by Jane Galaxy
They didn’t talk for a while. Vanessa was always up early to head to FB2, and by the time she got back, having run her ass all over Manhattan (putting the lie, somehow, to the agency’s name, which stood for the Five Boroughs Bureau, she later found out), was too exhausted to sit and watch Claudia stare silently into the TV.
“Did you know that Xavier Tome has gone vegan?” It was the first thing Claudia had said to her in a while. Vanessa was making herself a cheese sandwich at 11 o’clock at night after a day spent running around with Sam and not getting much from it.
“No,” she’d replied, turning carefully to avoid upsetting whatever delicate balance had apparently been struck while she was out of the house. Claudia ran her finger back and forth over the arm of her chair.
“He’s going to a life coach, too.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“The receptionist in the hospital waiting room said he asked for a seitan substitute at a restaurant. The life coach’s office is in Greenwich.” She looked embarrassed for a moment. “I looked it up on one of the computers and wrote down the address.”
Vanessa watched her sister for a moment.
“Look,” said Claudia. “I don’t know what this photography thing involves or how you get your information, but I just thought of it while I was waiting, and maybe it’s useful. I don’t know.”
“No,” Vanessa said. “That’s . . . thanks.”
She’d told Sam this the next day, and he had shrugged and decided to humor her.
Exclusive photos of Xavier Tome leaving the building with his arm around the life coach, leaning over to kiss him on the cheek, had sold for $8,000.
After that, it was impossible to keep Claudia out of things.
And it was outright impossible to work with a partner on the streets when her sister was suddenly enthusiastic and involved, even on her worst possible days. Vanessa didn’t want to force the issue when it made things so much smoother around the house. They could talk about something other than chores or the hospital, and it felt like they were sisters for the first time in their lives.
Vanessa could really only guess that Sam had understood her need to work away from him. It wasn’t just the commissions; it was a whole sense of independence and connection at the same time that she could never seem to articulate, not even to herself. They usually wound up finding their way back, though. After she split off on her own, he’d taken her to a rooftop party in Alphabet City. They’d gotten drunk and wound up having sex on a stranger’s bed. And again over the Fourth of July weekend last year, followed by late nights eating takeout at the office and—she was surprised to think about it without much embarrassment—having sloppy sex on Trevor’s desk. Trevor had kind of deserved it, Sam remarked afterward, and Vanessa couldn’t disagree.
Sam was nice enough, reliable for a good quick orgasm when she wanted one, and he didn’t lecture her about equipment or say mean shit around her to get her riled up like some of the other guys did. She tolerated him, liked him even, but he didn’t really have a life beyond taking pictures and hanging out where the pot was good. He just zipped from one paparazzi gangbang to the next rooftop party, making and spending insane amounts of money all in the same breath.
The memory of Jax’s eyes up close to hers, his breath on her bare neck and collarbone came back, his fingertips sliding over the small of her back, how deep and how thick. . . . Vanessa started when her sister suddenly shouted.
“Hart pics went up on Venal-Rama!” Claudia cried from the living room, and Vanessa stood up so fast she saw gray clouds for a moment.
Sure enough, there were her photos of Joanna Hart sitting on the stoop outside her building, the first anybody had gotten in several years. The tall blonde had seemed like an interesting subject while Vanessa was waiting by a bus stop, her expression mysterious and so full of angst compared to her privileged neighborhood surroundings—pure serendipity to capture a shy celebrity. The online versions made them almost seem like candids, the trees and buildings chopped from the sides of the images. She’d start getting congrats texts any second—when Trevor had seen them the week before, he’d lifted the Butler-only embargo on her and gave her a hell of a gift: two agency tips. Normally tips like that wouldn’t be dangled near anyone on freelance, and Vanessa had no plans to waste them.
That same afternoon, after Claudia was safely rolling through the hospital’s front doors, Vanessa had grabbed a cross-town bus and parked herself along a bank of restaurants in the middle of Soho to scout out her new stable of regulars on Trevor’s rosy gold assignment. Knute Forsythe, the weird Danish-American director, was in town taking meetings, and the hot tip was that he was considering Dominic Thompson for one of his bizarre hyper-realistic half-animated trips into the unknown that always freaked people out but wound up giving critics fodder to rave about for years.
It was a beautiful day, and she was sitting on a pylon at the side of a concrete building to check her phone when a low voice reverberated right in her ear.
“Hey.”
“What the shit?!” Vanessa squealed, whirling around.
Jax Butler grinned and looked around, putting his hands out.
“This is the best disguise I’ve got right now, so try not to ruin it.”
“Sunglasses?! Your disguise is literally sunglasses.”
“Hey, it’s a different pair than usual. And I’m wearing a V-neck shirt. With a scarf.” He held up the end. “I even gelled my hair down, and I think the world as a whole knows what a tragedy that is. I mean, look at me.”
She already knew he looked like an asshole.
“Paps can still tell—someone is going to notice you, and they’ll swarm us both.”
“Nah, there’s a rumor that I’m going to be down by the Brooklyn Bridge for a movie festival. That’s too many people on the ground for them to come looking around up here.”
Vanessa hadn’t been sure if she’d ever see him again. Or if she’d been hoping she wouldn’t see him again. It was weird enough to be outside in daylight having a normal conversation with the guy. Even weirder to have fled his apartment after he’d fucked her into temporary deafness.
“What—why are you even here?”
“Why are you here? What are you waiting on? You look like a bored art student.” He leaned too close to her, and the scent of him, just like before, stopped Vanessa cold for a moment.
“Good,” she replied firmly. “That’s the point. I’m waiting on Knute Forsythe.”
He nodded very slowly—raised his chin and lowered it once. She couldn’t see the expression in his eyes behind the glasses.
“I can definitely promise that the reason I’m here is more important and will help you wait out the boredom while he unhinges his jaw and eats . . . whatever he’s into. Raw chicken nailed to a 2x4, or something.”
“Okay, you’ve got until he shows up, and then I don’t know you, because this is an agency exclusive.”
“Hmm, nice work on that. I’m guessing. I have no idea. Short version: I need your help.”
“Me specifically?”
“I didn’t come all this way to talk to tourists.”
“Did you . . . follow me down here?”
“The first thing you can help me with is letting me finish.”
She had to swallow at that. “Don’t need help with jerky quips,” Vanessa muttered. “This doesn’t seem like your style, actually chasing after a girl.”
“My image needs a little . . . improvement. A little housecleaning. I want you to photograph me.”
“Why me? My photos are gonna look like every other pap’s. If this is because we had sex—”
“I’ve seen your other work. You’ve got a unique style.”
Vanessa looked at him carefully. Jax had his hands in his back pockets and was looking up the street at nothing. His hair did look ridiculous gelled down like that, and he smelled like cinnamon and lime in the breeze.
He’d leaned in to kiss her, before. Before he’d r
un his mouth around her nipple in hot, lazy strokes. On the street, Vanessa’s skin puckered at the thought.
She blinked.
“What, a few previews on the viewfinder?”
“That last shot of Joanna Hart was different than your other stuff.”
“Okay, that’s one.”
“The old woman in the street.”
“What?”
“When I deleted the other pictures, there was one of an old woman in a crosswalk. You do street photography in your spare time, don’t you?”
Vanessa didn’t answer.
“Okay, whatever. I won’t ask about that. But obviously you have the ability to take really great shots.”
“That doesn’t translate to a PR shoot! You don’t want this. Jax, you need to go to your agent and get them to hire someone who shoots in a studio, someone who does editorials for a magazine—”
“Just take the pictures. We’ll make it work. It’ll be fine.”
The thought occurred to Vanessa, very small and in the back of her mind, that she needed to quit arguing and just go with this, that he was asking her because he wanted to be near her again.
He’d been warm like the sun, and he’d tried to kiss her, before.
Nothing about what she knew of him had ever indicated that Jax Butler had the ability to commit to something longer-term than a gnat’s attention span—even the trades had some vague speculation that he might actually try to break his multi-picture deal with Card One, and that the studio had contingency plans for rebooting the series in case he bailed on them suddenly.
Jax turned back from the street to look at her, and in the haze of sunlight she could see the dim outlines of his eyes behind the dark sunglasses.
“What do I do?” Vanessa said quietly. “I mean, where do I go? How do we negotiate this?”
He pulled his cell phone out of a pocket, and it was a moment before Vanessa realized.
“Uh—”
“I’m not gonna drunk dial you,” he said, sighing loudly.
She managed to find her phone at the bottom of her bag, and then, just like that, she had an A-lister’s private phone number. Vanessa stared at the string of numbers in her text messaging app at the top of the screen, and then below where his first message read
Just me
“I’ll text you later,” said Jax in a strange voice, and she looked up to see him blending into a group of tourists ahead on the sidewalk. Knute Forsythe was exiting the restaurant, and she managed to pull her camera from the bag to catch him patting Dominic Thompson on the back as they entered a black town car. Decent shots, good lighting at least, and Trevor would be satisfied.
Vanessa pushed her short-and-flash back into the folds of her bag and found her phone again. Jax’s text bubble still hung there, and she tried to think of something to say back to him, to fill up the space a little and not seem so distant.
She put her phone away and decided to see how long this whole thing would last.
Chapter Seven
“IF THERE’S A legitimate danger to the safety of United States citizens, isn’t it our responsibility to get out there and see what it is, do something about it?”
“Not if it means jumping to conclusions and putting people at risk.”
“The government wants to call us vigilantes; all they see is an opportunity to label us and put this all down as terrorist activities.”
“Well, at least we can agree on that.”
“Look, there’s someone else out there calling themselves a hero, and they’re undoing everything we’ve worked for. We have to look into it, if nothing else, for our own reputations.”
“It shouldn’t be about our own reputations, Dirk. It should never have been.”
“Cut!” hollered Adriana, and light fuses began thumping, people shifting.
Holland spun around on his heel and walked in a straight line off set.
Jax sighed. If he were a more laid-back person, he might have taken comfort in knowing that he had a contractually-required hiatus coming up, but that only meant that he’d have to come back and finish. And then do press rounds and interview panels. The awkwardness would be inescapable, and then the media would pick up on it. He didn’t have a chance in hell of letting this fix itself; Holland definitely wasn’t in the mood to at least put up a pretense of civility or tolerance between the two of them.
And all this just as Jax was getting used to the idea of working with him. It was funny how when Holland was in golden retriever mode, circling around everybody looking for approval, he’d wanted nothing to do with the guy—and now that Jax had fucked up, and Holland was royally pissed off, for some reason he wanted to talk to him. Not about his feelings or some shit like that, but just to have a level conversation, now that Holland seemed to have emerged from whatever fever dream hypnosis his publicist had him under.
It gave him whiplash, being Dirk and arguing about loyalty and friendship with The Patriot before all expression dropped off Holland’s face.
Jax tried to focus on something else.
Complete radio silence from Georgina. That was understandable, and maybe even for the best. If not for a little while, then maybe forever. It was a constant, like background radiation, keeping him up in the middle of the night to agonize over before waking up the next morning and wondering for just a brief second what he’d been worried about.
Adriana was busy and snappish now that they were well into the schedule and was usually on calls with studio heads or trying to work out why her son had been benched from whatever team he played on. It was hard to tell the difference between her phone conversations from the way she talked to whoever was on the other end of the line. Jax sometimes found himself hovering near her, feeling the urgent need to tell her something, and then completely forgetting what it was when she turned around and finally had a second for him.
He’d tried to figure out what it was and had gone to Joanna’s trailer, but she was never there. When he did manage to track her down and offer to continue their conversation from before, she’d said,
“Don’t worry about it, Jax,” and hadn’t looked at him while she said that.
It was embarrassing, to want attention, to have it just out of reach like this.
He flopped down onto a chair inside his trailer and opened his text messaging app.
Barry the agent would be empty calories. Charlotte, Barry’s assistant, was decent for a chat, but spotty since she was usually texting on four different phones. He flicked down. The stylist would just want to talk about upcoming interviews. His publicist Miranda would tell him for the last time that she needed confirmation from Natalie about the Beijing trip—
Natalie.
Jax sat up straight and held the phone at a better angle.
What do you think Knute Forsyth is up to right now
Like do you think the odds are greater that he’s secretly normal or that he’s out there crushing doll heads with a ball press right now
His phone started vibrating and playing part of the Steel Knight original soundtrack (“Night Sunglasses”).
“Do you need something?” Natalie sounded bored, but she always sounded bored.
“Besides for you to tell Miranda that I’m doing something involving China so I can escape the vague yet crushing sense that I’m disappointing her somehow?”
Natalie sighed. “What is this really about?”
“Do you think I’m living up to my potential?”
“Potential for what?”
“Everything?”
“Didn’t you get a therapist for these questions?”
“Yeah, not for diagnosing my career! What am I saying, you wouldn’t understand these things, you’re from. . . .”
There was a long pause. Jax shifted his cell phone to his other ear.
“Where are you from?”
“The Midwest.”
“That’s vague. I mean, that’s a lot of place to be from. There’s time zones there. Plural.”
“
You’ve probably never heard of it.”
“I’ve been places! I was in Macau last month eating squid eyes!”
“Name the second-largest city in Oklahoma.”
“Oklahoma—”
“Nope.”
“Town—”
“Wrong.”
“Junior—”
“Absolutely not. It’s Tulsa.”
“You’re from Tulsa?”
Natalie scoffed. “No.”
“Then where are you from?”
“That information is not going to help you get through this shoot when you’ve been sleeping with your costar’s girlfriend.”
“Okay, extra harsh. One, you are supposed to be on my side here, and two—”
“Look, I put in your request with Barry—with Charlotte, actually, but I gifted her a Korean beauty box subscription to make sure you’re at the top of his to-do list.”
“Does that actually work?”
Natalie sighed again.
“We’ll find out. She did text me a bunch of emojis that don’t make sense, so who knows.”
“Mmkay. Did my favor with the toy company go through?”
“I got confirmation that they delivered an hour ago. And before you ask—”
“Don’t worry, Nat,” Jax said, smiling a little, “you’re off the hook helping me out with this one.”
“Stay frosty, Masterson,” she said, and the line clicked off.
Jax flicked back through his other text messages and opened the one with just a string of numbers at the top. He hadn’t bothered to put in Vanessa’s name as a contact yet, and it stuck out from all the others, with their random emojis and nicknames he couldn’t connect with real people anymore. He’d been texting with “RADASAURUS” off of a drunk wrong number for nine months about a secret underground hipster fashion show in Red Hook and still had no idea who that guy was.
Vanessa had texted him after he’d gotten back home from Soho.
