by Martha James
Less likely- but not impossible...
Looking around at the faces of frightened children and feeble elders all around him, he knew that he still couldn't take the risk.
At any rate, he realized with mild excitement, the killer was slowing down now, just a little bit, the exertion of his escape finally getting to him.
The only problem was, that same exhaustion was now beginning to overtake Julian himself...
“Get... Back... Here!” he wheezed, colors flashing before his eyes, sweat blinding him.
He was closing in though, getting closer and closer, and now- oh God!
He was close enough to reach out and touch the man, and he attempted to do just that.
He flung his hand through the air, grabbing the back of his hoodie, trying his damnedest to pull him back.
“Hold it! Right there!” he panted, but the man didn't stop.
Instead, he leapt through the air, his body careening from the subway platform and through the metal doors of a train as they eased their way shut- he almost didn't even make it in.
Julian had no chance of getting in after him, but couldn't immediately slow down from the momentum he'd built up. His leg fell over the edge of the platform, and he could feel himself lurching toward the train as it began to pull forward, the perfect recipe for death. He saw his life flash before his eyes in that fraction of an instant, certain that this was the end, but felt the hand of someone grabbing his own jacket, yanking him back down, and pulling him back onto the platform.
He collapsed, tumbling down onto his ass and panting like a dog with exhaustion, his eyes wide with terror.
“You alright buddy?” asked the man, a heavy-set, middle-aged New Yorker, a Good Samaritan in the right place at the right time. Julian struggled to even breathe, much less provide him with any kind of coherent answer, but at last he managed to choke out, with great effort, “Yeah... Yeah, thanks...”
In the distance he saw the police storming forward in his direction, and the sight filled him up with exhaustion, rather than fear.
He'd let him get away.
He'd been so close, had the man in the reach of his fingertips, and he'd let him get away.
He closed his eyes, and wished in that instant that he could just disappear into sleep, not looking for the very long night of questioning that he had in store ahead of him.
3
Desiree felt numb.
She wondered, honestly, whether she could ever again feel anything but numb.
It had always bothered her. The thought of how quickly things could change. How it could all be upended, just when you thought everything was going fine. Your world could be turned inside out before you even had time to notice it, and you were left trying to make sense of what had just taken place- an impossible feat, but one that you would be left attempting for the rest of your life.
Shade was gone. Forever.
Stabbed in the chest. His throat cut. His killer on the run, and no one at all with any clue whatsoever who might have done it, or even, really, why.
Julian had told the police everything he knew, which really wasn't much.
He mentioned having seen the blood coming from beneath the door of Shade and Jason's dressing room, and seeing the masked man as he exited through the stage door. Mentioned tracking him down outside, and what fleeting physical details he'd been able to perceive and recall. He'd seemed like an older man, he said. Not old, but middle-aged maybe. White. Dark hair, though of what color he couldn't say with certainty. Most of it had been concealed by his baseball cap, and the dim light of the evening had made perceiving its color impossible for him. He estimated him to be about 5'10” or 5'11”, said he'd been wearing sunglasses and he couldn't tell much about his face.
And that was about it.
The killer had been careful to avoid leaving any kind of DNA samples behind, and so far, the forensic team had yet to turn up a damn thing in that regard. Similarly, no security footage existed that told them much of anything about him. Nothing from the show that made it clear to anyone how he'd gotten in or when, nothing from the streets that revealed him with any clarity, and he'd been moving too fast on the underground for the cameras to pick up anything at all of any use to the police. Julian said he might be able to pick out the guy in a police line-up if he was presented to him, but the problem was that no one had any real clue as to any possible suspects.
Barring any real clues as to the identity of the killer, a dozen or so motives were tossed around by the police in the days to come. The most obvious answer would seem to have been a crazed fan of some kind- though a middle-aged man didn't exactly fit the profile of one of Desiree Star's typical audience members.
The cop who'd first told Desiree about this theory shrugged when Desiree objected on such grounds. “You never know,” he'd said. “There are a lot of twisted, perverted fucks out there, if you'll pardon my language. You never really know what a person might be capable of. What sort of weird skeletons they have in their closet...”
And then there was the “Shade the drug addict” angle, which a certain segment of the police force seemed hellbent on proving. Unsurprisingly, Shade's autopsy had revealed the presence of various substances in his blood at the time of his death- some alcohol, a bit of marijuana, and quite a bit of cocaine.
Desiree dreaded this information getting out, knowing how cruel people could be, and already able to hear people saying in her mind that Shade had “gotten what was coming to him” for his choice of lifestyle.
Some of the investigators certainly seemed to think this way. It had been Shade lying on the floor with his throat cut, after all, not Desiree, when she would have been the far more obvious target. It was entirely possible that he'd gotten in over his head with his drug use- “drug addiction,” the police were calling it, though Desiree didn't think there was any concrete reason to think of Shade's recreational drug use, excessive as it might have seemed to a virtual teetotaler like her, as a full-blown addiction.
But it wasn't uncommon, they persevered, for drug addicts to get in over their heads with their dealers. To keep needing more and more of their preferred substance in order to be satisfied, and to spend money that they really didn't have in order to fulfill their need.
It made sense, didn't it, that Shade might have arrived at his fate by a similar means?
Desiree's astronomical rise had carried him along with it, and maybe his increased spending power had gotten him hooked on higher quality stuff, which he genuinely couldn't afford in the quantities he desired. And so he'd become indebted, and his dealers had gotten tired of waiting, and one thing had led to another, and...
Desiree didn't want to hear it.
She wouldn't stand to hear his memory sullied, and would entertain no such theories unless there was concrete proof that that had been what had taken place.
All that was left for her to do, meanwhile, with no evidence, and no direction in which to pursue any sort of leads, was to mourn Shade's loss. To try and move on, as impossible as it seemed.
To try and piece her life back together as best she could...
The rest of the world tour had been cancelled after Shade's murder, both out of grief and out of fear for her security while traveling. She knew her fans around the world must be disappointed about this, but she knew just as well that there was no way she could have gone on at this point, even had she genuinely wished to do so.
She couldn't imagine Shade's absence ever not being felt whenever she and Jason were up on stage, and though finding a new drummer would be a simple enough task, it was pointless to think that Shade himself could ever be replaced.
_____
Following his funeral- an absolutely dismal affair- Desiree had returned home to California, where she planned to stay at her father's place for a while, recovering from the trauma of Shade's loss, and trying to figure out where she could possibly go from there.
Days passed. Then weeks.
She found that she now felt ne
rvous, all the time, never able to sit still for long, and not really able to go out that much, somewhat afraid as she now was of the outside world. She felt as safe in her sprawling childhood home as she did just about anywhere, given the gates that protected this whole community from intruders, and the extensive security measures her father had long ago put in place for their home.
Nevertheless, she found herself spending most of her time holed up in her teenage bedroom, avoiding both her father and the cleaning staff- trying, and failing, to write new material that expressed the pain of her loss. Everything she jotted down felt like complete garbage, as did all of her material up to the present point in time- it all felt shallow and meaningless, and nothing she put on paper seemed even remotely adequate to capture the depths of her present grief.
Then, after several weeks, things got really bad for her.
Her father announced at dinner one evening that he would be going away for a while. He travelled frequently for work, and this time he needed to go to Europe for about a month, followed by a stay at the New York office for an extended period of time.
“You're welcome to come with me if you'd like,” he offered, though he seemed well aware that this was of no real interest to her whatsoever.
She smiled at the suggestion, politely, but shook her head.
“No, I... I think I'll just stay here for now,” she said, although the prospect of being left alone was as bad or worse than that of emerging back into the world as he was so boldly suggesting.
“Suit yourself,” he'd said, which Desiree found to be more than a little bit callous, and that, as they say, was that.
She'd been alone at this point for... Well... It must have been about a week and a half, she supposed.
She honestly didn't know how much more of it she could take...
The days weren't so bad- they were mostly normal, with the cleaning staff around, and the golden sunlight streaming in through the windows of her room. The nights were what got her, when everyone went away, and she was left alone with her anxieties, with no one else around.
She kept imagining Shade's final moments, the horrors he must have known as his life was stolen away from him.
Then, perhaps even worse, she imagined herself as the victim- the police busting in and finding her body lying in a heap on the floor, her throat cut, blood pooling around her on the floor.
Every noise she heard over the course of her long and sleepless nights, every blowing tree branch or shadow cast across the floor, became the killer himself in her mind. Despite no signs that anyone was about, and no warning from the security system that she was in any sort of danger, she nevertheless believed as much wholeheartedly, convinced that every time she closed her eyes to sleep that it would be the very last time she ever did so...
And God, had she begun to feel like a wreck.
She didn't know how much longer she could continue to go on like this, and wondered how much longer it would be before she caught a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel, the relief of this seemingly interminable hell in which she now found herself existing.
Sitting on her bed she closed her eyes, despair overpowering her fear, and lowered her head into her knees.
She wept, silently, feeling that she would completely collapse in on herself if she could.
Something needed to change...
She couldn't keep living like this forever. Existing in fear, afraid every time she stepped around a corner.
She couldn't... She shouldn't have to...
And she didn't have to...
A pair of blue eyes suddenly materialized in her mind- a pair of blue eyes she'd envisioned more times than a few in the weeks that had passed since Shade's death.
As she had during the night of her first performance, she felt a deep, encompassing safety in the presence of their gaze, like she could survive anything life threw at her in their presence, and no danger in the world could possibly find its way to her.
She smiled, feeling a pang of hope for the first time since that fateful night.
She hurried up from her bed, grabbed her cell phone from its wall charger, and dialed up her manager, disregarding the fact that it was almost midnight.
“Hello, Geri? It's Desiree... Yeah, better, thank you... Listen, I'd like to get in touch with the agency that handled my security detail on the last tour. I'd like to privately hire the man they assigned to be my bodyguard, the one who... Who found Shade... Yeah... That's right... His name is Julian Hansen.”
4
As she'd hoped, everything had changed for Desiree once Julian was back in the picture.
She hadn't even been totally certain he would be up for taking on the task- she hoped he would of course, given the connection they'd shared, but she thought maybe he'd moved on to another job and wouldn't want to leave it. Plus there was the experience of discovering Shade's dead body which, if she'd been in that position, she couldn't say she would be too eager to be reminded of.
But as soon as she'd put in the request for his assistance, he'd turned up the following day with a smile on his face, and one eyebrow cocked confidently at her.
“Did you miss me?” he'd asked, playfully, though there was still some heaviness lingering in the air regarding the event that had separated them.
“Not for a second,” she'd said, beaming at him, and let him inside. “I hope I'm not pulling you away from anything...”
“Nah,” he said dismissively as he stepped into the house, “Well, I mean I was working security for Justin Bieber when your call came through, and I guess it depends on how you feel about him whether that's something you want to be pulled away from or not.”
“God, really?” she asked, laughing.
He smiled. “It's safe to say it didn't take me long to decide which job I would rather be assigned to...”
She blushed a little bit at this, but said teasingly, “I don't have to worry about catching a case of Bieber Fever from you then?”
He rolled his eyes.
“No, I was more worried about coming down with a case of Wanting-to-Slap-Bieber-Upside-the-Head Fever, if you want the truth about it. I shouldn't say this, but after a week working for him the idea of letting a few crazed fans have at him really didn't sound half bad to me. It's probably best that I got out of there when I could...”
Desiree couldn't believe it- five minutes together with Julian again, and she was already, almost starting to feel like her old self. Laughing. Joking. Flirting.
God, that man was amazing... It was unbelievable, the power that some people could hold over you, and how powerless you were to resist it, even if you wanted to.
She was beyond grateful to be able to surrender to his charms, and to have at least some small but significant part of her restored to its former self.
Time went by a lot more smoothly once Julian was back in her life. He only came at night, when she felt the most alone and vulnerable, but his presence, and the effects he had upon her could be felt at all hours of the day. She began writing music again- not songs about Shade and his loss, but songs about the sorts of things she'd always written about, which didn't seem quite so meaningless as they had for a while there. Songs about love, relationships, and being true to yourself.
Aside from that, she'd even begun leaving the house again, beginning three days after his return. Even when he wasn't with her, she felt protected by him, as though nothing bad could happen to her, knowing he was relatively close by.
Evenings became her favorite parts of the day, however. Much as it had been when he was working security on her world tour, the dynamic between the two of them wasn't exclusively that of a pop star and her body guard. Again they found themselves chatting, laughing their heads off in one another's presence, exchanging quiet looks, awkward pauses, and any number of moments that seemed as though they might almost have led to something, but never quite did.
Plus, on top of all that, now Desiree invited Julian to have dinner with her from time to time, whi
ch added a further level of intimacy between the two of them than they'd already shared. If the dynamic between the two of them had been merely cordial before, it advanced to the point of being downright jovial whenever the two of them had wine in their systems, and teetered dangerously on the brink of spiraling into-
Well... She still didn't quite allow herself to fully entertain the fantasy of what might transpire between the two of them, and what she hoped so dearly would eventually transpire between the two of them.
She still didn't feel quite so bold, or presumptuous, as to even suggest it. She kind of, almost hoped that Julian would take the initiative of making the first move himself. Yet she feared, secretly that whatever it was the two of them shared might end up being too fragile, to fleeting, and that if they tried to turn it into more than it already was, it might pop like a bubble before their eyes, leaving them both with nothing.