Sad_Girl
Blue Crack Supplier
It's been a difficult task, getting a chance to sit down and write. I was planning on adding to this chapter before I posted it, but it seems I was taking too long 
I hope I'll be updating more frequently 
**The following is a work of fiction. Not real.
Chapter Six
Natalie lay there in the pre-dawn hour, the light seeping into the room just enough so that she could see him. The blankets and sheets were tangled around his legs, one foot under them the other sticking out. He lay on his left side, face mostly down in a pillow that was pinned between his arm and head. The tangled blankets didn’t go any higher than his waist, leaving his chest and shoulders completely exposed.
She closed her eyes and tried to rest. She knew she was going to be miserably tired that day, and any rest she could manage would be better than nothing at all. Then he sighed in his sleep, shifting his weight and making the bedsprings groan in protest, and her eyes opened involuntarily. One of those fascinatingly thick hands of his dipped below the covers to scratch himself immodestly and she clenched her eyes shut, feeling like some sort of sexual deviant, watching him when he was sleeping.
Somehow, while concentrating on not looking, she managed to drift off into a restless slumber. The next thing she knew, the telephone beside her bed was ringing. She drew in a deep breath, trying to pull herself up from sleep, like a diver surfacing in the ocean. She reached out blindly for the phone, but rather than the cold plastic, she felt warm flesh.
She frowned and blinked her eyes in confusion, having to make a real effort just to focus her eyes.
“Hello?” She heard Bono mumble into the receiver, and suddenly her body flooded with adrenaline and she sat bolt upright in bed. “What? No, this is Bono…” he was saying, his eyes still closed as he lay on his back, one foot on the floor. “Natalie? Oh, right. Hold on.” He said, opening one eye and looking over at her. He held the phone out to her with a yawn. “ ‘s for you.” He told her, rolling over and closing his eyes again once she had the phone.
Mostly, she could just hear the sound of her heart pounding as she held the phone to her ear.
*Oh, this could be bad!*
“Hello?” She asked nervously, pinching the bridge of her nose between two fingers as if it would really ease the headache she knew was coming.
“Well, I was calling to let you know we had a missing singer, but apparently you’re on top of the situation.” Paul told her, the double entendre of his words cutting straight to the heart of her fears.
“Yeah, there was some shuffling about last night of room mates. Edge took Bono’s bed, and Holly wasn’t using hers…” She explained, but even to her it sounded like a lame excuse.
“Right, right. Fine. Whatever, we just needed to know where he was.” Paul told her curtly before hanging up without so much as a mumbled ‘bye’.
“Shit!” She yelled, throwing the nearest handy object, which happened to be the phone itself. It went as far as the cord would allow before hitting the floor with a clatter.
“What?” Bono asked, finally awake enough to sit up and look at her with both eyes open. Natalie covered her face with her hands. She wanted to scream! “Nat, what’s wrong?” She heard him ask, but she was too upset to find any words other than four letter ones which would not do any good. She felt the bed shift under her and looked up in shock to find Bono sitting beside her, studying her intently.
For a moment, her heart seemed to be lodged in her throat, and she could not seem to look away from that penetrating gaze. Finally she managed to look down at her hands as she smoothed out the blankets on her lap nervously.
“Nothing.” She muttered, shaking her head weakly.
“Bollocks. What did Paul say? Why was he even calling here so early?”
“He was looking for you.” She informed him coolly. She glanced up just in time to see it dawn on him what was bothering her. First his eyes widened slightly, his lips parting as his jaw dropped a bit. Then his mouth twisted up in a playful smirk.
“And he thought we…” He laughed, and Natalie scowled at him.
“Why is that funny?” She asked before she had the chance to think better of it. She felt like slapping the smile off his face. Or maybe kissing it away. She stood with a huff, tightening the belt of her robe, which she had never taken off the night before for sake of modesty.
“Isn’t it?” He asked, wiggling his eyebrows and grinning at her, following her with his eyes.
“This isn’t funny!” She told him seriously. She picked the phone up and replaced it on the nightstand and then proceeded to pace the floor, absent mindedly popping the joints in her fingers.
“What’s the big deal? What happened – or didn’t happen – is none of their business.” Bono told her, frowning at the severity of her reaction.
“No big deal for you. You’re not only the front man for your group, but you’re a guy. No one cares who a man is sleeping with. In fact, you can actually gain respect by bragging about who you’ve bedded. I, on the other hand, as a woman, will be labeled as a slut. No matter how hard I’ve worked to be successful, the reputation will follow me, everyone will say that I slept around to achieve any status I may attain.”
“That’s bull shit. You’re great at your job, Nat. People aren’t that petty and blind.” Bono argued, making Natalie laugh out loud.
“Bono. Sweetheart, I love your naïveté. I do. But I’ve learned this the hard way.” She told him, resisting the urge to reach out to him. To run her fingers through his mussed up hair, to stroke his cheek, run her thumb across his lower lip… She shook herself out of that particularly dangerous train of thought and to break the awkward silence, she continued to explain.
“Believe it or not, when I was young, I didn’t dream of being a road manager for a rock band.” She told him with a slight smile, her eyes growing distant. “I was a dancer.”
“A dancer?” He asked, and she could feel his eyes running up and down her body, assessing her as if seeing her in a whole new light.
“Mmm-hmm. I started ballet class before I started kindergarten.” She informed him, leaning back against the writing desk across the room from the bed where he was now relaxing. “Jazz dance, tap, ballroom… anything and everything. I was good, too.” She told him with a sheepish grin. “I was barely nineteen when I was offered a spot in ‘No no, Nannette’. We opened on Broadway on January 17th, 1971.” She told him, a wistful, distant look in her eyes as her words faded away and she was lost in a memory.
“Broadway!” Bono said after a moment, nudging her verbally back to the here and now. “That’s impressive.”
“I thought so at the time.” She smiled sadly. “I was on top of the world.” She sighed and sat down on the corner of the bed, her shoulders slumping forward dejectedly. “I thought I was going to be there for a long, long time. This was my life; when I was on stage with the lights on my skin and the music surrounding me, that was everything I ever wanted.”
“So what happened?” Bono asked, scooting over to sit beside her, not stopping until his leg was touching hers.
“I fell in love.” She said matter-of-factly. No chuckle as if she were only partly serious, no sarcasm to underscore the bitterness of the word being applied to a situation which led to such a loss for her. It was just the way it was. Love was capable of destroying a persons dreams. “He was the lead. Not only could he dance, but he could sing and he could act.”
“Of course, it didn’t take long for every person involved with the show to start saying that the only reason I was leading the chorus line was because I was sleeping with the star. It didn’t matter that I was a great dancer. I was nineteen and had never danced professionally before. In their minds, my relationship to Henry was the only way I could have gotten the job.”
“But you didn’t get fired for it, did you?”
“No. I didn’t get fired.” She told him, turning to face him and look him in the eye. “Worse. I got pregnant.” Bono’s shock was as clear as if it were written in bold letters across his forehead. “The worst fate a dancer can imagine. An affliction which changes your body dramatically and in the precise ways which inhibit and eventually prohibit any form of serious dance. At least for a year or so.” Her words were bitter now, the tears beginning to burn her eyes. It had been a long time since she had thought about that time in her life. She had never once spoken of it aloud for anyone to hear.
“Even if you can get your body back into shape, a year off was precious time lost in skill and professional contacts. If a woman kept the baby after she had it, it was as close to impossible as a thing gets for her to ever go back to work. Adoption may be an option that solves that problem, but it causes more problems. How can anyone look at the baby in their arms, that brand new life that knows only it’s mother, and give it away?”
Bono shook his head to indicate that he could not imagine such a difficult decision, but remained silent and waited for her to continue.
“So, there I was, a year after the day the show first opened, the day I thought was just the first day of the rest of my life, and the dream I had come close enough to touch was gone. I had a newborn son, a ruined reputation, and no money and no one to depend on.”
“What about the father? What happened to this Henry fellow?” Bono asked, scowling in sympathetic anger for the girl he had not known and the woman who was now sharing her secrets with him.
“He didn’t want anything to do with it. He called me a liar and a slut to anyone with ears, said he was not the father.” She could see the righteous indignation building inside of her young friend and she smiled gently, resting her hand on his. “It’s alright. We all have to live with our choices.” She told him.
“I can’t even imagine how he faces himself in the mirror.” Bono muttered angrily.
“He doesn’t. He died a year or so ago. Pneumonia, some rare form of it. He’d been sick a lot in the past few years, in and out of the hospital all the time. I figure life is a pattern far too big for me to see the whole picture. Maybe it was a blessing, the way things happened with him and I. I can’t imagine having been a widow before age thirty.”
“What about the baby? I’ve not heard you mention a son before.”
“No. He died at three months. Crib death, they called it. No apparent cause whatsoever. He just… stopped breathing. I was asleep on the couch, not four feet away from him, and there wasn’t anything I could…” she choked on her words as a sob escaped her chest unexpectedly. Her hand covered her mouth as her lower lip started to quiver and she felt the sorrow she had locked away inside of herself years ago.
She felt herself surrounded by Bono’s incredible warmth, his arms wrapping around her as naturally as a mother would hold a child or as a husband would comfort his wife. She let herself melt against him, her head on his shoulder and her arms sliding around his waist as she drew in several long, shaky breaths and tried to swallow her tears.
His cheek and chin brushed her hair, the light stubble covering them catching her silky hair like Velcro. One of his unusually thick hands ran up and down along her spine, the other was smoothing out her hair. She filled her lungs with his scent and took comfort in his strength of spirit.
“I’ve never told anyone I worked with since about this.” She told him, her voice a hoarse whisper, her head moving awkwardly up and down against his shoulder when she spoke.
“I won’t say anything.” He promised softly. “I’m honored that you’d tell me.” He added, and Natalie laughed slightly. It hadn’t been her intention to tell him so much, but it had all come spilling out. Never had she talked so easily with anyone as she did with Bono. She reluctantly pulled away from his embrace and wiped her eyes and nose with a tissue.
“So, anyway, I tried to get work as a dancer, again. After Jeremy died, but my reputation was ruined. No one would hire an out of shape dancer who had a history of sleeping around and dropping out of shows while they were in production.”
“I can see why you’re worried about this, but I promise you that Paul isn’t going to be spreading rumors.” He told her, smiling his crooked smile that made her heart swell when she saw it. “And I’ll be the first one to defend you if anything is said. I’m sorry I brought all of this up, I never thought it would be a big deal to steal Holly’s bed for the night.”
“No, I know. I didn’t think too much about it last night, either. If I had, I would’ve kicked you out on your pale Irish ass.” She teased.
“So you were looking at me arse!” he teased right back, making her laugh as her cheeks reddened. It was so easy to be with him. Natalie had never in her life known anyone like Bono. She was certain she never would again.
I hope I'll be updating more frequently **The following is a work of fiction. Not real.
Chapter Six
Natalie lay there in the pre-dawn hour, the light seeping into the room just enough so that she could see him. The blankets and sheets were tangled around his legs, one foot under them the other sticking out. He lay on his left side, face mostly down in a pillow that was pinned between his arm and head. The tangled blankets didn’t go any higher than his waist, leaving his chest and shoulders completely exposed.
She closed her eyes and tried to rest. She knew she was going to be miserably tired that day, and any rest she could manage would be better than nothing at all. Then he sighed in his sleep, shifting his weight and making the bedsprings groan in protest, and her eyes opened involuntarily. One of those fascinatingly thick hands of his dipped below the covers to scratch himself immodestly and she clenched her eyes shut, feeling like some sort of sexual deviant, watching him when he was sleeping.
Somehow, while concentrating on not looking, she managed to drift off into a restless slumber. The next thing she knew, the telephone beside her bed was ringing. She drew in a deep breath, trying to pull herself up from sleep, like a diver surfacing in the ocean. She reached out blindly for the phone, but rather than the cold plastic, she felt warm flesh.
She frowned and blinked her eyes in confusion, having to make a real effort just to focus her eyes.
“Hello?” She heard Bono mumble into the receiver, and suddenly her body flooded with adrenaline and she sat bolt upright in bed. “What? No, this is Bono…” he was saying, his eyes still closed as he lay on his back, one foot on the floor. “Natalie? Oh, right. Hold on.” He said, opening one eye and looking over at her. He held the phone out to her with a yawn. “ ‘s for you.” He told her, rolling over and closing his eyes again once she had the phone.
Mostly, she could just hear the sound of her heart pounding as she held the phone to her ear.
*Oh, this could be bad!*
“Hello?” She asked nervously, pinching the bridge of her nose between two fingers as if it would really ease the headache she knew was coming.
“Well, I was calling to let you know we had a missing singer, but apparently you’re on top of the situation.” Paul told her, the double entendre of his words cutting straight to the heart of her fears.
“Yeah, there was some shuffling about last night of room mates. Edge took Bono’s bed, and Holly wasn’t using hers…” She explained, but even to her it sounded like a lame excuse.
“Right, right. Fine. Whatever, we just needed to know where he was.” Paul told her curtly before hanging up without so much as a mumbled ‘bye’.
“Shit!” She yelled, throwing the nearest handy object, which happened to be the phone itself. It went as far as the cord would allow before hitting the floor with a clatter.
“What?” Bono asked, finally awake enough to sit up and look at her with both eyes open. Natalie covered her face with her hands. She wanted to scream! “Nat, what’s wrong?” She heard him ask, but she was too upset to find any words other than four letter ones which would not do any good. She felt the bed shift under her and looked up in shock to find Bono sitting beside her, studying her intently.
For a moment, her heart seemed to be lodged in her throat, and she could not seem to look away from that penetrating gaze. Finally she managed to look down at her hands as she smoothed out the blankets on her lap nervously.
“Nothing.” She muttered, shaking her head weakly.
“Bollocks. What did Paul say? Why was he even calling here so early?”
“He was looking for you.” She informed him coolly. She glanced up just in time to see it dawn on him what was bothering her. First his eyes widened slightly, his lips parting as his jaw dropped a bit. Then his mouth twisted up in a playful smirk.
“And he thought we…” He laughed, and Natalie scowled at him.
“Why is that funny?” She asked before she had the chance to think better of it. She felt like slapping the smile off his face. Or maybe kissing it away. She stood with a huff, tightening the belt of her robe, which she had never taken off the night before for sake of modesty.
“Isn’t it?” He asked, wiggling his eyebrows and grinning at her, following her with his eyes.
“This isn’t funny!” She told him seriously. She picked the phone up and replaced it on the nightstand and then proceeded to pace the floor, absent mindedly popping the joints in her fingers.
“What’s the big deal? What happened – or didn’t happen – is none of their business.” Bono told her, frowning at the severity of her reaction.
“No big deal for you. You’re not only the front man for your group, but you’re a guy. No one cares who a man is sleeping with. In fact, you can actually gain respect by bragging about who you’ve bedded. I, on the other hand, as a woman, will be labeled as a slut. No matter how hard I’ve worked to be successful, the reputation will follow me, everyone will say that I slept around to achieve any status I may attain.”
“That’s bull shit. You’re great at your job, Nat. People aren’t that petty and blind.” Bono argued, making Natalie laugh out loud.
“Bono. Sweetheart, I love your naïveté. I do. But I’ve learned this the hard way.” She told him, resisting the urge to reach out to him. To run her fingers through his mussed up hair, to stroke his cheek, run her thumb across his lower lip… She shook herself out of that particularly dangerous train of thought and to break the awkward silence, she continued to explain.
“Believe it or not, when I was young, I didn’t dream of being a road manager for a rock band.” She told him with a slight smile, her eyes growing distant. “I was a dancer.”
“A dancer?” He asked, and she could feel his eyes running up and down her body, assessing her as if seeing her in a whole new light.
“Mmm-hmm. I started ballet class before I started kindergarten.” She informed him, leaning back against the writing desk across the room from the bed where he was now relaxing. “Jazz dance, tap, ballroom… anything and everything. I was good, too.” She told him with a sheepish grin. “I was barely nineteen when I was offered a spot in ‘No no, Nannette’. We opened on Broadway on January 17th, 1971.” She told him, a wistful, distant look in her eyes as her words faded away and she was lost in a memory.
“Broadway!” Bono said after a moment, nudging her verbally back to the here and now. “That’s impressive.”
“I thought so at the time.” She smiled sadly. “I was on top of the world.” She sighed and sat down on the corner of the bed, her shoulders slumping forward dejectedly. “I thought I was going to be there for a long, long time. This was my life; when I was on stage with the lights on my skin and the music surrounding me, that was everything I ever wanted.”
“So what happened?” Bono asked, scooting over to sit beside her, not stopping until his leg was touching hers.
“I fell in love.” She said matter-of-factly. No chuckle as if she were only partly serious, no sarcasm to underscore the bitterness of the word being applied to a situation which led to such a loss for her. It was just the way it was. Love was capable of destroying a persons dreams. “He was the lead. Not only could he dance, but he could sing and he could act.”
“Of course, it didn’t take long for every person involved with the show to start saying that the only reason I was leading the chorus line was because I was sleeping with the star. It didn’t matter that I was a great dancer. I was nineteen and had never danced professionally before. In their minds, my relationship to Henry was the only way I could have gotten the job.”
“But you didn’t get fired for it, did you?”
“No. I didn’t get fired.” She told him, turning to face him and look him in the eye. “Worse. I got pregnant.” Bono’s shock was as clear as if it were written in bold letters across his forehead. “The worst fate a dancer can imagine. An affliction which changes your body dramatically and in the precise ways which inhibit and eventually prohibit any form of serious dance. At least for a year or so.” Her words were bitter now, the tears beginning to burn her eyes. It had been a long time since she had thought about that time in her life. She had never once spoken of it aloud for anyone to hear.
“Even if you can get your body back into shape, a year off was precious time lost in skill and professional contacts. If a woman kept the baby after she had it, it was as close to impossible as a thing gets for her to ever go back to work. Adoption may be an option that solves that problem, but it causes more problems. How can anyone look at the baby in their arms, that brand new life that knows only it’s mother, and give it away?”
Bono shook his head to indicate that he could not imagine such a difficult decision, but remained silent and waited for her to continue.
“So, there I was, a year after the day the show first opened, the day I thought was just the first day of the rest of my life, and the dream I had come close enough to touch was gone. I had a newborn son, a ruined reputation, and no money and no one to depend on.”
“What about the father? What happened to this Henry fellow?” Bono asked, scowling in sympathetic anger for the girl he had not known and the woman who was now sharing her secrets with him.
“He didn’t want anything to do with it. He called me a liar and a slut to anyone with ears, said he was not the father.” She could see the righteous indignation building inside of her young friend and she smiled gently, resting her hand on his. “It’s alright. We all have to live with our choices.” She told him.
“I can’t even imagine how he faces himself in the mirror.” Bono muttered angrily.
“He doesn’t. He died a year or so ago. Pneumonia, some rare form of it. He’d been sick a lot in the past few years, in and out of the hospital all the time. I figure life is a pattern far too big for me to see the whole picture. Maybe it was a blessing, the way things happened with him and I. I can’t imagine having been a widow before age thirty.”
“What about the baby? I’ve not heard you mention a son before.”
“No. He died at three months. Crib death, they called it. No apparent cause whatsoever. He just… stopped breathing. I was asleep on the couch, not four feet away from him, and there wasn’t anything I could…” she choked on her words as a sob escaped her chest unexpectedly. Her hand covered her mouth as her lower lip started to quiver and she felt the sorrow she had locked away inside of herself years ago.
She felt herself surrounded by Bono’s incredible warmth, his arms wrapping around her as naturally as a mother would hold a child or as a husband would comfort his wife. She let herself melt against him, her head on his shoulder and her arms sliding around his waist as she drew in several long, shaky breaths and tried to swallow her tears.
His cheek and chin brushed her hair, the light stubble covering them catching her silky hair like Velcro. One of his unusually thick hands ran up and down along her spine, the other was smoothing out her hair. She filled her lungs with his scent and took comfort in his strength of spirit.
“I’ve never told anyone I worked with since about this.” She told him, her voice a hoarse whisper, her head moving awkwardly up and down against his shoulder when she spoke.
“I won’t say anything.” He promised softly. “I’m honored that you’d tell me.” He added, and Natalie laughed slightly. It hadn’t been her intention to tell him so much, but it had all come spilling out. Never had she talked so easily with anyone as she did with Bono. She reluctantly pulled away from his embrace and wiped her eyes and nose with a tissue.
“So, anyway, I tried to get work as a dancer, again. After Jeremy died, but my reputation was ruined. No one would hire an out of shape dancer who had a history of sleeping around and dropping out of shows while they were in production.”
“I can see why you’re worried about this, but I promise you that Paul isn’t going to be spreading rumors.” He told her, smiling his crooked smile that made her heart swell when she saw it. “And I’ll be the first one to defend you if anything is said. I’m sorry I brought all of this up, I never thought it would be a big deal to steal Holly’s bed for the night.”
“No, I know. I didn’t think too much about it last night, either. If I had, I would’ve kicked you out on your pale Irish ass.” She teased.
“So you were looking at me arse!” he teased right back, making her laugh as her cheeks reddened. It was so easy to be with him. Natalie had never in her life known anyone like Bono. She was certain she never would again.
SG...Nat's story is so heartbreaking.... I see wonderful things in store for her. Great work 
Poor Natalie! This is a good chapter, though (just like all your other ones!), and I'm looking forward to more! 
