Ghosted

When I told Jack, he called me a filthy fucking cocksucker. Apparently, for his celebratory gift, he'd just sent himself flowers.

I sign some paperwork to get the car released and climb behind the wheel. Less than a thousand miles on it, according to the odometer, and I'm about to add another two hundred.

It’s a long drive. Tonight, it feels even longer. I get to the apartment just shy of four o’clock in the morning. The door is locked, but I use the key Kennedy gave me to get inside.

Quietly, I head down the small hall, glancing in Madison’s bedroom along the way, seeing her peacefully sleeping. I keep going, not wanting to disturb her. The door to Kennedy’s bedroom is cracked open, the dim light of a small lamp illuminating part of the room. My chest feels tight when I push the door open and see her, fast asleep in bed, clutching a familiar old notebook, the one that holds her version of our story.

I’ve read parts of it. The beginning. I’ve been too afraid to see how it all went to hell in California. She wrote it like it was meant for me, but I remember things differently. To me, she was the center of the universe, the sunlight that burned so bright, but she writes herself in the shadows, secondary in her own life. Instead, she made me the hero, the center of this alternate universe she invented around her.

I always knew it, yeah, but I never really understood that I was her Breezeo.

And then I slowly disappeared.

Carefully, I pull the notebook from her grasp and set it aside before turning off the lamp and laying down beside her. She stirs as the bed shifts, her eyes opening. She blinks in confusion before a small lazy smile plays on her lips, her voice a sleepy whisper when she says, “You’re here.”

“I said I would be, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, well, you say a lot,” she mumbles, shoving against me, snuggling up to me.

I put my arm around her, pulling her even closer as I unfasten my wrist brace, yanking it off to toss it somewhere in the darkness. My hand slides under her shirt, her skin warm against my palm as I stroke her back, fingertips tracing her spine. A soft moan escapes her.

The sound, fuck, it does something to me. Arching her back, she shifts her body, and it’s instinct that I move, pulling her beneath me as I hover over her.

She stares up at me and lets out a shaky breath before I lean down and kiss her.

“I mean it all,” I whisper against her lips as my hands roam, getting rid of those pesky clothes. “Every single word.”

“You’ve said some horrible crap,” she reminds me.

“That was the coke talking,” I say, kissing her neck as she tilts her head. “The whiskey, too.”

“Tell someone who fucking cares.”

Her voice is quiet, unthreatening, but there’s that ‘fucking’ word. Pulling back, I look at her. “What?”

“Those were the last words you said to me.”

“The day you left?”

She nods. “You were sober when you said it.”

Tell someone who fucking cares.

If that was how our story ended for her, I seriously dread to know what’s written in the last few pages of that notebook.

I try to sit up, but she wraps her arms around me. “Oh, no, I don’t think so. You finish what you started, Mister Big Shot.”

She kisses me, hard, and just like that, I give in, pushing my way between her thighs. In one stroke, I’m inside of her, and goddamn if I’m not home again, so I show her, over and over, as she writhes, that I didn’t mean it when I said that bullshit.

Dreams aren’t always just dreams. Sometimes, they turn into wide-eyed nightmares, the kind where you’re screaming but nobody can hear you. They don’t want to listen. They’re drowning you out.

The first time you snort coke is at a club in LA. It’s a present from the Markson model. Serena’s her name. It’s your twenty-first birthday. Clifford throws a party in your honor and invites the who’s who of Hollywood, but the woman you love stays home. Clifford says she’s not old enough to come. The venue is twenty-one and up. So you tell her it’s nothing special, just networking. Part of your job is making connections. It’s ‘work’.

But the pictures that hit the tabloids don’t much look like you’re working, not when in most of them you’re snorting powder off of a table. Clifford’s whole entourage is there. Girls surround you. But some of them aren’t twenty-one yet, either. A few are barely legal.

You apologize. It was a mistake. You ask for a second chance. But you only do that after the evidence comes out. And when you start filming your second movie—another teen comedy, where you play the lead this time—the world tilts a bit. Your first movie hasn’t even released yet and there are already whispers. Clifford Caldwell’s newest client might be someone to consider. You get more inquiries. You’re juggling so much. Promo is soon starting. You need a little pick me up.