Free Quirks & Kinks by Laurel Ulen Curtis

probably would have been helpful in the next two minutes of my life.
    I decided on being vaguely evasive.
    “I went to the restaurant.”
    “El Loco?”
    My look clearly said really?
    “Jesus. Sorry. You’re throwing me off being here. I feel like I can barely speak English.”
    “Qué?”
    “What?”
    “Exactly.”
    “Easie.”
    “Sorry.” I shrugged. “It was fun while you allowed it though.”
    “So . . . how did you find me?”
    Ah, shit.
    “A girl . . . woman . . . whatever . . . at the restaurant.”
    “Tammy?”
    “Brown hair. Long legs.”
    He nodded in understanding, confirming, “Tammy.” Apparently, he’d noticed Tammy’s legs.
    Great. Now that we’d officially confirmed the completely inconsequential girl’s name, we could move on.
    Oh yuck.
    What a gross taste in my mouth. Tangy. Green. A little earthy, like lettuce.
    Hmm. I guess jealousy is considered roughage.
    “Easie?”
    “Yeah?”
    “What did you want?” he asked, reminding me of the entire hodgepodge of drama that had brought me here.
    Man, today was a long fucking day. Filming, firing, physical abuse, verbal berating from Larry as he caved to the pressure of finding a new lead, getting shanghaied by Ashley, verbal volleyball with Tammy, driving millions of miles to Manhattan Beach, and finally, now, putting my emotional boundaries through the paces by talking to the one guy to make any kind of lasting impression on me in the last four plus years.
    Yeah. Long day.
    “Oh, I’m here about a part.”
    “A part?”
    “My, my, we’re big on repeating things today.”
    Ignoring my smart aleck remark, he moved on. “For me?”
    “Yeah. On a show I just started.”
    “Quirks and Kinks?”
    Agog, my head lurched forward and my neck stretched out like an ostrich. A really fucking surprised ostrich. “Excuse me?”
    He shrugged, nonplussed. “I caught the first episode.”
    “Only one episode has aired.”
    “Okay,” he conceded. “So I caught the only episode.”
    “So you saw—” I started, thinking about the ridiculous getup I’d donned for most of the show.
    “Sure did,” he confirmed with a cute wag of his brows and rock up onto the balls of his feet.
    “Greeaattt.”
    “Stop. You were great.”
    I scoffed.
    “No, seriously. It takes serious talent to depict something so far out of your comfort zone.”
    My head tilted to one side in question. “How do you know clown-sex is outside of my comfort zone?”
    I said it as joke thinking that clown-sex was outside of most people’s comfort zones, but he took it seriously, never taking his eyes off of mine as he spoke. “By the way you reacted when I told you I saw it.”
    Breaking the intensity of his eye contact, I rummaged in my bag and pulled out the one thing guaranteed to make him like me less.
    His eyes flared as I lit it up, but he didn’t say anything.
    When neither of us had broken the silence for a full minute, I took the initiative to bring things back on point.
    “So . . . the show?”
    He looked from my cigarette to me and back again, and then huffed out one big breath. “I’ll take a meeting.”
    “You’ll do it?” I asked, trying to speed up his decision process. Or just trick him into agreeing. One way or the other.
    “No,” he chuckled. “That’s not what I said. I’ll come talk to the producer, and you, if you want, and if I like what everyone has to say, then I’ll do it.”
    “Fine,” I conceded. “That’s better than nothing.”
    “When?”
    I knew Larry would want me to say right now, this minute, there’s no time to spare, blah, blah, blah. But I was tired. I didn’t have it in me. So I answered the way I wanted to.
    “First thing tomorrow morning.”
    Okay, if I had really conceded to my wants, I probably would have said never. But this was the best I was going to get.
    Staring contests had nothing on us as we sat there, soaking in our awkwardness for all of Manhattan Beach’s onlookers to see. The urge to leave battled