Billionaire Beast

“What happened?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” he answers. It’s a stall, and a pathetic one at that. “She got pregnant,” he says. “We were going to have a little baby girl. We’d even started picking out names for her and everything. When Jamie went into labor, though,” he sighs, “there were complications. Neither she, nor the baby, survived.”

I’m trying to do the right thing and brush my first thought aside, so I give the quick response. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” he says, “me, too.”

There’s something almost sadistic in having this talk while getting a massage. It’s not an unwritten rule as far as I know, but it just doesn’t feel right for anything pleasant to be happening right now.

“When did this happen?” I ask, that question being the first thing that popped in my mind.

“Are you asking me when it happened or are you asking me how it is that you never heard about it?” he asks.

“Both, I guess,” I respond, though I’m more interested in the second answer.

“It happened when I was about 20,” he says. “That would be, what? Nine years ago? Anyway, the reason you never heard about it is that you’re forgetting I was just a normal guy for quite a while there.”

“Yeah, but you were on that show when you were a kid,” I tell him. “Child stars who never worked again wouldn’t be able to keep something like that out of the public eye. I guess I’m just curious how you did.”

“We weren’t engaged or anything,” he says. “When Jamie died, I wasn’t the next of kin. The paperwork that was going to have my name on it was going to be the birth certificate. When there was no more need for that,” he says, “there just wasn’t anywhere else for my name to go. Her dad took possession of her remains, told me he didn’t want me anywhere near the funeral or his family, and that was the last I saw of any of them. The bastard even filed the baby’s death certificate without my name.”

“Why was her dad so pissed at you?” I ask. “It doesn’t sound like it was your fault.”

“It wasn’t,” he says, “but that didn’t change the fact that his daughter was dead, and if it weren’t for me, she’d be alive.”

“Okay, now that sounds like it is your fault,” I say.

“If she weren’t pregnant,” he says, “she wouldn’t have died in labor. I didn’t have anything to do with the blood clot that ended up killing her, but her body wouldn’t have been under that stress if it weren’t carrying a baby. She probably would have been fine if we’d never gotten pregnant.”

“It sounds like you blame yourself,” I tell him.

I can hear the sound of Damian moving, and I lift my head to look at him. He’s looking back at me with a completely helpless expression on his face.

That expression—it may not be what we’re looking for on film, but it’s certainly intimate. A person doesn’t have to be completely vulnerable to build, maintain, and experience intimacy, but it doesn’t hurt when vulnerability is there.

“I’m not kissing you this weekend,” I tell him, and put my head back down.

“What?” he asks. “What are you talking about? We’ve got our first kiss scene this next week. We go in there cold and I’d hate to see what we look like. Seriously, you need to screen test that shit. What feels good isn’t always what looks good.”

“We’ll kiss onscreen because that’s what’s in the script,” I tell him, “but there aren’t going to be any extracurricular activities. I just thought I should let you know that before too much time passed.”

“Raymond,” Damian says, “you’ve got the hands of a master.”

“Thank you, sir,” the man Damian called Raymond (even though we all know his real name is Man Bun) says. “Is that going to be all for you this afternoon?”

“Yeah,” Damian says. “That’ll be all for now.”

I look up at Bald Guy, but he seems less engaged in the world outside his massage performance. As I’m trying to get up, he just presses back against me as if it’s all part of the massage. It actually feels pretty cool, but that’s not the point.

“I’m sorry,” I say to Bald Guy, looking for a name tag but not finding one, “I have to follow him.”

“Your massage isn’t finished,” Bald Guy protests.

“I know,” I tell him. “I’m very sorry about that, but I’ve got to go after him.”

Bald guy scoffs loudly and throws his hands up in the air. It’s a pretty petulant scene, but it does allow me to get to my feet and hurry back into the locker room.