by Wild, Nikki
I felt she could probably use the rest.
When I pitched this promo to her, she agreed.
“It’s only a couple of days, right? Would it be okay if I just relax down here? Go have fun, and I’ll be waiting for you when you come back…”
“I’ll hold you to that,” I smiled wickedly, climbing across the couch to kiss her deeply.
But I had to get my rest that night, since I was hopping a plane at 4 in the fucking morning.
Instead of tearing her apart in bed, I got a halfway decent night’s sleep.
She was still curled up beside me, sleeping away, when I kissed her goodbye on the forehead.
“I love you,” she murmured quietly.
I paused.
What?
She rolled over, deep in sleep, and I was left to deal with what that meant to me…what it meant for us.
Oddly?
I wasn’t bothered with the idea. In fact…
Hearing it cemented something in my head.
Something strong.
Something we could build a foundation from.
I whispered loving words in her ear, watching a dopey, slumbering smile cross her lips.
With that, I quietly slunk downstairs and picked up my packed bags, stepping out the door. Locking it tight, I threw my shit into the trunk of my car and gunned it for the airport.
It had apparently rained overnight. The streets were slick with overlooked rain; the reflections of the streetlamps so late in the morning gave the roads an otherworldly glow.
I liked it.
Lights, rising from the darkness.
Reflected in all that was here.
It suited me.
I dropped the car off at a private lot near the airport, handed the keys to the valet, and strolled towards my destination with my suitcase in hand.
My chucks splashed indiscriminately through my own reflection in the puddles.
The night was cool, and greatly refreshing. A light mist hung around from the passing of the rain. After so much time on the bus, it was nice to have this rejuvenation in the air.
“Hey, bud.”
I growled inwardly.
Someone was nearby…
But I couldn’t tell where he was.
“Bud. Talkin’ to you.”
There.
Some tall, lanky guy in dark rags was loitering in the shadows just ahead. Hanging out near the airport. Stepping out from the dark to confront me. Looking for easy prey.
He thought that I fit that bill.
I almost laughed.
“Your wallet and your phone,” he growled, flicking out a particularly vicious switchblade.
I continued walking up, and he took a step towards me. As he saw that I wasn’t going to comply, he assessed me briefly, deciding that I was somehow bluffing in my confidence.
Fucking strung-out junkie.
I was half a foot taller and a lot broader.
“Stop,” he growled again.
“Fuck off,” I replied coolly.
He was tense.
Probably wasn’t used to this.
Criminals lacking imagination never know what to do when people don’t act according to plan. It’s early in the morning, the roads are deserted, and he has a knife.
The plan says, the victim stops.
The victim is terrified.
But me?
Hah.
I am, sure as shit, no goddamned victim.
The downside is that this tends to make a tweaked-out thief like him unpredictable. When the script in his head goes awry, even he doesn’t know what he’s gonna do, half the time.
Two choices:
Back down.
Strike.
But I had this guy pinned, and I knew exactly what he was gonna do. As he jumped forward with the knife, I easily sidestepped him. Channeling my momentum into a wide swing, I brought my suitcase up in a sharp arc.
He whirled back around to face me, but the case connected with his head, throwing him off balance and against a nearby building. As he reeled from the blow, I dropped the case to the side, stepping forward to try and tightly grasp his wrist.
Surprisingly, the fucker was agile.
He dodged my grip and slipped to the side, lashing out with the blade in an unpredictable volley of jabs.
We were back to square one.
Only this time…we were both ticked off.
“Couldn’t make it easy, could ya?” He grumbled. “Just had to go and make this a fucking mess, didn’t ya? You piece of shit!”
“Go the fuck home,” I commanded him.
He merely grit his teeth, taking a ridiculous defensive stance. His blade still stood at the ready, catching just the slightest bit of light.
Nobody else was out here.
It was just him and me.
“The wallet, and your phone,” he repeated.
Out of my peripheral, I took in my surroundings…and a dangerous but workable idea formed in my head.
“Go to Hell,” I grinned.
With a snarl, the bastard lunged again.
I was ready. I dodged out of the way, carefully planting my sneakers against the ground. He whipped around and whirled towards me again, but I jumped backward and gave his strike no purchase. His desperate lunge put him off balance. Out of control…
He was right where I wanted him, lined up to be on the receiving end of one solid punch. A certain satisfaction rolled through me as I connected.
I watched him clutch at his gut as he stumbled back from the blow, but he managed to maintain his grip on the switchblade. Carefully but swiftly, I delivered a kick to his head before throwing my weight into a shoulder tackle, pinning him by the chest up against the wall as I scrambled to get control of his arm.
Persistent fucker that he was, the switchblade was still in play, but he couldn’t maneuver it with my grip. I twisted his arm round into a submission worthy of my wrestling days back in school.
“Drop it,” I growled.
He chose to spit into my face…
So I broke his arm.
He screamed, finally relinquishing the blade to the wet concrete as he fell to his knees, I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck.
“Wrong time for this shit,” I told him. “I just came home with a girl who makes me crazy and now I have to leave her for a few days. Unlucky for you, I was already pissed off. I ever catch you on the streets again, I’ll break a whole lot more than that arm…”
I let go of him, and he curled up against the slick ground. The junkie probably wasn’t even listening to me through the sobbing and the pain.
I pitied him, almost.
Not enough to feel bad for him.
But enough to whip out my phone and call the police. I waited a couple of minutes as a cruiser pulled up, the officers dragging him off the pavement and throwing him into the back seat. I recounted what had happened as quickly as I could. With this minor detail to my night over, I bid the officer goodbye and nonchalantly lifted my suitcase back up from the ground. I had a flight to catch.
As I continued walking up to the airport, I wondered why I even bothered. A month ago, I would have left him there on the street to rot away, broken arm and all. Wouldn’t be the first time… My past was full of dark alleys and fights I had no business winning.
He had dared to challenge me.
Dared to try and overwhelm me.
And he had paid the price.
As I walked through the revolving door into the international airport, I realized that I had been changing. It had been so subtle, but I felt… different. I felt like I was becoming something more, maybe, as weird as that sounded.
I felt like a better man.
All because of that girl.
All because of Angel.
Chapter 24
Angel
I woke up the following morning, temporarily disoriented. At first, I didn’t recognize the ceiling above me – I knew it was going to take a few days at least for me to get used
to that.
But then there was Trent’s absence. It took a moment, it finally came back to me.
The film cameo.
He had to do some promotion with the rest of the band, and that meant taking a few days away to film their scenes and do some video commentary for the blu-ray extras.
So, I lay around in bed for a while, enjoying the feeling of his sheets and the freedom of just being here.
It didn’t matter that my past was gone.
It didn’t matter that I didn’t have a job.
It didn’t matter that I had no money.
For this moment – this beautiful, shining moment – I was alone in the expensive house of a rising rockstar, the same very rockstar who fucked me whenever I wanted it.
And it felt good.
I clamored out of bed and threw on one of his shirts and a pair of my panties. Satisfied, I wandered downstairs to rummage up some breakfast.
My eyes fell on a clock.
Half past noon.
I must have slept GREAT.
I was halfway through a delicious, crisp ham sandwich when I heard the knock at the door.
My heart seized up.
Don’t answer it.
I hesitated briefly.
Just when I thought it was gone…
KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK.
There was a muffled voice from the other side, and I thought I distinctly heard my name. But the voice was familiar somehow, and curiosity got the best of me…
I came over to the door, peering through the peephole. There, pacing angrily on the other side, was his band manager.
“It’s an emergency!” He shouted.
Without thinking, I unlocked the door and popped it open. It didn’t even occur to me that I wasn’t wearing any shorts…not until Steven’s face fell onto mine, and his eyes briefly trailed downwards.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him.
“Ah, so you are here…I figured you probably were,” he smiled.
I suddenly didn’t like this.
“Trent’s not home,” I told him, starting to close the door.
His palm flew out and caught it, and his devious smile only widened. It sent a careening strike of fear down my spine.
“You and I need to talk,” he told me. “About the other day. About the mess you’ve made.”
“No, I don’t think that we do.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I knew I wouldn’t like it. Instead, I tried to close the door again, but he was surprisingly strong for such a thin frame.
With his other hand holding the door ajar, Steven pointed his bony finger into my chest, glowering down at me.
“You’re already fucking things up for Trent. How long did you seriously think that you could fuck around here?”
I was flabbergasted.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re a goddamn liability, just like I said you were gonna be! Nobody ever fucking listens to me, do they? I had you pinned from the start, but nooo, Steven’s just the asshole manager…”
My curiosity finally erupted.
I knew it was a mistake…but I had to.
“What on Earth are you talking about?”
He looked legitimately surprised.
“You… wait, you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
Steven’s face curled into surprised menace.
“Ohhhh…you’re in for a world of fun.”
He whipped out his smartphone and began fiddling with it for a minute. By the time he’d pulled up a webpage for me, I was thoroughly confused.
But that confusion quickly turned to horror.
It was a highly trafficked celebrity news and gossip site called “Web News Now”, or WNN for short. Right there at the top was the latest article:
RARE: Trent Masters spotted harassing employees, treating mystery woman. Sugar baby, or sexy new fling? Interview inside!
“Go on,” he whispered wickedly. “Read it.”
Swallowing my hesitance, I opened the article. Inside were the cell phone pictures we had seen before – the ones that the attendant had deleted off of her phone – as well as a few others after we had left her company.
“I don’t… but how?” I asked. “We made her delete these! We watched her do it in front of us!”
“You’re that naïve?” Steven snarled. “By the time you two spotted her, she could have already emailed them to herself or texted them to friends or let them upload to the fucking cloud. There’s all sorts of ways to keep them. That would be bad enough, but Trent got the girl fired?”
My spirits sank as I continued reading.
Sure enough, there were a few paragraphs of speculation – about Trent in public with me, buying me clothes, and then about my relationship to him…
But after that, there was the interview.
Turned out, that girl – who went by the shortened “Chel” for the interview – had taken offense to Trent snapping at her. She’d leaked the photos intentionally, by the sounds of it, and during the small interview she went on the absolute warpath.
WNN: Meeting Trent must have been fun, right? What was he like in person?
CHEL: Complete paranoid jackass.
WNN: Oh? Care to go on?
CHEL: He was cool at first, but the longer I was talking to him, the weirder he sounded. Like he was a loose cannon or something. Then, he lost his shit at me for absolutely no reason at all like a total f*cking douchebag.
WNN: And that’s why you reached out to us? With the photos and the interview?
CHEL: I just think that the world deserves to know how much of a creep and an asshole Trent Masters really is.
WNN: You didn’t provoke him?
CHEL: He was buying clothes for this vapid bitch who clearly didn’t know what she was doing. I worked at the store, so I thought I’d do my actual job and, you know, help?
WNN: And that’s when he lost his temper?
CHEL: Yeah! He threatened me, and I decided to peace out away from that. But when she came out in our clothes again, we have to keep an eye on the clients, right? So I dutifully hovered out of the way.
WNN: And when he saw you, he was angry.
CHEL: Oh, he lost his shit. They both did. And that’s when he made a scene to my manager. I thought that might be the end of it, but no, the jackass made some phone call and got me f*cking fired.
WNN: Just for doing your job.
CHEL: I used to think he was totally cool.
WNN: Don’t meet your heroes, as they say.
CHEL: Yeah. He even said that to me before he pulled my livelihood out from under me. I’m a college student, putting myself through school, and some rockstar high school dropout decides he’s going to screw my life up? Not cool, dude.
WNN: Not cool indeed.
CHEL: And the girl didn’t try to stop him or come to my aid at all. She just watched him tear my life up. She’s probably f*cking him. I wouldn’t be surprised if they wanted to get rid of me to have a quickie in the dressing room.
WNN: Tell us about this mystery woman.
CHEL: Woman? Nah, dude, this groupie chick is way out of her fucking league with a guy like him. Didn’t see much of her. She had obvious lovey dovey eyes for him. I mean, what girl who likes a bad boy wouldn’t?
WNN: You think she’s a groupie?
CHEL: Or a prostitute. She certainly dressed like the kind of hooker a rockstar would go for.
WNN: Think that’s his girlfriend?
CHEL: No way. Trent Masters doesn’t date. And even if he did…after he flew off the handle at me and ripped out my only way to make a paycheck, I pity ANYONE who winds up stuck with that low-life, grade-A son of a bitch.
WNN: Thanks for your time, Chel!
CHEL: Thanks.
I looked up from the phone with horror and regret plastered across my face.