

  She planned to surprise Patton with a reservation at the Santa Barbara Biltmore to celebrate, but now she’ll be consoling him and begging for forgiveness. Ugh. Patton isn’t going to feel like having champagne and strawberries after this. In the three months they’ve known each other, she’s never seen him really low. He wakes up happy. Being with him is like having an extended pajama party.

  Another strained moment passes before Brendan Puck begins to clap his beefy hands. Then, the man and woman on either side of him clap, too.

  When Leslie and Patton leave the building, Leslie reaches for Patton’s hand and they lace fingers. They walk along the street until Leslie suddenly lets go of him and skips ahead, right up Hollywood Boulevard. He runs to catch up with her and sweeps her into a hug that forces her feet off the ground. She wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him. This is a sweet victory kiss, a new one for her collection.

  “Get a room,” a tattooed kid yells as he shoots past them on his skateboard. They ignore him.

  “You’re going to be rich and famous,” Leslie whispers when they break for breath.

  “I don’t think life can get any better than this,” Patton says, giving her another quick kiss. “Look,” he says. Leslie gazes down to their feet, where Patton is pointing.

  They are standing on Elvis Presley’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

  About the Author

  Laurie Horowitz is the author of The Mating Season, published by BookShots, and The Family Fortune, published by William Morrow. Her short fiction has been published in Fiction and at HollywoodDementia.com.

  If you loved Love Me Tender,

  you might like The Mating Season,

  another BookShot by Laurie Horowitz.

  Read on for a special sneak peek.

  Chapter 1

  When I get off the plane in Sharm el-Sheikh, I feel like I’ve been sitting for hours in a trash compactor. The man beside me smelled strongly of garlic and fried food.

  My mother says that flying used to be romantic. Not anymore. When I catch my reflection in an airport window, I see that over nineteen hours of air travel isn’t exactly a beauty treatment. Not that I care too much about that. I am a scientist, an ornithologist, a bird nerd. I am here for the adventure of a lifetime, and I can turn this exhaustion into exhilaration. All it takes is a little resolve.

  I remove my itinerary from the lower side pocket of my safari vest. I have two more copies of the schedule in my luggage. I printed out three just in case something happened to one—or two—of them. The sheet of paper clearly indicates that a driver is supposed to be here to pick me up.

  I go off to find my Patagonia at the luggage carousel. It’s a new bag my mother gave me for this trip, a lime-green water-resistant rolling duffle. My mother wanted to buy me a Tumi, but I lobbied for the Patagonia. What self-respecting outdoorswoman would pick a Tumi over a Patagonia? My mother calls it my Patagucci, because it’s expensive for what it is. She knows about these things. She’s been in retail since my father died when I was four.

  I am thrown by my missing driver. There’s no sign saying SOPHIE CASTLE anywhere to be found. Here I am in Egypt—my first time out of the United States. I could call Corey West, my producer at the Discovery Channel, or better yet, my friend Halley (named for the comet) who works with him and was the force behind getting me this gig. But no. I’m a big girl. I can figure out how to get from the airport to the hotel without calling Los Angeles.

  The driver should have been here to pick up two of us: me and my cameraman, Rigg Greensman. He came to the Discovery Channel from When Sharks Attack, which aired on Nat Geo Wild, and he is supposed to be one of the best cameramen in the field. Halley says I was lucky to get him. I’m sure she’s right, but it’s a little hard to believe when he’s not here. I googled him before I left the United States and printed out all the information I could find, including his picture. When I showed it to my mother, she said, “He’s too handsome for his own good.” I don’t understand that expression since he probably benefits from those looks, while any girl in his general vicinity is likely to be struck down by them. Anyone but me. I don’t pick up the shiny pebbles on the beach. I take the ones that are weirdly colored or oddly shaped. In a choice between Shrek and Prince Charming, I’d choose Shrek. Rigg, with his sun-kissed curls and cleft chin, looks too much like a drawing of a prince.

  Finally, I go outside and grab a taxi. The cabbie doesn’t speak much English, and all I know how to say in Arabic is As-Salaam-alaikum. This driver could take me anywhere. I’m at his mercy. I take my compass out of the left upper pocket of my safari vest. At least we are going in the right direction: south. If we were going north, we’d be heading toward Israel. Because I don’t know how long the journey is supposed to be, I can’t relax. The time ticks by and we get farther and farther from the bright lights of Sharm el-Sheikh. The only thing that comforts me is that I am hardly the type of woman who gets kidnapped into white slavery. I cut my long hair infrequently and when I do, I cut it with nail scissors. I don’t have a unibrow, but fifteen minutes with a pair of tweezers would not go amiss. My teeth are straight, thanks to my mother who has made every sacrifice to make sure I’ve had the best of everything, including braces. My breasts aren’t much to speak of, not that anyone’s been speaking much of them lately. My eyes are a greenish-brown. When you take all the features separately, each is attractive enough, but with the way I manage them—or fail to manage them—they don’t cause men to trail after me like lovesick pu
ppies. Not that I’d want them to.

  After almost an hour, dusk has turned to darkness and we pull into the gravel parking lot of the Pigeon House. The stucco exterior makes the building look like a sand dune and I feel a little like Lawrence of Arabia. I pay the driver in Egyptian pounds, glad that I had the foresight to get them, and walk inside, dragging my bag behind me.

  Chapter 2

  When I find my driver and cameraman, they are sitting at a plastic table in the bar at the back of the Pigeon House. I don’t know whether I am relieved or furious.

  “You were supposed to wait for me,” I say, stabbing at my itinerary.

  “And hello to you, too,” Rigg says. He stands and sticks out his hand. It isn’t until I reach out my own hand that I realize my fingernails are dirty. I pull it back. Rigg probably thinks I’m snubbing him. “Have a seat. This is our driver and translator, Ahmed,” Rigg says. In his buttery leather jacket, Rigg looks much as I expected he would. His Ray-Bans hold his floppy hair off his forehead like a woman’s headband.

  “Hello, Ahmed. Didn’t you read the itinerary?” I sit down in the kind of plastic chair you can pick up at Walmart, three for ten dollars.

  Ahmed looks at me blankly. He obviously doesn’t understand the word itinerary so I take it out and wave it in his face.

  “Put that thing away, will you?” Rigg says. His tone makes me feel like a guy who has just opened his raincoat and flashed his junk.

  I sit down and look at the menu. It’s in both English and Arabic. Turns out that the Middle East is a vegetarian’s paradise. I don’t eat birds, of course. After I stopped eating them, it was only a short jump to not eating anything sentient. I order falafel.

  When the food comes, I tuck in. I haven’t had anything to eat for five hours. I focus on the food and block out everything else. That is, until I feel Rigg staring at me. I pause to look up.

  “Haven’t you ever seen a girl eat before?” I ask, wiping some tahini off my chin with a paper napkin.

  “Not quite like that,” he says.

  “The girls you date probably don’t eat,” I say.

  “I don’t know why you would say that,” he says.

  “Just a hunch.” I look toward the bar and beckon over our translator.

  “What do you need?” Ahmed asks. He has very short cropped hair, bronze skin, and green eyes. He couldn’t be much older than twenty.

  “I’d like a beer,” I say.

  He calls out to a blond girl behind the bar. “Katya, this lady would like a beer,” he says in English.

  “I could have done that,” I say.

  “But I’m your translator.” He smiles. His two front teeth overlap just enough to be appealing.

  I take a breath and look at Rigg. “Tell me a little about yourself,” I say.

  “What do you want to know?” He leans back on the two rear legs of his chair and I’m tempted to tell him he’ll break his neck if he doesn’t come back down to earth.

  “What got you interested in birds?” I ask.

  “I’m not interested in birds,” he says.

  He’s been put on this bird project. He could at least pretend to be interested in birds.

  “Oh,” I say.

  “I’ve spent the last few years working on When Sharks Attack,” he says.

  “So how’d you end up here?”

  “Just a little careless mistake.” He is wobbling on that chair now. “My assistant lost his little finger.”

  “Lost it?”

  “Well, a shark ate it. We were trying to get an impossible shot,” he says.

  “I suppose it could have been worse,” I say. “It could have been his whole hand or his thumb, which is much more useful than a little finger.” I shovel up some hummus with a piece of pita and take a bite. “So, this is basically a demotion for you.”

  “I wouldn’t call it that,” he says without conviction.

  “Well, who knows? You could end up liking birds.”

  His expression says that I shouldn’t count on it, but he gives me a crooked smile.

  I wipe my plate clean with a piece of bread.

  “They won’t even have to wash that,” Rigg says.

  “I hope they do.” I get up and stand for a moment with my hands on my hips. “I’m going to bed and I suggest you do the same. Early day tomorrow. And just in case you haven’t read the itinerary, we start at dawn.”

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