by Molly McLain
She doesn’t have to. The droop in her shoulders and the quiver in her bottom lip say it all.
“Oh, my God.” Panicked eyes fall to the floor and she takes an awkward step backwards, almost tripping over the table behind her. Andy’s on his feet just in time, placing a steadying hand on her back.
It takes every ounce of self-control I have not to pound across the room and tear his fucking arm off.
“Wait, you’ve met?” My publicist shifts a frown between me and Crash. “I didn’t think you remembered each other.”
“We didn’t.” Yanking my hand from my jeans, I flex my fingers and resist the urge to take my self-loathing out on him. Andy’s been a good friend for a long time and, for some reason, he’s invested himself in my career. He can’t fix this fuck-up, though. It’s all mine. “Can you give us a few minutes? Alone?”
“Uh...” He pans back to Julianna, who’s glowering now, chin low and nostrils flaring. “Are you okay with that? I thought I’d stay—”
“Get the fuck out.” My bark booms across the room, my patience gone the second I see that fire in her eyes. “Now.”
Andy shoots me a blatant the fuck glare and I decide he has precisely two seconds to get his ass out before I flip my shit. Fortunately, he’s a smart guy and backpedals to the door without asking any more stupid questions.
“Call if you need anything,” he says to Julianna, and I bite my tongue to keep my teeth from gnashing.
The door closes behind him and I suck in a deep breath. “Please hear me out—”
“You bastard!”
I can explain.
“You fucking lied to me!”
So much for talking this out.
“Two days...” She shakes her head in disgust. “Two fucking days you knew who I was and you lied.”
“Technically, I didn’t.”
“Bullshit!” She throws her hands in the air, disgust rolling off of her in waves. “Tell me this is some kind of sick joke. Please.”
I shake my head, wishing I could hit the fast forward button and get to the part where she understands why I did what I did. Unfortunately, life doesn’t come with a remote. I can’t move ahead and I can’t go back, either.
“You don’t know how bad I want to punch you in the fucking face right now,” she snaps, before she spins away and marches to the minibar, pours a shot of whiskey, and downs it. “Actually, I think cutting off your dick sounds like a better idea.”
“Crash—”
“Don’t you dare call me that! You don’t get to act like you know me anymore, okay? Not when it was all a fucking lie.” Her voice cracks and so does something inside of me. I never meant to betray her.
“Julianna, please...” I take a step forward, but she holds out a hand.
“No. I mean it, RJ—shit.” Her eyes pinch shut and she pounds a soft, but pained fist on the bar. “My God, that’s not even your name.”
“Yes, it is.” I lift my hands. “Please let me explain.”
“Really? Really?” A bitter laugh shakes her little body. “I realize I’m supposed to be a professional right now, but you’ll have to forgive me for not giving a shit about your explanation, Rushton.”
My given name slides off her tongue like venom and I cringe. “It’s just RJ.”
“Whatever.” She pours another shot, but doesn’t drink it. Just holds it tightly in her hand, her chest rising and falling with every pissed off breath. “You fucked me,” she finally says, but it’s disbelief in her tone this time. “You came inside of me...how many times last night? Three? Four?”
Yep. Total dick move. I hear I’m pretty good at that.
“I hate to tell you, but if you were hoping for some big ‘I knocked up the reporter’ scandal, it’s not going to happen. I’m not that stupid.”
Ouch. Why the hell does that sting so much? “I didn’t use you.”
“Didn’t you?” She laughs again. “Isn’t that what we both did?”
My teeth grind together so hard my fucking jaw pops. “I didn’t use you,” I say again, and I know damn well she didn’t use me either, even if she wants to try and play it that way now.
“You know what really gets me?” She flings a hand around the room, shaking her head. “Why the big production? Are you so selfish that you couldn’t even spare me the humiliation and do this someplace less ridiculous?”
I tuck my hands back into my jeans and lift a shoulder. “I wanted more time with you.”
“WHY!?” She slams the glass in her hand down on the bar, teeth clenched. “Don’t you dare act like you give a shit now.”
Patience waning, I crane my head to the side and crack my neck. “I do give a shit. If you’d just listen for a minute—”
“This is going to take a fuck lot longer than a minute!”
Heat burns up the back of my neck and I clench my jaw against it. “Yep. Probably.”
“You fucked me,” she says again, and this time there’s no denying the pain in her voice. “How could you do that to me?”
There isn’t a single answer I can give her that’s not going to paint me like a selfish prick. I gesture to the sofa. “Sit. Please.”
“No,” she spats. “I don’t take orders from you anymore.”
Wow. Mature. “Okay. Then I’ll sit.”
For close to five minutes, we stand off like that. Her spitting silent daggers at me, which I sit on the couch, elbows on my knees, trying to find the right words. The fact that she hasn’t left yet gives me hope that just maybe she’ll come around. So, I start with the easy part.
“I changed my legal name seven years ago. From Rushton Scott Cole to Rushton Scott. I’ve always been RJ to my family. My old man’s Rush Sr. I was Rush Jr.”
Silence. She just stares blindly toward the city outside.
“Rushton Cole is just my pen name now. I kept it because my career was established and it made the most sense at the time. I know it doesn’t make sense to you now, but it will. Soon.”
Glancing at her now, she blinks back tears. She still won’t look at me, still isn’t interested. Or maybe that’s what she wants me to believe.
“You know I write about some twisted shit sometimes. Killers, vets with PTSD, the mob...psychopaths. Those plots take a lot of freaking research. You know how that works. You investigate a lot for your articles, too.”
She sniffs and blindly swipes at a tear, that glass of whiskey still locked in her other hand.
“My third book—the one that hit it big—was and still is the book I’m proudest of. For two years, I busted my ass, digging into that world.” Despite everything that happened, I still get that same pang of pride in the center of my chest when I think about that how that book panned out. How those characters grew from a few names on the screen to full-fledged personalities, living out loud on the page. “Have you read the book, Julianna? Do you know what happens?”
She wets her lips and pulls her shoulders back, still rigid. But she nods.
“For four months, I made weekly trips to the psych facility in Elgin. I met with staff and patients with borderline personality disorder. Men mostly.”
“Gabriel,” she says quietly, and I nod.
“Yeah.” The character I love most...and the one I wish I’d never dreamed up.
“What happened?”
“I fucked up. I didn’t think about how my choices would impact anyone but me.” Christ, but I was selfish then.
“Sounds to me like you need to stop feeling so fucking sorry for yourself.”
I flinch like she slapped me. “What?”
She lifts her chin and pins me with a glare that I feel all the way down to my bones. But it’s not anger in her eyes or even hurt. It’s a blatant demand for me to man the fuck up.
“You heard me,” she snaps, those eyes relentless. Fearless. Every bit the woman I was so drawn to in the first place.
“What happened?” she asks again, the question measured. A gracious second chance. I don’t deserve it, but she’
s giving it to me anyway.
“I met a guy at the hospital. Several actually, but one seemed more interested in talking with me than the others. He wasn’t really the kind of guy I wanted insight on, so I only met with him a couple of times. In hindsight, the hospital staff probably should have recognized his behavior as problematic, but they claimed he just liked me. Thought I was good for him.”
Her brow pinches and I swallow.
“I came home one day a few months after I stopped visiting and he was sitting on my couch watching a fucking Bears’ game.” I’d been so naive...so selfish in collecting my information that I hadn’t considered there might be negative impacts, especially for the patients. “I had to change my locks, amp up the security in my building, and eventually move.” I crack my neck again. “The fucker still found me.”
“God...”
I hold up a hand. I don’t want her feeling sorry for me when the shit he put me through was nothing compared to the things he did to the people I cared about.
“What do you know about borderline personality disorder?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing, beyond Gabriel.”
“Gabriel was tame compared to Len. Len...” I pause, rub a hand around the back of my neck and chuckle. “Len was one fucked up son of a bitch. By no fault of his own, though. He was sexually abused by an uncle as a kid. Became a predator himself by the time he was ten-years-old and was assaulted again as a teenager by the father of one of his victims.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah. So, Gabriel...he was nothing like Len. But he still instigated a shit storm of trouble when the guy got his hands on a copy of the book. He remembered that I’d come to visit the treatment facility and, when he got out, he thought he’d pay me a visit.”
Julianna slowly comes around the minibar and takes a seat on the sofa across from me. “Keep going.”
“At first, I thought he was pissed that I’d written a character like him, but it didn’t take long to figure out that he actually thought we were kindred spirits. Buddies, even.”
She nods, dark eyes intent and focused as she listens.
“I had a girlfriend at the time. Mindy. He started following us around when we’d go out, and then one night after I dropped her off, he broke into her place. He wasn’t as friendly with her as he was me, though.”
Julianna presses her fingers to her lips. “No...”
“It could have been a lot worse than it was. He pushed her around and told her to leave me alone, but...” It’s still fucking hard to think about what could have happened. “He didn’t touch her like that. Women weren’t really his thing.”
“She must’ve been terrified.”
“Yeah, she stopped returning my calls. Can’t say I blame her.” Shaking a hand over my hair, I get up and grab a beer from the minibar. This next part is always hardest to tell. If I didn’t have to drive us back downstate later, I’d swig the whiskey right alongside her just to numb the guilt.
“I tried my damnedest to get Len sent back to the hospital, but they never kept him for more than a few days. That’s when I started to take a serious look at what the fuck I did and how I contributed to his response. I thought I was doing the right thing by getting to know these people, instead of making assumptions. Some of them I actually enjoyed visiting with when they were on their meds and we could carry on a decent conversation.”
I glance back to her and she’s still watching me, her amber eyes swimming with emotion. I fucking hate it.
“Don’t look at me like that, Crash. I didn’t deserve anyone’s sympathy then and I don’t now. I screwed up. I used people to get what I wanted and I paid the price.” I tip back a swallow of beer and shake my head. “Actually, that’s bullshit. My old man carried the brunt of the burden. Still fucking does, too.”
That burn at back of my neck radiates down to my chest, tightening like a goddamn vise.
“I pulled back from the social scene. Shut down my Twitter account, cancelled book signings, declined party invitations... Basically did anything that would keep me under the radar. Len...” I press my fist to my chest. Pound at the ache a couple of times and clear my throat. “Len didn’t like that he couldn’t find me, so he came here, Crash. He looked up my fucking family and he broke into my parents’ house and waited...fucking waited until my dad came home from work. My old man saw the jimmied lock, but break-ins don’t happen in Hillsboro, right? So, he went on in and—”
My voice cracks and Julianna comes to me, wrapping her too-forgiving arms around my waist. “It’s okay,” she hushes, pressing warm kisses to the center of my chest.
“It’s not okay...” I gulp down the emotion. “My dad never saw the knife. I don’t think he would have tried to talk Len down like he had if he’d known what the fucker had planned.”
Putting down the beer, I pull her close, bury my face in her hair, and inhale. Inhale, inhale, inhale. Her lavender and vanilla shampoo, already so familiar, fills my lungs, giving me just a little of that whiskey numbness I need.
“But your dad is okay now. Right?”
I nod. “He’s got a limp from the stabs to his thigh and the busted knee. And it’s a damn good thing my old man’s the redneck he is, because that gun he kept in the kitchen drawer...it saved his life.”
Julianna goes rigid and then she blinks up at me. “Wait, I know this part. I heard about it in the news. Didn’t your dad chase the guy off and they later found him dead at a wayside?”
I nod. “Overdosed. He had an entire bottle of his psych meds in his stomach and a needle in his arm.”
“Took out his own demons. Wow.” She shakes her head.
I spent so many months wishing the guy would disappear. I’ll never forgive myself for the hell I brought to my family. But part of me felt sorry for him. All he ever wanted was acceptance, but his own trauma kept getting in the way of him accepting himself first.
I clear my throat and rest my cheek on the top of her head. “I tried to get my parents to move somewhere that wasn’t associated with me, but my old man refused. Didn’t want to leave our family home. Said he wasn’t afraid to get a little dirty on my account. Said it kept him young.”
Crash chuckles softly. “Sounds like something you’d say.”
“Maybe now. At the time, I freaked the fuck out. I kept my social life on lockdown. No social media, no signings, no interviews... I even went so far as to change my name, not for me, but for the people around me. Just in the case another Len decided to look up Rushton Cole Jr. and drop in for a visit.”
She nods, but her focus is trained on my chest, those wheels turning.
“That’s my story, Crash. That’s why the asshole author disappeared.”
She shakes her head and I feel the change in her posture, though she doesn’t step away. “But why didn’t you tell me who you were when you realized who I was?”
“I haven’t dated in two years. Either the women already know who I am and they only want a piece of me because of my career or they get pissed when I abandon them to write. Sometimes I don’t come out of that cave for weeks. I’ve survived for days on my mom’s cookies and Redbull care packages. It ain’t pretty.” I laugh, but Julianna is still transfixed on my shirt.
“You saw me as opportunity,” she says slowly, but her breathing comes faster. “I was only supposed to be there overnight and then gone. I wouldn’t be there long enough to ask questions. I’d just—”
“No.” I shake her shoulders. “I wouldn’t have stopped in the shower then.”
Her eyes dart to mine as she shrugs out of my grasp and backs away. “You had chance after chance to tell me, but you didn’t. And all those sweet things, like making me breakfast and paying for my tow...even driving me here... You did it to ease your guilty conscience. It wasn’t for me.”
“Yeah, it was. I fucking like you. I care about you.”
She reels around, hands pushed into her hair. “You. Don’t. Get. To. Do. That. You don’t get to say those kinds of th
ings when the foundation you’ve built something on a complete lie. Those words are meaningless!”
“I never lied!”
“You sure as hell never told the truth!”
“Everything I told you was true. Everything!” I stab a finger at her though she’s yards away. “Do you know fucking hard it is for me to be real with someone?”
“Because of your career?” she scoffs. “Come on, RJ.”
“I don’t want someone else to get hurt because of me!”
“It’s been seven years! He’s dead, RJ. Gone.”
I can’t believe I’m hearing this. I thought she understood. “You’re just like the rest of them.”
She gives a shaky smile and then presses her lips together. “Mmm, okay. Okay,” she says again, beginning to pace. “Did you ever stop think that maybe the problem here is actually you? Because you seem to be the common denominator...”
Those words...fuck. Isn’t that what I just told her? I was the goddamn problem, but I fixed it. As much as I could. I tried to protect the people around me.
“What are you really afraid of, RJ?” She props her hands on her hips and levels that man up glare at me again. “And don’t tell me it’s someone getting hurt, unless you’re ready to take a long hard look in the mirror and admit that person is you.”
“What?” I scoff. “What are you talking about?”
“You might look like a tough guy, but beneath that hard exterior, you’re the one who’s afraid to get hurt.”
“This isn’t about me.”
“Yes, it is.” She nods. “I know, because I’ve lived it. I spent years hating my sister for the crap she pulled and then the second I thought I could I trust her again, she pulled the same shit. I quit trying. I didn’t think I could handle another bruise, so I created this fantasy world where I made myself believe that if I didn’t get attached to anyone, she couldn’t hurt me again.” She pushes a hand through her hair and swallows. “The person I was really afraid of hurting was me. I was terrified of falling for someone again, only to lose them. I feared the what if constantly, spending so much time worrying about things I couldn’t control.”
