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Sweet as Sin

Page 30

by J. T. Geissinger


  He just shook his head back and forth, in complete disbelief. Even wrecked, his face wet and his lips pulled back in an ugly snarl, he was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

  He lunged for me suddenly, grabbed my face and crushed his mouth to mine. “You love me! I know you love me!” He cried it against my mouth as he held my head trapped between his hands. I twisted away, fighting back, until finally I found enough space to slap him.

  His head snapped back. When he snapped it back around, he stared at me with his hand against his cheek, panting and wild-eyed.

  I shouted, “I don’t love you! I never did, all right? Stop being such a child! I only said it because that’s what you wanted to hear! You knew I was never really committed to you, you said so yourself! I’m always running away, remember? I’m always comparing you to some other dickhead, remember? That’s because you were never the right thing for me, and we both know it!”

  I saw the change as it happened. Fury took the place of disbelief, and for a moment I thought he would lunge at me again, only this time to curl his hands around my throat.

  Instead he reached out, ripped the chain he’d given me from my neck, and threw it to the ground.

  The room wobbled. I had to get away from him before I fainted, or cracked apart with the screams of anguish bubbling up inside my throat.

  I turned and walked quickly away. After ten feet, I stopped. Over my shoulder, I said, “I won’t tell anyone about you. About Avery and Michael.” I bit back a sob. “And I’ll pay you back for the house.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Nico said bitterly, “Don’t bother. I usually pay my whores a lot less, but you earned it. That was the biggest mind fuck of all time.”

  His angry steps pounded down the corridor. Once they faded and he was gone, I leaned over and threw up all over my shoes.

  When Chloe and Grace finally found me, I was crumpled in a corner, sobbing like a baby, clutching the broken necklace to my chest.

  It didn’t take anywhere near eight hours for the entertainment news to begin reporting what would soon become the hottest story of the year.

  By midnight, the internet had exploded with eye-witness accounts of the lead singer of Bad Habit’s epic rejection. One particularly nasty piece, titled “Life Imitates Art,” a reference to how I’d left Nico at the altar in the video for “Soul Deep,” crucified Nico for his ruthlessness in not only finding a new girlfriend, but also proposing to her so soon after Avery Kane’s unfortunate death. I’d anticipated this kind of thing, which was one of my main reasons for wanting to keep our engagement quiet for as long as possible.

  What I hadn’t expected was the tsunami of hate that would be directed my way.

  I was a ruthless gold digger. I was a conniving slut. I was the reason Nico and Avery broke up. I was the reason she overdosed. A whole galaxy of conspiracy theories arose in which I had not only plotted to oust Avery from her role in the video, but I had plotted to push her to the edge by flaunting my relationship with Nico in her face. A few of my more rabid detractors went so far as to outright blame me for her death.

  Apparently I was also plotting to break up the band. In some corners, that was considered worse.

  I read every story. I obsessed over every detail. In the days that followed, I hunted through papers and magazines and stalked online bloggers, hungry for news, for any mention of Nico and how he was doing in the aftermath of the atomic bomb I’d dropped on his head.

  Unfortunately for me, there was plenty of news to be had.

  “I don’t know why you keep doing this to yourself,” snapped Grace, snatching the copy of US Weekly magazine from my hands. The cover picture showed Nico and a busty brunette staggering through the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills at two o’clock in the morning. His arm was slung over her shoulder; his head was bent as he said something into her ear. Her skirt was so short it was almost a belt.

  Not even a week and I’d been replaced. I was so depressed I couldn’t even muster the energy to feel sorry for myself.

  I snatched the magazine back, returning to the page I’d been reading. “It’s called self-flagellation,” I muttered. “I’ve heard it’s good for the soul.”

  Grace huffed, “There’s nothing wrong with your soul, Kat. It’s your brain that’s the problem!”

  I’d been staying with her again, hiding in the cocoon of her controlled-access building since the prior weekend. Chloe was hysterical with worry, mainly because she was convinced I was headed for a trip to the hospital due to the sheer amount of liquid that had been exiting my body through my eyes, but Grace was her usual tough-as-nails self, ordering me to eat when it was time, ordering me to sleep, ordering me to take a shower. It was good she was around, because if not for her influence, I wouldn’t have done any of those things.

  I would have simply existed on a steady toxic diet of tabloids, watching the love of my life fuck his way through every brunette in town.

  To say I was surprised by that unexpected development would be akin to saying the dinosaurs were surprised when that giant meteor first touched down.

  I wasn’t surprised. I was fucking annihilated.

  “This is ridiculous, Kat. None of this even makes sense. If you were so convinced you were done with him, if you were so over it that you had to break up with the poor guy like that, why the hell are you acting like this?” Grace’s narrowed gray eyes drilled into me.

  “It’s complicated. And by the way, that ‘poor guy’ has had his dick inside at least two dozen women in the past week! I think he’s doing just fine.” In an attempt to escape her relentless stare, I tossed aside the magazine and burrowed deeper into the safety of her couch. The snuggie I was wrapped in was no match for her burning gaze, because I felt its heat right through the Barbie-puke-pink fabric.

  “If the tabloids are to be believed. And considering their track record with UFOs, mutant human-alien hybrids, and Oprah Winfrey secretly being a government-controlled robot, they’re not.”

  She had a point. It counted for exactly zero on the “Make Kat Feel Better” scale.

  I said, “You’ll never convince me Quentin Tarantino isn’t a mutant human-alien hybrid. Have you seen his forehead?”

  Grace sighed.

  “And why are you sticking up for Nico anyway? I know you never liked him!”

  A stony silence. I looked up to find Grace staring down at me, scary as an axe murderer. Her tone was as severe as her expression. “You know I’m not stupid, right?”

  “Um. Yes?”

  “Good. Because you’re acting as if I’m too dull to figure out something else is going on here that you’re not willing to talk about.”

  I opened my mouth to protest. Grace put up a hand and said, “Shush.”

  I shushed.

  “I won’t push you to tell me what it is, but I want you to know that I know you have a ridiculous tendency toward unquestioning self-sacrifice. You’d be first in a line of Hindu widows to throw herself on her husband’s burning funeral pyre. You’d be the only virgin in tribal history to willingly jump into the volcano to appease the gods. You’re that soldier who would fall on a grenade to save his buddies.”

  I was touched. “Thanks, Gracie.”

  “It’s not a compliment, for God’s sake! What I’m saying is that you have no sense of self-preservation! You’re too worried about saving everybody else! How about if, just once, you thought about what you wanted first?”

  I said, “What I want, more than anything else in the world, is for Nico to be happy. That’s all. So in a way, I am being selfish by letting him go.”

  Grace stared at me as if I were insane. “Kat, if you think that man is going to be happy without you, you’ve never been more deluded in your life. He’s going to self-destruct. What do you think all these women he’s suddenly with are about?”

  “They’re about to score him a nasty case of genital warts, that’s what,” I grumbled.

  She snapped, “Do
n’t be flippant! When you’re talking about flushing true love down the toilet, you don’t get to be flippant. Not in front of me.”

  I was astonished. “And here I assumed you thought true love existed in the same place as unicorns and the tooth fairy.”

  She swallowed, looking away. “Well, you’re wrong. It’s rare, but it happens. It’s what every single person I see in my practice really wants. Underneath all the bullshit, it’s what everybody longs for.” She looked back at me. For the first time since I’d known her, Grace’s eyes shone with tears. “And if you throw it away like a piece of trash, I will never forgive you.”

  She stood abruptly. Crossing to the dining room, she snatched her handbag from where it hung on the arm of a chair, then proceeded to walk out of the apartment and slam the door shut behind her, all without looking at me once.

  In the bedroom, my cell phone rang.

  I flew down the hallway, my heart in my throat. But when I fished the phone from my purse, it was a number I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t him.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Kat. It’s Barney.”

  My heart leapt, then plummeted. I clutched the phone as if my life depended on it. “Oh God, Barney, has something happened to Nico? Is he all right?”

  Barney paused. In a strange voice, he said, “He’s been through worse. It’s not the end of the world, it’s just an adjustment.”

  Goddamn, drive a stake through my heart, why don’t you? I had to put my hand on my chest to press against the piercing pain his words evoked.

  “I’m calling because I have some of your things here that Nico packed up, and he’s anxious to get rid of them. I went by your house to give them back to you, but you weren’t home. Where would you like me to bring them?”

  Now he sounded businesslike and impersonal. I supposed I was lucky he wasn’t calling me the c-word. I gave him Grace’s address.

  I thought we were going to hang up, but then he said offhandedly, “You know the band leaves tomorrow night for the tour.”

  “Of course I know.”

  “Well, I thought you should also know that Nico’s bringing a few . . . guests with him. A few special guests, that is. Of the female persuasion.”

  Was he fucking kidding me? My face went hot. “Gee, thanks, Barney. I really needed to know that. I appreciate your honesty. I’m sure it will help me sleep much better tonight.”

  There was a distinct shrug in his reply. “I’m only telling you because I don’t want you to feel badly about how you ended it. You did him a favor, really. He realizes now your relationship was just sort of a temporary insanity. He’s been laughing about it. He’s going to chalk it up to hard experience. Boot camp, so to speak. As you can see, he’s already moved on.”

  I stood there with my mouth open, blinking rapidly, unable to come up with a single reply that didn’t involve threatening to disembowel a man I had previously respected and liked.

  “I mean you must have known, Kat. I love Nico, he’s like a brother to me, but he’s a musician. Honestly, they’re unreliable. There’s always something more important to them than you.”

  He hung up without waiting for my reply. I stood motionless in the living room with the dead phone to my ear, replaying the conversation over and over in my head, wondering if I was going insane.

  Boot camp.

  It’s not the end of the world.

  He’s a musician. Honestly, they’re unreliable.

  I’d heard all that before.

  When the front desk called the house phone twenty minutes later to announce a guest in the lobby, I was prepared.

  I’d put on actual clothes. (They were Grace’s, and they didn’t fit right, but who cared.) The snuggie had been rolled up and shoved in the closet. I’d brushed my teeth, combed my hair, and consumed a fortifying shot of tequila.

  “Send him up,” I said to the concierge, and sat down to wait.

  Three minutes later, a knock came on the door. I opened it, not knowing what to expect, but it was only Barney with two lumpy duffel bags, standing in the doorway with his calm smile, his crisp suit, and the bulge of his gun beneath his breast pocket like some kind of assassin Buddha.

  “Barney,” I said cautiously.

  “Kat.” His gaze dropped to the hollow of my throat. A ghost of a smile lit his face, then disappeared.

  “Come in.”

  He ambled into the foyer of Grace’s elegant apartment, looked briefly around, then set the bags down beneath a mirrored console. He turned back to me. His gaze flickered to the light fixture in the ceiling, to the oil painting that hung on the wall in the hallway, to the phone on the console where he’d set the bags.

  “Nice place,” he said and set a finger to his lips.

  All the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Holy shit, is he telling me what I think he’s telling me? “Uh . . . yep.”

  Barney nodded slowly, his gaze meaningful. He glanced at the bags. “That should be everything. Nico didn’t have time to bother with it, so I did my best to find whatever of yours was lying around.”

  “Okay.”

  Barney and I stared at each other. His gaze dropped again to the hollow of my throat. “Sorry about all this, Kat. You always struck me as a nice girl. I hate to see him acting like such a dog so soon after you broke up.”

  My voice shook with emotion when I answered. “Well, it’s like you said. He’s a musician. There’s always something more important to them than you.”

  Those were the exact words Barney had said to me on the phone, which were also the exact words I’d said to Nico the day I walked out on him before Avery’s death. I remembered the other things, too: when I’d told Nico about how I thought life was a boot camp, and when Grace had said I’d been through worse the day the paparazzi first showed up at my house. Put together, they were much more than coincidence.

  They were a code. Nico was telling me something. But what?

  Barney stepped closer. He reached out and touched the chain around my neck. I’d had it repaired the day after Nico had torn it off. Looking into my eyes, he said, “Take care, Kat,” and he tapped the gold pendant twice.

  And I understood what he was really saying: trust.

  I had to shove my fist in my mouth to stifle my gasp. Barney nodded, holding my gaze, then turned and let himself out. As the door closed behind him, I dove at the bags he’d left on the floor near the console and tore open the zippers. In a frenzy, I dug through the contents of one bag until I reached the bottom. In it were only clothes, some makeup, a few pieces of my jewelry. I tore into the other bag, crushed when I didn’t find anything, thinking the entire thing was in my head, manufactured from desperation and denial, but then my fingers brushed a smooth surface, and I froze.

  A folded piece of paper lay at the bottom of the bag.

  I picked it up with shaking hands and read.

  Phones tapped. House(s) bugged. Barney’s waiting for you downstairs, parking garage level two. PS – I’m gonna give you such a goddamn spanking.

  Sweet relief flooded me. I laughed and sobbed at the same time, tears springing to my eyes. I found a pair of Adidas in the mess of clothes on the floor and tugged them on, not bothering with the laces, then dashed off a note for Grace, and left it on the console. When I got to the lower parking level, Barney leaned out the driver’s window, impatiently waving me over to the Escalade.

  I sprinted to it as if I were being chased by a herd of stampeding elephants, jumped in the passenger seat, slammed the door behind me, turned to Barney, and shouted, “What the hell is going on?”

  His response was a curt, “Seat belt.”

  Without waiting for me to comply, he threw the car into drive. We burned rubber around a corner and leapt up the incline to the first parking level. The force threw me back against my seat. Deciding now would be a good time to follow Barney’s instructions before I cracked my head against the dashboard or the window, I fumbled with the strap of the seat belt as we screamed around another
corner, roared down a straight section, and blasted past the parking attendant hollering at us to slow down.

  We flew out into the street. Barney made a hard right, and the Escalade fishtailed for a moment before righting itself. Barney stomped on the gas pedal and the SUV jumped forward with a spine-tingling bellow. An intersection loomed ahead, which, judging by our current speed, we would be barreling through just as the light turned red.

  “Christ, Barney, slow down!”

  I turned my head to shout at him again, but the words died in my mouth as I looked past him, out the driver’s window.

  I just had time to scream before the other car smashed into us, dead-on.

  Blackness. A crushing weight on top of me. A high-pitched buzzing in my ears. The stench of smoke and gasoline stinging my nose.

  I opened my eyes and saw light in flickering flashes, like a strobe light in a disco, pulsing and disorienting. Everything looked wrong. Smashed and upside down. Moving my head sent pain shooting through my neck. I moaned and tasted blood in my mouth.

  We were in an accident. The car’s upside down. Someone hit us. Someone . . . someone is saying my name.

  I turned my head toward the voice. I was dreaming, surely. That hand could not really belong to that arm, to that body, to that face. I was mixing it all up. Everything was jumbled in my head.

  The hand fastened on my wrist and pulled. It hurt. The weight on top of me didn’t budge. I tried to focus on the weight and realized it was Barney, unconscious and bleeding from a cut on his forehead, his body slanted across mine. Another hand wrapped around the back of my neck. The hands dragged me from beneath the motionless body of Barney, through the smashed window, onto the asphalt of the street. I saw flashes of blue sky and green trees, a high-rise glinting in the afternoon sun. My body screamed in pain, but I was too weak to give voice to it.

  Then Michael lifted me onto his shoulder, the pain crescendoed, and the world fell black once more.

  The first thing I became conscious of was the fresh, bracing scent of salt air.

  I held perfectly still, aware in every cell of my body that I was in danger. I remembered what had happened. More important, I remembered who had taken me. I could only guess as to why.

 

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