by Sara Celi
He mumbled a few more protests before he finally gave into my demands, struggling to his unsteady feet before he leaned on me for support. I dragged and pulled him to my car, where I shoved him onto the backseat of my Corolla, then covered him with a raincoat I found in the back of my trunk. It didn’t do much, but I didn’t have a better option. I threw my tote bag in the passenger seat and the car into drive.
“Stay down,” I said to Tanner as I backed the car out of the parking spot.
I turned up the radio and drove toward the exit. Outside, the crowd of photographers had crushed themselves into a semi-circle around Craving’s entrance, and I strained to see who had their attention but couldn’t get a good look.
“I think we’re okay,” I said to Tanner as I flipped my car’s turning signal. “I don’t think they—”
Tanner sat up in the backseat, and the raincoat fell off him. “Why don’t I—” He grabbed the handle of the passenger door. “Let me just—and I…”
“What the fuck are you doing?” I punched the master lock on the driver’s side panel of the car. “Lie back down! Right now! They’re going to see you!” My attention darted back and forth between Tanner and the photographers.
It would only take one of them to see him.
“Tanner!” I said again, almost yelling. “Now! Lie down!”
He mumbled something else inaudible, nodded, closed his eyes, and slumped in the seat. It would have to be good enough. I gave the car some gas and pulled the car into traffic.
Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot of a not-so-great apartment complex on a marginal street in Culver City. I choose a spot the back of the dark lot, turned off the engine, and took another look at Tanner Vance. During the drive, the part of the jacket that covered his head had slipped off, revealing his face. He’d passed out again, and his mouth hung open. Every once in a while, he snorted as he breathed through his mouth. He reminded me of a disheveled puppy dog, and for a moment, I considered leaving him in the backseat of my car overnight.
Wouldn’t work. Couldn’t have one of Hollywood’s hottest hunks waking up in a strange car in a stranger neighborhood. Besides, if anyone walked by, they’d notice him. Who knew what would happen then?
“Tanner,” I said again. “Wake up.” He didn’t move. I sighed. “Tanner! Wake up!” I tapped the horn on my steering wheel. “Jesus Christ. Tanner!”
He stirred, and one eye cracked open. “Where am I?”
“My apartment complex.”
“What?”
He rolled a bit in the seat, so I took that as a good sign and got out of the car. There in the dark, empty, hidden parking lot, I struggled to get him out, across the lot, through the back entrance, and down the wooden hallway to the small two-bedroom apartment. I shared it with Samantha, a sometimes model I met through a Craigslist ad, and her best friend, Kelly, an actress on her way to minor stardom on a scripted MTV show. Both were gone for the weekend on a trip with friends to Santa Barbara. They didn’t plan to be home until Monday night. Lucky break.
“Here you go,” I said as I guided shaky, drunken, half-lucid Tanner Vance through the door and onto the couch. He collapsed onto it with another groan. I turned on the room light, and he winced. “You can sleep there.”
“Hurmpah.”
He smacked his lips, twisted on the couch—which was where I normally crashed—then fell asleep a few seconds later. I stood above him, staring at his gorgeous, chiseled face and broad hands. I already knew he had a great body underneath his gray shirt; I’d seen it many times in about every magazine on the planet. Tanner had the kind of chest, legs, stomach, and arms that would make any personal trainer swoon. Everything flowed together like something out of Greek mythology.
Satisfied with leaving him there, I locked the apartment deadbolt, walked into Kelly’s bedroom, changed, and fell on top of her bed.
“Who are you and what the hell am I doing here?”
Those words, and a gruff hand, shook me awake a few hours later. Tanner stood next to Kelly’s twin bed with his arms crossed, frowning at me. His bloodshot brown eyes narrowed.
“I’ll ask you one more time. Where am I and what in the fucking hell am I doing here?”
“Good morning to you, too.” I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. “And this is my apartment, for one thing.”
He glanced at the room. “Figured. Where are we? The Valley?”
“Culver City.”
A grunt.
“Not far from Sunset. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes without traffic.” I threw back the sheets, got up, and took Kelly’s white terry-cloth robe off the back of a small wooden chair by the bed. I put the robe on, then crossed my arms over my chest. “Are you feeling okay this morning?”
Listen, I don’t know what this is about.” Tanner frowned. “But if you think—”
“I don’t think anything.” I moved past him and walked into the kitchen. “Would you like some coffee? We have a Keurig machine.” I paused. “You probably need some.” I sorted through the cabinets, searching for coffee cups.
“What did you do to me last night?” Tanner said. “How did I get here?”
“You were sick. Throwing up in the parking lot.” I found two cups in the upper cabinet and placed them on the counter in front of the machine. “I think you threw up three times, at least. I found you right after I finished my shift at Twisted.”
He looked me up and down. “You’re a stripper?”
I crossed my arms. “No. A cocktail waitress.”
“And what? Last night you stood there in the parking lot, watching me?”
“Someone had to. You l were about to do something stupid.”
“I can take care of myself, thank you.”
I turned on the Keurig and placed coffee inside the lip. “Didn’t seem like that yesterday.”
He snorted. “Like you’d know.”
“I can tell when a person is in trouble.” I shrugged and brewed the coffee for the first mug. “I wanted to help. Besides, there were people—”
“People? Oh, God.” His eyes closed. “What kind of people?”
“Photographers and tabloids. Bloggers.”
“Where?” When he opened his eyes and stepped closer to me, I backed up against the counter and the warm coffee machine. “Where were these people?”
“Out in front of the parking garage, on the street in front of Craving. I didn’t want them to see you like that, since you’re—”
“Where’s your phone?”
“What?”
“Your phone. Give it to me.”
I laughed. What a ridiculous question. “You’re in a strange apartment with someone you’ve never met, and you’re worried about my stupid phone?”
He tapped his back pocket. “My wallet, phone, and keys are still here. Already checked. You didn’t steal them, so now all I need to do is see your phone.”
“Why?” He doesn’t want to give this argument up, does he?
Tanner held out his hand. “Need to check it. Make sure you didn’t take any photos of last night.”
“I didn’t.”
“Don’t believe you. So where is it? Give it to me.”
What a jerk. More than a jerk. “My phone doesn’t have a camera. It doesn’t take photos.”
“What?” He laughed once. “I don’t believe you. Hand it over.”
“I’m serious,” I said, growing more frustrated by the second. Here I was, trying to do something nice for someone, and he didn’t appreciate it at all. Instead, he stood in my kitchen making demands. Who did this guy think he was?
“You want to do this the hard way, don’t you? Okay, fine. Now. Give it to me now, or I’ll call the police.” He glared at me. “You don’t want me to do that. It won’t turn out well.”
I stared at him.
“Kidnapping is a pretty serious charge,” he added. “Can put someone in jail for years.”
Anger twisted and lurched in my stomach. How dare he accuse me of kidna
pping him? I saved him. Without me, who knows what could have happened in that parking lot? He could have driven home drunk, or puked his guts out and choked on his own vomit. He might have done something stupid in front of all those photographers. He might have killed someone. What an ungrateful jerkoff.
“Who do you think the police are going to believe?” Tanner gestured between our bodies. “Me? Or you?”
“I’m not the one who got drunk out of his mind last night.”
He shrugged. “Maybe so, but I’m the one who’s famous.”
I snorted. “So what?”
“So what?” He walked into the living room for a moment, and when he returned he held two rumpled magazines in his left hand. “What are these?”
One, an issue of Tell Us, had the words, “Tanner and Lana: Reconciling at Last” across the front, along with two mournful-looking photos of them. Tell Us followed up the cover story with a few more expanded articles about Lana’s reality show, what came next for Tanner, and style tips from LA Stands for Lana. The other, an issue of Celeb, led with the headline “Lana and Harper, Stronger than Ever!” A smaller font on Celeb’s front cover implied Tanner still nursed a broken heart.
“Either one of these yours?” Tanner said.
I gulped. I owned both, but I didn’t want to admit that.
He flipped open Tell Us’s crumpled front cover. “This one was a favorite. If I remember correctly, the article supposedly had information from sources ‘close to the couple.’”
“Those are my roommate’s magazines,” I finally managed.
“I found them on the coffee table when I woke up.” Tanner placed them on the counter and shook his head. “Funny how they both came from the same week. Makes you wonder which one is true, right?” Then he laughed without humor. “Did you at least enjoy reading all of the lies people put out there about my life?”
“Thrilling. Kept me up all night.” I kept my face expressionless. “Just what I wanted to read—endless gossip about people I had never met.” As I said them, the words sounded good. Believable.
“Give me the phone, and we won’t have a problem, okay?” Tanner said.
I pushed past him and disappeared down the hallway, then into Kelly’s bedroom. I found the phone at the bottom of my faux leather tote bag, one with rotting straps I had repaired in a desperate bid to keep from spending money on a new one. I yanked the phone out of the bag and walked back into the kitchen, making sure I slammed the bedroom door and stomped as loud as possible down the hallway.
Tanner laughed when he saw the clunky brick I called a cellphone. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m not a liar,” I said. “But you’re a jerk.”
“Everyone has smartphones these days. Everyone.” He took the phone and examined it like a relic from thirty years ago. “Guess I don’t have to worry about you uploading photos of me on your couch to Instagram, do I?”
“Like I said. I didn’t take any photos of you last night. No tweets about you, either.”
“Good.” He handed the phone back to me. “Since we’ve got that settled, I’ll leave now.”
“I’ll drive you back to the parking lot. That’s where your car is, right?”
He shook his head. “I called a car already. My driver, actually. James. He’ll be here soon.”
I frowned and cross my arms. “What? Earlier you asked me where we were.”
Tanner grinned. “A test. Wanted to see if you were lying.” He took a shiny gold iPhone out of his back pocket and unlocked it. “My phone has GPS, you know. And the car is two minutes away.”
“So you weren’t driving last night?”
“Nope.” A pause. “Not that I can remember much about what happened. Things are a little blurry.”
“Great.”
“Great.”
We eyed each other.
“Fantastic.”
“Fantastic.”
I waited for him to say something else, to thank me, or to apologize for the ungrateful way he’d acted, but Tanner didn’t do any of those things. Instead, he watched his phone, and when the car showed up at the front door, he grunted a good-bye. Walked out. Gone. Disappeared. Like he’d never been in the apartment in the first place, and like he’d never needed my help at all.
He’d never even asked my name. Dickhead.
I shut the door behind him, locked it, and punched my fist against it once. No wonder Tanner Vance was having a bad year, and no wonder that supermodel girlfriend of his had left him in such a public way. If he acted this way toward people who tried to be kind to him, he more than deserved it.
“Thanks,” I said to James as I slid into the back of the black Mercedes moments after it pulled up to the apartment complex.
“Didn’t expect to find you in Culver City this morning, sir.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t ask other questions. For the last three years, James Marx had been more than my on-call driver and employee. He’d become a type of silent confidant, always around to witness the finer points of my screwed up, downward-spiraling life.
Speaking of which…
As James drove away from the apartment complex, I stared at it out of the window, watching it grow smaller and smaller until it disappeared. Simple, typical place. Eight, maybe ten units, and they all probably had the same layout as the one I’d woken up in that morning. It was nothing special, but it reminded me of the one I’d rented for the first six months I lived in Southern California, before the wave of Hollywood success came.
The apartment didn’t intrigue me. The woman I found inside did.
Miss No Name.
I hadn’t slept with her. I knew that much, and part of me regretted the fact. She had a nice ass and rosebud lips, and long, tumbling brown hair with tinges of red to break up the darkness. I liked what I found that morning. Better than my usual choice on any given night. Miss No Name had more than looks.
Miss No Name had moxie. And a hint of self-respect.
Most women I met didn’t have either of those things once they encountered me. Whatever resolve they had always faded, and more than one of them had ended up begging me to sleep with them before we’d barely said hello. The younger version of me had loved this. I’d used it to my advantage many times, tearing through wannabe models and actresses who thought a brief relationship with me would further their careers.
But now, with the last year of “life experience” behind me, all that was quickly becoming boring.
James turned the car onto Santa Monica Boulevard, and we passed the familiar shops and buildings of Beverly Hills. I knew this route so well. Soon, we’d turn onto Benedict Canyon, then Mulholland Drive. Moments later, we’d arrive at the house I’d purchased during what felt like another chapter of my life, a happier time I wouldn’t ever get back. But a guy like me probably didn’t deserve real happiness.
My phone buzzed, and I shifted in the seat until I dug it out from the back pocket of my pants. When I saw the number, I considered throwing the phone out the passenger window.
Incoming from Kenneth, my publicist. At seven-fucking a.m.
“What is it?” I said after I punched the answer button.
“Have you seen LA Unfiltered this morning?” Kenneth tripped over his words. “Oh my God, Tanner.”
“You know I hate that site. Never read it.”
“This isn’t something about Lana, I promise.” Kenneth paused, then cleared his throat. “How many times have you been out partying this week?”
“None.” Sounded good, right?
“Don’t lie to me, Tanner. You can lie to everyone else, but not to me.”
“Okay,” I said, not trying to hide my annoyance. Kenneth was a good man, and better than most, but sometimes I could do without the probing questions about my personal life. I was a grown-up. He didn’t need to babysit me. “I went out one night this week. Last night.”
Kenneth scoffed. “Interesting, because Unfiltered has photos of you
doing what looks likes Molly, and they say these photos are from Bungalow 23’s Rave Crave party three nights ago.”
I sat up straighter in the seat. “What? You’re kidding.”
“I wish,” Kenneth said, his voice turning harder. “It’s bad. First post. Ten photos. And of course, the bottle service at your table and some half-naked model-types make it all worse.”
“Maybe it’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be,” I said, trying my best to remember what had happened at the Rave Crave party. Goddamn it.
“Good grief. You don’t get it, do you? This is more than drinking we’re taking about. These are photos of you doing drugs. Drugs.”
“Come on. Drugs?”
“This won’t play well in the heartland,” Kenneth said. “It won’t play well here, either. In fact, it won’t play well anywhere. Did you have to go this far? MDMA? Come on, man.”
“I bet those pictures were Photoshopped.” But I honestly couldn’t recall much about that night beyond the bottle service. Maybe I had done Molly.
Shit.
“It could have been worse,” I said. “Cocaine. Crack. Meth? At least it wasn’t any of those.”
“I better not ever hear it is. No one wants another Robert Downey Jr. situation.” Kenneth sighed. “Least of all me.”
“I’m not like him,” I said, but I didn’t feel so convinced anymore.
“And of course you have to go and do this now. We were doing so well,” Kenneth said. “They were going to do an article on you in Details next month. Something nice. Fluffy. Positive. But this—this is the latest in the narrative, Tanner. People think you’re a drunk with no future. They already say you’re nothing but an alcoholic mess. Washed up. Distracted. A liability. Now they’ll start wondering if you’re a druggie. I told you what I—”
“I know,” I said. “I haven’t forgotten what you told me that producer said at the party you were at last week. I get it.”