The Passion Agency

  The Passion Agency

  Rebecca Lee

  Be sure to stop by Rebecca’s blog at http://authorrebeccalee.blogspot.com to receive exclusive previews and offers!

  Chapter 1--Donnatella

  “Hi, I am Donna. My real name is Donnatella. So you can can call me Donnatella. Ha, ha,” the brunette woman either side of 40 (she wasn’t ever going to admit which it was to anybody but the Department of Motor Vehicles.)

  She shook her head and tried to get going again.

  “Hey, my name is Donnatella. My friends call me “Passion” for a nickname believe it or not. Ha, ha.”

  “No. No. No more laughing at your own stuff unless they laugh first. Even then. It makes you look like a total goober from the hood,” she said to herself out loud. “Fuck it, let’s go to the meat and potatoes of the presentation.”

  She took a deep breath, sucked in her mid-section which was smaller years ago before a child and grinding around chasing money to survive came into her life.

  Why are the people with the most money usually in better shape?

  Donnatella “Passion” Casteel could tell you the answer simply enough: more time, less stress trying to just got by, and more access to better foods.

  But she could list a million of them if you gave her all day and maybe some Oak Leaf Pinot from Walmart (or maybe some good bud.) She quit that stuff, but she didn’t. Sort of like how she quit men, but she didn’t.

  Couldn’t find one whom she was really attracted to who wasn’t ultimately attracted to someone younger, like her teenage daughter.

  Live and let live. Turn the other cheek. Get over it.

  She’d done all those things. But when you are a woman of a certain age, the value you placed in yourself is put to the sternest test, because the value society places in you plummets.

  “Because fixated on female youth and beauty. That’s fucking why,” she snarled into the mirror.

  “Wait, that isn’t the speech. You aren’t ever going to get hired that way and you need this job,” Donnatella, Donna for short, said to herself as she straightened her dark suit coat and debated on how low to unbutton her shirt.

  “I am Donnatella Casteel,” she said. “I have the exact background and desire to succeed you’ll find in your best legal assistants all around Los Angeles…..”

  “Shit, no,” she stopped herself again. “How would I know that? I mean really, that sounds like a desperate thing to say.”

  “I am Donnatella Casteel,” she said. “I have always loved the law and the energy of working for a firm. I am anxious to get back into the game after years working clerical for the City of Inglewood. I am a self-starter. I do the work without having to be asked and I do it according to the specifications of my superiors. You ask me to do something? It’s done….”

  She sighed as her big fluffy hair monster of a white cat Fox (named after Los Angeles Laker Rick Fox) came bounding up onto the wood chest in front of the mirror. Fox' back was arched and her meow made it clear she wanted her Donna for a petting session. Like right now.

  “Forget it,” she said aloud again to herself. “No one is going to care. It will come down to how much they really need me, how quickly, and whether there is some younger hotter girl there trying for the job. They can look at her all day and figure it would be better than looking at me.”

  Donna Casteel. In her mind, a past-her-prime ex-sexy thing now with a pouchy front gut, thighs of cellulite, and saggy breasts.

  But she did have a very rare ability honed to perfection. It was an ability she was unaware of but was on full display in everything she did.

  It was the uncanny ability to defeat herself before she even started.

  It was not something she even fully grasped in herself as a skill. Because everyone she was around, from her friends, to her mom who lived halfway across the country, to her two living siblings, were all mired deeper in that slump than she was.

  The nickname “Passion”, as her friends once called her (and many still did out of habit) was more crude parody and cruel joke, than anything that actually fit

  She made her way to a full-length mirror in the little bathroom of her 2 bedroom, 1 bath prairie style home in Inglewood off Manchester somewhere near the LA Forum.

  It was a typical decent neighborhood with occasional break-ins or domestic disputes. A shooting every year over drugs maybe. Some years none. The kind of neighborhood where you chose to live because you likely got a deal on the house as a hand-me-down, or you got it outright free.

  It was an old house with old house problems. The drier climate and mild winters of southern California hid a lot of ills in a house that would be big trouble in say Cleveland, Ohio with the freezing nights and howling winds. All in all Donna and her daughter were happy enough there.

  Her daughter was a strange one and she loved her. But it didn’t look or feel like Donna envisioned it when she was a little girl. They had an uneasy but comfortable peace. When it came right down to it, neither of them wanted the stress or drama of doing anything to make it better by actually talking.

  That was kind of the theme for Donna Casteel in the year 2012. There wasn't much meaningful happening in her life. Things were just happening to her. She wasn't choosing and she wasn't acting.

  Life was just things she had to do to keep a roof over her head.

  She had to go grab this legal assistant’s job she didn’t want for starters.

  She couldn’t have felt more ambivalent or uninspired by it all. But that state was so normal at this point in her life, she just went with it. She plopped down on her couch in the living area which connected with the dining area which connected with the kitchen. With so much of this and that piled up on the table, next to the couch, and near the two openings to the kitchen, there was no real way to know where one room ended and one began.

  She put her head back and let her mind drift while she petted Fox the big and lazy, but lovable ball of fur.

  She thought often of how life was seemingly so promising all those years ago.

  She had a man whom she believed loved her. He had an entry level job out at the airport. Baggage and stuff. Right out of high school. She was beautiful, young, and very pregnant.

  By miracle they even had their own little apartment closer inside the City. A bunch of blocks south of the University, but on the East side of the 110 freeway. It was a start. She could have had any man she wanted back in those days. A daring seductive mix of Italian, Black and Filipino in a five and a half foot frame. She was no athlete but didn’t need to be. Likewise, she was no great scholar, but it never mattered.

  She had Darry (short for Darrigan Casteel) and he had her.

  The first time he laid eyes on her at the very beginning of Junior year, she knew. She was sitting outside in a group of her friends and in he walked into that little hornet's nest like he was the king of the school yard. He talked only to her and didn’t care if it offended them.

  He was tall, sort of lanky, and looked Hispanic, but it could have been Asian.

  He was no pin-up model but he had presence. He looked into Donnatella’s eyes and she melted. Deep down she was sold. All he had to do to cause her to fall harder and deeper for him was to keep whatever he was doing.

  Life was deceptively simple in those days. It’s that way for most young people in love. You were together and you loved it, so you just began to be together more and more.

  Donna got tons of sexual experience but scant life experience. She never realized that it was even remotely possible that the man she fell for when she was seventeen, would be gone and out of her life when she wasn’t even twenty.

  He was on to the next girl.

  Now she daydreamed about that first meeting often. Not because
she had a deep longing for Darry, but because she wondered why she made the choices she did.

  She had that one saving grace of emotional intelligence going for her.

  It was no small gift.

  She actively wondered how her different choices could have caused things to turn out differently. She at least believed things could have been different and it was her fault that she wasn't happy.

  She didn’t know it at the time while sat there dreading another interview for another crappy job. But this mental habit would stand to give her opportunities to experience things her lack of formal education, state of financial “brokeness”, and general attitude of malaise, should have never allowed her to experience.

  The future was potentially very bright but she had no way of knowing it.

  What she knew as she emerged from her daydream, is she would never make it to Carson for her interview on time. plus the damn cat had left white hair all over her black skirt and suit coat.

  Deep down she just wanted to go back to sleep and blow off this interview.

  Chapter 2--Love, Sex, Sadness

  Across from the Los Angeles Forum, basketball arena for the Lakers back in the late 90s, there was a restaurant that could best be described as one part Waffle House, one part Dennys, and one part health code violation waiting to happen.

  Breakfast was served around the clock and everything was heart-cloggingly greasy off the griddle, no matter what was ordered. It was called “All Night Cafe”

  It attracted mostly locals but since the Lakers would practice sometimes at the Forum rather than their training complex in nearby El Segundo, you’d get a special very rich visitor or two. Professional basketball players. The catch of all catches for poor women in Los Angeles or similar big cities.

  Seems even your most well-off athletes wanted a taste of home. For a woman working the second of her three jobs like Donnatella Casteel, the brushes with celebdom did a lot to break up the monotony of mostly oddball and poor tipping Inglewood locals.

  Inglewood was and remains a city which had passed it’s prime many years ago as a destination suburb for the well-off middle and upper class in Los Angeles. Situated strategically between the central city of Los Angeles and the more well off communities to the South and West such as Hermosa Beach and Palos Verdes, Inglewood had slid slowly into a place for people looking for nothing in particular except to get by and get by safely.

  The population was either older, retired, and getting by, or young and struggling. Over time, it had acquired a reputation as a spillover community from the urban roughness of South Central Los Angeles.

  Thanks to the generosity of her mother who had moved out and let Donna and and her little daughter Brea have her small two bedroom dwelling, Inglewood was home.

  The “All Night Cafe”, wasn't a bad place to supplement Donna Casteel’s income. She worked weekly as a clerk with the City Water department collecting payments, and handling incoming calls from people explaining why they couldn’t pay a bill.

  She worked nights as a babysitter/nanny for a family out by the beach.

  In between. she held the mostly uneventful drudgery existence of a short-order waitress to low-income clientele. But at least it was clost to her house.

  The boredom all changed one Saturday morning when two tall white men wearing matching warm-up outfits came rolling up in a dark Ford Bronco and entered the restaurant looking for some breakfast.

  Donna took the order and although she was a fair sports fan, she didn’t know the identity of either man. She assumed they were basketball players because of their height and their nice car. She did her usual decent and pleasant job taking their order from a corner booth. One of the players, was named Mikel Torexion and he was just there for a tryout. The other was was a little more well known.

  Chris Talion was a last man on the bench for the Lakers but wouldn’t likely hold that spot the next season. He was handsome with dark hair and a Hollywood jaw. T

  hat day he didn’t say much but tried to make jokes with Donna who was a little too tired to care. Turns out he had heard about this pretty waitress from a couple of his buddies who weren’t with the team, but had come to the restaurant.

  They told Chris the stats. She brunette, dark, sexy, and with a great body and as the guys in the group liked to say, a “slammin” booty.

  Chris acted shy but it was all an act. He didn’t have a serious girlfriend because it wasn’t necessary. Every night there would be set of willing beautiful young women of all shapes, colors, and sizes waiting outside the player’s exit at whatever arena the team was at. These women would require no more than a pulse in return, provided you were a pro basketball player or “baller”.

  It was that easy and Chris Talion was enjoying the lifestyle to the fullest during his season on the end of the Laker’s bench. There was always room for more and he put his eyes and mind on Donna right away.

  When he asked her for her number, she was flattered and didn’t try to play like there was a reason she couldn’t or wouldn’t. Having received word from the dishwasher in the back that he was a pro and Laker, Donna knew her odds of ever seeing him again were pretty low. Bottom line: playing hard to get wasn’t a good idea when a catch like that was on the line

  He called that night after their game ended at around ten and her along for a burger and a drive to the coast. She readily agreed. That’s how it was. A poor woman and guy with lots of money and prestige asking you out, you didn’t quibble. Donna told herself she would never jump in a car with a man she didn’t really know, but here existed one of the very acceptable exceptions.

  If she didn’t, some other girl would.

  Donna Casteel was looking hard for a better life in her early 30s when she met her baller.

  That night after they reached the coast, he drove them to a seaside bar in Hermosa Beach where they downed drinks.

  They got along famously.

  Donna had some sports knowledge and even more street smarts. She could always talk about everything.

  She talked about it being her dream to start her own business (hair and nails salon) and he talked about nothing much but how interesting she was. He was a Stanford grad so he did have a brain. Clearly. But he wasn’t on the date for the intellectual exercise.

  Chris saw what he wanted and he bided his time figuring he’d get it that night.

  After about an hour and a couple drinks apiece, Chris suggested they go find a local room and spend the night. Donna put up little resistance.

  Out of that night of passion, a relationship that lasted for well over a decade was born. It was still continuing but with an ugly subplot on the day Donna headed out to Carson for her job interview.

  Donna had nothing to lose and was rolling the dice that this one great catch could be something more. She knew what she was doing. She figured that maybe if she played along and rolled the dice it might become an actual relationship.

  It did. TFor large chunks of time, Chris, though no longer a Laker, would crash out at Donna’s small home. He even moved in for a spells beginning in 2011.

  This cohabitation is where the relationship took a permanent and unsavory turn of events. But it was also the starting point of the path to real passion for Donna Casteel.

  …

  Donna always saw herself as a hands-on and caring parent who loved her daughter Brea with all the passion she could in the limited time she had in her day. Being lower middle class with little formal education and no great earning prospects in the future, she either kept working jobs she hated or go on welfare.

  Like a lot of people from her economic status, she qualified for a lot less “free stuff” than she thought she could. She knew because she checked. One clerk put it to her straight.