by Roxy Reid
“Never send an ex-girlfriend to do a reporter’s work,” Shaun mutters.
“Shaun. Listen to me. I have looked into this man. I’ve looked really fucking close. You know what this story, and this paycheck, would mean to a photographer starting off.”
He’s silent.
“I’m telling you there’s nothing to find,” I say.
Shaun sighs heavily, “Fine. Well, shit. See if you can at least get some photos of him drunk, or with a girl, or something. Even that will help beef up the whole ‘no songs for the album’ thing.”
I tap on the glass, nervously, “That’s the thing, Shaun. He’s writing again. And fast. He played a new song for the crowd last night, and they loved it. He’ll have the whole album written before you go to print. You don’t have a story.”
“WHAT?! What the hell, De Luca? This is my cover story for next month’s issue. I had it on good authority he hadn’t written a damn thing. Hell, he even reached out to Zane Wright—”
That’s when the other shoe drops. It’s not someone from the tour who’s the source. It’s Zane. That utter slimeball.
“Look, there’s still a way to salvage this,” I say. “You run a good story about him. One of those glowing profiles you like to do of up and coming indie artists. I’ve got some gorgeous photos of him. And I know I could get him to do an interview about the songs for his next album. They’re really, really good. You’d be the first to have the scoop.”
“What do I look like, a P.R. campaign? I’ll just run the empty album story, but move it off the cover. If we make it a smaller story, people won’t notice how little we have. Maybe I can get quotes from some of those jerks he’s fired over the years. Make him look like a short-tempered wack job. That’d be something.”
I’m losing Shaun. I’m losing him, and he’s going to run a story that hurts Finn, with or without my help.
I press my palm to the glass, trying to think.
It feels like a lifetime since I stood at a different window in New York and tried to convince Shaun I was tough enough to take Finn Ryan down.
“What if I can get him to talk about the writer’s block?” I ask desperately. “‘Finn Ryan Opens Up’? Pair it with some really sexy shirtless photos? You’d sell magazines.”
“Maybe if it was a nude photo shoot,” Shaun says gloomily. “You think Finn Ryan would get naked for you?”
I hold back a hysterical laugh, thinking of all the times I’ve seen Finn naked in the past week.
Finn will absolutely not go for a nude photo shoot, but I might be able to talk him into posing shirtless if I do something black and white, artsy and edgy. And if I don’t get the photos to Shaun until the last minute, right before they go to print, he’ll have no choice but to use them.
I run a hand through my hair. “Sure. Sure I can get him to pose nude. It shouldn’t be a problem …” I say, turning around, and the words dry in my mouth.
Finn’s standing there. And he’s furious. He’s only wearing his boxers, so I can see that literally every muscle in his body is tense. He stalks toward me.
Thousands of years of evolutionary survival instincts kick in, and I dodge behind the couch, keeping it between him and me.
He’s over the couch in one lethal, graceful leap.
“Who are you talking to, Charlie?” he growls.
“Finn, please—”
Finn snatches the phone, “You’re talking to False Prophet? What the hell?” He throws the phone down on the couch. “Did last night mean anything to you? Or were you just lying to me?”
“Last night?” Shaun’s voice drifts up from the phone between us. “Charlie, what is he talking about?”
I hang up the phone before Shaun can overhear anything else, but I have a sinking feeling he has the juicy angle he needed.
Undercover Photographer Sent to Expose Finn Ryan Gets Seduced By Rockstar.
Across from me, Finn’s breathing like he just ran a mile, his face a wreck of hurt and anger.
Finally, he asks, “Has this all been some sort of grand plan to get back at me for dumping you ten years ago?”
“No! No. Well, it may have started out that way, but it’s different now. You heard me trying to get out of it.” I go to Finn, needing to touch him, to ground us both, but he shakes me off.
“You weren’t trying all that hard. Nude photos. Promising I’ll talk about not having the songs written. What the hell?”
“Finn, I—”
“I trusted you,” he says, and there’s no rebuttal big enough in the world for that. He storms over to the window and stares out, his back to me, “How long has this been going on?”
I close my eyes, because I know this is going to be the nail that seals the coffin, “Since I sent in the application to shoot for you.”
He swears, viciously.
When he turns to face me, it’s not fury I see in his face. It’s defeat. And that’s a thousand times worse. “That’s why you wouldn’t tell me why you applied. You’ve been lying from the beginning.”
“Yes, I’ve been lying, but only about this, I swear! Everything else between us is real.”
“Maybe your half. I built my half on someone who doesn’t exist.”
I stumble back. I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted this thing between us to still work out until he makes it clear that this will never, ever work.
Finally, he says, “If it was real for you, why didn’t you tell me? The instant you started to … care?”
“It was twenty thousand dollars, Finn. I know that’s nothing to you, but it’s something to me,” I feel like crying, because it seems so ridiculous now. But I’m not going to give Finn the satisfaction of crying when he’s looking at me with so much scorn.
“Twenty thousand dollars. That’s your price, huh?” He strides over to his suitcase and yanks out his checkbook.
“Finn, please …”
“This damn pen isn’t working. Fuck. Do you have a pen?”
I cross my arms, “I don’t know what you’re doing Finn, but stop. Stop and listen to me.”
Finn finds a hotel pen and writes something in his checkbook, but he’s so angry that when he goes to rip out the check, it tears in half.
He writes the check again, and holds it out to me with cold fury, “There you go. Forty thousand. Don’t publish a single one of those photos, or I’ll sue you for everything you have.”
“I’m not taking your money!”
Finn must realize from the mulish set of my jaw that I mean it, because he stalks over to my camera bags and shoves the check in one of them. Then he shoves the camera bags into my arms. “Get out.”
“I’m not dressed!”
Finn disappears into the bedroom and returns with my clothes and shoes, which he piles on top of the camera bags in my arms.
“There. Now, get out!” He yanks the door open and gestures for me to leave.
“You literally expect me to walk out into the hallway barefoot, wearing nothing but your t-shirt,” I say.
“Don’t give me the martyr crap. You have your own damn room.”
I take a deep breath. He’s right. I have my own room. We both need time to calm down. I’ll give him space, and then we can talk it over in San Francisco tonight.
“Ok. Fine. I understand,” I say as I pass him, trying my best to be the adult in the situation when what I really want is to grab his shirt collar and yank him down to my level and shout in his face until he goddamn listens to me.
“I’ll see you at the airport,” I say, stepping into the hallway. I hope the carpet was cleaned recently.
“Oh fuck no. You’re fired. We are never talking again.”
“But the rest of your album—”
“Oh Christ, Charlie. Don’t pretend you care,” Finn’s voice is like a lash, and I wince.
“I’d cash that check if I were you,” Finn says. “Because that’s the last thing you’ll ever get out of me.”
“Finn, please, I love—”
; He winces, and I trail off. When he speaks it’s like his voice has been dragged over broken glass, “Don’t Charlie. Just don’t.”
I stare at him, helpless, because I’m sure as hell not walking away if I’ve got even one option left, but I don’t know what else to do. I’ve tried explaining. I offered to give him space. And I almost told him what he means to me.
Meanwhile, he’s refused to listen, fired me, and is about to get on a jet to another city.
“I wasn’t going to tell him about your songs,” I blurt. “Zane told him first. I was just trying to do damage control …” I trail off, because Finn’s shaking his head. He doesn’t believe me.
He doesn’t believe me, and he doesn’t believe in me.
I’m out of options.
Finn looks at me for a long moment. Like I’m a painful thing he’s memorizing. “Goodbye, Charlie. Tell your parents they were right after all.”
“Wait, what does that—”
But he’s already shut the door in my face.
A part of me wants to pound the door and scream, make a scene until he comes out, but I know Finn. He’s immune to other people’s opinions. And he’s not coming out.
13
Charlie
I sit slouched in a booth at a shitty Italian restaurant in the O’Hare airport. The vinyl is sticky and the pasta is horrible, but I’ve got seven hours to kill before my flight back to New York, and I’m feeling homesick.
For the first time, flying back to New York feels … small. I love visiting my parents in San Francisco, but normally when I get on a plane to head back to my real life, it feels good. Like I’m heading back into the adventure.
But for the first time, the things I’m leaving—Finn, the tour—feel more real than what I’m going back to. A tiny apartment and a lonely career that doesn’t mean anything.
I try not to examine that feeling too closely. Instead, I pull out my laptop and start going through the photos I took of Finn on tour. I’ll pick the best ones and send them to Bridget. They wanted to run projections of photos from the tour before the encore at the last concert. It’s pretty much the epitome of too little too late, and I don’t think Finn will let them use any photo I took. But I made a promise, and I’m not going to break it.
I’m holding it together as I focus on finding good crowd shots and ones of the band. But as I start sifting through the ones of Finn, my throat aches. I’m trying to be dispassionate and focus on objective things. The lighting, whether or not the shot’s in focus, whether or not the background is too distracting.
But it’s not working, because there, at the center of it all, is Finn. Beautiful, challenging, arrogant, insecure Finn. Quick to stand up for people, slow to forgive. A good, good man who has a habit of making me fall for him, and then kicking me out of his life.
For a moment, I imagine what it would be like if I had actually applied to shoot Finn’s tour for real, without False Prophet whispering doubt in my ear. If I’d just gotten to know him again. And helped him write his songs, and let myself fall in love. If I’d been ok going out for a nice, romantic dinner in Chicago. If we hadn’t had a reason to fight this morning.
I’d be on that plane with him right now. Watching Chicago fall away behind us as we fly west, into the sunset.
Finn was geeking out about that the other day, how if you time it right, you can fly with the sunset for hours. When I said I’d never done that, he’d promised we’d do it. And instead of telling him that was the sweetest thing any man had ever promised me, I smacked his arm and told him not to be ridiculous.
Maybe False Prophet isn’t the only reason Finn and I wouldn’t have worked. Finn acts sarcastic and prickly, but when it comes down to it, he puts his heart out there. For his friends, for his music, for … well, for me.
Meanwhile, I barely had the guts to admit I wanted to date him. I thought if I didn’t admit I cared, Finn couldn’t break my heart again.
I groan and put my head in my hands. Didn’t that backfire spectacularly.
My phone buzzes with a notification, and I turn to it, grateful for a distraction. Any distraction.
But it’s just a social media reminder. Eleven years since you posted this photo, Charlie!
I click on the notification and freeze.
It’s a photo of Finn. Just his face, lazy and happy, smiling up at me. I took it a few hours after we had sex for the first time. He was so careful, so worried he was going to mess it up. And he did, technically mess it up. It hurt, and I didn’t orgasm, and we were both self-conscious the whole time. It was, in hindsight, the worst sex I’ve ever had.
But he was so happy that I’d picked him. And he made me laugh, and was surprisingly tender. And in the end, I was glad I’d picked him too.
Finn smiles up at me from the screen. He looks so young, but also like he always has, and always will. He looks like Finn, and my heart aches.
I close my eyes. No, I can’t do this again. It’s over. I fucking refuse to spend more of my life pining over Finn Ryan. We aren’t right for each other. There’s nothing else to it.
I close out of the app and call my mom, because if there’s ever someone I can count on to cut through my tendency to romanticize, it’s her. Especially when it comes to Finn.
She answers on the second ring with so much delight I wince.
I should call my parents more.
We chat about how the restaurant’s going and how the street is changing. She asks if the plastic vines and white lights twining around the indoor trellis in our restaurant is tacky, and I lie and tell her it isn’t, because I love that trellis.
We’ve been talking for a while, before I work up the courage to say, “Um … Mom. Can you say something bad about Finn Ryan? An old photo of him popped up on social media, and I just need to snap myself out of the what-ifs.”
Normally, this is just the sort of prompt she needs, but this time she hesitates, “You haven’t brought him up in a while. Is this because you’re shooting his tour?”
I blink, “How do you know that?”
“His brother—oh, what’s his name? John? James?”
“Jim.”
“Right, Jim. He ran into your dad, and he said Finn had told him about it. He said Finn was really excited about seeing you again.”
My heart lifts, before I remember that duh, Finn said that before he knew the truth. “Well, he’s not excited anymore. He fired me.”
“What?! Why? Oh I knew that boy was no good.”
It’s exactly the type of thing I wanted her to say, but instead of a surge of vindication, I just feel guilt and a protective urge to defend Finn. I sigh and slouch, my head in my hands and my elbows on the table. “This time it was my fault, Mom. I really, really screwed up.”
“Honey? What’s going on?” she says, and I know she can hear the threat of tears in my voice.
So I tell her everything. Well, not everything. I leave the Study Game out. But I tell her about Shaun, and Zane, and about helping Finn with his song, and falling for him, and about the big horrible fight when he found out about my lie.
“Why is it always him?” I finish. “He dumped me out of nowhere the first time, and then I fall for him again and I … why him, Mom? Why does it have to be him?” I complain.
“Well … maybe because it’s supposed to be him.”
I sit up, shocked. I have never, ever heard my mom say something nice about Finn. Not since we started dating. One time she grudgingly admitted he was tall, but that was only because it’s obviously and objectively true.
“Are you ok, Mom? Are you running a fever?”
She groans, and laughs, but it’s a tired laugh, “Charlie, no one tells you how to be a parent. Except your own parents, and God knows you can’t trust them.” She sighs. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but you were so young. And you wouldn’t listen to reason.”
“What are you talking about, Mom?”
For a moment I don’t think she’s going to answer. And then she says,
“Your dad and I told Finn to break up with you.”
“WHAT?”
“You were going to drop out of high school! And give up your college scholarship to follow this boy from bar to bar across the country! I tried to reason with you. So did your dad. So did all your friends. But you wouldn’t listen to any of us when we said you could do long distance. Because God forbid he stay in school or follow you across the country.”
“Mom.”
“Sorry, sorry. What I’m trying to say is that when you wouldn’t listen to us, we decided to reason with Finn. He actually came to us first, because he wanted to talk about … well, I suppose that one is his story to tell. But the point is, we expressed our concerns. That you were too young. That you were giving up too much. That if you ever changed your mind, and didn’t want to be with him, you’d be left with nothing. That if he really cared about you, he’d let you go, so you could have a life. You were so young honey. Both of you were. And I thought … well, who ends up with their high-school sweetheart?”
I stare straight ahead stunned.
Tell your parents they were right after all. That’s what he said in Chicago.
And before that, in New Orleans, I wasn’t good enough for the great Charlie De Luca.
And suddenly it all makes sense. The break up came out of nowhere because he still loved me. And yeah, he should have just talked to me. But I should have been grown-up enough to pick my own future, instead of just trying to wrap mine around his, despite everyone telling me it was a bad decision. Hell, even Finn’s mom tried to convince me to go to college.
“I’m sorry, honey. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone behind your back like that. And we definitely should have told you sooner. But we thought we were doing what was best for you. What were the odds you were going to find the person you could be happy with forever in high school?” my mom asks.
“Pretty low,” I say numbly. 28-year-old me understands why my parents did this. 18-year-old me is furious. Both of us feel sucker punched.
My phone starts buzzing with an incoming call.
It’s Shaun Coleman.
The swirl of emotions inside me narrows to one point: rage.