by Vivian Lux
Zoe stood over me with her hands on her hips. "Are you kidding me?" she demanded. "You've got the pitch of the century. If I had an ace up my sleeve like yours, I would have played it a long time ago, but you held on and waited for the right moment. Well, here it is. Now's the time, Scar. Be Ruthless."
I groaned at the pun. "That's terrible."
She grinned. "I've been waiting our entire friendship to say that."
"Did it feel good?"
"Not as good as I hoped, because you look like you're not going to do it."
I tapped my fingers on my desk. "I'm not a sell-out."
"This isn't selling out, this is saving your ass. You just got free of Kevin the Cunt, you have a shit-ton of debt and you have to swing that rent payment by yourself now. Don't be noble here. Use what you've got."
What I've got is so much deeper and more complicated than I ever let on to you, I thought, turning my back so she couldn't see the sudden turmoil her suggestion sent me into. I swallowed and tried to keep my voice even and level. "I'll think about it."
Chapter 3
Keir
Day drinking always made me sleepy, and we had a rehearsal gig tonight, so I didn't feel bad about bowing out of the bar early and heading home. I had big plans for the day.
Read a book. Take a nap.
Rock 'n' roll, baby.
With the money from royalties from our first album, I bought a little beach bungalow outright. It wasn't fancy, but it was paid for and it was mine. When I got my hands on it, it was a little worse for the wear, tattered shutters and missing roof tiles and all that. Rane declared it a dump and made fun of me when I started amassing power tools, but he didn't seem to mind when I figured out how to rehang the drywall in his kitchen after an especially raucous wrap-party. This place was good practice.
I liked fixing shit.
But some things were perfect and didn't need fixing. Like the plaid tufted loveseat that still occupied a place of honor in my living room. I headed inside and immediately flopped onto it. I was too big for it by a long shot, but I wasn't about to let it go.
When we moved out here, Rane pulled rank and claimed the big-ass couch that lived in my Dad's old basement. But I hadn't minded. I liked this tattered, worn thing that still smelled like our garage rehearsal space, even five years later.
Good memories.
The afternoon sun was moving to the back of the house, leaving my east-facing living room in a comfortable gloom. I reached behind me and switched on the lamp, then rolled over and debated the pile of paperbacks that teetered dangerously on the end table.
I wasn't a reader in high school. Sitting still and being forced to read a certain number of pages, that wasn't my style. But there was a lot of fucking downtime on tour, and I soon picked up the paperback habit, more out of boredom than anything else. I prepped for this upcoming tour by scouring the used bookstore on the hunt for cheap shit I wouldn't worry about spilling beer on or leaving in a hotel bathroom.
But as usual, I overdid it, and now I had an entire suitcase full of thrillers, classics and one or two non-fiction essay books I grabbed in a random fit of self-improvement.
The roadies were going to roast my ass good.
But I didn't actually give a shit about that. Once I committed to something, I went all the way. I bought all these books. So now I was gonna read them.
Maybe I'd get a head start now.
I grabbed the topmost one, a battered copy of A Clockwork Orange. Settling back on the couch, I opened to page one, but the words on the page immediately drifted together. This morning's nonsense in the back room had gotten nowhere, but now I was dealing with a wicked case of blue-balls-after-the-fact. Burgess's made-up language of droogs and milk-bars couldn't compete with my frustrated brain.
I closed my eyes, letting the familiar fantasy play out.
"You know what day it is?"
"Of course I do."
She dropped her book bag and grinned, twirling a sweet little circle in the middle of the garage floor. That plaid skirt swirled upward, exposing a little of the creamy thighs underneath. "Do I look older and wiser?" she asked, landing and striking a thoughtful pose.
I leaned back on the plaid loveseat. It was late afternoon on a too-hot June day. She was graduating next week and eighteen today.
"God, I hope you're not wiser," I said. "Because then you might change your mind about me."
She danced forward and rested her hands on my thighs. I was instantly hard for her.
I had been hard for her for going on two years now. But today was the day.
"I'm not going to change my mind," she said.
Up close, her brown eyes were so much more. The catlike yellow hidden underneath seemed like a secret only for me. I wondered if anyone else had ever had the treat of seeing Scarlett's eyes up close like this. I wondered if they knew what a fucking privilege it was.
I took her in my arms and laid her down on the couch. Underneath me.
Those eyes watched me, staying open the entire time. And afterward, when she was trembling and a little scared about what we had done, those eyes were even wider, somehow.
I didn't want them to ever be scared again.
"It's a sin, you know," she babbled, her mother's words coming out of her pretty lips. "Outside of marriage like this."
I reached under the couch for the small velvet box I had ready. Her birthday present.
"So let's not sin anymore," I told her, dropping to one knee.
That's always where I stopped the memory. Right when her eyes went wide and her happy cries filled my ears. Her tears and her arms around my neck as she told me yes.
I never went past that point. Choosing to remember only the good parts. That was the whole point of a fantasy.
I grunted my climax, but it was joyless and perfunctory. I cleaned myself off, feeling pathetic.
Where was all this Scarlett shit coming from?
All these years, I carried Scarlett with me, familiar as a body part. All these years, I held her in as something that was part of me and my identity. No day went by that I didn't think of her, but it was in the way I thought about something like...well, fuck, Rane writes pretty words, not me. She was like...my elbow or something. Just...there. Something I'd miss if it were gone, but not something I consciously thought about at every moment.
Why was I suddenly thinking about fucking her again? Remembering her gasps, her smiles, the promises we made? Why now?
The answer to my question was pretty obvious. I was thinking about her again because I was reminded of her again. All this time, I thought she had stayed in Buffalo, under her parents' thumb. All this time, I thought there was a continent in between us. That she had made her choice and I made mine.
To find out she was here... In the same city...
It was such a stupid thing. A discarded copy of Grip was left backstage at one of our shows a few months, back ,when Rane and Maddie were first starting up their thing. I was bored and irritated with Rane over something I couldn't remember anymore, so I'd picked it up and started leafing through it.
And saw her picture.
It was a grainy little thumbnail shot. By rights, I shouldn't have even recognized it as her. But I did, because I was fucking tuned to her frequency or whatever...
I saw her photo--as grainy and indistinct as it was, it was still her--and suddenly Scarlett Sawyer moved from being my elbow back to being my heart.
I got up off the couch and headed over to my bedroom. Late afternoon sunlight slanted across the floorboards and shone like a spotlight on the end table where I kept it. The little blue velvet box.
She had tiny fingers. I used to tease her for her "elf-hands," delighting in giving her the rings I wore back then and watching them slip right off her fingers to land on the floor with a clang. I had to be so careful when I bought this one. Finding the right size right out of the gate had taken some serious detective work. But I had done it. It slipped onto her ring finger and stayed ther
e like it belonged.
Now, it seemed too small in my hand. Cheap and a little gaudy. It was funny how I still held onto it, this symbol of old pain. I could buy one of these about every five minutes now, but back then it represented the classic two months' worth of salary. Which, as a working musician, meant it cost me four hundred fifty-eight dollars with tax.
Scarlett wasn't the one who gave it back to me. Maybe that's why I had always kept it, hoping I could see her again and ask her why. Why wasn't she there that afternoon like we planned? Why, when I went to her window, was it her mother that met me there instead?
Mrs. Sawyer. I knew she was evil, but I never knew how evil. Scarlett let a few things slip here and there but never let the full story out. I had to find out myself.
She was standing in the middle of Scarlett's bedroom, just staring. The only movement was her hand, opening and closing at her side like she was trying to catch hold of something that had already passed her by.
My heart sank when I saw her there. Had she caught wind of our plans somehow? We had been so careful.
Behind her, Scarlett's closet stood wide open. I had never been inside Scarlett's bedroom before. It was on the main floor in the back of the house, a converted porch that was hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. The one time I had tried to surprise her by showing up at her window late at night, she was nearly hysterical with fear. So all the time we spent together was at my house next door.
She told me she had packed her suitcases and stashed them in her closet behind the blankets her mom stored there. But the closet was standing wide open, the blankets spilled out across the floor.
And there were no suitcases.
My heart sank even further.
Scarlett's mother finally turned and noticed me standing there. The statue-like blankness of her face dissolved.
Seeing me gave her someone to hate. And that gave her life again.
Her mouth was already twisting into the shape of words before she finally spoke. "What did you do with her?" she snarled at me, lunging to the window.
My father always raised us to look adults in the eye, but I feared if I peered at her directly, she would turn me into stone.
Instead, I focused on a small patch of peeling paint on the window pane. It was odd, a rare taint of ugliness on the Sawyers' house, but I guess it didn't matter to them because Scarlett's window didn't face the street.
Everything that faced the street was polished and perfect.
I stared down that peeling paint, wanting to get ahold of it and rip it upward. Tear an open wound across the window the way one was tearing across my heart. "I could ask you the same question," I said instead.
She stood back up again, surprised that I was standing my ground. "I should call the police, you know." Mrs. Sawyer's voice was colder than anything I had ever heard. There was no concern for where Scarlett actually was. Only the worry that she was gone from her clutches. "You're a grown man, she's a child; it's disgusting."
My fist clenched even now, as if I could shield the ring from my memory. Just as they did back then. "Scarlett and I are adults," I told her calmly. "And we've done nothing wrong." Then my calm broke. "Where the fuck is she?"
"Don't you dare swear at me!" she hissed, shoving Scarlett's blankets off her bed like she would find her daughter hiding underneath. "You Wilders, bunch of trash strewn across our street." She slammed the closet open wider and kicked the blankets over. "If I find out you did anything to my daughter..." She whirled and lunged to the doorway again. "You'd better tell me where she is!"
But I was already walking away. "Even if I knew," I called behind me, "I would never tell you."
It was the truth. I didn't know.
I waited to hear from her. Hung around the library. Called her cell phone close to a thousand times until her voicemail was filled and I could no longer hear her bright voice saying, "This is Scarlett! You know what to do!"
I didn't know what to do. Except hope I'd hear from her, hope I'd see her again. Hope I'd be able to fix things between us so we could go back to the way things were before.
Over the years, hope gave way to despair. Despair then gave way to terrible, terrible anger.
And after that came...now.
Wherever the fuck I was in this grieving process, the wound still felt as fresh as it had that afternoon on Wallace Street.
As I held the ring in my hands, my mind slipped back to her picture in Grip. Confident. Smiling. Beautiful. It was clear she was not broken. It was clear she had moved on.
Maybe it was time I did the same.
Tilting my hand was such a small thing. Just the slightest movement and the ring slid from where it nestled in my palm and landed in the trashcan. It glinted a little in the sunlight, like a wink farewell.
I walked away to get ready for tonight's show.
Chapter 4
Scarlett
"Hey, shush, we're late," I warned Zoe.
"So what?" She flung the back door open with a dramatic bang. "We're losing our jobs. We're entitled to boozy lunches that run wildly late."
She wavered a little as we made our way back to our row. I tried to slide unobtrusively back into my chair, but she banged her bag down on her desk and stretched her arms over her head with a yawn. "I think I'll take a nap," she slurred, and promptly plopped down and buried her head in her arms.
One thing I was trying to learn from my friendship with Zoe Chandler was how not to worry about what others thought of me. It was slow progress, and it came to a grinding halt whenever I put myself in view of perceived authority.
Like right now.
The sound of tapping heels in your aisle was never a good thing. Zoe lifted her head at the same time my heart leapt into my throat.
Marcia from HR was waddling down our row with a clipboard. "Which one of you is Scarlett Sawyer?"
"Awesome, and I've worked here two years next month," Zoe muttered.
"I'm Scarlett," I piped up.
"Kelly and Thad are ready for you."
"Now? Seriously?" I wasn't prepared and I was ever so slightly tipsy. "I thought we'd have until tomorrow!" I lamented.
Marcia looked bored by my panic. I wondered if her job was on the line. Would they make HR pitch themselves?
The young reporter stands up from her desk and smooths the front of her slacks. At the tender age of twenty-three, she managed to land a paid position with one of the premier music magazines in the US. Now, only six months later, she finds herself desperately fighting to save the career she has only just started.
It was a good opening paragraph. Too bad it was my life story I was writing.
"Your ace. Use it, Scar," Zoe hissed, crossing the aisle and squeezing my arm. "Don't worry about me," she ordered, then flopped into my chair and flung her arms out dramatically before rolling herself away, "save yourself!"
I saluted her and grabbed a notebook off my desk before turning to follow Marcia. So this is how it feels to walk to your execution, I thought. The innocent prisoner, wrongfully accused, holds her head high as she follows the guard down the long hallway, knowing what lies at the very end. I closed my eyes. A picture of dignity and poise, she knows she only has to say one word to save her life. Will she do it? Will she sink that low?
I opened my eyes in front of the conference room door. "In here," Marcia prompted me.
Thad and Kelly looked up from their lists and spreadsheets with bored expressions. "Name?" Thad asked, pen poised.
"Scarlett Sawyer, from the music desk."
"Scarlett, like Gone with the Wind?"
I smiled, though it felt like my face would shatter. "Yep!"
"Okay, Scarlett." He leaned back and threaded his fingers behind his head. "Wow us."
It was that simple. All I had to do was wow them. If I wowed them, I could keep my dream job, keep my apartment, my independence, the life I built. And all I had to do to wow them was bare my deepest secret.
The tender place under my ribs twinged
. Reminding me what was actually at stake.
I took a deep breath.
"Keir Wilder," I exhaled.
I instantly had their attention. Kelly leaned forward. Thad's eyebrows nearly shot off his forehead. "Go on," he said.
I closed my eyes and formed the pitch in my head. I could see the words on the paper, right there in my mind's eye.
And they were brilliant.
Slowly, keeping my eyes tightly closed, I started to speak. "We've heard one million interviews from Rane Wilder. Rane Wilder is the image of Ruthless. He's got his image, his wealth, his celebrity girlfriend, Madeline Cole--and she's even his stepsister,for heaven's sake. The two of them are in the tabloids nearly every week. The paparazzi follow them everywhere. They are visible and press-savvy and they are always giving interviews, both about the band and their relationship. We know everything there is to know about them...and then some."
I paused, swallowed, pushed down my hesitation. "But what about the actual voice of the band? What do we know about Keir?"
I opened my eyes.
Kelly was leaning forward raptly, the collar of her starched white blouse falling slightly away to reveal a little glimpse of red lace. So she's a wild thing. I bet she was a groupie before she went into music journalism. She's practically salivating. I turned and pitched directly to her.
"He's the singer," I continued, nodding so she'd nod along with me. "But we rarely ever hear his thoughts on the band, on his brother, on their music. He's the singer in a wildly popular rock 'n' roll band, but we only know him from the photographs we have." Kelly nodded like her head was on a spring. I pressed my hands into the table, careful to keep them from shaking.
Since I was little, I'd developed a script. It was a way of watching myself from the outside. Take away any ammunition that people could use against me, before they even noticed it, by scrutinizing myself carefully, every movement, every word choice. I felt myself slipping into it now.
The hard-boiled journalist lifts her chin. Her face is set, eyes clear. She stares across the conference room table like a battle-weary soldier facing down the enemy.