Except for a few additional pictures of Avery earlier in her modeling career, there was nothing more. No mention of her returning to rehab. No sightings of her with Nico.
I collapsed against the back of the chair, stunned and sickened.
Where had Nico gone with Avery after they left his house?
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. I told myself that over and over. Except, of course, it really did.
I was about to rise from the chair when something in one of the pictures made me gasp.
It was a shot of Avery on a catwalk in Milan. Sleek and stunning, she was striding away from the camera wearing an evening gown that featured a back that plunged all the way to the dimples at the base of her spine. Her tawny hair was upswept in an elegant chignon so her entire back was exposed.
And there, in all her creepy glory, was the mother of death, Nyx.
Avery and Nico had matching tattoos.
At least I made it to the kitchen sink before my dinner made its way back up.
I stayed with Grace for the next two nights. We never did go see the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I went straight to bed and stayed there, rising only to eat and use the toilet. I was ill in every way a person could be: soul sick, heartsick, physically sick. None of the food I ate stayed down, but Grace kept forcing soup and crackers on me, keeping me hydrated with Pedialyte. On Tuesday morning, Grace went to my house and retrieved my kit and a few other things I’d need for the trip to Santa Barbara because I just couldn’t face the possibility that there might be paparazzi still camped outside my door.
But Officer Cox had been right. The paparazzi had moved on to more interesting stories. Grace relayed that there wasn’t a single cameraman in sight.
Nico and I were already yesterday’s news.
I drove to Santa Barbara in Grace’s Lexus because my Fiat was still parked in my garage, and she insisted she’d use a car service to get back and forth to her office. “I can write it off as a business expense,” she said airily, waving my protests away. “Besides, I’ve always wanted to know what it feels like to have a chauffeur.” And that was that.
And now I was in an ocean-view hotel room in Santa Barbara, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the cell phone in my hand. I’d turned it off on the cab ride home from Nico’s, not wanting to hear any more excuses. Not wanting to know if he’d try another tack. Now I felt sufficiently far enough away to deal with it. With shaking hands, I hit the button to turn it on.
There were five voicemails.
The first was from Chloe from three days prior. “Just wanted to let you know I got home in one piece. Hope you’re okay, too. Dude, that was intense.” She paused, and I could picture her chewing her lip. “Um . . . so . . . how long do you think I should wait before calling Officer Cox?” She giggled. “I think I need to report a woman dying of being sex starved.” She hung up after promising to send her crew over to clean up what remained of the trampled flowers in my yard.
Three days ago felt like another lifetime.
The next call was from the coordinator for the Reem Acra shoot, saying she’d emailed me the final itinerary and inviting me to a cocktail reception, which happened to be in just a few hours’ time. I quickly texted her to confirm, then went back to voicemail.
The third call came in at two thirty in the morning. At first, no one said anything. Rock music pounded in the background, blaringly loud. Then, in a thick voice, Nico spoke.
“Gave you eighteen hours. Now ask me why.”
My heart jumped into my throat. The music played a moment longer, then the call cut off. Another call came in the next day at almost 4:00 a.m. More loud music. Another pause. Then Nico’s voice again, even rougher this time.
“Goddamn it, Kat.” He hung up.
On his final call, Nico didn’t say anything. It sounded as if a party had been raging wherever he was for days. All I heard was music, the sound of his ragged breathing, and, making my heart clench, a woman’s faint laughter in the background, before the call dropped and I was left clutching the phone to my ear, shaking.
Maybe Nico was taking a ride on the Village Bicycle after all.
The phone in my hand rang. I jerked so sharply I dropped it. I put my hand over my thundering heart, took a few breaths, and leaned down to pick it up. Seeing the number on the readout, I made the decision to press Send before I was even conscious of it.
“Nico.”
“Fuck,” he breathed, “you picked up.”
He sounded terrible. Actually, he sounded incredibly relieved, but also pissed off, strung out, and a little drunk.
“I had my phone turned off.” Why was I explaining that to him? What was I hoping for here, something that would make sense? Something that wouldn’t make me want to jump off my hotel room balcony? I should have learned my lesson by now.
“Runnin’ away again. Always fuckin’ runnin’ away from me, Kat. And always comparin’ me to some other dickhead that broke your heart. Even your dad.”
Blood rushed to my face. My ears were scalding. “I’m going to hang up now.”
“Yeah? Well before you do, ask me why.”
I was shaking in anger, in hurt, in confusion. “I already told you, why doesn’t matter. You made your choice perfectly clear. It is what it is.”
His laugh was disturbing on many levels. “Don’t kid yourself, baby. Why’s the only thing that ever matters. Now ask me.”
I stood and began to pace. “How long have you been up?”
“A while. Where are you?”
I didn’t answer.
“’Cause I know you’re not at home. Know you haven’t been there in days. So where are you, Kat?”
He’d been by my house, more than once, looking for me. Why? He wanted to have his cake and eat it, too? “I’m working.”
“Where?” His question was clipped and demanding.
“What difference does it make? You already told me everything I needed to know—”
“Not everything,” he interrupted, his voice turning hard. “You left before you heard it all. Because you didn’t want to hear it all.”
My anger was growing, along with my impatience. Now this was my fault? “Okay, Nico. You win. I’ll play your little game: Why?”
There was a long, deafening silence, then a ragged sigh. “I can’t talk about this over the phone.”
Fighting back tears, I looked out at the ocean. “You know what?” I whispered, shaking my head. “I think I’m all checkmated out.”
“Don’t fuckin’ hang up!”
I’d never heard him so angry. Even when he was screaming at the paparazzi, even when Brody and A.J. had walked in on us in bed. His fury crawled right through the line and grabbed me around the neck, squeezing. I couldn’t answer. But I didn’t hang up.
“Tell me where you are! I’m comin’ to get you!”
A lone tear tracked its way down my cheek. “No, you’re not. You pursued me and convinced me she wasn’t your girlfriend. Then you fucked me and told me you’d always take care of her. You love her, Nico. You have history. You have her picture next to your bed! You even have the same tattoo!” My voice was getting shrill. “How am I supposed to compete with that? How can you expect me to want to?”
The sound he made was part hiss, part growl. There was a loud bang, then he let out a string of curses. “Tell me where you are!”
Alarmed, I sat up straight. “What did you just do? What was that sound?”
“Probably broke my fuckin’ hand punchin’ this wall, is what I just did! Tell me where you are so I don’t break the other one!”
“I’m not taking the blame for you acting crazy, Nico! If you want to be stupid enough to ruin your hands so you’ll never be able to play the guitar again, that’s totally on you!”
There was another loud bang, and another. He made a sound like he was gritting his teeth against pain.
“Nico! Stop it!” What was the matter with him? Was the man off his meds?
“Tel
l me where you are!”
Another loud bang, and suddenly I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t take this kind of drama.
“Stop hitting things first!” I waited a moment. He seemed to be listening to me, because there were no more loud bangs. “Okay. You want to know where I am? Here’s where: out of your life.”
For the first time since we’d met, I hung up on Nico Nyx.
It felt like I’d just cut off my own arm.
I worked. I ate. I slept. I made it through the next three days without checking my phone again, or dying, though it really felt like I would.
Then on the final day of the shoot, life decided it would be super fun to drop a nuclear bomb on my head.
I was applying contouring powder to the knife-edged angle of a model’s cheekbone in one of the hotel suites that had been set up for makeup and wardrobe. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, snapping gum and fiddling constantly with the pink bedazzled phone in her lap, tweeting and Facebooking and all the rest. She clicked a link on the screen, and a song began to play. Her nose wrinkled in distaste. I tapped it with the handle of my brush.
“Don’t scrunch your nose. You’ll get bunny lines and will have to get Botox when you’re twenty.”
Obviously, I was feeling a little stabby.
“I can’t believe anybody likes One Direction, they’re such a bunch of little boys?”
The model, a wafer-thin El Salvadorian girl ironically nicknamed Gordita—Spanish for “chubby”—had the habit of ending sentences at a higher pitch than the beginning, so it always sounded like she was asking a question. I made a noncommittal noise and started working on her other cheekbone. They were so sharp they could draw blood if I accidentally touched them with my finger. I wondered what the last meal she’d had was. Probably water and an olive, followed by a piece of sugarless gum for dessert.
When I turned to get the eyelash glue from the vanity beside us, she squealed.
I whirled around, expecting to see a spider on her arm, or at the very least a cheeseburger that had made a sudden appearance on one of the trays of Evian an assistant was circulating through the room, but she was staring at her phone, enraptured by whatever was on the screen.
“Omigod! It’s Bad Habit’s new video! It was just released!”
My stomach did this funny thing where it tried to crawl up my esophagus and escape. Forgetting the lash glue, I plastered myself to Gordita’s side, watching over her shoulder.
And there they were, in all their rock ’n’ roll glory. Bad Habit.
It struck me for the first time how apropos that name really was. Greedy and unable to resist temptation exactly as if I were an addict, I stared with my mouth open as the video I’d made with Nico came to life.
Watching it was so surreal. Even on a four-inch screen, I could see the combustible attraction between us. The tension in our bodies, the way we looked at one another, even the way we didn’t look at each other all screamed “want.”
I was proud about how I looked. Like a vampy, old-fashioned pinup girl back in the days when having a good figure meant having tits and ass, not the body of a twelve-year-old boy like my friend Gordita beside me.
But if the camera had been kind to me, it absolutely worshipped Nico. He was undeniably gorgeous and charismatic in real life, and sexy as sin, but the camera brought out another facet of his beauty. He was a man of flesh and bone and blood, but onscreen there was this quality of otherworldliness about him, a glow, as if he’d stepped straight off a cloud from Mount Olympus.
He was a star, he was beautiful, and, for one infinitesimal moment in time, he’d been mine.
I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted blood.
“God, he’s so hot!” Gordita was practically drooling. I couldn’t argue with her, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to pinch the nonexistent fat on her upper arm and ask, “Have you stopped working out lately, dear?”
She puffed out her lower lip and blew out a breath, fluttering her bangs. “Too bad about what happened to him, though.”
Dread descended on me as if a wet blanket had been dropped on my head. A surge of adrenaline flooded me, and my hands began to shake. “What do you mean? What happened?”
“That thing with his girlfriend?”
“G-girlfriend?” I nearly choked on my own tongue getting the word out. Gordita looked at me strangely.
“Yeah, Avery Kane? You must’ve heard of her, she’s super famous? Anyway, they found her dead in rehab last night. Apparently she was getting drugs in the other rehab she was in, and was, like, a danger to herself? She went on some rampage or something. So Nico got some kind of court order and put her into this, like, mega-secret rehab for rich junkies where she couldn’t, like, leave, even if she wanted to?”
She began inspecting her manicure, not realizing that my entire world had begun to spin out of control. The room was slipping sideways. “But I guess there’s always ways to get drugs, even in rehab. She OD’d. Heroin, the news said? She’d shoot up between her toes so there wouldn’t be any track marks on her arms.” Gordita laughed a girlish, envious laugh that was like fingers down a chalkboard to my ears. “Smart girl.”
I couldn’t catch my breath. It felt like the walls were closing in around me. Everything in the room was too bright, too loud, too close.
“Hey. You don’t look so good. Are you okay?”
Gordita reached for me, but I turned and ran from the room, already sure where I was headed.
The street outside the long driveway to Nico’s house was mobbed. It was well past sunset, but it seemed closer to noon from the illumination of so many news vans, video cameras, and lights on portable stands. Overhead, a helicopter whirred. Its searchlight danced jaggedly around the neighborhood, but I didn’t care if it caught me in its blinding beam.
All I could think about was getting to Nico.
It had taken me less than two hours to make the trip from Santa Barbara to Hollywood, my foot crammed against the gas pedal, my heart flying as fast as the car. I went through hell by the time I reached him, a hell of whys and what-ifs, blame and self-recrimination.
He hadn’t lied to me about at least one thing. He’d taken Avery back to rehab, just a different, more exclusive one than the one she’d been in. He’d basically had her committed. But what about all the rest? The lost hours, the tattoos, what he’d said to me in bed about how he’d always take care of her?
The worst part was knowing that he would have told me before I’d left his bedroom that day when he came back after the long night away. He would have told me everything, if I’d just done like he’d wanted, and asked him “why.”
Now I couldn’t wait to know. I had to know, and I was going to try to get him to tell me. If—and this was a giant if—he’d even see me at all.
Because he wasn’t answering my calls. His cell rang and rang, then an automated message came on saying the voicemail was full and to try again later.
Two police cars were parked in front of the gate to Nico’s house, keeping the press and paparazzi at bay. I pulled up and rolled down the window, listening to the sound of a thousand shutters clicking as an officer approached my car.
“You’re going to have to turn the car around, ma’am—”
“Please, no, you have to let me in. He’s . . . ” I swallowed. “Mr. Nyx is expecting me.”
The officer paused, assessing me. I knew I most likely looked like shit, but wasn’t going to break eye contact like I had something to hide. His gaze darted around the interior of the car. He was probably looking for weapons. “Who are you?”
“Friend of the family. Close friend. He’ll be upset if he finds out I was here and got turned away.” My heart pounded. Lying had never been my forte.
The officer’s eyes were keen and penetrating. “Lady, if you’re such a close friend, why don’t you have the gate code?”
Shit. The damn gate code! I looked at the tall iron gate in desperation, willing it to open. It didn’t
oblige.
“Please,” I begged. “He knows me. I’ve been trying his cell but . . . it’s turned off. Look, his number is right here, I have it in my phone. I just . . . I don’t have the house number.”
The officer’s look soured. I forged ahead, getting desperate. “My name is Katherine Reid. Nico and I did a video together, the one that was just released. Have you seen it?”
No answer. He didn’t look impressed. Maybe he wasn’t a fan of rock music.
“Please just call. Tell him Kat is here. He’ll let me in.”
I must have sounded more sure than I felt, because after another moment of silent inspection, the officer straightened and returned to his squad car. He conferred briefly with the officer from the other car, then retrieved a phone from his dashboard. He dialed, watching me.
The conversation was short. When I saw the officer’s expression, my heart sank. He walked leisurely back to my car, his hand resting lightly on the butt of the gun strapped to the belt around his waist. He leaned into the window. I closed my eyes, defeated.
Nico didn’t want to see me. He’d turned me away.
“All right, Kat. Up you go.”
Luckily the officer straightened then, because all the blood drained from my face. God only knows what he would have thought of that.
The gate swung slowly open. I waited until there was just enough room, then revved the engine and blasted past it, roaring up the hill at top speed until I reached the circular gravel drive. I narrowly missed destroying the fountain at its center in my haste.
The house was dark. I slid to a stop, inches from the hedge that flanked the steps to the front door. I was out of the car, across the porch, and ringing the bell in seconds. Then I realized the door was already open. Literally open, cracked a few inches, not only unlocked. Filled with trepidation, I pushed it open wider and stepped inside, into darkness.
“Nico?” My voice echoed off the walls. There was no response. I began to panic. “Nico, where are you?”
I crossed the empty living room. The dining room was empty as well, as was the kitchen, the theater, the recording studio. I took the stairs to the second floor two at a time, not bothering with the elevator. I couldn’t be trapped inside an elevator at a time like this. As it was, I could hardly breathe.
Sweet as Sin Page 17
