Well, thank God for small favors.
"Attention passengers of United Airlines Flight 43 to Los Angeles," the overhead speaker called out. "Boarding will begin in twenty minutes."
Right. They were going to call out the Elite Super Diamond Prestige Award Members first and then all the other variations of passenger, so Rory was pretty sure she'd be the last person to board the plane.
"I gotta go, ladies," she said, however. "Gotta get that seat. If I board late, they may just throw me off the plane if they're overbooked."
Natalie, Kim, Lisa, Carla, Brittney, Becca, Ashley, Christine, and Alicia all gave a variation of the eye roll. To go through all the reactions took at least a minute.
The hugs took another ten minutes.
Detaching herself from Alicia took another five.
"Promise to come visit, okay?" Alicia said with glossy eyes as she hugged her best friend for the eighth time. "And I promise to come by soon too!"
Promises made, Rory headed towards her gate. Her head spinning from the booze, she had no doubt she'd sit down and fall asleep once she boarded.
And then...Southern California.
Different from what Alicia lived in.
But...there was something about how it felt.
Something was going to happen.
Her life felt as if it was about to change.
She didn't know how.
But Rory definitely felt excited.
One moment it was sunny like an Indian summer on the island of Montcove, and the next moment it would turn into a monsoon. Thankfully bad weather didn’t linger for long and things were mostly peaceful. At least they were, till a few years ago when the peace was disturbed when Montcove suddenly became a celebrity vacation destination.
It took just one celebrity marriage to kick Montcove’s status as an obscure vacation island into oblivion. Where the residents were used to a few thousand tourists a year, now they saw hordes of Hollywood celebrities renting villas and hotels and driving around in their fancy cars. With Hollywood stars came business opportunities, and much to the dismay of local residents, plenty of outsiders had bought up properties and set up shop to cash in on the buzz.
The old German bakery was now a luxury rent-a-car, while the shabby Windwood Hotel had been turned into a luxury rehab. In the three years since the boom started, the residents had seen everything—A-list celebrities, the fanatic tourists who came for celeb spotting, and of course, the dreaded paparazzi.
As good as that was for the economy of the island, many of the residents still found it a nuisance they could do nothing about. It was on one such summer night that the rain gods decided to come down over the island. The residents ran in to take cover, the celebrities rolled up the windows on their expensive sports cars, and the paparazzi rushed to save their expensive camera lenses.
Chapter 1
The wind hit Arsen in the face, determined to do some harm. Beads of sweat mixed with rainwater trickled down from his longish hair as he walked past the main door of the villa. Loud voices, clinking glasses, and smoke fumes trailed him, but he couldn’t care less.
Enough’s enough.
His vision was blurred, thanks to a healthy combination of too much vodka and sleepless nights. For a moment he thought about the cops, only to realize that he wasn’t in LA anymore.
“Podunk town,” he muttered as he opened the door to his red Ferrari and thumped himself down on the driver’s seat. A barrage of swear words left his mouth, and Arsen cursed the day he had agreed to this arrangement.
After a year full of scandals, freak incidents, and decadent overindulgence, he thought that this time away from LA would allow him to do what he did best—make music. Instead, he spent his time getting high, getting drunk, and dwelling in the misery of a songwriter’s block. The ideas had stopped coming, the words all but disappeared, and in the ten days that he and the band had been in Montcove, he had barely written a single verse.
To everyone else, Arsen was in a temporary slump. For them, a triple Grammy-winner shouldn’t take long to churn out a whole bunch of new hit songs. Deep inside, however, he knew that this was no random writer’s block. Everything that had happened to him since his band, Insurrection, took off three years ago had been surreal, and it all led up to this point. Everything was at stake in this game, and only he held the dice.
The arrogant wind grew fiercer as his red Ferrari sped down the hill to the town center, swaying harshly to the songs of Frank Sinatra, one of Arsen’s idols. He didn’t know where he was going or what he was going there for; he just wanted to be away from that Villa, from everyone inside it, and most of all, from himself. Or at least the rock star persona that he’d built up over time.
Arsen grabbed a half-finished bottle of Jack Daniels that sat on the passenger seat and tried to keep his eyes on the road. The rain blurred his already diminished vision. His mind was sending him warning signals. He should’ve pulled off, parked by the side of the road, and asked Don to come pick him up instead. In the back of his mind, he was aware that he shouldn’t be driving at all. But he was desperate to get away from it all: the drugs, the booze, and the scantily-clad sexpots who routinely threw themselves at him.
In all the extravagance, the band had forgotten why they got together in the first place—to make music. All that mattered to his bandmates now was partying, spending money, and utter decadence. Arsen pulled off the bottle cap with his teeth and took a big swig. He flinched as the liquor hit the back of his throat. A few days’ worth of booze rumbled inside his body, and he amused himself by wondering what his DUI reading would be if he were pulled over.