Free I Love the 80s by Megan Crane Page A

from its headband, fell forward in the sort of careless dark mess that just begged for hands to fix it. Her hands, perhaps. Jenna’s fingers, as if alerted, twitched slightly in response, and she quelled the urge to sit on them.
    ‘Did you sleep with him?’
    ‘What?’ She jerked her attention away from the luxuriant spill of wavy hair across his forehead. Then what he’d said penetrated. She flushed. He looked up, and his expression was cynical, at odds with the light tone he’d used.
    ‘Of course not,’ Jenna hissed, appalled.
    ‘Really.’ It wasn’t a question. ‘Are you sure? Maybe it was just a blow job. Better than a handshake for sealing the deal. That’s a direct quote, by the way.’
    ‘I did not touch Duncan Paradis.’ She was horrified that he would ask. Then she was more horrified when he smiled slightly, indulgently, as if he didn’t believe her. ‘I would never touch Duncan Paradis,’ she said fiercely. Her skin itched with the force of her mortification.
    ‘If you say so,’ he murmured, and returned his attention to his guitar.
    Jenna sat there, and grew more and more agitated the longer he continued to play, the pick in his nimble fingers coaxing out a melody that she almost recognized. Her breathing went shallow, and she wondered how she could feel so hot with embarrassment when he seemed to have forgotten she was there at all.
    ‘Where’s, uh, the rest of the band?’ she asked finally, when she thought she might scream if she didn’t speak.
    ‘Out and about.’ He didn’t look up. ‘More out than about, probably.’
    ‘Oh. I thought you were recording.’
    ‘We are. This is called songwriting. It works better without interruptions and idle conversation.’
    Pluck. Pluck. Pluck.
    As if she did not exist.
    Jenna looked down and saw that her hands were balled into fists.
    Upon a moment’s reflection, complete with that
pluck pluck pluck
sound in the background, she accepted the factthat she wanted to take both of those fists and plant them in Tommy Seer’s pretty face.
    This was a brand-new, revolutionary feeling. It was also upsetting. She’d never imagined a moment involving Tommy Seer in which she would want to do anything but gaze at him adoringly and love him. Cherish him. Worship him, even. Then again, she’d never previously imagined him to be so irritating.
    Not to mention the fact that she was still embarrassed by that cynical look he’d thrown at her, and his assumption that she’d had any kind of sexual contact with the repulsive Duncan Paradis. How dare he? What kind of person did he think she was?
    And more to the point, what kind of person was she, that she was still quietly sitting there on that couch, waiting for him to finish being rude to her? At his leisure?
    The events of this insane dream whirled around and around in Jenna’s mind then, very nearly making her gasp out loud. Why was she so passive and
absurd
that even in her own dreams she allowed herself to be led about, condescended to, ordered around, and talked down to in such a variety of ways, by a variety of people, all of whom seemed to regard her as – at best – little more than a pawn in whatever their latest schemes were? None of it made her feel good, despite the brief moment of joy that she’d had something to do with one of her favourite moments in history. But if being bullied left and right was the price of sharing a moment like that, Jenna wasn’t sure it was worth it.
    The dream was clearly a metaphor for her entire life, she decided then, comprehension dawning as Tommy’s clever fingers poured melodies into the charged air between them. A very pointed metaphor, involving this man she had adored for so long yet never met, and representing some thirty-five years of going with the flow and not making waves and waiting in vain for something to happen, finally, to make all her bending and contorting worth it somehow. It represented hiding away in her new single-woman apartment clutching