by Eva Luxe
“You piece of shit!” Brad shouted and ran toward the flashing camera.
A man stood at the start of the dirt road with a camera around his neck, snapping photos as Brad ran stark naked toward him, his hand swinging in the air.
The cameraman turned around and ran away. I heard a motorbike engine start and pull off, and Brad screaming and shouting profanities. I sat on the blanket, frozen for a second. It had been a camera.
He’d had a camera, and he’d taken photos of us. Naked. On top of each other. It didn’t matter that the blanket was around me now. It hadn’t been, then.
I had been seen naked with Brad, and they had photos.
Brad came back. He didn’t seem to care at all that he was naked. I snapped back to reality and scrambled for my clothes. I got dressed as quickly as I could.
“He got away,” Brad said. He seemed upset about it. I was, too.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Carly, don’t run away,” he said, grabbing my wrist when I tried to run to my car. “Please, we have to talk about this.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk about it. There’s nothing to say. This was a terrible mistake. I shouldn’t have come here.”
“The cameraman was out of line completely, but you can’t tell me this was a mistake.”
I shook my head. I felt like crying. I had no control over this, and it scared the hell out of me. A fight had turned into passion, and now, it had turned into a nightmare. I had to get out of here and into my own room, hiding away from the world that had now seen a side of me that I hadn’t even known existed until tonight.
“Let me go, Brad,” I said.
“Not until we talk.”
I yanked my hand back with a shout. “I said let me go!”
I stormed to my car and got into it, throwing it into reverse. Brad jumped out of the way. He knew I wouldn’t look out for him. When I made up my mind about something, I could be really set in my ways.
I raced to the dirt road that led down the hill. I hurried as fast as I could, and left Brad alone in the dark on the hill that had once been our spot.
It was all ruined now, of course. It wasn’t our spot anymore. It was a place of nightmares. Everything had gone wrong there tonight, and I didn’t want to go back. Ever. Again.
Chapter 16
Brad
My phone rang shrilly and incessantly until I rolled over and snatched it off the nightstand. I lay on my stomach, my face in the pillows, and pressed the phone against my ear.
“Do you get a kick out of doing exactly what I asked you not to do?” Kina’s voice asked, and she sounded pissed.
“What?” I asked, trying to figure out what she was talking about. My head was still foggy with sleep.
“Is this some kind of joke to you? I’m helping you out, free of charge, and you’re throwing it back in my face.”
I sat up, rubbing my eyes. “Kina, slow down,” I said. “What happened?”
She laughed sarcastically. “It has to be nice living in the land of oblivion.”
I heard Jacob in the background, telling Kina to calm down.
“The hell I’m going to calm down. If he wants to be a dick, fine, but this comes back to me. And I’m not even getting paid for it.”
She was talking to Jacob, but she hadn’t taken the phone away from her ear, and I heard every word of it loud and clear.
“Still here,” I said, getting out of bed.
“Good, so you heard it,” she snapped. “I’m curious, why did you bother to call me about your image back in Laramie if you don’t care at all?”
I shook my head. “What are you talking about? Of course, I care. I’ve been trying my best to defuse the situation here.”
Kina laughed again, and I was starting to get irritated with it.
“Yeah, sure. You defused it perfectly. Having a date with a local is exactly what you need to do to get the press off your case. Well done, Brad.”
God, she was bitchy when she was angry. How did Jacob deal with this? I heard him plead with her to calm down in the background, but I had a feeling it wasn’t going to happen. She was angry, and if she knew I’d seen Carly last night, she had found out somewhere else because I hadn’t told Jacob that I was going to see Carly. Unless she was referring to our drinks together, which was where the press must have seen us in the first place.
“I’m allowed to go out with people,” I said.
“Sure, you are,” Kina said. “But you can’t do what everyone else does when you’re being watched like a hawk. You can’t mess around like that.”
I shook my head. “It was just a date, Kina. Surely that’s not a crime, even when the world watches me?”
“Yeah, well a date is fine, but getting naked in public isn’t quite what the world had in mind.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, but the moment I asked it, last night rushed back to me. The photo that they had gotten, the flash, the man on the motorcycle.
“Just hold on,” I said to Kina.
I walked into the living room, picked up the remote, and switched on the television. I flipped to the news channel. And there it was. The reason Kina was so mad at me. Photos of me and Carly on the blanket last night were scattered all over the show. Our bodies were blurred out in all the right places, but it wasn’t hard to guess what we’d been doing.
“Shit,” I said.
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Kina said coldly. I could understand why she was so angry now. I had done exactly what she’d asked me not to do. It hadn’t been on purpose, but there it was.
The whole thing last night had felt like a bad dream. I’d found out the hard way that my attempts to shake the press hadn’t worked. I’d been so proud of myself that I’d gotten away from them, believing that my car had been fast enough, that my driving had been skilled enough.
Like an idiot, I had believed I’d won. As if there was ever winning against the paparazzi. They always knew how to find someone, how to get to the bottom of a story, no matter how invasive they had to be.
I should have known better. Instead, I was plastered all over the news with Carly, and we were both naked. I had subjected her to the side effects of being with someone famous in a way much worse than it would have been if we’d gone dancing together.
There was so much that needed to be done now to clear this up. It was so much harder to get rid of bad publicity than to earn good publicity, and this was very bad.
For a moment, I wondered if I should get a PR Manager of my own, someone that could help me out the way Kina had helped Jacob when he’d been transferred from Texas with an assault charge on his name and very few fans that cared about him.
“I’ll call you back, Kina,” I said. “I’m sorry about this.”
“Don’t be sorry, be careful,” she said. “We’ll have to fix this.”
“I’ll figure something out.”
I hung up. I wondered how this would impact me. It put me in a bad light, sure. There would be gossip for months, not to mention that they would hunt Carly down now to find out who she was and where she fit into the picture.
The upside was that it had nothing to do with alcohol or drugs, so it wouldn’t directly affect my game, but Coach Rudi wasn’t happy with his players being on the news for anything. Even scandals with women, which was what the Sharks seemed to be infamous for most of the time. At least three of my teammates had been involved in scandals with women that I knew about.
What bothered me the most was how this would affect Carly. Her life would never be the same again. If this blew over— and that might take time— she would always be marked as the woman who was caught sleeping with Brad Williams, famous football player. She would carry this with her for a long time to come, and that was what I’d hoped to avoid. God, what a mess.
I dialed her number and waited for it to ring. I hoped she would answer. I needed to talk to her. I needed to find out if she was okay. No doubt, she had seen the new
s already. She had been frantic last night about the photo, horrified that she had been caught in such a compromising position.
She wasn’t answering her phone. I had half expected it, although it pissed me off. I needed to talk to her. When something like this happened, we had to stick together, not ignore each other.
When I got her voicemail, I hung up without leaving a message and dialed again. If I kept ringing her, she had to answer. She had to pick up the phone and talk to me. I hated it when she was ignoring me like this. It wasn’t the first time. Lately, it seemed like it was all she did.
When I’d tried a few times, I decided to stop. It was no use if she wasn’t going to answer. Maybe she wasn’t with her phone, and I would end up looking like a creeper. I doubted she wasn’t near her phone, though.
My phone beeped with a text message a few minutes later.
I don’t want to talk to you. You’ve ruined my life.
I was suddenly furious. Who the hell did she think she was, blaming me for this? If she didn’t want to talk, we could text.
It takes two to tango, sweetheart. I wasn’t naked and willing all by myself.
Maybe it was a little snappy for me, but I was angry that she was blaming me for this. It wasn’t my fault. I had tried to protect her, after all. I had thought our spot would be secluded enough. I had thought that nothing would go wrong. Everything I had done was to protect her. Turned out that I had thought wrong.
That’s rich, Brad. Leave me alone.
She wasn’t even going to fight with me. I wanted something— anything— from her. I needed to talk to her, so we could sort it out. At least that, if nothing else. I sent more messages, but she stopped replying. This was what she did best, I realized. She withdrew.
When her dad had dragged her away all those years ago, I had felt guilty for not fighting enough for her. When I’d walked away from her on graduation day, I had felt like a fool for leaving the girl I loved. This time, it was all her. She was walking away from this. She wasn’t fighting for it.
But why should she? What were we? I had no idea where we stood, and whatever we might have been before was over now. I was sure of it.
I sank down onto the couch, my head in my hands. I knew this feeling too well. The feeling of losing Carly. The feeling of being talked about and judged by people who didn’t know me.
I hated it when something like this happened. Until now, I had been lucky. I hadn’t been involved in any scandals. That had mainly been because I hadn’t been interested in much, other than playing my game and doing my training and spending time with the few friends I had. Since Carly, I even been with any other women. I couldn’t get her out of my head for all these years and now that I’d been able to be with her again, I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life with that same issue.
Was this what it had been like for Jacob, as well as for Hanson and Brian? My three closest friends on my team had all been through scandals with women.
A knock on the front door pulled me out of the spiral of my thoughts. My mom wasn’t home, it seemed, so I got up and walked to the door.
When I opened it, Charles Donovan stood in front of me. He was seething with rage, and I had seen this look on him before. He had that same look in his eyes that he’d had when he’d pinned me against the wall and threatened me, telling me to stay away from Carly. I was pretty sure he probably brought a gun again.
I opened my mouth to speak, but he didn’t let me get that far. His fist shot out, and he punched me in the nose with a force that made my head snap back. I staggered to keep my balance.
“I told you not to come around here,” he said, sneering at me.
I pressed my hand against my nose, and it came away red and wet. I was gushing blood onto my shirt. My nose ached, and my head throbbed. Charles turned around and stormed away.
Maybe I deserved that. I closed the front door and walked to the bathroom, my shirt pressed against my nose. It was full of blood, anyway. I tried to get the bleeding to stop with tissues and a cold, wet washcloth. Still, it took a while for the bleeding to stop.
When I finally managed it, I turned and inspected my face in the mirror. I had blood on my upper lip and chin, and my shirt was stained with so much blood it looked like I’d been shot. My head still ached, but it was no match for how horrid I felt.
I was reliving that day, six years ago, all over again. He hadn’t assaulted me then, not like this. It had been scary, but it hadn’t hurt. This time, it hurt like a bitch. Not only physically, but my ego was pretty damn dented.
I didn’t blame him for hitting me, though. Not this time. His daughter was naked, all over the news, and it was all my fault. This time, he was within his right to tell me to stay away from her. What was worse was that he hadn’t even needed to tell me to stay away from her. She was enforcing that all by herself, telling me to leave her alone.
I picked up my phone and tried to call her again. It was like Kina said: I did exactly what I was told not to do. Pity that Carly still didn’t answer. Not that I’d expected her to. I’m just not the type of guy to give up.
Chapter 17
Carly
Brad wouldn’t stop trying to call me. He refused to give up. Maybe when I had been younger, and I had still wanted him to pursue me, I would have appreciated his attempts to get me back. Now, I wanted him to leave me alone. I wanted nothing to do with him.
There was no point talking to him anymore. It didn’t matter how well we got along, how much it felt like we connected the way it used to be. He had ruined my life. I should have known better than to get involved with the man who had broken my heart once before. But time had numbed the pain from before, and I had been willing to give him another chance.
That had been a mistake. I couldn’t be a part of the scandal that was all over the news. I had known that Brad’s life was all over the papers all the time—there was a reason I’d known as much about him as I did when he’d arrived—but I couldn’t be a part of that.
For a short while, everything had been perfect. Brad and I had been the way we’d been once upon a time, perfectly matched together. I would even dare say in love. But we weren’t the same people anymore. We had grown apart; our lives were different now.
My dad came into the living room where I was watching television and froze when he saw me. He was still furious. It was all over his face.
He rubbed his hands, one over the other. For a moment, I thought he was going to say something to me, but instead, he turned around and walked out again without saying a word. We hadn’t spoken since the fight we’d had when my dad had switched on the news and seen me naked on the TV screen.
I had still been in the bedroom. He’d shouted about it so loudly that I had come out of the room to see what was going on.
“That little shit doesn’t know when to quit, does he?” he’d shouted. “As soon as I saw it on the news, I put two and two together and figured out who he is. And that you’re still disobeying me to go sneak out and be with him. Look how far that’s gotten you. All over the news. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
My mom had tried to calm him down. I had walked in, seen the images, and felt like I was going to faint.
“I don’t even want to know what your excuse is for this one,” my dad had said, pointing right in my face. “The first time, I could have said that he’d seduced you, but this time you were a clear participant.”
He’d pointed at the television. His anger had been so thick, it had filled the room. I had matched his anger with my own.
“I’m not a kid anymore, and if I like a guy, I can do what I want!” I’d shouted right back. I had never been the type to roll over and die when it concerned my dad and his ridiculous rules. Or, at least since that fateful day when he’d caught me with Brad.
“Graduation,” he’d said. “That was our agreement.”
“It was your agreement, Dad. Not mine. I’m twenty-five years old.”
“See if I pay your student loans now
,” he’d said before storming out of the house, leaving me behind in the wake of his fury.
Well, at some point this would have had to have come to a head. I’d probably have student loans until I was fifty. While I’m sure my dad would have enjoyed holding that over my head, it wasn’t practical to have to do what he wanted just due to financial strings attached to the arrangement.
I turned my attention back to the TV, trying to subdue my emotions. My mom came in and sat down next to me.
“You know he’s only trying to protect you,” she said.
“From what? Living my life?”
My mom sighed. “I know what you’re saying, honey, but he means well.”
After a while, my dad walked in again. His hand was red and swollen.
“What did you do?” I asked when I saw his hand. My dad looked at me, his face a mix of rage and guilt. “Did you go over there? Did you hurt him?”
My dad hesitated a moment, long enough for me to know that it was true.
“I told him a long time ago not to come around here anyway,” he said. “To leave you alone. Did he think I was kidding?”
“He didn’t come around here!” I cried. “I went out to meet him. What the hell, Daddy? What did you do?”
“Don’t you dare take that tone with me,” my dad said, but his rage wasn’t as much as before. Or maybe mine was enough to match it now.
My mom cleared her throat. “Charles,” she said in the way she used to say my name when I had done something wrong and she was going to reprimand me. “What did you do?”
“The bastard deserved it,” he said, but there was uncertainty in his voice now. “God, it’s nothing he won’t recover from. But he was with Carly, Denise. He let them put her all over the news. What was I supposed to do?”
“He didn’t let them, Dad,” I protested. “He didn’t know they were going to do it. And he couldn’t stop them from doing it.”
As I said it, I realized I was a hypocrite. I was mad at Brad for letting these things happen to me even though, when I was really being honest with myself, I knew the truth.
