by JA Huss
I open the envelope and pull out a thick card. Not a greeting card, a two-sided card, like a glossy business card, except larger.
A Private Affair
You’re Invited
When: Right now.
Where: Get in the car in the front of the store.
My alarms should be going off. I’ve been a prisoner twice. Once by force, once self-imposed. So I should be wary. But I don’t even think twice. I grab my coat and walk out the front door, searching for Ark.
The world is blanketed in white. But the car in front, with a driver standing next to it, is long and black. The driver smiles at me, then opens the door to the backseat and I get in. He walks around the front of the car and gets in the driver’s side.
“It’s not far,” he says. Like he knows that my mind is whirling with thoughts. He looks for traffic and pulls out onto the street.
I glance down at the card in my hand. There’s no artist’s name or gallery listed, but my heart knows. My heart knows because Ark’s got a piece of it. And the closer we get to my final destination, the more whole I become.
I got a photograph in the mail last Christmas. It wasn’t of a person, but of a view through an open door of a cage. The view was from the loft terrace in Denver, looking out over California Street.
I looked at that picture every night for months and I wondered, Why won’t he come for me?
And then I decided he was waiting for me to come to him. He was waiting for me to leave the cage and let myself be free.
When we pull up to an old building that looks like it’s been rehabbed recently, my heart beats a little faster. Two Dragons Art Gallery is an urban legend in New York. People admit to having been there, but no one can tell you where it is.
When I first heard this I immediately thought they were drugged and taken somewhere in secret. But then I was told the reason no one knows where it is because the location isn’t permanent. One time it’s here, the next it’s there. Always on the edge of things, never on the beaten path.
And somehow, that fits Ark.
The gallery changes from exhibit to exhibit. It’s fleeting. Just a moment in a night. Sometimes it’s in a building. A subway station. A basement room in an underused public library. Once I heard it was in a bar bathroom.
It’s always in Brooklyn, though. Ark’s real home town. And that’s why I agreed to do the reading today. I hoped against hope he would find me and let me back into his secret world.
The driver gets out and walks around to open my door. I take his hand as he helps me out. I pull away, but he holds on tighter.
“It’s icy, Miss Marshall. I was instructed to make sure you don’t slip down the stairs.”
I look to where he’s pointing. An outside stairwell that looks like it was recently shoveled, but the snow is thick and already piling up again.
My strappy sandals were not put on with this in mind. So I keep hold of the driver’s hand until we reach the bottom after a precarious descent.
He lets go of me in front of an old metal door, and then he pulls and it swings open.
I step inside and the door closes behind me.
The room seems vast and long, but it’s hard to tell because there is only one small spotlight shining down from the ceiling.
I am transfixed by the image it’s illuminating on the wall. I walk forward, past the darkness, and into the light. And I just stare at the picture of JD. His blue eyes. His blond hair and scruffy chin. His charming smile.
The unframed photograph is the size of a picture window. His face is so big. So happy. So familiar. And so real.
My fingers stretch until I can touch his lips. And then I walk forward, my arms spread out, and I press my cheek to his. My hands wrap around the edges of the canvas in a desperate attempt to pull him into the hug he deserves.
And I cry.
I cry all the tears I owe him.
They fall down my cheeks in rivers.
When I saw the announcement in the neighborhood paper that Zoey Marshall was going to do a reading in Brooklyn, I knew it was time. I knew she was coming for me.
Two years I’ve watched her from afar. Two years of endless internet searches, red-eye flights to try to catch a glimpse of her in a city before she left, stalking her blog, and her Facebook, and her Twitter. I wanted to keep that connection any way I could while she healed.
I watched her story play out on TV at first. Her father did the talking, of course. Zoey Marshall does not make public appearances. At least, not until today.
Tens of thousands of people preordered the book. While she never made a public statement on TV or did a print interview, she was always a click away on her blog where she wove a story about her fictitious sabbatical at a hippy commune tree house community in the Brazilian rainforest.
JD didn’t sell those films. He deleted them. No one ever came forward to say this is Zoey Marshall’s real story.
And even though I know she made some of the story in the novel up to make us more romantic, all the important things are true.
We were in love.
JD is dead.
People were saved.
Lives go on.
I’ve been back to see Ray a few times. Jax thinks I’m crazy, but the FBI went through his records for almost a year and never found a single i undotted or t uncrossed. Ray was as up and up as a porn mogul can get. Still is.
Public Fuck America never went live, obviously. But I did get back all the videos of JD. I had to fight for the ones of Blue. Jax made sure that evidence, including the videos and contract she had with Gabriel, disappeared.
I kept everything that was mine.
We destroyed the rest.
There were lots of trials. Not Gabriel’s. He bled to death on the concrete floor of my loft that night. And those trials had lots of deals. No one got off, not even the flock wives. The deals were made to keep Blue’s reputation intact. And now that she wrote the book, it’s sort of a cover in and of itself. A brilliant move, actually. She made our story fiction. No one will ever believe it’s true.
My transient gallery has grown through word of mouth generated so as to ensure people in her circles—her publisher, her agent, her publicist, her editor—all knew about it.
I have lived every moment of the past two years with her in mind.
So when the text comes through that she got into the car, my heart beats wildly with anticipation. She is not going to a transient show in some dingy abandoned building. She’s coming to my home. My personal gallery where I have labored over the past twenty-six months to create the perfect exhibit.
And not by coincidence, it’s called One, Two, Three.
One lost girl.
Two best friends.
Three eternal soulmates.
The idling motor of a car outside breaks my concentration and I stand up. I straighten my suit coat, and my tie, making sure it’s tight.
Her shoes tap on the concrete steps. I picture her hand being held by my driver, Matthew, and then the door opens with a creak.
She’s illuminated by the outside light for a brief moment, and then the door closes behind her and she stands in the shadows.
But it only takes her a moment to see JD. It’s hard not to, since I’ve placed a spotlight above his head. It’s my favorite picture of JD, taken when he was sitting outside on our terrace when we first moved into the loft.
It was a good day. One of the best. We were rich. He was happy. I was satisfied that we’d gotten through the hardest thing he’d ever have to go through. He was better. He was whole again. He was saved.
It turns out salvation is no more permanent than anything else in this life.
But if I could save him once, I could do it again.
Blue reaches out to touch his lips and then she spreads her arms and hugs the photo. It’s almost as wide as her arms, but not quite. There is just enough room for her to grab onto the edges and place her cheek on his.
“You came,” I say, stepping out of
the shadows.
She turns to face me, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I owed you a story. So I wrote you a story.”
I walk forward and take her hand. “I love your story.”
She starts to cry again. “Why did you leave me? After it was all over I asked them to tell me where you were, but they refused.”
I take her in my arms and hold her tight. I smell her hair and close my eyes. “I left because I love you. And you were right.”
She pulls back and looks up at my face, her blue eyes filled with tears. “I was wrong about everything.”
“No,” I whisper. “You said I wasn’t invested that night. And you were right. I wasn’t. I wasn’t invested in anything. Not the job, not JD, not the business, not even you. So I had to let you go, Blue. Because you deserve better than that. You deserve the kind of love that has no conditions. You deserve the kind of love that’s free. You deserve devotion. So I left so I could find a way to give you all those things.”
And then I reach into my pocket and pull out a remote control. “Click it on, Blue.”
She reaches for the little white plastic with a blinking red light. “What is it?” She looks up at me with total trust and I smile.
“My investment.”
And then I press her finger and the lights come on.
We are everywhere. Our faces paper the wall, lit up like the angels we wanted to think we were, and not the demons we know we are.
Me. JD. And Ark. Three people who stumbled on each other in the rain.
Us in the tub, the mist obscuring our faces, but not our intentions. Us on the terrace, their hands between my legs, my mouth open in a moan you can hear through time and paper. Us, us, us. Everywhere.
I walk down the row of photographs, studying each one, remembering the day they were taken, the smile reluctantly coming forth with each passing moment. “We were in love, weren’t we?” I ask Ark.
“We still are, baby. We still are.”
My chin trembles and when I look he nods, as if to reaffirm this declaration yet again. He places a hand into the small of my back and urges me forward. I take small steps so I can see each picture. Most of them are in black and white. We are nude. We are kissing. “There are more of JD and me than with you.” I sigh. “You always forgot the tripod.”
“I know,” Ark says. “But I don’t make that mistake anymore.” I give him a weird look as we take a step into the darkness. The end of the line of photos. “I can’t afford to let the moments slip by. So I take pictures every day. I want to record every change.”
And then he reaches for the little remote in my hand and clicks it one more time. The opposite side of the room lights up, only the photos on that wall are not of us.
They are of a little girl.
I know who she is the second I look into her blue eyes. But even if I didn’t recognize her, the charm in her smile gives it away.
“Her name is Paige.”
Blue stares at my six-year-old daughter. JD’s daughter.
“Her parents went to jail, and since JD had me listed as next of kin on all his legal papers, they let me adopt her. She’s my whole life, Blue. She erases all the mistakes.”
Blue walks up to the largest picture and touches my little girl’s face. “She’s beautiful.”
“She looks just like him, don’t you think?”
Blue nods and then she turns. “What happened? I run that night through my head every day. Why? Why did he do that?
I can only shrug. But it’s a copout and I know it. You’re invested now, I remind myself. “He was sick, Blue. He was sick since the day I met him. Manic-depressive. Bipolar, whatever you want to call it. And the guilt he had…” I shake my head. “He’s the one who heard about the baby-sellers. He’s the one who made Marie go work for them to pay for his drug habit. He’s the one who handed the baby over. She disappeared the same day as the baby. And I can only assume they are the ones who killed her, but we just don’t know. JD said she killed herself because he made her sell the baby. He couldn’t live with the guilt.”
Blue walks over to me and I wrap her up in my arms. “I couldn’t save him, but I could save Paige by getting her back. I could save you by walking away and letting you figure out who you are and what you want. And I could save myself by walking away from that life and starting this one.”
“I love you,” she says.
I swallow hard and step back half a step. “Then stay with me, Blue. Let me love you back the way you deserve to be loved. You don’t need me to save you. I don’t need you to save me. She doesn’t need us to save her.” I motion to Paige’s picture on the wall.
Blue hesitates, and then looks me in the eyes. “JD was right and you were wrong, you know.”
“I’m wrong a lot. But please don’t hold it against me.”
She smiles and places her small hands on my rough cheeks, pressing against my skin. And then she rises up on her tiptoes and kisses me. “You were wrong about the motto on your back, Ark. Everything should come in threes. Especially us. Because one is where it all starts. Two is only halfway there. But three…” She rises up to kiss me again and then she whispers, “Three was always our perfect ending.”
I hold Blue’s hand and lead her over to the elevator. She draws in several deep breaths, betraying her apprehension. But I squeeze her hand until she brings those blue eyes up to meet my dark ones. And then I kiss her. Our mouths come together—hesitantly at first, then with more passion. I slide my hands up along her face and fold her into my embrace. She pulls back, resting her head on my chest, like she’s listening for my heartbeat.
“I miss him,” I say. She nods her head, but her back shakes from the silent sobs. “But Paige… she helps. You’ll see.”
We ride up to the top and the doors open into my penthouse apartment. Paige waits with the housekeeper in her pajamas. You only have to look at her to know that JD is still here with us.
Paige stands up and does this little curtsy, turning on the charm she comes by naturally. “I know you,” she whispers.
Blue stares at her, her sadness receding before my eyes. And then she wipes her tears and smiles. “I know you too,” Blue replies back in her own hushed voice. “I know you too.”
And that’s how we start it. Our new life together.
One little girl.
Two soulmates.
And three mended hearts.
I’m a believer now. I can see it with my own eyes.
Everything should come in threes.
Read other books by JA HUSS
JA Huss is the USA Today bestselling author of more than twenty romances. She likes stories about family, loyalty, and extraordinary characters who struggle with basic human emotions while dealing with bigger than life problems. JA loves writing heroes who make you swoon, heroines who makes you jealous, and the perfect Happily Ever After ending.
Welcome to The End of book Shit. We call them the EOBS now. I write these chapters at the end of every book. They sort of have cult status these days. Sometimes they are a little controversial, sometimes not. They are never edited. So if you see a typo, oh well. I wait until the last minute to write them—like right now it’s 1 AM Monday, January 26, 2015. I have to send this to my formatter tonight. Like now. So she can get it back to me before Tuesday so I can upload with enough time to get the book live before the 28th (the official release day).
So fuck. (I swear a lot in these) I’m not sure how much I should tell you about where this all came from. It started out pretty dirty because it came right out of a porn video. I saw this video about a year and a half ago. It was a guy who made these reality videos for an online site. But that was not what captured my attention.
So here’s how it went… this was in Eastern Europe somewhere, it was all in subtitles. It was the dead of winter. The guy with the camera was in a train station or something. And he must’ve seen this girl. She was tall, not too thin, nice curvy figure underneath her huge coat and winter clothes.
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nbsp; But she was very pretty. Black hair. Dark eyes. Perfect face. Beautiful actually, but in a very poor way. Like, you could tell she had normal everyday problems on her mind. Her clothes were ordinary. Nothing special. And she looked tired. She was coming home from work, I think.
So this camera guy was filming his approach to her. Telling her she’s pretty, does she want to let him take her picture? She ignores him for a long time—at least ten minutes of that movie is just this guy practically begging this girl to give him some attention. He follows her all the way out to her car, and then he gets down to business. If you show me your bra, I’ll give you this money. I don’t know how many Euro he said. One hundred maybe.
Her eyes bugged out, but she said no.
But the guy knew he could persuade her if he just kept upping the amount, So he gets to five hundred Euro, holds the money out, makes her take it. And then asks her, Where do you work?
She’s a cashier.
How much do you make in a week?
She tells him some small amount, not in Euro, some other currency. So a small amount.
And he tells her, Just show me your underwear and that five hundred is yours.
And you could see her face as she worked through what this money might mean.
You could pay rent with this. You could buy food. Clothes. He says all this to her as she bites her lip and takes deep breaths.
Ok, she says. But not in public.
He says, OK, let’s go to my place.
So gets in his car, and he’s filming this whole time. And he actually says to the camera, I can’t believe she got in my car!
And the girl is clearly nervous, but she trusts him for some reason.
They get to his place and she lifts up her shirt and shows him her bra.