by Virna DePaul
Usually he towered over me, but with my heels on, we were far closer in height. It was nice to wear the massive platforms and go from five foot five at best to almost six feet. That was the one thing about extreme fashion that I enjoyed. Maybe it gave me more of a level playing field. Then I looked into the mirror and saw his eyes crinkling back at me and realized what bullshit that was. He was ruggedly handsome in a Cary Grant kind of way. He wasn’t Tucker, with his lean body and cut abs and gorgeous green eyes and wicked smile, but he also wasn’t leaving anytime soon.
Hermes had tried his hardest to keep me safe even with me doing my best to screw my life up. I could find it easy to just listen more to him, let him lead my life and protect me for as long as he could stand me.
Maybe that’s what I should do.
“Who did you even invite?” I asked, teetering a bit on my huge heels.
He kept rubbing my shoulders, trying to calm me. “All the right people. It’s about appearances, Dominique. You don’t have to worry about a thing. I’ll take care of you just like I always have.”
He kissed my cheek. I stilled and tried hard to remember what I wanted, who I wanted and, for right now, that was still Tucker. He was excitement and connection, while Hermes was just the security, that predictable path that might offer comfort but didn’t offer much else. The difference between them was similar to the difference between your favorite sneakers and your best pair of heels. Both were a key part of your wardrobe and both could be comfortable, but only one of them made you feel every inch the woman you knew you could be.
I pulled away and rummaged for stud earrings, just to have something to do, but he wasn’t deterred.
“I’ve planned dancing afterward. Perhaps you can save me a dance?” he said.
It was getting harder to swallow and, beyond that, even harder to balance the two men in my life. “I’ll think about it.”
* * *
Le Jules Verne was one of the premiere restaurants of the city, and you couldn’t beat the real estate. It was nestled part way up the Eiffel Tower. From outside the huge banks of windows, one could look out and spy the skyline for The City of Lights as well as the very steel girders holding up the whole edifice. It was a striking view made even more breathtaking by the orange-rose glow of the setting sun. The small tea light candles on each table added to the effect with their flickering lights.
When I stepped into the restaurant, I smiled at the collected throng of critics, sycophants and other designers who greeted me. Some big names I never would have counted on being here had shown up. A few were kind enough to kiss my cheeks and gush over me, which really surprised me given my shoes hadn’t been a big hit at the previous shows. I was feeling happy that perhaps the evening wouldn’t be a total disaster when I spotted the reason everyone was being so nice to me.
In a far corner, near a table set to overflowing with drink selections, was my mother.
I inhaled a swift breath and looked accusingly at Hermes. He was looking at my mother with a frown, as if even he hadn’t known she would be here. I’m not sure I believed that but…
I turned back to my mom. Anna Lorenz had never been more than a size two in her entire life. I envied her ability to deny herself more than a couple protein shakes in a day and a salad. High fashion didn’t allow as many curves as my size six and Anna Lorenz was high fashion incarnate. Gulping, I steadied my shoulders. There was approved press here, and it was my duty to play nice with my mother, to smile and kiss her cheek. Besides, she’d made plans to attend my show to support me. Maybe she’d decided to come early as a show of love on my birthday.
I was halfway across the restaurant and poised to engage with the dragon lady when someone coughed behind me.
Tucker!
I grinned at him, definitely underdressed in jeans and a logo t-shirt. Flinging my arms around him, I relished the way his lips felt on my own, the way his tongue tangled deftly with my own.
“I was worried after all the tension at the restaurant last night that you wouldn’t come.”
“Hey, my cougar only turns twenty-seven once, right?”
I giggled, actually feeling the tension and stress and anxiety seeping out of me. “It’s not that big an age difference, so try again there, Point Break.”
“Fine, but I couldn’t let you run the gauntlet here without someone cheering in your corner. I needed to be here for you. Do you want me to go?”
I felt my mom’s pointed gaze already burning into my back. The last thing I could take would be losing my support. He was the crutch I needed to get through the night.
“No, I don’t want you to go, but you might want to run after I tell you that my mom is here. In the corner. I have to go talk to her right away. It’s what everyone’s expecting.”
“Is it what you want?” he pressed, concern brimming in his eyes. “Because I could monopolize your time quite easily if you let me.”
“It’s what I need to do, and that’s what’s important,” I countered, wishing I could take the out he was offering me. Kissing his cheek, I smiled back for him as broadly as I could. “It’s fine. I have this.” Now that you’re here.
Snaking through the crowd was hard, and felt a little like I was walking to my own execution. I smiled down at my mother. She was shorter than I was, barely five feet tall and built so birdlike. Her shoes were heels but nothing like the skyscrapers I wore. Her cold blue eyes, so like glaciers, stared back at me and her sharp chin was pointed like a weapon in my direction.
I bent down and hugged her as tightly as I had to, not too much, just enough to be a good shot for the cameras. “So,” I said, keeping my voice as low as I could in the vain hope my words wouldn’t be spread to different magazines and news outlets. “How are you, Mother?”
“Disappointed, but that’s not new. I suspected your designs would become a passing fad and looking at reviews so far, I might be right.”
I felt an immediate spark of anger light up my chest and resolutely shoved it down. She was right, after all. The buzz about my shoes had been disappointing. “My own show hasn’t happened yet.”
“You keep going to clubs and running away from Louvre guards, and I’m sure it won’t make a difference,” my mother replied, her tone cold.
What? How did she know about the Louvre? I glanced around for Hermes. Had he followed me? When I didn’t see him, only caught a glimpse of Tucker with his back to me, I turned back to my mom. “I wasn’t running from guards. Someone recognized a friend of mine and…”
I trailed off when she scoffed. “Right. Your friend the rock star with Point Rupture. The one you went with to Sacre Bleu?”
“Tucker Benning is a talented singer and songwriter too, and it’s Point Break.”
“He’s still a bad influence. You know how rockers are, and I bet it was his idea to drag you to the club and get you drunk and acting ridiculous.”
I pulled away from her and my hand was already snaking out, clamping around the neck of a magnum of champagne. “He balances me.”
She waved her hand dismissively. “You know who balanced you? Us? Your father. But he’s dead and gone, and no rock star can replace him. If he has to be dead, at least he doesn’t have to see how you’re returning to your old ways.”
“I’m not returning to my old ways. And even if I was, can you blame me? Look at all the nasty barbs and whispers you send my way! Daddy…daddy loved me. He always encouraged me. But you’re right. He is dead and gone, and you blame me for that. You’ve always made that clear,” I said shakily, trying to keep my voice down but knowing I wasn’t doing the greatest job. A flash went off somewhere close by.
I couldn’t handle it anymore. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination or not, but I heard the whispers of disdain, the disapproval burbling through all my mother’s so-called friends, her nearest and dearest. Still gripping the champagne bottle, I whirled and ran. Storming past Tucker, I rushed out of Le Jules Verne and headed for the elevator.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Tucker
I was behind Nikki, and that was what was scaring the ever-loving shit out of me. She caught the elevator first, and I had to stand there waiting for a second one to come my way. I felt like some idiot living out a huge joke just staring at my cell phone screen and counting the minutes until the damn elevator came back down to the level with Le Jules Verne. It had been almost four minutes since Nik disappeared and I knew that was more than enough time for her to do something nuts.
When the elevator finally arrived, I headed up after her. Mixed in with my panicked concern for her was a little voice telling me that I should get away from her as fast as I could. I cared about her, more than I had about any woman in my life, and it was all so sudden and so fast, but she also seemed set on self-destruction.
The elevator climbed slowly up the tower and I heard the ding ringing out around me.
I leapt off the elevator and what I found was even crazier than I’d expected. There were shards of green glass everywhere from where Nikki had obviously hurled the champagne bottle at the guards as a way to distract them. Now she was already balancing on a metal ledge of the Eiffel Tower, dozens of feet above the cobblestones and tourists below.
I got it then, why the guards weren’t surging forward. They were scared of what she’d do. Now Nikki basically had all of us hostage. If we moved in too closely, she might actually jump. At least with the Pont Neuf there’d been a small chance she would hit the water correctly and live. Here, if she slipped over the railing, she’d be a pancake.
Okay, so we’re in France.
She’d be a damn crepe.
The thought made me realize more than anything else that Nikki had driven me over the edge of sanity.
Holding up my hands, I inched as close to her as the guards were and called out her name. “Nik? It’s Tucker, and we need to talk about this. You know you don’t want to jump. You know it’s not the way you want things to play out.”
She didn’t turn around, but she did look back at me, her red hair whipping around her face in the breeze. I was scared the winds would pick up, that she’d be pushed over. I just had to get her down before something awful happened, before there was no going back.
“Tucker, you should go back to the party. I’m sure Mother and Hermes ordered the best pastry chef in Paris to make my cake. You need to enjoy that, maybe even pick up one of Mother’s interns. You know, one of the normal girls.”
A huge part of me wished I could do just that. I wasn’t about emotional baggage and Nikki Lorenz had a whole damn airport’s worth of it. But if I turned my back now and she was hurt… It would happen, and I couldn’t let it. Looking back to the guards, I gave them a quick nod and they let me step closer, let me get nearer to her.
“I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to go back to the party at all, not if your mom is going to upset you.”
“Then you still don’t have to worry about it. I don’t need you to watch my every move.”
“You need someone to make sure you don’t jump off bridges and towers, apparently,” I replied, and I knew that my volume was rising but I could only keep my frustration down so much. “Nikki, just get down from there and we can talk this out back at my hotel, okay?”
“Really? Or are you just talking me down to be someone else’s problem?”
“I don’t know!” I said, throwing my hands up in the air. “Honestly? I have no clue. I know that I don’t want to get sucked in, and that everything with you is like sinking in quicksand. I promised myself just fun and no commitment and here I am trying to save you from yourself. You know you need help. Damn it, you have to know this, Nik. I just don’t want to be sucked down too.”
Her eyes blazed back at me. “You know it’s too late, right? Too late to help me.” She sobbed. “Do you know my dad died of a heart attack, Tucker? When I was still partying and drinking and being a fool? My mother told me once that I was the reason. That I drove him to an early grave with my antics. God, it’s probably true. And if it’s true, how will I ever find peace?”
“By knowing your dad loved you. I heard you say it in the restaurant. And you didn’t cause him to die. It was just his time. But it’s not yours, Nikki. It’s not.”
She said nothing and I moved even closer.
“Is that what the balancing is all about, Nikki? You blame yourself for your dad’s death?”
“I don’t know what it’s about anymore. But I want it to stop. I want to get away from here. I want to think. I want…I want to go back to your hotel room, Tucker, like you said. Can we do that?”
“Yes, princess. Yes, we can,” I said, relief sweeping through me.
She started to spin around, to try and face me with her body too and she screamed as she slipped.
I lunged forward then, hoping I wasn’t too late.
I was.
But she fell backwards instead of forwards, tumbled instead onto the floor of the tower. I ran toward her and picked her up in my arms, wishing I could literally fly her out of here before the others showed up. The guards started surging forward but by now Hermes had finally gotten up here and was talking to them in rapid fire French. I figured he was giving whatever bullshit lines he needed to about “Do you know who this is?” and keeping it all quiet for the benefit of the Lorenz family.
I didn’t care.
My heart had stopped seeing her stumble.
If luck had worked out the other way, she would have smashed into the pavement below. Game over. I had no idea what I was doing anymore. She’d stormed out of her own birthday party and thrown a heavy ass champagne bottle at the rent-a-cops on the Eiffel Tower. She’d almost killed herself.
It was completely batshit insane.
“Why the fuck would you even do that!” I gritted out as I marched back to the elevator. Luckily one was already open and I strode inside. When it was moving, I set her down and hit the ‘Stop” button. Then I saw the cut on her leg, probably from where a bolt on the tower had torn into her calf. The cut wasn’t too deep, but it was bleeding. I tore off part of my shirt to wrap around her leg. She’d hurt herself, and if things had gone any differently she’d have done a lot worse. It wasn’t just about her, and about what she wanted. I cared about her, damn it, and I didn’t want to lose her like that. “Are you completely fucking insane?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I am. I just needed to feel something.”
“So you got on a ledge. What does that even prove to you?”
“It makes me feel alive,” she said, tears running down her face. “It makes me feel like I have some control.”
Her shoulders were shaking as she sobbed, and I wanted to hold her close to me, to promise that nothing bad would ever happen to her on my watch. It was those stupid white knight tendencies. I couldn’t save her from herself. She needed to face the fact she was her own worst enemy before I or anyone else could help her.
“There has to be another way to feel alive that doesn’t include endangering your life.”
She stopped shaking and glared back at me, her eyes as angry and resentful as they’d been before she’d slipped. “I am not suicidal.”
“You’re not?”
“No, of course I’m not. I just…it’s like cutting. Most of my life, all I’ve felt is numb. When I get into fights with Mom, it’s so different. It’s like after the shows this week. All of it makes me numb inside but, worse, it causes all these voices in my ears. All I hear are the doubts and the nastiness, all I can concentrate on is the criticism. When I do something daring like this, it makes me alive, shakes me out of it. I just need the doubt to stop. I need to feel.”
I pulled her to me and kissed her, not sure about what the fuck I was doing anymore. Who was I kidding? I’d thrown out the road map the second I’d bought a ticket to Paris. Besides, I could be pissed all I wanted to but Nikki had a point. I was trying not to get drawn into her orbit, telling myself that I couldn’t get sucked in, but I already had been. The minute I’d found her on the Pont N
euf and dragged her down from it, I’d gotten caught in all of it.
I wasn’t sure if there was a way to escape, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. All I knew was that we needed out of this damn party and away from all the people who pressured her more. I wasn’t sure how to keep Nik from falling apart or even if that was my job, but I knew she’d never seem even halfway sane with that ass Hermes and her bitch of a mom hovering over her.
I pulled her closer, supporting her. Her calf wasn’t bleeding as badly as it had been, and I was hoping that it was mostly just a scrape. I hit the button on the elevator to get it going again.
“I’m so sorry, Tucker. I know I fucked things up. You should leave for your own good,” she said, sniffling a little and trying to hold back tears even as she raised her chin. That was my fiery redhead, trying to be so strong even when her pain and fragility was written all over her. She was right. I should leave her. Right here and right now.
But I couldn’t. Not yet.
“I’m confused, Nik, but I have an idea. Let’s get out of here. After all, it’s still your birthday for a few more hours.”
* * *
It was hard to concentrate as we made our way to the spot I wanted. My mind was running over all the crazy shit that had happened to me in the last few days. It was almost impossible to wrap my head around it. I had no idea what the future was for Point Break. I really didn’t. Liam had dodged talking about even returning to the studio, let alone resurrecting the back leg of our tour. Maybe the band would get through it and come back together or maybe Liam would stay on vacation forever, I didn’t know, but I still had a lot of ideas. If I had to build a new band for myself out in California, I would. Hell, maybe it was time to step out of the shadow and do vocals too, not just be the writer and back-up vocals. Maybe it was a biased jury, but Nikki had liked the song I’d sung her the other night, the softer side of me.
I had options if I went home.
