Unstoppable (Fierce)

by Voight, Ginger

  I held back the tears. I deserved his anger. I had squandered every single good thing he’d ever given me the minute I let Eddie touch me. I couldn’t even ask to be forgiven. “This is what I warned you about a long time ago, Jace. I told you loving me came with a price.”

  He nodded. “You did warn me,” he admitted softly. “I guess I should have listened.”

  His words cut me to the core. This was every nightmare I had ever had coming true. The fight was gone. He had been burned enough by me. The only way he could save himself was to let it all go. When he walked over to the door of his dressing room and opened it, I knew it was my cue to leave.

  I had no choice but to take it.

  I brushed past his hard body, that very same body I had begun to consider part of my own. I could feel myself tearing away from him, like leaving a limb or two behind.

  I definitely left my heart behind.

  So I threw myself into the only thing I had left: the music. I ignored everything and everyone so that I could put the finishing touches on my new set. I wanted no comparisons between Shelby and me, so I chose songs that she couldn’t or wouldn’t sing. The minute those drums – and my angry vocal – announced my first song, I watched the audience whip around and stare at the stage in astonishment. Instead of milling around, bored and counting the seconds for the “real” stars to perform, people rushed to their seat to watch me sing, and it helped patch up the holes real relationships had left behind.

  That first night with the new set, I knocked it out of the park. I knew I wouldn’t get much credit for it, given PING was ready to skewer anything I set out to do. I also knew that being great came at a cost, that Shelby might react badly to it and cut herself again.

  But I couldn’t worry about it. She had her hero now, someone who would make sure she felt loved and accepted and perfect – the very same way he used to make me feel. All I had left was the music, and it had never let me down even if I had failed it plenty.

  I sang the hell out of my songs and then I let everyone else close the show as I retreated back to my tiny, somewhat safe, hotel room. I no longer participated in the encore, and I certainly didn’t hang around outside signing for fans. After all, none of them were chanting my name.

  By the next morning PING delivered its verdict.

  DIVA SHOWS OFF WITH SURPRISING NEW SET BEFORE DITCHING BAND AND IGNORING FANS.

  IS JORDI HEMPHILL THUMBING HER NOSE AT THE PEOPLE WHO MADE HER A STAR?

  I couldn’t win.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Atlanta, Georgia

  March 26, 2012

  I separated myself further from the pack when I arrived that Monday in Atlanta. I came much earlier than my touring cohorts. The corporate offices of Tempestuous were located in “Hotlanta” and my week was stacked deep with promotional appearances for my new “Fierce” line of clothing and accessories. Their designers had been working overtime, using my eclectic style from the show to launch a whole new line of clothes designed to make every “diva” over a size 12 feel like a rock star.

  Iris even flew in to help coordinate PR around the launch, which included mall appearances of my very own. She wanted me there a day early so that I could get pampered and primped… much like a show poodle.

  Andy already warned me that her dear friend Iris was a fashion general, who would crack that whip to get me into chic shape. I had a taste of this in New York, but I could tell that she was just getting started. She advised I just go with the flow and allow her to work her magic, which is precisely what I did. Her celebrity stylists were no Jorge, but by the time they were done I looked, and mostly felt, like a new person.

  My cropped brown hair was darkened to accommodate broad, bright magenta highlights. The smoky, dramatic makeup helped me feel edgier and even somewhat sexy, though my days as Jace’s sex queen had come to an abrupt end.

  He had a new queen now, someone who was so far different from me that no one could convince me that we were even from the same species.

  I didn’t fit in. And I was tired of trying. I not only added yet another tattoo (a flaming microphone on my calf) but also pierced my nose to get even further from Shelby’s wholesome, goody-goody girl-next-door image.

  I wore clunky boots and sported chains around my wrist, neck and waist. Tempestuous had crafted punk-inspired jewelry that featured handcuffs and skulls, which all served to further harden my image.

  Surprisingly, Iris supported the entire overhaul. She fussed over me like a stage mom, never saying one word about how the new clothes were in a size larger than the clothes before. She flung a dozen outfits over her arm and made me model each one, until she was satisfied that I looked my absolute best.

  If I didn’t, she would, in her genteel southern way, gently encourage me to try something else.

  By Wednesday we were fast friends and I loved her like family. She reminded me, in fact, of my late Aunt Jackie, who had gone off to New York the minute she graduated high school. She got to live her dream before cancer claimed her at the tender age of 38.

  I had just turned 16 that year, and was looking forward to a summer in the city. Instead they brought her body back to Oswen and buried her in the family plot.

  Iris shone just as bright as my Aunt Jackie had. She had an ever-present smile that made everyone feel like they were in the presence of a friend. She wasn’t stingy with hugs or praise. The irony was that this woman with no children of her own had better maternal instincts than my own mother.

  I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that she noticed faded bruises while I was trying on the new clothes, but her concern took me off guard.

  “Where’d you get that, hon?” she asked as she pointed to the hint of green around my thigh.

  I glanced down, remembering that afternoon in the limo that awarded me those bruises. I blushed hotly and turned away before she could see the truth written all over my face. “Oh, that. It’s nothing. I get those all the time while I sleep. I think I must moonlight as a sumo wrestler.”

  Her blue eyes narrowed. She didn’t buy it. “You should be kinder to yourself,” she said softly.

  I shrugged. Little did she know this was not a time to be kind to myself.

  This was a time to answer for all my sins.

  The only reprieve I got was that Eddie had chosen not to join us in Atlanta, which surprised me given all the press I was getting. That meant I could do what I was getting paid to do, then run back to the hotel and hide behind the safety and privacy of four walls until the next day.

  When the crew got in that Thursday, they were taken aback by my dramatic makeover, Shelby most of all. Our friendship had dried up since Boston, when she felt slighted by my comments about her set. I hadn’t really extended any white flags to her in the meantime. I didn’t even stick around to watch her performances after she changed up her own set list.

  It was clear she took all of my behavior personally. So when I showed up at rehearsal looking so dramatically different, she took it to mean precisely the way I intended.

  I was nothing like her. And I was through pretending.

  Jace’s eyes swept over me, taking in the drastic changes, but he said nothing. His jaw clenched as my chin tipped defiantly. I was done making excuses, done trying to apologize. He had made his choice. Let him have it.

  He brushed past me without a word.

  It stretched the tension between us all to the breaking point, which of course PING celebrated with glee.

  THE FIERCE TOUR THREATENS TO IMPLODE WITH BACKSTAGE HOSTILITIES!

  By the time I stepped on stage, which had always been my refuge before, I felt like I was navigating a minefield. In every face in the crowd I saw the judgmental faces of my tormentors: Eddie, my mother, PING. I ended up blowing the lyrics of two of my songs, which meant my showstopper fell like a dud when it was supposed to be the one that got people on their feet.

  I wanted to run back to the hotel, but Vanni was waiting for me in my dressing room. He stood from th
e makeup chair, walked toward where I stood in the doorway and pulled me into the room. He shut the door and locked it. “We’re done playing around,” he informed me as he practically dragged me to the couch. He plopped me on my butt and sat close enough to me I could see the golden flecks in his dark brown eyes. “What’s going on, Jordi?”

  I shook my head and looked away, but he was quick to grasp my chin in his hand. “No running away this time,” he said softly.

  In those dark eyes I felt stripped bare and vulnerable. And it hurt. It hurt a lot. “You wouldn’t understand,” I mumbled.

  His eyebrow arched. “You think not?” He took my hands into his. “You think I don’t know what it’s like to never feel good enough? To always wait for that shoe to drop when things start to look good for once? To fail spectacularly because that’s what I feel I deserve?”

  I shook my head.

  “Two years ago I was on top of the world. I had it all. Fame. Money. All the women I could bed in every town I could conquer. It was everything I always thought I wanted. What I really wanted was to matter to someone. For someone to give a damn and mean it, and never leave.”

  “You had that,” I reminded. “You had Andy.”

  He shook his head. “Inside I was still a scared little boy, wondering what I could have done so wrong that my own father would leave and never come back. That was the truth of my life, Jordi. I just didn’t know it at the time. I had spent my whole life filling the holes with stuff from the outside world that I never really healed this one gaping, open wound. Instead I covered it with the safe adulation of strangers. They only got as close as I let them. And it medicated the wounds, however briefly. I wanted all the love without the risk, which meant I had no idea how to love at all. Andy started the healing process by giving me what I wanted and what I needed, but that scared the shit out of me for a long, long time. The stakes were higher. If I disappointed her, it wasn’t just some one-night-stand I never called back. It was someone I cared about, that I needed in spite of myself. Hurting her inevitably reinforced all those negative feelings I had harbored for so long.”

  He stroked my hair with his hand. “You think you’re not good enough, but baby you are. You’re good enough to be successful, to have your dreams come true… to be loved.”

  I shook my head, unable to stop the tears if I wanted to. He drew me into his arms. “I see you settle for so much less than you deserve, as if it’s some kind of penance you should pay to be special. Jealous little liars sold you that line of bullshit, people intimidated by how great you are destined to become. You think it’s an accident that you were the one born with that voice? You were meant to stand out. You were meant to shine. It’s beyond you, baby. It’s going to happen one way or the other. They want to tear you down so they can build themselves up, but the honest truth is they can’t destroy you. Only you destroy you, by believing them. Don’t make the same mistake I did and tear it all to shit.”

  He pulled away to look me in the face. “Don’t waste the same time I did. Don’t destroy your health, your body and your future the way I did. And don’t squander love like I did, Jordi. In the end you’ll just regret all the time you can’t get back.”

  I stared into those eyes. “I don’t know how to fix what I’ve broken, Vanni,” I whispered.

  “You have to fix what’s been broken in you,” he said.

  I had to chuckle. “You make it sound so easy.”

  “It’s easier than you think,” he assured. “Just take it one step at a time.” As I tried to ponder on which step that would be he offered his suggestion. “I think you should leave Eddie.”

  My eyes shot to his as he continued. “Iris told me that things are more serious than you let on. She’s concerned about your safety.”

  “I’m fine,” I lied immediately and automatically. “He wouldn’t raise a hand to me.”

  “Wouldn’t he?” Vanni challenged. “If he can hurt you with his words, he can hurt you with his hands. It’s really kind of inevitable.”

  I shook my head again. Eddie was an asshole; I was the first to admit it. But he wasn’t a threat to my personal safety. I said as much to Vanni.

  “That’s the root of the problem, isn’t it?” he countered. “You think his being an asshole is in any way OK. If it hurts you, it’s not OK.”

  “It’s complicated,” I tried to explain, but there was no way he would understand unless I told him the truth. Given all the ammo the tour had given PING, Eddie was in a better position than ever to take us all down with that leaked video.

  I still needed to protect Jace and Graham and Vanni and the tour. So what if I took the hit? I was used to it by now, hence all the padding.

  “I used to say that, too,” Vanni replied. “When I was thrust into a fake relationship to cover up my boss’s affair. Meanwhile Andy’s heart got obliterated in the process. Nothing is worth that.” He paused only for a second. “What is Jace worth to you?”

  I thought about denying it, but there was no point. Vanni read me like an open book. “Every hit that I take,” I said softly.

  Vanni sighed as he pulled me close. I felt his exasperation, but there was little comfort I could offer him or me. These were the choices I had to make. I owed him 100% on the stage, but I could promise him nothing more than that.

  He was called to the stage for his intro, so he reluctantly left. He made me promise that I would stay and perform the encore, and I couldn’t really refuse. We exited the room together, just in time to see Shelby heading toward her dressing room for a costume change.

  Her eyes darted from him to me, processing this strange new data suspiciously. I ducked my head and followed him out to the stage, where I watched him perform from the sidelines until I could grit through the encore performance an hour later. It was awkward and tense, despite my best efforts for the show to go on.

  I didn’t stay for the impromptu M&G that night, and PING ate it all up. Social media was ablaze with reports almost as soon as the concertgoers dispersed.

  Thanks to the technology I held in my hand with my smart phone, I was able to watch it all unfold.

  DIVA BLOWS PERFORMANCES, CONTINUES TO SNUB FANS!

  Celebrity blogger Miles O’Rourke used his flaming red pen to embellish my photos for the PING website, showing horns on my brand new alternative rock image. He had all the juicy backstage gossip, which included snide little innuendo that I was getting plenty of private time with the lead singers of the show…that happened to be men, anyway.

  “Conspicuously absent from these private powwows is Shelby Goddard, Jordi’s only female competition on tour. Sources say that things have been strained between the feuding females since Jordi slammed Shelby’s song choices for boring the audience. Seems the Fierce females are BFFs no longer.”

  Masochistically I ended up scrolling to the bottom of the blog to see what the fans were saying.

  “Who does she think she is? Just because she got pity-voted into the finale she thinks she can treat Shelby like shit?”

  “Shelby is a lady who treats her body with respect. Jordi doesn’t know how to handle that so she goes to the other extreme. She thinks it makes her alternative. All it shows is how pathetic she is.”

  “Nobody is going to the tour to see her fat ass. She needs to get over herself. Srsly.”

  By the second night in Atlanta, I was greeted with stuffed pigs being thrown on the stage. Apparently irate fans thought I needed to be taken down a peg or two. I was in tears when I knocked gently on Vanni’s hotel room door. From the look on his face, I knew he had read the same reports I had.

  He invited me into the room and walked me to the sitting room of his suite. He offered me a bottle of water as he sat next to me on the plush sofa. He tried to comfort me, crooning that no one deserved to be treated so harshly or so poorly, and that was when I finally let the torrent loose regarding my past and what happened with Shane.

  What, truly, did life/fate/destiny feel I deserve if they threw me to the wo
lves as a six-year-old child?

  He was horrified with my story, which I edited to leave out some of the gorier details because I couldn’t look into his face and tell him what Shane had forced me to do. I still felt so ashamed. He brought out his computer and set up a video chat with Andy, who listened tearfully to my story.

  Neither one of them knew what to say or do to comfort me, aside from telling me that they loved me and would never let anyone hurt me again.

  Little did they realize there was nothing anyone could do to prevent it. As long as I was legally bound to Eddie, I was tied to these same ghosts from my past.

  As humiliated as I was by what Shane had done, there was no way I could force the words out about a possible sex scandal with Jace.

  What would it say about me that I went from being an innocent child abused by a family friend to being a wanton slut who slept with someone outside my marriage bed?

  I couldn’t risk it. I wouldn’t risk it.

  We stayed up long into the night talking, until I passed out, exhausted, on the sofa. When Vanni walked me out the following morning, in the same rumpled clothes I wore from the night before, I knew how it had to look. But Vanni told me that no matter what PING said or didn’t say, as long as we knew the truth, and Andy knew the truth, then they couldn’t hurt us.

  Even he couldn’t have predicted the look in both Jace’s and Shelby’s eyes when they nearly bumped into us in the hallway just as they were coming back from breakfast. Jace looked at my disheveled appearance, and how Vanni’s arm was draped across my shoulder, and made his own conclusions.

  They were easy conclusions to make, given it wasn’t that long ago when he was the one walking me from his hotel room.

  There was a tense standoff before Shelby grabbed his hand and led him silently toward their rooms. Vanni stared after them. “Do you want me to talk to him?”

  I shook my head. There was no point. Let him think I was banging the entire crew. Maybe his hatred would be easier to bear than his disappointment.