Long Way Down (Calloway Sisters 4)

I think it’s right now, when a little boy with cotton candy points up at me, that I realize I’m an animal in this zoo.

Ryke guides me through a hole in the crowd. Pushing ahead. We knock shoulders and elbow sides, but there isn’t time for apologies or sorry eyes. We just want to leave safely.

By the time we reach the exit, someone familiar waits there. In an expensive black suit and sunglasses, his shoulder is propped confidently on the wall of a gift shop, ankles crossed. Surrounded by four bodyguards, he basks in the attention.

No one hassles him, though they snap photos from faraway.

“I was going to meet you by the exhibits, but I thought I’d watch how you two handle the crowds. I needed a reminder on what a clusterfuck looks like.” Connor Cobalt straightens off the wall and then nods to the gift shop. “It’s empty.” He goes inside, his bodyguards waiting by the door.

“Are we supposed to follow him?” I ask Ryke.

“Yeah,” Ryke says with agitation. “What a fucking prick.” Because Connor couldn’t even say come with me. He demonstrates a lot more power when you follow out of freewill.

Truth be told, he is kind of godly. Just not the kind that I want in my arms. I clasp Ryke’s hand and we disappear inside.

* * *

“My private investigator has been tracking your private investigator,” Connor explains by the rack of plush lions. “My PI also said that you two have been stalking potential perpetrators.”

Ryke scowls. “No one is fucking stalking anyone.”

I’m so spent energy-wise that I near laughter. Of course Connor found our PI. Of course he has come to slap our wrists for our dangerous wrongdoings. What other scenario is there?

This is the way we all go.

I snort.

Connor arches a brow at me. “What’s amusing about this—other than the fact that you two are searching in a zoo?”

I catch Ryke mouthing the words, shut the fuck up.

I’ve known all along, Ryke. We were never supposed to be in the zoo. I think I love him more for that. He just wanted to cheer me up.

“Did you find your home with the primates satisfactory?” Connor asks him. “Or were there not enough bananas for you?”

Ryke outstretches his arm. “Did you come here just to bust my fucking balls? You could have done this over the fucking phone.”

“Stop searching for these flour-bombers. It will lead you both nowhere. It’s a waste of time, and I’d let you both waste yours but I can’t…” He takes a brief pause, lips tightening like he senses more emotion on the rise than he predicted. “I can’t watch you two put your excess energy in this because it has no good ending, and you both need one.”

He’s telling us that we’re chasing after shadows.

Stopping feels like an even bigger defeat. Like crumpling a treasure map. Destroying the message in a bottle before letting it float out to sea.

I’d rather keep the slightest hope alive. Even if we’re fooling ourselves. Is that so bad?

“I thought you were going to keep your fucking opinions to yourself,” Ryke rebuts, his tone a little less antagonistic but still pissed.

“I know. This is the last time. Consider it a bonus. I don’t give those often, so take pleasure in it while you can.”

Ryke must feel the same as me about the entire ordeal because he says, “Tell your PI to leave our fucking PI alone.”

Connor is blank-faced. “You’re a stubborn piece of work, my friend.”

I smile at the my friend part. “Have you seen the ship names of you two on Twitter?” I ask them.

Their alpha male statures rotate fully to me.

Ryke frowns. “What the fuck do you mean?”

Connor begins, “A ship name is—”

“I know what it fucking is.” Lily and Lo described it a long time ago, when the fandom culture was pretty new to all of us. “I don’t understand why we have one together.”

I pick up a plush lion with a tag that says my name is Leo. “During New Year’s Eve,” I explain, “when Connor let you stay at the party after…” I don’t mention the fight but Ryke nods, understanding that part. “Willow said the Twitterverse went insane and started calling you friends. Now you have a ship name.”

Connor wears 0% surprise.

I smile at him. “You know it, don’t you?”

Ryke’s brows furrow. “What the fuck is it?”

“CoKe,” Connor answers in a flat tone, but mild annoyance crosses his face. Probably at the prospect of sharing anything with Ryke.

Ryke repeatedly shakes his head. “Unfuckingbelievable.”

Coke, like Pepsi, has always been Fizzle’s nemesis, and in a way, it’s kind of wrong that Ryke and Connor have a ship name based on our family’s competitor.

Though when you remember how much they do not mix. How much they never seem to gel. Two men who see the world in vastly different ways and vastly different colors. Forced to be around each other. Forced to cultivate something. I believe any name for Ryke and Connor would have to be a little wrong to be right. Whether they like it or not, it really fits.

And their friendship isn’t as fragile or as breakable as they’d like to imagine. You see, I have this theory.

Relationships that take the most effort and the most time become the mightiest, most resilient bonds in the end. So if this theory proves right, their friendship will be the strongest of them all.

As the Twitter topic dies off and we’re left with the lingering one of private investigators and potential flour-bombers, Connor studies my expression that I try to hide with fifty-foot high walls and iron bars.

If anyone can see through them though, it’s these two men.

“I really wish you would consider waiting for Rose to be a surrogate,” he says. “It’s a goal that may bring you more happiness in the very end than these ones.”

I joke, “You want your wife to carry Ryke’s baby?”

“For you two, we’d do almost anything.”

Connor was the one who discovered the child pornography tapes of me. He’s why Scott Van Wright went to jail and why Scott’s friends won’t ever replay those videos and violate me.

I’ve never said thank you to Connor, but I’m so immeasurably grateful for what he did. I nod to him and whisper, “I know you would. Thank you.”

If anyone is smart enough to see the depth of my words, it’s him.

I just wish he could also offer a platter of false hope.

You’ll be pregnant in no time, Daisy!

You’ll catch those flour-bomb attackers and stop another one from happening, Daisy!

You’ll save the day!

Why can’t reality be as sweet and victorious as fairytales? I can only clasp Ryke’s hand and wish upon a star that one day, it will be.

RYKE MEADOWS

Another month has passed and she’s still not pregnant.

The only thing that’s growing is the fucking struggle. Daisy’s last period put her in excruciating pain. I had to watch her curl up into a ball and hug a pillow like she was dying. And I couldn’t do much but carry her where she needed to go and give her a heating pad.

Neither of us said it out loud, but we know her cyst is the fucking culprit. I’m concerned about her egg reserve. When she had surgery on the left ovary, her doctor said the “chocolate fluid” polluted the quality of the eggs. So her right ovary is all she really has for surrogacy and IVF.

I’ve read enough and called the doctor too many fucking times to be blind to her situation. If the cyst grows to 3 cm (it’s currently 2 cm), it’ll need to be removed before IVF. Then the risks are exponentially higher, leading to infection and possibly decreasing her egg reserve again.

As the months pass us by, surrogacy seems like the safer option, but Dais isn’t ready to give up. In the end, I’m just really fucking worried about her health.

She’s my first priority.

And our lives have to move on together.

r />

It’s why I’m about to leave for Connor and Rose’s house where she’s currently at with my brother and Lily. I’m stuck in Fizzle headquarters with Greg Calloway, Samuel Stokes, and four other businessmen whose names I can’t remember. All congregated at a long conference table. Images of the first cans of Fizz are framed on the walls behind me.

I slip on my leather bike jacket, thinking they’ll take the fucking hint that I need to leave.

“This has to be the most challenging rock face that you’ve ever climbed,” a man with a gray mustache tells me, sliding a stack of papers across the table. We’ve been discussing my next commercial for Ziff where I’m supposed to be free-solo climbing. They keep repeating words like “astonishing” and “jaw-dropping” and “extraordinary”—while Greg and Sam have stayed fucking quiet.

I roughly flip through the papers, grazing over some of the rock faces they’ve chosen. I shake my head slowly and then more rapidly. “These are fucking impossible to climb without a harness. It’s never been done.”

What I did before—the Yosemite Triple Crown—that was the hardest thing I’ve ever accomplished while free-soloing. But I wasn’t the first to do it.

“That’s the point,” a younger man tells me. “It’ll be covered on the news. It’ll give the most exposure to the sports drink that you’re promoting.”

I hate how he emphasizes that word. Like reinforcing that this is a fucking job. I understand that I’m not climbing just for fun when I endorse Fizzle, but I only started doing this because Greg asked me to.

The older businessman with the mustache slides over a check. I’ve never been enticed by money. I’d climb if it said ten bucks, but when they’re impatient to increase the difficulty, everything fucking changes.

I have to think about time. I have to think about Daisy. I have to think about consequences and my little brother. Will cash persuade me? Will it push me towards a rock face I’d never consider trying? I’m not sure.

And I fucking know…this is what Lo was afraid of.

I flip over the check, and it knocks me back. Fuck.

“You’ll have that after you film the commercial,” he tells me.