Dirty Headlines

“Can I help you?” I cocked my head. I wanted to be strong, but I was tired, hungry, and annoyed. And pissed at myself—so pissed that I’d let myself get carried away with a man like Célian Laurent. I usually made smart choices. I was a salad girl, and he was a deep-fried cake.

“Me? No, though I’m sure you’ll do it at some point once you get fired and have to become a waitress to support your slutty ways.” She walked toward me on her high heels. The limo driver looked the other way, like he couldn’t watch the scene. Her sentence hadn’t even made any sense. I folded my arms across my chest.

“Why are you here?”

“To tell you to back off.”

“If Célian doesn’t want me, he’s welcome to tell me himself.”

I didn’t agree with any part of that sentence. I was no longer sure I wanted him anyway, and at any rate, it wasn’t entirely clear we were even together. But I’d be damned if I’d let her boss me around like that.

Lily kept coming until she was chest to chest with me. She was much taller and a little leaner. Most of all, she was meaner.

“You’re ruining his life, Jade.”

“Jude,” I corrected. She’d seemed to love my unique name before she’d known her fake fiancé was sleeping with me.

She rolled her eyes, like I was an idiot for even pointing that out. “Whatever. You butting into his life means he’s losing everything he cares about. He doesn’t have any family of his own. We were his family—not to mention the network. You are toxic to him, and he’s trying hard not to hurt your feelings, but whenever I call him, he comes back.”

My face heated, but I said nothing. I didn’t believe her—not completely, anyway. Yet her words got to me. I started walking toward my house, bypassing her on the sidewalk. I felt her turning around behind me.

“He’s going to be back in my arms by the end of this week.”

“Good luck,” I shouted back, not turning around to face her.

“You’ve always been a fling! A meaningless one-night stand that got stretched into more because of the circumstances.”

I smiled bitterly. Yes. That I believe.

At home, I made Dad his vegetable soup for tomorrow, following the recipe they’d given me through his program. I was cutting a carrot into depressingly small pieces when my dad hollered from the living room.

“Would you look at that? Your boyfriend is famous.”

The first thing that popped into my head was that Milton had been arrested for killing a prostitute. He was so clean cut and morbidly middle class, it seemed like something he’d be capable of doing. I nicked my little finger when the thought of Célian sprung into my mind.

Was he in trouble? More importantly—was I supposed to care this much?

“How do you mean, Dad?” I tried to keep my voice light.

“He looks good in a tux, I’ll give him that. Of course, if I was as tall as LeBron James, I would rock a designer suit like nobody’s business. You have to see this, JoJo.”

I placed the knife on the chopping board and wiped my hands on my jeans, walking over to the living room. I stood behind the sofa, so Dad couldn’t see me. Good call, considering the horror I knew had plastered itself on my unsuspecting face as I realized what I was looking at.

It was a gossip show rerun from earlier in the day. Some New York socialite had celebrated her birthday and rented out half the left wing of some glitzy hotel. She’d ordered a cake the size of a house—literally, an actual house—and someone from the Guinness Book of World Records came in to measure it. As the camera spun around the horrendous excuse for a sponge cake (“It took over five hundred sacks of sugar and six hundred pounds of flour to make the cake…”), it caught some of the guests at the party. And there was my very own Waldo, who’d been missing in action for the past three days.

Lily’s arm was looped around Célian’s.

He smiled.

She clapped.

They looked happy.

Happy like record stores and stone skipping and stolen iPods could never make him. Happy like his fiancée had just helped him save his news channel.

“Who’s the girl?” Dad scratched his bald head.

“His fiancée.” Rocks. The admission felt like swallowing rocks.

Dad twisted his head, frowning. “JoJo?”

I nodded, squeezing my eyes shut so he wouldn’t see the pain swirling inside them. I wanted to run to the cemetery down the block where my mother was buried and throw myself on her tombstone and tell her I wished she’d really cursed me—so my heart would be lonely and hungry, so it wouldn’t be linked via an invisible string, like a balloon, to a man who was too good at sucking the air out of it.