I Love the 80s (29 page)

She could not let him die.

She could not.

Jenna scraped her hair back into a knot at the nape of her neck, and told herself, sternly, that she didn’t have time to indulge her broken heart, her hurt feelings, or her desire to curl up in the foetal position for several months.

It was time to follow Nick.

Tommy thought that if filming of the stupid video didn’t stop soon, he might spontaneously burst into flames. Or pieces.

He stood on his mark and pouted at the camera, as
directed. He lip-synced the lyrics on cue, which sounded more and more inane to him every time he did another take – and he’d written them in the first place. He was irritated well above and beyond the level he normally was at this stage in the proceedings.

It wasn’t that the filming had gotten any more strenuous, or even any more stupid than usual. It was that Jenna wasn’t there to amuse him, and he hated himself for how much he missed her.

It was a ridiculous way to feel. He’d been making videos for years now, and had done so happily enough without her presence. Why should her absence now seem so unbearable?

Surely, he raged at himself while he was supposed to be transmitting sultriness towards the camera, his feelings for a woman should disappear in a puff of smoke when she exposed herself as a lunatic psychopath. Surely he should not feel this bad. As if several of the goddamned steel cages were perched on top of him, crushing him. Robbing him of breath.

Damn her. And damn him for once again playing the gullible fool, the one he’d thought he’d banished years before, right around the time he’d realized what it meant to sign his whole life away.

‘Uh … Tommy?’ The director sounded apprehensive. Tommy blinked, and wondered how many times the man had called his name. ‘Lovely expressions, really lovely. Totally raw and hot. But I’m wondering if we can do it one more time with a little
more
sex and a little
less
mayhem?’

‘You look like a bloody serial killer, mate,’ Sebastian chimed in from his chair behind the cameras. There was a burst of laughter from the rest of the band.
Ha ha
, Tommy thought sourly.
If only you knew
.

‘Of course,’ he said out loud, in as even a tone as he could manage. He even smiled, because he was a goddamned professional.

The music swelled around him, and he resumed his place. He waited for the verse to start over again.

He couldn’t get that creepy book of hers out of his head, no matter how hard he tried to focus on something – anything – else. All the tiny writing and the notations – like an encyclopedia of a psychotic breakdown. Careful flow charts of how and when ‘accidents’ had befallen him – or would befall him. How had she done it? How had she managed to arrange all of it so well? She’d had no reason to suppose he would ever see her as more than a secretary and a spy for Duncan.

He tried to shift and think sexy thoughts as he mouthed the words to the song, and the shitty thing was how hard it
wasn’t.
He had only to think of Jenna, laid out in front of him, her soft skin with a sheen of sweat and her hair tousled all around her – and something roared through him, hot and loud.
Mine
, he thought, against all reason and sense. When he didn’t even want her any more.

When he refused to want her any more.

‘Cut!’ the director yelled again. He rubbed at his temples and then smiled – in a noticeably strained way – at Tommy.
‘Why don’t we take a break? Regroup, think happy thoughts, that kind of thing?’

Another burst of laughter from the peanut gallery, as punctuation.

Tommy didn’t trust himself to respond. He walked across the set towards make-up, and sat there while they fussed around him, moving the same strands of his hair this way and that and powdering his skin.

‘Who pissed on you today?’ Nick asked, coming up from behind Tommy to lean against the counter. He looked like he wanted to find whoever the pisser was, and congratulate him. He smirked when Tommy glared at him. ‘I’m sorry I asked. But you look like you could spit nails.’

Tommy watched his oldest friend walk off, and hated himself even more for the way he’d turned against him. Thank God no one knew. He would carry the shame of it to his grave. Nick and he might not have been as close as they’d once been, but how the hell did you throw decades of friendship down the toilet so easily? How could he have suspected Nick? In that moment, Tommy loathed himself.

What the hell had he become?

It came to him then, out of nowhere. He hadn’t been to Buffalo since he’d left it behind in Nick’s rear-view mirror. They’d driven his piece-of-shit Chevy as far as it would go down the New York State Thruway, and left it in a smoking heap by the side of the road when it broke down. They’d hitch-hiked the rest of the way into New York City. And Tommy had always viewed that journey as a kind of rebirth. Fuck Buffalo. Fuck the generations of
his relatives who lacked the imagination to leave the trailer park, much less the city. He’d vowed he’d never return.

But he wasn’t the same guy any longer. And it occurred to him that maybe Buffalo was exactly what he needed. If he saw where he came from, maybe he’d get a grip on where he’d ended up. Maybe he’d figure out how to move forward.

Maybe he’d even get over her.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

Jenna did not mistake Nick’s quiet tone for calm. She could see the look on his face, as he towered over her in the dark, swanky bar, and what she saw there made her squirm on her barstool.

‘Oh,’ she said, stalling. She smiled brightly. ‘Hi!’

Nick glared at her. He did not say hello and he did not change that grim expression even one iota.

‘Why are you following me?’ he asked instead. Not nicely. His hovering had already attracted attention. The other patrons in the bar were looking over, especially the three coltish-looking eighteen-year-old girls Nick had abandoned in order to speak to Jenna.

‘Following you?’ Jenna repeated, and tried to look confused. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I mean, you’ve been following me all night,’ Nick said, his voice getting lower and tenser with each word. ‘Every time I look up, there you are. Does this have anything to do with whatever’s going on with Tommy?’

Tommy.
Jenna could not allow herself to think about
him. She thrust the sharp surge of pain away, and ordered herself not to burst into tears. Somehow.

‘I don’t know what’s going on with him,’ she said in a steely tone, forcing herself to be tough. This was not entirely untrue. It had been almost two days since Tommy had stormed out of her apartment. He could have any number of things going on with him by now.

‘So this is for my benefit?’ Nick smirked at her. ‘No thanks. I don’t go for dumpy secretaries.’ The look he swept over her, raking her from head to toe, was beyond insulting. Jenna was fairly certain it would leave scars behind in its wake.

‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ she snapped, her temper getting the better of her. Who was he to look at another person that way? And she was not
dumpy
, she simply wasn’t an eighteen-year-old
skank.
She made a face. ‘Why are you and he even friends?’

Nick shook his head at her, like she was pathetic beyond comprehension.

‘He’s not my
friend
,’ he spat out. He didn’t say,
you stupid little bitch
, but it was strongly implied. ‘We’re family. You couldn’t understand.’

Because Jenna could see how much he meant that, she didn’t understand how he could want to hurt someone he cared for so much.

‘Maybe not,’ she murmured, stalling again while she puzzled over it.

‘What did you do to him?’ Nick demanded, still with that horribly insulting glare. ‘I’ve never seen him this bad.
He was even talking about going back to Buffalo, of all places. Is that because of you?’

‘I …’ Jenna didn’t know how to answer that. ‘Buffalo?’

‘The pit of hell,’ Nick said darkly. His lips tightened. ‘I think he might be about to do something colossally stupid.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Jenna said then, the words bursting out of her. ‘Why do you care? And if you do really care, why are you trying to hurt him?’

Nick stared at her in shock, and fell back a step.

‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded. He looked pale around the eyes. ‘What the
fuck
do you mean by that?’

‘Someone is trying to kill Tommy,’ Jenna said matter-of-factly. Not that she wasn’t afraid he might hurt her, but at this point she was in for a penny, in for a pound. If she was dead, she was already dead. Plus, sleep deprivation apparently made her brave. She shrugged and met Nick’s stare with her own. ‘He thinks it might be you.’

Nick’s mouth actually fell open. For a moment, he did nothing but look at her in confusion.

‘What?’ he asked again. It was more of a gasp. He shook his head slightly, as if he was dizzy. ‘I want to kill the guy, sure, but not
really
—I would never—’ He cut himself off. When he looked at Jenna again, his expression was bewildered more than anything else. ‘Does he really think I would do that?’ he asked.

Jenna shrugged, because, of course, Tommy now thought
she
was the person trying to kill him. Since she
knew he was wrong, she didn’t feel compelled to share that titbit with Nick.

‘That stupid bastard,’ Nick muttered, but Jenna could see he was off balance. He threw her a look of intense dislike, and opened his mouth as if to say something. But he stopped himself. ‘I guess I’m glad you told me that,’ he gritted out. ‘Now I can go kick his ass.’

Jenna failed to come up with an appropriate response for that, so they looked at each other in awkward silence for a moment, and then Nick turned and stalked away. Not back to the eighteen-year-olds (and Jenna was being bitchy – maybe they were twenty), but directly to the door and out into the night.

Jenna let out the breath she’d been holding, and smiled sweetly at the pissed-off eighteen-year-olds when the three of them glared daggers at her.

Yes, girls
, she thought but did not say,
I can repel any famous musician with the power of my dumpy, secretarial words.

It was great for Tommy that his oldest friend wasn’t the killer, assuming she believed Nick, which, for some reason, she did. He’d looked too shocked by the accusation, too appalled that Tommy would think that kind of thing about him. Of course, he could be an excellent actor who had fooled her. It wasn’t as if she knew the first thing about reading people to determine if they were lying to her about their murderous intentions. She wasn’t Sherlock Holmes. Hell, she wasn’t even Maddie Hayes from
Moonlighting.

But she didn’t think he was lying.

Which meant, with four days to go until Tommy went over that bridge, she still had no idea who the killer was.

Jenna tossed back the rest of her drink, and got to her feet.

Back to square one.

Buffalo was some seven hours and whole worlds away from Manhattan, and light years away from
Tommy Seer
, the lead singer of one of the decade’s biggest bands. The culture shock, he thought at one point during his impromptu tour of his home town, might just kill him.

But it didn’t. He drove around the city, and through the trailer park where he and Nick had grown up. The place looked exactly the same. If he squinted he could almost see the two of them, feverish with their longing to escape, making up songs and telling lies about their futures on the front steps of one of the double-wides. He drove out of the trailer park and this time, he didn’t look in the rear-view mirror. He just drove. He had no idea where he was headed, but he wasn’t surprised when he found himself outside his old high school.

It was a battered brick building that sat on the crest of a hill, squaring off against the encroaching city and looking the worse for the battle. The place exuded neglect.
Chipped paint and faded graffiti marked the walls. Around the back, temporary classroom trailers abutted the main building – the very same ones that had sat in that exact spot when he’d been a student there. The football field out in front was mowed and tended, but the track surrounding it looked cracked and unsafe. He remembered how completely he’d hated this place when he was a kid, and it was strange to feel so disconnected from it now. Not that the school had become smaller, but the surrounding world so much bigger. Maybe it was Tommy’s own ability to put this shitty, forgotten urban high school into its proper, minimized context.

He dropped his head forward in defeat, because he still had all that rage inside him. He still felt trapped, and doomed. Not because of Jenna and her fucking book, but because of the choices he’d made. All that time and all that space, and he’d been doing nothing but running in circles.

He’d left here years ago, determined to outrun his demons, and yet here they all were, together again. It was like a goddamned reunion.

Tommy stood for a moment and stared up at the school, empty in the late-afternoon shadows, and then he walked up to the benches out in front, surrounding a desolate-looking flagpole. As he had more times than he could possibly count, he sat down there, and waited. For his heart to stop aching. For the night to fall. For all of it to make sense, somehow – his past and his present and his murky future. For some kind of sign.

He waited.

He lost track of time. The sun went down, and the temperature dropped. He hadn’t thought of Buffalo’s famously cold winters, the ones that started in early fall and often brought snow, and he wished he’d brought something warmer to wear than his leather bomber jacket.

Stars came out, so many of them, and Tommy watched them for a long time. He had the sense of the city spread out around him – the Rust Belt city of his youth in the middle of its rapid decline. He still felt Buffalo as a great darkness pressing in on him, crushing him into his predestined life, the one his family had expected of him before he was born – a life he’d always hated. City of Light, his ass. This had always been a city of pain – of lost opportunities, closing factories, and diminished hopes.