by Shari King
A lazy smile played on her lips when she saw him and she immediately dismissed the acolyte. She didn’t flinch from her position. Hands on hips. Shoulders back. Feet apart. Long, glossy black hair now unclipped and falling in two perfect sheets to her waist. Her golden skin oozing St Tropez and sheer sex.
‘Something is wrong,’ she said, her intoxicating Spanish accent changing the vowels.
‘What’s that?’ It was a game Davie was all set to play.
‘You have been here for a minute and I cannot see your cock yet,’ she teased.
Davie responded by leaning over and biting down on one of her nipples, just the way he knew she liked it. He’d been screwing her for the last year and he’d never known a chick to like it as rough as she did. Sometimes he wasn’t sure if it was passion or legal assault.
As he unleashed his dick and lifted her up, her legs automatically wrapped round his waist. Pushing up against the ivory silk fabric that lined the wall of the trailer, he slid inside her, grinding against her as she barked out orders. Harder. Faster. Her hands were in his hair, grabbing, pulling, as her lip bit down on his until it felt like it was bleeding. This one was a wildcat. Thankfully, he’d always been known for his support of wildlife causes.
The ringing of his cell interrupted his amusement. Taking one hand off her ass, he reached round to his back pocket and extracted the phone, immediately recognizing the tone that was allocated to Al’s number.
Two things happened at once. He answered the call and Vala slapped him hard across the face. He grabbed her wrist, trying to speak as she climbed off his dick, still slapping and biting.
‘Al, hey.’
‘Switch on the TV.’
‘What?’
‘Switch on the TV. Sam Rubin. KTLA. Quick.’
Pushing Vala away, he grabbed the remote from the walnut table in the centre of the room and flicked it onto Channel 5. Rainbow Nixon was standing in front of a press pack, dressed in a long, flowing white robe, a string of fricking daisies round her head, speaking to the crowd.
‘My poor darling Sky is lying in hospital right now, close to death.’
Davie couldn’t help a twitch of a smile. That was quick work. He’d only left the instructions an hour ago. Damn, she was playing the part well. If she’d acted as well as this back in the 1980s, she’d be a fucking megastar now.
‘And I can no longer keep quiet and tolerate this situation. It’s time people knew the truth about these so-called reality shows. The lies. The manipulations. We’ve fallen victim to the very worst kind of evil and now my beautiful girl lies in a hospital bed and I don’t know if she will ever wake up.’
He froze. What? This wasn’t in the script. She was supposed to spin them a line, whip up a few headlines. What the fuck was she doing? A cold chill rose from his toes, collapsing his erection as it passed on the way to his stomach.
‘I discovered this morning that my daughter deliberately overdosed in order to get publicity for the Season Two premiere of our family’s show, New York Nixons. I had absolutely no knowledge that my baby planned to do this.’
Lie. That was a lie. It had originally been her idea. Sure, he’d been happy to go along with it, but… shit, she was throwing him under the bus. Stop speaking. Stop. Speaking.
‘Her actions were on the instructions of the producer of our show, Davie Johnston.’
The press went crazy, bulbs flashed, and dozens of voices shouted out questions at once. The suit standing next to Rainbow put his hand up to hush them, then pointed to a journalist on his left, who immediately reacted to his cue.
‘Rainbow, these are very series accusations. Do you have any proof of this?’
‘I do. Only minutes ago, I received this call from that vile man.’
Rainbow held a recording device to the microphone and pressed play.
Davie froze. Paralysed. Mute. His entire brain hijacked by an internal voice screaming, ‘No!’
‘Rainbow, it’s Davie. Problem at this end. Sky’s situation didn’t get as much airtime as we thought. Two choices: we need a repeat, another overdose, or else make a press statement saying she’s not recovering. You know the drill. Tears. Prayers. Twitter. Facebook. Call me back to discuss.’
Holy. Fucking. Shit. Vomit rose from his stomach, making his oesophagus twist so tight it felt like he was being suffocated. No breath. No air. No strength in his legs.
He sank to his knees. This was bad. Really bad. A life-changer.
His phone fell to the floor and somewhere in the distance he could hear Al say his name. He grabbed the handset and pummelled it with his fist, intending to switch it off, smash it, anything to make this stop.
Instead, he heard the modulated tones of his answering machine: ‘First new message.’
His assistant’s voice joined the cacophony of noise exploding in his head.
‘Hi, Davie. This is Jorja. We’ve had an interview request from a journalist called Sarah McKenzie at the Daily Scot. I know you love to keep your profile up in the UK, so shall I set up a date? She wants the focus to be your life back in Scotland, growing up with Zander Leith and Mirren McLean. Oh, and she said something really weird, something about wanting to meet the families the three of you left behind.’
Davie Johnston’s world faded to black.
7.
‘Fake’ – Alexander O’Neal
‘I never meant this to happen, Mirren.’
Oh, dear God, she was in cliché hell. Any minute now, he’d tell her he hadn’t meant to hurt her.
‘And I never meant to h—’
‘Stop! Which bit did you not mean, Jack? The bit where you shagged her, or the bit where she accidentally got pregnant with your kid?’
Yes, she knew she’d switched from cliché to dialogue straight out of an afternoon soap opera, but she obviously hadn’t read the manual on how to deal with a husband of nineteen years who had just ceremoniously shafted your life. They were standing in their indoor kitchen. There was an outdoor one too, but that was more functional. This was her dream room, every item hand-picked. The red lacquer La Cornue’s Grand Palais range, copper sink, Hammacher juicer, Mugnaini pizza oven and the Meneghini Arredamenti fridge in solid oak, a contrast against the hand-painted scarlet solid-wood doors on the cupboards and drawers. The white marble worktops glistened under the rack of spotlights overhead. In the corner, a turret, her own addition, accommodation for a semicircular booth that had been the backdrop to years of family dinners, homework and long nights at the laptop.
They’d planned and built it with no expense spared because they’d wanted it to last a lifetime. Shame she’d had to find out that he didn’t have the same view on monogamy.
Looking at him now, Mirren thought she’d never seen a man look so utterly pathetic. Jack Gore was from the Liam Neeson school of manhood. Tall, broad, with a naturally muscular, lean physique and a face that was undoubtedly attractive but stopped just a shade on the craggy side of movie-star handsome. It had always been obvious that Chloe took after her: same hair, same features, same smile. Logan had his father’s blond hair, wide grin and deep blue eyes, yet somehow they were proportioned slightly differently, giving her son an all-American cuteness instead of his father’s rugged appeal.
He was still speaking, but she wasn’t listening.
For the first time in many, many years, she wanted to physically hurt someone, to smash his face until it was pulp. In all her married life, she could never have comprehended feeling this way about him. Jack. Her easy-going, macho husband, the one who could walk into any room and make her instantly feel at ease because he was there. That wasn’t the guy who was standing in front of her now. This one was needy, weak, pitiful.
‘You’d just been so busy and—’
‘Don’t you dare blame me.’ Her voice was low and edged with pure ice. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she repeated, stopping there, biting back the urge to justify herself, to rhyme off the contributions she’d made to this family. She’d brought up those childr
en while he travelled the world working on movies; she’d run the home; she’d forged a career that made more damn money than him; she’d handled every single one of Chloe’s incidents and problems; and she’d done it all while waiting for this lying, cheating prick to return home to her.
And she’d loved him. My God, she’d loved him.
‘Help me, Mir. You’ve got to help me. I don’t want this. I want us. You and me. I swear on the kids’ lives it was nothing. Don’t let it change us. You know I couldn’t live—’
‘Get out.’
He reacted like he’d been slapped. It didn’t even come close to the physical pain she wanted him to feel, but it was a start.
‘Get out, Jack. We’re done.’
‘Mirren, you can’t throw away the best part of twenty years on one fling that didn’t mean—’
‘I didn’t. You did. And it’s not one fling, Jack. It’s a lifetime. The baby is yours, I take it?’
He ran his fingers through his hair, the way he always did when he was stressed. A pang of pain shot through her as she realized that she used to think the gesture was endearing. She’d watched him do that as he waited for her answer when he proposed. When he watched her crease with pain when she was in labour. When a movie deal fell through or an actor was playing up. He’d done it the first time the police had brought Chloe home, and he did it now. Caught. Betraying everything they had for a midlife-crisis fling with a twenty-two-year-old.
‘Yeah, well, you know. She says it is and we were… together… but I don’t know. I just don’t know, Mir. It was only a couple of times.’
The twitch in his right eye confirmed he was lying. It was all lies. Even the fact that he was here proved a lie. Two more weeks in Istanbul he’d told her, yet here he was, saying they wrapped early. Lies. He’d probably had a couple of weeks end-of-shoot R&R with the mistress planned and now he’d cut it short to dig himself out of the huge crater his treachery had kicked him into. And still he was talking . . .
‘Obviously we’ll do a DNA test. It might not be mine. That’s happened before. Look at Sly Stallone . . .’
Her hand gripped the edge of the marble worktop as a wave of dizziness kicked in. It was all so sordid. So cheap. If she stayed in this room a minute longer, it would destroy her.
Reaching over for the car keys that lay on the counter, she eyed him with such undisguised hatred that both hands went to his hair.
‘Be gone by the time I get back,’ she told him. ‘And take your faithless dick with you.’
The slamming of the solid-mahogany door put the exclamation mark on the end of the sentence. Outside, she headed for his brand-new, bright red Maserati and jumped in. How predictable. How could she possibly have omitted to notice that he was swimming in the pool of the midlife crisis?
The engine roared as she powered out of the drive and turned right. Five hundred yards along the road, she stopped at the checkpoint that kept the residents of Malibu Colony protected from the scrutiny and threats of the outside world. These were some of the most expensive homes in the country, populated by people who spent half their lives earning enough money to live there, and the other half feeling paranoid that it could all be taken away.
What the hell was she doing here?
How had she gone from being a little girl in a Glasgow scheme to breathing the rarefied air of the chosen few?
At the next set of lights, she turned left onto the Pacific Coast Highway and started heading north, fighting feelings of envy towards the surfers who chased the waves on her left. Past Zuma, she caught a right and began heading up the narrow, twisting Trancas Canyon Road.
On a clifftop to her right, she could see the rehab clinic that held her daughter and for the first time tears sprang to the back of her eyes. All she’d ever wanted was the stability of a family and enough financial security to know that the fears of her childhood would never come back.
Well, that was lost now. Success had come almost too easy, in part due to her inherent ability to make good judgements when it came to building a team around her. Most of her people had been with her since the first Clansman movie - loyal, dedicated professionals who knew their jobs, did them well and never let her down. Professionally, she’d built something that worked incredibly well.
But her family?
She’d got that one about as wrong as it could get.
The car turned a sharp left and she pulled over into a lay-by on the edge of the cliff. It was the kind of place that teenagers came to make out – in the middle of nowhere, plenty of time to see someone approaching and with a breathtaking view of the ocean below them.
Standing against the metal of the barrier, she pulled her white cashmere cardigan around her to protect against the breeze. Her hair was loose and strands fell across her face as she hugged herself, desperate to feel a glimmer of warmth inside her soul.
Hundreds of feet away, the surfers were just dots, moving, chasing, riding the waves. An image, like a movie in her head, took her back just a few years. Jack was home between movies; Chloe would have been about fourteen, Logan a year younger. All four of them were out on the ocean, laughing as they surfed and paddled back and forth for hours. Chloe was a natural water baby, Logan the same, and she’d taken a snapshot that day with her mind. The perfect happy family.
What went wrong?
She tried to ignore the voice that said, ‘Karma.’
Sins of the father? Nope, in this case it was sins of the mother. Was that it? Retribution for the sins of the past?
Another shudder. She realized that it came with a vibration in her cardigan pocket. Pulling out her phone, she stared at the text on the screen, trying to decipher the words, as if they were written in a foreign language.
‘Mirren, it’s Davie. Got your number from Al. Need to talk. Urgent.’
Karma. Coming back to get her. Suddenly, Jack and his betrayal paled into insignificance. This could be worse. Much, much worse. Davie belonged to another world. One she’d escaped from.
If the truth about her past came out, it would be over.
Not just her marriage, but the life she had built.
Maybe it already was.
She would never return that call. Would never reopen that door. It was behind her and there was no going back. Only forward.
Mirren McLean returned to the Maserati. Started the engine. Rolled the car over the cliff.
8.
‘Blurred Lines’ – Robin Thicke (ft. T.I. and Pharrell)
It was hard to know where Mirren started and Chloe stopped. Zander saw her every day, usually sitting in the gardens, sullen, uncommunicative, resistant to all attempts by any of the other inmates to speak to her. Of course, the staff didn’t call them inmates, but that was how it felt. Ordered there by the courts. No time off for good behaviour.
They were hostages in a gilded cage. There were three kinds of people in rehab. The ones who seriously wanted to kick their habit and entered voluntarily with no fanfare or public declaration of intent. The ones who viewed it as a publicity stunt – hey, look at me, I’m sorting my life out – and invariably blamed their addiction on prescription pain-killers. They were inevitably out and back on crack by day four.
And then there were the Zanders and Chloes. Detained as a punishment in premises that were more luxurious than a five-star hotel, pampered, cosseted, but deprived of the one thing room service didn’t sell – their next high.
It was no coincidence that the dreams had started again. Five years of 1990s therapy unravelled in a single week, a single glance. After that first conversation, he’d kept his distance and avoided further dialogue. It wasn’t difficult. They had her so spaced out on drugs to help the detox that she was barely coherent.
She was there again now, and as he passed for the last time, he said a silent goodbye. She didn’t hear.
‘Hey, my baby boy, I’ll be missing you. Who am I gonna spoil now that you’re gone?’ Nurse Plump enveloped him in a borderline inappropriate hug and blasted h
is ears with her gregarious goodbye.
Time to play the game.
He responded to her embrace, rewarding her with a wink when they finally pulled apart. ‘I might just miss you so much I have to come back for you.’
‘I’ll be right here, sweetheart. Right here and waiting.’
He knew she’d be dining out on this conversation for months. Patient confidentiality would be screwed on the back of a tantalizing gossip after too many bottles of Two-Buck Chuck.
He signed his release forms, checked out and shook Lebron’s hand after taking back possession of his wallet, his phone and his car keys. The material trappings of his life, handed back to him. Access to millions of dollars returned to a man they didn’t trust to pee on his own last week.
A voice from behind him interrupted the goodbyes.
‘You’re going, Zander?’
His name. She said his name. Yet it wasn’t her voice. The one in his dreams had his accent, was deeper, harder. And yet before he turned round, he knew it was her.
‘Yeah, they’re letting me out.’
‘I’ll miss you.’
It struck him as a strange thing to say. One conversation, that was all they’d ever had.
‘I liked watching you here. Made me feel . . . safe.’
No, not again. No. No. No.
His palms began to sweat, a small distraction from the heart that was about to explode in his chest.
There wasn’t a second of the last week that she hadn’t been in his mind and now this.
His fight-or-flight instinct chose flight.
He took two steps towards the door, hoping Lebron didn’t notice his trembling hand and the sheen on his forehead.
‘Can I come find you when I get out?’ The question was calm, almost dazed, with no trace of desperation or pleading.
No. No. No.
Yet somehow what came out was, ‘Yes.’