by Milly Taiden
“Jet, baby. Someone’s here to see you.”
He groaned and sat up in the bed. I could see him easily from the doorway. “Tell them to go away. I have a fucking hangover.”
Tina looked at me and laughed. “Oh, God, you should see your face. Shocked? You shouldn’t be, he doesn’t do the whole monogamy thing. You’re an idiot.”
Jet stood, buck naked, and I turned away before I got more of a view than I bargained for. I refused to remember him like this, hung over and in another woman’s bed. Heart beating erratically, I tipped my head at Tina.
“Enjoy your time together.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
I didn’t answer her, just walked away. I didn’t run, though I wanted to. I didn’t cry, though that was something I wanted to do, as well.
Everyone had been right and I’d been a naive fool to believe for one second that Jet Sterling was anything but a womanizing asshole. Chin high, I strode down the hallway and out of the hotel.
I stared into the street, waiting at a taxi stand outside the hotel, hoping I could hold it together long enough to get away from here. Away from Jet.
From behind me, I could hear footsteps; I knew it was Jet, but kept my back to him. I didn’t owe him anything. His breathing was uneven, as if he’d run to catch me. But why would he care now?
“Don’t bother, Jet. You made your choice loud and clear.”
A large set of hands spun me around to face him, and I gasped at the pressure he put into holding me firm. For one tiny sliver of a second, I thought he was going to apologize, to tell me he was sorry.
I was so very, very wrong.
“What the hell? Are you turning into Elise? Stalking me everywhere I go? Going to tell people we’re a couple now when we fucking well aren’t?”
I gasped and kicked at him, missing miserably. “Let me go!”
Our eyes met and I saw the pain in his, but I didn’t care, or at least told myself I didn’t. If he wanted Tina and the women like her, the ones who would use him and treat him like a tool to further their careers, then so be it.
“I said, let me go!” I tried to jerk out of his hands, but he wasn’t loosening up a bit.
“Jasmin?” Reggie’s voice caught me off guard. His hands were pulling me out of Jet’s, prying at his fingers, his blue eyes full of worry. He turned to his friend. “Jet, man, let her go.”
Jet did let me go, but not for any good reason.
He took a swing at Reggie, catching him in the side of the face. Busting open his friend’s lip.
“Jet, what are you doing?” I put myself between the two men, but Reggie grabbed me and pushed me aside, speaking low and calm.
“Jasmin, you’ve got to go. I’ll deal with him. You’ve got to go. Now.”
As if on cue, a cab pulled up and the passenger door opened.
But I couldn’t leave. In front of me, Jet breathed hard, his eyes wild with anger and pain, like a tempest raged inside of him, just waiting to be unleashed. On me. On Reggie, who’d put himself between me and Jet.
Jet didn’t for one second resemble the stuntman I’d thought I was falling for.
“Jasmin, get the hell out of here!” Reggie shoved me toward the cab, turning his back on Jet. And that’s when all hell broke loose.
Jet punched the Reggie in the ribs, and Reggie spun, clocking Jet in the jaw with a sharp right hook.
They tangled, fists flying, heads butting, blood spurting from their lips and noses. This was not play fighting; they were after blood. How could Jet do this, to his mentor of all people?
I tried to pull Jet off, grabbed his arm when he cocked it for another blow. “Jet, stop!”
He didn’t answer me, just shoved me back. I tripped over my feet and hit the sidewalk hard, scraping my hands and knocking the wind out of me.
They were still going at it, but now Jet had the upper hand. Jet held his mentor by the shirt at waist level while he continued to pummel his friend’s face. Reggie’s eyes were closed and I saw him go limp.
Jet was going to kill him.
Gasping for air, I pushed myself to my feet and ran toward Jet’s back, jumping onto it, wrapping my arms around his neck, but I wasn’t trying to hurt him.
“Just breathe.”
Jet let out a roar of anger as the distant sound of sirens reached us, but he stopped swinging. I slid from his back, stunned at the transformation in him, as he let Reggie slide to the ground. I crouched beside the older man, checked his pulse. It was steady, but he was out cold.
Jet grabbed my arm and lifted me away from Reggie, glaring at me. Who was he? Not the Jet I knew. This was what he’d been hiding. Not the secrets of his past, but this dark, mean, ugly side. A side I wanted nothing to do with. I jerked away from him, and this time he let me go.
“Go back to your life, Jethro. Go back to your pitiful, empty life.” Tears trickled down my face and that only fed my anger, like gasoline on a fire.
I was so angry and afraid that the words snarled in my throat, choking me, stopping me from saying even one more thing.
Jet spun to face me, chest heaving, muscles glistening with sweat, blood dripping from his lips.
“Jasper called me. You fucking well told him that you knew!” He roared, eyes pinning me to the cab. I hadn’t even realized I’d stepped back, an instinctive reaction to this man I did not know.
I closed my eyes, anger and fear quickly mingling with shame. “I was trying to help. I didn’t want him to be so angry at you.”
“You didn’t help! You made it worse! He fucking well hated me before, now . . .” He spun away, grabbed at his hair. “He will never trust me again. Because you couldn’t keep your fat mouth shut.”
I cringed against the cab. Wait, why was I cringing? I’d done nothing wrong. “Listen here, asshole!”
He swung toward me, his eyes going wide, and I held my hand up to him to keep him from saying anything, no longer caring. If he took a swing at me, so be it, but I would not let him think I would let him talk to me like this, not even after seeing Reggie get pummeled.
“I didn’t say anything that would lead him to believe I knew anything about his past. I told him that I hoped you two could work out whatever it was you were fighting about. I told him that you loved him and I hated to see you hurt. But I never fucking said anything about your secrets.”
I slid into the cab and slammed the door behind me. “Airport” was all I managed to say to the cabbie before the hot tears poured down my face.
How could things have gone so wrong, so fast? How could I have thought for one minute that I loved him?
The taxi dropped me off at the main entrance of the airport and I found a bathroom to clean up in before going to my gate.
I didn’t look in the mirror, just put cool paper towels on my cheeks and eyes, let the heat from the tears and angers leak out. A quick glance once I’d cleaned my face up showed me I had made the right choice not to look at the mirror too closely before. Wrecked, I looked wrecked.
The lineup for my flight was already moving by the time I got through security and found my departure gate. I’d had to beg Lily for some money in order to get my flight bumped up. I literally had nothing left in my bank account, the small advance gone except for a few dollars. Zero, zilch, nada. If I couldn’t salvage this job and get paid for my time with Jet, there was no way I’d be able to keep the house, or Ryan’s car. All I had was my portfolio and camera in hand because of my stupid suitcase, and yet it was almost too much. I wished I could have left the camera behind, loaded with pictures of Jet. Pictures I wanted nothing to do with anymore.
I slid into my seat on the airplane and stared at the entrance. There was more than a little part of me that thought Jet would come running onto the plane at the last instant, like a scene in a movie, beg my forgiveness, tell me he was wrong. That he would tell me it was all just a show, that he hadn’t hurt his mentor for trying to stick up for me. No, that wouldn’t happen; h
e was with Tina, and I’d seen all too clearly what Jet could do with his fists when motivated. I scowled and the lady next to me pulled her body toward the isle and away from me, her eyes wide with fear. I ignored her and nursed my anger. Better than the alternative: thinking about how much I hurt, how incredibly stupid I felt for falling under his stupid spell. The engines rumbled and the plane started to taxi; the attendants went through the damn safety speech.
I fiddled with my camera, flipped it over and started to scroll through the pictures. Most of them were of Jet. Laughing, smiling, stealing my heart without even trying. I’d told Lily I thought I was falling in love with him, but that was a lie.
The simple truth was I loved him, or at least, I loved the Jet he’d shown me. I hit the button to go back another picture, my eyes blurring with tears. The first picture of him flashed on the screen, the one where he slumped over the table, where he’d been trying to drown his past.
I hit the button again, my finger slipping to the side. A red light flashed on the camera and it asked if I wanted to delete the pictures. A large part of me did, and my finger hovered over the ok button. That’s all it would take and the pictures of Jet would be gone, and I would be able to put him behind me.
In seconds, every memory, every picture of Jet would be gone, erased. My finger eased away from the camera. Instead I slid it open, popped out the memory card and slid it into my back pocket. Less temptation that way to throw it out on the tarmac.
The anger flowed back and it kept the tears at bay. Right now, I had to focus on keeping my job, above all else. There was no way I’d salvage my budding career if I went in there cringing and crying. That didn’t mean I wasn’t scared. I was freaking terrified.
Jet was gone from my life, as I’d known he would be; I’d known it from the beginning, really, and had let myself be fooled into believing otherwise. I was an idiot, and I deserved this pain and hurt. Maybe I needed this. A reminder that dreams and love were too dangerous, too unpredictable, too high risk for anything but being spoken of in theory, not practice. At least in my life.
The attendant came by and offered drinks. I held up my hand for the mini bottle of alcohol, not caring what flavor or kind the clear liquid was.
Tequila. It burned, stole my breath for a moment, and I stopped the attendant, handed her my last ten dollar bill. “Another two.”
She smirked at me, but I didn’t care. I downed the second bottle, the numbing effect settling over my limbs, stilling my mind.
I sipped at the third one, stared out the window, and wondered if Jet missed me at all. I decided I didn’t care and tipped the bottle back.
* * * * *
Someone tapped my shoulder, and a voice asked me to get up. My mother? No, she was dead . . . everyone I loved was gone.
“Go away,” I mumbled, covering my head with my hands.
“Miss, you have to leave now, everyone else has disembarked.”
I turned bleary eyes to the same attendant who’d given me my fifth, or was it sixth bottle?
“I love him, you know. But he was an asshole,” I whispered, and then burst into tears. She helped me to my feet.
“Is there someone here to take you home?”
“Yes, I think so.” Had I remembered to call Lily, tell her when I was getting in? Vaguely, I recalled talking to her, but was it before or after I started drinking?
The attendant helped me all the way out, and then Lily was there, slinging my camera bag over her shoulder, letting me lean on her. I couldn’t stop crying.
“Oh my god, Jasmin . . . what’s wrong . . . are you drunk?”
“I don’t know. Oh, I think I’m going to be sick.”
She rushed me to the closest bathroom, where I promptly puked, not into the toilet but the sink. The other women in the bathroom sidled away from us, some with sneers on their faces, the others gagging.
I hung my head, stared at the liquid streaming down the sink. “At least there aren’t any chunks.”
Lily snorted. “That’s hardly something to be happy about.”
“You want to clean up chunks out of the sink?” I mumbled, wiping the back of my hand across my mouth.
Lily started to snicker, then let out a full laugh. “I can’t believe you’re drunk. What the hell was it anyway, beer?”
“Tequila.”
She kept laughing as she gathered me up again, and we worked through the airport and out to her little red Honda. I slumped into the passenger seat and passed out, jerking awake when the car stopped and a door slammed. I rolled my head to see Lily on my side of the car, unbuckling my seat belt.
“Come on. We’ve got to get you cleaned up. You have a meeting with Kevin in an hour.”
“What? Are you kidding me?” It was Saturday; I’d thought I had ‘til Monday to plan what I would say! Panic bloomed. I had the pictures, but I smelled like tequila, hadn’t slept the night before, and wasn’t sure I was up to facing the boss just yet.
This was a disaster beyond anything I could have imagined.
Lily helped me shower, dress and fix my hair, then left me to get me a cup of coffee. I stood there, staring into the mirror in the bathroom. What I saw was such a reversal of my image from just a day ago, or maybe the mirror in the bathroom at my hotel in Mexico had been a magic mirror, showing me what I wanted to see and not what truly was. The girl looking back at me now had hollow eyes, empty of anything except loss. I was done with dreams. They were stupid and useless and would only make you hate your life. Ryan was wrong.
I turned away, closed my eyes, and clenched my hands into fists.
Somehow I would convince Kevin that it wasn’t a mistake letting me go. I’d tell him the truth, I’d show him the pictures, outline the article I had been putting together, and explain that Jet and I were nothing more than friends.
Liar.
Well, at least I was nothing more than a friend to him, and not even that now. His anger had been so heavy, so all-encompassing, that it was hard to imagine the light-hearted stuntman I’d met less than a week ago as the same guy. How could he be the same person?
I didn’t want to believe I could be so wrong about someone, that I could fall so blindly into love with a person who’d been leading me on the whole time. Thank God I hadn’t slept with him; how much harder would this have been if I could remember the feel of him in me?
A whimper slipped out of my lips, and I clamped my hand over my mouth, something in me firming up, my spine straightening.
I would not fall; I would not let this break me.
Lily came back in and handed me a cup of black coffee. I took a sip, grimaced and kept drinking.
“Are you going to tell me what happened, what really happened?” Her summer blue eyes searched mine.
I swallowed a mouthful of the over-hot java, felt it burn the back of my throat, not unlike the tequila. “I was wrong. That’s all. Maybe I was ready to move forward and just picked the wrong guy.” A barb seemed to hook into my heart and pull upward, as if my words would yank my heart right out of my body. I put the cup down on the edge of the sink.
“Let’s go, I’ve got to convince Kevin to let me keep my job.”
Lily gave me a half smile, sad, wistful and cheeky all in one bundle. “You got it, tequila breath.”
Groaning, I let her lead me to the car, and of course, she drove.
The office building where Wild Child operated was quiet. After hours, more than half the lights were dimmed, so not like there would be anyone here to see my walk of shame if Kevin gave me the boot. I stiffened my spine and clenched the memory card in my hand. I wouldn’t go down without a fight. Besides, I could point out to Kevin that I’d learned my lesson; hell, if a man ever looked sideways at me again I was likely to punch him in the nose.
But Kevin wasn’t alone when we got there.
The other applicant, the one I’d sat next to in line for the job, pimple face, glasses and all, sat on the far side of the office, a greasy smile on his face. Paul, Mr. Acne.
“You were the kid following Jet around, weren’t you?” I said, putting the pieces together. Oh, crap, I was in trouble. If he had pictures of me and Jet together, there’d be no convincing Kevin we hadn’t been intimate. Son of a bitch.
Kevin lifted his hand and pointed to the chair in front of him. “Paul here has made some pretty serious accusations. Said you were sleeping with not only Jet Sterling, but his friend Hugh LaMer. And his evidence is, I must say, compelling.” Kevin thumbed through a stack of photos on his desk. Photos of Jet with his arms around me, Hugh lifting me onto his shoulder, one of me and Jet on the surfboards. I wanted to grab them all, take them as my own. So I could burn them one by one and hope the memories would go up in smoke with them.
I forced my tequila-fogged brain to focus as best I could. “Sir, I never broke my promise to you. I didn’t sleep with anyone. The men are extremely . . . fresh and easy with their charms. But I repeat, I did not sleep with Jet or Hugh.”
Kevin’s eyes didn’t give him away. “Hmm.” He slid through another photo and held it out to me. “And this?”
I took what he offered and stared at the photo, not really seeing it at first. How the hell had the punk ass little shit got this photo? It was a low angled shot of me and Jet on the stairs, from last night, Jet’s hands on my ass, my hands in his hair, a deep throat kiss that I could still taste. My eyes blurred. “You won’t believe me, so why should I say anything else.” I stood, hanging onto the picture.
“Hey!” Paul stood up and strode over to me. “That’s my picture.” He leaned closer to me, smirking. “And my job.”
I’m going to blame what happened next on the tequila. I slugged him, a straight uppercut that rolled his eyes to the back of his head.
“Miss Vargas!” Kevin roared, coming around the desk. “Get out before I call the police. Now!”
I leaned over and scooped the remainder of the photos of me and Jet off the desk. “I’ll take these off your hands as you won’t be needing them.”
Hands shaking, I stormed out the door, ignoring Lily’s wide eyes as I passed her.
