Then, winter, deep into January, and finally Trev asked me to try out for the NFL. He’d put in a word for me, and all I’d have to do is clean up and show my face at the next Combine in February. Of course, if The Giants were interested, I’d have to go to the Draft after that because I wasn’t qualified as a free agent yet.
I hadn’t played in a while, not since Blaze had left me, but I could get into shape quickly. I had played for many years in the semi-pro league with Skate after high school.
The idea grew on me quickly, within a few minutes. It was if it had been an old childhood dream that had somehow been buried under gravel and mud and shit and not resurfaced because I’d tamped that mud with my own pessimistic and cynical moods. But the thought warmed itself to me. The thought of a Major Change or just Doing Something Totally Different With My Life. I liked the thought. It was like being reborn, beginning anew.
And then there were Trev’s dark eyes, looking at me like he was looking at a dying brother. Tramone, Trev’s “real” brother, the dude who’d sourced me the gun I’d once planned on using on Dino Moretti, had gone “AWOL” around the time Trev had found me in my apartment. He wasn’t dead, because he’d call every now and then to say hello. But he’d done something, something bad, he’d said, so he was probably running from the law. Maybe Trev was putting his hopes in me because he couldn’t put his hopes in his own blood anymore. Whatever it was, I’m grateful.
I’d do anything for those eyes, those dark eyes, because the owner of those eyes had saved my ass on more occasions than one.
He’d saved my life.
So I agreed to go to the Combine.
And I cleaned up my act.
And I made it into the NFL.
I started training again. I impressed the hell out of the scouts at the Combine. I was the only non-college player to be picked on the first day of the Draft. (I was actually picked by the Eagles. Don’t ask me the money that exchanged hands to get me to play with Trev in the Giants.)
Once I made it, Year Two, I thought of Blaze. The drugs were out of my system so I could think more clearly again. I wasn’t jonesing for liquor every five minutes so I could actually string together a lucid thought occasionally. And what I strung together was this: I’d had a good girl. I’d had love in my hands and it went wrong. I don’t know why it went wrong but it did. That love was lost. And then I was lost. I did some things I’m not proud of, things that That Person I Loved would hate me for. And even though I’m not with her now, I still value her opinion. Because she will always be my Blaze. And the next time I want to do something insanely freaking crazy, I need to remember her. She is a part of me. She will always be with me, even if she’s not physically with me.
I needed to remember her, to remember a time in my life when I hadn’t sunk so low and when I’d still had some self-respect in me. I needed to always remember my time with Blaze. The apotheosis of my lifetime on this earth.
So I emblazoned her name all over my back.
She would forever be mine, and I would forever remember the lightning we shared when our bodies had united at night, in the day, in the morning, in the afternoon, every time.
I wish I could say that I stayed sober. You already know I didn’t.
I hook up with women now, sure. I booze it up when I don’t have football practice. My name’s on PerezHilton and National Examiner more often than Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart’s. So? Fuckem. They’ll never know how close I came to ruining myself, to destroying my life completely.
The image burned into my back will be forever my reminder of that. It’s my reminder, no one else’s. OK, I slipped tonight, after the game. I showed the image to the world. But they don’t need to know what it means, where it comes from.
It’s personal. It’s a personal reminder of how good life can be, and how close it can come to going down the chute.
-7-
My eyes are still on Vikki’s top-floor balcony when Blaze’s shadow-figure finally turns and re-enters the apartment. I feel instantly alone.
I start my car, the snow is picking up. Fat clumps of it land on my windshield and I turn on the wipers to shove them off. My tires skid for a second and then start moving.
I still can’t believe it’s her. Here. In Brooklyn.
A sadness settles in my chest so hard and heavy that I almost nod off from its suddenness.
Just as I turn into the street, I see that kid from earlier again, the one who’d mumbled out Blaze’s name when I’d hugged her earlier, and who’d stood on the sidewalk with his friends and taken pictures. I see him aim a phone at me. Did he follow me all this way?
Flash!
Then he aims it up at the balcony.
Flash!
I almost stop the car and rip his neck off and throw his head against the nearest wall. But I realize he’s probably got other friends ready to go Flash! at my possible reactions. I can live with Blazing Romance for Declan Cox! on TMZ. But not Declan Cox Goes Psycho on a Fan’s Head.
I put my foot gently down on the gas. And curse quietly under my breath as I drive away feeling like America’s Guinea Pig behind spectator glass.
Something tells me people are going to know damn well what that tat on my back means tomorrow morning.
It’s worse than having your heart on your sleeve. It’s having your heart on every glossy magazine for anybody to pore over.
I start thinking about Karma...
SIX
GOSSIP
~ DECEMBER 16, PRESENT YEAR ~
-1-
Blaze Ryleigh
The next morning.
It’s all over TMZ. All over PerezHilton. All over The Hollywood Gossip. It’s on E! Online, Egotastic, GossipGirls, Hello!, Hollywood Rag, Hollywood Tuna, Just Jared, on and on and on... Not to mention the blogs. Dozens of them. The NFL’s favorite Bad Boy. America’s favorite Bad Boy.
Declan Cox. “The Boy Nobody Could Tame.” “Blaze on Fire.” “EXCLUSIVE: PHOTOS!”
Even CNN made a brief mention of it. “The talk of the town after last night’s Second Miracle at Meadowlands is in fact not the eighty-seven yard charge by the game’s hero, Declan Cox, after a switch-up given to him by his High School friend, Trevor Perkins, starting quarterback for The Giants for the last two years”—they break to a clip of Trev passing Deck the ball while the sports anchor goes on talking—“but actually it’s what happened later. It’s all over the gossip sites, and this iReport video has gone viral”—switch to a shaky homemade video of me crying, Deck’s arm around me outside Tom’s, snow drifting over my hair. “The person in the video is none other DJ Blaze Ryleigh, better known by her stage name, HeavenLeigh. If you haven’t heard of her, she’s got an EP floating around but I’m sure it’ll start soaring after this publicity. It seems the two had a fling once upon a time and, were it not for the fact that the NFL’s most eligible Bad Boy Bachelor played such an incredible game last night, and after an earth-shaking touchdown then bared the word BLAZE, on his back, to the world”—switch to image, Deck flexing beautifully—“this rather meaningless incident in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Prospect Heights might have gone unnoticed—”
I flick Vikki’s TV off.
I hear her feet shuffling out of her bedroom and making their way into her plush living room. She’s bleary-eyed when I see her. In her Femme Fatale accent, she says, “Look on bright side. Is going to push your sales through the roof.” True da roof.
“At the expense of whatever self-respect I had before.” I fling the remote on the red couch. Vikki moves over to her kitchen counter which is at the end of the open-plan living room. She scratches her scruffy blond hair and tightens her kimono around herself. “I heard you come in late last night. You have fun?”
She gives a wan smile, looks up at me while she pours some of the coffee I brewed for us. “You really want to know?”
I don’t, because it probably involves detailed descriptions of a lot of grunting and groaning on her and Skate’s part. “Uhm,
no. Look, Vikki, I have to ask you... Deck’s tattoo. Did you—”
Her eyes go cold. “I didn’t know, and I am shocked you think I would hide such a thing from you.” Ssing from you.
I bow my head shamefully. “Yeah, right.” I look at my feet. Shuffle them. “Sorry.” I look back at the TV, black now. “I can’t believe how my name is all over the news right now.”
“Deck is a popular boy.”
News of Deck was impossible to miss. He might as well be riding the red carpet with Antonio Banderas or Tom Cruise or The Next Up And Coming Hollywood Sex Symbol. And in Europe he’s in magazines with the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo or David Beckham. It’s his charm, the glint in his eyes when he looks angrily at the cameras. It’s the rumors (hell, they’re unbearable to listen to) of how goddamned good he is in bed, normally promulgated by some honky-tonk skank in a little town in the middle of nowhere that Deck was confirmed to have visited the night before. It’s his silence, his sullenness on the road, and most of all, it’s his delicious good looks, his availability, and his raw-to-the-bone sex appeal.
Declan Cox is a demigod of female arousal. And now the tat on his back, counterpointed by the riot of ink on his right arm—the words Live In The Now spanning the inside of it, letters I once licked in foreplay, the vines around those letters, up to his shoulder, the tiger, the naked woman—these things only make him that much more sexy.
For me? He’ll always just be my Deck, the boy who shattered in my arms the night his father was murdered in front of his own eyes. He’ll always be that boy on the roof of that Bushwick building I used to live in, talking to me about my girl Savva, my best friend, comforting me. He’ll always be that boy holding me while golden rays of early spring sunrise had shafted into his apartment window after a night of sex. He’ll be the guy who I watched fall when a brute, Dino Moretti, landed a cracking chain on his skull, and the boy who built the confidence in me to go at it on my own, and make a go of it in the music biz.
But the papers. The papers... Oh, hell, you’d think the people writing these things had never seen a virile man in their entire lives! Every time I caught one of the headlines (much like I’m catching them now, impossible to miss, only now they’re about me) I’d wondered if the people coming up with them were little more than overly-hormonal sixteen-year-old girls who just needed a good freaking orgasm to get their heads back on straight!
“Bad Boy Deck Swings it Again.”
“SPOTTED: Manning the Deck-Man.”
“HOT!! HOT!! HOT!! PICTURES OF DECK-MAN WORKING OUT!”
Oh, brother!
And now it’s me, like some tawdry thirties pulp magazine my face is splashed all over the tubes and all over the interwebz in granulated pictures that make me look desperate and foolish, tears pouring from my eyes like some petulant child.
It’s bad enough to have seen Deck’s declaration of love for me on his skin (because what else could it have been?) but to have it splayed out for all of America to poke and laugh at, to comment on, is mortifying.
“It will go away,” Vikki says, slurping her coffee happily.
Maybe I don’t want it to go away. “Why did he do it, Vikki?” I turn to her. “Did Skate say anything to you about it last night?”
She takes another loud sip, puts the mug down. Her expression tells me that Skate told her something. She bites her lip. Lead forms in my chest and moves to my stomach. “Well, firstly, let me tell you that I almost ripped his cock off for not telling me everything! But you know how men are with their Alpha secrets and all that crap. Urgh!” She rolls her eyes. “He said Deck did something, something he regrets. And that he got the tattoo after that as a reminder of...when his life had been...better, he said. Skate wouldn’t tell me any more. No matter how hard I tried or what I ‘denied’ him, he kept quiet about! So you’re gonna have to get it out of Deck directly, Blaze.”
I don’t even argue with her, because she’s right.
The thought of seeing him, of peering into his glowing blue eyes, the flickering of his cornfield hair in the strong December wind, these thoughts make my legs weak. But now with the press all over this, speaking directly to him is the last thing I want to do.
And yet, seeing him again yesterday, after all these years—
It was there, it was all there. The fire, the ache, the need. As if nothing had changed. As if four years had come and gone in a teary blink. Splash. And over.
And I need closure. I need to part with Declan in peace, to say the things I should have said but never did. I need to at least make good for how I treated him. I need to tell him I still love him, so that I can finally leave him. Maybe that’s what keeps me stuck to him, unable to move forward. Maybe that’s what keeps me trapped and loveless: The denial of the fact that I do love him.
So, fine, it’s the truth. I can admit it, and then move on. Things are different now. We’re different now. He travels. I travel. He has girls drooling all over him, I choose to remain, to all intents and purposes, single. We’ve moved on.
But have I really? No, I haven’t. It’s the lie that keeps it alive, like some foreign substance in a body that needs to be spotted and nuked, it grows and grows until the lie is all there is: The lie that I stopped loving him. Because I never did stop. He needs to know that. And then we can move on.
I pull my phone out of my pocket to call him and then realize I might not have his number. Surely he’s changed it since becoming world famous?
I’m staring at my phone thinking about this when it starts buzzing and flashing. I almost drop it the surprise is so great!
I see Deck’s blue 37 football jersey come up on the screen. I remember putting that picture on there after he’d made the NFL (I got that pic off the People website) and never expected to get a call from him again. I’d even forgotten that I’d done it. I’m smiling and reminiscing and laughing so deeply about it that the phone almost goes to voicemail. Vikki’s shrill voice from behind me saying “Answer it damnit!” pulls me out of my reverie and the phone almost slides out of my sweaty palm as I move it to my ear.
Deck speaks. “Blaze, I need to see you. Please. Just...once...then you can be free of me forever. I promise. ... Blaze?”
“Uhm, yeah...” I clear my throat. “Yeah, uhm sure.” I didn’t even think about my answer, just gave it.
Deck seems surprised. “Really?”
The last four years wash over me, the regrets, the doubts, the thoughts of betrayal. Of course he’d be surprised. Wouldn’t he have expected a different answer after I broke it off so suddenly with him? He thinks I hate him, I realize with dismay.
The cold, gnarly hands of Fear start caressing my heart. I feel its feet pitter-patter gently in my chest and hear a low rumble of satisfied laughter in the back of my mind. The laughter of Fear, telling me to not hope, to not expect anything from this.
But I don’t hope. This will just be a conversation, a get-together, two old friends going for a chat. And then the chat will be highlighted and displayed on TMZ with Special Mention on Fox News and CNN sports afterwards...
“Where did you have in mind?” I ask.
“My place.”
“Brooklyn Heights?” (I also got that off TMZ...)
“Yeah.”
I think of that cow, that hussy, that Evil Woman who put that first nail of Fear into the coffin of our relationship. She also lived in Brooklyn Heights. Does he have coffee with her on a Sunday? Or, worse, does he go there for an afternoon fuck after a game? I never understood why he moved there, knowing “she” lives in the area. Maybe even the same building?
“Could we rather meet somewhere else?”
“This is the...safest. From the press, I mean. Sure, they might know you came here, but at least there won’t be grainy pictures of us personally in tomorrow’s columns.”
Right. That. “Uhm, OK. F—fine. I just... Look, I just don’t like...where you live... It brings back a lot of memories.”
Declan’s answer is so quick, so fast, so t
o the point, that it takes me a second to understand it. “She doesn’t live here anymore, Blaze. She moved out a long time before I moved in.”
She. Yeah. She. “Oh, OK, well—” So now he’s a mind reader...
“That is the reason you didn’t want to come here, isn’t it?”
He knows me too well. Still knows me. Knows me better than I know myself. And if I let myself go to his place, understanding just how much he really does know me, I’ll fall for him again. And I won’t be able to pick myself up...
But I must let him go. I made a mistake, and I must do it for myself. Karma, as he and I had spoken of many times before. I need to make good on this. “OK. When?”
And his answer is bullet fast again. “Now.”
-2-
I’m struck abruptly by the bright flash of a camera as I get downstairs. I’m in a sleeveless jeans jacket and tight bluejeans with light brown ankle-boots. My purse dangles from my arm. I’m not made up at all, and my hair’s a little messy. My tat-sleeve is screaming openly at the world because Vikki had the heat up at her place and I wanted a bit of a biting chill to wake me up before I get to Deck’s place.
I picture what the image might look like tomorrow in the gossip papers and I shudder. I try and think of what Vikki told me: Will be good for sales. Probably it will be. But I don’t care about sales.
I jump in my three-door Toyota and head on over to Brooklyn Heights to visit Declan Cox, the boy of my dreams, the man eternally in my soul. The guy who’s erected a living memorial to me on his skin for all of life to see.
I’m suddenly nervous. Insanely nervous. And giddy, and trembling, all the way down to my stomach.
And lower.
And that is bad, because this is supposed to be an official goodbye, a handshake and a see-you-later-alligator because I’m sorry I was such a bitch and I’ve grown up since then and we’re adults, aren’t we?
But that flame, that orange and yellow and red flame licking his upper back, undulating with the ripples of his bulging muscles, all of it burning above a name which is mine: Blaze. He might as well have inked B.R. 4 D.C. in a heart with an arrow going through it on his back.
Need Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy Book Three) Page 12