Forever, Jack (8 page)

I’m running down the hallways at boarding school. We’re not supposed to run, but it’s dark, and I don’t know where any of the other kids are. It must be after
lights out
, and I have no idea
why
I’m running. My breath is wheezing in and out of my chest, my legs burning as I round the corner by the school kitchens. But … I just turned this corner, how did I get back to the beginning? Who am I running from?

Then I hear him breathing right behind me. “William.”

I lurch up into a sitting position and snap my eyes open only to be blinded by whiteness all around me. “Shit,” I mumble, squeezing my eyes closed to blue negatives dancing on my lids. My brain unpeels from the inside of my skull and settles with a deep thud.

Ow.

“Jack, Jesus. Jumpy much?” Devon’s voice is over to my left.

I carefully slit one eye open and look to my left. It
is
Devon, and I’m at his place. Butler Cove. Shit. I close my eyes again and acknowledge the hollow ache in my chest. I can’t tell if my head or my chest hurts more. “What time is it?” I croak.

“After six in the evening. You’ve been asleep all day, and by the looks of it, could sleep another twelve. I was just making sure you weren’t actually in a coma. Everything all right?” He hands me a glass of ice water. “Here.”

“Thanks.” I close my eyes and take a sip, the iciness splashing in my empty insides. “Why did you call me William?”

“What?”

“I thought … never mind. I must have been dreaming.” I haven’t had that dream for years. “Where’ve you been?”

Devon takes a seat opposite me, a beer bottle dangling from his hand.

“Savannah. It’s all a go for
Roberts.
We got all the permits for the Riverfront and as long as SCAD still wants in, we should begin set design by next week and hopefully begin shooting by September.”

I wince and pinch the bridge of my nose. My whole push to set the movie in Savannah seems so fucking stupid now. “Great,” I muster.

Devon tips his beer back, taking a long sip. “Again, is everything all right?”

“No.” I let out a long breath and lie back down, flinging my arm over my forehead. “No. Nothing is all right. I fucked up. I went to see Keri Ann last night, and I fucked up.”

“How so?”

“I may have told her I was in love with her.”

“You’re a sick sadistic bastard, you know that?”

“To her or to myself?” I manage.

Devon lowers his beer. “I was going to say to her, actually, but this is an interesting turn of events for someone who didn’t seem to give a shit about her before.”

I look over to where he’s sitting, wearing ripped jeans and a black t-shirt, the tips of his hair bleached yellow.

His brow is furrowed as he looks at me. “You sure had me fooled. First I thought it was the real deal, then you disappeared off to England and we
all
got to see how you spent your time there. So forgive me if I’m not following.”

“It’s complicated.”

“It always is. You want to give it a shot?”

I eye Devon, one of my best friends in the plastic, ego-filled circus I live my life in. He deserves to know what was and is going on with me. And frankly, I need the help. I am tired of the isolation. Exhausted actually.

Sorting through the happenings of the last five months since Audrey showed me the depths of her emotional depravity, I decide to start at the beginning. Devon wants my story, and I need to give voice to it, if only to diminish whatever is devouring my insides.

Five Months Ago …

A skinny, red-faced and hyperventilating guy, who doesn’t look old enough to work, has just given me the keys to the Hertz rental I ordered delivered to the General Aviation Terminal on Hilton Head Island. He obviously had no idea he was going to be delivering a car to a celebrity when he woke up this morning. Now he keeps saying “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!” over and over again while I try to get around him to the car. I’ve already given him a personalized autograph “to give to his girlfriend.” It would be amusing if I were in a better mood.

I don’t remember being this nervous about anything for a long time. Not since those first couple of screen tests where it’s down to you and that other guy who’s been all over
Variety
and you’re wondering how you’re gonna pay your rent that’s two weeks late. Where
everything
, your whole future, is riding on the outcome of how you play the next few hours.

“Do you have a map of the area?” I ask him patiently. I’d flung my bag into the back seat of the rental with my good hand and tugged my cap down, sliding my shades back on. I pull my wallet out of the pocket of my worn jeans and balance it on my bandaged right hand to remove a twenty. “Here. Thanks. Do you have a map?” I repeat.

The guy, still blocking the driver’s side door, takes the money and looks at my hand. “Wow, like, thanks. Dude … what did you do to your hand?”

“I punched a wall. Map?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. There’s a complimentary map on the passenger seat. Why’dya punch a wall?”

“It was better than punching a person.”

The guy nods emphatically like he “
like, totally, gets it
.”

“Thanks for delivering the car.”

My hand was fucked from punching the wall so I went over to Nick’s. Being a tattoo artist, I knew he had bandages and antiseptic. Thank God he also persuaded me to get it x-rayed. He knew a guy who played for the Lakers who had his own doc on call, so I got it taken care of fast and more importantly, privately. Hairline fracture to the third metacarpal. Great. So I’m in a cast.

The kid still doesn’t move, so I reach out for the door with my left hand and open it, slowly nudging him backward until I can safely get in. He steps away finally, and I nod and close the door.

I take a deep breath and start the car.

This is the kind of fear that sits heavy on your chest—a fundamental, incessant anxiety like you’re stuck in a dark alley—it’s life or death, and your feet have forgotten how to run. You’ve glimpsed your salvation like a glittering empire in the distance, but you can’t fucking remember how to get there. Every moment you spend pondering, is a moment your goal drifts further away, the road becoming more and more complicated and hazardous until it’s gone.

My phone buzzes again. It hasn’t stopped with messages in the twenty minutes it took to get from the plane to the car. I grab it and scroll down, starting at the bottom.

Duane/Peak Ent: CALL ME RIGHT THIS MINUTE OR WE’RE PULLING OUT OF ROBERTS

Devon: Dude, seriously. I expected you a week ago. I need to talk to you about scheduling filming too.

Devon: you realize there’s a high school sweetheart trying to help her get over you, right?

I hate that one.

Sheila PR: Why do you keep doing this to me? You don’t pay me enough for this. Peak is breathing down my neck about damage control. I need a statement!!!!!!!

Duane/Peak Ent: Ok look. This is serious. Just call me back we can work this out — if it’s really over, we just need to schedule some photo ops, outings, we can cover. JUST CALL ME.

I stop reading and pull out onto the road following signs for the mainland. “
Cover”
my ass. Duane, from Peak Entertainment is looking to persuade, threaten, and cajole me back in line. Everyone is getting hysterical, but there’s a reason why I don’t call them back. Yet. Either Duane or my publicist, Sheila. They want me to put out a statement saying Audrey and I are fine, but I don’t want Keri Ann to see it. Not until I speak to her and tell her what’s going on.

But how can I find the courage to explain that even though I’d told her Audrey and I were over, I
believed
I had gotten her pregnant. With one hundred percent certainty.

The morning the news broke about Audrey cheating on me.

The day the pictures came out.

I knew about the cheating before Audrey knew that I knew, of course. She came to find me in my home gym where I was pounding up a ten percent incline with bricks in my back pack because I was just
that
pissed off. I’d thought we had a deal. I’d passed up a
lot
of women to stick to it, to respect Audrey privately and publicly and to not make her look a fool. For the most part, I’d managed to keep my dick in my pants, even though Audrey and my occasional sexual relationship had mostly fizzled out around the second installment of
Erath
. That was a long time with only sporadic sex.

Audrey was all hysterical and sorry and kissing me and undressing me. And call me a bastard, but my ego needed, no
demanded,
I show her what she was missing.

I was pumped up, sweating, and pissed off, in the middle of a work out, and I just did it. I fucked her. And I didn’t use any protection, something I had
never
done. I’d taken some kind of perverse pleasure from that fact. I was like a stupid animal staking his claim. For nothing. Wounded pride. That was
it
. And I was so disgusted with myself afterwards. I still am.

How did I explain
that
to a girl like Keri Ann. It would never even occur to her to use someone for her own gain. In
any
way. And I had used a woman in the worst and basest way possible. And then moved on to Keri Ann, and like the animal I was, decided to rid her of her virginity before abandoning her.

As I turn off the airport road, I let myself think about Savannah, what seems like a lifetime ago, in a secluded corner of that dark club. I’d been sitting, numbing myself with a bottle of Bushmills, while I figured out what I would say to Keri Ann, how I would explain. And there she was. I couldn’t believe my lying eyes. It was wishful thinking, surely. I mean, the way she was dressed—those legs coming out from the tight, short black dress, long, tanned, toned and ending in the sexiest shoes I had ever seen. Probably just because they were on
her.
Keri Ann didn’t dress like that, or even wear makeup. I seriously thought I was in a drunken stupor.

She’d looked so different. But God, she’d looked breathtaking. And I acted like an animal. Again. It was a primal response, pure and simple. I was on top of the guy before I could even process that I wanted to rip his throat out for touching her. Kissing her.

He
kissed
her.

I never wanted him to breathe again.

I knew,
I knew,
that it was because of me she was doing this. I had turned that amazing, pure, unaffected and
untouched
girl into the haunting siren who was bewitching every guy in the room and unknowingly asking to be touched. I could see it on their faces.

Now as I drive toward Butler Cove, I don’t know what to say, how to say it, or if she’ll care. I mean, it’s been two months since I last saw her. Since I stood in the back office in that club in Savannah, half drunk, and let her walk out of the door, and out of my life. Again.

Her eyes. Fuck, her eyes—the look in them just about kills me every time I let it creep into my mind. Watery, with the unshed tears she was failing to hold back. Blue. Blue like rough denim, and they always said exactly what she was thinking. And right then it was disappointment. In me.

That thought shudders through me, and I pull over. I need to check my directions anyway. I lay my forehead on the steering wheel for a second and take a deep breath, then reach for the map. It’s attached to a magazine.
Hilton Head Monthly.
I pull the stapled map off and fling the magazine back to the passenger seat where it lands face down.

Holy shit!

I grab the magazine again and stare at the back cover. Then I check the map again and drive not to Butler Cove, but to a gallery.