Star Struck

by Jane Lovering

  I’d never heard Felix sound so bitter. His words were diamond-edged and he’d got feelings on display that I’d never seen before

  ‘I’ll go and see them. Your parents. You’re right, I’ve been selfish.’

  ‘You do that.’ A moment stationary, then he was back to leaping around. ‘Catch you later.’

  ‘Have a good evening.’

  I watched him dance out and when the door closed, I gave into the urge to cry. That hadn’t been the Felix I knew, it had been someone else in his skin, someone brittle and cold. The things he’d said, the pain in his eyes, none of it was my Felix. My Felix was impervious, break proof, a body full of fun and lax morals, a smile, a blown kiss and a slow dance away from who he’d been tonight.

  But he had been right. At first I hadn’t been able to face seeing his parents because I was afraid of the look that I’d see on their faces. That look that said I reminded them of everything they’d lost; their slow, sad, pitiful acceptance that I had lived while their daughter had died. The look that would have told me they wished it had been the other way around. Yeah, Skye. You’re a waste of space …

  And a tiny voice that hid right in the back of my mind whispered guilt to me. The guilt that poked at me whenever I wondered why I’d given up my seat to slump in the back with Felix … well, after his outburst I guess I knew now. Michael and I had fought. That was all, some stupid argument about our engagement probably, something so pathetic and disposable had meant that my best friend had taken my passenger seat and died because of it.

  The tears dried stiff on my cheeks. Goose pimples rose on my arms and the back of my neck, and I remembered Jack earlier, standing with his arms clamped around himself, obviously fighting his own memory.

  Jack. Jack who was giving me only half a story. Felix, who was changing in front of my eyes. I couldn’t sit here with my brain spinning, I needed to do … something. I opened the door and saw Lissa going into Jack’s room down the corridor. She had her hair on sideways and was carrying her shoes, both clear marks of someone who’s been in the vicinity of Felix for a while.

  I locked my room and followed her. Jack opened the door at my knock. ‘Hey. Checking up to see that I’m working, eh? Genius.’ He stood back to let me in. Lissa was flopped in a chair, one foot up on her thigh, massaging her toes with an expression of mingled bliss and agony.

  ‘Hi, Skye. Wow, your Felix certainly knows how to party.’

  ‘What did you want, Liss?’ Jack folded his arms and stared at her.

  ‘Cool down, Iceman. I came to fix some of the paperwork.’ Lissa put both feet back on the floor and then looked from Jack to me, and back again. ‘But I guess it can wait, if you two have a prior engagement.’ She kept her eyes on Jack.

  His expression never flickered.

  ‘Actually, Lissa, I wanted to talk to you,’ I said. ‘About Felix.’

  She held both hands up in the air. ‘Whoa, back off girlfriend and let someone else play with the toys.’

  ‘He’s all yours. But what I mean was … what you said about him the other day. That he was on some kind of destruction course?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, cautiously. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Has he said anything, or … He was devastated right after the accident, of course, but it’s just not in Fe’s nature to be down for long. He was back to partying a few weeks later, and showing up at mine with a takeaway and incredibly tall tales.’

  ‘He cries a lot, you know that?’

  I stared at her. ‘Felix hardly ever cries. He didn’t even cry on the anniversary. I was a wreck, but he sat in with me, we watched some crappy TV show where everyone sings “Auld Lang Syne” and drank a bottle of Zinfandel and I cried so much I was sick.’

  Jack moved, warily. ‘Liss, maybe this isn’t really the time for this conversation.’

  ‘D’you know Jack, I think it might be?’ She didn’t take her eyes off me. ‘Felix is … ah, I guess even I don’t know what Felix is. One hell of an actor? Maybe. Destroying himself?’ She shrugged. ‘Something is with him, and I sure as Christ don’t know what it is. But you ever see him on a come-down, you watch his eyes, Skye. That boy is ruined.’

  I sat down suddenly on the edge of the bed. ‘Why? Why is he pretending, why is he falling apart and not letting me know?’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t dare.’ Jack sat next to me. ‘Maybe he felt he had to carry the pain for the both of you.’

  ‘Perhaps there are questions he doesn’t want you to ask.’ Lissa kicked her high heels back on, shuffling her toes right down into them. ‘Okay, guys, time to do business. I’ve brought papers for you to sign, Jack.’ She scuffled in her tote bag and pulled out a sheaf of typewritten A4.

  Jack held the stack loosely. ‘What will you do now, Liss?’

  Lissa waved an arm. ‘Sea, fish, plenty more. I got other clients, sweetie, other irons in the fire. The whole agency never revolved around you.’

  ‘I know, but …’

  ‘Jackie-boy, the good old U S of A is my territory. Okay, your British agency and mine have affiliations, but you want to head back to the land of teacakes and white cliffs and “gor blimey guvnor”, you go alone. Right?’ He shrugged. ‘It’s really okay,’ she said, more softly. ‘It was never real with us. You were lonely. You still are lonely, I get that, but you don’t need me any more.’

  ‘Just, after what happened …’

  Lissa looked sharply towards me. ‘Yeah, well. Maybe that was just meant to be, you ever think of that? I’ll live, I am living. Things are going pretty good, don’t waste your tears on me.’ Her gaze flicked from me to Jack and back again. ‘You save yourself, Brit-boy. I got the feeling that you both got a lot of saving to do, maybe you can save each other, I don’t know. But I’m not a part of it any more.’

  Jack smiled. It was one of his nice smiles, a genuine expression that softened the whole of his saturnine face. ‘Hey, Lissa Zimmerman, you’re a really nice lady, do you know that?’

  ‘Don’t shout so loud, you’ll ruin my rep. Now sign here and give us both our freedom.’

  I left them arguing good-naturedly about final terms and settlements and other such technical details, and went back to my room, to bed. Alone, whatever Felix might have suggested.

  Chapter Twenty

  After Lissa left him, papers tucked under her arm, he turned out the room lights and stood in the darkness, feeling every inch of his skin dance with the need for nicotine. Geth hadn’t told Skye anything. That much was obvious from the way she was still speaking to him, still willing to be anywhere near him. His tongue prickled and the roof of his mouth was dry as the craving swept across his nerve endings; masochistically he refused to let his fingers wander towards the pack on the bedside table. Used the unfulfilled need to punish himself for all of it, the sharp needles of want niggling his nerve endings, like a dentist’s drill. He should give up smoking, he knew it. Quitting the alcohol had taught him that the pain came early and left late but it still left, eventually, and it left a better, cleaner, more responsible life behind it. Giving up was easy, whatever he’d told Skye.

  It was what the giving up meant that was difficult.

  You didn’t just give up the substance; you gave up everything that went with it, the lifestyle, the friends, the feelings. And he was very much afraid that he couldn’t lose any more of those and still function as a human being.

  Okay. So, he was safe a while longer. Just let it be a while longer, let him talk to Skye, tell her in his own words, let her make up her own mind what to think about him.

  Jack ran a hand through his hair as he stood at the window watching the neon motel lights send their shimmering messages out into the waiting desert. The bright lights that meant nothing, shining into the empty dark. He’d always thought of himself as a bit like that empty darkness, a hollow, infinite space that
would never fill with light. But now … now Skye was starting to make him see that he didn’t have to be like this. That he didn’t want to be like this, not any more. He wanted to throw himself open to her, let her in, let her brightness illuminate all those dark corners that had festered over the years.

  But is wanting it enough? He wanted a new life, but that was easy. Enough money thrown at the situation and it would resolve itself. Back to Britain, back to the little farm on the edge of the moors, back to writing the books and protecting himself from the outside world, that would do it. Just feeling … now that was harder. After all, with feeling the good stuff – and with Skye he rather thought there’d be a lot of good stuff – would come the memories of the bad stuff. Memories he lived with by never giving them room to turn round, like caging a savage bull. Keeping them so carefully guarded that he remembered them under controlled conditions. Letting her in would mean letting them out.

  He took half a step towards the dressing table, then stopped, the pain of denial blocking everything else. Would letting everything out be so bad, really? Wouldn’t it be better to wipe the slate clean, bring all that darkness from inside himself into the light, where it might lose its power to hag-ride him every night through his dreams?

  The urgent desperate need died back as he relaxed. Skye. Yes. Not despite her scars but because of them. Because she would understand.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I hid in the room until the following evening, with the assistance of a kind of ad hoc room service, who brought me, rather oddly, a plate of toast, two hard-boiled eggs and an enormous pan of something which resembled paella. I wasn’t about to attempt any outings downstairs, not when I might run into Gethryn, either sober or drunk, and the few times I ventured up the corridor and knocked on his door, Jack hadn’t been in his room.

  I did my make-up with shaking hands. Gethryn would be there tonight. I’d have to look him in the face, knowing him for what he truly was under the glamour of show business. Knowing him for the drunken letch who used his screen persona as bait, a man for whom the word ‘no’ was an aphrodisiac. I shivered at how close I might have come to being forced into something I didn’t want, wondering how many other girls had fallen for Gethryn’s patter and then found themselves trying to gloss over something that hadn’t been consensual. Wondered how many had pushed the memories away behind the signed photographs he handed out like boons. Did they tell themselves that they’d wanted it? Because of who he was?

  It was almost like a mini panic attack, this sudden flushing of my system with adrenaline, the desire to pee every ten seconds and the great Stomach Rebellion which made me feel alternately sick and as though everything I’d ever eaten was going to fall out of my bottom if I so much as coughed. When I checked my face in the mirror, I saw that I was almost green and my scar stood out like a bone marker under the make-up, thrown into relief by the lighting and the foundation, streaking down my forehead, splitting my eyebrow in two and stuttering to a standstill across my cheekbone. I couldn’t go anywhere like this.

  I began struggling out of the dress, unlacing the bodice-strapping across my chest with both hands to save time. When I heard the knock at the door, I held the velvet up against me in an attitude of Victorian shock. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Who were you expecting?’

  ‘Oh, Jack …’ I pulled the door open, still attempting modesty with the flapping bodice, ‘I can’t go to the ball, I really can’t. Don’t try to make me. If you go down now I expect Ruth will still be free and she’ll … accommodate you,’ I finished, my mind suddenly flashing unwanted images of Jack being accommodated by another woman.

  ‘Hey.’ Jack held out a hand to shut me up. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He came in and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Take your time.’

  I looked at him. He was wearing his pyjama bottoms, tightly fastened around the fly I was glad to see, bare feet and a T-shirt which was more crumple than fabric, and bore the legend ‘Sweet … maybe. Passionate … I suppose. But don’t ever mistake that for nice.’ ‘That’s a Doctor Who quote.’

  He inclined his head, gravely.

  ‘But … what the hell were you going as?’

  He flipped his glasses from where they were hooked into the neck of the T and pushed them on. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

  I began to giggle. ‘Oh, my God, you’re going as yourself! That’s brilliant.’

  ‘Glad you think so.’ The glasses magnified his eyes and made the little flecks that danced within them look like slices of sunlight.

  ‘Yeah. Cheating, but brilliant.’

  The black lace showed against his throat under the baggy neck of the shirt, and I found that I was staring at it. The darkness of it made his skin look very pale. ‘What are you staring at now?’

  ‘The thong around your neck. Do you always wear it?’

  His hand came up, almost defensively, and a finger traced the leather. ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Even when you’re working?’

  There was a kind of pause, during which I suddenly realised that the thong was so much more to him than mere decoration. I didn’t know what it stood for, why he wore it, but I could see in his eyes that questions about it made him wary. ‘Mmm. Look, what’s all this about not wanting to go to the ball?’

  I sat on the bed, fiddling with the flappy bit of dress where I was still incompletely laced up. ‘Jack. Look at me.’

  His stare briefly traced my face before settling back into my eyes. ‘What am I supposed to be seeing?’

  ‘This!’ I poked myself in the scar and stood up again. The weight of the skirt tugged the dress down a few inches and I had to perform a haulage operation in order to get the bodice to cover my chest.

  ‘Okay. Seeing it. Refusing to believe that’s what’s stopping you from coming to the ball with me. Don’t you think it’s just a touch solipsistic to think that people will even notice? There’re people down there who have spent months on their costumes, getting every detail right …’ He gave a short, hollow laugh. ‘They’re really not going to be looking at your scar. And anyway, don’t you want to see if I can dance?’

  ‘You said you could.’

  ‘Maybe I was lying.’ He tilted his head to one side and gave me an unblinking stare. ‘Or is it something else? Someone … oh, please tell me you’re not going to let Gethryn ruin our evening! Skye, I know the guy is a bastard but …’

  ‘He scared me,’ I said quietly. ‘What you saw in the car park, you were right, I didn’t want it. He was … I mean, I think he would have stopped if I’d told him, but … I’m not sure, and he’s said things … just because he’s famous he seems to think he can have any woman he wants, can make her do whatever he wants.’

  Despite my anxiety, when Jack ran his tongue along his lower lip, thinking, a tingle ran the length of my spine. ‘Nobody has ever accused him of anything,’ he said slowly. ‘But then he does tend to pick girls who … sorry … have issues. Girls who might be grateful, girls he can manipulate because they think he …’ A sudden shake of his head sent his glasses askew across his face and he pulled them off, pushed one of the side arms into his mouth. ‘I tried to warn you.’

  ‘Yeah, right, for the record, Jack, an actual warning might have been more use than your oblique “he’s not very nice”, you know. If you’re going to warn someone, telling them what you’re warning them about is generally better than dark, broody hinting. This isn’t an episode; you don’t have to keep up the tension for the full fifty minutes.’ I realised that my bodice was heading floorwards again and gave it a mighty heave.

  I got a grin for that. ‘Sorry. Force of habit and lack of experience. Now, come on, you’re not going to let him deprive you of the chance to watch me strut my funky thing, are you?’

  I closed my arms against my body. ‘I don’t know.’

  Gently he pushed me by
one shoulder until I turned around. ‘Do it up properly and we’ll go down. Go on, I’m not looking.’

  He wasn’t. When I sneaked a quick glance over my shoulder I saw him staring down at his feet, wiggling his long toes against the carpet. His hair hid his face from me. ‘So, then.’ I began relacing the dress, refusing to let my mind go back to thinking about Gethryn when Jack was there, so darkly alluring. ‘You were going to tell me about that thing around your neck?’

  He did it again, raising his fingers to toy with the leather. ‘It was Ryan’s,’ he said in such a quiet voice that I wasn’t sure I’d heard.

  Ryan. His best friend. Who’d been killed in the accident that had given Jack his scars. Whoo. Was there some kind of homoerotic thing going on here?

  ‘I wear it to remind me.’ And then his voice strengthened. ‘Why don’t you wear your engagement ring? I’d have thought it would be something you’d find it hard to be parted from.’

  My fingers became clumsy. ‘I … we … I don’t have one.’

  Why didn’t I have a ring? Michael had been loaded, some kind of job in investments, regular bonuses, a collection of cars and his own flat. I’d been told all that much, seen the pictures. So why hadn’t he bought me a ring? If I’d thrown it at him during that last fight at the party, why hadn’t Felix mentioned it? I pulled the last string through. ‘I’ve finished.’

  ‘You look fabulous.’ Jack’s eyes gleamed behind his glasses. ‘Real Skeldarian Queen. Apart from the strange smell.’

  ‘That was Gethryn. Well, it was his drink. I’ve had the dress hanging out of the window ever since, but it still smells a bit …’ I sniffed, ‘fruity. Do you think I should change?’

  ‘I really don’t think anyone but me is going to notice, Skye. Honestly, it’s okay, it doesn’t even smell like drink any more.’

  ‘Well, sorry, but colour me still slightly worried.’

  He stood up alongside me. His height matched mine now I wore the towering shoes I’d borrowed along with the dress; my gaze was exactly level with his eyes. I could just make out the darker ring of pupil inside the near-black iris. ‘Onward then.’ After a momentary hesitation, Jack took my hand and looped it through his elbow. ‘Come on. Let’s make a grand entrance.’