by Vivian Lux
I moved my hands, spreading out the headline for them to see. "The Voice of Ruthless Breaks his Silence."
She lifts her chin, she clears her throat, she takes a dramatic pause, looking at both of them directly in the eye."I propose an in-depth, intimate interview with Keir Wilder."
I heard a rustling, the shuffling of papers. I knew better than to look at them. I had to be detached and disinterested. Let them come to me.
The silence stretched out for a second too long. I clenched my fists and willed myself not to smile, squirm or otherwise betray the way my heart hammered in my chest. Sellout. You're selling out.
Then the moment was over. Kelly sat back. The gap in her blouse closed and she was all business once again. "No one has ever gotten an interview with Keir," she said disdainfully, picking an imaginary crumb off her finger. "We've tried a million times. He refuses to talk to the press." She flicked her gel-manicured nails. "That's a known fact."
She gives them a secret, satisfied grin. "That's because you've never had me do the interview."
"And what makes you different?" Thad asked.
I had them. Time to reel them in with my hook. The fact that I was selling my soul for this story was no longer an issue. This was a matter of survival.
"Keir Wilder knows me. From before he was famous."
"Knows you? How?"
I felt the words wad up in my throat like a logjam, not wanting to be spoken out loud.
"Keir Wilder..." I stopped,licked my lips, let my words hang in the air. My thumb went to my naked ring finger but, of course, there was nothing there. I had only worn his ring for three weeks before my mother finally noticed me enough to see me wearing it.
"I grew up next door to him. Keir Wilder was my first love."
Chapter 5
Keir
I grabbed a towel from one of the roadies and made my way through the subterranean hallway that led back to the green room. Sweat was pouring off of my body, and I felt like I had been hit by a semi-truck.
Best feeling in the world.
My brother beat me to the green room and rushed to claim the couch. Maddie slung her legs over his lap, and he idly ran his hand up and down her calf as he watched me chug a bottle of water.
"Good shit out there," he said.
I nodded at him. My voice was always run to shit after a show, and Rane knew that I tried to use it as little as possible.
This was a habit he very much enjoyed exploiting.
"So, little brother," he said with that smirk on his face, "I can hear the girls screaming for you, even from way back here."
Maddie smacked Rane in the arm. "Would you leave him alone?!" she huffed.
Rane spread his hands innocently. "What? I'm just a concerned older brother, that's all."
"Your concern is touching," I whispered. "And a bit creepy."
Rane sat back on the cushion. "Hey, you know that phrase, use it or lose it?" He pointed in the general region of my crotch.
Maddie smacked him again. "Gross!" she cried.
"You have a disturbing amount of concern for the state of my dick," I whispered. He wasn't going to shut up unless I said something. If I blew out my vocal cords, it would be his fault.
"We are the 'Wilder Brothers.'" He put that title very firmly in air quotes. "We apparently have a reputation to maintain." He punctuated this pronouncement by reaching out to squeeze Maddie's breast. She swatted him away with a sigh and a giggle.
"You do, anyway," I muttered, and turned away. It was as I feared. He didn't believe my performance at the bar. He knew nothing happened in that back room.
And he saw how I had jumped when Twitch mentioned Scarlett.
Should I tell him I dumped the ring? He would throw me a fucking party. I couldn't handle that kind of shit. Not yet, anyway.
Maybe I'd tell him when we were leaving on tour. Two more weeks and we'd be out of LA and on the road for the US leg of our world tour. Six weeks on the road. It would be grueling, but I was ready for it. I needed to get out of town for a while, see the country. Get away from this cesspool and all the people trying to get in my business. Then maybe I'd let Rane know I was ready to move on.
I chugged the rest of my water bottle and went in search for another towel. Another local show on the books. The tour had been postponed when Rane fell and shattered his hand in a terrible hiking accident. It was touch and go there for a while that he would ever play guitar again, but thankfully, his girlfriend whipped his ass into shape and forced him actually to do his physical therapy.
I hadn't been enough to get him to see that he needed to actually work hard. There was a part of me that still resented that I hadn't been enough.
Rane and I had been inseparable since--well, since I was born. Only eleven months apart, we moved through our neighborhood in tandem, always a pair, often mistaken for twins in looks if not demeanor. Where Rane was carefree, always ready to move on if something didn't work, I held on. It was my job to keep the two of us on track, and I accepted that as my lot from day one. He did what he needed to do for himself, and I did what I needed to do for the both of us.
But now he had Maddie. The two of them were talking about getting married in the next year or two. Seeing my brother engaged was bringing up all sorts of old shit for me. Shit I hadn't been able to fix. Shit I hadn't been able to hold on to. Shit I couldn't put into words.
I kept my cards close to my chest. When people thought they knew you, that's when they had power over you.
Very few people knew who Keir Wilder really was.
"Phone's ringing, Keir." Our bassist came over to me, handing me my phone.
I looked at the number. It was an LA number, but one I didn't recognize. "Thanks, Balzac. I'll let it go to voicemail." If they had my number, it must be legit. I didn't give that out to anyone.
The voicemail light came on, and I hit the playback button.
A long pause, a sip of breath. That sip of breath was all it took to get my heart racing. My legs were already moving, running I didn't know where, but I needed to move. I needed to fucking jump and leap into the air because I knew this voice. I knew it.
"Hi." A very long pause. "It's Scarlett. It's been a long time, I know." A pause, a swallow...were those tears in my eyes? I blinked them away and saw my fist was clenched, my knuckles white. My heart was pounding. I wanted to punch something. "But I'm hoping you'll call me back. Hoping you'll talk to me." She paused again. "This is the number for my desk at Grip magazine," she confessed in a sudden headlong rush. "I wanted to know if you'd agree to an interview. Please. Okay. Thank you. Call me back. Bye."
An ocean began sounding in my ears. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Rane stand up and limp towards me, his bad leg still stiff after the accident.
"Hey," he nudged me, "who is it? You look like you've seen a fucking ghost."
I let the phone drop from my hand, where it landed on the couch with a bounce. "No. I heard one," I said, sinking back down to the couch. I felt boneless, like I took a hit to the jaw.
Maddie slid over and rubbed my shoulder. "Hey," she said worriedly. "What's wrong?"
I buried my head in my hands, then just as quickly looked back up again with a smile. I felt like someone was running taps in my chest. Hot, cold, hot, cold. Shock was giving way to joy, joy into anger, anger into resentment, resentment into hope.
Her voice. I heard her voice again. I wanted to press play, listen to the message again, and I also wanted to smash my phone into tiny plastic fragments.
"That was Scarlett," I said.
I was smiling and baring my teeth. I wanted to sing and I wanted to hurt something. I wanted to hold my first love again and I wanted to hurt her the way she hurt me.
"She called me. She wants to meet."
Chapter 6
Scarlett
Watching, always watching. Watching myself, what I said, what I did. Always mindful of how I was coming across, ever vigilant. The more I observed, the more I understood, the
more I could prevent myself from making the mistakes that caused hellfire to rain down on me. If I could just be careful enough, I could keep from getting in trouble.
And so I watched.
I watched my mother, gauging her moods. Would today be a good day, where she was the proud homemaker, mother of four--three strapping boys and one baby girl princess--wonderful children who she was raising right? Or would today be one of the black days, the evil ones, where we were all ungrateful? Would today be a day she snapped, screaming at the top of her lungs about how we were all out to get her, conspiring against her?
I never knew what mother I'd wake up to, so I learned to watch.
I watched my father as he watched my mother, bowing and scraping. Lighting her cigarettes and indulging her moods. The two of them seemed locked in a private dance that sometimes resembled a death match. It was the shifting sand that was my mother who came up with the arbitrary rules of our household: today we would be chastised into saying grace before meals, only to have it forgotten tomorrow; today we were donating all of our possessions to the church, but tomorrow we'd go to the mall and spend a fortune. But it was my immovable rock of a father--with his belt and fists for my brothers, and his locked rooms for me--that enforced them. I always left the room whenever he entered. It was a trick I used with Kevin when the rot in our relationship started to fester. I stayed out of sight, and I watched.
I watched the popular girls at Star of the Sea Academy, the way they swung their hair over their shoulders and rolled their eyes. I watched the way they touched each other, light finger brushes, almost casual. Nothing ever desperate. Nothing ever clinging. These girls didn't need, not like I did. My need for love was a bottomless pit that swallowed everything. It frightened me.
I spent my whole life watching, like my life was a movie. I took careful notes, cataloging them in my brain. How to be a woman. How to be a young person. How to be "normal." I watched, and I wrote down what I saw so I could remember it. Then I wrote down the scenarios where I might need the knowledge I gained by writing it down so I could rehearse and be ready to not make the same mistakes again.
And that's how I became a writer.
Today, I watched Zoe pack her belongings. A Cheshire cat smile plays at the edges of the young woman's face like she knows a secret we're not privy to. She knows she will be okay with the certainty of youth and privilege.
"Scar, stop staring at me," she sighed.
I sat up at my desk. "Sorry."
She shook her head. "What were you thinking about this time?"
I swallowed. "Can I lie?"
"You can try. But you know it's useless with me."
"I know," I conceded. I didn't know how I found a friend like Zoe, and I no longer believed in a God to give thanks to. But I said a thank you to the universe for her anyway, then smiled at her. "Fine, you tell me what I was thinking if you know me so well."
"You're freaking out in some sort of guilt-ridden martyr complex over the fact that you finally put your own self-interest first." Zoe picked at her manicure and stared me down.
"You're freaky," I told her.
"You know I'm right." She tossed her hair, thick and unstraightened today, behind her head and dumped a canister of pens directly into her cardboard box where they rolled around loose. "That's exactly what you're doing."
"I'm more worried that he won't call me back," I fretted. "I left the message so late last night. It took me that long to work up the nerve."
"If half of the stories you've told me are true, he will."
"They're all true. But it was a long time ago. Five years now. Fuck, my life has changed so much since then, but his? He has the world at his feet now."
Zoe smiled and chucked me under the chin. "You were the literal girl next door, Scarlett. Guys don't get over them very easily."
I shook my head. "You don't get it. I don't want him to still want me. That would be a terrible thing to hope for."
Zoe plopped a ream of printer paper in her box. I raised my eyebrows at her. "What? I'm going out in a blaze of glory here," she protested. "Go grab me a box of the good pens."
I stood up and went to the filing cabinet. "Looks like they were cleaned out."
"Fuck. Now I wish I had flipped off Thad like I had planned. I lost my nerve and fucking thanked them for firing me."
I swallowed. Zoe had bombed her pitch. So had Jason and, if the rumor mill was right, so had Kevin. Of all the people I had started at Grip with, I was the only one who was still employed.
And all because I had sold out.
I took a huge, frantic gulp of air. "Zoe. I can't believe I have to do this."
She rushed over to me and clutched my hands in hers. "Scar, you only called him. You haven't even heard back yet. This may not happen, but if it does? You're interviewing him, not the other way around. You don't have to say anything about yourself."
I shook my head. "He'll want to know. He'll want an explanation."
She stood up. "So rehearse it. What's your story?"
I closed my eyes. She's a teenager, has barely seen the world. She knows there's a world outside of her street in suburban Buffalo, but it may as well be a dream. She walks on eggshells in a fragile, unhappy home, a bird fluttering in a cage.
Then a boy comes and bursts that cage wide open, and she falls for him. She loves him with every part of her, but that love is sick and desperate and clinging. She knows she loves not only him but the relief he gives her from the stranglehold of her cage. Loving him gives her the courage to fly free...
But that freedom comes with a terrible price, and in her grief, she flees, both from her cage...and from him...
I opened my eyes and shook my head. "There's no way I'm not the bad guy here."
"So, um, maybe say you're sorry? Are you sorry?"
I bit my lip. There was a part of the story I never told Zoe. She only knew the first part, how my mother had seen the ring on my finger because I was too stupidly blinded by happiness to realize the danger. How she lunged for the phone, ready to call the police on Keir for "corrupting her underage daughter." How my father talked her out of it, only to promise to "take care of it himself." How my mother smiled so adoringly at him when he went to the safe for his gun.
That's where I stopped. With me trying to give the ring back out of fear they'd kill him. I never told her the next part of the story.
That was the part I didn't even tell myself.
If I didn't acknowledge it, I could pretend it never happened.
I bit my lip. "Am I sorry for how things ended between us? Yes. No. I don't know."
Zoe shook her head. "Maybe he won't call back."
"Then I'm out of a job."
"Which is the worse option? Losing your job or talking to Keir Wilder after you walked out on him five years ago?"
I looked at her sharply. "Don't hold back now."
She shrugged. "Well? Which is worse?"
"I thought it was losing my job. But now I'm not so sure."
"Well, maybe he won't call you back and your decision can be made for you. And you can move in with me and we'll send out our resumes together. That doesn't sound so bad, does it?"
I shook my head. It really didn't. Not the way she meant it, anyway.
But she wasn't thinking.
Kevin knew where she lived. He'd find me. He'd find her.
Zoe didn't know that he would hurt me. And when I finally left him, I didn't tell her about the shove, how he'd thrown me to the floor. Only about the argument. I told her I was done with him, and she rolled her eyes and said, "Thank God," and we left it at that. She thought Kevin was loser, far too controlling for sure, but nothing dangerous.
No one knew he was dangerous, not even me. Not until I finally opened my eyes and saw him for what he was. But by then three years had gone by.
I never seemed to be able to get out of harm's way until it was too late.
When I fled my parents' house that horrible, blurry day, it felt like I'd left
my identity behind. I was a scared, sheltered good girl, broken-hearted and broken spirited. Leaving Kevin, as much strength as it took, left me feeling much the same way.
But calling Keir? That made me feel...oddly hopeful.
"No, it doesn't sound bad," I said slowly. "But I don't think it'll come to that." I looked up at Zoe as she unwound her lumbar support and dropped it in her box of stolen office supplies. "Because I'm pretty sure he'll call."
"You are? Why?"
I swallowed. "This is going to make me sound so full of myself."
"Honey, I wish you were full of yourself. Your self could use some filling. Spill it."
"Because...because I asked him to." And out of nowhere, I felt myself smiling.
Chapter 7
Keir
My brother set my phone down. I waited for him to curse, cuff me on the back of the head, knock some sense into me.
"She sounds the same," he finally said.
"She does." I wasn't sure why this made me so damn happy. Scarlett would be almost twenty-four now; there was no reason she should still sound like an eighteen-year-old.
But she didn't sound eighteen at eighteen years old, either. She was two years younger than me, but I was the one who acted like a kid. Especially when I was around her. She had this effect on me where I would eagerly show her all the cards I normally kept close to my chest. Scarlett opened me up, to the point where I would happily babble on for hours at a time, telling her all of my rock 'n' roll dreams and exactly how I was going to make them come true.
Scarlett Sawyer never babbled about stupid shit. She always chose her words carefully, watching the reaction of those around her as she spoke them in her sexy, throaty growl. I used to love listening to her talk.
I pressed the play button again.
Rane snatched the phone out of my hand. "Stop."
"Hey, fuck you."
"You're not seriously considering meeting her, are you?"
"And if I am?"