Lead Me Back

by Reiss, CD

  “The line weights were separate. Took all day to unwrap.”

  “That’s Justin. He’s wrapped in gross paper, but inside it’s not so bad. Maybe not a Singer with all the attachments, but something really cool. He loves his friends. He sticks his neck out for them. He’s generous and honest. Of course he’s egotistical and entitled, but not when it comes to me. And there’s always another piece of him I uncover that’s part of the present I asked for but never thought I deserved.”

  She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs.

  “That’s not what I expected you to say.”

  “What did you expect?”

  She shrugged. “I thought he was exciting for you.”

  “I mean . . . sure. But he’s exciting because he surprises me. This stuff—me—on the internet isn’t exciting. It’s scary. I don’t want to be scared, but I don’t want DMZ to make choices for me either.”

  “Okay. So. I didn’t want to tell Mom I was a lesbian because of Dad, right?”

  “Yes, and she surprised you, I know, but it’s not like you had a choice to be gay.”

  “Can you let me finish?”

  “Sorry.”

  “The only thing she worried about was other people not giving me a fair shake. She was right. It sucks sometimes because people suck. But I have to be true to myself, and so do you. Now I’m not advocating that, of all the guys in the world, you stay with Justin Beckett. I know the last thing you want is everyone’s eyes on you for the wrong reasons.”

  “I don’t.”

  “And he’s a real piece of work.”

  It sounded as if she was going to tell me to drop him, and maybe that was what I needed to hear, so I nodded as if I agreed.

  “Maybe,” Talia said. “You should give him a chance to make you happy until he doesn’t.”

  Her quick turnaround pulled a surprised laugh out of me. My relief was a bright, blinking sign that she was right.

  “You got all the sense,” I said.

  “You got all the talent.”

  “Whatever.” I sniffed. “I need some good news. World peace or a sale at Nordstrom’s. Anything.”

  “Anything?” She smiled and slid her phone from her pocket. “Even if it doesn’t help you at all?”

  “Yes. Show me now.”

  She handed me her phone, and I gasped when I saw the sonogram.

  “No way!”

  “Shh. It’s not three months yet. So . . .”

  “You or Soley?”

  “Soley. My egg. The sperm donor’s anonymous.”

  “This is why you can’t keep up the theater.”

  “It’s expensive all around. So, yeah.”

  “I’m so happy for you.”

  She looked at the sonogram with an involuntary grin, as if seeing it for the first time. Her pride was infectious, and though it changed nothing about my situation, the light of her joy chased away the shadows of my life’s unknowns.

  Justin was too complicated to make me smile like that. Or maybe I was too complicated.

  CHAPTER 14

  JUSTIN

  “Oh, no. Yeah, no,” I said, scrolling through the pictures of Heidi. My trainer, Dina, leaned on one foot, granite-muscled arms crossed. She didn’t appreciate the interruption, but when Ken texted with 911 and a link, what was I supposed to do?

  When the second link came through, she snapped the phone out of my hands.

  “Give it to me.” I held my hand out, but she pocketed it.

  “You committed to an eight-pack,” she said. “And I committed to giving you one. Star plank. Now.”

  Fine. Kayla didn’t seem like a constant consumer of celebrity gossip. No one was sending her links of me feeding Heidi. She could wait an hour while Dina tortured me.

  On my eightieth star plank, Kayla’s reaction to the pictures faded into the background, and I thought about Gordon. He’d served her divorce papers, but there was a 100 percent chance he was a mess about it.

  I should be there to help him out. Instead, I was making it worse, giving the media every reason to follow me around, showing up in public with his wife and feeding her like a dumbass. Cutting him off made me feel as if he were in some other universe, but that wasn’t the deal. We were connected by an entire industry that bought and sold our lives. I was too stupid to see it.

  Dina yelled for a hundred crunches, and I leaned into the burn in my muscles, hardening the ones just under my heart.

  Stupid. Just dumb.

  I couldn’t even call him and explain again. He wouldn’t believe me, even if he picked up. Knowing Gordon Daws like I did, he was leaning into his own burn.

  “Another set,” Dina barked, standing over me.

  “Please.” I dropped onto my back and reached up. “Phone.”

  “Do it.”

  Giving her the set did nothing to break up the frustration.

  “Walk it off,” she said.

  I paced and bounced. My gym overlooked the pool where Sunset Boys had partied for days on end. There were nights I’d never remember and mornings I woke up naked on the living room carpet with a full condom crusted to my dick. Chad had stood on the edge of the pool and pissed right in it. Everyone got out as if the water had turned to acid. I’d laughed so hard my abs hurt almost as much as they did after a hundred crunches.

  Dina handed me the phone.

  “Good work today,” she said.

  “Yeah.” I opened Ken’s link. “Thanks.”

  “See you Tuesday.”

  The alley. Kayla’s blurred face. A buzz rose in my ears. Pure, vibrating tension.

  “Sure.”

  The Tesla pulling up next to her white van. The early morning exit in the previous night’s clothes.

  Kayla wasn’t used to this. She didn’t know it would go away. She didn’t know what to expect, and I wasn’t there to tell her it would all be all right. She hadn’t asked for this, but I’d brought it on her. I used to think success was easy. Every path I walked turned to gold as soon as I stepped onto it. I must have used up whatever grace I’d been born with. Now I ruined everything I touched.

  The pressure of the buzzing was so loud I didn’t hear Dina leave.

  I started to call Kayla but stopped myself when I imagined every dumb thing that could come out of my mouth.

  I texted.

  —Hey—

  Three running dots appeared where she’d answer. Her phone was on. She hadn’t blocked me, but it took forever for her to reply. Ken’s office called, and I dismissed it. He probably wanted to talk to me about the pictures. That could wait.

  I went outside, and when she still hadn’t replied, my skin got hot to tap out a demand that would backfire.

  Instead, I stripped my shirt and dropped it at the edge of the pool.

  I checked my phone. Still nothing from her. I put my phone facedown on top of that and dived into the water wearing my gym shorts.

  The tense buzz was replaced with the whoosh of water, and the burn of the workout was cooled, though the tightness of broken muscle was still there. By the time I popped up and reached over the edge for my phone, she’d answered.

  —Hey—

  In three letters, she told me I was going to have to bring up the pictures. Did she know about Heidi? The alley? Both? Neither? Would she have been wordier under normal circumstances, or was she just busy?

  —I’m not going to beat around the bush. Did

  u see the pics in DMZ or no?—

  My wet fingers left domes of water on my screen. I wiped it on my shirt.

  —Which ones?—

  Indirect conflict was my kryptonite. I called her and put her on speaker.

  “Where are you?” I said when she picked up.

  “On my way home.”

  “What did you see?”

  She sighed as if she was the most exhausted person in LA and the person responsible for her exhaustion was the person on the other side of the phone.

  I lifted myself out of the pool.

&
nbsp; “I’ll meet you at your place.”

  Standing over the phone as it nested in my shirt, I waited for her to answer.

  “Kayla?”

  “No.”

  No? I felt a jolt of surprise and a flash of frustration that I squashed like a bug. Then I was just bummed out.

  “All right—”

  “The people across the alley,” she continued. “I can’t tell if they’re home, and you can’t come in the front because you can’t walk the streets, so . . .”

  “Come here.”

  She sighed again. What was that about? Resignation? Frustration? Irritation? It wasn’t like her to breathe hard instead of saying what was on her mind.

  “Please,” I continued, “or I’ll meet you anywhere you want. A coffee shop. Paris. The moon. The—” I tried to think of someplace impossibly far away but came up with a closer option. “Louise’s. Meet me at my grandmother’s if you don’t want to meet me alone. You know where it is.”

  “Your place is fine, I guess.”

  I sent her the address and got ready.

  Standing in my house with her thumb hooked over the strap of her bag, she looked around without trying to make a big deal about it. Her yellow dress crossed over in the front, and the blue flowers completed each other at the seams. Her denim espadrilles matched the dress, and her makeup made her skin glow. I couldn’t tell if she’d spent thirty seconds getting ready to see me, or if she’d stressed over every decision.

  “So,” she said. “This is your house.”

  “Yeah.”

  I was suddenly embarrassed by how I lived. She was judging every piece of furniture my decorator had picked. She could spot the things that came with the house and didn’t quite go. The art on the walls was trash. She knew exactly how much every piece cost, and she knew that I didn’t.

  We should have met at Louise’s. I wouldn’t have to explain that I was never home when I’d bought this house, or that I hadn’t had the time or energy to make the place my own.

  She was perfect and I wasn’t. She was a nutrient and I was a toxin.

  “You look good,” she said.

  “I got that going for me.”

  She tilted her head to one side as if I wasn’t making sense, which I wasn’t, because she hadn’t heard any of the trash I was talking about myself.

  “Wanna sit outside?” I asked.

  “I have a meeting, and I need to work on my portfolio.”

  “Right. That’s cool. Who are you meeting with?”

  She jammed her tongue between her teeth and cheek, as if she didn’t want to say anything.

  Was she waiting for me to bring it up?

  Fine. I’d bring it up. I had nothing to hide.

  “I can explain,” I said.

  “I don’t want you to explain.”

  “What do you want?” I sounded put upon and annoyed, which wasn’t how I felt. “Just tell me and I’ll make it happen.”

  She cleared her throat, looking inward for a moment before she spoke.

  “You’re going to say Heidi is just a friend, and it wasn’t anything, and yada yada. The pictures of us from the other night? I don’t know. You’ll say anything from . . . you won’t come by me anymore to you’ll buy the building across the alley.”

  My phone buzzed like I had a beehive in my pocket.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” I said, pulling it out. Ken. I shut the damn thing off and tossed it onto the cushions.

  “I’m just trying to give you the benefit of whatever explanation absolves you or takes care of whatever doubts you think I have so that we can get to the bottom of this.”

  If she was getting to the core of something, I was sitting down for it. I dropped onto my couch, got comfortable, and held my hands out to my sides.

  “Go ahead. Take me down.”

  She sat on the arm of the couch, still hugging her bag as if she wanted to split. The neck of her yellow dress gapped with the twist of her body . . . and yeah, she was fully covered and all, but that little imperfection was all I could see. Like the first cut into fruit that bled sweet juice. When I touched her there, I’d lick my fingers clean.

  “It’s not a new bottom,” she said.

  “Is it the one where I take over your life and you have nothing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it’s my fault this goes on?”

  “It’s not your fault, but it’s because of you.”

  “Right. So, you want to pick up and move to, like, Madagascar or something? Because this is what it is. If I quit music and acting tomorrow, nothing would change. I could live in a monastery in the Himalayas, and they’d find me. And, man, sometimes it’s like I don’t know how this happened. People need entertainment, and I want to do that. I love my job, but it’s not about my job anymore, is it?”

  “No.” She slid off the arm of the couch and onto the cushions. She needed a reason to be with me, my past, my reputation, and my career, and I couldn’t give her a single one. I wanted to put my arms around her so bad, just to ground me enough to say the right words, but everything in her body language said “nope.” I was on my own with my conflicting motives clenched in a fist of fear.

  If I was going to explain it, I had to loosen the fist and toss the motives on the table.

  “I was just having fun with my friends. Then I was making money. Then traveling and fucking around and somewhere in there it stopped being about entertaining anyone. It was about me. What I did. How I did it. Who I did it with.”

  She looked away as if she had a choice between that and telling me I was being a baby.

  “I know,” I continued. “I brought some of it on myself, but not all of it. To them . . . the websites and the gossip sites . . . I was gonna either be an altar boy or a scumbag, and I ain’t no altar boy. So I just did what I wanted. Then the whole world became my parents, and I was a rebellious kid trying to separate. And now . . .”

  Now this perfect woman was sitting in a corner of my couch clutching her bag as if it were a life preserver and I was a shark.

  Had I scared her? She didn’t have fear on her face. More an anticipation of an emotional gut punch I had no intention of delivering.

  I gently took hold of her bag. She let it go, and I put it on the table.

  “And now,” I said. “I’m sitting here, on my couch in a big house, with this girl I’m crazy about. I’m wondering if she’ll let me touch her. Where she’ll let me kiss her. What I have to say to make her accept me when I’m a grown man, but the world still thinks they’re my parents. I’d love to tell her that’s gonna change, but it’s not. And I can’t think of a reason she should have to deal with that.”

  Her hands were folded in her lap as her thumbs circled each other.

  “That’s very honest,” she said.

  I shifted over until my arm stretched over the couch behind her and let my hand hover over hers, waiting for a sign it was okay to lower it.

  She raised her hands until they touched my palm, and they fell back into her lap.

  “I’ll do the best I can to protect you,” I said. “That’s all I got.”

  She extended her thumb to stroke my index finger.

  “I believe . . .” She filled her lungs and let it go. “I believe you’ll try.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I do. I’m out of my mind to believe a word you say, but something about you, Justin. There’s something the cameras don’t catch, and I can see it. When you’re close to me like this, I can see the part of you worth trusting.”

  “Kaylacakes.” I kissed her cheek and went down the length of her neck. She smelled like coconut oil.

  “So we’re clear . . .” She faced me. “After the next kiss, before we go any further, I expect monogamy.”

  “So do I.”

  I kissed her that promise.

  “After we kiss again . . .” She twisted to face me and laid her fingertips on my lips. I’ll never know why that was such a turn-on. “No slipups. No excuses. I’ll dr
op you no matter how much I like you.”

  “So, you like me?”

  “Enough to let this get further than the next kiss.”

  My hand left hers and drifted to her knee.

  “How much further?”

  She bit her lip, then took my wrist and pushed my hand up her skirt. The inside of her thigh was warm and soft.

  “I should kiss you first,” I said, brushing my lips across hers. “Seal the deal.”

  “Seal it,” she said.

  So I kissed her.

  CHAPTER 15

  KAYLA

  I went to his place to gauge my own feelings. Was he messing with me? Did he like me enough to make the feelings of vulnerability worth it? More importantly, did I like him enough? Was I just fooling myself? Was I falling for a brand image, or a human?

  When I first came in and moved my gaze to him from his living room walls, I caught sight of him in an unguarded moment. He was a checkered floor that always looked black on white unless you saw it out of the corner of your eye. For that split second, it became white on black until you looked right at it again.

  For the first time, he didn’t take up more space than he should. He didn’t exude magnetism and charm. In that moment, he was a kid in a grown-up house.

  Then the Justin I knew returned, until he told me his story, and I could look that kid in the face. He was that kid, and the man he became, and everything in between that was more than the tabloids and less than what was expected of him.

  A fully human man with all the beautiful trappings of a god, who was still riddled with flaws and insecurities, looked at me—with my incompleteness and deficits and as if I were a goddess.

  I’d never known how much I needed to be looked at like that, because no one ever had. His veneration lifted me, and his acceptance grounded me.

  “Seal the deal,” he said.

  “Seal it.” I opened my mouth for his tongue and my legs for his hand. He brushed the damp cotton of my underwear where I was swollen and sensitive.

  “I bet,” he said with a husky vocal fry, “if I got under there, I’d feel how wet you are already.”

  “Better check.”