by Megan Crane
He had to be.
And she was the unlikely person to do it, because she was the only one who knew what was coming. He might suspect it, but she could tell he thought he was being paranoid. Jenna knew.
‘You have a terrifying look on your face,’ Ken said, interrupting her reverie. ‘I’m proud of you for taking one for the team, kiddo,’ he said with a smile. ‘But I’m not going to lie and tell you I think it’s anything but a crappy job.’ He sighed, not unhappily. ‘And now I have to go kiss Chuck’s ass. What I need you to do is take a break from the Wild Boys and do something with this office, so I can work again. Can you do that?’
‘Of course I can do that,’ Jenna assured him, with the sort of cool confidence she imagined Aunt Jen, organizer extraordinaire, might exude.
‘That is way cool,’ Ken said, sounding relieved. He came around the side of the desk. ‘Because I can’t take the clutter any more. I can’t find anything. You’re my saviour.’ He grinned. ‘I’ve got to book. I’ll see you in few hours, when Chuck finishes yelling and screaming.’
Chuck, Jenna knew, was Chuck Arendt, the CEO. Once the best of friends, Chuck and Ken had fallen out by the late Eighties, though no one knew exactly why. People claimed it was because Chuck was jealous that Ken was seen as the creative genius behind Video TV, and felt he was equally responsible. Ken didn’t bother to explain, he just scurried out of the room, taking his absurdly bright jacket with him.
Which left Jenna with the unenviable task of having to neaten up and organize his disaster of an office in Aunt Jen style. Not something she was at all sure she could do, actually.
The good news, she discovered quickly, was that he had been unable to completely undo, in a few short weeks, the spectacularly well-organized system Aunt Jen had implemented. Once Jenna sorted through the immediate mess, the architecture behind it was sound. Which meant she could turn her head off and let it return to its new favourite subject: Tommy’s approaching demise.
Jenna’s mind raced. If he was really Tommy’s killer, how had Duncan gotten away with it? Had he really used Eugenia? That seemed unlikely – she might be one hundred and sixty-seven people away from the throne of England, but that didn’t mean she was a good choice for a partner in crime. Given how confrontational she was, and how much Duncan seemed to enjoy talking down to her, Jenna couldn’t imagine him conspiring with her at all. On the other hand, the two of them were involved in an elaborate charade involving her supposed engagement to Tommy, just to hide their affair. So who knew what was more unlikely for such people?
Having watched every single episode of The Sopranos, Jenna had all kinds of ideas about nearby places where Duncan might have disposed of poor Tommy. She needed to think no further than the New Jersey Meadowlands, a place she saw only when flying into Newark airport, but which her imagination insisted was brimming with mafia-discarded remains. She repressed a shiver.
Was Duncan a shooter? Or did he plan to bash Tommy over the head with something – after all, he was stocky enough to do some damage? Jenna’s head whirled with one grisly image after another, until she had to stop before she completely freaked herself out. It was hard enough to walk around the far more dangerous New York she found herself in these days, let alone imagining a murderous Duncan Paradis with a chainsaw, for the love of all that was holy.
She had calmed herself down and was sitting at her desk, going through Ken’s mail, when he came rushing back in the door a few hours later.
‘Why didn’t you tell me that the Wild Boys are going to start shooting the video for the new single next week?’ he demanded in lieu of a greeting. ‘Dante La Rue pulled me aside after the meeting and told me his secretary had given him the message, but he didn’t know how I didn’t already know about the shoot.’
‘I don’t know anything about it either,’ Jenna assured him. ‘They don’t give me a schedule, Ken. They do whatever it is they’re doing and allow me to tag along.’
Ken stood there, his skinny arms propped on his skinny hips, his glaring yellow jacket brightening up the whole room, and not in a good way. Jenna was tempted to pull out her sunglasses.
‘That needs to change,’ he said. ‘I can’t be kept in the dark. They must have some kind of schedule somewhere. Tell them you need it.’
‘I will,’ Jenna promised. She indicated his office, behind her. ‘I think you’ll find everything is back the way you like it.’
Smiling, Ken walked into his office. Jenna followed. Ken beamed as he saw the neat desk, all the piles he’d left for her no more than a memory.
‘You are truly a miracle worker,’ he told her with a happy sigh.
Which is what she tried to tell herself a little bit later, as she walked from the subway through the Village on her way to the town house again. Maybe she wasn’t actually a miracle worker, but she did have the advantage of not only having been through 1987 before, but having been obsessed with it ever after. She had so many facts about the last few months of Tommy’s life running through her brain that she could probably write an encyclopedia on them.
Maybe it was the fact that she’d just spent hours face to face with organizational genius, but it occurred to her that if she wanted to help Tommy avoid his fate, she should, well, get organized.
Thank you, Aunt Jen, she thought, sending that thought spinning out away from her, into whatever mysterious void had brought her here. I hope you really are in my twenty-first-century life, because I think you’ll enjoy low-waisted jeans. You deserve to look that good, and so much less hippy.
And then she climbed up the front stairs, succumbed to her second entrance exam of the day, and went in search of a pen and paper.
She would start writing down every little fact she could remember about this period. Surely, now that she was actually in 1987 instead of thinking back on it from years in the future, she’d be able to discern some pattern. Some answer. Something.
She found a notebook and a pen in the library, and settled herself on one of the couches.
Tommy had started to trust her – or, at any rate, had stopped disliking her quite so intensely. This, then, was the very least she could do for the fantasy she’d loved for so long and the real man she’d only just begun to admire. The very least.
It wasn’t working a miracle, she thought as she began to write, but it was a start.
Present
Destiny is just another word you use
Don’t you wonder what it means?
I’m too afraid to ask the question
Too many shadows in between.
The Wild Boys, ‘Careless Lips Kill Relationships’
I only know the stars you claim
Constellations without name
Wherever there is fire, wherever it is bright
Carve our hearts into the night
I am celestially yours.
The Wild Boys, ‘Celestially Yours’
13
The secretary was getting to him.
There was nothing about her that should have interested him in the slightest, and interested was a strong word to begin with, Tommy thought while sitting through another interminable photo shoot. Interested made it sound like he was hot for her, which he wasn’t. Because that was impossible.
He could see her through the mirror, while the stylists worked on his hair, plumping it up and out, because the photographer had a vision that apparently involved big hair and a serious amount of gel.
She wasn’t ugly. She was probably cute, as far as regular people went. Her name was Jenna, which struck him as a little silly. She had masses of dark, curly hair, which today she had piled up on the top of her head in a huge, lopsided ponytail. Big brown eyes, too, that he’d seen widen in astonishment and narrow in anger and glaze over with desire, for that matter, though why he’d spent any time thinking about her eyes, he didn’t know.
She wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t going to grace the covers of any magazines any time soon, which had been Tommy’s main criterion for sexual
partners ever since the Wild Boys hit it big. He liked models. They always looked good in photographs, and could be depended upon to dress for the camera no matter where they were going. They inspired envy and admiration wherever they went, like luxury sports cars. And they were unlikely to trick him into unburdening himself in the back garden of the town house, as their main topics of conversation were themselves and which other models had finally succumbed to fat.
He couldn’t see Jenna’s clavicle from across the loft space that was serving as the shoot location, which should have automatically excluded her from his consideration. Not that he was considering her.
On the other hand, he’d been staring at her for whole minutes now, and it wasn’t the first time, either. Tommy forced himself to look away. Nick was sitting in the next chair, surrendering to full make-up, and was likely to start noticing if Tommy wasn’t careful, given Nick’s brooding attention to everything and everyone these days. Tommy couldn’t afford to have Nick crawling up his ass about some nonentity of a secretary, not now.
What the hell was the matter with him?
His new policy, developed over the past few years as he’d realized that he was little more than a hamster running endless circles on a wheel inside Duncan Paradis’s cage, was to stop lying to himself. He’d gotten so good at it. A consequence, maybe, of selling his soul at the tender age of twenty-two. But that was over now, and it was unflinching honesty for him, even – especially – when it hurt.
So Tommy had to admit the truth as he sat there on the stool, eyeing himself in the mirrors and seeing her behind him. Somehow, for some reason, she was getting under his skin. The worst part was, she wasn’t even doing anything. She wasn’t prancing around in something alluring, or trying to tempt him. She was sitting across the room with a paperback cracked open in front of her, wearing tight jeans tucked into slouchy boots and one of those off-the-shoulder sweatshirts all the girls were forever tugging back up, drawing attention to the curve of their arms and the slopes of their breasts. Objectively, sure, she was cute, he guessed. But she wasn’t anything special. She wasn’t a luxury sports car. She was a Chevy. No one else in the room even glanced at her.
And here he was, unable to look away.
It had been one thing when she had been in the grip of the groupie virus. She’d gazed at him with that dazed look in her eyes, no doubt dreaming of her favourite fantasy involving whatever character he was in her head. He’d figured he could use that to his advantage. She’d claimed she hadn’t slept with Duncan Paradis – which Tommy had believed since Duncan was definitely more about the blow job when it came to underlings and nonentities – so Tommy saw no reason why he shouldn’t use her own rich fantasy life against her. Clearly, she wanted to sleep with Tommy Seer, and who was he to turn her down when it was a means to his own ends?
The first surprising thing about Jenna Jenkins was the fact she’d stopped him. Not only had she stopped him, but she’d been so horrified. Mostly in such scenarios, the groupie in question never noticed that he wasn’t into it. But he could still remember with perfect clarity the way her voice had shaken, the way she’d told him she didn’t want to seal the deal with him. Why that should continue to fascinate him, interrupting his thoughts at strange moments, he couldn’t say.
Then she’d been around all the time. Sitting in the lounge every day, smiling. Not prattling on about herself. Not whining for attention. Not intruding, or throwing out unsolicited suggestions or critiques about the music. Not even trying particularly hard to befriend the other members of the band. He’d found himself irrationally annoyed by her very unobtrusiveness.
Which, of course, he had dealt with by being as obnoxious as possible.
‘You need to leave that poor girl alone,’ Sebastian had chided him after a particularly frustrating day, when he’d actually gone out of his way to insult her and though he’d seen the heat rise in her cheeks, she’d only smiled politely in return. He knew she could stand up for herself, so why didn’t she?
‘She’s Duncan’s spy,’ he’d snapped at Sebastian.
‘You’re being an asshole,’ Sebastian had retorted, and had then proceeded to spend the afternoon chatting with her, to rub it in.
The longer she sat around doing nothing, being unfailingly pleasant and polite no matter the provocation, the more he had the urge to ruffle her feathers. He acted like the sullen teenager he’d been long ago. He was rude. He lounged around in various states of undress, to prompt the groupie reaction. And the longer it went on, she gazed at him with those big glazed calf eyes less and less. Which for some reason outraged him. He, who had maintained a firm no-groupie policy in recent years – it was too much like masturbation, and not in a good way – was furious that she was losing that groupie glow.
So, naturally, he’d made it all worse by confiding his paranoid delusions to her.
On the scale of epically bad ideas, that had to rank at the top, right under signing away his life to Duncan Paradis. He didn’t know this girl. He didn’t want to know this girl. So he was completely unable to figure out how he’d found himself talking to her about things he never, ever talked about.
And now, once again, he was brooding and staring at her. Like a lovesick puppy. It was embarrassing. It had to stop.
So of course she chose that moment to look up from her book, adjust the sleeve that had crept down her arm to expose the tender joint of her arm and shoulder, see him in the mirrors, and smile.
Politely.
Damn her.
Hours later, Tommy’s cheeks ached from all the smiling and pouting. He was happy to take a break while they did something with the lights, and wardrobe was consulted about Richie’s spandex jumpsuit.
He was sick of having his picture taken, to tell the truth, but had surrendered to vanity like anyone else and had experimented to figure out how to make sure to take a good picture anyway. Sebastian, of course, had been born with such knowledge. Tommy had spent more time than he cared to admit in various poses in front of his mirror. It only took a few unflattering pictures in the tabloids – which band mates were sure to plaster across tour buses forever – to convince a man that he’d be better off discovering his good side.
Even Nick, who had once threatened a photographer with biological improbabilities if he didn’t stop taking his picture, had given in. At the moment, he was standing in front of a bank of mirrors, in a wide stance that would have been more appropriate for sports of some kind, simmering at himself.
‘You look like you have gas,’ Tommy offered helpfully.
Nick ignored him, trying the look from different angles.
‘I hated those Vanity Fair pictures last month,’ he muttered. ‘I had a double chin in half of them.’
Tommy sighed by way of an answer. Nick might as well be asking if he looked fat in his pants. Tommy refused to respond for both their sakes.
‘That’s easy for you to say,’ Nick said, glaring at him as if he’d said something. ‘You’re the pretty-boy lead singer. The world would end if a hair of yours was out of place. The rest of us, who cares?’
‘You’re pretty too, Nick,’ Tommy said drily. Then laughed when his oldest friend scowled and gave him the finger. He turned away from the mirrors and looked around the loft. It buzzed with activity, as it had since they’d arrived that morning. Stylists and PR lackeys and record-company people, all milling around having low-volume conversations. The photographer was deep in conversation with Sebastian, no doubt hearing Sebastian’s numerous thoughts on how best to preserve and enhance the Wild Boys’ image while still achieving the photographer’s vision. Richie was standing near the windows while the spandex controversy raged around him, staring out over Manhattan and smoking a cigarette.
She was still sitting quietly on the same couch. Tommy was irritated. How could she sit still for so long? Why didn’t she have to take breaks, go to the bathroom, whatever else? It was unnatural.
So unnatural, in fact, that he crossed the room to tell her so
. ‘Your ass must be numb,’ he heard himself say.
She had watched him approach with that frozen sort of smile he knew she used only on him. And, now that he considered it, on Duncan, which infuriated him. It was obviously automatic, as she waited for the other shoe to drop. The sort of smile she might give a wild animal. Now, her eyebrows crept high on her forehead.
‘Excuse me?’
Tommy gestured at the couch, grimly aware that not only did he sound like a lunatic, but the gloriously deconstructed jacket that he wore – the stylist’s words, not his – had a leather fringe hanging from the sleeves that waved when he moved. He felt like a bullfighter, only more absurd.
‘You’ve been sitting in the same position for hours,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ She thought he was insane. He could see it in her eyes. He felt insane.
‘Did Eugenia let anything slip yet?’ he asked, as if his leather fringe were not waving in front of her nose. As if that had been the reason he’d come over to speak to her.
Jenna looked startled. She straightened in her seat.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Well. Yesterday she told me the story of how she started in modelling.’
‘I’m sure that must have been fascinating.’
‘And today she said something about her mother.’ Her face lit up with laughter as she looked at him. He felt it everywhere, like a kind of ache. ‘I’m going to consider it progress.’
He wanted to sleep with her.
Tommy stared down at her, his mind racing, confused. His body was far more direct. It announced itself in the wholly unwelcome pressure in his groin, a situation not at all helped by the fact he was wearing a pair of white leather trousers that might as well have been painted on.
He couldn’t possibly want to sleep with her.
