Badd Mojo

by Jasinda Wilder

  I've been trying my damnedest to keep the memories of the past suppressed. I've tried to not think about it, to pretend it's not me who experienced it all. I've tried to keep the pain of it from tainting my relationship with Canaan, but...

  I can't keep pretending.

  I want more.

  I want love.

  I want Canaan to love me, and I want to love him back. I want what Eva and Baxter have, but I'm terrified, because I have deep, dark secret.

  And it's eating away at me.

  It's poisoning my relationship with Canaan, and preventing me from going after what I really want.

  I don't know what to do.

  It's festering inside me, an infected wound in my soul.

  But I can't keep pretending I don't want more. I can't keep doing this stupid dance with Canaan, acting like what we have is purely physical when we both know it's not. He wants more too, but he's just as scared as me. Maybe he has his own secret. I don't know. I just know...

  I have to tell him.

  I feel my stomach welling up, my throat closing, hot acid burning bitter in my mouth. Tears sting my eyes.

  This is why I don't think about this, why I don't go here, emotionally--it makes me physically ill.

  "I'm sorry," I blurted out. "I'm sorry. I--I have to go. I--I need to get out of here. I need--I need air." I fled, stumbling out of the kitchen toward the stairs.

  I felt everyone looking at me, surprised, confused. I felt the questions no one asked.

  I left, and I found myself on the docks, sailboats on my left, the masts bobbing in the wet cold wind that just kicked up. The sky is gray and heavy overhead, the air chilly, with a wet cold wind blowing. I don't know how long I walked along the docks, but I knew Cane was behind me. I felt him.

  Eventually, I stumbled to a stop. My feet ached, burned, throbbed--I had run out barefoot.

  "Aerie, babe, what the fuck?" Canaan was out of breath when he caught up with me.

  I collapsed forward onto the dock, sobbing, shaking my head, unable to form words.

  "Aerie?" He was beside me, his arm over me. "Talk to me, babe. You're scaring me."

  I sat up, turning my tear-stained face to Canaan's. "There's something I need to tell you."

  5

  Canaan

  * * *

  This was scaring the fuck out of me. Aerie wasn't the type of girl to freak out like this. Tate, sure--Tate was prone to unexpected outbursts, but they were like tropical thunderstorms, gone as fast as they came. Aerie? She just didn't explode. She was measured, fairly even-keeled. If her feelings got hurt, she got angry, if she was sad, she cried--she emoted normally, whereas Tate tended to bury those kinds of things until everything just popped suddenly. Aerie didn't keep things in.

  So this was crazy.

  I couldn't make sense of what just happened. I didn't know what to do, except sit on the dock beside her. My initial reaction, when she said she had to tell me something, was raw panic: she was pregnant. What else could cause such a freak-out in someone as even-tempered as Aerie? But then I looked closer, at her eyes, at her face...I saw pain. Agony.

  "Aerie...god, what's going on?"

  She shook her head. "I...I can't. I can't. I can't." She was rocking back and forth, sitting on the damp dock, barefoot; it had begun to drizzle, and her fine blonde hair was dampening and sticking to her face.

  "Honey, you're worrying me. I don't understand what's going on."

  "I have to tell you, but I can't. I can't." She was staring out at the bay, unseeing, a haunted expression on her face.

  "Tell me what?"

  She just shook her head.

  I pulled her to her feet. "Aerie, honey, it's raining. We need to get inside."

  She finally looked at me once more, tears trickling down her cheeks. "Okay."

  I led her back down the road to the studio and we sat down on the couch near the guitar racks. We kept a few throw blankets down here, because this was Alaska and it got chilly sometimes. I unfolded a blanket and wrapped it around Aerie's shoulders. She didn't want to be too close to me--I tried to pull her onto my lap, but she just shook her head and slid over to the middle of the couch, the blanket draped around her, head hanging, sniffling, tears falling steadily.

  I gave her a while, letting her work through it on her own, occasionally touching her back, or stroking her hair.

  Eventually, she sucked in a deep breath, sat back, rubbed her eyes, and then rested her head on the couch, gazing at me sideways. "Okay. I've been trying to talk myself out of this, but I can't. I need to...I need to get this out. To someone. To you."

  "Aerie, whatever it is, it's going to be okay." I took her hand, twined our fingers together. "You can tell me anything."

  Keeping the blanket wrapped around her, she got up, shuffled to the guitar rack, took the ukulele, and returned to the couch, propping her feet up and wrapping the blanket around her so only her hands could be seen gripping the instrument. She plucked a slow, mournful melody.

  "Playing helps me think. It calms me," she said, as if I of all people would need an explanation.

  "Preaching to the choir, babe."

  "I know." She plucked and strummed for another minute or two, staring at the ceiling, obviously deep in thought. Then, slowly, she began to talk. "Just after high school, right when we were really starting to blow up, we were mostly working in the Manhattan area. We hadn't started traveling yet. We didn't have any set plans, but Mom was definitely working us toward modeling and the whole social media thing. I was into it more than Tate. It's easy to see that now, looking back, but then it didn't even occur to me that we could want different things. You know? Of course you do." She hesitated, and then continued. "Tate was boy crazy. She's always been boy crazy. I...I played the scene with her, went on dates here and there, went to parties with her and hung out with guys, but I never took it anywhere." She glanced at me, meaningfully.

  I let out a breath. "Aerie, honey, don't try to spare my feelings by mincing words, okay? I'm a big boy. Just tell it like it is."

  She nodded, and her gaze went back to middle distance, staring into nothingness as she gathered her thoughts, still strumming idly. "So, as I said, I played the game and all that, but I rarely slept with any of the guys I met."

  That's not quite how I remembered things, but as I thought about it I had to admit that most of the stories of their sexual exploits had been about Tate, while Aerie had always hinted at things, but she'd rarely been outright about the details.

  "Okay," I said. "I'm following so far."

  "I did sleep with guys occasionally, but not as often as I allowed you and others to assume." She sucked in a deep breath and let it out, her hand stilling on the strings. "And, like I said, I dated, but never seriously. I just wasn't that interested. No one ever seemed to catch my interest."

  I wanted her to get to the point, but I kept quiet and listened, knowing whatever this was, it was serious, and she needed to get it out in her own way, in her own time.

  She kept going. "Then I met Lex."

  The name rang a bell. "Lex?"

  She nodded, her hand tightening on the neck of the uke. "Lex Landon." She said this as if it was admission.

  "Lex Landon, the lead singer of Ghostmother?"

  "Lex Landon, lead singer of Ghostmother--Lex Landon, who did a run on a Broadway show--Lex Landon who was and still is the lead in Blood Brothers."

  Blood Brothers was a TV show set and filmed in NYC, a fictional show about paramedics, shot with handhelds like a war documentary, that often told true stories from real EMS calls.

  Lex Landon was a true-blue superstar, already famous from a triple-platinum, Grammy-winning rock band, who then became even more famous from a handful of supporting roles in movies wherein he stole the scenes from the more famous leads, and then did a turn in an original Broadway musical that won a Tony, and was now leading a TV show which had racked up four Emmys in as many years. A golden boy with the Midas touch.

  He was
also thirty-something.

  "When...when was this, again?" I asked, feeling a little queasy.

  She didn't answer right away. When she did, it was in a very quiet, very uneasy voice. "I was just barely eighteen, and he was thirty, almost thirty-one."

  "Aerie. Come on."

  She stared hard at me. "I thought you said it was going to be okay, don't mince words, I could tell you anything?"

  I hissed. "Fuck, you're right, I'm sorry. I just feel like he should have known better."

  She laughed, an intensely bitter sound. "I haven't even told you what happened, Cane."

  I nodded, slumping lower on the couch. "Go ahead, babe. I'm listening. No judgments here, I promise."

  "Oh, just wait. You'll judge, and you'll have every right." She let the silence stretch for a while, and then resumed her story. "Tate and I were at a party. Lots of famous people, lots of networking, lots of posing with celebrities and acting like we had the world in the palms of our hands. Which, to be honest, we kind of did. I'd just taken a selfie with Clooney, who's just darling by the way, and stepped out onto the rooftop deck for some air. Lex was out there, smoking a joint by himself. He offered it to me, and I took a hit or two with him, and we got to talking. Innocent enough. But...he was Lex Landon! I mean, I don't get star struck easily, but he was someone I really, really liked and looked up to. I loved Ghostmother, and I thought he was a fantastic actor, and god, he was so fucking gorgeous. So I was a little giddy. It was fun. We talked on the roof for an hour or two, and then we went back to the party and went our separate ways. That was it. But we kept meeting at parties. Like, it was weird. He was at every party I went to for a month straight. Finally, I confronted him about it, and we laughed. I was like, dude, Lex, you're stalking me, you super-creep. It was funny, because he was the famous one and I wasn't.

  "So, finally, he asked if I wanted to meet for coffee. Also innocent enough, and why the hell wouldn't I want to have coffee with Lex Landon? Coffee that day became coffee every week." She looked at me then, a hard, meaningful glance. "I suppose I should point out that absolutely no one knows about this, including Tate. Me and Lex, and that's it, and I seriously doubt Lex has ever told anyone either."

  I frowned. "Not even Tate knows about this?"

  "Not even Tate." She ran a finger along a string on the uke, continuing. "We started hanging out. It was weird, and we both knew it. But we had so much fun together, just talking about everything. It was innocent enough, I thought. Just talk, always in public--that was it. Have a cup of coffee together, talk for an hour or two, and that was it. But it consumed me. He consumed me. I thought about him, fantasized, daydreamed. It was...bad. Teenage infatuation, I know that now, but then...it felt like love. I was in love, I knew it, I knew it down to my bones."

  "I don't know if you can so easily dismiss that kind of intense attraction or whatever as nothing but teenaged infatuation," I said. "I've had that, and it feels very, very real in the moment."

  She sucked in a shuddery breath. "God--thank god you get it."

  "It's so fucking intense, you know? Like, it feels so real, so genuine, so all-encompassing. It's everything. All the more so because it's so new, the first time you've ever felt anything like that."

  She nodded. "So that's what I was feeling. I thought about Lex, all the time. All we ever got was an hour over coffee, usually when he was either on the way to a shoot, or on a break from it. It was easy to keep it from Tate because she'd been taking an art class that I decided to skip out on, so I had that hour free to myself every week. And I just...I never told Tate about it. I was jealous, maybe. Scared she'd steal him from me, or make fun of me? I don't know. Maybe I thought she'd pop the bubble, like...ruin it for me or something. I just didn't want to share it--share him. He was my secret famous friend. See, it was secret for him, too. He never said it, but it was obvious, even then. He was always there first, in a ball cap and big sunglasses, sitting in a back corner of this particular coffee shop we always went to. It was our spot. This went on for...months."

  Another pause, in which she was clearly gathering courage for the next part of the story, which I could sense the shape of, in that tense, waiting silence.

  "We were sitting together having coffee. He had a double espresso with little bit of foam, and I had a vanilla latte. It was just past three in the afternoon. A sunny, beautiful day. I remember it...very vividly. The tension had been building for months, and neither of us talked about it. Then, suddenly, he interrupted me. 'I can't do this anymore,' he'd said, in this gruff, scary voice. 'Do what anymore,' I asked. 'See me,' he said. He couldn't see me anymore, it was too hard. So I freaked out and got up and left.

  "We never saw each other on the street, never walked in or out together, we only ever sat at that hidden little table in the back of the coffee shop, where no one could see us. Well, when I walked out, he chased me. Grabbed me. Spun me around and gave me one of those little envelopes they give you at hotels, with a keycard in it. It was for a local hotel, just a couple blocks away. Little boutique hotel, kind of out of the way. The kind of place he could go and pay them to keep quiet and not ask or answer questions about him. It had the room number on it, in black Sharpie--533." She paused again, strummed a chord, and quieted the strings. "He told me he was going to that room, right then. He'd be there in fifteen minutes. He didn't tell me to meet him there, didn't say anything else, just handed me the keycard and told me he'd be there in fifteen minutes. And then he walked away.

  "I knew exactly what he was doing, leaving it up to me to decide what to do. Well...I went. I knew it was...weird, at the very least. I knew no one would approve, least of all Mom or Tate. I knew if the press got wind of it, it would blow up and be bad for both of us. I knew all this, and I went anyway."

  I didn't know what to say. I didn't even know exactly how I felt about it. So...I just kept quiet, and let her talk.

  After another long silence, she kept going. "I went up to room 533 at this upscale boutique hotel, and as soon as the door closed behind me, he was all over me." Her eyes went to mine. "And don't think I was a victim in it--I wasn't. I wanted it, I wanted him, and I went into that room knowing exactly what would happen. And it did."

  I didn't like this at all.

  I didn't like the bitter knot of acid in my stomach, or the way my heart hammered and twisted. I didn't like the jealousy smashing through me like lightning. I didn't like the anger I felt toward Aerie for doing that, and I didn't like the anger I felt at him...I didn't like anything about this. My teeth ground in my jaw, painfully. I kept still, kept quiet, and kept listening.

  "Like meeting for coffee, I went back to room 533, at that hotel, at the same time almost every single day for several weeks. It was...incredible. I'm sorry, I really am, I hate saying this to you of all people, but it just was. I won't go into details, but...it was just...it was amazing. And he was thirty-one, and I was eighteen.

  "I was in love." She shook her head, blinking hard against the tears that fell again. "I just...I knew, in my heart, all the way down, I knew that I loved him, and that he loved me, and we should stop being secretive about it. He could take me to premieres and the Oscars and I'd be his girlfriend...I had it all planned out."

  The pain on her face, in her voice...sliced me to the bone. It was so palpable, still so fresh, but all the more potent after being stoppered up inside her for so long.

  "God, Aerie."

  She shook her head. "Ohhhh buddy...just you wait. This is where it starts to get really interesting."

  "Shit."

  "Shit is right."

  Aerie was still composed, but just barely, and I knew that once she got to the really "interesting" part, she was going to completely lose it.

  Aerie held off the tears, and kept going. "So. Weeks of this, me and Lex having our secret trysts. I was still going to parties, hanging out with boys, going on dates, all the things I was always doing. I wasn't sleeping with anyone else, and I think even Tate started to get suspicious, b
ut I'd always gone through dry spells where I just wasn't into sleeping with anyone--I've been that way since we lost our virginity at sixteen. So that's how I played it. She'd taken another art class in that same time bracket, and his shooting schedule was always the same, so our meetings were regular. I never even had his phone number, and he never had mine. I just met him in room 533 at two p.m., and we'd sleep together, talk a little, and then he'd get dressed and leave first, and I'd leave second, a few minutes later. We never talked about it, it was just the way things were."

  She was blinking a lot, and her voice was tight, and I could tell we were coming to the heart of the matter; I touched her ankle, squeezed--she was sitting a ways away from me on the couch, clearly needing space to get the story out.

  "Well, one night Tate and I were at another big, high profile party with lots of famous people. We were doing our thing, hanging out, talking, and taking selfies. I was near the entrance of the ballroom where the party was happening, talking to some random person. Well...the doors opened, and Lex came in. With a woman. They were holding hands, like they were comfortable together because they'd been together for so long." She hesitated, swallowing hard. "And...and he was wearing a wedding ring on his left hand, which he'd never worn before. I'd known he was with someone, or used to be, but there hadn't been anything in the tabloids about them lately, so I guess I assumed they'd broken up." She sighed, paused, and then continued.

  "So he saw me, and I saw him, and our eyes met, and--and he just walked straight past me as if he didn't know me. It cut me to the fucking bone. I mean, I just...I knew he'd been keeping our relationship a secret from the press, because he was almost fifteen years older than me...but finding out he was fucking married? It was bullshit, and I was pissed, but what could I do? Confront him right then and there, at the party? I couldn't do that. Those parties were career events for Tate and me, and I didn't dare make a scene. Especially since Tate was there and had no idea about the whole thing. So I just had to swallow the hurt and acted like everything was hunky-fucking-dory."

  "God, Aerie, that fuckin' sucks," I said. "What an asshole."

  Another bitter, sarcastic bark of laughter. "Oh god, Cane, you have no idea."