Bad Boys and Billionaires (The Naughty List Bundles)

by Synthia St. Claire

  “He did? I didn’t see him.” Grandpa sat down and put a wrapped up bacon and egg sandwich from the deli down on the table. “All I heard was the door slam, no car or anything. And I sure didn’t see him.”

  “You must’ve just missed him then, because... wait, did you say you heard the door slam?” I opened my sandwich and stared at it. Even in my rage, the thing was glorious. Thick, perfectly scrambled egg, crisp bacon.

  Grandpa nodded. “Yeah, door slam, then nothing.”

  I sat there in silence for a moment, wondering if maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. I thought maybe it was one of those ultra-real hallucinations people have. I looked over at the kitchen. “He was drinking that coffee over there, so unless I poured them both, drank them both, and then slammed the door, I’m not imagining it.”

  “Huh,” he grunted as he stood up and slapped his knees. “Well, I’m old, I’m sure I just didn’t notice him. My eyes aren’t what they used to be. Eat that thing before it gets cold and the fake cheese stuff they put on it you seem to like so much turns into jelly.”

  I didn’t have to hear him a second time. The first wedge of sandwich was halfway in my mouth. I sank my teeth in, thick, buttery toast, and the sharp bite of whatever it was they called garlic-cheese at the deli.

  Perfect.

  “You’re sure he was here?” Grandpa was shaking his head, hands on his hips. “Hmm.”

  “Yeah,” I said around a mouthful of egg. “Whatever though, fu – forget him.”

  I blushed, and grandpa chuckled. His eyes though, the pinched look on his face, it told a different story. A worried one, though I didn’t know what it was about.

  “Something wrong?” I said, crunching down on some bacon.

  Grandpa smiled with the left corner of his mouth, but his down-turned eyes told a much less happy story. “No, I was just thinking back. Old man reminiscing about long-gone times. Anyway, you enjoy that sandwich. I’ll be out back.”

  I barely even heard him say ‘out back’ before I took another bite.

  I don’t care. I don’t need him, don’t even want him.

  I took another bite with lots of egg.

  And if I keep thinking this stuff, eventually it might even be true.

  Four

  “Who is this?” A tiny, almost inaudible voice tittered through my phone. The person on the other end said something about an article, but it took a minute to register.

  It was almost a week since that weird visit from Damon, but I was still feeling kinda wonky about reality.

  Everything had been so stupid crazy that I’d completely forgotten about the pitch I sent to the New York Times three months before. I sent them this long, rambling abstract about a story idea based on all the whacky stuff my grandpa tells me all the time – about the werewolves, and the ghosts or whatever they are that wander Fort Branch in the darkest hours of the night. Real spooky stories some of them, but it’s all based on old folk tales, ancient magic, the kind of thing that really gets ahold of you and won’t let go.

  “I’m sorry. Did you say you’re from the Times?”

  “Yes, ma’am, this is Lily Kyle, right? You sent a story abstract?”

  My breath hitched in my chest. “Ohmygod let me go outside. Reception is terrible in the house.”

  The door slapped closed and I noticed that grandpa was gone again unannounced. Weird.

  “Okay, sorry, I live in this really old house out in the desert, and I dunno, I guess the cell signal gets so used to not being interrupted by anything that it can’t even get through regular old walls. That’s how it works, right? Kind of like working out, you know, how it never has to try to do anything so it never... Jesus. I’m nervous,” I admitted. “When I get nervous, I blabber.”

  The person on the other end of the line laughed in a non-mocking, warm way. “It’s fine. I’d rather have you ramble at me for a minute rather than just hang up like most people do when they get worked up.”

  “Really? People just straight hang up on you?” I giggled nervously, coming out of my shock a little.

  “Yeah, more than you’d expect. Anyway, so, Miss Kyle, I’m—”

  “Just Lily,” I said. “No one’s ever called me ‘miss’ anything before.”

  “All right, good. So, Lily, you sent us this,” she paused for a second, and I heard papers rumpling. “You sent a story idea about some incredible, unbelievable things. Monsters and ghosts and magic and all that, and I have to tell you, we get this stuff all the time, but something about your submission caught my attention.”

  Whoever this woman was, she had a crystal clear voice with practiced enunciation. She wasn’t the type to start throwing around ‘ain’t’, or to call the capitol ‘Warshington’. Then it struck me – I didn’t actually know who she was. “Ma’am? What’s your name?” I said.

  “Oh God, I’m sorry, I always forget that part. Jolie Evers, I’m the assistant editor in charge of cultural interest stories here at the Times.”

  “Wow,” I whispered. How cool would that be? Picking stories to run in the biggest and, well maybe one of the only, papers left.

  Ms. Evers laughed again. “It’s not as crazy as it sounds.” Both her voice, and the practiced non-regional accent started to loosen up, probably to get me to relax a little more. “Basically I’m in charge of the weekend thing that tells people which shows to go see and which movies suck. And call me Jolie. I can tell I like you already. Okay,” there was another few seconds of shuffling papers. “Graduation’s coming up pretty soon, huh?”

  She was filling time.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Or well, it was last weekend.”

  “Oh!” more shuffling, “congrats, then. Have you picked out a college?”

  I bit my lip. That was the question I learned to avoid at all costs. “No, well, there are a few that I’m looking –”

  “It took me a few tries. I went to Rutgers for six weeks, stopped going to class, the old story. Eventually I ended up in New York, took some community college credits and finished a degree at NYU. But, it took a whole lot longer than it was supposed to. I was on the seven year degree track.”

  I liked her. Really liked her. She had this cadence that was nice. And, Jolie’s quick then slow then quick rate of talking was a lot like mine, so that made me feel right at home.

  “You have no idea how nice it is to hear that.” I had somehow relaxed, and I never relax on the phone. “I’m not gonna lie, it feels like everyone expects me to go to college because I’m not like... a giant lunk, you know? But I just don’t really know.”

  “Well, if it helps, I can tell you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. Morons don’t send – okay, that’s not true. Plenty of morons send story ideas to us, but they aren’t this cool. I swear I had my notes around here somewhere, I’m sorry to waste your time like this.”

  I couldn’t tell her how nothing had been such a waste of my time as sitting around and pining for Damon had been. This short and strange little conversation was really welcome. Just a couple of minutes on the phone with this lady had me almost half-way back to normal. Or, normal for me, anyway.

  “Oh shit, here they are. Sorry. I swear out of the blue a lot too, another of my better features.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh a little. “Happens to me all the time. Grandpa says I remind him of some of his army buddies.”

  “You live with your grandpa out there? What’s that town called?” She asked.

  “Fort Branch, and yeah, I live with my Grandpa Joe. My parents died about ten years ago and he fought for me. One of my aunts wanted to raise me – she’s got a bunch of kids – but he wasn’t going to have any part of that.” I stopped for a second. “Sorry, I’m just going on and on about shit that doesn’t matter. Oops. See?”

  It was her turn to chuckle. “No, not at all, this is all great stuff. Your story idea was about the desert folk legends and the magic and mysticism that your grandpa tells you about.” I heard tapping, like she was taking notes or maybe w
riting a distracted email. “The story is as much your story as it is about werewolves and ancient spirits and all that. So, no, this is important.”

  I didn’t really know what else to say. It’s easy for me to babble when I’m nervous, but suddenly, my nerves weren’t on edge so the words didn’t come so easily. “What else do you need to know? Oh and what was it that you thought was so cool about the story? You never said.”

  “Ah,” she sighed. “Yeah, I do that too. I can’t find... oh, okay here we go. Right, what hit me about this is how real it is.”

  “Real?” I said. “They’re just stories.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. Most of the things like this that come across my desk are from whackjobs with an agenda. Yours is very, uh, earnest? By real, I mean it’s about real people and real things, not necessarily that the subjects of the folktales are real. Make sense?”

  “Yeah, I think so. You want to run my story?” I was getting so giddy I had almost started vibrating.

  More tapping on her keyboard, then Jolie said, “Yeah, but you gotta get it written first. Now, the way this works is that you write the piece and send it to me by the deadline. I look over it and tell you if there’s anything that needs re-writing, like if something doesn’t make sense, or whatever. Then we run it past our editing team who fixes comma splices and a bunch of other things I don’t care about, and we run the story.”

  “Wow,” I said again in another whisper. “I can’t believe this.”

  “Yeah, I remember when I got my first story run. Wait. Is this your first one?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Well I worked on the school paper, but nothing like this, ever.”

  “Good. Okay well first of all, there’s nothing to worry about. We don’t have any space for your piece for like three months, so there’s no rush. How about we put the deadline at the end of the summer? That way we’ll be able to go back and forth and get it just perfect before it goes out to millions of readers across the planet.”

  When she said that, my stomach at once tied in a knot, fell, and landed about a quarter-inch above my bladder. A heavy feeling settled right above the lump in my gut. And for all the stupid times for my mind to swerve back to Damon, it just had to be right then.

  More than once, when I’d been in a bad mood, or I wrote something that I thought sucked, he always told me it was good. There was one time that stuck in my mind when I spent like a month writing an article about water usage in the desert that I was sure was the most boring thing on earth. He sat there and read it, and actually asked questions afterwards. For all his weird distance, he never made me feel bad about anything I wrote.

  “Uh-oh,” Jolie said. “I didn’t mean to freak you out. You okay?”

  My phone beeped. A text came through, but I wasn’t about to stop paying attention to this for a text from anyone. As soon as I was able to realize that I didn’t have a future, I’d started fretting. That was about two years ago. Jolie, calling me from the Times, about to run my story, was the first time I’d actually felt like maybe there was a way out. If I did a good job, maybe they’d run another and another... maybe end up in New York? I had to snap myself out of that rabbit hole.

  Again, my damn phone beeped and again I ignored first the second, then the third obnoxious little chiming sound, and blinked hard. I had to focus. This was the opportunity I’d wanted for as long as I could remember.

  “No, sorry, someone keeps sending me texts so my phone is making that noise. To be honest though, when you said millions, it kinda hit me that this whole thing was actually real, you know?”

  “Ha, yeah, I get that. It’ll be fine, I promise. That’s why I want to make sure you’ve got plenty of time for editing and everything. Now what I’m going to need from you is...”

  Jolie told me all about the deadline, the word count and everything else she required from me, but the whole time all I could think about was the strange stuff that happened with Damon, despite my attempt to pay attention.

  I was just... a mess. I was sitting there on the phone, listening to the biggest opportunity of my life and I couldn’t make myself pay attention to her. She kept going on about werewolf this, ancient magic that, but none of it could get through the feedback loop in my head.

  Damon and me, that’s all it was, all that went through my mind. The way he kissed me after so long, and those words he said – that he wanted to tell me, but just couldn’t to protect me – and asking about Devin. It was all just so confusing and so strange.

  I shook my head, starting to get annoyed with myself.

  “And that’s all there is to it. Any questions?” she asked.

  God did I ever have questions. So many I hadn’t the first clue where to start. So instead, I just said, “No! That all sounds great. You’re emailing me all the instructions, right? I don’t want to miss anything.”

  More like ‘I haven’t been listening to you for the past five minutes’.

  “Yeah, and I’ll send you the contract, too. It's standard stuff. We just have to write up a thing that says you understand that if someone wants to publish it in a book or whatever, it will go through us. You’ll get the five-hundred bucks on publication of the article, and if it does end up going into a book, you’ll get half of the proceeds and we get the rest.”

  “Fine, yeah, that’s all great,” I said. My head was a thousand miles away.

  I started feeling hot, then cold, then hot again, like some kind of energy was passing through me, radiating from the middle of my body to my fingertips and my toes. I had no idea what was going on, but it was vaguely pleasant, if a little frightening.

  Jolie said something else, and we both said our goodbyes. I’m sure mine sounded very distracted, but with the way I was feeling, I needed to sit down, and fast. The weird sensation inside me wasn’t letting up. It just kept getting stronger and stronger until I had trouble keeping my breath going.

  When I finally made it back inside and flopped on the couch, I sat there for a second before reaching for the coffee I had poured right before Jolie called.

  My hand is... it’s shaking. What is going on with me?

  I wrapped my fingers around the handle of the mug, squeezing until they were still. I braced myself against as a wave of force slammed into me – a force with nothing to see. There was nothing visible, nothing to hear or taste or smell, just energy pounding against my stomach.

  Without warning, the strangest damn thing in the world happened. I heard static – no, I felt it. My nerves and my mind both went a little hazy, like I was right on the verge of fainting, but instead of slumping over and blacking out, a voice broke through the interference. But... no, calling it a voice isn’t right. It was more like a feeling put to words.

  Slowly, I sipped my coffee, but my hand was shaking so hard a little spilled on my chin and I gave up.

  “What is this?” I said out loud to no one, “what’s happening to me?”

  Somewhere in the back of my mind I heard a wailing sound, high-pitched, off and on, like a voice that I couldn’t understand. But then, just when I thought there was nothing else that could surprise me, an incredible feeling of peace overcame me just as I saw his face.

  Damon. I reached out, like I could possibly grab the hallucination, and to my shock, I felt the stubble on the vision’s cheeks. I caressed him with the back of my hand and stroked his bottom lip, letting the warmth of his being course through me.

  And then, just like that, it was gone.

  My pulse was a short thud set against the long, unchanging, droning sound in my head. It was real though, the sound was real.

  I turned my head left and right looking for some kind of anchor, something to hold. I felt like my being was slipping away.

  “Leroy!” It was Grandpa Joe coming through the clattering screen, his voice distant.

  And then everything went black.

  Five

  “You took quite a spill,” Grandpa said, dabbing my forehead with a cloth. “Seem okay now,
though. What happened?”

  “I...” I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hands. They were wet from the cloth. “I don’t know. How long have I been out?”

  He checked his watch. “Not very long. Couple minutes maybe? I came in just as you were checking out.”

  Grandpa wiped my forehead again and sat down in front of me, watching closely. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I just... I dunno, felt all weird and then passed out. It was like my head was humming, and then I saw what I guess was a dream or something, like when you’re half asleep, you know?”

  “Hmm,” he leaned closer. “What was it?”

  “The image? It’s kind of embarrassing, but I saw Damon’s face right before everything started vibrating or whatever. I tried to... coffee. I had coffee, where is it?”

  Grandpa shook his head. “No coffee that I saw. No nothing.”

  “No, that’s impossible. I poured a cup of coffee, then the woman from the Times called and as soon as I got off the phone with her, I sat down and all that stuff happened.” I chewed my lip.

  There had to be some way to know whether it was all yet another stupid hallucination. Ever since Damon had apparently vanished right after leaving the house, it was hard to prove anything was real. “Could you hand me my phone?” I tried to sit up, felt weird again, and then just pointed. I hated being helpless, but it was better than splitting my head open.

  He handed it over, kind of grimacing as he did. “You were really pale when I came in. Maybe that’s not a good idea?” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but I grabbed it and unlocked the screen.

  The first thing I did was check to make sure the call from Jolie wasn’t a hallucination. Immediately after ascertaining that I wasn’t totally insane, I flipped to my texts.

  It wasn’t just the two messages I thought I missed, there were eight of them. Every single one, of course, was from Damon. The weirdest thing though, is they all said the same thing. “Forget about me, Lily, I’m sorry I went to your house the other day, I never should have done that.”