by Tia Siren
“I’ll do it for twenty-four grand,” I said.
“Ava,” my agent said with a laugh, “you can’t just negotiate a contract like this.”
I stared at Mason, who chuckled to himself. He held his hand up in the air to stop my agent from talking. He tilted his head to the side and looked at me, knowing I was playing hardball. I almost felt like it excited him.
“Done,” he said. “Twenty-four thousand dollars for a two-hour shoot.”
“When and where?” I said, feeling excitement rise and fall in my chest.
“Berkshire Studios on the corner of Eighth and Independence,” he said. “Instead of breakfast, let’s make it tomorrow evening instead.”
“Fine,” I said. “My agent can send the contract to the studio, and I’ll sign it there.”
I turned without looking at my agent and walked out of the office. I stared straight ahead as I climbed into the elevator. When the doors slid shut, I leaned against the wall and put my head back, breathing deeply. I had never been so tense in my life. If the gig was for anyone other than the Yorks, I would have been absolutely ecstatic that I was doing the highest-paying gig of my career. But the excitement was squashed by the thought of doing anything for them. I had really gotten myself into it this time.
Chapter 9
Mason
If someone had told me a year ago that I would be spending my Friday night preparing a studio for a fake photo shoot so I could pay a girl twenty-four thousand dollars just to talk to me, I would have said they were nuts. But there I was, setting a table for two with food from a restaurant with a large check in my pocket. I had even paid the agency fees for her so she would get the whole amount. She didn’t know that, of course, and from the way she had acted during the meeting, I wasn’t planning on telling her. She didn’t seem to want anything from me. But that night, for as long as I could keep her in her chair, it would just be me and her, no one to interrupt us and no reason to hold back any emotions she may be feeling. That sounded great, except that she was livid at me.
There wasn’t even a photographer on the scene because there weren’t going to be any pictures. There wasn’t going to be the flash of any bulb, any makeup artist, or any wardrobe changes that night. I just wanted to be able to sit down and talk to her. I wanted to know why she was so angry with me, why she hated me so much that she couldn’t even be in a room with me for more than ten minutes. I wanted to know how I could get her out of my mind. I had been planning and thinking about this since Wednesday when I’d called to set the initial appointment with her agent. I had thought about every single detail, painfully groaned over what food to pick, and had thought of exactly what I wanted to say about fifteen different times. Things never made me nervous, but this had me all tied up in knots. I hadn’t slept in two nights, and I knew I wasn’t looking my best. I didn’t care, though. All I cared about was getting her in that seat across from me.
After I got the information from the mattress place and called and set an appointment, I’d tried to relax, figuring it was only a matter of time. That was futile because, by that point, I’d had a new thing to obsess over. It had been driving me nuts, and John had called to see if we were going out for our normal Wednesday night drinks, so I’d said yes. I figured getting laid would help me, but I just couldn’t do it. I turned down every woman who hit on me that night, to the point where John noticed. There was something holding me back, something I couldn’t sleep away, drink away, or buy away. I knew, lying alone on my new mattress and staring up at the ceiling fan, that Ava was the thing holding me back. All I could see was her in the face of every woman who talked to me. She was the one I wanted, the girl I wanted to take home with me, but she wasn’t in the bar, and no one else even came close to her. It was a blockage I had to get out of my system.
I didn’t know exactly what it would take to help this situation, but I was hoping sitting down and talking was the first step. Who knew? Maybe fucking her one last time would get it out of my system like it had with every other girl in the past. At the same time, I usually only lusted after a girl for a few hours before fucking her, not weeks and definitely not a decade. Could it really have been that long and somewhere in my mind I still wanted Ava? Any other time, I would have answered no, but with the way I was feeling, I couldn’t brush it off as ridiculous.
John had called me last night and today to see if I wanted to go out. I had to lie to him, making up a story about not feeling well. I didn’t want to go out, but that wouldn’t be a simple enough excuse for him. I didn’t want to bring him into all of it; he would never understand. Hell, I barely understood why my brain was so wrapped up in this girl. If I kept blowing off him and the girls at the club, though, he was going to catch on.
As my thoughts circulated around, the door opened and Ava walked in. She already looked upset. Her arms were folded across her chest and irritation was written on her face. She was wearing a women’s black suit jacket, a white collared shirt, and a pair of pants with extra-wide legs. Her long hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she was wearing just enough makeup to hide the bags under her eyes. She looked so grown up, so much different than the girl I knew a lifetime ago.
“Please, have a seat,” I said, pulling out her chair.
“Where is everyone?” she asked. “Mason, this does not look like a photo shoot.”
“You were upset before you even walked through the door,” I said, sitting across from her. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” She laughed, her expression incredulous as she gestured around the empty room. “This is what’s wrong—everything about this whole thing from the obviously fake photo shoot to the fact that I’m going to take money from you and your family. It doesn’t feel good, and you forced me into this. Where are the photographer and wardrobe staff? I just want to get this done and over with.”
“Wait,” I said, grabbing her wrist before she could stand all the way up. “Sit down, please. There isn’t going to be a photo shoot, no pictures. I wanted to talk to you, and I knew this was the only way I could get you across the table from me. I could tell you didn’t want to talk to me by the way you left the mattress store and then again in your agent’s office when I thought you were going to completely lose it. I needed a way to be in front of you, to talk to you without distractions.”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking at the food and the empty room. “There had to be another way than tricking me. It’s hard for me to believe you would pay me twenty-four grand just to sit here and talk to you.”
“That’s all it is,” I said. “And food if you’re hungry. I ordered from your favorite Italian place. They’re still open. Can you believe it?”
“Mason.” She sat down. “What do you want from me? Don’t you think you and your family have done enough over the years?”
“That’s exactly why it’s important we talk,” I said. “Obviously, we have a really long history, and the fact that we can’t be in the same room together is a big deal to me.”
“You do know that if our parents knew we were sitting here talking, hiding in the back of a studio, they would lose their damn minds,” she said. “And rightfully so. My mother would die if she knew I had agreed to this. I would be kicked out of the family in a heartbeat, and I know your father would definitely have a problem with it.”
“I know all of that,” I said. “That’s why I picked this place. I knew there would be no way my parents would be over here, and your parents—unless they have friends here—have no reason to come. The press, who sometimes like to stalk me, would think nothing of me going into a small studio across town. Trust me, this is exactly the place we should be meeting.”
“Why are we meeting at all?” She laughed again with no humor. “I should be home studying, doing anything other than sitting here in front of you.”
“Well, you’re here now, so you might as well not waste the trip,” I said.
“You’re such a piece of work,” she said, leaning back i
n her chair. “Even still, after everything, you’re hiding me away from the world, talking to me in secret. I knew there was something fishy about you going to my agent when you’re not the one who handles marketing for your company. Dan Riser does.”
“How do you know that?” I laughed, taking the cover off her food.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Let’s just get this over with so I can go back to my life.”
I didn’t know what she meant about hiding her away, but I was ready to get some of this off both of our shoulders. Ava was finally in front of me, and I didn’t want to waste a moment of it.
Chapter 10
Ava
The last place in the entire world I wanted to be was sitting in an empty studio on a Friday night across a table from Mason York. It was extremely awkward and a little weird considering he could be anywhere he wanted but was sitting there across from me. I had gotten ready, trying not to be nervous, trying to calm my irritation, telling myself I was doing a gig and nothing else. I had expected a photo shoot, but that looked like it was a complete and total lie. What kind of man would pay a woman to sit there and talk to him, especially when he was paying her twenty-four grand to do it? I immediately figured there was something else going on, but he seemed perfectly rooted in his thoughts. I didn’t want his dinner or his sad little puppy dog stare. I wanted to go home.
I had nothing to say to Mason York that wouldn’t be said when I finally took him and his family to court. But there I was, listening to him tell me how he only wanted to talk to me, and all I could do was think about how badly I wanted to leave. Being around him, face to face, made it hard to hate him as much as I really wanted to. We had so much history between us. We’d basically grown up together, learning and shaping ourselves into adults with each other’s help. All that aside, in the end, he’d shown his true colors, standing beside his father while he ruined my family’s life. Why would I want to talk to someone whose family was responsible for my parents’ downfall? My father worked at a damn grocery store in Brooklyn, and my mom did the best she could juggling bills with pretty much no money to work with. They were as far down as they could go, and it had been like that for years because of Mason’s father and his disgusting lack of morals. As far as I was concerned, they were all my enemies.
“You say you want to talk, but you haven’t talked to me in almost a decade,” I said. “You say that we need to hash things out, but you show no remorse for anything that’s happened. I don’t understand you, Mason. What do you really want with me? Did you bring me here to have sex with you? Are you into weird shit like that now?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t expect anything like that.”
“Then what is it? Because my time is precious, and I’m sure that even though twenty-four grand is like pennies to you, that’s still a lot of money to get me here.”
“Ava, please,” he said. “I’m dead serious. I brought you here to talk. That’s the only thing I want from you. We need to sit face to face and talk and figure everything out.”
“What is everything? I don’t understand what’s so important to you that you need to hash things out ten years later,” I said angrily. “How about ten years ago when you broke my heart and my family’s heart in half? That would have been the perfect time to want to talk.”
“I know,” he said, looking down at his plate. “But that’s not how it happened, and there’s no reason to harp on the past when I can’t change that.”
“You do remember that our families hate each other, right? That we have gone ten years trying our best to avoid anything with the name York on it,” I said. “That my mother and father can’t even mention your name without becoming angry and stressed out. You do remember that we were both forbidden to ever speak to each other again.”
He scoffed. “Yes. I clearly remember the family feud. I spent a good portion of my early twenties being reminded of that by my mother and father. The thing is, I know it’s there, but I can’t really remember what happened to start the whole thing. I know a lot of things happened between all of us, mostly with our parents, but there had to have been one thing that sparked the whole feud in the first place.”
“You’re telling me that you have no idea why our families started hating each other?”
“I have no idea,” he said calmly.
“After we had sex, your father found out,” I said. “I don’t know how he found out, but he knew. He didn’t like it. You know they never thought I was good enough for you or for the York name, no matter how good of friends they were with my parents. So your father went in during the partnership with Spencer Hotels and stole my father’s company right out from under him and sold it piece by piece to the lowest bidder.”
“That’s not true. It fell apart; that’s all,” he said, shaking his head.
“No, it’s true. You were just too sheltered from the fallout to see that,” I said. “But I wasn’t. I was there for every gruesome second of it.”
“If I remember correctly, the whole damn thing started because your mother leaked to the tabloids that my mother had plastic surgery,” he said. “I remember my mom being so upset, so hurt, so angry over it. I didn’t hear the end of it for weeks. That’s what started this whole stupid family feud in the first place. I never heard anything about my father and your dad’s company.”
“Okay, first of all, that came after your father took down Spencer Hotels,” I said. “Secondly, of course your father didn’t tell you he’d done something so terrible to someone. He doesn’t want you to think he’s a terrible human being. And third, my mom told one person about the plastic surgery, and she just happened to be connected to a tabloid. That may be what they want you to think happened between our families, but they most certainly started this thing when they blew up our lives and destroyed everything we’d worked for. Everything got way out of control after that story leaked—like, it spun out of control within hours. My mom never meant for that to happen. Unlike your father, she wasn’t looking to take something out on your mother, who was probably an innocent party in all of it. My mom felt really bad about that and probably still does.”
Mason scoffed. “Yeah, because your mom needed to tell some ‘friend’ that my mom had an eye lift. And your mother feeling bad did not take away the trauma my mom had to deal with for months over that story.”
“At least my mother felt bad,” I said. “Did your father feel bad for the collapse of Spencer Hotels? Did he feel bad when we had to move from our home and my father had to pick up a job at a grocery store just to pay the bills? If your father is so innocent, if his hands are so clean from the whole thing, then why didn’t he offer my father a position at his company? I’ve seen him do it for people he barely knows.”
He sat there looking at me, just blinking. Obviously, he didn’t know his father had done that to us, but that didn’t make it any better. He was sticking up for him, refusing to even think his dad could do something like that. He knew the man better than me, and he knew he was capable of that and a whole lot more. Still, he said nothing. I put my napkin on the table and stood up, grabbing my bag.
“Can I just have my payment so I can go?” I asked. “Obviously, you have a lot of things to chew over, and this conversation is going nowhere.”
“Yeah,” he whispered, sliding an envelope across the table to me.
I looked inside at the check that was from him personally. Just another example of how he had tricked me into the job. I guessed it was better anyway. I didn’t want a corporate check from York Hotels anywhere near me.
“You didn’t subtract the agency fees,” I said. “You know what? It’s fine. I’ll cut them a check.”
“They’re already paid,” he whispered, not looking at me.
I didn’t know what to say, so I turned and walked from the room, shutting the door behind me. I had always wondered what it would be like to sit across the table from Mason again, but I had never thought I would be telling him something he didn�
��t already know.
Chapter 11
Mason
It was Saturday, and instead of having my normal lunch with my parents, I was out to dinner with them and my father’s entire company. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be at home, drowning in a bottle of whiskey, replaying my conversation with Ava over and over in my head. But I didn’t have a choice in the matter, so there I was, sitting quietly next to my mother. The restaurant was fancy, with candlelit tables, white linen tablecloths, and waiters specifically assigned to each table all night. I thought about Ava and wondered if she had ever eaten at a place like this, or if she would even want to at this point. She was so angry with life, with my father, and with the way things had turned out that it had turned her completely away from the lifestyle I lived. Not that I blamed her. It was all stuffed shirts and overpriced food.
I looked across the table at the faces of the men sitting there. They were all wearing suits that would have paid Ava’s parents’ mortgage. Next to my father was Mr. Overly, his right-hand man in everything. He had been the head of Spencer Hotels under Ava’s father since it had started. It made me think about her comment and how my father hadn’t offered her father a position at the table, but he had brought in Overly. The two laughed and joked with each other, and it was starting to piss me off. Everything seemed so surreal, the story she told, the account of events from another perspective. It made everything seem so much more than black and white. I didn’t know what to think at this point. I didn’t see why Ava would make something like that up. We hadn’t been around each other in ten years, but she had never been the kind of girl to jump to crazy conclusions and point fingers in the wrong direction because she was angry. That would be a whole lot of anger to hold on to for a decade if none of it were true.