“Are you actually looking to buy a house in Macao?”
He growled at me in answer.
After that, he moved on to intimidation. Nick, with his rabid, devoted fanbase that dubbed themselves the Maddies, could use Twitter to annihilate someone with merely a whisper of impropriety. They were not to be trifled with, and if you worked at all in the entertainment business, if your livelihood depended in any way on public opinion, Nick Madison could do irreparable damage to your reputation. He tried that, but attempting to go after me on social media was a mistake. It was digital, and if it was digital, it served Owen, its unholy master, not the other way around.
Tweets he tried to send were dead before anyone ever saw them. When he tried to type my name, it came out as Ed Sheeran or Shawn Mendes or Dwayne Johnson. He eventually got so annoyed he hurled the new phone that I’d just gotten him across the yard. Unfortunately, they were mowing that morning, and that was the end of that. The next day, as soon as Owen activated the third new phone, it started blowing up with notifications. There were comments about his posts on the bunnies in his backyard, how depressed he was about the sugar content in the gummy vitamins he was taking for hair loss, and whether he should wear Atelier Versace or Prada to his next function. Being as these were all very “first world problems,” he came across like, as his buddy from across the pond, Ben Tremont, said, a real prat.
“Who are you?” more friends posted on his feed.
“Where’s your outrage about immigration and the environment?”
There was a lot of #NickMadisonSniffingGlueAgain.
It was particularly bad when the management at Halcyon contacted Mr. Cox, who immediately afterward called to rip Nick a new asshole and order him to, “Put down your goddamn phone! Do you want them to sue you for breach now? Do you have any idea how long it will take for you to get another recording deal if you blow this one all to hell?”
After he hung up, he turned his now familiar death glare on me. I might have grinned a bit more than was necessary, but he got the message loud and clear. I was not to be fucked with. And it wasn’t that anybody knew me, but that was the point. I couldn’t be an effective fixer if my face was everywhere.
Next in his bag of tricks was always the seduction angle, and I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t try that one on me. Easy to tell that he couldn’t even get it up for me; his utter revulsion was not hard to miss. I was not what did it for him, surely far too vile and loathsome to even attempt to seduce. The feeling, or lack thereof, was completely mutual.
Nick Madison was, without a doubt, pretty, but I couldn’t imagine how anyone could look past the brooding, whining, pouting, foot-stomping, sniveling kid he was, to anything underneath. There was no substance there. No one in their right mind would want to go to bed with a spoiled brat masquerading as an adult, and certainly not me. Men aroused me, not boys who didn’t even know who they were.
Because I was there, in his home, in his face, underfoot, like a faucet he couldn’t get to stop dripping, he finally gave up. And even though he made it crystal clear that he hoped I ended up as the victim of some random serial killer, not only dead but, hopefully, dismembered—his language was definitely colorful—he quit waging open war with me. The raging hostility remained, but the volume, thankfully, was turned down to simmering hatred.
He refused to run with me; instead, he swam and lifted weights, ate right and drank gallons of water. He followed, to the letter, the exercise regimen his new trainer, Felix, who resembled some Nubian god, assigned him. He listened to Marisol, who he adored, and therefore consumed whatever she prepared, and slowly his weight increased. There was new muscle and definition, his body filling out, becoming carved and toned, sleek and tanned from the hours and hours spent outdoors in the pool and playing tennis at a nearby country club, where I arranged private time with the pro. He went on long, rambling walks through the Botanical Garden, he and Callie moving at a brisk pace, side by side, with me bringing up the rear. He never deigned to speak to me, only her. For me there was endless icy hatred, but at least July, our second month together, came and went without him screaming and throwing things.
When I hung the plaques for his three platinum records, he was annoyed, but later in the day I saw him standing there looking at them. I wanted to inspire him, and hopefully it was helping. The albums, Excuse to Do Nothing, 77 Fahrenheit, and All That Silence, I downloaded and listened to and found them far better than I assumed they would be. The songs “Cavalry Blue,” about a guy waiting to be saved from death row, and “On Three,” an ode to the love of playing music with friends, were two of my favorites. I, for obvious reasons, kept that to myself, as he nearly hissed like a cat whenever I got close to him.