No Secret At All - Chapter Ten

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A lot of the details of the Zoo TV tour have been/will be changed for the sake of the story. (For example, when Bono made the first phone call to the white house, his first appearance as Macphisto, when Adam and Edge cut their hair, and lots of other things) That’s why they call it fan FICTION :wink:
Disclaimer: although this story is inspired by real people, it is completely fictional. None of it happened. Even the things which are based loosely off reality have been changed/altered for the sake of the storyline. Please don’t mistake any of this for reality or take it seriously – it’s written for the sake of fun and entertainment. No harm intended. There will be some foul / offensive language and adult themes READ AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION



No Secret At All

Chapter 10


They arrived in Times Square to start filming shortly after midnight, and within minutes the fighting began.

“Lacey is a perfect choice to be in the video, she has plenty of experience on film for one thing. People recognize her, too,” Edge argued.

“Yeah, they recognize her as Pippi Longstocking or Punky fucking Brewster or whatever!” Larry retorted. Edge’s face darkened to a shade of red which was deeper than anyone had ever seen.

“The name was Sunny Sinclair; she had the lead role in a TV show for nearly a decade – everybody recognizes her, but she’s not a little girl anymore and deserves a chance,” Edge informed Larry, and both men frowned at Adam when he couldn’t help but snicker at their quarrel.

“Guys, guys! Calm down, there’s a simple enough solution. Both of the girls can appear in the video, one of them with Bono and the other with whoever wants to do it. Maybe a few shots of the couples on the dance floor or something,” Phil suggested. Edge and Larry stood facing each other for a long silent moment, mentally chewing on this offer and waiting for the other man to respond.

“It’s not like either girl will be the main focus of the video, right?” Bono pointed out.

“Absolutely, it’s just one facet of the video, directing the viewer’s train of thought toward romantic relationships and the difficulties between a man and a woman,” Phil agreed.

“I don’t know what the big deal is anyway,” Edge complained. “Do you have something against Lacey?”

Larry rolled his eyes in response to Edge’s question, not even bothering to validate it with a ‘no’. He didn’t know the girl well enough to have anything against her.

“It’s not like you know this model Phil hired or anything,” Edge was saying when a woman stepped around the corner and hurried toward Phil, her long blonde hair waving in the wind behind her.

“Sorry, am I late?” she asked breathlessly, hopping as she slipped into her shoes as if she had literally dressed as she hurried to join them. Edge turned back to Larry, flashing him a bemused look as he recognized her as the stripper from the previous night. Larry’s inability to look him in the eye told Edge that he had known exactly who Phil had hired for the video. Suddenly, Larry’s insistence that she appearance in the video made sense.

“Nope, you are right on time,” Phil told her, directing her toward the make-up trailer and wardrobe assistants, where Lacey was already in the process of dressing for the video shoot.

“So, you enjoyed yourself more than you let on last night, eh?” Adam teased, nudging Larry on the shoulder.

“She’s perfect for this… she has the saddest, most mysterious eyes,” Larry explained, though his shoulders were hunched and his gaze fell on the ground, letting everyone know there was more to his reasoning than that.

“We paid for her to take most of her clothes off and you were looking at her eyes?” Bono joked, raising a chuckle out of everyone but Larry. Even he had to smirk, though. He couldn’t logically explain why he had wanted so badly to see her again; not beyond the obviously instinctive physical attraction – but there was something more to it.

*************************************************************

Roxie had initially turned down the offer. It seemed a little like a scam to her, who had learned the hard way that if something seemed too good to be true, it probably was. For some reason, though, once she realized taking the job would mean seeing the man with the steely eyes and the face of an angel again, she couldn’t resist.

She told herself she was being silly, wasting so much time and energy thinking about someone who was so out of her league. He wouldn’t want anything more out of her than every other man in her life, and that had certainly never brought her anything but tears.

Still, here she was, sitting in a trailer just off Times Square getting make-up applied as a stranger sized her up and picked out something for her to wear. Apparently her own outfit had been too risqué for a U2 video, according to her. Roxie had to lift an eyebrow at the thought of a music video where they wanted the model to put on more clothes, rather than take them off.

The younger girl in the chair beside her was chatting a mile a minute to the woman who was styling her hair and Roxie could not help but listen. She was going on about how good it felt to be filming something again. Apparently she had spent a good deal of her life in front of the camera, but had been hard pressed for work for awhile now.

“Is this your first filming?” She asked, directing her attention on Roxie so abruptly that it took her a moment to realize she was being addressed.

“Uh, yeah. I’m usually more of a stage performer,” she replied smartly. Lacey didn’t seem to notice the cynical edge to her words.

“I would love to work on stage,” Lacey sighed dreamily. “Broadway has a romantic element that you don’t find anywhere else these days. Have you appeared on Broadway?”

“No, not exactly,” Roxie chuckled, closing her eyes as the stylist working on her began to brush and style her long blonde hair.

“Where have you appeared?” Lacey pressed.

“Well, right now I’m dancing at ‘Glycerin’,” Roxie informed her, “But I’ve appeared at half a dozen of New York’s oldest and sleaziest nudie bars as well as in two or three off-off Broadway productions of bad musicals that no one wanted to see in the first place.”

The silence that fell over the trailer was exactly what Roxie had expected and hoped for, but what followed made her open her eyes in surprise and stare at the girl next to her.

“Do you think you could teach me to dance?” Lacey asked her green eyes wide and innocent as she waited for a response from the dumbfounded dancer.

“You want to learn how to dance… like I dance?” Roxie asked, wondering if perhaps the girl didn’t understand the nature of her dancing.

“Yeah,” Lacey confirmed, nodding her head and messing up what the stylist was attempting to do with her hair. “There’s this movie I want to audition for; actually, it’s still way pre-production, but I know the studio is looking at it seriously and it would be perfect for getting people to take me more serious as an adult actress. It’s about showgirls, like in Las Vegas…”

“That’s not exactly the same thing I do,” Roxie said, not sure whether to be amused or insulted.

“But it’s close; a lot closer than anything I’ve done before; and it would help me lose some inhibitions,” Lacey argued.

“Well… if you’re serious, I guess you could come to the club in the early afternoon sometime and I could show you a thing or two. Some of the other girls would, probably, too,” Roxie agreed finally. Who was she to tell the girl not to give it a try? Sure, she looked like someone’s kid sister – but for some guys, that was what they wanted to see. Several of the girls did shows in Catholic school girl outfits, after all.

“That would be really great,” Lacey said, grinning in satisfaction. “Thank you.”

“You haven’t tried it yet, babe. You might not be thanking me after you’ve been on stage once.”

***********************************************************

Larry paced a small section of sidewalk and burned through a cigarette in record time as he waited for the girls to emerge from the small make-up trailer. He was dismayed to realize his hands were shaking, his palms sweaty. He was acting like a fool, he scolded himself inwardly; over a woman he didn’t know anything about - a woman who used her body to earn a living, no less. The memory of the way she had danced the night before sent a rush of heat through his body; the thought of her scent and the softness of her skin made him ache.

He told himself that she would lose all her mystery once he’d spoken to her; and once he knew what sort of person she was he would most likely lose interest. He tried to imagine that she was no different from Katrina in attitude and personality, but he couldn’t quite reckon that image with the short interaction he’d had with her.

Before he had the chance, however, Phil was calling him over to join the others as he filmed them together with the backdrop of Times Square. He did his best to concentrate, but it was difficult. He caught himself searching for her among the crew and the few bystanders who had gathered to see what was happening. When his eyes finally found her, his breath caught in his throat until his chest ached. She caught him staring, her blue eyes blinking at him in surprise before she looked away quickly. It was a reaction that seemed almost… shy.

What seemed like hours later, at least to Larry in his distraction, they moved into the small below ground bar which they had contracted to film the remainder of the video in. As the others settled in, Larry tried to bolster the courage to simply walk right up to her and speak, but found his mind absolutely blank, and his tongue too dry to form words. He was relieved when the owner of the bar poured a generous serving of whiskey in a glass for Bono as they began filming him seated alone at a table lip synching the words to the song. He requested a drink for himself and was quickly served an equally generous glass of whiskey and a pint of Guinness to chase it.

Edge’s new girlfriend sat beside and slightly behind Bono looking serious and troubled, and Larry noticed Roxie standing across the room, chewing nervously on a manicured fingernail. He finished the whiskey and was about to approach her when Phil called for a change.

“Can we get the camera set up over here and get some shots at the bar? Let’s start with Larry and Roxie, over here. Can we adjust the lighting?” he was saying, busily directing this person and that as the cameras and lights were shifted in Larry’s direction. “Actually – you’re a dancer, right?” he asked Roxie, and when she nodded he re-directed the crew and the extras once more, moving them over to the small dance floor.

Larry shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other, looking for a moment like a young boy who’d never danced with a girl before. He felt every set of eyes in the place watching him, weighing so heavily on him that it was hard to move. Finally he found his courage and as Phil started filming, draped his arms over her shoulders casually, first brushing her soft curtain of hair out of her face with one finger. When she looked up at him, sky blue eyes peeking out from beneath thick golden eyelashes, he missed a beat, his step failing as they started to move. He smiled shyly and mumbled an apology.

She rested her hands on his slender hips and the warmth of her fingertips burned its way across his waist to light a fire in his belly. He wanted to say something to her, to break the spell, but his mind raced with images of her smooth, pale skin and the shape of her body beneath the modest clothes she wore.

She drew closer and whispered in his ear that it might work better if they switched positions – she was not being bossy or sarcastic about it but matter-of-fact, and Larry couldn’t help but appreciate that. Of course they should switch positions; with her arms around his neck and his hands on her waist. It was a more traditional pose, and the camera would get a better view of them. He smiled at the realization, embarrassed slightly at his awkward approach, but not embarrassed in any way by her words. *damn* he thought inwardly, she wasn’t acting the way he had told himself she would – she seemed downright modest.

She was certainly not the sexually aggressive person she had seemed when she danced, which led him to the conclusion that she was, perhaps, just good at her job. He realized, to his surprise, that he was smiling despite the cameras and all of the people staring – he’d nearly forgotten they were there at all.

“I’m Larry, by the way,” he finally found his voice, but had to lean in close to her ear to be heard over the music.

“Hi Larry,” she replied with a relieved laugh. She’d been waiting for him to speak.

“And you’re – is – should I call you Roxie? Or is that just a stage name?”

“Most people call me Roxie,” she informed him with a slight nod. “My mother named me Lilly. Lilly Ann Roxdale.”

“Lilly,” Larry said her name and it sounded like a prayer, like a wish; like something a lover would murmur in the night. He thought he felt her shiver slightly and automatically drew her closer, warming her with the heat of his own body protectively. They fell into the rhythm of the dance and an easy silence where no words were needed. The world melted away around them into a sphere of faint, amber light and smoke and the soft, sweet sound of ‘One’ – and when Larry’s cheek brushed against hers, his nose nudging hers gently, the whole world seemed to hold it’s breath in anticipation.

The soft, subtle sensation of her breath against his lips was more powerful than any touch he’d ever known, and Larry very nearly gave in to the desire that boiled in his head and heart; a voice somewhere deep inside of him whispering ‘please…’

The world stood still – the moment hanging there, their lips not quite touching – and suddenly reality intruded. The silence was what startled him back to awareness of time and place, and when Larry looked up, over Roxie’s shoulder and saw how everyone stared at them, completely mesmerized, he felt his face flush red and the sudden, crushing weight of their attention pressed down on his shoulders once more.

It was as if the spell was broken, not only for the two of them, but for everyone who’d been watching. Adam, Edge, Bono and Paul exchanged glances of bewildered amusement. They’d rarely seen Larry so completely taken; it was as if he was enchanted.

Phil also sensed that the spell was broken, and soon called it a wrap. He had some candid footage of Lacey flirting with Edge, playfully resting her head on his shoulder and of Adam chatting amiably with some of the female extras. He was confident he had everything he needed to cut an award-winning video for the band.

As they closed the set, Larry and Roxie drifted their separate ways, but as the band made it’s way back to the bus he saw her waiting near the curb for a cab. He veered away from the others and made his way toward her, breaking into a slight jog as the cab arrived.

“Hey!” he flagged her down before she climbed into the backseat.

“Hey,” she replied, smiling softly at him.

“I… uh, was wondering if you had a like a phone number, maybe or something,” he stammered, cursing himself for not having thought ahead and figured out what to say.

“Yeah,” she chuckled, “I have a phone number.” For a minute she let it hang there, toying with him as if she would make him ask for it more clearly. Finally, she pulled a pen out of her purse and took his hand. He flinched as she wrote her number across his palm.

“Tickles,” he explained with a shy laugh. She grinned at him and finished writing.

“It’s nice to have met you, Larry,” she told him honestly, her blue eyes locking with his own. “I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone quite like you before.”

“Bet you say that to all the guys,” Larry replied smartly, and she laughed as she slipped into the cab and then melted away into the New York City night.


the inspiration for this scene:
LarryMullenJr61.jpg
LarryMullenJr62.jpg

LMJOSCEra3s15.jpg
 
I totally got the visual from your description of that dance from the "One" video and then to scroll down & see the snaps. Wow!Love, love, love it SG!!!
:bow:
 
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