by Jane Galaxy
“You know—” There was muffled talking and laughter for a moment, and then she could hear Sam’s voice again. “Sorry, what were you asking?”
“Have a good night, Sam,” said Vanessa in a loud voice. “Try not to die from hotboxing.”
“Wha—” his voice came out of the earpiece, but she had already pressed disconnect.
Sam was worthless, and Trevor wasn’t going to be any help. Vanessa needed to figure this out on her own.
She left a note for Claudia, camera bag slung over one shoulder.
Gone for a walk, be back later.
A private celebrity who was actually serious about their privacy was a tough line to walk, especially since Vanessa had recently seen what a celebrity’s real private life actually looked like. Maybe it was objectively wrong to hunt down someone who didn’t want to be bothered, to seek out moments of a person’s private life when they had gone to lengths to avoid staying out of the press even as they were the lead on a prestige drama, even as they were the new star of a blockbuster series that was set to go supernova.
Jesus, was she going soft? Not that she had ever been as bloodthirsty as Trevor. But still—business was business, and she’d never questioned the morals of any of this.
Vanessa stopped at the corner edge of the park and watched a couple lifting their toddler between them by the arms, and then turned to see a group of men talking and laughing nearby, stirring out cigarette butts with their toes and checking their camera viewfinders.
Ah, there they were. The Manhattan wolf pack, out for an evening celebrity hunt.
Idiots. If they couldn’t be bothered to hide, no wonder Joanna Hart never left her house.
Someone was going to get a shot of Joanna, and no one would be nice about it. Definitely not these guys. But there was a line between not being nice, and being actively awful, and Vanessa knew where that line lay, and felt even more sure that she understood both sides now. That she could be a little more compassionate. Like an insider, straddling both worlds, celebrity versus paparazzi, art versus entertainment.
She remembered Jax’s words the night they’d had dinner: why not use the resources you’ve got? It’s what anyone would do in this business.
A couple more men joined the throng. She half-smiled, more of a smirk, and crossed the street, head tucked low into her jacket.
She needed to be the one to do this. It would feel incomplete, somehow—unfair—if Vanessa wasn’t the person who got to finish what had been started with her early scoop. Her accidental exclusive of Joanna Hart in a world with no lucky shots. There was money to be made, of course, and it would be nice to finally start paying medical bills in full instead of constantly drifting on the goodwill of medical billing specialists by begging and breaking down in tears that were only sometimes fake.
Vanessa checked her phone to see if Claudia had found her note, but there weren’t any texts, and the Twitter feed was busy updating the world on Taran Pope’s new haircut.
She paused on a corner and looked up at the hazy gray sky.
Was any of this going to be worth a shit if she was just constantly chasing down debts that never seemed to shrink? She could get bigger and bigger jobs, but there was always another hospital treatment around the corner, always some other surprise agency fee that took away more of her money and more of her dignity.
Trevor was never going to give her a staff position. It was exhausting pulling the small jobs. A break, a genuine career-making break without Trevor’s greedy fingerprints all over it, before or after, would be . . . it would be heavenly. There had to be a way to kill the dragon in one fell swoop, get it all taken care of and done, and then she could breathe. She could focus on getting her photographs into a gallery, maybe the one Jax had mentioned, and her life would finally start.
It was a nice thought.
Vanessa checked the strap on her bag and looked up and down the alley. All clear. There wasn’t even a homeless person crouched by one of the dumpsters. She pulled firmly on the fire escape ladder and brought it down with a minimum of metallic feedback, then pulled up, and was up. That was the problem with men dominating the paparazzi world—so many of them were overweight and wanted to stand around in the park smoking and talking in the vague hope that something might happen.
There was no point in denying to herself that this was legally—if not morally—wrong, but at the very least, even if she couldn’t publish photographs she took tonight, maybe she’d be able to get a better sense of what Joanna Hart’s life looked like. For future reference. No one else was doing the research, that was for sure.
She made sure to stay low on the catwalk this time, crouching down and listening hard. There were voices inside, and Vanessa carefully, slowly moved on her stomach underneath the window and to the other side where there was space for her to stay in the darkness. Lesson learned from the last time getting caught outside a celebrity’s window.
She rose, barely onto her knees, and then peered through just the edge of the huge glass pane. There was a trick to seeing enough without revealing herself, but it was tough. The people inside were in an odd position away from the window, and she had to lean forward to get a clear view.
Vanessa waited. Their voices were quiet—Joanna Hart was in there with a man. She turned and tried not to breathe onto the glass.
There was Morganna herself with her blonde hair, sitting on a couch, and there was a man with black wavy hair, the back of his head turned towards Vanessa. Joanna was in profile, looking towards him down her nose, haughtily, but the look from her eyes was smug and triumphant. Joanna raised a hand with long slender fingers and ran the tips up the man’s jaw and around his ear, and Jax drew in closer to brush his lips along her throat as both pairs of their eyes locked onto her outside—
Oh, shit.
Chapter Fifteen
OH, SHIT.
Jax felt Joanna register that there was someone outside the window before he fully realized it himself, and she jerked away from him with a startled noise.
“What—” she said, as Jax started to disentangle himself from her on the couch. “Oh my God, who is that?”
“What are you doing?” he was saying over her to the closed window, fumbling to try to get the latch undone and pull up the window. The two of them looked at each other for a moment; he could hear the sounds of traffic echoing back and forth between buildings. “Vanessa, why are you here?!”
“What is she doing?” called Joanna’s voice from across the room.
The dark-haired woman outside just bit down on her bottom lip and then rolled it back and forth without breaking eye contact.
“Vanessa,” Jax said. What was his face doing? It felt like his eyebrows were twisting out of his head, like his jaw was on fire. It was like something out of a movie, her suddenly appearing in the exact spot he was in—Jax didn’t think screenwriters came up with contrived crap like that anymore. He just got to live it, now.
Then he saw the camera dangling from her neck, and Jax’s entire body went cold.
She rose, took several steps across the metal box, and disappeared down the ladder with a series of echoing clangs.
“Vanessa, wait!” He pulled his upper body back inside and stood looking at the spot on the escape where she’d been kneeling. Turning, he found Joanna with her arms folded and a strange twist to her eyebrows. “What the shit,” he said to her, trying and failing to explain any of it, all of it.
Joanna opened and closed her mouth several times, and then gave a dry huff that was probably supposed to be a chuckle and sat down, staring out the window.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she said, voice shaking. “I mean, that’s just—” She rose again. “I’m calling the police.”
“Wait,” said Jax. He ran one hand through his hair, and in the pause, Joanna gave him a searing look of disbelief and disgust.
“Jax, there are people crawling around outside my apartment watching me through my fucking windows.” She crossed h
er arms back over her chest and jerked her head around to peer out into the darkness through the pane above the kitchen sink, as if there could be a whole group of people just waiting for her to finally notice them.
“She’s not stalking you, she was trying to get a photograph.” His voice came out too reasonable, too patient, and he wished it would have sounded like that when Vanessa was still outside. Had he been yelling at her?
Joanna’s voice went up an octave.
“Oh, I see, I should hold off on reporting her because she’s got a camera and is trying to get the right angle, so I should just be patient.” She started towards her phone on an end table nearby, and Jax spun around to throw his palms out at her.
“That’s not what I mean! She’s pap, but I know her, we’ve been hanging out, and—” He floundered for a second. “She’s probably just doing her job. I’ll talk to her, tell her she was over the line.”
Joanna stared at him, the arm holding the cell slowly lowering to hang by her side.
“Oh,” she said in a dangerously bright and reasonable voice. “I see.”
“Joanna—”
“Not even going to touch your weird-as-fuck views on violating what little privacy I have left, but now you’re literally in bed with the paparazzi?”
“What?”
“You said you’re hanging out with her.”
“Well—”
“So that’s pretty much code for sleeping with her, right? Or seeing her? Which, not to be rude, but seriously? You’re seeing someone? You.”
“That’s not—”
She stared at him, and Joanna’s eyes actually dropped and then rose, taking stock of him, taking in the whole picture and coming up short of anything impressive.
“It’s—it is more complicated than that,” Jax said. Joanna’s insults hadn’t quite registered with him enough to sting. Maybe it would feel worse later, when his arms stopped feeling like they had electricity flowing through them.
She let out a nervous bark of laughter.
“I hardly even know you! I’m just tasked with writhing around with you in front of five people and a camera rig, and even I know that we’ve officially hit a new stratum of peak Jax Butler. Or rock bottom. Whichever.” Joanna threw her hands up into the air, what he could see of them buried in the sleeves of her oversized white sweater, and he caught a glimpse of her phone case, colorful against the fine cashmere.
He could get to his phone, and call her, and figure this out. Figure out what Vanessa was thinking. Had he been yelling at her? Was it too loud? Did she think he was—
“I have to go,” he said. “Just . . . don’t call the police. I will fix this, I swear.”
The call went to voice mail. Jax looked down at the end call screen. Vanessa could be on a subway somewhere, or trying to call him—if he called her back right away, would their wires just keep getting crossed? He dialed again and waited. He felt sore and achy, energetic and like he couldn’t breathe. Should he leave a voicemail? What would he say without the back-and-forth, without her responding?
He didn’t want to talk to a brick wall. Jax pressed the red button when the robotic voice kicked in, and dialed again.
On the third ring, he could hear air rushing past on the earpiece.
“Vanessa!” Why did he keep yelling at her? His hand was shaking like his body wanted to be pissed but his brain wouldn’t allow it.
“I’m here,” she said after a moment.
“Where did you go? What were you doing on her fire escape?”
There was a long pause, and a rustling sound. Jax imagined her long dark hair swishing past the phone in her hand as she was walking.
“I—” Vanessa gave a long sigh.
“Vanessa,” he said quietly, after a moment. She’d fucked up, but he could fix this.
“I should not have done that. I really, really should not have done that. I don’t know what I thought I was doing,” she said finally, picking each word as she went along, like laying train tracks right in front of herself. “But I know I wasn’t expecting that. I mean, I thought—”
She thought what?
“We were rehearsing.” What a dumb line, what an obvious lie.
There was a very long pause, and Jax tried again.
“Vanessa?”
“Is that—That’s what you’re going with?”
“It’s the truth.”
“Well. It’s, um.” She sounded distracted, or her voice wobbled, or the wind had distorted it. “It’s pretty unoriginal, as explanations go. I mean, this isn’t a sitcom or a cartoon.”
“No, it’s not, this is way more serious,” he said sharply, annoyed that she wasn’t on his side about this, she was already on the other side of this, and that felt distinctly wrong. “Come on, Vanessa. Honest to God, that’s what we were doing.” He waited, but there was just more rustling. “Joanna’s struggling with this love scene, and I thought maybe she needed some time away from the cameras, and she said we could rehearse at her house, and—”
There was a moment where Jax’s soul faltered, before the world came rushing back up at him again.
She would believe him, because what he was saying was the truth. There were facts, and he would present them, and she would believe them because they were facts. They were iron-clad; it was impossible for there to be a version where she wouldn’t believe him, because he was saying the truth. Vanessa wanted the truth.
Jax heard a gust of wind, or maybe a sigh, come through the phone.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said, and he was taken by the strange tone of her voice, flat and like a hollow bell. “I mean, I don’t have an excuse, I’m just a shameless money-grubbing star chaser. You know, so I’ve photographed you a lot, which means I’ve followed you a lot, and I’ve seen how this goes. And I guess. . . .”
He thought back to the line in Steel Knight. How did it go?
“We’re very different,” she was saying.
I’d ask what’s behind the exoskeleton, but I can see right through you. No, that was the wrong one.
“We come from opposite sides of the world we work in, and I really don’t have the room to be that outraged.” She sounded so calm suddenly, like she’d been ready for this. Like she’d been thinking about it. He pushed the thought down hard. Weren’t they just supposed to be talking about what she’d done?
Maybe it was earlier in the movie. Aren’t the best superheroes the ones who realize they can never cancel out their mistakes?
“And we’ve never talked about being exclusive, I guess, which somehow, as unfair as it is to bring this all down to the absence of something, seems relevant all of a sudden.” Vanessa laughed into the phone; the connection was going bad and it came through choppy. “But there it is.”
“That’s not true, I’m telling you,” he said, very patiently, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to look around. He had no idea where he’d been walking.
“Exactly—you’re the one telling me. And of course you’d say that. Anyone would.” She paused, maybe somewhere in the city stopping on another sidewalk, looking around her at someplace she’d wound up, maybe looking down at her feet. “It’s not like I haven’t seen you do this before.”
His brain was working so hard to hold back his anger that Jax barely heard himself say what he did next, but the struggle finally broke.
“Yeah, well, same goes for you.”
When she hung up, it was several moments before his phone went dark and he realized he was still standing in the same spot in some nondescript back street row of brownstones. Ah, that was the line from the movie.
You’re a playboy first and anything else second, Dirk.
“Maybe that’s true,” said the Steel Knight, “but at least I’m trying to be something else, trying to change for the better. Unlike some people.” He really needed to learn to shut his mouth; it was bad for the “mysterious brooding superhero” brand.
Then again, maybe people the world over preferred a wise-cracki
ng asshole in a stupid blue load-bearing exoskeleton.
Simon Westerling tilted his head carefully to the side and stared at his former college roommate for a few long seconds.
“Maybe as a hobby,” said his former friend, and threw another long rope of electricity out at the dark-haired man in the carbon fiber suit. The Steel Knight caught it, but the distortion had come too quickly after the last one, and the power converter wouldn’t be stable enough to hold these kinds of attacks for much longer. That, and he really needed to figure out how to make this thing less of a wearable forklift and more armor-y—the constant physical abuse to his body alone would mean an extended absence from sunbathing with nude supermodels on Corfu.
“I mean, you just fall up, you know that?” said the bald man. His voice was a little breathy, on the far side of rage. Simon had once had blond waves back when they were in college, and maybe he could have attracted people if he hadn’t been such an insufferable ass about his damn dorm room start-ups. Everything had to be disrupted, or out to change the world, or some other nonsensical bullshit.
“So you’re saying that my success is your fault,” the Knight argued, mostly to get Simon to quit throwing electrical waves at him. Maybe he could distract the guy for a moment. “Does that make you a failure or a success?”
The other man grunted and wasted no time sending out another beam of energy. This was about to go shit-end up, Dirk thought.
“You got lucky,” Simon spat. “You and your goddamn Christmas trust fund money, pitching in during second semester when I needed a break. I could have GOTTEN THE GODDAMN LOAN, except you and your STUPID LUCK, and then you profited from ME! Without putting in a SECOND of work!”
There was an energy surge, and the Steel Knight fell backward. Dirk watched the other man approach and tower over him.
“You’ve done pretty well without my help in the meantime!” he shouted in reply. “I sold you back the shares I owned!”
“At a rock bottom price!” Simon raised his hands again, but Dirk went on.
