He seemed bemused about the whole thing. Gay pandas. Who knew?
“Can you imagine watching panda sex as a part of your daily job?” I asked Vanessa as we walked through the bird enclosure next. Lachlan was way more excited about the bird than he had been about the pandas. He was flapping his arms excitedly and making bird noises from his stroller. “What a weird thing to worry about.”
She smirked. “Says the guy who bangs on things for a living.”
“I bang on things rhythmically. And I sing,” I replied. “It’s art.”
Her smile widened. “Ah yes, much more normal.”
She was right, of course. There was nothing normal about my job. I’d started college thinking I’d get a practical degree that would set me up for a standard nine to five job. That hadn’t quite worked out like I expected.
“Normal is overrated,” I told her. “Who would want to be normal? Normal is a setting on the dryer.”
Vanessa looked like she was about to agree with me, but just then, a woman stepped out from the crowd and blocked our bath. Without warning, she threw her soda on Vanessa, catching her full across the face and chest with what looked to be Big Red. Vanessa sputtered, clearly shocked and confused.
“I know who you are! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” the woman hissed. “Go slither back under whatever rock you came from!”
I was absolutely frozen in shock. Vanessa drew back her left arm, presumably to punch her assailant. Her arm was shaking, I noticed, but the look on her face was resolute. Thankfully, the security guys that had accompanied us were faster than she was, physically separating Vanessa from the woman (who was still yelling) and quickly pulling us all away. We were whisked out of the zoo entirely and stuffed into an SUV before we could process anything.
Lachlan was crying, Jason was livid, Wendy was frightened, and I was still struggling to catch up to what I’d just witnessed. I caught the look on Vanessa’s wet face, though, and it shook me to the core. She looked torn between wanting to murder someone and wanting to disappear completely. She was wearing the same bleak expression as we drove away. I had no idea what to say to her.
Maybe normal wouldn’t be so bad after all.
30
Vanessa
All that effort to dye my hair, and I still got doused in Big Red. It wasn’t as bad as blood, but red soda doesn’t come out of white cotton very easily at all. I could only scrub, soak, and hope for the best. I should have worn black.
Thankfully, perhaps, I didn’t have a long time to dwell on losing another piece of clothing to Ian-related shenanigans for very long. I had to talk to the cops. The bemused pair of Atlanta city cops were barely able to finish half-heartedly taking my statement before I needed to go to the venue and start scoping out tomorrow night’s shoot. I just wanted to focus on my work and put it all behind me, but it wasn’t possible. I had to relive the whole thing for the police.
Ian had been very good all afternoon. He’d stayed with me, holding my hand and comforting me as best as he could, probably worried about me being alone. I saw that he was frustrated, angry, and confused by the police’s indifferent reaction. After the way I’d been treated in Dallas, I wasn’t surprised by their lukewarm inquiry.
“Well, at least you’ll be leaving town tomorrow, ma’am,” I was told by the bored-looking officer. “I’m sorry this happened to you, but these things do happen around famous people and at least no one was injured.”
You would have thought Axial Tilt just randomly spawned crazy people or something. Maybe they did. After all, I was there.
The woman who splashed me was charged with misdemeanor assault, but I really had no interest in seeing her punished. Without me wanting to pursue her, it was likely that the charges would be dropped. Ian seemed confused about that, too.
“Why don’t you want to press charges?” he asked me after the police had gone. “She assaulted you!”
I shrugged. I was all out of anger now. It had drained out of me sometime during the ride back to the hotel. “She threw a soda on me. It wasn’t a grenade. I’ll survive.”
His eyes glinted, and I suspected a lot of emotion was simmering just beneath his placid expression. “But she—”
I shook my head at him. There was no reason to get so worked up. “She’s just an idiot that believes everything she reads. That’s the bigger crime. Did you hear what the police said about her statement?”
Ian’s expression was torn. “Yeah, she sounds like she’s been low-key stalking Jason for years, and thought he’d see her and realize she was his soulmate. She’s obviously mentally unstable.”
“Exactly. Jail isn’t the right place for her. She needs to get some counseling or something. And maybe to lay off the gossip sites for a while.”
During my time as an EMT, I’d seen the system fail the mentally unstable time and time again. Putting them into the criminal justice system inevitably made things so much worse. Terrible memories tugged at my awareness and I shoved them back down. I couldn’t afford to deal with it right now. I needed to scope out the venue for the show tomorrow. That’s what I really needed to be focusing on. Not the woman at the zoo. And definitely not my accident.
“You’re handling this all a bit too well,” Ian said, reading my mind.
I swallowed. “Yeah. I’ll probably melt down later.” I sighed. “All of this reminds me way too much of…” I stared at the scar on my arm. “Let’s just say this isn’t the first time a crazy person has attacked or hurt me. Or nearly the worst.”
I saw Ian teetering on the edge of asking me. Indecision played over his features and then he took a deep breath. I steeled myself for the inevitable.
“What actually happened to you?” he asked. “I’ve been curious for a while, but I—”
“You were afraid to ask because you didn’t want to set me off?” My voice was dry.
He shook his head. “I didn’t want you to feel pressured to share something so personal or painful if you didn’t want to. I still don’t.”
Oh. He wasn’t being snarky and rude. I was being snarky and rude. I should stop that. Ian was being kind. He deserved the benefit of the doubt.
“But you want to know?” I asked. It sucked how small and frightened my voice sounded.
“Only if you want to tell me.”
I took a deep breath and made the conscious, terrifying decision to tell Ian the truth. Would he still want me if he knew? Or was I so much damaged goods? There was only one way to find out. I reached out to hold his hand for comfort, but whether it was his or mine, I wasn’t sure. Maybe both.
“It’s not a story I tell that often,” I said. “But here goes. I was on a shift with my partner, Sam. He was my partner at work, but he was also my fiancé. My college sweetheart.” It felt odd to be telling Ian about Sam. Very odd. I shook my head and tried to stay focused. “Anyway, we were on a shift and we picked up a guy that was in mental health crisis, but also on drugs. He’d passed out, but he came to as we were transporting him. He pulled out a gun. Sam was in the back. He was hit in the chest. I was driving.” My voice sounded disembodied and robotic in my own ears. “Gunshots are very loud. I lost control of the ambulance and we careened into a ditch. Sam died before help came. I made it out before the explosion, but I lost my arm.”
Ian didn’t seem to know how to react. I knew it was a lot to take in. I stared down at our joined hands. “I’m sorry,” he said eventually. “I knew it must have been something horrible, but I didn’t think—” he trailed off.
“The guy went to jail,” I said. “It took what felt like forever, but he’s gone to jail for a very long time.”
The trial was hell, but thankfully nobody asked me to testify. They probably knew I couldn’t do it. Well, either that or the evidence was so extremely clear they didn’t need me to.
“Did it make you feel better that he went to jail?” Ian stared down at his feet. I wondered if he felt like he should have gone to jail after his accident. After all, someone di
ed. I couldn’t imagine that Ian being in jail would have been justice, but the expression on his face indicated that he might not agree. “Did it?” he repeated.
“Some. But only a little bit.” I nodded. “And mostly it was too late. It was very bad at first. I woke up and my whole life had changed. I’d gone from planning my wedding and thinking I was going to have one type of future, and it was just… vanished. I was lying in a hospital bed, one of my arms didn’t work at all, and I had burns all over my legs. I wanted to die for a while, just because it would have been easier than living with the truth.”
The weight of the realization had nearly crushed me. Even now, more than a year and half later, it threatened to smash me into a thousand little pieces. I took a deep, shuddering breath.
I’d thought I’d be able to talk about it. I really did. After all the therapy and the physical therapy and the time, I’d honestly believed that I could have a genuine, earnest conversation about the accident without melting into a puddle of tears and guilt. But apparently that was not the case at all.
Hot tears burned in the corners of my eyes, and God, I hated crying. But hating the tears couldn’t do anything to stop them. They brimmed over my self-control and streamed down my face, blurring my mascara and making me feel weak.
Ian wrapped his arms around me, holding me against his chest while I sobbed like a baby. It felt better to cry than I wanted to admit. Eventually the strength of his arms and the slow, steady beating of his heart calmed me down.
I felt foolish and hysterical, but when I drew back and saw his face, it held nothing but understanding and kindness. And that just set me off again, but for a different reason. I knew I was falling in love with him, and even though I felt a real connection between us, it scared the shit out of me because our lives were on different tracks. There was no future for us. Only pain.
31
Ian
Vanessa was napping in my bed when a knock at my door sent me scrambling across the unnecessarily large hotel suite to answer it before she woke up. I’d carried her over and tucked her in after she’d fallen asleep. She was absolutely drained, and I could understand why. I didn’t think anything could wake her, but I also didn’t want to chance it. I shut the door to the bedroom and sprinted to the front door.
It was Don at my door. He strode inside and took a seat before I could even stop him or tell him that Vanessa was sleeping off her nightmare afternoon in the other room.
“So, I’ve got some bad news,” he said, perching on a chair, “and I don’t want you to freak out.”
I didn’t want any news at the moment. I definitely didn’t want or need any bad news. In fact, I didn’t want Don in my hotel room at all. Unfortunately, Don was impossible to deter. It was going to be quicker and easier to listen to him than to throw him out. “What news?” I asked warily.
He cocked his head to the side as if evaluating me. “Well, it’s actually good news, but I think you’ll probably interpret it as being bad news. Sometimes you see reason. Or maybe you won’t. It’s always hard to say with you.”
I could feel myself frowning already. “Do you think you could be any more cryptic?”
“Thornton’s people have finally talked him into a contract.”
My heart leapt into my throat. “I thought we were done with Thornton.”
When he’d stormed out at South by Southwest, it had been with Tom and Jason hurling insults at him. His entire attitude from the moment he arrived until the moment he stomped off like a petulant asshole had been unpleasant. Unlike Vanessa, who’s style was to stay entirely out of the way and work around us while we did our thing, Thornton wanted to direct. And by direct, he meant micromanage and be a huge pain in the ass. Unfortunately for him, rock concerts don’t lend themselves to meticulous blocking and scene composition. We just kind of did our thing, and we liked it that way. Vanessa seemed to have an instinctive understanding of that (although one would think anyone would be able to grasp the concept). Thornton, however, did not ‘get us,’ and his pushy, prissy demeanor won him no fans.
“Well, he’s back,” Don was explaining. “Look, the guy wins Oscars like Jason wins blondes.”
I rolled my eyes. “Jason is married now.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Sure, and I don’t see how it matters. We have Vanessa now.”
Don took a deep breath. “This is what I was worried about.”
“Isn’t she under contract?” I asked.
Don nodded. “Yes, and thanks to your genius of a brother, it’s heavily in our favor. We can keep all her footage and terminate her at any time.”
“But she hasn’t done anything wrong.”
Don looked at me like I was a moron. “Look, I think Vanessa’s great. She’s very nice, and even nicer to look at. Her videos are good. But she’s sort of a liability,” he told me. “Axial Tilt is going to be on the local news tonight because of the incident at the zoo today.”
I ground my teeth. “That wasn’t Vanessa’s fault!”
“I know.” But clearly, he didn’t care. “Honestly, I like Vanessa. But she’s not going to win any Oscars anytime soon.”
“Thornton won’t win any Oscars for filming our tour, either. The last time I checked, there’s no category for that.”
“I think you’re missing the point.”
I could feel myself getting angry, little by little. Usually I was reasonably patient, but Don was rapidly depleting my reserves with his bullshit. “Alright. So, enlighten me.”
“We’re going to cut Vanessa loose. She’s still going to get paid for the entire tour, and Thornton can edit her footage into something that’s honestly probably going to be a lot better. She’ll be fine, and we’ll get everything we want.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed. Thornton did win Oscars, but this wasn’t a documentary about penguins or an experimental art film. These were rock concerts and Vanessa seemed to have an intuitive eye for how to make them look damn good. We hadn’t even seen what Thornton would produce.
“Thornton might produce absolute garbage,” I told Don. “And even if he is the genius he claims to be, Vanessa is already here, now.”
Don sat up straight and looked me in the eye. “So is Thornton.”
I swallowed. “You’ve already brought him here?” I took a deep breath.
“Yes.” He had the balls to look proud of the fact. I wanted to punch him, but I didn’t.
“Does the rest of the band know?” I asked.
“They do now. I texted them. This just happened.”
“And they support it?” I had a hard time imagining that they would. Everyone liked Vanessa. And just getting rid of someone we’d made a commitment to was a shitty thing to do, even if there was another option.
Don shrugged. “It’s irrelevant. This is my department. This is the business end of the music business. I manage things like this. You all just play the shows.” He clearly thought he was smarter than me, and while it might be true, I hated him in that moment. I wasn’t just a monkey that played the drums. I was a person with thoughts, feelings, and opinions of my very own. I didn’t appreciate having my decisions made for me.
“You didn’t come here to discuss this, did you?” He wanted rid of Vanessa. It was obvious. He didn’t care at all about how this would affect her. He didn’t care about how this would make her feel. I knew it wasn’t his job to worry about that, but I worried about it. More and more, it was all I worried about.
Don shook his head. “No. The decision is made. I’m here to tell you, so we can both tell Vanessa, because I know you two have a… well, a thing. But this is a done deal.”
The sound of a door opening, startled us both. “There’s no need for that,” Vanessa said, stepping out of the bedroom. She was still wearing the T-shirt of mine that she’d changed into because her own was stained red. “I’ll get my stuff and go.”
32
Vanessa
“Vanessa, wait,” Ian said, following me down
the hall and toward the elevator. “Please wait.”
I shook my head back and forth with enough violence to leave me lightheaded.
“Just let me go, Ian.” I stomped forward without looking back, feeling weirdly out of my body. After breaking down this afternoon, I was fresh out of tears. In fact, I was fresh out of emotions, period. I felt empty. Numb. For once, I was glad I was numb.
My stubby little legs were no match for Ian’s long ones. Catching up to me was probably easy. He slid into the elevator before I could punch the button to close it, and as the doors snapped shut, I saw Don walking out of Ian’s hotel room with a guilty look on his face. He was an okay guy. I knew he didn’t want me to find out that way. Sometimes things just go wrong.
“Vanessa, we’ll figure this out,” Ian promised me, turning to face me in the elevator as we crawled down four floors to where my room was. This felt like the slowest elevator ride of my entire life. I could have walked down eight flights of stairs more quickly than this slow-ass elevator. “I’m not going to let this happen.” His expression was resolute, but I didn’t have the heart to hope.
“I heard what Don said,” I told Ian. My voice sounded emotionless. “It’s already happened. The best thing I can do now is get out of here before I humiliate myself any further.” I took a deep, shuddering breath.
“You haven’t humiliated yourself at all.”
I shook my head again. “Just let me go.”
“I don’t want to.” He seemed halfway surprised to hear himself say it. I know I was.
The elevator finally dinged open and I bolted down the hallway toward my room. Ian chased after me.
“This is fine,” I told him. I wasn’t lying. It was. “I’ll be fine.”
Ian looked less than convinced. “But—”
I cut him off. “Look, Ian,” I said, fumbling with my key card and then shoving the door open, “Don is right. My contract takes care of me. I’ll get paid for the full length of the tour. I’m going to be okay.”
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