“Ha!” I threw my costume on the bed and pulled my favorite yellow and white sundress over my head. “Sounds dreamy. But it’s not a story anyone wants to see.”
“Are you kidding? Of course it is! It’s modern,” she insisted. I hid a smirk as I spritzed myself with perfume, amused by her enthusiasm. “I’ll tell you what no one wants to see anymore is two women fighting over a man. Boring!”
I ran a brush through my tangled locks. “Well, if Jackson will listen to anyone, he’ll listen to you.” A little mascara and eye shadow, and I was beginning to look alive again. “Maybe you can get him to recast Madison’s role while you’re at it.”
I heard heavy footsteps in the hallway coming from the direction of Cole’s dressing room and flung open the door to find him headed down the stairs. “That was fast,” I called, dabbing a coral stain on my lips.
“I have to make it to the bank before it closes.”
Cole had been strangely distant toward me all day; I figured we could use some time alone to talk about what happened between us last night, so I could decide how best to proceed. My horoscope this morning had emphasized that as stressful as today might be, it would also bring clarity, but thus far I was just confused. “Give me a sec. I’ll come with you.”
“I’m in a rush—”
“It’ll take two seconds.”
I slipped my feet into my sandals and pointed to the dress on the bed. “Can you return that to wardrobe?” I asked Felicity.
“Sure.” Felicity eyed me as I powdered my nose and checked my appearance in the mirror one last time. “You sure about this? He’s been in a bad mood all day.”
I lowered my voice. “You’re the one who said a romance would be good press. That pic you posted of him with his arm around me on set the other day already has the trolls buzzing. A snap of us walking hand in hand on the beach could make the cover of Star Weekly.”
“You’re speaking my language, but—”
“I’m going.” I cut her off before I could change my mind. “Do you have my A-pills?”
She nodded and checked her watch. “You still have another hour though.”
I was already beginning to feel irritable, the need for another dose prickling beneath my skin like an itch I couldn’t scratch. “I’ll take them with me.”
“You promise you’ll wait?” she asked.
I batted my eyes. “I promise.”
She deposited the precious little blue leather bag in my hand, and I blew her a kiss. “See you at home.”
In the hall I passed Madison, pulling on an atrocious lime-green raincoat. She started to speak, but I held up a hand. “Sorry, in a rush.”
I descended to the living room to find Cole already gone, but the driver lingered in the doorway, an umbrella dangling from his hand. He eyed my thin sundress. “Sure you don’t wanna wait till the rain stops?”
I grabbed a bottle of water from the craft services table and quickly downed my pill. “I’ll be fine.”
Even with the umbrella, I was soaked by the time I reached the golf cart, twenty feet away. The driver unzipped the thick clear plastic rain coating, and I settled on the bench next to Cole. “Quite a storm,” I commented as we pulled away.
He grunted.
“Not bad today, all things considered,” I offered. He stared silently at the rain running down the plastic as we jostled along the road. “Just curious…What made you guys decide to cast Madison?”
He shrugged. “No one else was available on such short notice after the other girl dropped out. Taylor vouched for her.”
Hmmm. That was odd; Taylor seemed to like Madison even less than she liked me. “Do you know why?” I asked.
“Does it matter?” he snapped.
His mood was darker than the skies overhead. I held my hands up, beginning to wish I hadn’t insisted on coming along. “No, sorry.”
We rode in silence the rest of the way to the bank. I was disconcerted; he was so into me last night—I’d been the one slowing things down. Perhaps I was too cold?
The golf cart pulled under the portico outside the small, coral-painted bank, and we both got out. “You don’t need to come in,” he said.
“Oh, I was going to get some cash. I thought I might—”
But he was already halfway through the door.
“I have to go back for the others,” the driver called. “Probably take half an hour.”
I hesitated, considering whether to head back with him. But I didn’t want to give Cole the satisfaction of thinking I’d only come along to be with him, and I did need cash. I gave the driver a thumbs-up and swung open the door of the bank. I’d have half an hour alone with Cole. Surely I could turn things around. Maybe I could even get something out of him, see what the hell was going on with him. With us.
I acquired my colorful foreign cash from a friendly teller with striking pink and purple extensions woven into a French roll, then sat on a tropical printed couch looking out at the rain while he chatted with a banker in the bank’s only office for a good fifteen minutes. By the time he emerged, the rain had cleared. He breezed out the front door without acknowledging me—probably thinking I’d headed back into town with the driver—and I hurried after him.
He stopped short when he saw the golf cart wasn’t waiting beneath the portico. “Where’s the guy?”
“He had to go get the others. He’ll be back in fifteen.”
“For fuck’s sake.”
“The rain’s cleared. Let’s take a walk,” I suggested brightly, in an effort to lift his mood. “I’ve been wanting to check out the town.”
We set out along the palm-lined cobblestone road that led down a slight incline to the small harbor, skirting puddles and dodging dripping palm fronds. Ahead of us in the port, mostly sailboats and fishing boats bobbed on the still choppy sea, but a sizable yacht was docked just outside the marina. A boardwalk curved around the little port, lined with shops and restaurants painted in bright colors. I noticed a group of probably thirty people huddled under an overhang beneath a sign that read “Ferry, 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.”
“Ferry must be late due to the storm,” I commented, scurrying to catch up with him, glancing up at the sky. Patches of clouds hid the sun, and the air was thick with moisture.
He spun to face me. “Oh my God, do you ever shut up?”
I inhaled sharply, taken aback.
“You never stop talking, do you? Is it all those pills you’re always popping? Or do you actually think I give a shit about what you have to say?”
I stepped back, bewildered, but the ground wasn’t where I expected it to be. I felt the water close over my ankle as I lost my balance, flailing my arms as I reached for him to catch me.
Only, he didn’t catch me. He didn’t even try. He simply stood by and watched as I tumbled hard on my ass into the muddy puddle, the wind knocked out of me. Behind him, I could see the people waiting for the ferry staring, cell phones raised.
Anger seared my chest. I reached my hand toward him and smiled, hissing through my teeth, “Take my hand, or I will walk off this film.”
He snatched my hand and jerked me to my feet, his eyes cold. My dress was ruined. “Now smile for the cameras,” I growled, keeping a death grip on his hand.
I turned to the people and made a show of laughing it off, taking a bow as they filmed. Cole fired up his movie star smile and waved. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a lime-green raincoat among the onlookers, but when I looked again she was gone, swallowed by the crowd. A woman with a baby strapped to her chest and three kids trailing behind her came running over wanting a selfie with Cole. He obliged, opening the floodgates. We were still trapped in a sea of cameras when our golf cart finally pulled up.
I dove through the plastic, refusing to even look at Cole as he piled in behind me.
“You okay?” the driver asked, glancing down at my dress.
I nodded. “Just took a spill. My butt’s not as bruised as my ego.”
He
laughed. “I can’t imagine what you guys put up with.”
Cole shot from the golf cart when it pulled up to the pier leading to our bungalows, but I was hot on his heels. “Hey,” I shouted, shading my eyes against the sun reflecting off the water as I trailed him down the wet planks all the way to the far end. I did my best to look nonchalant in case any of our crew were to see us, but I wasn’t about to let him get away. By the time he got out his key and pushed his door open, I was close enough to force my way through the door behind him. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I kicked the door shut, leaving us alone in his gargantuan bungalow. His television and glass floor windows were twice as large as those in the other bungalows, his kitchen a marble and steel full-size affair instead of a kitchenette, and his deck had a hot tub in addition to the plunge pool. Also, there was a giant, comfortable-looking suede sectional couch that didn’t match the decor in the rest of the resort, and the walls were covered in what I could tell was real art—bright splashes of modernist color interspersed with movie posters featuring Cole’s face. I guessed this was his private villa, not available for rent by the resort.
He spun to face me. “Wrong with me? What the fuck is wrong with you? Chasing me around like a love-sick puppy all day, acting like we’re together—you should be embarrassed.”
Tears sprang to my eyes. I hated myself for my desperation. “But last night—”
“We were drunk,” he spat. “And you know how I get when I’m playing a character. Peyton had his claws in me. I got carried away.”
My mouth hung open. “Are you saying you method-fucked me?”
He groaned. “My mistake.”
I shivered in the blasting air-conditioning, my chest so tight I could hardly breathe. Behind him, his ten-years-younger face smirked down at me from a life-size poster of him as Bad Billy, cowboy hat askew, the same gun he showed me in the wine cellar in hand. “Why did you offer me this part?” I demanded.
“It wasn’t my decision.”
I felt the tears hot on my cheeks but didn’t bother to wipe them away. “If you hate me so much, why did you let them cast me?”
“I don’t hate you. I just…I didn’t have a choice, okay? Jackson knows everything. He threatened to tell it all if I didn’t give him the money for this project and star in it with you.”
“What?” I sank into a rattan chair, my wet dress cold against my legs. “But you said—”
“He wasn’t in his room doing homework that night. He saw.”
My mind raced, piecing together elements of the night I’d tried so hard to forget. “What did he see?”
“It doesn’t matter. Enough.”
“But—” Carefully neglected memories began to rise from the lagoon where I’d buried them, nearly unrecognizable beneath thirteen years of lies. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He sighed. “It was better you didn’t know.”
“And now he’s blackmailing you—to do a movie?” It was like sand was stuck in the gears of my mind. This couldn’t be true. “That’s insane. Why?”
“I don’t know. I was a shitty father?”
“You didn’t ask him?”
“I’m not in control of the situation,” he growled. “Don’t you see that?”
I’d never known Cole not to be in control of a situation. “Why me? And Madison…?” I was thinking out loud now. “What’s his plan?”
“I don’t think Madison has anything to do with it. And I don’t know if there is a plan, other than to punish me, to make me pay for stealing his childhood—his words, not mine.”
It was too strange to believe. Thoughtful, sensitive, considerate Jackson, a blackmailer? The guy meditated for an hour every morning before our 6:00 a.m. call time. “He didn’t blackmail me.”
“He didn’t need to.” Cole smirked. “You would’ve walked across hot coals for work that paid enough to fill your pool.”
“Enough with the damn pool,” I snapped. “The script is actually good.”
The walls were closing in. I had too many questions. There were too many holes. Could I trust Cole? I stared down through the glass floor at the unsettled ocean, still murky from the storm. “We should have…” My voice trailed off. I couldn’t imagine what it was we should have done. It was all so long ago. The lies had become indistinguishable from the truth.
“We had no choice.” His eyes were hard. “We did what we had to do.”
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Maybe it’s better for it to finally come out,” I murmured. “Be done with it.”
“No.” He leaned forward and took me by the shoulders. “You’re not sending us to jail.”
I squinted hard at him. What else hadn’t he told me? “I should speak with Jackson—”
“No.”
“But—”
“He can’t know you know.” He squatted next to me, his gaze flinty. “Do you understand? It would only make things worse.”
Again I nodded. “And how can you be sure he won’t talk, after we’ve finished the movie?”
“I’ll make sure of it by whatever means necessary.” I didn’t like the edge to his voice.
“Cole,” I protested.
“He won’t talk.”
Felicity
Seven Years Ago
It’s snowing again.
Everyone around here talks about how beautiful the snow is, but I hate it. Sure, it’s pretty coming down, but it traps you inside for days at a time unless you want to completely freeze your ass off, and then it gets dirty and melts and makes a horrible muddy mess.
But the snow is the least of what I hate about this place. I hate the one stoplight that flashes yellow at night (completely unnecessary), I hate the school (full of small-minded bitches who whisper behind my back every time I turn around), I hate the Walmart (where we go for absolutely everything, and I know all the checkers because they go to our warehouse of a church, which I hate most of all). Strike me dead, but God I hate that church.
Every single person in a twenty-mile radius who has been saved by their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (and that’s literally everyone) shows up on Sunday morning and Wednesday night and whatever prayer group in between to sing and pray and gossip and pass judgment on one another and come up with new ways to hate anyone who doesn’t hold the same beliefs they do. Like my beautiful mother, who, according to their rules, consorted with the devil and is currently burning in the fires of hell.
I tried with the church at first. I really did; I was lost, badly depressed. I’d hoped it would be like the church Jewel’s foster parents took her to, where everyone was kind and she made friendship bracelets and learned to sing. I wanted something to believe in and naively thought a church full of people who called themselves Christians would, I don’t know, love thy brother and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but no such luck. Apparently, all churches are not created equal. Still, I kept going in hopes of meeting that one Sunday school teacher or friend who would be a life raft instead of a hypocrite who whispered behind my back and judged me for the “mistakes” of my mother.
The last straw came when I finally admitted to the church group that I was struggling to have faith in a God that would take away the single mother of a ten-year-old. After lots of hemming and hawing, they finally came up with the explanation that He had taken away my mother so that I would come to live with my grandparents and be brought back to the church. So basically they wanted me to put my trust in a God that murders mothers to get their daughters to worship Him. No thanks.
Iris was right to take the first bus to Miami. Good thing she got knocked up with me and her parents kicked her out (a claim they deny), or she might have wound up stuck here forever. Of course then she might still be alive, so there’s no use playing the coulda-shoulda-woulda game. It’s a game I play far too often, and it’s holy shit depressing.
I have a lot of time to think because I don’t have any friends.
Like right now, there�
�s a study group going on at Ellie’s house, and anyone who’s not playing in or cheering at the varsity basketball game over in New Bethlehem is there cheating off one another’s homework while Ellie’s mom cooks spaghetti with meatballs for them. I know because I used to be invited. But now I’m here in my cold little room by myself doing my trigonometry homework under the quilt that hardly keeps me warm. Whatever. Their loss. I’m the one whose work they’d be copying. I’m smarter than any of them.
The first year I was a novelty, the only new girl in a class of townies who had known one another since kindergarten. But these kids didn’t like novelty, and I was too shell-shocked to attempt to fit in. The second year I tried. That was the year I went to church and even joined the basketball team. I had a few friends for a while, but they all turned their backs on me around the time my waist slimmed down and my boobs showed up. For better or worse, I turned out looking exactly like my curvy, blond mother, save my nose, which I still haven’t quite grown into. And now all the girls hate me because all the guys want to screw me. Yeah, that’s right. Being a member of the Holy Cross Evangelist Church doesn’t stop you from being a spiteful bitch or a rapey asshole.
But I’m not gonna make the same mistakes Iris made. Not that I’m into any of those meatheads anyway.
So I quarantine myself in the bedroom that used to be hers and stalk Cole, Stella, and Jackson on the internet. Jackson’s pretty hard because he’s my age and stays out of the public eye—even all his social accounts are locked—though every now and then I’ll see a picture of him with his dad at an awards show or a charity event. Cole, of course, pops up on the internet all the time, but most of it’s PR bullshit. Red carpet pictures, puff pieces, movie star smiles. But Stella…she’s a fucking mess. And the bloodsuckers love nothing more than a fucking mess.
It was all downhill for her after she and Cole killed my mom. It seems like every time I open a tabloid, there’s another juicy story about her losing her mind, and I relish every minute of her implosion. It’s what she deserves after what she did to my mother, and it keeps me entertained here in Boring-sylvania.
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