‘You and Jack were fighting,’ she said quietly, as much to break the awful silence as anything.
‘No we weren’t.’
‘Was it about me?’
‘I told you,’ said Lex curtly. ‘We weren’t fighting.’
The silence resumed for the rest of the short drive to Ava’s building on Alta Loma. Lex pulled over and was about to give her a kiss on the cheek goodbye when he noticed she was crying. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said gently.
‘You!’ Ava sobbed. ‘You’re the matter. OK, so you hate my hair. I get it,’ she hiccupped. ‘But there’s no need to be so mean to me and get so angry all the time.’
Lex winced. It was Jack he was mad at, not Ava. ‘I don’t hate your hair. I was surprised, that’s all.’
But Ava had already jumped out of the car, slamming the door behind her. After about four steps she stumbled, twisting her ankle and falling painfully onto her knees in the driveway, prompting renewed sobs. Lex opened the door and walked over to her.
‘Leave me alone,’ she sniffed.
‘No can do, I’m afraid,’ he said, scooping her up into his arms. ‘I told Jack I’d get you home safely. This isn’t safely.’
She let him carry her into the building, too exhausted and emotional to protest. Once they reached her apartment, Lex sat her down gently on the sofa, produced a bag of ice from the freezer which he wrapped in a tea towel and told her to press against her bruised knees, and started brewing some coffee.
‘I don’t need any coffee.’ She hiccupped again, wondering at exactly what point the gods would decide she’d been humiliated enough.
‘I do,’ said Lex. ‘I had too many sakes myself. Plus I have to get all the way back to Malibu after this and I’m exhausted.’
In the end she took the proffered mug without complaint, along with the accompanying slices of toast and peanut butter. After a few bites and gulps of the strong, comforting Colombian blend, she began to feel more herself.
‘I made a fool of myself, didn’t I?’ Ava could hardly bring herself to look at Lex.
‘You had a bit too much to drink,’ he said kindly. ‘It’s not like you were taking your clothes off or dancing on tables. Besides, it was your party. Nobody minded.’
‘But that isn’t what you and Jack were angry about?’
‘No.’ Scooching along next to her on the sofa, Lex stroked her strange new hair. It was as soft as rabbit’s fur and felt oddly erotic. He stopped instantly.
‘Well what then?’ said Ava. ‘And please don’t tell me “nothing” again. I’m not a child and I wasn’t that drunk. I know what I saw.’
‘If you must know, it was about Ivan Charles,’ said Lex. He didn’t want to say anything to her about the UK Christmas number one plan, he still hoped Jack would eventually see sense on that score, but he did owe her some sort of an explanation. ‘Jack said something about my reaction to Ivan and Kendall’s wedding that ticked me off, OK? It was nothing to do with you.’
‘It was to do with Kendall,’ said Ava bleakly. ‘I understand. You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?’
‘I … what? No!’ Lex shook his head vehemently. ‘Why would you say something like that?’
‘It’s OK,’ Ava went on. She’d drunk enough to lose her inhibitions and watched her hand stroking Lex’s thigh as if it belonged to somebody else entirely. ‘Kendall’s incredibly beautiful. Why wouldn’t you be in love with her?’
‘I’m not in love with her,’ repeated Lex. Ava’s hand was making it hard to concentrate. She looked so different tonight, so adult and sensual, so close to him. ‘Maybe once, a long time ago, I had feelings for—’
Ava’s hand had slipped under his shirt. She nuzzled her face against his neck. ‘I could make you happy,’ she whispered, her warm breath caressing his skin like a kiss. It felt so good, Lex struggled to suppress a moan of pleasure. ‘I’d appreciate you like Kendall never did.’
He tried to pull away, but when he did Ava’s dewy eyes were gazing into his, her pupils dilated and pale lips parted in a look of purest desire. Before he knew it, he was kissing her. Pulling off her T-shirt and unfastening her bra, he ran his hands over her beautiful body, the tiny apple breasts and narrow waist. For a second the cold jolted him back to sanity. ‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ he murmured, as Ava’s fingers fumbled with the buttons on his fly.
‘Why not?’
His jeans were open now, his erection straining at his Calvin Klein boxer shorts. Ava stroked it gently through the fabric and the last vestiges of Lex’s willpower melted away. He couldn’t remember why not. Something to do with Kendall, or Jack, or work or … God, that felt good. Closing his eyes he surrendered to the pleasure of the moment. He was with a girl who wanted him. Really wanted him.
It had been a long time.
Across town in Brentwood, Jack brushed his teeth angrily, scrubbing away till his gums bled. Just thinking about tonight’s conversation made him furious. When would he let it go? The barefaced cheek of it! When would Lex let it go?, that was the question. Lex was the one who brought everything back to Ivan and, by extension, Kendall. Not him.
Marching into the bedroom in a sulk he picked up Sonya’s photograph. It was one of his favourite pictures of his wife, taken on holiday in St Paul de Vence the year they’d got engaged. Technically, it wasn’t a great shot. Sonya’s face was turned half away from the camera and her hair was blowing everywhere. But somehow it captured her spirit perfectly. Her laugh that lit up her face like a beacon; her easy, natural beauty, the exact opposite of the contrived, high-
maintenance perfection of the LA girls; her intelligence, so different to the laboured intellectualism of the women Jack had dated at Oxford.
‘It’s not fair, Son,’ he told the picture. ‘When I signed all Jester’s acts, everyone said I was crazy, but I proved them all wrong. JSM’s more profitable now than ever. So why can’t the kid give me a break and let me manage this girl without second-guessing my every decision? Would I like to get back at Ivan? Sure. But that doesn’t mean a UK number one wouldn’t be the right thing for Ava, does it?’
He stared at Sonya’s image, waiting to feel a connection. Not an answer, as such, but a sense of her presence, of companionship, of not being completely alone. In the first year after her death that connection had come so easily. There were times when he closed his eyes that Jack almost felt as if he could touch her, hear her voice, smell her skin. But not now. Now there was nothing but a photo in a frame. Was this what people meant by time being a healer, Jack wondered bitterly? That as the months and years passed, what little you had left of the person you loved would be taken from you too? It struck him forcefully that he could no longer remember the sound of Sonya’s voice. She had slipped away from him, slipped to a place he couldn’t follow.
Replacing the picture on the dressing table, he sat down on the end of the bed. At first the sadness was overwhelming. But then he had another thought. What if the silence was an answer in itself? What if Sonya was telling him to let go, to move on, to take his comfort from those who could still comfort him – from the living?
He thought about Lisa Marie. She’d have spent the night with him tonight if he’d asked her to. They’d been dating casually for over a year now and Jack enjoyed her company. She was smart, perceptive, beautiful and completely undemanding, never suggesting that they go on long vacations together or swap keys to one another’s places. It was an easy relationship that never got in the way at work or caused Jack any anxiety. But that was the problem. He wasn’t anxious because he wasn’t in love. Neither was Lisa Marie. And they never would be. He hadn’t asked her home tonight because he knew in his heart she couldn’t comfort him, couldn’t support him in the way he needed.
The one woman who could was six thousand miles away, fast asleep in her bed in a sleepy Cotswold town, as unreachable as the stars. Catriona had been so cross with him about signing Ava, he hadn’t called for a few months after that. When he did pick up the
phone again, the closeness he’d thought had been developing between them last year had gone. She was happy to hear from him, polite, friendly, full of news about Hector and Rosie and village life. But the window for something more between them – if there had ever really been such a window – seemed irrevocably to have closed. Since then work had sucked Jack back into his own life, his own world in LA. And really, what did Catriona know of that world, of the stresses of dealing with a suspicious partner whilst trying to butter up the likes of Don Lenner? How could she help him, if he did pick up the phone and call her?
Even so, the urge to hear Catriona’s voice was so strong, Jack found himself dialling her number anyway, getting three-quarters of the way through before he finally came to his senses. At last, restless and depressed, he slipped under the bedclothes, turned out the light and went to sleep.
Lex Abrahams woke the next morning with a dry mouth, a pounding head and a sinking feeling in his stomach that he couldn’t quite account for. Then he opened his eyes and blearily took in his surroundings. That was definitely not his ceiling. Or his wardrobe. Or his discarded leather trousers lying casually strewn over the chair by the bed.
Oh shit.
Ava slept peacefully beside him, face down and with the duvet pulled up only as far as her waist. Lex stared at her bare back and short, silken crop of hair for a long time. She was beautiful. No doubt about that. And funny and smart and great company. But she was also eighteen and vulnerable and his client. What was Jack gonna say?
In Ava’s shower a few minutes later, he scrubbed himself off, as if the Kiehl’s lime body wash could make him feel less like a dirty old man. More of last night’s events drifted back to him: the restaurant, the sake, Jack’s plan for Ava to make a UK comeback this Christmas. What he’d experienced last night as anger now felt more like anxiety. But what was he anxious about? Losing Ava, the way he’d lost Kendall? Certainly the whole concept of ‘trips to England’ didn’t fill him with happiness and confidence.
I’m overthinking it, he told himself, wrapping a pink Victoria’s Secret towel around his waist and hunting through Ava’s kitchen cupboards for some Alka-Seltzer. This UK trip might never even happen. They’d all have to see what happened with Ava’s album here first. In the meantime, would a relationship with Ava really be the worst thing in the world? After all, she’d made all the moves last night. It wasn’t as though he’d tried to seduce her, or tricked her into anything she didn’t want to do. In Lex’s job, with the hours he worked, it was tough to find time to date, period. Being with someone who understood, who operated in the same world, made sense. Jack was dating a colleague, after all. Was Ava really so different?
‘There you are.’ Swaddled in a fluffy white towelling bathrobe, Ava padded into the bathroom and put her arms around him. ‘I thought you’d done a runner.’
‘Why would you think that?’ Lex hugged her back. ‘Get dressed and I’ll take you out for breakfast.’
Fuck it. He couldn’t stay single and alone for ever. He was tired of pining for Kendall, tired of having nothing else in his life but work. He and Ava might be good for each other.
Really, what was the worst that could happen?
‘And … action!’
Ava Bentley threw her arms wide as the cameras began to roll, twirling around joyously amid the artificial snowflakes. Or ‘snowfakes’, as Lex called them. Thank God he was here. Shooting a Christmas video was a gruelling and thankless task at the best of times. But doing it in LA, surrounded by vacuous Valley-girl runners and swaying palm trees in unseasonably warm eighty-degree sunshine lent the process an even more preposterous, farcical air.
‘Hug your shoulders a little bit,’ the shoot director shouted into Ava’s headset as she mimed along to ‘Home’, the catchy, upbeat track that her record company planned to release as a European Christmas single, to go head-to-head with Kendall Bryce’s festive offering. ‘Try to look cold.’
If I were cold, thought Ava, I’d have put on a sweater and jeans. I wouldn’t be cavorting around in distressed silver leather pants and a studded bra. But she did her best, cosying up to the fur-clad backing dancers as horrid synthetic blobs of white settled in her silver cropped hair. It was harder than it sounded, miming lyrics while performing a dance routine, and trying to appear happy and freezing cold at the same time. One look at Lex’s face confirmed her suspicions, that the effort made her look ridiculous.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, pulling off her headset to groans from the crew, all of whom were sweltering in the open-air set and longing to go home. ‘Can we try something different? This isn’t working. It’s kitsch as hell and I look like a—’
‘I think “ass” is the word she’s looking for.’ Lex Abrahams got up from his folding beach chair and walked over to the director. He wished he were directing Ava’s video himself, but they’d both agreed they needed some distance between their personal and professional lives, and at the time bringing in an outsider had seemed like a good idea.
‘She looks great,’ the director said defensively. ‘It’s holiday season, people. It’s supposed to be kitsch. Do you know how much money Katy Perry’s made out of kitsch music videos?’
‘Ava isn’t Katy Perry,’ said Lex. ‘She’s never done that whole knowing, tongue-in-cheek thing. She’s no good at it.’
‘Thanks a lot!’ said Ava, cooling herself down in front of an on-set snow blower. But she knew he was right.
‘The outfit says sexy, the set says cheesy, the dancers say gay. What message are we trying to send here?’
‘Oh would you quit it?’ the director snapped. ‘Dancers always say gay. That’s their job. We already cleared the art direction and the choreography with Columbia, OK. If you don’t like the direction we’ve taken, take it up with them. But for now can we just shoot the damn thing. Ah!’ Turning around, he clapped his hands in delight. ‘There they are. Perfect!’
Lex looked at Ava. ‘You have got to be kidding me.’ They both burst out laughing. There, being led across the blistering parking lot by a bikini-and-Daisy Duke-clad extra, was a team of four reindeer, complete with jingle bell harnesses and little red bows around their necks.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Ava, wiping away tears of mirth and hopelessly smearing her eye make-up in the process, ‘they have red noses that light up when you push a button?’
The director scowled. ‘OK, break time’s over, people. Let’s go again, from the top. Reindeer won’t come in till the final chorus.’
Ava tried to get a grip on her giggles while the make-up ladies set to work repairing her face. It was funny, but only to a point. What on earth were people going to say when they saw this crap back in England? It made Cliff Richard’s Mistletoe and Wine video seem positively cutting-edge. At this rate, Kendall Bryce was going to wipe the floor with her.
‘Help me,’ she mouthed to Lex.
Reluctantly, Lex dialled Jack’s number. They weren’t getting on well at the moment, but he needed to bring in the big guns. If they didn’t get the record company to tone down the cheese factor, they all stood to lose money, not to mention end up with serious egg on their faces.
‘Don’t worry,’ he mouthed back to Ava. ‘It’s all under control.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
London, six months later …
Backstage at the world-famous 100 Club on Oxford Street, Kendall shivered in her stage outfit of black PVC hot pants, thigh-high Vivienne Westwood boots and a mesh vest top with an orange silk flame appliquéd across the breasts.
‘You’ll be fine,’ said Ivan, wrapping a cashmere blanket around her shoulders to warm her and passing her a bottle of Evian. ‘You’ll knock ’em dead.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘You will.’ He leaned into kiss her and Kendall instinctively leaned back. She could already smell the alcohol on his breath and it was only half past seven. A shiver of fear ran through her. Please don’t let him get loaded tonight. Please don’t let him lose his temper. Please let me
be OK.
It was November now. Next month, Kendall and Ivan would celebrate their first wedding anniversary. Was it really only one year since that magical, starry night at the Chelsea Physic Garden? So much had happened in that time it felt like a decade ago.
The first six months of marriage had been exciting. Or rather, Kendall’s career had been exciting, a nonstop frenzy of travel, performing and promotion that had seen her visit over forty different countries and countless cities. The marriage itself was just something that existed in the background, a part of the Kendall Bryce story to be wheeled out in every interview and feature. Meanwhile Flame’s sales spread across the globe like wildfire. Despite achieving only modest success in the US, it was a multi-platinum-selling album, and back in the UK, Kendall’s star had risen to an all-time high.
Ivan accompanied his wife on as many trips as possible, occasionally taking breaks to see to business in London or to spend time with his children. Now that they were older, his relationship with both Rosie and Hector had blossomed, with the years of tension between Ivan and his son finally appearing to be over. On paper, everything seemed to be going well. A string of magazines did features on Ivan and Kendall Charles’s ‘perfect’ life together, and speculation was rife as to when the young Mrs Charles would find a window in her schedule to conceive their much-anticipated first child.
It wasn’t till the summer that Kendall had first became aware of Ivan’s drinking. With hindsight, there had been signs of it much earlier. Every time Ivan returned from spending time with his family, he hit the bottle harder than usual at the endless round of after-parties and promotional events that were his and Kendall’s life. But it wasn’t until Kendall’s record company allowed her a month-long break in August that the scale of the problem truly sank in.
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