The Bet

by J. D. Hawkins

  “Mom! He’s just my manager!” But the lie comes out sounding defensive and weak, and I know I’m not convincing her.

  She smiles gently. “I’m not judging.”

  “Fine. But still…”

  “Listen, Haley, the kind of man who would look for a rare, limited edition record for a girl’s mother is also the kind of guy who would go to the ends of the earth for that girl – young woman, I mean – and her secrets.”

  “And is apparently also the kind of man who would spill those secrets to the whole world?” I say, slumping back against the chair in exhausted defeat.

  “Are you sure about that?” my mom asks.

  “Yes! It’s exactly the kind of thing he’d do. Probably for publicity or something.”

  Mom’s expression remains skeptical. “Did he tell you that?”

  “Of course not. He said he didn’t tell anyone.”

  “So why do you think it was him?”

  “Because…he was the only one who knew! And he’s lied to me before.”

  My mom gives me the same sigh-and-critical-look combination that she gives her music students who skip their homework.

  “Haley…”

  “Mom…” I say, in the same voice I used when I wanted to skip school. “The whole music thing…it just sucks. Someone messed up my guitar before a gig. And way before that, Brando made a bet with some douche bag that he would make my song a hit. One minute the label won’t give us a video budget, the next they send me on tour with Lexi. They basically forced me to sign with Majestic by throwing a bunch of lawyers at us saying I’d have to repay the studio time back myself if I didn’t. This business is just full of snakes and lies and people playing fucked up games. It’s not as simple as it looks. You don’t understand.”

  “Don’t I?”

  I look at her soft face, barely able to conceal the hurt she feels.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  She shrugs it off and smiles. “It sounds to me like the music industry hasn’t changed one bit, honestly.”

  I let out a little laugh, but the smile disappears quickly when I remember. “The point is, Brando probably did this. And he probably thought he was doing me a favor, that it would help my career.”

  “Haley,” my mom says with an air of finality, “the - ‘secret’ – as you call it, was never going to stay secret for long once you got your name out there. Do you know how many people found out about me and Rex at the time? How many of his biographers I’ve had to fend off insinuating questions from? What about the strange letters I get from his insane fans that think they’ve made some connection between us? You’re right. I don’t know this Brando, but I do know people. And it’s worth giving them the benefit of the doubt every once in a while.”

  I nod slowly, taking in her words, wishing I believed them. “I’d like to say thanks for the support, Mom. But the truth is that I’m more confused than ever right now.”

  “So listen to your heart instead of your head,” she says simply. As if it’s that easy. “Now sit tight and let me make you some tea.”

  30

  Brando

  LESS THAN FORTY-eight hours since Haley got into the cab, her last words to me (“fuck you”) still ringing painfully in my ears, I’m back in LA. I called and texted her until she turned her phone off, and then I called and texted her until I realized she wasn’t going to turn it back on. It’s been a long two days, but not long enough for me to feel any less pissed off, miserable, and frustrated. Somebody once told me that there are stages to grief, and I feel like I’m learning what they are: Punching a hole in a hotel room wall, staring at a ceiling fan for an hour without moving, and googling whether anybody’s actually died from a broken heart.

  I enter my apartment planning to spend the next five to ten years ordering take-out and wearing pajamas while I recover. But even here I can’t escape. I can’t look at anything without feeling a mental stab, a memory of her. The couch reminds me of the cute way she folded her legs under herself when we first came here, of the song she played just for me. I can’t look at the window without feeling like her silhouette is missing from it, and even glancing toward the fire escape makes me relive the entire conversation we had out there. I try to resist looking at her pictures on my phone, but there’s not an ounce of willpower left in me, and I fall into a dark hole, gazing for minutes at a time at each image.

  Maybe Jax was right. This is Lexi all over again. Only different. With Lexi I always knew she was bad for me, I always saw this coming, but Haley? She’s ten times the girl Lexi is, and I feel ten times stronger about her than I ever did with Lexi. If I still can’t make it work with Haley, then maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m just not cut out for something so good. Maybe I should just stick to banging chicks and keeping my feelings cold. I never asked myself if Haley was too good for me because I knew I probably wouldn’t like the answer.

  I grab my duffle bag and stuff a few things into it. I need to get out of the apartment, get out of my head. And the only way I know how to do that is push my body to its limit. I quickly change into my gym gear and storm out like I’m late. It’s dark by the time I arrive at the gym. Nobody but an overweight guy and an older woman on a couple of the treadmills.

  I take a towel out of the bag, throw it over my shoulder, and stuff my bag into a locker before turning to the door. I swagger into the gym, rolling my shoulders and neck to loosen up. I’m halfway to the weight rack when I hear a voice behind me.

  “I was wondering when you’d show up again.”

  I turn around, even though I know who it is. It’s a voice so drenched in husky sexuality it would be hard to mistake. Even harder to mistake those blue, seductive eyes set in that sharp face. The blonde yoga instructor. Her tank top and tiny spandex shorts covering only the most obscene parts of her body, and revealing most of her bronzed skin. I remember immediately what it was like to feel her hard, smooth body rolling over my cock, and feel a quick rush of adrenaline pump into my veins.

  “You been avoiding me?” she asks with a small smile. She knows it couldn’t be true.

  “I’ve been a little busy,” I say, my voice sounding like it isn’t mine.

  She folds her arms. A gesture of mock-defiance, or an opportunity to squeeze her tits together in a way that would make most men bite their tongues. I feel a small spike of lust, but it’s faint, distant. Like an echo. Nothing like the forceful compulsion that used to take me over and turn me into an animal. Every impulse in my body seems to reject her now. My instincts all tell me it isn’t right.

  “It’s okay,” she says, drawing the words out until they sound like soft moans. “I forgive you.”

  I stand and stare like an idiot encased in jello. Somehow unable to deal with even this basic situation. A situation I’ve been in a million times before, a situation that used to feel as comfortable and routine as pouring a glass of water. Now it seems too complicated, too much for me to handle.

  “You can make it up to me,” she says, taking my hand and leading me back to her massage room, back to the place where the old me, a different me, fucked her into oblivion.

  It takes barely fifteen seconds to cross the gym floor, but in those fifteen seconds my mind races at the speed of light. In those fifteen seconds I change my mind a hundred times, remember everything that happened since I last entered that room, experience every regret and joy all over again. Fifteen seconds of deep existential crisis.

  I need to do this, I want to do this. Haley’s gone. It’s over. This is where I belong now. This is who I am. I’m not the guy who can make Haley happy. I’m not the guy who can make it work with her. I’m the guy who fucks yoga instructors at the gym. I’m the guy who fucks and forgets. I’m not boyfriend material. I’m a one-night stand. I’m the guy incapable of loving, or being loved.

  She crosses through the doorway but I stop short, slamming my hand on the doorframe and holding back as if blocked by some invisible force field. I snatch my hand away from hers and
she spins around, a delicate frown forming. She eyes me for a second and sees the strain on my face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I shake my head, mouth too dry to speak, brain too fried to think.

  “Relax,” she says, stepping towards me, “it’s just like last time.”

  She reaches out a hand to place it against my chest but I pull back instinctively.

  “I can’t,” I say, suddenly feeling short of breath.

  “What?” Her shock is evident. “Why?”

  “Because,” I look at the floor for a few seconds before looking her in the eye and blurting out the truth, surprising even myself. “I’m in love with someone.”

  Saying the words out loud feels like etching them in stone. The second they leave my lips the thick cloud that’s been fucking up my mind for days seems to disappear, and the simple, indisputable revelation forms into a solid proof that I can hold on to.

  I spin on my heels and almost run out of the gym, leaving my bag behind. I might be not be the guy who can fuck hot women randomly anymore, but I’m still the guy who doesn’t know how to give up.

  Haley’s house is exactly how I imagined it would look. On the outskirts of a quiet hippie town near the beach, at the end of a quiet road that winds slowly up a hill, surrounded by a few quiet clusters of shady trees. It’s no wonder she enjoys making noise.

  I step through the worn, wooden gate and knock on the door, shaking my arms and stretching my neck like I’m bracing for a fight. The door opens slowly, but the person who opens it is anything but confrontational.

  “So you must be Brando,” says the striking woman in the doorframe.

  She’s tall and slim, a flowing dress hanging from softly-curved shoulders. Her angular bone structure seems to catch and hold the light like a supermodel. Though she’s got the comfortable smile and glinting eyes of someone in their fifties, something about her makes everything else seem a little less physical.

  “Ms. Cooke,” I say, quickly suppressing the guilty pang of finding Haley’s mom kinda hot.

  She smiles, and it’s like the sun is shining directly at me. “Call me Wanda. Come on in,” she says, standing aside. I step through the doorway, looking around the room like a detective scanning for clues. “She’s not here,” Wanda says, noticing my tensed muscles. “She’s out in the shed.”

  “The shed?”

  “It’s where she likes to record and play. Me too, sometimes,” she says, as she leads me through the house toward the back door. “It’s a kind of studio. And a guest room.”

  She pushes open the kitchen door to the long lawn of neatly-cut bright-green grass, colored blooms and bushes lining it all the way to the end, where a ramshackle wooden structure sits amid the greenery like some miniature English cottage that time forgot.

  “Look. Wanda,” I say, turning back after she holds the door open once again for me to step past. “Thanks for telling me she was here. I know she probably told you not to.”

  “You’d have found her here eventually. Better sooner rather than later.” Wanda looks down sadly. “Haley’s like a wild flame: Quick to start, and quick to calm. But if you leave her to herself, she can burn everything around her.”

  I know Wanda’s right, but something about the way she says it makes me feel like I’m hearing a secret.

  “I can see where she got her poetic side.”

  Wanda takes my hand in hers and looks at me with mint-blue eyes. It feels like she can read my mind.

  “I hope she didn’t inherit my taste in men.”

  As soon as she says it, she drops my hand and steps back into the house, closing the door. The message is clear: You’re on your own, buddy. I spin around to face the shed across the lawn, which seems a thousand miles long now, and start walking.

  By the time I get close to the shed door, my head’s swirling with so many thoughts, so many emotions, so many memories, that I can’t tell if the sound I’m hearing is real or imagined. It’s only when I get close enough to put a hand against the deeply-grained wood that I know it’s really her. She’s singing. Low and long, a sad song. She stops every few lines, then starts back up again, the same way she always does when she’s writing.

  I listen for a while, taking deep breaths, and then brace myself once again. I glance back toward the house and see Wanda looking through the glass pane of the door. She offers me a gentle look of sympathy before turning away and heading back into the house.

  I knock.

  Haley calls out something that gets muffled through the wall, then gets back to playing. I knock again. This time I hear her stop, and the thud of what’s probably her guitar being put down. I take a step back from the door.

  “What the fuck?” she snarls, her face twisting with uncontrolled anger as soon as she sees me. “No! Go away!”

  As she screams this last word she puts her hand on my chest and shoves me as violently as she can. I stumble back, and she storms toward me.

  “Just fucking leave already! Get out of my life!” she screams, her voice breaking up with how loud she’s screaming. She shoves me again, putting all of her strength into it.

  “Don’t you fucking get it already? I don’t want anything to do with you!”

  This time I grab her biceps and hold her before she can shove me again.

  “Stop it!” I shout, my voice so loud it seems to swallow hers, to boom off the surrounding mountains. “For fuck’s sake, Haley! Stop.”

  We glare at each other, chests heaving, jaws clenching. Two animals in a fight to the death.

  “I’ll never forgive you for what you did,” Haley hisses, her voice as sharp as a blade.

  “I’ve done a lot of dumb things, Haley. Made a lot of mistakes. But that wasn’t one of them.”

  “Fuck you!” Haley says, shrugging my hands off her, rage pouring off her in waves.

  Something in me snaps. “No, Haley. Fuck you! I didn’t come here to beg. I didn’t come here to apologize. I’m sick of fucking apologizing. This whole tour I’ve been twisting myself into knots over you. Praying you’d give me another chance. Wondering how fucking long you were going to stay mad at me. And then for a whole month before that I didn’t even leave the house. I felt like I’d give anything to see you again, and it still wasn’t enough.”

  Haley glares at me even more fiercely.

  “And for what, Haley? For what? A stupid bet that I didn't care about from the second I realized how good you really were. A stupid bet that I won, and still feel like I lost. A stupid bet that I'd make all over again, because it's the best damn thing that happened ever happened to me - and maybe to you, too. I'm not the one hung up on the bet, Haley, you are. You keep treating me like I’m an asshole – and maybe I am, but not for the reasons you think. The only mistake I made was feeling the way I do about you. But I’m done. I’m done being the nice guy. I didn’t come here to apologize. I didn’t come here to beg you for another chance. I came here to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” Haley spits, her voice even harder and tighter.

  “That I fucking love you.”

  The words seem to light a fire in her face, her eyes flickering over mine, her lips opening in an angry scowl, trembling with anger. Her cheeks go hot red like I just slapped her in the face.

  She leaps at me again, even more aggressively, even more fueled by her hot-headed temper, even more out of control. Only this time it’s not to push me. It’s to kiss me.

  31

  Haley

  ON THE DRIVE back to LA I have to struggle to stop myself from smiling. I hang my arm out of the window and watch Brando as he focuses on the road, feeling weird in a happy kind of way. He notices me watching and laughs.

  “You look pretty happy to return to LA,” he says

  “I’m just happy right now. Take the 1.”

  “Why?” he says, frowning. “It’s longer.”

  “Yeah. But I like the ocean view.”

  I lean toward the window and let the wind caress my face, stroke m
y hair. When I open my eyes I see Brando, notice the lines of his arm muscles, the Italian nose in profile, the way he looks like he’s dreaming when his face is at rest.

  He glances over at me and notices me staring again.

  “I feel like I should be charging you when you look at me like that.”

  “I hope I can afford it,” I giggle, as I lean over to turn on the radio.

  We listen to the tail end of a half-decent song, both of us only half-listening, until the two DJs start talking.

  “…an interesting story. Rex Bentley – you like Rex Bentley, Sara?”

  “Who doesn’t? ‘Put on your red shoes…’”

  “Well his daughter, apparently. Haley Grace Cooke: The girl who just supported Lexi Dark on her tour and is set up to be even bigger.”

  “She’s his daughter?”

  “That’s what people are saying.”

  “I can believe it.”

  “What do you think? Is this just one of those publicity things? Or you think she really didn’t want people to know?”

  Brando presses the off button so hard he nearly breaks it. We drive on in silence for a few minutes, but the sense of something wrong hangs in the space between us.

  “What do I do?” I finally ask, turning to Brando. “What do I do about this?”

  Brando focuses on the road, sighing deeply before he speaks.

  “Rowland wants to use this, of course. Play up the connection. Milk the publicity, really drive home the ‘estranged daughter of the musical legend is just as talented’ angle. He’s already talking feature pieces about how you always knew the music was in your blood. Me: I want this to go away. Disappear. You can stand on your own talent, you worked your ass off for this career, and you’ve got no reason to want to be associated with a scumbag like him. If it were up to me, this story would be dead and gone yesterday.”

  I nod. “Me too. But how? Is that even possible?”

  Brando’s lips press together as he thinks of how best to let me down.