by Jane Galaxy
She realized that Claudia was staring at her.
“Then we went to Santorini and saw the volcano,” said Vanessa finally.
There was a long pause.
“What happened when you came back?”
“I sold the photographs of him.”
“And?”
“And we ate dinner at The Houndstooth.” Vanessa listened to her sister breathe in. She hadn’t told her that she’d been to one of the only places in New York still off-limits to anyone with a cell phone and a bit of amateur ambition—well, anyone who wasn’t savvy enough to not get caught, anyway.
“So,” said Claudia again in that very careful voice, “you’re . . . together?”
“Well. . . .” Vanessa started again. “Not exactly. Kind of, but not officially, you know? And then I was trying to get shots of Joanna Hart, and I went up to her apartment, and they were there. Together.”
Claudia’s eyes were large, but she didn’t say anything.
“He called me and told me they were rehearsing parts for a movie.”
She looked at her sister and found the disgusted expression she was expecting. Vanessa half-smiled.
“Jesus, was he hitting the random button on TV tropes for a good excuse?”
“Straight out of a sitcom,” said Vanessa.
“That’s shitty,” Claudia announced.
“I feel awful.”
“Why? You aren’t the asshole in this scenario.”
“But I went up there looking for a scandal. I violated Joanna Hart’s privacy because I thought . . . it’d be better somehow, if it was me. The one girl photog who’d magically become an expert on celebrity life after spending a week on yachts and in fancy cars. And it’s not like I don’t know Jax Butler’s reputation. I’ve followed him around for so long, I know what he’s like, and I still—” Vanessa gestured uselessly. “I still expected him to be different after that trip, I guess. Stupidly.”
“I’m sorry,” said Claudia, and that, instead of some words of encouragement, felt more final than her conversation with Jax had.
“It’s not like I’m a victim,” said Vanessa.
“I didn’t say you were,” Claudia replied, setting her hand on Vanessa’s arm.
“No, I know, but I’m not innocent here, either.” Off Claudia’s look, she said, “I took pictures of the two of them together and turned them in to the bureau.”
Claudia tilted her head one way and then the other like she was weighing it, and decided it was probably okay.
Vanessa pursed her lips and braced herself for the next part.
“And I turned in the photos of Georgina and Jax together.”
It took a moment, but Claudia finally gave in and cringed. Hard.
“That one’s way shady,” said Claudia, “But . . . I’m kind of impressed at your revenge game.”
Vanessa smiled.
“Thanks.”
Claudia patted her on the cheek.
“You’ll find someone new to stalk on demand in a secret agreement that has to be protected from the delicate consciences of the masses,” she said. “I feel confident that you’ll land on your feet.” She stood and bent over to give her sister a brief hug. “Will you think about what I said? No, that’s not a question.” Claudia squared her shoulders and put on a serious expression. “Think about what I said about me contributing, Vanessa.”
“I will,” she promised.
“I’ve gotta go look after Trina’s boys again.”
“Alright, see you in the morning.”
When her sister had gone, Vanessa looked around the apartment. Four years ago, in the joy of celebrating her first paycheck, she’d used up an entire box of pushpins tacking up the corners of her more serious work. When Jax had mentioned the possibility of a gallery show, she had gone through everything on the walls piece by piece, picking her favorites and arranging them into groups by theme and narrative.
She opened the file with the pictures of people on the Greek island and went through them again.
The emotions there were so much clearer than she remembered. Vanessa flicked through white tourists in their bathing suits. Accidental glamour shots—that wasn’t even the point, and it had still bled into her serious work. She’d been papping in Europe and hadn’t even noticed. Vanessa looked at the stacks of prints from high school again, carefully arranged on the dining room table. She’d had so much when she was younger and hadn’t been able to appreciate it. She held up one, of Papa in the workshop, next to the computer screen showing a middle-aged man holding his young son on his shoulders.
Vanessa methodically tore the print in half, and then into quarters, and put the stack face down in the bottom of the kitchen trashcan.
Chapter Seventeen
YOU’RE IN . . . WITH In-Crowd News!
Tonight: have troubled Hollywood teen-queens Zara and Mycah gone from broken-up to feuding? We’ve got all the goods from Z’s Snapchats, and deets on Mycah’s steamy Ibiza meet-up with . . . singer Julia Valentine?! There’s a mess you won’t want to miss.
Plus, we get to follow reality star and prom-trepreneur Becca Lindsay around New York’s hottest fashion shows, including the launch of her sister Kate’s new line of gorgeous handbags for Hedda Upclaire UK. Love the chain design. We’ve got a special exclusive discount code we’ll share at the end of the show just for In-Crowd viewers, so stay tuned!
But of course, our top story of the night is definitely more super and a lot less heroic than anything else going on in Hollywood these days. Rumors out of Tinseltown have it that bad boy Jax Butler, Dirk Masterson himself, has been wrecking hearts and beds all over the Protectorate set.
We were the first to hear mutterings that his jet-setting playboy lifestyle had not slowed after his ultra-octane, heart-pounding supercar race against the cops through Beverly Hills, but that he’d even doubled down and shifted into high gear! Vroom vroom. A thrill ride at Jax’s hands wouldn’t be unwelcome for a lot of starlets, but apparently he’s keeping it a bit too much in the Card One family.
Holland Matthews, better known to you superhero nerds as The Patriot, America’s premier protector who manages to make a three-corner hat and duster look sexy as hell, confirmed last week at a red carpet event that he and Georgina Ashlar quietly ended their relationship this past summer. Sounds like a conspiracy worthy of The Patriot’s detective skills.
Sources close to the hunky blond confirmed to In-Crowd that it wasn’t just the pressures of filming while Georgina was getting ready for her turn on Season 12 of Dance Me to the Moon that caused the split, it was that she and Jax got up close and . . . well, personal! Photographs of the two outside his apartment last spring are all over magazine covers. I wonder if he let her see his secret underground headquarters. Matthews and Butler reportedly got into a blow-out fight with punches thrown, putting all those rippling gym-hardened muscles to uses other than Holland’s 2014 cover of Fitness NOW, as seen here.
And Holland hasn’t had anything nice to say about Jax lately. When asked about how they prepare for scenes on set, he had this to say:
“Ah, you know, I’m a professional. I can’t speak for his methods. Myself, I just do the work.”
Holland’s friends have confirmed to In-Crowd that he’s currently staying with close pal and co-star Taran Pope, no doubt living it up in Pope’s new penthouse loft in Tribeca, recently valued at almost $20 million. With rooftop views, an infinity pool, and plenty of other trendy features, it’ll be a wonder if those two ever leave the house. Hope they invite yours truly when Taran throws his next house party.
As for Jax Butler, well, the buck don’t stop with Holland Matthews. Photographs of him getting hot and heavy with Joanna Hart have surfaced—putting the lie to rumors that the two aren’t quite finding their rhythm on camera! That sure doesn’t look awkward or stilted to me. The famously reclusive actress and former child star hasn’t done interviews since the photos came out—hmm—but there are a few who suspect she could be playing things
distant and waiting to confirm a possible pregnancy.
Whatever the case, this all seems to be causing a cool-down on the The Protectorate set, which is wrapping filming soon, and the chill isn’t due to Tristan Eccleston’s character Lucius and his ice powers. Rumors are flying about whether any of the superheroes will be able to finish their scenes together or if Card One will have to use their magical CGI powers to make it happen. Of course, there’s always the possibility that Jax could do what industry execs have long suspected, and cut and run from Card One altogether. How would you feel about a Protectorate franchise without its leader? Is Jax Butler ever gonna stop breaking hearts? Hit us up on Twitter or Snapchat!
And speaking of the gorgeous British classical actor—love his accent, by the way—are Tristan Eccleston and Gabriella Zahn getting back together, or—
Jax raised the remote and flicked the television screen off. He was still in the odd position he’d been in when he first flopped down onto the couch and leaned his head all the way over the back of it. Staring at the ceiling while Adriana Guzman did that weird thing with her voice making every sentence sound like a question had helped him tolerate the broadcast somewhat, but not much. It was easy to imagine every photograph she’d been talking about as they came up.
He wondered how much side money Holland’s publicist was making by constantly leaking crap to the press as a “source,” or an “insider,” or a “close friend.” Close friend his ass. Publicists were nice until they were fuckers.
God, this whole thing was a shitshow.
He sat up, then leaned forward to put his face in his hands, partly to stop the bloodrush headache (okay, it was a hangover) and partly to massage his temples and think about how worse things could happen.
Aliens could invade.
The government could collapse once and for all.
An earthquake could hit the city.
He could lose his contract with Card One, never get hired again, and never do anything meaningful or genuinely satisfying with his entire life, spending the rest of it bedding young and ambitious women who’d prove how good their acting skills were by pretending to want to be around him.
Damnit.
It was easy to want to change, in theory. He’d tried. A few times, even. There’d been that therapist who told him he couldn’t love someone else if he couldn’t be gentle with himself first.
Which, after some thought, and getting the bill, Jax had realized was bullshit. If loving yourself first was a requirement for someone else loving you, then anybody who failed to fix their self-esteem issues deserved to die alone and be eaten by their cats. It was a more depressing thought than the ones he’d started with.
Then there was the life coach who told him that he just needed to get organized, and his brain would follow. Jax hired Natalie and—problem solved.
Until his dad had died, and dear old pop’s second wife waited three months after the funeral to bother getting in touch with his only son.
And the . . . thing with the car happened.
His next therapist, the one with the weird hair who’d been court-ordered as part of his sealed settlement with the Beverly Hills Police Department, had given Jax a book to read, which said that when an abusive parent died before the child could confront the parent and resolve the trauma, it was normal for the child to lash out in frustration and grief over the lack of closure.
Sure.
Punching a $150,000 car through the clubhouse of his private gated neighborhood probably indicated something along the lines of frustration.
From there, he’d seen a naturist who petted him with feathers and told him his aura was shaky, a club promoter who sold him some kickass Molly before getting indicted on tax fraud and disappearing into federal prison, and just for fun, a psychic who told him that he smiled a lot on the outside but was unhappy in his heart. That sounded like a classic line to trot out to skeptics, and the psychic had not been impressed when Jax said so.
Her prediction in Instigator Weekly that Jax Butler was going to die in a horrible accident before his next birthday was proof of that.
The constant reinvention of Henry Jackson Butler had gotten so convoluted over the last few years that it had honestly been a relief to escape into Dirk Masterson’s life. Until that had taken over and hadn’t solved any of his problems, and now. . . .
Now all this.
When the entertainment shows started making noise about contract buy-outs and the possibility of your character tragically but conveniently dying or getting plastic surgery to look like some speculative replacement actor, that’s when the shit really started hitting the fan.
And that, he realized, staring at a cobweb on the ceiling that kept shaking every time the A/C came on, was all on him.
And then Jax thought: at what point do you take responsibility for your own fuck-ups and quit blaming your problems on your parents?
He’d blamed dad for a lot of bad things in his life. Dropping out of high school a month before graduation because he could. His choice to run to Hollywood and away from being woken up for 4AM wind sprints and getting threatened with military school. Changing his name so he’d never have to go by the same one as his dad’s again. When Jax had gotten his first big paycheck, he blew most of it on a massive house party, because he’d never had one before, and maybe Henry Butler would hear about it somewhere and . . . be jealous, or something. Realize that he’d wasted his own life on being bitter and horrible.
There wasn’t a way for a dead man to be jealous of his son fucking up his own career.
Definitely no way that Henry Butler would envy the spectacular way he’d ruined both a professional working relationship and the first thing that had felt stable and grounded in a long, long time.
It’s like typecasting—easy to fall into it, hard to crawl out once you’ve set yourself up that way.
Vanessa was right about that, he realized.
Jax hadn’t thought her name, hadn’t formed the word to echo around inside his head, for a while.
He thought about the way her skin glowed at its best curves, the way she stuck the tip of her tongue between her teeth when she smiled at him, brushing her hand over his jaw when she kissed him.
If you want approval, you’re not going to get it unless you do something you know you could approve of, too.
He was never going to get anywhere with the usual Jax nonsense. He was never going to get it just sitting around the apartment waiting for something to happen, thinking about how he could get ahold of someone to take care of a cobweb (Natalie, he realized—Natalie would know that).
There was nothing to be gained by doing the same old same old.
He needed something big.
Sparks were arcing out of the exoskeleton at his slightest movement. The Steel Knight—dripping with sweat, blood, and mech oil—staggered to his feet and managed to wipe some of the grease out of his eyes. Simon—what was left of Simon and the power loader that had been closest when the controller glove had overblown—was a charred, twisted-up something on the floor, currently flaking away bits of ash and . . . whatever was left, drifting across the floor in the wind that had come up through the gaping hole in the side of the building.
Dirk had been clever to set the power controller to offload, but he had gotten lucky, too, he realized. He let himself breathe for a minute—in through the nose, out through the mouth—then slowed to listen for anything or anyone else coming his way.
Some noise sounded in the distance. He waited, and it thudded again.
The exoskeleton made it easier for him to work longer and harder, survive impacts that could liquefy his innards, but exhaustion was taking over. With difficulty, the Steel Knight made the climb to the top of the warehouse to see what was going on. There were the amber and yellow dock lights flickering onto the river intake, and there—suddenly there was a flash of light from inside another building.
Shit. Was there somebody else waiting for him? Someone Simon had given instructions t
o, someone who could carry on the InarchTech name and keep funneling money back to foreign interests—
Dodson.
Simon’s right-hand woman and CTO. She was still in the building, wasn’t she? That bald asshole had talked to someone on the radio before, giving instructions. Likely she was powering the main switching units back on to finish the job of sending the Omnicore code to the Russian hacking collective, which would render all this work and the charred bodies completely moot.
Dirk made a move forward to calculate the jump from this building to the next, but even leaning was making his leg strain and start to crack and shudder. The bone was definitely broken. He gritted his teeth. If Dodson did this, he’d just be on the run from a bigger bunch of enemies. Wearing an exoskeleton suit and dodging the FBI wouldn’t exactly be noble in the long run if he couldn’t manage to make something of this newfound sense of duty and responsibility to cancel out his past sins.
He chuckled to himself.
“Figures that no one would be around to see me actually having something approaching integrity or honor.”
Dirk took a deep breath and tried his leg again—maybe the bone wouldn’t feel like it was grinding into gravel this time, maybe the intense shooting pain making his eyes water was just a hallucination. Maybe—
There were three silhouettes, or maybe four, running toward the warehouse along the dock below him. One of them was definitely a woman, another looked more like a teenager, and the third—the third was wearing a ridiculous triangular hat and long coat, like some historical re-enactor giving a walking tour of Boston. They crouched next to the door murmuring to each other, and then the teenager planted something on the electrical panel on the outside of the building. There was a pause, a sudden sharp zap, and the lights inside went black. Moments passed, and suddenly Dodson threw open the warehouse door and began firing at the group, point-blank.