Different Circles

“Nothing to that either,” Laura said, fighting to keep looking Neesh in the eye as she lied to her. She knew she was a terrible liar and hated doing it, but that was not any of Neesh’s business and it was not her place to decide who should know Celia’s secrets.

Neesh nodded, seemingly buying the lie. “A pity,” she said. “But understandable. I saw that picture of the pilot she was supposed to be getting it on with. A little masculine looking for my tastes.”

“Suzie is cool,” Laura said. “And she’s not as butch looking as that picture suggests.”

Another nod. “What about those other stories?” Neesh asked. “The ones about you and the groupies out on tour. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to—just say no comment—but the thought of you having a bunch of slutty bitches come to your hotel room to eat you out is really fuckin’ hot, Teach.”

Laura smiled. It was her place to decide who to share her personal information with, and Neesh was a friend who would understand and be discrete with the information. “Yeah,” she said. “That happened. Not quite as much as they suggested, but with fair regularity.”

“Goddamn!” Neesh said, clearly aroused by the admission. “You have got to tell me about this. How does it work? You just go pull some slut from the audience, or what?”

And so, Laura explained the intricacies of how a traveling musician hooked up with a lesbian groupie out on the road. She made a point to explain the unbreakable, set-in-stone rule about how you never kiss a groupie. Neesh listened quite attentively, and her own nipples got hard as she heard the tale.

“And Jake knows about all this?” she asked.

“He knows,” she assured her. “It’s part of our deal.”

“Girlfriend,” Neesh said, “I really do envy you on this matter.”

“Being able to do that kept me from going crazy with lust out on the road and maybe being tempted to try something with the opposite sex. Jake would definitely not approve of that. Neither would I.”

She nodded. “Not that that keeps the fucking media from speculating about it,” she said bitterly.

“Yeah,” Laura sighed. “I know what you mean.”

What she meant was the latest unsubstantiated rumor being passed around about the little bundle in Laura’s belly. Shortly after the appointment with Dr. Vargo in which it was confirmed that Laura was pregnant, she and Jake released a statement through Pauline announcing the particulars of the situation in as sterile and straightforward and, most of all, briefly a manner as possible. Most of the entertainment media printed and aired the announcement as written the next day. After that, the speculation and rumormongering began.

Though, as Pauline had assured them, no tabloid, newspaper, or entertainment show dared publish anything about the underage transvestite story since it was provably refutable and would thus open them up to libel and slander charges (though the offending email continued to circulate and the story continued to be passed far and wide by word of mouth), the stories about her pregnancy were a completely different monster. The first had been that Laura had conceived via artificial insemination because Jake had become sterile from all the drugs he had taken over the years and all the STDs he had contracted. The next had been that she had conceived accidentally as a result of birth control failure just before an orgy the couple attended (it was taken as a given in the entertainment press that Jake and Laura regularly attended orgies) and they were unsure who the father even was. And now, the latest rumor that had appeared first in the American Watcher, and then the LA Times and on Entertainment Reports, was that they knew exactly who the father was: Gordon Paladay, known to the world as Bigg G, who was a regular visitor to the Kingsley’s clifftop house in San Luis Obispo county according to the locals (G had only been there one time, Neesh still had not been there at all). The idea that Jake was actually the father of little Ziggy and that the two of them had actually wanted to create her was never even suggested. And, since there was no way to prove that reporters filing these stories or presenting them on television knew that the rumors were untrue, there was nothing the Kingsleys or the Paladays could do except to declare the story the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard when their agents were contacted for comment on the matter.

“Where do they even come up with shit like that?” Neesh asked. “Do a group of them just sit down and make things up, or what?”

“No, that would be unethical journalism,” Laura said angrily. “Instead, they go find someone on the street, someone who does not even know us on anything more than a superficial level, and ask them their opinion on the matter. God only knows who came up with the artificial insemination story, or the orgy story, but Jake and I are pretty sure it was some of the locals in Oceano that fed them the story about Gordon being the father.”

“Yeah?” Neesh said. “What makes you think that?”