Fiercely Emma: Cake Series Book Three

by J. Bengtsson

  On the day in question, while waiting for my scene to film, I was fooling around with some of the other actors when I ran up a wall and did a flip. With my background in gymnastics and a daredevil mentality, the stunt coordinator on set honed in on my potential and convinced me to give stunt performing a try. That was four years ago, and now it was my primary line of work. It turned out that risking my life on a daily basis paid pretty damn well. Which also made giving it up all the more difficult even as the injuries continued to pile up. My body was tired, and at the rate I was going, I’d be paralyzed in no time. Every day I told myself I was going to quit and find myself a less dangerous profession, like coal mining or deep-sea fishing.

  “Bruised a few ribs jumping off a bridge. I hit the water wrong.”

  “A bridge?” Richie laughed. “They might as well just finish you off now.”

  I nodded. “At least the x-ray showed no breaks this time.”

  “Ah, yes, the silver lining. This has got to be some sort of a record. What is it now, four or five trips to the ER since January?”

  “Five. With any luck, I’ll be dead soon.”

  “What is it with you and living dangerously? I can’t even walk from the car to the restaurant without freaking out, and you’re flinging yourself off bridges,” he said, shaking his head. “After Alexis and all her jacked up crazy, I figured you’d dial it down a notch. But not you, Finn, oh no. You’re just a glutton for punishment.”

  “What can I say? I’m an action junkie.” My bravado had just the right amount of cocky swagger. It was what Richie expected from me, so I acted the part even though I hated the way things had played out over the past year. It felt like I’d been going at full speed for way too long, and I wanted nothing more than to slow things down; maybe even leave Los Angeles behind for good. I was ready for a simpler life, and I wanted to settle down and start a family.

  “I keep telling you to go out on auditions again.”

  “Yeah, well, someone needs to be working, or we’ll get kicked out of this place too.”

  “You insult me. I’ve always got some trick up my sleeve. I predict we’ll be back in the lap of luxury in no time, mark my words, Finn.”

  We ordered our burritos, and then I lumbered to my seat and slowly lowered my tormented body onto the unforgiving plastic, wincing and whining dramatically.

  “Jesus, sweetheart, how many centimeters are you dilated?”

  “You know, maybe I might be more physically pleasing if your ass-explosion hadn’t forced me to abandon my ice bath.”

  “Oh yeah, about that. Is this a good time to discuss your shrinkage?”

  “I was submerged in ice! You’d be so lucky to have my package… on a warm day.”

  “Uh-huh, you tell yourself that, if it makes you feel better, but we both know the truth.”

  A couple of young, college-age women at an adjacent table made eye contact. They’d been watching my entire spectacle in amusement. I mustered the energy to smile in their direction and was rewarded with two dazzling ones back.

  “Looks painful,” the shorter blonde said, running her eyes over my beaten up body. “I hope the other guy got it worse.”

  “Sadly, there was no other guy.”

  “His girlfriend beats him,” Richie said, always eager to jump into a conversation when coeds were involved. “This is an intervention.”

  “In a Chipotles?” the taller blonde asked. “Shouldn’t you take him to a shelter or hospital or something?”

  “I was hungry.” Richie shrugged.

  Both women laughed at his deadpan comment and then turned their attention back on me. That was the way it usually went down. Richie was the comic relief, but I always got the girl.

  “Well, if you need someone to nurse the wounds…” one offered.

  I realized then that I could probably get myself one, if not two, nursey-maids for the night, but I was not in any shape for beautiful women. I had a date with my pain medications tonight, and I planned on showing them a really good time.

  “Thanks for the offer, but you know, I’ve got the intervention and all.”

  “Oh, right. Well, if you change your mind…” She pulled a pen out of her purse, wrote her number on a receipt, and walked over and handed it to me. I smiled and nodded, giving her the reassurance that I might just reconsider her offer at a later date even though I had no intention of doing so whatsoever. That was me. Always the nice guy. Why spend the energy being rude to people when a smile and nod took so much less effort?

  Redirecting my focus on Richie, who’d been glancing between the women and myself, I narrowed in on his wide-eyed expression.

  “What?”

  “Unbelievable.” He shook his head. “You’re whining like a bitch, and you still get the girl. I swear I could have rolled you in here in a coffin and you’d get more action than me.”

  “Speaking of that, have I ever told you about the slasher flick I was in where I played a corpse who actually did get some action?”

  “Yeah, I saw that one. Disgusting, if you ask me,” Richie said, cringing. “Have any of your characters ever survived an entire movie?”

  “Once, but not without a few missing limbs.”

  “You really need to audition for some less lethal roles… play up those leading man looks, bro, before you totally jack up your face.”

  “I have auditioned for those parts. Can I help it if the only people who want to hire me also want to rip out my intestines and bludgeon me to death?”

  “No, I guess not. Although I don’t think you’re faring much better in your current role as a stuntman. You know you have a black eye, right?”

  “Do I?” Recently, I’d noticed that pain had a tendency to rally around one spot at a time, making all the other injuries pale in comparison. I gently touched the area around my eye and winced when I found the offending spot. “Is it bad?”

  He laughed, glancing back over at the women still staring in my direction. “Apparently not.”

  “Great. I’ll use it to slay the ladies this weekend.”

  “Yeah, about that,” my roommate said, visibly squirming.

  “What? You better not be flaking on me.” I glared at Richie, knowing that whatever was about to come out of his mouth would not benefit me.

  “Remember when I said that I had something up my sleeve?”

  “You mean from one minute ago? Yeah, I remember.”

  “I got a job.”

  “No way! Really? You got the cable network pilot?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what?”

  “I got booked for the weekend to escort a rich divorcée to some out of town wedding.”

  The words he spoke took time to filter though my brain, but when they finally made their glorious appearance, my eyes bugged out of their sockets. “YOU’RE A MALE ESCORT?”

  I must have said it louder than I’d intended, as both women’s heads turned away from me and settled squarely on Richie. All of the sudden he was the most interesting train wreck in the room, and they were sufficiently awestruck. After all, it’s not everyday you got to see a well-dressed, articulate streetwalker.

  “Would you keep it down?” he whispered, glancing around at the other patrons. “Jesus.”

  “This is awesome, Richie,” I said, grinning from ear-to-ear. “I always knew you had it in you.”

  “Shut up. It’s not what you think.”

  “Well, that’s a relief, because you really don’t want to know what I was thinking. What exactly are you expected to do with her?”

  “Whatever she wants. Within limits, of course.”

  “I… wow…. how much does your pimp get paid?”

  “Haha. Very funny.”

  I hadn’t been joking. Did Richie fully grasp what he’d committed himself to? He obviously caught my skeptical expression.

  “It’s an agency. Totally legit. You really should try it. Easy money.”

  “Uh-huh. I think I’ll stick to bridge jumping.
It seems less dangerous. Are you sure you’ve thought this through? I mean, once you do this, you can’t take it back.”

  “I’m not a prostitute, Finn.”

  “Actually, if you have sex with her, you sort of are.”

  “I get paid for my time, not sex, but if she’s hot and wants it, I say why not? I’ll throw it in as a freebie.”

  “And if she’s not hot?”

  “I’ll probably still throw it in. My standards aren’t real high.”

  Thinking back to his crack whore crush, I had to agree. “It sounds like you have it all figured out. But what the hell I am supposed to do about the weekend? I can’t go by myself.”

  “Are you not listening to me? By the end of this weekend, I’ll have enough money to buy us both a one-way ticket out of Hell. Besides, how hard can it be to find someone to buy my ticket? It’s the Sun Desert Music Festival.”

  As it turned out, finding a new wingman proved more difficult than I’d imagined. Not one of my buddies could commit to a last-minute weekend concert. The majority of my friends had responsibilities greater than themselves and were now married… some even with children on the way. They couldn’t be acting like an aimless bachelor anymore. I envied them. Where they were was the place I’d expected to be by now too. Thanks, Alexis! The swift kick to my gut reminded me of her heartless deception.

  Maybe it was best to just cancel the whole damn weekend. I could try hawking the tickets on Hollywood Boulevard, the place where Richie had bought them from a scalper a few weeks before. But I needed this mini-vacation more than I wanted to admit. What with the breakup, my brother’s most recent imprisonment, and all the damn injuries, I needed a little fun in my life, and the jacked up energy of a music festival would be the perfect antidote. Music, alcohol, and women… that should bring my optimism levels back up to brimming.

  Certainly it would have been easier to find a trip buddy if I were to expand my search criteria to include females, but would defeat the purpose of the trip. Richie and I had planned to spend the weekend drinking and trolling for women, and although, it wouldn’t be as fun without him, I decided to hold firm to that approach even if it meant going it alone.

  “We watched My Bloody Bachelor again last night. I’ll never understand why you went into the pool house in the first place. I mean, you clearly saw the headless body floating in the water,” Shelby said, disappointment clear in her judgmental voice. “Haven’t I taught you anything?”

  I could argue with my mother and explain to her for the thousandth time that it was my character, not me, who’d made the reckless decision to go into the pool house, but she wouldn’t listen. As far as my mother was concerned, every onscreen death I’d suffered was my own damn fault.

  “What do you want, Shelby?” This conversation was going nowhere, and I only had a few minutes before the pain meds kicked in. Once that happened, I’d be like one of those sticky hands you flung against a wall and then watched as it grotesquely disengaged and oozed to the floor.

  “What I want is to see you in a movie where you don’t get brutally murdered. Is that so much to ask?”

  Yes. Yes, it is. Gliding my fingers over the end button, I apprehensively awaited the reason for the interruption. I only ever heard from her when she wanted something, and I understood that this conversation would be no different.

  “Did you call for something specific?” I asked. There was no point in delaying the inevitable. Whatever she wanted was going to cost me. I just needed the dollar amount so I could go to bed.

  “Can I borrow your car this weekend?”

  “My car?” I blurted out. No, not that, anything but that. “You want to borrow my Charger? I… no… I don’t think so.”

  One might think my reluctance to loan her my vehicle stemmed from her decision to throw me away as a baby, but Shelby’s earliest mistakes had long been forgiven, if not for any other reason than the fact that all her later mistakes made my toilet birth seem tame.

  “Come on. I need it for a work trip. Mine is still in the shop. Please, Indy. You can take your brother’s pickup truck.”

  “Okay, first of all, I’ve been going by Finn for eight years now. Why is it so hard for you to get my name straight? And secondly, I can’t loan you my car because I’m going to a concert this weekend and will probably be using it as my hotel room.”

  “All the more reason to take the truck. It runs great. It’s actually way better for you because you can bring a mattress and sleep on the flatbed. Besides, you don’t want me breaking down on a freeway in the middle of Los Angeles, do you?”

  “Hold on. I thought you said the pickup worked fine – but now you’re basically saying it’s going to break down on me. Which one is it?”

  Even though I planned to put up a fight, I already knew my mother would manipulate me into submission. She always did, because, like it or not, denying Shelby came with its own set of problems… ones I’d always been ill-equipped to deal with. See, the thing about my mother was that every decision she made or any transaction she brokered was always done entirely for her own benefit. I figured this out in early infancy when I’d been tossed out with the trash, yet it never ceased to amaze me how I still routinely fell for her self-serving tricks.

  “It drives like a charm, no worries. I just meant that it’s not used to freeways.”

  My head spun on its axis as the pain in my bones began to dull. A warm, Zen-like sensation was quickly frosting over my brain. Focus. Did she just say it was “not used to freeways?” I shook my head clear. It was a motor vehicle. My Shelby-bullshit radar was now spinning and flashing red warning lights. I knew when she was about to screw me over and clearly this was one of those times. “I’ll be driving on a freeway!”

  “Yes, but you’re a man. If you break down – not that I’m saying you will – but if you did, at least you wouldn’t have to worry about a creep having his way with you. How would you feel if some psycho dumped my body in a wooded area off the 5 freeway?”

  “Honestly, Shelby, I think I’d be relieved.”

  Perhaps the drugs were making me too candid, but Shelby took no offense. In fact, she acted as if it was the funniest thing I’d said all year. I laughed along with her. Yes, it was just a joke. Funny me. But with the laughter came a fading resolve. Dammit, she had her claws in me now. It was only a matter of time before I was on the losing end of this deal. Chalk another one up for Shelby, the puppet master.

  Maybe it was already blatantly obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: Shelby and I were mother and son on paper alone. For all other purposes, we were more like a pair of dysfunctional siblings… or, more pointedly, a prison guard and death row inmate. It was Shelby’s mother and grandmother who had done most of the raising, if you could call it that. Mostly I’d just run wild with all the other kids who came and went. Parenting was somewhat optional in my extended family and done only when the adult had no other choice but to get involved.

  Growing up, I’d been on a first name basis with each and every Child Protective Services worker in the area. By all standards, I’d had an unconventional upbringing. As a mother, Shelby sucked. She couldn’t take care of herself, much less the baby she’d nearly flushed down the toilet. But custody hadn’t been handed over to her after my unorthodox birth anyway. It was Misty, my grandmother, only thirty-three at the time, who got that honor. She was only fifteen herself when Shelby was born, and her own mother, Gigi, had raised the baby. In a way, it was a time-honored tradition in our family for the mothers of the teen moms to raise the baby of the following generation. That was just how it was done. Not to say Misty was some great caretaker, as she was more interested in her revolving door of boyfriends and husbands than me, but clearly she was a better choice than Shelby, who more than once had forgotten where she’d left me while out on shopping trips.

  “And besides,” I said, “I don’t think there are any wooded areas off the 5 freeway in Los Angeles.”

  “It was just an example,” she huffed. “My bo
dy could be dumped anywhere at any time.”

  That was Shelby, always overly dramatic. No wonder I was drawn to acting, with the role model I’d had growing up.

  “I have a bad feeling about this.” I wasn’t sure why I was stalling. It wasn’t like it would make a difference.

  “Come on, Indy. How often do I ask you for anything?”

  “Um…all the time. I loaned you $300 last week.”

  “Oh, was that a loan? I wasn’t aware.”

  “They’re all loans, Shelby. You just never pay them back.”

  “You’re rich. You don’t need all that money anyway.”

  I laughed at that. I made a pretty good living for a single guy, but I was nowhere near rich. Hell I wasn’t even in six figures. Of course, when you compared my income to hers, I guess I could see where she would come up with that hypothesis.

  “If…and I mean if… I loan you my car, it would be with the assumption that the junkyard number you’re unloading will get me where I’m going on time. Can you promise me that?”

  “I swear on my life.”

  “Because this weekend is important to me, Shelby.”

  “I know. I promise.”

  “I’m not joking. If you’re saddling me with a shitty drive just so yours will be pleasantly air-conditioned…and murder-free… I swear to god, I’ll make you pay.”

  “I won’t let you down.”

  I could almost see the victory smirk on her face. And now that she’d gotten what she’d called for, the conversation shifted to how much more she could squeeze out of me. “So can you bring your car by Friday morning?”

  “Me? You’re the one who wants it. Why don’t you come to me?”

  Silence.

  “Shelby?”

  “Come on, Indy, it’s out of my way.”

  “Like fifteen minutes out of your way.”

  “Gigi and the kids want to see you. Is a little drive going to kill you?” Shelby asked, sighing. “Besides, you have the whole week off.”