Hitman's Hookup: A Bad Boy Romance (51 page)

Lydia looked at me knowingly. “Have you spoken with…”

“No,” I said shortly. I didn’t even want to
hear
his name. “No, I haven’t. I managed to convince my mom that Gina lied through her teeth to the press for publicity. So my mom knows
nothing
about how little I talk to…
him
. I’ve kept her out of it because God knows she’d make a mess of any information I give her.”

Lydia nodded her head knowingly and reached into the donut box for a chocolate glazed with sprinkles, taking a thoughtful bite and inclining her head toward the shoebox.

“Hey I remember that box. That’s the one you had in our room in college.”

I scratched my head and knelt down next to it. “God, you’re right. It is. I must have shoved this under the bed right when I moved in.”

I pulled off a layer of newspaper from the top that hid the contents. It was a copy of the student newspaper from the last week before I graduated. I saw on the front cover a photo of Wilder. Well, not Wilder. He was clearly Nick there: slim, no tattoos, youthful face. Slightly messy hair.

I smiled in spite of myself.

“Lemme see,” Lydia said, reaching over.

I snatched it out of reach. “It’s just packaging. It’s nothing. I tucked it in here to keep the rest of the stuff from breaking, obviously.”

Lydia got off the bed and dove for it, grabbing the paper out of my hand and shaking it open.

“Let’s see what made you smile,” she said. Her eyes went wide at the photo. “Jesus Christ. You
kept
this? As what? A memory of the play you would have been in if not for that asshole embarrassing you?”

I sighed and dug back into the box. “It was last-minute packing; it must have been. You know how that week was before graduation. It was utter chaos. Packing, signing forms, cleaning, getting robes, finishing May term classes…”

I drifted off mid-sentence. Tucked between my favorite coffee mug with my alma-mater’s emblem on it (I’d thought I had lost it in my move) and a stack of photos was a rolled up piece of paper.

I put my hand on it. It felt warm, like it had a life of its own.

I knew what it was at once.

It was the note Wilder had scribbled the night we met in the coffee shop. The one that promised that I would fall in love with him one day.

“Oh God,” I muttered out loud.

I immediately regretted it. Lydia hopped off the bed again, leaving the newspaper behind. She grabbed the paper scroll before I could stop her. Maybe part of me didn’t want to stop her.

Lydia unfurled it with one hand, smoothing it out awkwardly against her thigh. Her right hand was still holding a half-eaten donut. Her fingers splayed across the text to hold open the paper. As she read the words, her eyes widened.

“You kept this?” she asked a moment later after looking at me in stunned silence.

I buried my face in my hands and nodded.

“
Why
did you keep this?” Lydia insisted.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. But I obviously did.”

I felt tears stinging at my eyeballs and tried my hardest to push them back. But then they fell in a waterfall. They wouldn’t stop coming. I felt my back heaving, my lungs gasping for air. In a second, Lydia’s arms were around me.

I couldn’t remember the last time that I had cried. It might have been years. I hadn’t shed a single tear in all of the months since this had all started. I’d mostly just felt numb. I don’t know how long we sat huddled on the carpet of my bedroom like that. The more I cried the more I
wanted
to cry, and the harder it was to stop.

I thought about my mother. I thought about my childhood. I thought about Wilder in the coffee shop, Wilder on the stage with me, Wilder’s eyes turning cold during the audition. I thought about all the jobs I hadn’t managed to get.

I thought about all of the nights I’d been alone with my aunt in this apartment. I thought about how all of that was about to end. I even thought about Italy: the movie set, the hotels, tangled up with Wilder all those nights in secret; the stolen glances on set.

I thought about waiting, all alone, at that restaurant.

I thought about how I saw their pregnancy announcement.

I thought about Meredith Grey and Cristina and all the shit they’d gone through on that fucking television show, and how even in the most poignant moments I hadn’t managed to cry.

I let it all out in a flow of wet tears and sobs.

Lydia held me through all of it.

CHAPTER FIFTY

WILDER

“I just don’t think it’s the best idea for you to be flying to New York right now. Did you even call the doctor?” I called from the bedroom, hoisting my suitcase onto the mattress and wandering over to one of the three walk-in closets.

I stared at the wall of suits. Hailey had given me only about eight feet of hanging space when I’d moved in with her. The rest of the spaces were filled floor to ceiling with her clothes.

Hailey was in her bathroom sitting in a director’s chair, five different people getting her prepped for our trip to New York. “He said it was fine,” she replied.

“Great,” I replied with no real meaning. I had been hoping that she would cancel, which was ridiculous. Like she would let me go to an event where Olivia was going to be without her as an escort.

I sighed and rubbed the bridge of my nose. A five-hour flight on a private jet with Hailey and her crew was going to give me a migraine, guaranteed. I foolishly turned around to tell a man who wasn’t there to pack painkillers for me.

It had been six months since I’d fired Harrison at the hotel in Italy, and I still found myself looking for him over my shoulder to help me with things. I’d been laying low since Italy. No jobs; only the publicity events that Hailey required me to go to.

I hadn’t hired a new assistant since firing Harrison. It was going to be awhile before I trusted anyone again with the intimate details of my personal life. Besides that, Hailey always had so many people in her house I couldn’t imagine the benefit in adding yet another.

I ran my fingers across my suit jackets until I came to a tuxedo. I pulled it down and smelled it. It seemed clean. Then I picked out a light grey suit to wear for my dad’s wedding. I’d been practicing cognitive dissonance over the last two months to prepare myself. I just kept imagining the wedding and pretending that Olivia
wouldn’t
be there.

It wasn’t fucking working.

Nights were the hardest. There had been so many times that I’d woken up at three a.m., quietly climbing out of bed and wandering Hailey’s thirty-thousand square foot mansion with my phone glued to my hand. I kept
almost
dialing Olivia’s number. But I honestly couldn’t be sure that Hailey hadn’t bugged my phone.

Besides that, it had been six months. What could I possibly say? I’d left Olivia in that restaurant alone for God knew how long. And on top of that, I’d ignored all of her phone calls to my hotel room. She’d stopped after the first night.

I had figured she would. She had too much pride to do anything else. I opened my underwear drawer and pulled out a handful of black boxer briefs, slamming the drawer shut angrily.

“Problem?” Said a cold voice from the doorway to the closet. Hailey was standing there in a silk white bathrobe, her pregnant stomach protruding through the silky fabric.

“Nope,” I replied, coldly pushing past her. I’d made her have three separate ultrasounds in the space of two months. I wanted to make sure she hadn’t been lying. But there was definitely a baby in there, and her fans couldn’t be more over the moon about it.

Sometimes when I was having a particularly bad bout of self-loathing, I’d go to her Instagram where she was posting demure belly shots with my hands wrapped around her and look at the adoring, sycophantic, gleeful, fawning comments from her pre-teen fans about how “perfect” Hailey’s life was.

Everyone thought the photos were candid and spur-of-the-moment. Nobody realized that they were the product of elaborate photoshoots where it was everything I could do to not drown myself in whiskey beforehand.

I hadn’t had a sip of alcohol in over six months. Considering I was basically Hailey’s prisoner, I felt like that earned me some kind of medal for heroism.

I threw the underwear into my suitcase and realized I would need to find my garment bag. I had no idea where it was.

“I sent everyone downstairs,” Hailey said to me, walking over and running her hands down my back. “I thought before we left for the airport we could…” She reached up to my ear and nibbled on my lobe. I felt chills erupt that were far from sexual. I put my hands up.

“I have too much to do. No,” I replied.

Some nights she could get me to have sex. Most nights I pretended to be working on post-production shit for the movie. That was always a lie. Fox wasn’t letting me within one hundred yards of an editing room even though I was a producer. Part of me wondered if he was trying to protect my feelings.

The other part of me knew it was mostly because he didn’t trust me at all.

Both of those theories, if true, were good instincts on Fox’s part. I didn’t think I could handle seeing Liv’s face every day, even if it was only onscreen.

Hailey let out a hiss at my rejection and jumped back from me. “Are you going to want to fuck me
ever again
?” she screamed.

I turned around to take the temperature of her eyes. If they were dead, it meant this was all a show designed to gain my sympathy and attention. If they were flaming, it meant that she was actually angry.

Living with her was exhausting.

I looked hard at the blue orbs sitting in her skull. They were the former. This was a performance.

“Hailey, calm the fuck down,” I said, exasperated. “I’m not playing this game with you. Not today. It’s going to be a long, long fucking weekend if this is how we’re kicking it off.” I left her in the bedroom.

She could act for the walls for all I fucking cared.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

OLIVIA

“I can’t believe there isn’t a press tour!” My mother exclaimed grandly.

We were sitting in my hotel room, a glass-walled suite overlooking Times Square. It was so late that there were very few people walking around, and the bright lights of the billboards and neon signs were casting shadows against the walls and illuminating our faces in strange, multi-colored patterns.

“Budget constraints,” I replied, chewing on a grape from the fruit bowl. “And the studio feels like all the drama, uh…
surrounding
the film is a viral campaign on its own.”

This was entirely true. The hashtag for
Love and Mafia
had been in the top ten trending topics of various social media sites for a record number of months in a row; all of that buzz generated by little more than a few, thirty-second teaser trailers released online with no fanfare.

The studio used strategic shots of my face and Wilder’s intercut rapidly. It basically looked like an advertisement for our
own
love story in the press. With the exception of a few close-up shots of the pistol that my character wore strapped to her thigh, you’d never know there was any action in it.

The studio was using this as a test campaign for future films. I tried not to think about the
Truman Show
-esque comparisons and outcomes from such a strategy; manufacturing drama in the real lives of co-stars simply to promote a movie by spending almost zero money.

My mother leaned forward and took my hands into hers, a look of dramatic concern over her face. “I never truly realized
how much
the press makes up in these wild stories. I’m so glad I could learn from your experience.”

I pulled away with a grimace. “Gee, thanks, Mom. Glad my own invasion of privacy has been worth it for you.”

My mom had “surprised” me by being in the lobby ready to greet me at midnight; I was beyond exhausted but she had insisted on coming up to my room. I stood up and walked over to the garment bag hanging on the back of the closet door. It had been there when I’d checked into the room only a half an hour ago; Lydia had done her job.

I unzipped the bag and pulled out the red, floor-length silk dress that Lydia had designed for me. Behind it was a vintage white-and-grey fur coat. Old Hollywood glamour had been the aim of our many design sessions. Lydia had nailed it.

“So Garrett doesn’t care that you’re just gallivanting around the city at midnight?” I asked her as I ran my hands over the silk.

“Of course not! You know my insomnia and how bad it is. He almost expects it of me to not come home until three in the morning. He’s usually at his motorcycle shop tinkering until all hours of the night anyway.” My mom leaned back on the sofa and gasped. “Is that your dress?”

I turned around and saw the look of surprise. “Yeah, Lydia designed it and sewed it by hand. She thrifted the coat.” My mother covered her mouth with her hands. I suddenly realized there were tears in her eyes. “What, Mom?” I hung the dress in the closet and walked over, girding myself for the histrionics; usually she cried to get my attention.

But when I got closer I realized she was
actually
crying. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her do that. I sat down next to her and brushed her long, blonde hair over her shoulder like she’d done for me when I was a child. She leaned into me and sobbed.

“Mom. What’s wrong?”

My mom took a few minutes to gather herself. I sat there stroking her hair, staring over her body at the scene below in Times Square.

A man was walking his dog. He passed a woman bundled up in a huge, puffy, worn black coat who was blasting unheard music out of a boom box resting on her shoulder. The man smiled and nodded at her, and she did a dance that looked like pure rhythm and joy. They passed each other and carried on with their separate tasks. I heard my mom inhale shakily and sit upright, dabbing her eyes with the five-star hotel tissue.