by CD Reiss
“Right here!” came a voice in the front.
I saw his bald head shining and waved. “Take your strobe down. It’s not that cloudy.”
Laughter.
“Laine!” shouted a voice I recognized as Bart’s. “What’s happening with Michael? Did he buy kiddie porn?”
“Technically?”
“Come on!” Renaldo said, adjusting his dials. “What else is there?”
“He was protecting the person in the pictures, guys. You know him. You’ve worked with him. He’s not a pedophile.”
Another voice piped in before I even finished. Kyle? Lennart? “You the moral support?”
What was it about being in front of those cameras that made me feel peeled open? I couldn’t tell whether it was that I knew the men behind them or the universal desire to be seen and loved, but I wanted to answer what was asked so that it could be known finally. I felt the power to protect myself and him in just a few words. I could finish all of this nonsense.
“Yeah, Laine? Why are you here?”
“Because I’m the girl in the pictures.”
I didn’t have much else to offer. A bunch of explanations went through my head. In the split second where I decided to reveal more, I felt a hand on my arm. I looked over. A man in his fifties, in a suit, with a perfectly proportioned smile.
He turned to the cameras. “All right, guys. You got your pictures. You’ll know what you need to, when you need to.”
“Thanks, Ken!” Renaldo shouted as everyone put their rigs away.
I was led back into the building by Ken, who didn’t leave me much of a choice. It wasn’t until I was under the cold, hard fluorescents and Ken was in front of me that I lost the sense of control and ownership I’d clung to.
“What was that?” he asked.
Behind him, clusters of men and women in uniform passed by, making him seem as much a part of the system as the cops themselves.
“That was me. Why?”
“People like you keep people like me in a new Ferrari every year.”
I crossed my arms, suddenly cold. “What’s the problem?”
“Now that you told the world there are pornographic pictures of you? What could be the problem?”
“Michael got them.”
“They were digitized. That’s how they got onto your phone. No?”
They’d been crappy photos of photos, but yes. They’d been on my phone, which meant easily distributed. And found. I’d never trusted Jake, so it shouldn’t even be a question that he’d upload the pictures if he could turn a dime off them.
I felt small, weak, and unprotected. I closed my eyes as if no one could see me if I couldn’t see them.
“What should I do?” I whispered into the darkness.
“My job is to protect my client. But a bit of personal advice? If I were you, I’d go home and change out of last night’s dress. And don’t look at the internet.”
Chapter 34
Laine
Irving pulled up in front if my building.
“Think of it this way,” Tom said from the backseat, “everyone who gets the pictures was looking at an underage girl. They’re going to catch a lot of real sickos.”
I nodded and opened the door. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Thanks, guys. It meant a lot to me that you came.”
“We should come up,” Irving said.
“No, I just want to go to bed. Would you call me later?”
“Sure.” He hugged me from the driver’s side.
Tom got out to do the same. “Call. I mean it.” His hair flopped in the wind.
A shutter went off behind me. I cringed.
“Lonnie!” Tom yelled. “You asshole!”
He brandished his middle finger and charged the pap, our friend and colleague, and Lonnie backed up. But Johnny, Red, Allie, and others I couldn’t identify also scattered.
I went up the steps, Dave following on bent knees with a clickclickclick. I kept my head down and walked into my building. My head stayed down in the lobby, in the elevator, in the hall, and as I opened my door. I dropped my keys on the floor with a clatter. I locked the door behind me, stepped out of my shoes as I walked, peeled off my stockings across the room, and tried to unzip my dress but couldn’t without stopping. So I kept walking to my bed. I pulled back the covers.
I hadn’t hid under the covers in years. I hadn’t hidden behind or under anything since I’d left my final foster home to tool around with the motorcycle crew out of their little dump in Whittier. When Mister Yi, the dad with the sweater factory, hadn’t liked the way I linked a seam, I’d hidden. When the OCD mom in Studio City had yelled at me for leaving milk on the table or putting toilet paper in the toilet instead of the trash, I’d hidden. And in Westlake, where Tom and I were ignored, then moved, then moved again, I just hid when I had to and lashed out the rest of the time.
I’d stopped hiding so definitively at one point that I forgot I’d ever done it, until I thought about the pictures and people finding them and men looking at me like that. As I stood over my bed, ready to hide, I stopped myself. I wasn’t hiding.
As safe as I felt under the covers was as safe as I felt with Michael. He was my under the covers. He was my Los Angeles. Let them all look at me. He was mine.
Chapter 35
Michael
I walked out of the precinct with an unblemished record, thanks to my legal team and Laine explaining what had happened to the LAPD. I walked past the paparazzi as they shouted. I fingered the phone I hadn’t seen in hours.
“Hey, Michael! Have you seen Laine’s pictures?”
I froze. Ken yanked my arm, and my lawyer nudged me so subtly no one would have even noticed in the photos. A black car waited with an open door. Gali nodded at me when I got in.
“She’s about to be more famous than you,” Ken started before he’d even sat all the way. “They’re finding the pictures faster than we can send out DMCA notices.”
“How do they know it’s her?”
He poked at his phone then pocketed it again. “She told them.”
“No. No, she didn’t.” I was filling space. Obviously she had.
He took the phone from me. “It’s all over YouTube.”
He handed back my phone, with Laine on it under a white triangle. She stood against the backdrop of the concrete police station steps, her hands pressed together in front of her. I pressed the triangle.
—Hi, Miss Cartwright
She shields her eyes with her forearm.
She corrects their lighting.
Laughter.
—What’s happening with Michael? Did he buy kiddie porn?
—Technically?
She stalls, but it’s obvious she’s looking forward to telling them something. The cameras are eating her alive. She looks stunning, larger than life. Like a rare, escaped bird perched proudly over the city. Star quality. She had it.
—He was protecting the person in the pictures, guys. You know him. You’ve worked with him. He’s not a pedophile.
She loves her big reveal. It’s all over her face. She loves telling them I’m innocent. The camera sees all of it.
—You the moral support?
—Yeah, Laine? Why are you here?
—Because I’m the girl in the pictures.
And just like that, it ended on her complete lack of fear in the truth, and the triangle reappeared over her.
“She didn’t know they were out,” Ken said. “That Jake is a real piece of work. Stupid and smart at the same time. The prosecutor is making jail time his life’s mission.”
“How did you let that happen?”
“Let it happen? She’s a free agent, Mike. You knew this.”
I leaned back in the seat. “I’m starting to want to do things her way. I’m getting bogged down in the rules.”
“You’re already in breach of contract with Big Girls. A party’s not a party for you. It’s an obligation. And the big stuff? Conduct unbecoming. You’re turnin
g into a liability on Bullets in the middle of a schedule killer.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. You’re a public relations nightmare right now. That’s not what the studios bank on.”
I had no answer, because he was right. I was the good guy. I didn’t get taken in for buying kiddie porn, and I didn’t fail to do one interview, one junket stop, or one party. That was a big part of the reason I was paid so well and hired so easily. No one had to worry about me. No one had to spend money covering my tracks. No one had to spin my Saturday nights into Sunday’s public apology.
All of that was about to change.
Would I become like my father? A dead weight for a decade or more because I couldn’t find work? He had all the money he needed, but he wasn’t working, and I was about to have the same problem.
I dialed her number. I needed to hear her voice. I needed to tell her to wait for me, to not do anything or speak to anyone until I came to her. She didn’t answer the phone, and I found I was glad. I had to think, and I couldn’t. I hung up. I didn’t want to leave a message in front of Ken and my lawyer, who only pretended he wasn’t paying attention.
“I need her pictures to go away,” I told Ken.
“Keep associating with her, and they’ll keep looking for her pictures. They’ll never die.”
“You’re not getting it. That’s not an option.”
“Mike, you hired me for a reason. This kind of thing? It’s chaos, and chaos happens to everyone at some point,” he said. “I manage chaos. I calm it down, or I turn it to my client’s advantage. That’s my job. That’s why you need me. And believe me, I don’t need your money. Fire me the way you fired Gene, and as a businessman, I won’t care. I have plenty to do. But you’ve been with me since you were eighteen, and I care about what happens to you. The stakes are high now, and if you go off the deep end now, if you spiral into a pit, and I can’t stop you, I’ll feel…” He motioned with his hand, spinning it at the wrist.
“Guilty?” I offered.
“Close enough.”
“And in your professional opinion, I should no longer see Laine?”
“If you want to protect the both of you.”
“And if I continue to see her anyway?” I asked.
“There might be more chaos than I can manage and more than either of you can handle. That’s my professional opinion. You can have any girl you want. Just pick another one. A pretty one who won’t sabotage your career.”
I respected Ken. He knew his job, and he wasn’t the biggest jerk I’d met over the course of my career, but what he was suggesting simply wouldn’t work for me. I couldn’t imagine thanking Laine for a nice time and walking away. I couldn’t imagine never seeing her again, never being surprised by her, never witnessing her delight and her darkness, her impulsiveness and her cynical wisdom.
My phone buzzed. I was sick of it. I was about to shut it off, but it was my mother, who was probably worried sick that she’d raised a pedophile. “Mom? Hey, I—”
“Gareth is at Sequoia Hospital. His liver. He didn’t even take a damned drink, but it’s failing.”
I forgot about everything but getting to the hospital on time.
Chapter 36
Laine
That blanket over me was cinnamon-scented and invisible. I padded around on bare feet, in my robe. I felt better, slightly untouchable, and inside a sphere of safety.
I’d gotten a text from Michael.
—Wait for me—
I could do that. As much as I wanted to run out and shoot frame on top of frame, that was the wrong thing to do. I needed to lie low for his sake and wait until it could be sorted out. I didn’t look at the internet. I exercised a level of self-control so rigid I pulled the cable out of the wall. If I saw myself on the feeds, I knew I would be paralyzed.
I felt good about that. Relaxed, even. I knew what to do.
I pulled up the photos I’d taken of him in the upstairs loft. He was so perfect on my screen in all his thirty-inch glory. I’d forgotten what he had been explaining at that moment, but he looked calm, yet on edge, as if anything could happen. I smiled, a warm feeling radiating from my chest to my fingers and toes. I edited the digitals on autopilot, wiping away imperfections with my stylus, little marks and flecks, the little chapped spot on his lower lip, gone gone gone.
Those lips, on my body, moving between my legs and on my mouth, the scent of my arousal on them. My bones liquefied as I thought about it, as if the scaffolding that held me up had gone viscous and warm. When he looked through the screen, I realized he wasn’t looking at the camera. He wasn’t looking at an audience. He wasn’t acting or faking. He was looking at me, and that elation in his eye was mine.
I undid all my changes and went back to the raw image. Those blemishes weren’t imperfections. They were perfection itself. They were part of my experience of him, which was three-dimensional, alive, dynamic, and flawed.
I layered the image on itself and blended it so the defects weren’t covered but more apparent. I touched up the image until I could practically smell him, and his skin was as textured as it seemed when his face was an inch from mine.
It was dark when I finished, and I sat back and looked at my work. Through the reality of who he was, one thing was abundantly clear.
He wasn’t normal.
Even with every imperfection uncovered, he was perfect. He jumped out of the frame from the way his mouth was set against his jaw, to the expression in his eyes, to the tilt of his chin. Not everyone had that. Not even every actor could make his face work as a whole. I remembered the moment I took the pictures. He’d been unprepared, yet his face and body worked in such a way as to make me feel as if he sat in the room with me.
Michael Greydon was a star, a regular guy inside a body that would shoot across the sky.
I looked out the window at the moon rising over downtown, and I saw a couple of paps standing outside the Whole Foods. Likely, they were either waiting for me to leave or for Michael to arrive.
This was his life. This was a problem he faced. I’d face it for him. I’d tolerate anything to be with him, but the paps outside Whole Foods would be our smallest problem. I had a ten-ton past that was already coming between us. He was a star, and I was dragging him down. He was meant for a perfect life, and I would always be the girl in those pictures. If we got married tomorrow and had babies, I’d always have an asterisk by my name.
—Are you all right?—
It was Phoebe. I called her. She picked up on the first ring from someplace loud and crowded.
“I have to be honest,” I said, sitting in my chair by the window, “this sucks.”
“Oh, honey—” The sound cut off as if she’d wheeled herself into a closet.
“Are you sure you still want me to take pictures of your wedding?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” she asked.
“All your clients will know me as kiddie porn girl.”
“You stop it, do you understand? You stop that right now. You’re a good person, and talented, and a bunch of things that I’ll be happy to brief anyone on. Should I come over and make you a list?”
“No, I’m good,” I said. “I’m just going to go to sleep and wake up and try to feel better.”
“Can you call me tomorrow? I want to really talk this through. I want to hit it from all angles.”
I recoiled. God, no. The last thing I wanted was to look at the situation from all angles. I wanted to close my eyes and make it go away, and Phoebe, with her analyst’s mind under a rainbow glitter shell, wouldn’t allow that.
“Let’s talk tomorrow,” I said.
We hung up, but I knew I wouldn’t call her in the morning. Just the thought of dissecting my reckless actions made me want to run in all directions at once.
Chapter 37
Michael
I never had to go into the main entrance of anything. I flew charter and had staff and a special liaison to manage things like t
he DMV. I only knew what other people did because I had to get in front of a camera and act like other people.
It was sad, really sad, that I’d never been a citizen of the world. I’d never thought I was too good to stand in line at the DMV. I lived the way I did because the one time my father and I had gone through the regular gate for a commercial airliner to Australia, we were mobbed. He’d signed everyone’s boarding pass, and the plane was late. He grumbled afterward, but at the gate, he was a pure gentleman.
I admired a lot about my father, and that incident was one in particular. I hoped I wouldn’t have to reprise it at the hospital, because Ken dropped me off in the parking lot and took off to spin pornography into heroism.
—Wait for me—
I texted Laine as I walked quickly, eyes on the phone. If I avoided eye contact, I could move through public spaces faster. But there were no mobs, no paparazzi. Though I felt eyes and camera phones on me, no one stopped me in the stairwell. Everyone had their own cares and troubles, and by the time I got to the ICU nurse, I felt as if I could walk at a normal pace with my head up.
“Mister Greydon,” she said when I was a few steps away. She grabbed her clipboard and walked me down the hall before I could even stop.
Brooke sat in a small waiting area outside a bank of private rooms. I’d never seen my mother look so worried.
“What are you doing?” she said. “No, don’t answer. I’ll tell you what you’re doing. You’re killing your father.” Brooke was shaking. Her face couldn’t express much past the collagen injections, but the trembling in her arms told me she was upset.
“Just stop and tell me what happened.” I had neither the desire to defend myself against her anxieties, nor did I have the time to explain that I wasn’t a pervert. I was still out of breath from ignoring people while I ran up four flights of stairs.
“It did. It was stress. All this in the news, he just broke down.”
“Don’t look at the internet, Mom. That’s, like, a rule.”
“The calls coming in. They asked if you showed any signs of a sociopath as a child. Did we know you were a molester. And the girl, her pictures are all over the place. They crop them, but you know where everything is. Gareth, he just… running around the house yelling and cursing. For someone who did this his whole life… he didn’t know what to do, and then he just… I thought he was acting.” Her eyes filled up, red-rimmed and shiny, until she blinked. When her tears fell, not a speck of mascara or liner moved. “He said he had a pain and was acting confused. And see, I said it. Right there. Acting.”