A Little Dinged Up (gxg)

Chapter 33

I'd like to say that the rest of the week was uneventful, but that would be stretching the truth. Regardless of how sore we were after our prom night, we still had to work the next day. Fortunately, Ava had been right about the easy shooting schedule letting her sit down. I didn't have it quite as easy, and I was standing about for a while, and I was pretty sure the pain meant that Ava had somehow bruised my poor uterus in her vigor. On the good side, when I mentioned that to her that evening, she spent almost an hour kissing it to make sure it was better. Well, French kissing the entry to it anyway.

We did finally shoot a scene they needed me for later that week, and Sean was almost killed. No, not by me. We walked through it half a dozen times, and yet when we went to actually shoot the fight scene, he didn't pull his punch and unexpectedly hit my right in my healing ribs, dropping me like a sack of potatoes. Once Ava made sure I was okay, she lit into Sean, and I thought she was going to scratch his eyes out. But I was able to get up and hold her back before she could.

Instead, we had Miki interview him, and the moron pretty much admitted badmouthing Ava to the press because she was turning down his dates. Like I said, he wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier. The results of that interview got him a long overdue discussion with the director, who pretty much put him on a short leash from then on. I guess that was like visiting the principal after fucking up in school.

Miki had killed it that week anyway. She did a review of the tattoo parlor that Liv was doing her guest artist gig at, as well as a few local bars for the music and a couple of food trucks too. Between her posts and her TMZ job, her channel was taking off. It didn't hurt that she looked so damned cute too, because she would just reel people in with questions and her adorable smile and then ambush them with the hard questions. I was going to have to be better prepared the next time we had an interview with her, because whether she was a friend or not, I couldn't ask her to pull punches.

Speaking of Liv's guest gig, she'd had an amazing time. She got the word out that she was doing that, and all kinds of requests came in for her to make art for. She ended up doing over a dozen pieces of ink art over the two days, including one that was similar to my black lotus, but with a beautiful iris on it for a young female soldier. I never knew it, but evidently, they refer to valor, wisdom and hope, and I thought that was a pretty amazing choice for a soldier to get.

The best thing was, Miki and Liv also arranged to get the pickup truck on Saturday, and somehow convinced Ava that the plan wasn't completely insane. I never realized you could rent a pickup truck from U-Haul, but they're a lot cheaper than renting a convertible for the day, and the bed of the truck was a lot bigger of a landing area than the back seat of a tiny car. Ava even suggested putting a twin sized mattress in the back for a safer landing, and mentioned we'd need to cover up all of the U-Haul lettering since we were going to use it in a commercial. We got a whole bunch of butcher's paper and taped everything up evenly, so it didn't look too bad, and then we got to go do some craziness.

Just south of Nashville is the town of Franklin, which is where one end of a 444 mile road called the Natchez Trace Parkway starts. Now this road follows an old path used for hundreds of years for travelling between Tennessee and Louisiana. But as much history as it might have, I wasn't there for it. I was there for a very cool bridge. The Natchez Trace Parkway Bridge was 150 feet high where it spanned a valley called Birdsong Hollow. It was a very cool double arch bridge, and conveniently had railings that were under three feet high. It looked terrifying when you were standing on it, but I had my trusty flying suit on, and was planning on jumping anyway.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Ava asked while hugging me from behind. "This looks really fucking high!"

"Yeah, this view makes me queasy too, so I'm glad we'll be done quick," I admitted. "And it is a lot of money, more than my other sponsors pay me in a year. I don't have the sweet actress money." I reached around and grabbed her butt, making her squeal as she jumped into me.