Waking Up in Vegas(23)
“Well, yeah. Say she hooks up with a guy who loves a full, succulent ass—once her clothes come off, and he finds out hers is made of memory foam, he’ll most likely finish having sex with her, but he won’t care if she gets off and he definitely won’t be calling her again.”
“You don’t need to illustrate with hand gestures, Mr. Morgan.” She cleared her throat with a dainty ahem. “Are you trying to tell me that all men are that shallow?”
“All? No, but I can tell you this: if you go fishing with fake bait and the trout snaps your line, he may have the rubber worm, but he’s not exactly getting the meal. He’s just sore where the hook gouged him and he learns to be more cautious in the future when something looks good enough to eat.”
I wouldn’t place a bet on it, but I think I heard a faint growling sound as she flipped to another page in the stack.
“Explain this one, please.” She glanced up at me, then returned her eyes to the page. “Mr. Morgan groped my breasts.”
“Who wrote that?”
“Would there be more than one person with this complaint?”
She had me there and I just shrugged.
“And?”
I sat back, crossing an ankle over my knee. “Can we agree that, second only to Los Angeles, we live in the most body-conscious city in the United States?”
“With all the people vying to be performers here? Yes, I can concede that.”
“That makes plastic surgery cheap here, and plentiful. I work with three women who’ve had augmentation done. At one time, there were five, all floating their fake titties around the station.”
“They’re called breasts, Mr. Morgan. And women talking about their breast enlargements still does not give you the right to grab them.” She’d started tapping the top of her pen on the sheaf of complaints. Guess I’d better be more careful with the language.
“Ah, but that’s just the point. They want everyone to see, touch, and admire their high-priced acquisitions. On any given day, there are bare breasts being flashed in that building at least twice. In my defense, I never touched one fake tata uninvited.”
“Then why would anyone complain?”
“I may have, on occasion, done more than the polite one-finger poke.”
“Why, if that’s what everyone else was doing?” The pen-tap sped up to cha-cha tempo.
“They would ask if they felt real. Now, I don’t know what kind of foreplay you’re into, but for me, poking a woman’s breast with my index finger is not even on the list. So…”
“So you groped them.”
“I prefer to call it a reality check.”
She made another note in another margin, then shuffled the pages until she came to one with the corner folded down.
“Explain having sex in the women’s bathroom.”
“What, like the mechanics of it?”
She hit me with a one-browed glare and I guess that was all the answer she was going to give. I tried a different question. “Was Alex the one who wrote that? Because it was her last day, and she was on her lunch break. So technically, she was off the clock.”
She responded without checking the sheet that was lying in front of her. “No. The complaint was from someone who walked in on it.”
“And that would be harassing that other woman… how?”
“She was unable to use the bathroom.”
“There are three other bathrooms in that building.”
“It’s still inappropriate.”
“It’s not like we invited her to watch, or participate. We were two consenting adults, entertaining ourselves on our own time, behind a locked handicap stall door.” Her eyes narrowed and I could see I was not winning this argument. “I don’t normally even date the women I work with, let alone have sex with them. This was a one-off, and it was her last day, so Alex doesn’t count.”
“In your book.”
“In my book, yes.”
“Let’s get to the reason you’ve been sent here, shall we? You called your co-host a porn star, in front of other people.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I’d tend to believe Bill Kalani over you at this point, and he heard you say it.”
“I may have said it, but it wasn’t me calling her that.”
She just looked at me and blinked a few times.
“She said that she thought that I thought she sounded like a porn star, and I repeated it. This is all a huge misunderstanding.”
“Where would Jensen get such an idea?”
“I may have mumbled something that she overheard.”
“Does it happen often, this thinking out loud? Because while you are free to think what you like, when you say it to others, that is where it becomes harassment.”