"Mister Sloane?" she asked, in a high, perky voice.
In the shadows, she could see the old man lean forward, as if to get a better look at her. "You're not June," he finally said.
"Oh! I'm Darla," she giggled. "June called in sick, she sent me to take care of you."
"Darla, huh?" The old man snorted in amusement. "Figures. Did she tell you what to expect?"
"Yeah...I'm supposed to dress up and read from a script? Just like when I was tryin' to break into Hollywood a few years back," she reminisced with a giggle.
"The articles are in the closet," he said, pointing to it with a gesture. "The script is on that table there."
Darla opened the closet, finding an ugly green jacket and a black pleated skirt that went halfway down her thighs. June had told her that there would be no physical intimacy, so she just slipped the outfit on over her working clothes.
"The wig, and the glasses, girl," the old man rasped. Her face slipping into an innocent 'oops' expression, Darla turned back to the closet, seeing the bust adorned with the extras. Her hair was already quite short, so the auburn wig slipped right on, and the round frames of the glasses were bereft of lenses, which was good, as she got headaches looking through anything else but her contact lenses. Looking herself over once more in the mirror on the inside of the closet's door, she wondered at how plain she looked. Was this really what the old man wanted? She shrugged - he paid June good for this, and if he paid her good as well, she'd dress as ugly as he wanted.
She walked over to the table and picked up the script. "Just start reading?" The old man nodded. "Okay." She cleared her throat a little, then began: "In the interest of moving our relat-"
"Goddamnit!" The old man snapped. "Not so perky!"
Darla recoiled a little at the outburst. "What?"
The old man paused to take a hit from his oxygen mask. "You sound like a damn cheerleader. Act like you're bored."
Darla nodded and began again. Stamping one foot and rolling her eyes, she read: "Ugh...in the interest of moving our -"
"That's contempt, Daria, not boredom. Act like you ARE boring."
"My name's Darla, Mister Sloane," she corrected him. He grunted, and she tried to think about the most boring person she knew, and it struck her: her cousin Edith. When she attended family reunions as a youth, all the little brat wanted to do was stay indoors and read, instead of horse around outside, looking for interesting bugs and going for a swim in the pond and simply exploring the vast area around her uncle's home in Tennessee.
She rolled her neck once, then began to recite in a dull monotone. "In the interest of moving our relationship forward and taking it to a new..." She glanced up, but the old man was silent. "...deeper level, I've decided I'm ready too. Damn it."
"Really? Are you sure?" The old man's voice was a little husky now.
Suppressing a smile, she continued reading. "Sure I'm sure. Of course, there's the issue of...you know."
"No problem! I've got one right here." He held up an object; in the dim light of the room, Darla imagined it to be a wallet. "You know, my parents won't be home..."
"Wait! You just carry one of those things around?" She injected a little emotion into the line, but the old man kept reading his lines, so he must have approved.
"Wishful thinking?" She could now hear his breathing become more labored, and she was pretty sure one of his hands had snaked its way beneath the sheet that covered his lower half.
"God, guys ARE all the same." The contempt crept back into her voice, not over the old man's actions, but because she was really getting into the script and understanding the characters' motivations. Really, it was Hollywood's loss that she had come to Nevada to become a different kind of performer.
"What, responsible?"
"You know, maybe we ARE rushing into this. Forget I brought it up." She wondered if this was just a fantasy of the old man's, or if it was a memory from his younger days, or what.
She would never know. "Forget you brought it uhh...I...oh shit..." At first she thought he had just brought himself to climax, but then he clutched his chest. "Heart..." With that last word, he sagged forward.
"Oh shit!" Darla dropped the script and rushed over to the old man, turning on the nightstand lamp with one hand as she tried to righten him with the other. She soon moved him so that he was laying flat across the bed, and began administering CPR. It was already too late, however...
Eight hundred miles away, Daria Morgendorffer awoke from a deep sleep. "W'izzit?" Jane asked from the other side of the bed, mostly asleep.
"I just had a dream about Tom," Daria said.
"Tom...Tom...oh, high school." Jane let out a chuckle. "That's ancient history, amiga. What happened in the dream?"
"He died. In a really humiliating way."
Jane grinned, pulling her partner of decades back down to the bed. "Well, maybe if we're lucky, your dream will come true."
XXXXXXXXXX
I was inspired a little of the Howard Hughes-esque ending for Tom depicted in the credits of Is It College Yet?, and I wondered if that elderly Tom ever had any other women in his life after Daria. That mutated into "What if being rejected by Daria was the pinnacle of his sexual experience?" There was only one question left to ask: "What if Tom deliberately relived this rejection for the rest of his life, going so far as to hire prostitutes to act out Daria's role?" The answer, of course, was "Death by his own hand".