by Maggie Marr
Cici looked up into the blue sky. She was used to public humiliation as a by-product of celebrity. She’d experienced embarrassment at the hands of her ex-husband, her ex-lovers, even her former agents and business managers, but she didn’t want this for her niece. Cici hadn’t spoken with Nikki since Jeb’s demise. Cici texted and called. She’d had her assistant drive by Nikki’s apartment, but Nikki didn't respond. If not for the updates provided by Jay from Worldwide Studios, Cici would be in full-throttle panic mode. Perhaps Nikki was angered—hurt. Their conversation in the limo, the night of Jeb’s death, had been unpleasant.
“Give this Jeb mess three more days and it’ll be over. Best bet is to lie low.”
Cici didn’t want to lie low—not this time. She’d let other lies and scandals blow by, but those didn’t involve her niece or the disgusting accusation that she and her niece were involved in a three-way love triangle with the likes of Jeb Schmaltzer—this accusation appalled Cici and made her stomach churn with sour bile.
“What do you want me to do with the rock star?” Kiki asked, changing the subject.
Cici shook her head—there were a multitude of problems right now with her niece center stage for all of them.
“Pictures?” Cici asked.
Too dangerous to e-mail—Kiki handed over hard copies to Cici. She flipped through the photos of Nikki with Sick Puppy’s lead singer and guitarist, Adam. The guy was sexy. Cici could see why her niece was fuck-foundered. With his dark hair and ropy muscles along with the string of Asian tattoos up and down his arms, this guy was every little twenty-something’s bad-boy-rock-star-fantasy come true.
“Sexy fucker, isn’t he,” Kiki said.
While pushing the upper echelon of age, Kiki admittedly liked them young—very young. Cici wondered if Kiki was still utilizing that little Boy Toy Service that was available to older ladies out of the Peninsula.
Nikki appeared happy in these pictures. In the photo from the Whiskey A Go Go, Adam had his arm slung around Nikki’s neck. Nikki was laughing uproariously—head pushed forward with a giant openmouthed smile. The pain that seemed ever-present in Nikki’s eyes since the death of her mother was actually absent in these photos.
“I haven’t seen her having that much fun since…” Cici let the words drift away. Hot tears settled in the backs of her eyes. Kiki wasn’t her shrink, Kiki was her publicist. Kiki had worked a miracle by managing to give Cici’s sister’s death some semblance of privacy—a miracle and a shitload of payoffs. “I wish she’d find someone better for her.”
“She’s a beautiful girl,” Kiki said.
“What’s he after with these?” Cici asked. She laid the pics across the patio table as if setting up for a hand of high-stakes poker.
“What you thought. A little door opener and bit of leverage. Some press to get the record execs attention.”
“And where?”
“The usual suspects—Us, People, Enquirer.” Kiki drained her second glass of Chardonnay.
“Takers?”
“One, so far as I know.”
“And this is it? No sex shots, no nude shots, nothing indecent or unseemly?” Cici asked.
Her eyes skirted over the pictures. One with Nikki holding a guitar in a shithole of an apartment. Adam stood behind her with his arms wrapped around her, teaching her to play.
“Not that I’ve found and not that I’ve heard.”
Cici’s phone buzzed. She tilted it toward her and looked at the name. A picture of Jessica Caulfield-Fox with her two sons popped onto the screen.
“It’s Jess,” Cici said. “I need to take this.” She didn’t move to stand and Kiki didn’t move to leave. They both—whether they wanted to or not—knew too much about each other to need that kind of formality.
“Jess!” Cici said. “Calling to congratulate me on all my tabloid covers?”
“Ha! You have Kiki with you?” Jessica asked.
Cici nodded—her friend knew her so well. “Right here.” Cici picked up a picture of Nikki at a Westside park, lying under a tree with her head in Adam’s lap.
“I got two interesting calls,” Jessica said.
“From?”
“One was from Mike. And one was from Bikram Shasta.”
“Bikram Shasta?” Cici asked. “I thought he was dead?”
“Not quite—south of Pico.”
“He might as well be dead. What does Bikram have that you and Mike would want?”
“Well it would seem a bit of a script with a certain director attached.”
Cici’s fingertips tingled and her heart pitter-pattered at a higher rate in her chest.
“JP Anderson,” Jessica said.
Cici gulped in air. She closed her eyes. She might give her right kidney to work with JP Anderson. The last three actresses who had starred in JP Anderson films had gotten a nomination for an Oscar and two had won.
“And the script?” Cici whispered.
“Pretty fucking good,” Jessica said. “I’m halfway through and it’s brilliant. I mean, when you throw JP into the mix—Cici, this thing could be awesome.”
Cici’s heart ka-thwapped against her ribs. Bikram had called Jessica because JP wanted her—no, needed her, in that role.
“And he wants…” Cici closed her eyes. “JP wants me?” she whispered softly.
“According to Bikram,” Jessica said. “JP will only do the film if you’re in the lead.”
“Send it to me,” Cici gasped out. “I want it. I want it now. Have to read it—send it now!”
“Already done,” Jessica said. “Check your e-mail.”
Cici smiled. Her eyes continued to glance across the pictures of Nikki on the table, but there was a too-long pause from Jessica—a pause that made Cici’s breath become shallow and her heart hammer faster.
“What is it Jess,” Cici said. “There’s something else—a shoe to drop?”
Jessica sighed into the phone. Cici could picture her with her chin on her hand, trying to figure out how to tell Cici something that Jess knew for certain that Cici didn’t want to hear.
“Let it rip, Jess.”
“Well… it’s the script.”
“You said it was brilliant.” Cici’s brows furrowed.
“It is brilliant,” Jessica said. “But it’s Boundless Bound.”
“Boundless Bound,” Cici whispered and glanced over at Kiki, whose eyes where wide and her lips were formed into a perfect O. “Boundless Bound—how do I know that name?”
Then it hit Cici—a sack of wet cement to the gut. Boundless Bound!
“Oh my fucking God,” Cici said. “That’s Jebidiah Schmaltzer’s script!”
“And there is the problem,” Jessica said.
Cici closed her eyes. Nothing came easy for her. Every advantage, every gain, every positive thing in her life always came vacuum-packed in problems. She should be used to the good coming with the cream-filled bad.
“We could push,” Cici said, already knowing that Jess would have tried to think of every possible solution.
“JP has the next four slots full. We push and it’s at least another eighteen months before we go into production.”
Anything could happen in eighteen months.
“I’ll read it,” Cici said softly. “This will be such a shit-storm for Nikki.”
“Uh, yeah,” Jessica said. “Because the new owner of the script according to Bikram isn’t Jeb’s widow, but is in fact one Miss Nikki Solange.”
Chapter 12
Bare, Beautiful Skin
Nikki’s decrepit Toyota rattled to a stop in front of Aunt Cici’s security gate. Late last night LiLo was found, car banged into yet another Beverly Hills tree. Finally the paps had dispersed from in front of Aunt Cici’s Bel Air gate and congealed into a giant blob of bulb-flashing humanity in front of the Beverly Hills police department. Now only the celebrity-sighting van cruised by at exactly eleven, one, and three—Nikki could time her arrival and departure around those tourist looky-loos.
The Toyota’s backseat was full of all the itty-bitties and errands Aunt Cici had asked Nikki to take care of. Shoes, gowns, dry cleaning, Kiehl’s, bags, books—the price tag for the merchandise in the backseat of Nikki’s Toyota exceeded the value of the entire car times ten.
Nikki punched in the security code and the gates rumbled to life. She gunned her car up the curling Mount-Olympus-style drive. Her iPhone rang. She already had her earbuds in, so she pressed Call to pick up.
“Nikki, darling, it’s Kiki.”
Nikki’s left shoulder muscle tightened into a hard knot. There couldn’t be any good news coming from Aunt Cici’s publicist, not with Jeb Schmaltzer’s killer still wandering the world and the tabs still sporting front-page shots and interior spreads that included Aunt Cici’s million-dollar mug.
“Hi, Kiki.” Nikki swallowed around the lump in her throat.
“Where are you, darling? You sound like you’re in the Himalayas. You didn’t slip out of town, did you, darling?”
“I’m in Bel Air,” Nikki said. She pulled her beater up beside her aunt’s convertible ice-blue jag.
“Tell your aunt hello from me,” Kiki said and grunted. Probably in the midst of her late-morning rubdown, which, according to Nikki’s aunt and her friends, often led to Kiki’s afternoon lay. Nikki crinkled her nose with the thought of Kiki, the old crone, high and astride some nubile young stud.
“So listen, dear,” Kiki gasped out. “I wanted to let you know before you saw the cover of this week’s People magazine.”
“I thought they found someone else to bother,” Nikki said. She was tired of the blazing headlines announcing to the world that she and Aunt Cici had been involved in an illicit love triangle with Jeb Schmaltzer.
“Darling, these pictures are new and they’re sans Celeste. They only involve you and one other person.”
Nikki squinted her eyes. Her most interesting thing to date since moving to LA, aside from Jeb’s death, was discovering Boundless Bound, and that little treasure wasn’t tab-worthy news. With Jeb dead, Boundless Bound wouldn’t be Nikki’s news at all.
“They’re pictures of you and that little rocker you’ve been bedding from Sick Puppy. He’s got some sort of viral sensation going with his latest song. With your rise to celeb status thanks to dead Jeb, the tabs were salivating for the pics,” Kiki said.
Nikki’s head hammered with the realization that this was exactly what Aunt Cici had mentioned in the car the night of Jeb’s death.
“Who sold them?” Nikki asked, her voice weary. She feared she already knew the sad, sick answer to her question.
“Adam,” Kiki said with the most dramatic of sighs. “And I hear the deal was quite lucrative for him.”
*
Nikki parked her car on Franklin, west of the Whitley intersection, and killed the engine. The snake’s tail of traffic that stood still while Nikki parallel parked rushed by her with a handful of angry honks. She looked across the slightly sloped hill toward the front of Adam’s building. A short, squatty woman ambled down the steps with two liver-colored pit bulls that strained at their leashes.
Nikki rested her forehead on the steering wheel and stared at her ragged-edged thumbnail that she’d gnawed on her trek from Bel Air to Hollywood. She ran her pointer fingertip around the rough edge of the nail. Aunt Cici had warned her about Adam. Aunt Cici had warned her about a lot of things. She tilted her head and kept the bridge of her nose plastered to the wheel as she speared her gaze at the front of Adam’s building.
She wasn’t surprised Adam had sold the pictures of them together to the highest bidder, she wasn’t even surprised he’d wanted the publicity for himself and for Sick Puppy, but what Nikki was surprised about was that no matter how “casual” she called their f&ff sessions, somewhere inside—in that attached, private place—sadness meandered along with the feeling of being used.
Why did Aunt Cici have to be right? Nikki closed her eyes and shut out the taupe-colored apartment building, the green grass, even the sliver of blue sky that peeked through the front windshield. She exhaled a giant stream of air and pressed out the unwanted chunks of ugly emotion that clustered together and stuck to her insides.
Aunt Cici’s predictions and the predictions of her cadre of friends on the behavior of every inhabitant of La-La Land had been pretty damned accurate. Maybe she should start listening to that cluster of bitches instead of tossing them off with a shake of her head. Aside from Christina, that gaggle seemed to be the only group that knew anything about the words loyalty and trust.
Nikki pulled her head from the steering wheel. She had to see Adam. She had to see Adam and end this, whatever it was, in person. She had to end it now, this instant before she lost her nerve or talked herself out of the righteous indignation that pulsed through her bloodstream. She pushed open her door, and the Toyota’s hinges shrieked in protest. Nikki slammed the car door and walked up the front stairs to Adam’s building. Once inside, the fluorescent bulb in the hall buzzed like an angry wasp. She stepped around an open trash bag toppling over with beer cans. Her hands grasped the metal doorknob, and without a knock she let herself into Adam’s apartment. The front of the apartment was empty of people. Nikki picked her way through the mess of too many people living in too small a space to Adam’s room.
She should have texted. She should have called. She should have pounded on the front door of Adam’s apartment instead of turning the cool knob of his unlocked door because while she was hurt and angry, she wasn’t prepared for the sight before her.
Three girls. And a man. And Adam. Naked. In Adam’s bed.
Late afternoon sunlight filtered through the soot-stained window of Adam’s bedroom. Nikki stood in the doorway and listened to the multi-toned metronomic respiration of five sexy individuals wiped out from an active night. The room smelled like sex and sweat and passion. Tits and cocks lay at odd angles on the king-sized bed.
A queasy, oily feeling settled in Nikki’s stomach. Adam barely washed his clothes; she doubted he washed his sheets. Not long before she had been in that bed. Granted, absent one, two, three, four, people—but she’d been in it.
Nikki glanced into the full-length mirror beside her and peered into her stark, blue-ringed eyes that drooped with fatigue and sadness and even hints of fear. She didn’t have any room left for rage. She couldn’t muster any anger for Adam, but a thin layer of self-loathing filmed her skin. Who was she? What was she doing? Why was she here?
There were no answers in her eyes.
No earth-shaking revelations about herself or what she wanted or why she played like she knew what she was doing with her life. Over her shoulder, on the bed, sun glinted across the blond hair of the girl closest to Adam. Beside her was a lusciously exotic, darker-skinned creature with huge breasts and pierced nipples.
This wasn’t Nikki’s scene. She was wild enough to move halfway across the country, wild enough to believe she knew enough to make movies, but she wasn’t wild enough for the rock star life. She would never pierce her nipples or her pussy. She would never be comfortable with multiple sex partners in one night. And right this moment, standing in the warm room with naked, nubile bodies, she felt certain that she would never be anything but a complete fuckup.
Nikki grasped the doorjamb between the hall and Adam’s room. She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to have sex with gangs of people. She didn’t want to have f&ffs with a man who, while good in bed, thought little more of her than one of many holes in which to shove his cock.
The beautiful bodies intertwined perfectly. The light glimmered against different shades of skin. Marks of ink. Arms. Legs. Cocks. Oddly erotic, her gaze followed the flesh where one arm merged with a leg and a leg was slung over a torso and all of it merged into one brilliant picture of naked and perfect twenty-something skin.
No. She didn’t want this. This picture, while beautiful in some weirdly free way, was not for Nikki. She wanted the forever after. She wanted the love story. She wanted the life that
included one person—one man on whom she could rely. Even at twenty-two, Nikki knew in her heart that she was looking for something more than Adam could provide.
Nikki turned away from the group on the bed. She hadn’t forgotten anything at Adam’s, had never left anything behind. She picked her way through the skirts, the bras, the panties, and out of Adam’s room and out the front door. Nikki never looked back at anything she left behind.
*
The darkness of Dresden1 dulled Nikki’s sense of sight but the pounding bass heightened her hearing. Bodies bounced in unison to the outrageous beat the DJ laid down. Christina was ensconced in the VIP section with Striker Ross, the latest up-and-coming, soon-to-be action star. Striker’s next film would be produced by Lydia. A low-level reality star with a well-known Adderall problem lingered around the edge of the VIP area with her overbleached entourage of hangers-on.
Nikki angled toward Christina. She moved through the low-cut shirts and high-cut skirts that flashed tits and ass. She was nearly to the roped-off area when her eyes latched on to him. And by him she meant a man who grabbed her breath and clutched her heart.
She stopped. A sudden sense of being hunted wafted through Nikki’s limbs. And yet she wanted to be hunted by this man. He was tall and thick with sculpted muscles that his black sweater clung to. A perfectly fitted sweater that skimmed over his body. His eyes were so dark they looked nearly otherworldly, as if they were vacant, all-seeing black holes. His jaw was cut hard and his hair was a deep, dark black.
He leaned against the bar. No glass. No drink. Only him. His eyes held her. Held her still. Pinned her down. Made her squirm and yet nearly pulled her to him. She was entranced by him until her phone rang over and over in her purse. Nikki yanked her gaze from the guy at the bar. “Unknown Number” flashed across the phone’s screen. She pressed the phone to her ear.
