HDU #2: Dirt (3 page)

Ian paused, his
eyes fluttering to the ground for a moment before returning to Amanda with a
hope that made him seem about five years old.
 
“Really?”

“Yes,” Amanda
exhaled.
 
“Now please.”
 
She lifted her heeled foot as much as
she could and pretended to kick his ass toward the door.
 
“Go into my party and have some fun.”

“Alright,
alright.”
 
Ian dusted off the back
of his pants and laughed, finally looking at ease.
 
Playing with the borrowed diamond cuff on her wrist, Amanda
watched him go.

Maybe Wendy was right.
 
Lying was a good thing.

At least in this
instance.
 
She didn’t care about
the industry’s stupid rules.
 
Ian
was her friend and she wanted him at her party.
 
The fact that she had to be an actress and lie to keep him
there was ironic, but whatever.
 
She couldn’t very well tell Ian that Liam was among those who preferred
that he be kept off the guest list just in case.

 
Taking a deep breath, Amanda returned
with a smile to the middle of the carpet and a beckoning Wendy, who positioned
her for photos with yet another set of beautiful, smiling stars whom she didn’t
even slightly know.

Just landed at Teterboro.
 
See you in 20.

Amanda let out a
whooshing sigh of relief upon receiving Liam’s text.
 
She could hardly wait another minute for him to arrive.
 
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t expected it,
but her birthday party had thus far been a big night of posing for pictures and
speaking to magazines to promote
Leadoff
.
 
It was miraculous that she’d been able
to sneak off to the bar and privately sip on her gin-free basil and cucumber
tonic for even a moment.

“Care if we join
you?”

A very short
moment.

Amanda turned to
see Ian joined by Harper, who wore a friendly smile on her peach-tinted
lips.
 
It completely contradicted
her voice.
 
Even in her wild days,
it had always been something of a bored, unfazed monotone.
 
Maybe the voice was the reason why
Amanda had yet to fully trust her.
 
She kind of always sounded as if she wanted to leave the conversation.
 
But the main reason was probably that
Casey had ruined her trust of most people.
 
Harper, after all, was yet another big name blonde who had
inexplicably befriended Ian.
 
But
this time around, Amanda suspected that things were different.
 
Harper had been in rehab once herself
and had better advice for Ian than Amanda would ever know how to give.
 
Plus, her famous days as a mean girl
were over.
 
After all, it was her
meditation that had inspired Ian to suggest Amanda forget revenge on Casey and
focus on “positive energy only.”

Amanda smiled,
patting the brown leather barstool next to her.
 
“Sit here.
 
The
curtain’ll hide you guys that way, too.”

Ian laughed,
anxiously loosening his tie as he plopped himself down.
 
“Good thinking.
 
You gonna wait here till Liam comes to
save you?”

“If I can get
away with it, yeah.
 
I just want to
see him already.”

Harper’s lips twitched
into a crooked smile.
 
“Been like,
three months right?”

“Ugh, yes.”

“Yeah.
 
We’ll leave you alone at that
point.”
 
She grimaced and shook her
head, her platinum hair catching the light.
 
“God, I feel bad for your neighbors tonight.”

Amanda blinked,
taking a second to realize what she was alluding to.
 
“Oh.
 
Ha.
 
Right.”
 
She blinked again, harder this time, trying to suppress the
flashback of kissing Liam in the bed of her East Village sublet on that day
that he’d come back to get her.
 
Amanda shuddered at herself and the memory of that day.
 
God
.
 
He had been on top of her in her bed,
down to boxer briefs and pretty much hard as a rock by the time she’d abruptly
sat up and realized that she couldn’t go through with it.
 
Not yet.
 
It was technically the first official day of their
relationship.
 
She wanted a fresh
beginning, to leave the mess of the past few months behind and start anew.
 
She wanted to feel as if they’d truly
been dating before sharing that kind of moment.

That was what
she told him, anyway.

And it was half
true.
 
She did want to feel as if
she’d actually been in a relationship before having sex.
 
But there was the other half of her
reason and it was basically that, plain and simple, she was in bed with
Liam Brody
.
 
He was a different Liam now but it wasn’t as if their past
few months together had erased his extensive sexual and romantic experience.
 
Or her general lack of either.
 
While she’d been thrown just about
every challenge possible since January, a real relationship hadn’t been one of
them and her paltry experience with Brandt could hardly be considered
preparation.
 
So despite the
confidence she’d gathered of late, Amanda had yet to muster up the courage to
strip bare and give Liam the ride of his life.

She hadn’t made
the full transformation into
that
girl yet.
 
The typical Hollywood
girl who was self-assured to the point of cockiness.
 
Someone who knew when to take risks and exactly how to be
with a guy like Liam Brody because she had experience and sexual prowess —
things that Amanda was certain she lacked thanks to the utter tragedy that had
been her sex life with Brandt.

“Did you just
vibrate?” Harper asked, stirring Amanda from her thoughts.
 

“
What?
”

Already jittery,
Ian jumped in his seat at her surprise.
 
Harper flashed Amanda an odd look.
 
“Your phone? I think it just vibrated.”

“Oh!” Amanda’s
eyes fluttered and she hoped her cheeks weren’t blushing as they often did for
next to no reason.
 
Clearing her
throat, she glanced down at her iPhone — the one she had purchased for
herself after receiving her first paycheck from ZINC, finally inducting herself
“into the age of modern technology,” as Ian had phrased it.

Ian forced a
smile.
 
“Liam?”

“I don’t think
so.”
 
The buzz had come from a new
email and Liam hadn’t emailed her since they’d first been acquainted.
 
Tapping on the envelope icon, Amanda
blinked.
 
And then frowned.

Sitting in her
inbox was a lone message timestamped from two minutes ago — and sent from
her own email address.

“Wrinkles,”
Harper clucked, gently pressing between Amanda’s furrowed brows with her
bejeweled finger.

“Sorry, I just…”
Amanda trailed off as she read the words in the message.

 
i don’t see this douche’s career lasting long. all he ever
does is play some variation of a cocky asshole in movies and from the looks of
it that doesn’t involve a ton of acting. fingers crossed that his career ends
embarrassingly so girls stop sleeping with him. there’s really no need for him
to procreate. ever.

Amanda
squinted.
 
It was a comment she had
made about Liam on HDU last year, as PrettyKitty29.
 
It was from early December – a good month before they
had ever met in person.
 
She had
forgotten about it completely until now.
 
Probably because she’d left so many comments of that nature.
 
Dozens upon dozens.
 
They all kind of blended together.
 
Looking back on the time in her life,
Amanda cringed.
 
Then, the biggest
highlight of her day consisted of spreading awful stories about someone whom
she was really only making assumptions about since she didn’t actually know him.
 
She felt nothing like that person
anymore.
 
Still staring at the
screen, her stomach started to churn.
 
But the memory of her bored, hateful self wasn’t actually the most
disconcerting thing about reading the comment.

It was figuring
out how the hell it got there.
 
For
the life of her, she couldn’t and all she could hope was that it was some
glitch in the system that synced her HDU inbox and email.
 
It
could just be a glitch
, she reasoned with herself.
 
She swallowed.

Or it could be that someone hacked into your
email, where you’ve very stupidly kept every last shred of evidence regarding
Liam, Ian and HDU.

After a couple
seconds of staring with her breath held, Amanda let herself release a slow but
hesitant breath, her fingers typing out a three-word reply — which felt
strange and a little stupid considering it was addressed to her own inbox.

Who is this?

“You okay?”
Ian’s voice sounded far away but she managed to nod at his question right after
hitting send.

Please be no one, please be no one, please be
no one.
 
Amanda stared at her
phone, refreshing her inbox maniacally, all the while stretching her lips into
a strained smile for Ian and Harper, who cocked their heads curiously at her.

“Nothing,”
Amanda said meekly, not that either of them had asked a question.
 
Harper gave her a strange look.

“You’re sure
you’re okay?” she asked slowly.

Amanda flashed
her a smile that she was about certain made her look like some terrifying wax
figure.
 
“Totally fine.”

Except not.
 
Her grip tightened around her phone upon
feeling it vibrate once again.

With dread, she
peered down slowly, her heart slamming against her ribcage upon confirming the
brand new message in her inbox, once again from her very own email address.

Take a guess, Pretty. ;)

~

Amanda’s hair
flew behind her as she ran down a corridor that looked like it might lead to a
bathroom, though she couldn’t be sure.
 
Agno was located on the ground floor of a marble building that had been
a famous bank in the early 1900s.
 
It had been preserved to continue looking as such, which meant no
restroom signs or markings to mar its grand appearance.
 
Amanda had no idea where she was
going.
 
Regardless, she kept
running.
 
She would’ve commended
herself for her stilettoed speed were she not so completely racked with worry.

Somebody knows.

She raked her
fingers through her auburn tresses, taking about three seconds to destroy the
look that the stylist had dedicated forty minutes to during hair and makeup at
Wendy’s Tribeca apartment.

Somebody knows about me, about Ian, about
Liam, about HDU, about the contract, about everything.
 
We could all be screwed.

“Oh no.”

Amanda stopped
suddenly in her tracks, her heart dropping like a brick into her stomach.
 
Liam.
 
She and Ian had barely anything to lose compared to what he
had — especially in this particular year of his career.
 
A movie that he had physically and
mentally given everything for.
 
A
probable Oscar.
 
A verbal deal to
star in a $218 million production that would launch him into the most exclusive
percentage of Hollywood’s top earners.

And she was set
to ruin it all by letting herself get hacked like a tech-challenged idiot.
 
Fingers flying, Amanda sent a reply,
feeling suddenly as much fury as she did terror.

Tell me who you are and what you want.

Heart racing,
she waited for a response, each second feeling like a solid minute.
 
By the time an actual minute passed
with no reply, her fury transformed back into total panic.
 
“Shit,” she breathed, frozen alone in
the middle of the giant, empty marble hall, barely lit by the lone chandelier
on the seventy-foot ceiling.
 
Her
heart begin to pound in her throat, she tried to take in a deep breath despite
the feeling of her air passage tightening up.
 
Okay, Amanda
.
 
You
need to relax and not have a heart attack when you’re alone in some dark
hallway where no one will find you.
 
Calm down.
 
Maybe it was
just some weird, technical glitch.
 
Those happen sometimes.
 
Right? Right.

Leaning back
against the wall, she finally let out a long, heavy sigh.
 
“God.”
 
Eyes closed, it took her a good five seconds to realize that
she was standing square in the middle of the corridor — that there was no
wall behind her to lean against.
 

Jumping half a
foot in the air, Amanda spun around.

“
Jesus Christ!
” she half-squealed,
half-shrieked, her body rippling with shivery goosebumps.