by Sierra Rose
I’d learned to keep her in front of the cameras, and away from the microphones.
She was actually pretty good in print. One I removed some of the layers of makeup and dressed her up in some of New York’s finest, she looked the part. A bit extreme, perhaps. But over the years, Nick had certainly dated worse.
She never actually stopped talking, of course. I could see from the pained grimace on Nick’s face in some of the photos I edited out, that she was still going full speed. Whispering in his ear as she pressed herself up against him for the cameras.
But the pictures themselves were good. About a month in, I actually got a text message from Mitchell himself saying, he didn’t know how I was doing it, but to keep up the good work. I printed out a screenshot of it, and framed it up on my wall.
Nick and I never talked about that night in my apartment. Just like we never talked about our random shopping spree and the Dior bag still tucked safely beneath my bed. We kept going as if it never happened—eyes fixed on our four-month finish line. Both firmly committed to perpetuating our little scheme. Both for our own, personal reasons.
And so, it was with a decided spring in my step, that I headed to Ella’s apartment early one Tuesday morning. It was going to be a busy day. First a brunch, then a lunch, then a ‘tea’ at the golf club, followed by a late-night dinner with pictures back at the Solay.
After a few well-placed bribes, followed by a personal call to the manager by Mitchell Hunter himself, Nick and Ella were officially allowed back into the restaurant. The incident with the flaming dessert was graciously forgotten contingent upon the solemn oath that the both of them never order anything flammable again. (It was a promise that Nick had no trouble making.)
I waved cheerfully at the doorman, and headed up to the third floor. It was a nice flat in a nice building in a nice part of town. Far more than someone like Ella deserved. But for one of Nick’s women, real or not, it looked the part. He was also, of course, paying for the entire thing.
“Ella?” I called as I rang the bell. “Open up—we’ve got a lot to do today, and we’re already running a little late.” I rang again. “Ella?”
Still nothing. I switched to knocking.
“Ella—come on, wake up! We’ve got to get a move on!”
If it was any other client, I would have assumed they were passed out drunk in the bathroom, but Ella didn’t drink. If it was any other client, I’d also just whip out my key and let myself in. But the first day I’d tried to make a copy—Ella had refused.
“Ella?” I lowered my voice, and pressed my ear up to the door. “Are you okay in there?”
No response.
I tried calling, but it went straight to voicemail. I considered climbing up the fire escape from the outside, but there was a fresh layer of ice on the ground.
Out of ideas, I decided to head over to Nick’s instead. There was a chance that she had simply gotten up early and gone to meet him by herself. That would mean I’d have to do my daily wardrobe swap at his place—but it wouldn’t be a problem. Not with all Gemma’s clothes.
I tried calling him on the way as well, but again, there was no answer. I hung up without leaving a message, frowning out the window of my cab.
That was far more troublesome.
I couldn’t remember a time in the last few years that Nick had failed to take my call. On one memorable occasion, he had actually been in the middle of a lunch with the Prime Minister of England—who he’d asked to wait a moment so he could answer.
What the hell is going on?
As it turned out, I wasn’t going to have to wait long to find out.
The second I arrived at Nick’s building, I saw the crowd. Gathered around something in a tight circle. Some looking up. Some staring down. As always, the flashing lights of the paparazzi were never far behind, and from the looks of things, a press van was already pulling up outside.
“Oh shit...”
My cabbie pulled over and glanced back in the partition.
“You sure this is the right place, miss?”
I pressed my face to the window, trying my best to see what was going on. With the number of people already gathered, it was impossible to see what they were all looking at. But one way or another, I had a terrible feeling my twenty seconds had started a long time ago...
“It’s the right place, I’m afraid.” I passed up some money, but paused on my way out. “In fact, do you think you could actually wait? I shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”
And one way or another, it was likely I was going to need a quick escape.
“It’s your money, lady.”
With that, he leaned back in his chair to read, while I pushed open the door and darted across the sidewalk towards the mob, ready to silence them all.
Even once I was on the ground, it was impossible to see what was going on. There were too many people clustered around, and I was by no means the tallest person in the crowd. After my first cries of ‘excuse me!’ went unnoticed, I started elbowing my way to the front, using my oversized Dior bag to knock people out of the way—left and right.
A few choice profanities and possible lawsuits later, I was at the front. It was then that I saw it. Just in time to hear its dying breath.
There was a metallic groan, and Nick’s beloved coffee maker finally gave way. Beside it, scattered like dark funeral petals, were the prized African java beans. The airtight jar in which they were always kept lay in pieces not far away. Along with an array of tinted glass.
My eyes widened in shock. In the whole crowd, I was the only one not moving.
Nick loved that coffee maker more than most people loved their children. I honestly think that if it came down to it, he would sacrifice the life of a person he didn’t know just to keep the damn thing going. And now this...?
I lifted my head as my eyes made the slow journey up to the top story of the building. It was impossible to see anything from all the way down here, but I could easily picture exactly how it must have looked. The cord ripped clean from the wall. The stiffly blowing curtains.
That being said...
“I wonder whose it is,” a voice called out beside me. “I wonder what happened!”
My head whipped around as an unexpected silver lining suddenly presented itself.
“No idea!” someone called back. “It just went flying from one of those top story windows. We were lucky this whole sidewalk was roped off for construction!”
They didn’t know it was Nick?
They didn’t know it was Nick!
My heart leapt in my chest as I extracted myself from the horde, calling out a string of excuses and misdirection as I went.
“I heard it was that old lady on the fiftieth floor! Some sort of drunken accident!” In a much lower voice. “Maybe it was Rick Treaken—he lives in this building.” Then in the high falsetto of a cartoon mouse. “Maybe it fell off a moving truck that nobody saw...”
By the time I’d reached the doorway, I already heard the conversation of the crowd begin to change. As newer people came upon the scene, the dialogue had already shifted.
“This guy name Rick was moving—damn thing fell out of the truck!”
“Could have killed someone, dude was probably drunk!”
“He was celebrating his fiftieth birthday, after all,” a woman replied wisely. “Or maybe he lived on the fiftieth floor?”
My lips twitched up in a little grin as I hurried inside, but now was no time to gloat. As much as I’d love to blame it on a meteor or a narcoleptic weather man, I happened to know exactly who the coffee maker belonged to. I just had no idea how it had found its way outside.
But I had a sneaking suspicion it had something to do with a certain silicone nightmare and why Nick wasn’t answering his phone...
A quick jaunt in the service elevator, and I was shooting up to the top floor. Right away, I knew it was going to be bad. I heard the screams before the doors even opened.
“—had nothing to do
with you! How could it have had anything to do with you, when you weren’t even here?!”
The doors whizzed open, and I ducked as a ceramic pot flew past me. It had been a gift from the Chinese ambassador last year. I recognized the markings.
“Exactly!” Nick yelled back, ducking as the priceless memento shattered on the wall above his head. “I wasn’t even here—so why the FUCK were you in my apartment?!”
No one had noticed me yet. In fact, they were in such a state, they didn’t even seem to notice the giant hole in the wall where the window was supposed to be—outlined now in a few stray coffee beans and a jagged square of glass.
“Funny you should bring that up!” Ella spat. “You’d think that after how you and your precious publicist BEGGED me to come date you—”
“Begged you?!”
“—this wouldn’t be the first time I was seeing this place! I mean, come on Nick! How the hell could you possible say no to these?!”
At this point, she lifted up her shirt. I considered retreating back into the elevator.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Nick whirled around, facing the opposite direction as he pressed his fists into his eyes. “For the last time—put your fucking clothes on!”
“Or what?!” She sashayed forward—a snake, ready to strike. “You’ll fire me the way you fired Bradley? The way you started shouting when you walked in on us, you’d think it hadn’t already been over five years—”
“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!”
It was at this point that I stepped forward, out of the frozen elevator. Both people stopped shouting the second they saw me—staring at me in surprise. Then Ella got right back into it at the top of her lungs, while Nick picked up his coat and headed for the door.
“That’s it,” he muttered as he stormed past me, into the elevator I’d just left, “I can’t do this anymore.”
My eyes grew wide, and without thinking, I rushed back in after him—leaving Ella to her destructive rant. “Nick, wait!”
The sound of my voice steadied him for a second, and he stopped pressing the button for the lobby long enough to look up into my eyes.
For the second time in less than a minute, I froze dead still.
I’d never seen him look like that before. Not once. There was not an ounce of that playful humor that always sparkled in his eyes. Not a single inch of leniency.
This fake relationship was done. There was absolutely no fighting it. And to be honest, no matter how well it had been going (on a professional level), I couldn’t help but be relieved. It had hurt to see him go through it, even if it was an unspoken competition between us. It had hurt to photo-shop out those grimaces and replace them with smiles.
Nick didn’t deserve that. No matter how much it might help the company. No matter how fiercely it was demanded by his father.
No—it was finished. Miss Ella Campbell would not be coming back to this place. One way or another, I would see to that.
The best I could hope to do in the meantime, was minimize the damage along the way.
“What is it, Abby?”
The question caught me off guard. I realized I must have been staring for a long time. But his tone caught me off guard as well. It also quite simply broke my heart.
He sounded sad.
All at once, two emotions warred up inside me. The desire to hold him and comfort him until I could coax out that sparkling smile. And the desire to grab Ella Campbell by the hair, and throw her out the hole in the window right after the coffee maker.
“Just...wait,” I breathed, unable to take my eyes off of him. “Can you do that for me? I just need a minute up here. Just one minute. Can you go down into the lobby and just...wait?”
He stared at me for a second, shoulders rising and falling as he took deep, steadying breaths. Then he abruptly turned away and hit the button again.
“Fine.”
I stepped out of the elevator immediately.
“Thank you.” I tried to get him to catch my eye. “I’ll see you in just a minute. I’m going to clear all of this up, Nick, I pro—”
But the doors shut, and he was gone.
“Well it’s about time!” an impatient voice drawled from behind me. “Abigail Wilder, you are not going to believe what just happened to me.”
It was like my insides went cold. I turned slowly on a pointed heel, rotating around to see the seething blond standing behind me. The same blond who seemed to wilt before my eyes.
They have a saying, you know. About us publicists. About what happens to the people who try to hurt our clients. About what happens to the people who stand in our way.
I’ll let you use your imagination and guess what that saying might be...
* * *
Five minutes later, I was racing back down the service elevator. From what I was able to pull up on my phone, the crowd was already mostly dispersed. In fact, if that taxi I’d requested still happened to be waiting outside, I might be able to sneak Nick out of the...
The doors opened and I looked around a deserted lobby.
Oh no! No, no, no, no, no!
A smiling building attendant caught my eye, and I hurried forward—my high heels clattering over the marble tile as I ran.
“Excuse me—have you seen Nicholas Hunter? He was supposed to be here—I asked him to wait for me?”
The man nodded calmly.
“And he did, miss. He waited for exactly one minute, and then he left.”
Of course he did.
“Okay,” I looked around breathlessly, “well, do you have any idea where he went? Is it a favorite bar, or maybe that gym downtown? The one with the boxing ring—”
“I don’t have to guess.” The man smiled good-naturedly. “When I called for his car, I asked where he was going to go, and he told me.”
That brought me up short.
“He...he did?” The list of possibilities I was scrolling through faded immediately from my mind, as I focused all my attention on this one man. “Well, where was it? Where did he go?”
He patted me cheerfully on the shoulder...then drastically changed my day.
“He went to Spain.”
Chapter 22
Spain. Nick got pissed off, so instead of waiting one more minute, he went to Spain.
...to be fair, I should have seen it coming.
The first day he and I ever met—the day his father showed up unannounced at his penthouse with the news he now had a publicist—that day had been a little rocky to say the least.
After Mitchell left, he and I had stared at each other for a good five minutes. Neither one of us moving, neither one of us talking. Just looking. Appraising. Deciding.
Then, with a skill and a charm I hadn’t yet learned to fear, he smiled and told me that he was going to grab a water from the kitchen. When he got back, we’d set up in the living room, he promised, and start going over a game plan for the next few months.
He hadn’t gone to the kitchen. He’d gone to Rome.
It was kind of his thing.
Some people drank when they got upset. Some people called up their best friend in a fit of tears. Some people (like me) buried themselves in a tub of ice cream watching old Sex in the City reruns until four in the morning.
Nick bought the first random airplane ticket he could find.
His girlfriend dumped him for cheating—he went to Iceland. He got back together and then re-dumped that same girlfriend for cheating—Bulgaria. His father screams at him for frivolous spending—it’s off to Argentina. His soccer team loses the game—Minsk.
Worst by far was the day he found out his favorite bike messenger had fallen in love and married the woman of his dreams (inadvertently moving him away to California). That time, Nick had vanished to Lebanese sheep farm for a month and threatened to never return.
In other words...I guess I was lucky it was just Spain.
By the time I landed in Barcelona (according to the travel itinerary I hacked into, I at least knew where he was going t
o touch down), it was coming up on ten at night. My Spanish was broken, at best, but I got into a cab and managed to have him drop me at the closest of three locations from which I’d start my search. You see, as unpredictable as Nick could be, in some ways, he was actually quite traditional.
The first thing he always did in a new city, was get ice cream.
Because Nick was twelve.
While he wasn’t at the first location I tried, or the second, the gods threw me down a bit of luck—he was at the third. I paid the cabbie, got out, and started walking slowly towards him across the cobblestone streets.
I couldn’t help but smile as I approached. You had never seen a sadder sight, and yet, there was an air of whimsy about it that made the whole thing utterly adorable.
Nick was sitting by himself at an outdoor table. A look of childlike devastation on his face. A melting ice cream cone in his hand. Every now and then, he would glance down and consider eating it, before resting his cheek on his hand again with a small sigh.
I pursed my lips and shook my head. All the money and power in the world, but if only all those people could see him now. There wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house.
He saw me coming and made a compulsive movement, like he was going to stand. Either to bolt back to the airport with his magical eight ball of destinations, or simply to greet me—I’d never know. Instead, all he did was kick out the chair across from him, and gesture for me to sit.
I did so with a fond smile, gazing at him sympathetically.
“So Nick...what are we into now?”
He stared down at the soggy cone, giving away nothing.
“Rocky Road.”
I nodded and sat there quietly, keeping my face as serious as his. He wasn’t the kind of man who would give in to something just because he was pressed. I had to let him get there on his own time.
And that time didn’t seem to be any time soon.
For the next hour or so, we simply sat there in comfortable silence. Eating our ice cream, drinking our espresso. Watching the sights and sounds of Barcelona as they hurried by.
It wasn’t until the nightclub across the street opened with a distant cheer, that he cast me a sideways glance. Fixing me in those sky-blue eyes.
