“What’s up?” she asks me straightway, picking up the phone before it even starts to ring. Swear to God, sometimes Cheryl freaks me out; it’s like she always knows when I need her.
“Hey, babe, have you talked with CJ?”
“Not today, why? Something’s up?” she says, and I can tell by the way she’s breathing her words out that she’s typing on her laptop while talking to me, her cell phone pressed between her shoulder and ear.
“Well, uh, we were supposed to start writing today, but Aidan isn’t picking up his cell,” I tell her, trying to hide away all the worry and anxiety tying my stomach into knots. Something’s going on, I can feel it deep in my bones.
“He’s probably just running late or something,” she says in a distracted tone, and so I just agree with her, trying to tell myself that there’s nothing to worry about. “Are you going to tell him about the baby?” she asks, her tone of voice growing steady, and I imagine her sitting upright in front of her desk, her cell phone now back in her hand. “You should tell him, you know?”
“That’s the plan,” I chuckle, although I can’t shake off that dark feeling casting its shadow over every single one of my thoughts. “As soon as he gets here, I’m going to break the news to him.”
“Now that’s my Abby,” Cheryl laughs, and then she’s back to her distracted tone of voice. I can hear the faint sound of fingers tapping on the keyboard, so I just say my goodbyes and let her do her work.
I sit down on the couch, propping my feet up on the coffee table in front of me, and rest my tablet on my lap. I power it up and then head straight toward my group, Dirty Lil’ Angels, and start scrolling down all the man candy the girls there post non-stop. There's nothing better to ease a worried mind than half-naked men, right? Except, right now, it isn’t helping; it seems that every man in there reminds me of Aidan, and that just flares up the urge to call him again. Somehow, I stop myself from doing it; I don’t want him to pick up his cellphone and see dozens of missed calls from Miss ‘Stalker’ Abby.
I mean don’t feel that bad for me, babe.
It's easy to pass the time if you know how to.
For example, I’m able to spend almost an hour in Dirty Lil’ Angels, and then I head to Rainforest.com to check on how Big Dick is doing; it's still going strong in the Top 100, although we’ll probably drop from there in the next few weeks. If we had the ad budget, we could have kept it going as strong as we had when we were doing signings.
But we don’t have that kind of mon
ey. We’re waiting for our royalty payments now, because I invested most of my liquid cash in this project.
But everything seems to be going great at the end of the day, you know?
What?
Don’t shake your head. On paper, everything is great.
Fine.
I feel it too. There’s something….off.
I don’t know what it is, and it’s probably stupid…so why am I feeling a knot in the pit of my stomach?
Succumbing to that worry, I pick up the phone and call Aidan one more time (my last attempt, I lie to myself). Predictably, he doesn’t pick up, and so I just throw the cellphone onto the couch with an exasperated sigh.
This isn’t like him. Sure, he sometimes misses his calls like a regular human being, but he's never flaked on me without telling me first. So what the hell is going on? My mind is already busy imagining him sprawled on the middle of a busy road, his helmet cracked while his motorcycle lies a few feet away from him in a mess of twisted bent metal.
Okay, Abby, time to hop off of the paranoid train. I take one deep breath, trying to push all of these thoughts away, and start scrolling down my Facebook’s feed in a futile attempt to distract myself. I go through countless videos of babies, cats, and people failing miserably at whatever they’re doing, but none of them grab my attention. But that’s when my heart skips a beat.
Aidan’s Facebook page has just been updated. HUGE COCK - COMING SOON, his post reads, a book cover filling the whole screen of my tablet. The Huge Cock title hangs over a shirtless picture of Aidan against a dark background, his hands seductively diving under the hemline of his unbuttoned jeans.
My name is nowhere to be seen on the cover, but at the bottom there are three words, and each one of them feels like a bullet hitting me in the chest: Bad Boy Publishing.
Aidan’s betrayed me.
22
Aidan
"I can't do this," CJ says, her eyes sadder than I've ever seen them. They aren't the color of a summer sky anymore, but rather the deepest parts of the ocean—dark like the trenches where only the most secretive fish seem to lurk.
We decided to meet at a café for lunch, which was her idea, and so far, I've watched CJ push her salad around her plate without actually taking a single bite. She spears a cherry tomato with the prongs of her fork, and then quickly flicks it off again.
Something's wrong. That much I know.