by Christa Wick
"I love you, Melanie," he repeated as she stared at the floor, tears flowing freely down her face.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Standing at one of the tinted second-story windows, Melanie watched the Alfa Romeo pull onto the street with Declan inside. The paparazzi who had been camped outside the mansion for weeks broke into a small feeding frenzy, elbowing one another out of the way as they tried to get their cameras close enough to the car's shaded glass to capture a photo of the vehicle's occupants.
Declan gunned the engine.
Reporters scattered like cockroaches fleeing the light.
Fuck! How was she going to get past them?
She didn't even know the access code for the gate at the drive, just knew it was different from the house's code.
A high, braying laugh left Melanie at an hysterical pitch. She would have to haul her oversized bottom over the side fence, hoping no one saw her.
Waiting for her phone to power on, she checked her backpack for her tablet, wallet, check book and passport before sliding her laptop in. With the phone ready, she requested a taxi at an address two blocks over then headed into Declan's bedroom.
She couldn't go over the fence with her suitcase and didn't want to attract any additional attention beyond what her size commanded in the rich, trendy neighborhood. That meant leaving almost everything behind.
She rolled two lightweight but long-sleeved shirts and a pair of pants then placed them in the backpack. Grabbing the same hoodie she'd worn in Colorado when she'd discovered Declan was her new stepbrother, she made a small sling and tossed in several pairs of underwear and socks and her two favorite bras, plus an extra pair of shoes and a pair of sandals. Then she changed into fresh clothes and took her backpack and the makeshift sling downstairs to the sewing room where she had left the oversized purse that served as her workbag when she was on set.
Discarding the pieces of her former profession didn't hurt as much as leaving Declan, but her chest tightened all the same when she emptied the bag and put the hoodie with its cargo inside. Last, she went into Declan's study and grabbed a pair of pink tinted Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses and a signed Boston Red Sox baseball cap. Feeling like the worst kind of thief as she pulled her hair back and donned Declan's treasured cap to shield her face, she promised herself she wouldn't lose the hat and would send it back as soon as possible.
Shouldering both bags, she left out the kitchen door, re-arming the system before grabbing the tall rolling trash can at the side of the house and quietly wheeling it to the fence line. She climbed up, denting the lid, then carefully peaked over the fence. With her face feeling like a thousand fire ants were crawling across it, she looked down the side street in both directions, squinting at anything big enough for one of the paparazzi to hide behind.
Seeing no one, she sucked in a deep breath that she didn't release until she slid down the other side of the fence, the skin on her forearms scraped and a few splinters digging deep. Another quick glance at the street and sidewalks satisfied her that no one had sent up an alarm even if they had seen her.
Of course, any photographer hoping for an exclusive would be wise to keep his mouth shut and snap away without alerting any of his competitors.
Pushing that worry aside, she started walking as quickly as she could toward the address she had given the cab company, the Ray-Bans on and the cap's brim pulled low.
When she reached the address, she hugged the shadows of a tree for a dozen or more minutes until the cabbie arrived. She was lucky the pick up was in a neighborhood where the homeowners pulled down a minimum of seven figures a year and tipped well. If it had been for the Normandie address, she couldn't have guaranteed the cab would show up at all.
Sliding into the back seat, she hunkered down and gave him a second address that was a few blocks over from Cammie's new place. Out of all that had happened in the last week, all of the secrets that had been revealed, the only bright spot was that Cammie hadn't been outed or otherwise identified. Melanie was not going to be the one who brought the wolves to her friend's door by having the cabbie recognize her and tell the tabloids the address at which he had dropped her off.
Fifty minutes later, Melanie waited in the lobby of a secured building while the guard called up to Cammie's unit. A few minutes after that, Cammie practically flew down the stairs to wrap Melanie in a hug.
"You didn't tell me you were coming!"
With the guard watching them, Melanie tried to play it off as a casual stop but, this close to her best friend, she couldn't get her jaws to work. Her trap was firmly shut as her lips pressed and rolled along a thin line.
Catching a glimpse of Melanie's face, Cammie's smile faltered but she kept her voice bright. "Let's get you upstairs! I'm so excited you came by!"
As soon as the door was shut, Cammie hugged Melanie again and all the pretense melted away.
"Okay, spill -- and I mean words, but my shoulder is ready for you to cry on, too."
Melanie shook her head. For the last few days all she had been was a tear factory. It didn't matter that most of it had been done in private. She was ashamed of how hard she was taking the collapse of a relationship that had existed only in her mind.
She used to be so pragmatic.
"Sit," Cammie ordered. "Let me get you something to drink. A virgin--"
"Just water, please."
Turning back, Cammie made a sweeping appraisal. "Water to start, but you need more than that in you. There's no color to your skin."
"Not wearing any makeup."
Melanie wanted to lean her head back against the couch, close her eyes and maybe sleep a few minutes. Cammie's sharp, knowing gaze wasn't going to let her get away with hiding, not even for a few minutes.
"There's a day with no makeup and then there's the look of someone who's been running on empty way too long."
Uncapping a bottle of cold water, she brought it over to the couch, sat down next to Melanie and handed her the drink.
"I don't really need to ask what you're doing, do I? The email you sent and the fact that your cell phone seems to be turned off because you're mom is messaging and calling me now--"
"Sorry," Melanie interjected. "I sent her an email, too. I just didn't want to talk to anyone."
"Because you know I'm not going to say 'oh, poor Melanie, you should leave that man.' Your mom might coddle you because she's your mom, but not me."
Melanie's head swung a hard left. Her brows arched as she looked at Cammie.
"Yeah," Cammie nodded. "I said it."
Ignoring the challenge, Melanie took a long draw on the bottle of water.
"You said in the email that it felt like no one wanted to work with Declan. Did he tell you to get out of his life because you're ruining his career?"
Melanie shook her head.
"Has he been the least bit unkind?"
"He told me I was being silly," Melanie whispered.
"About what?"
Melanie shook her head again. Knowing Cammie, the dancer would tell her the same thing. Silly Melanie. Stupid Melanie. Ugly Melanie.
Cammie would pick at the facts until Melanie doubted herself. But her friend didn't understand. Little details like where Willie's bin was placed, or her picture inside and on top -- those things had to be experienced in real time and in the flesh for someone to understand their meaning. And there were all the other details experienced over a month's time that formed the foundation of an intuitive, but still logical, conclusion.
"What matters," she said at last as Cammie leaned in for the next phase of her interrogation, "is that Declan doesn't love me."
"He said that?" Cammie challenged.
Melanie looked away, lips sealed in a flat line.
"Oh, I see, it's opposite day. He said he loved you so of course it means he doesn't," Cammie huffed and jerked her hands up. "Go on. Continue telling me why you're leaving."
Melanie huffed back, her nostrils flaring from the sharp needling by her best friend.
"It doesn't matter whether he wishes he could. He doesn't. Trying to cling to any other belief is hurting us both. Once I'm out of the picture, the industry will forgive him and so will his fans."
"And they'll stop reminding you that you don't look like that Shayna bitch," Cammie muttered.
Melanie's fingers twisted against one another in her lap. "It's not how I feel about me--"
"Yes it is," Cammie persisted.
Dropping her gaze to the water bottle, Melanie stopped arguing. Cammie curled an arm around Melanie's shoulders then lightly touched heads with her.
"I've seen how he looks at you."
"You only saw us together for a few hours one day and that was almost a month ago."
"And he was already in love." Pausing, Cammie withdrew her arm and studied Melanie for a long, hard, uncomfortable second. "Maybe you're the one who's not really in love."
A bomb exploded in Melanie's chest. Bilious shrapnel filled her mouth. She forced herself to swallow it down, coughing until her eyes blurred and leaked with the strain of trying to hold everything in.
Cammie wrestled her into another tight hug.
"Oh, honey...I'm sorry. I don't know that I'm wrong, but it was wrong to say it."
"I love him," Melanie protested. "I love him so much I don't know how I'm going to survive."
Cammie stroked at her hair, her throat softly murmuring little nothings in an attempt to calm Melanie.
"Okay, baby, I believe you. It's okay. I'm sorry."
Melanie shrugged her friend's touch away. She didn't want more emotion, she needed an absence of feeling. She needed sleep and darkness. She hadn't come here to have her hair stroked and be lied to that it was going to be okay. She was leaving the rest of what was left of her heart in California and flying to Europe with a giant hole in her chest.
There was no murmuring that fact away.
"I need to make sure you'll be okay," Melanie said as Cammie tried to keep her on the couch for more coddling.
Escaping, Melanie returned to the entry table where she'd left her bags. She pulled out her checkbook and a pen and started writing a check for fifty thousand dollars.
"What are you doing?"
"I don't know that Declan won't change his mind about you living here. I don't think he will, but I want to make sure you're--"
Cammie ripped the checkbook from Melanie's hands. Seeing the amount, she turned her sharp scowl from the check to Melanie.
"Are you freaking insane?"
If she was, Melanie thought, maybe Declan would actually love her.
"I'm going to London, starting over. I don't want to leave thinking I messed up my life and yours. I don't nee--"
Finished rolling her eyes, Cammie tore the check into tiny pieces.
"Shut up while you're ahead," the dancer advised as she sprinkled the confetti-sized pieces of torn check into the small trash receptacle by the entry table. "I'm not staying here, either."
"What?"
"I'm going home," Cammie announced as she steered Melanie back to the couch. "I've paid off the last of the mortgage and have six month's in expenses socked away in the bank."
Stopping, Cammie grinned and shook her head, as if amazed by what she was about to say. "I even have a normal, mundane job lined up."
Melanie couldn't keep the slightly skeptical look off her face. "What about listing your work history?"
Melanie didn't have a problem with her friend's work history, but she could imagine a lot of employers viewing it negatively. Female supervisors might take her as some kind of threat, especially in a family-run business. Male supervisors might think Cammie's history as an exotic dancer meant they could call her into the office for a blow job or a quick fuck.
The dancer's grin didn't falter. "Marco is listing me as a book keeper for the holding company for the last four years, which isn't even a lie. Half my between sets time is spent running payroll."
Melanie seized Cammie's wrist and gave it a squeeze. "You never mentioned that."
The dancer shrugged. "If I told you, I'd have to admit how slimy it feels spending the whole time doing lap dances. If the place is full of creeps, I might spend all my time offstage in the office taking care of the books."
"Lately," she admitted, "it's been full of a lot of creeps. Trickle-down misogyny someone called it on television."
Leveraging the hold on Cammie's wrist, Melanie tugged her into a tight hug and asked, "When will you go?"
Pulling back, Cammie wrapped her hands around Melanie's shoulders and squeezed.
"When you're ready for me to leave."
Melanie blinked at the answer. She knew six months saved in expenses didn't mean rent and utilities at the Normandie Avenue apartment. It meant six months of Cammie's two younger siblings and her son in school, all of them engaged in extra-curricular activities like band and soccer. It meant orthodontics, driving lessons for the oldest, and so much more.
How long had Cammie been holding back, ready to go but staying for Melanie's benefit?
"Don't look at me like that," Cammie admonished and wiped at her own cheeks. "I've been afraid to pull the trigger -- to be a mom full-time. And this last month put me over what I need between working extra shifts and doing more back office accounting because I don't have anyone to spend the rest of my day with -- not to mention being out of the lease on that rathole."
Unable to conceal her own tears, Melanie nodded. "I understand."
Walking over to her backpack, she unzipped the front pocket and pulled out her passport. She wasn't certain when her mother and Roger would leave for, or arrive in, London, or if she needed a visa for England, but she knew France would let her in for ninety days on a whim. That would give her, and her new, highly connected stepfather, enough time to sort out her working and living in England.
"I'm ready," she said, flashing the passport at Cammie as the dancer's cell phone began to vibrate.
Cammie pulled the phone out of her back pocket, the happy-yet-sad smile on her face thinning to an anxious line. She looked up from the display as the phone continued to vibrate. "It's Declan. What do you want me to do?"
Melanie walked over, took the phone and pressed the decline icon. Then she powered her phone back on and sent Declan a short text before powering down again.
I am safe. Leave Cammie out of this.
Shoving the phone and her passport in her bag, she turned back to her roommate and best friend for the last three years.
"Can you give me one last ride?"
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Having Cammie drop her off at the JetFly terminal at LAX, Melanie bought a ticket to Atlanta with a connecting flight to London after she had checked the requirements for entering the country. With six hours remaining before the flight to Georgia, she went to the stands outside the baggage claim area and jumped on a shuttle bus bound for the Courtyard Hotel that was only a mile away. Once there, she paid two hundred dollars for a room she would use for slightly less than three hours, just long enough to shower and take a nap before leaving the hotel to find her first meal in more than a day.
She left the Courtyard wearing a big, floppy sunhat, Declan's beloved Boston Red Sox cap left with Cammie after extracting a promise that the dancer would mail it to him right away. The sunglasses, of no known importance to Declan, she kept because they helped hide her face.
And leaving didn't hurt so much when she could hold them, her heart momentarily fooled into thinking he'd just stepped out of the room and would soon be there to reclaim the glasses -- and Melanie.
Ninety minutes before her plane was scheduled to depart, Melanie slid the glasses on and approached the security line at her terminal. She handed the guard at the front of the roped off area her boarding pass and ID as she looked at the two hundred or so people between her and the x-ray machines.
"Remove your glasses and hat, miss," the TSA officer ordered.
Forcing a smile, she took off the hat and glasses, nestling the Ray-Bans in the hat's
crown. The man, young and eager looking, studied her ID and her face a few more seconds until the elderly woman behind Melanie cleared her throat.
Thank God for impatient people, Melanie thought as the officer returned her boarding pass and driver's license.
She slogged along ten minutes, then twenty, the line in front of her only reduced to maybe a hundred bodies because the airport seemed to be on a higher alert level than usual.
"You," an authoritative voice called out.
Just like the hundred people ahead of her and the hundred behind, Melanie looked up to see if she could spot the person being singled out. People shuffled and she saw another TSA officer, his arm extended and one damning finger pointed in her general direction. She scanned the people directly next to her, looking for the potential smuggler or international bad guy.
"In the hat and glasses."
A young man with a ball cap but no glasses lifted his brows in her direction. She shook her head. She'd already been subject to scrutinization at the front of the line.
"He means you," a cute, geekish girl with glass-free frames said to Melanie as she paused half a second while swiping through her iPhone.
Looking at the officer, Melanie touched her index finger to her chest. Nodding, he crooked his finger, calling her out of line. Apologizing her way past a dozen or more people, she reached the rope barrier. The officer unhooked it and gestured for her to step through.
She paused on the other side, studying him as he hooked the rope back in place. Despite the cool temperature of the air conditioned terminal, the man had started to sweat profusely. Beyond that, he was relatively unremarkable. Standard good looks, medium height, medium build, somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, the hair visible beneath his TSA cap shaved close.
"Boarding pass and ID."
Already clutching them in her fist, she handed the documents over. "The gentleman at the front of the line checked them."