I paused. “No. I-- I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. This situation had gotten wildly out of control. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you...”
“What other secrets have you kept from me?” Ariel asked. “What else don’t I know?”
“Nothing!”
“How can I ever trust you?” I could see panic on Ariel’s features. She was terrified and lashing out because I had snapped at her. In my moment of frustration, I’d pushed her too far.
I paused. “What?”
She hissed in her breath. “You don’t want me, do you? I was only ever convenient. It just took me a really, really, really long time to figure it out. I think you should leave.”
“Wait,” I said, realizing that I’d let this whole situation get out of control. Ariel was scared. She was pushing me away out of fear. “Ariel, hold on—”
She shook her head at me. Her platinum blonde hair shook back and forth urgently, but her eyes just looked tired. “I think you should go,” she told me. “My life is about to hit rock bottom. And I’m so sick of all the lies. Ursula’s lies. Meg’s lies. Mine. Yours. I just can’t do this anymore…”
“I—”
“Please go,” she snapped. She stood up, crossed the room, opened the door, and pointed at the hallway that would lead me to the alleyway behind Sebastian’s. The hallway that led away from her, maybe forever. Her tears were dry now, and the resolution on her face made my heart twist. “I think you should leave.”
44
Ariel
For a few minutes after Derek left, I felt better. A righteous anger fueled me, but it was like a sugar high—effervescent and temporary. Eventually I crashed from it. The emptiness that I felt when the anger burned off pulled me down, down, down. I couldn’t escape the empty, aching feeling that I’d just made a terrible mistake.
“You did the right thing,” my dad told me when I eventually called him up and spilled my guts to him. “I know maybe it doesn’t feel like it right now, but you did the right thing.”
I wasn’t crying anymore. The tears had dried up, another casualty of the emptiness that was gobbling up everything in its path. “I don’t know, dad.”
“This is what I wanted to protect you from,” he said gently. I knew it was true, but it still hurt to get the ‘I told you so’ message from him. “But it’s probably better that you and Derek go your separate ways. At least for a while.”
“Yeah…
But even if my dad had been right all along, there was nothing else I could have done. I had to make the choices I made. I didn’t know what would happen now, but it would probably be horrible.
“You were wrong that he was in love with Ursula,” I said, feeling like that little piece of the story at least vindicated me a tiny bit. “At least I know his feelings for me were real. That whole thing with Ursula was just for show, exactly like I told you.”
My dad was quiet for a moment. “Does that make you feel better?”
“Yes!” I felt like this was a really important point. “Yes, this all proves that he wasn’t ever cheating on her with me. He was never with her. She was using him, and it makes a lot more sense now how obsessed she was with keeping him. Their relationship was totally fake, just like he said. That does make me feel better. But not as much as I thought it would.” My momentary triumph melted away as quickly as it had come. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”
He chose not to answer that question, probably content that I already knew his reply.
“When this story drops, you’re going to want to be really far away from LA,” my dad told me. I could hear the tight tone in his voice, and I swallowed hard against the worry that I heard behind it. He was genuinely scared for me. “You should come home tonight. There are going to be people that want to talk to you. Lots of them. “
I shook my head at the phone. “I don’t want to come back to Sacramento. I don’t want to be a lawyer.”
Even now, after everything, I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Maybe I couldn’t be a singer or a dancer, but that didn’t mean that lawyer was the only other possible career path for me. Maybe I could be a dance teacher? It sounded horrible, but it was still better than being a lawyer.
“You don’t have to be a lawyer, Ariel.” My dad sounded tired. “I’m starting to see that you aren’t ever going to want to be a lawyer.”
“Really?”
I don’t think I could remember a single time in my adult life when my dad had wavered on his commitment to my career path. He’d been holding the line for me to follow in his footsteps since I was in high school.
“Really,” he said. “I still think you’d be a fantastic lawyer, don’t get me wrong. If it were up to me, you’d be off to Stanford as soon as humanly possible. But it isn’t up to me. It’s up to you. But you do need to come home. Because all hell is about to break loose.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “Ariel, you know I’m right. Derek has security and high walls and lawyers and all kinds of things to protect him from the blowback of this scandal. This will be tough for him, probably, but he’s got resources. You don’t. You’re going to be a sitting duck.”
“I’ll just order delivery until it blows over.”
“How much money do you have in your bank account right now?” my dad asked. “I looked. It’s about five hundred dollars. You’ve already burned through everything you made on the production of ‘She Done Him Wrong’.”
“You checked my bank account?!” I gasped. “How?”
“I helped you set up that savings account when you were in high school,” he reminded me. “I still have access.”
“You shouldn’t have spied on me that way.”
“I didn’t spy. I put five hundred dollars in there,” he said. “I didn’t want your credit to get messed up from overdraft fees. You can be mad at me for giving you money if you want to, but it seems a bit petty.”
I paused. "Thank you." My dad was a pain in the ass. He really was. He was overbearing, difficult, and he thought he was always right, but he loved me. “Really, thank you.”
“Will you come home?” he asked.
Coupled with the cash I had on hand from my tips at Sebastian’s, I had just enough money to wrap everything up here and move back to Sacramento.
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling defeated. I’d come so close. Well, not that close really, but I’d tried hard. I’d tried my best. All I’d ever wanted was to sing and dance professionally. It had been my dream since I was a little girl. It was sad to think that even my best effort wasn’t enough.
“I’d really like to see you, Ariel. I’ve been so worried about you these past few weeks.”
I sighed. “Give me a couple of days.”
“Can you be home before the story drops, please?” my dad begged. “If you won’t do it for yourself, at least do it for Sebastian.”
“Sebastian?”
“The press are going to come down on him hard. They’ll be swarming around, looking for you.”
“I hadn’t even thought of that.”
I couldn’t let Sebastian suffer for my bad decisions. It just wasn’t fair.
“That’s understandable,” my dad said. “I know you’ve had a lot on your mind. For what it’s worth, I’m very proud of you?”
I laughed. “You are?”
“Yes,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “You made a very brave choice. I’m proud that I raised a daughter who was willing to fight for what she wanted.”
“If I did the right thing, why do I feel so bad?”
“Because this whole mess cost you Derek. I have to say, I’m a bit surprised,” he admitted. “I wasn’t sure his feelings for you were real. I guess they were. But sometimes that’s not enough. You can’t rely on him now. The man has a career to protect. He’s better off distancing himself from you and I’m sure that’s exactly what he’s doing. You’ve learned some really hard lessons about Hollywood in the last couple of weeks, haven’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“Oh, Ariel, I’m so sorry. I never wanted this to happen. But come home. I’ll be able to help keep the vultures away until the scandal dies down. Then, maybe, after a while, you and Derek will be able to patch things up.”
I blinked. “I’m not sure I even want that.”
“You don't?"
I frowned. “I don’t know what I want. I guess what I really wanted was for Derek to fight for me. To stop all the lies. But I guess you’re right. There’s too much at stake for him. I was a liability from the beginning. And we both made mistakes.”
“This is how people learn,” my dad said. “They make mistakes. It’s okay. It’s normal to get your heart broken at this age. Sure, you’re going to have your relationship mistakes be a little more public than the average person, but you learned.”
He was trying hard to reassure me, but being told that I’d learned a lesson that would benefit me down the line felt like very cold comfort.
“I think I want to just go to bed now, dad.”
Maybe things would make more sense in the morning. I had to attend a press event with the entire cast and crew tomorrow. Seeing the movie production come to an ‘official’ end would at least help me to put a period at the end of this sentence. I needed that closure. And after that, I guessed I’d just go home. Because my dad was right, I didn’t want to be around when the shit hit the fan.
45
Derek
It was going on two in the morning, and I was going on an unknown number of very strong drinks when I got a call from Meg. It came in from an unknown number, but somehow, I knew it was her. My body wanted sleep and my brain wanted oblivion, but my irrepressible curiosity still wanted answers.
“I figured it out,” she announced the moment I answered. She sounded excited, but I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm to match. I probably never would again. I’d just lost Ariel. Maybe forever.
“Hello Meg,” I replied drunkenly. “Do you usually call people at this hour?”
“Is it late? I’ve been busy. I didn’t notice.”
I could never tell when Meg was being sarcastic or if she was just always being sarcastic.
“No wonder you don’t have many friends,” I told her. “How’d you get this number anyway?”
“Don’t worry about that,” she replied quickly, probably to prevent me from asking additional questions. “Worry about the fact that Ursula is working for Dante Malcolm.”
The name rang a bell, but I was drunk. “Who?”
“Dante Malcolm,” she hissed. She said it almost like she was afraid to say the name aloud.
“Who is that again?”
Meg made an unintelligible, irritated noise. “Dante Malcolm? Come on, Prince. You have to know who that is. The Australian media and tabloid baron?”
A picture slowly came into focus. “The weird, ancient, heavy ginger guy with the thick glasses and all the newspapers?”
“Yeah. Him. All the newspapers, several movie studios, TV channels, cable news… that guy.” Meg was obviously annoyed that I was slow on the uptake this evening. Morning. Whatever.
I tried to focus on the new information. “He doesn’t like my dad,” I remembered vaguely. Something about a stock deal back in the nineties? It was fuzzy in my memory. My dad has so many people who don’t like him.
“He doesn’t like you,” Meg corrected. “He doesn’t like your whole family. I don’t know if he lost a billionaire pissing match with your dad back in the day or what, but if you didn’t realize, he’s kind of a media supervillain. The word is that he likes to keep most of Hollywood on a short leash. He deals in gossip and secrets. He’s sort of like me in that way, but you know, better at it and enjoying it. And powerful. Imagine a big, fat spider in the middle of a big, Hollywood web, pulling the strings in the background and keeping the rich and influential at his beck and call.”
“I’m still not following why any of this matters. I mean it sounds bad, but…”
Meg cut me off. “That’s probably because you’re drunk.”
“That’s fair,” I admitted, gulping down some water and trying to sober up by force of will. “But explain it to me anyway.”
The world came back into focus a little at a time. It was painful.
She sighed in exasperation. “Fine. I’ll break it down in little words for you. Dante Malcolm, nasty gossip-dealing billionaire extraordinaire, is unsatisfied with his level of control when it comes to the Prince family. You’re too clean, apparently? He doesn’t have anything to blackmail you or your family with, and he views you as a threat to his little empire of secrets and lies. So, he decided to add you to his, um, collection.”
“Through Ursula.”
“Correct!” Meg told me. “Ursula was working with Malcolm because, well, he can make her career with a wave of his creepy fingers. She’s got a powerful incentive to cooperate. The situation with me was actually engineered at his direction.”
“Why?”
“To bring you down or add you to his asset list,” Meg explained. “Either one was fine. He initially wanted the first option; hence all the time Ursula was spending with you. She was supposed to be finding out your deep, dark secrets for him. She obviously failed at that. So, he’s going to settle for ruining your life. Ruining Ariel’s life is just a bonus, I guess.”
“Disgusting.”
“I agree,” she said. “But still impressive. It was quite the setup. I’m actually a bit flattered that he knows who I am and viewed me as a potential asset too…”
“I thought you said it was disgusting. And what happened to getting out of the gossip world?” I asked her.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m getting out,” Meg said firmly. “I’m getting very out. Permanently out. Out in orbit. After I drop this little bombshell, I’ll need to be far away from the blast zone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course, I’m sure,” she snapped. “I found all this out by hacking Ursula’s phone. Incidentally, it’s also how I figured out your number, if you were wondering.”
“That’s illegal.”
“Oh, very. That’s bad and all, but I’ve got them both on a recording talking about their evil plan, which is twice as illegal. They’re toast. My debt will be paid in full because this is international news, even if it was obtained by unconventional methods. Once I leak my recordings, they’ll both be humiliated.”
I sighed. “But it’ll be too late,” I told her. “The pictures are still scheduled for release.”
“Probably,” Meg told me. “But you might still be able to stop it. Ursula hasn’t delivered the pictures to Malcolm yet. She was clever, actually. She kept only hard copies, and they have to be hand delivered. She’s supposed to drop them off to Malcolm’s guy at the studio tomorrow in exchange for her payment, which is substantial.”
My heart thumped against my chest. “Malcolm has a guy at the studio?”
“Malcolm has a guy everywhere.”
“Okay, so I just need to stop her from giving him the photos. That might be possible… maybe. Who’s the contact?”
“Here’s the best part. You know him.” Meg replied. “Clint.”
“Meg,” I told her. “I know you want to release this and be free of whoever’s pulling your strings, but please, listen to me. I have an idea…”
46
Derek
The next morning dawned with what felt like the world’s biggest hangover. I felt achy, sick, and feverish. Worry, confusion, disappointment, and regret all had a limb and they were about to pull me into pieces. It was all I could do to brush myself off and drag my sorry, regretful self to the very important press appearance that had been scheduled for weeks—the official LA launch of the tour.
The event was being held at a local theater—the stage kind, not the movie kind. It was coincidentally the same theater I’d performed at for a recent production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, so I was very familiar with the place. But nothing felt familiar abou
t the experience that was coming.
This was a kind of soft release of the music from the film and start of our tour. Ursula and I would be dancing and singing to the recording of two numbers from ‘She Done Him Wrong,’ one of which was the most romantic from the film. The other included the chorus girls, and since the production was here in LA, they were all attending as well and would be performing live. They wouldn’t be joining us on the tour, of course, but since we had literally just wrapped the production, everyone thought it would be fun to start us off with a bang and have them back us.
Everyone but me, that is. I hated every aspect and every detail of this tour. One of the only things that had me here at all, however, was the opportunity to talk to Ariel. Consequently, she wasn’t there when I arrived. But Ursula was.
“There he is!” she cried, coming over to kiss me on the cheek when I passed by her dressing room looking for Ariel. “Are you excited for our big debut in front of an audience?”
I shrugged and put on a happy face. “Not really. Hey, I’m glad I ran into you. I just wanted you to know that Meg Butler has given us advance notice that you’re going to release the story about Ariel and me and have been in Dante Malcolm’s pocket all this time.”
Ursula paled. “What?”
“You heard me.”
She swallowed hard. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh really? Because I received some fascinating information to the contrary. And what’s more, I’ve got proof.”
Her eyes were wild. For whatever reason, seeing Ursula’s panic made me feel worse. I thought I might feel some, I don’t know, schadenfreude, but I didn’t. I felt crappy. Even though Ursula might feel even crappier, it didn’t make me feel better to see her upset.
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