BRIAN (The Callahans Book 1) (37 page)

“June, wait.”

It was a shock to hear my name on his lips—my name uttered straight from Devon Ray’s mouth—even though I knew what an ass he was in real life. It stopped me in my tracks just long enough to allow him to take me by the shoulder and turn me around, to make him think he had a chance with me after all.

“Fuck off, Devon.” I snapped a quick photo of his face with my phone as I whirled around.

“What the hell was that?” he said, blinking at the flash and staggering backward. I hadn’t realized just how drunk he was, which made the entire encounter even worse. A drunken Devon Ray had made a pass at me. He’d probably try to bang anything that moved at this point.

“Evidence,” I said briskly. “So my nana believes me when I tell her what a jerk you are in real life.”

“Delete that photo,” he barked.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” I snapped, charging out the door. He recoiled from the afternoon sunlight like a vampire might’ve, retreating into the clutter and darkness of his hotel room. I slammed the door shut behind me and charged down the stairwell, seething, my mind playing one thought on loop.

Celebrities—they’re just like us. Fucking assholes.

My shift was nowhere near over, and now I had a cold pizza in my car that wouldn’t get delivered to the location I was supposed to go to next, but I wasn’t in the mood anymore. Paycheck and tips be damned. What had just transpired between Devon Ray and me was the only thing I could think of.

I let out a string of profanities, beating my fist against the steering wheel, when I realized the jerk hadn’t even paid for the pizza I’d left there. I was going to have to play dumb to get out of this, and I wasn’t dumb. I was underemployed, sure, but I wasn’t stupid. This was going to come out of my paycheck.

I sighed and dialed my work number before peeling out of the hotel parking lot.

“This is June,” I said. “I’m sick. I’m not coming back in today.”

I hung up before the manager could argue with me. There was no arguing with this. Reality had just shifted. I’d just delivered pizza to Devon Ray, and argued with him about his charmed life, topping the entire experience with refusing his drunken come-on.

Was I an idiot? He was probably right—it was the closest I’d ever get to a celebrity hookup. I’d squandered it, but I wasn’t so sure I was upset about that fact.

I didn’t care how famous the guy was. I wasn’t going to give my body to an asshole to do as he pleased with it. It was a story that I knew no one would ever believe—until I remembered that I’d snapped a photo of him.

I wheeled into a shopping center immediately, earning a horn blast from the truck behind me when I failed to signal my sudden desire, and pulled into a parking spot. Peering at my phone’s screen, I sucked in a lungful of air and burst out laughing.

This was priceless. I was in possession of probably the one and only shitty picture of Devon Ray, Hollywood heartthrob. It was probably worth my weight in gold.

He was scowling and flinching at the same time, giving him a double chin I would’ve never believed to be possible. I briefly considered downloading a social media app for the sole purpose of sharing it, though I doubted anyone would think it was genuine.

In this photo, Devon Ray looked like an ordinary, angry man. It evaporated nearly all of the sexual tension I’d had with him, the helpless attraction that had trapped me in that messy hotel room for so long.

I tossed my phone onto the passenger seat and pulled out of my parking spot.

Driving aimlessly was one of my favorite ways to digest things. I’d done it so often when I first got my driver’s license that I’d become intimately acquainted with the sprawling metropolis. I was an ideal pizza delivery person, really. I knew all the best shortcuts, the streets and intersections to avoid at certain points of the day. If only I hadn’t gotten my college education, I would’ve been perfectly satisfied with my current job.

Nana had pushed me to complete my degree. I didn’t understand why it was so important to her, but I couldn’t tell her no. For my tiny grandmother, dependent on an oxygen tank to breathe and so diminutive in her wheelchair that she looked like a child, no was never an acceptable answer. The woman had raised me, and she demanded a college education. I remembered the fight we’d had about it very well.

“I’ll just go to college later,” I’d said, exasperated, throwing my hands up in the air at her. It wasn’t a week after my high school graduation, and Nana was pushing me to at least enroll in a nearby community college to get some requirements out of the way if I wasn’t keen on selecting a major yet.

“You’ll go to college now,” she insisted, her voice reedy but firm. She never had to raise it to get what she wanted. She was implacable. “There isn’t a ‘later’ for your education.”

The “later” I meant was troubling even to me. I couldn’t imagine going to college full time while holding down my crappy pizza delivery job and taking care of Nana. That “later” I’d mentioned to her? That was the inevitable “later” of not having to take care of her anymore.

“I’m just scared that I won’t have enough time for everything, Nana,” I told her.

“There is always time for everything if you put enough importance on it,” she responded. “You don’t worry about me. You have to think about your future.”

There was that troubling thing again. The “future” Nana was talking about was the future without her in it.

“Maybe I’ll quit the pizza place,” I suggested hopefully. “That’ll give me more time for my studies.” I didn’t mind the work, and I loved driving. But a job was a job—an obligation that put me in occasionally crappy situations, like naked people opening the door.

“You need your job to help pay for your books,” Nana said. “You won’t be quitting the pizza place.”

There was no arguing with her. She’d always been like that, before the oxygen tank, before the wheelchair. I couldn’t get away with anything under her watch. As I got older, beginning in high school, it was so troubling to me to start becoming the one who watched over her.

Nana’s health was deteriorating quickly. The only mother—and grandmother—I’d ever known, she’d brought me into her home before I had memories of my other home, the one with my mother and father.

Nana had been brief and as vague as she thought was necessary when explaining that situation the moment I was old enough to ask about it.

“Your mother and father had you a little too young,” she said. “They fell in together a little too young, too, and they both have a lot of growing up to do.”

I grew up, too, and I didn’t ask about them again. They never came calling, Nana never mentioned them, and life was just dandy.

Except that I had a college degree and still worked as a pizza delivery person.

“Get a job to suit your skills,” Nana had urged me, as I dabbed Vaseline ointment on her nostrils, which tended to chafe because of the oxygen she had to use. “You’re not living up to your full potential, June.”

“The job market’s really tough right now, Nana,” I said pleasantly, counting out her pills before setting them on a saucer beside a glass of water. “I know that something will come along.”

“Something’s not just going to come along if you don’t go out there and seize it,” she said irritably, her small hands fluttering at me, trying to shoo me away. “Don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself, girl, before you lose your momentum.”

Nana was angry at herself, angry that her waning health forced me into the position of caretaker when she’d been so good at taking care of me growing up. And she was angry that this responsibility limited my potential in the job market.

She was right. I couldn’t fathom getting a full-time office job. It would take me away from her, and she depended on me. We got by on a stipend I got paid for being her full-time caretaker. It also helped that we were involved in a home nurse program at a local hospital, meaning that a healthcare professional visited Nana at the house every day, usually when I was delivering pizzas. The money from the pizza delivery job helped make things more comfortable around our snug house.

Our lives were far from perfect, but we were used to things the way they were. I treasured Nana, and I was grateful for the fact that I was in a position to provide for her, especially after the way she had once provided for me. She could’ve left me to my fate with my hapless parents, or perhaps to the foster system. Instead, she’d given up her retirement and relaxation to raise me as if I’d been her own child.

I couldn’t resent her now for our current circumstances. I was unable of feeling that way about Nana. She was precious to me.

That was also why I wasn’t going to tell her how big of a jerk Devon Ray was in real life.

Nana had enough to worry about, what with her failing health and her concerns that I was wasting my life. I didn’t want to tread on her fantasies about her favorite movie star of the moment.

It was funny. She liked newly popular actors like Devon, and I preferred stars of past eras—the Humphrey Bogarts, Jimmy Stewarts, Fred Astaires. To me, today’s actors were more focused on appearances than real talent. I’d taken Nana to see Devon’s last movie, the one I’d awkwardly mentioned to him before he’d revealed the ugliness inside of himself to me. She had been transfixed the entire time, gushing afterward about how talented Devon was.

“That young man is going places,” she told me as I helped her into the passenger seat of my car in the movie theater parking lot.

“Who, Devon Ray?” I’d scoffed. “He looks and acts just like anyone else right now.”

“No, no. This one’s different.”

“Different how?” I was of the opinion that you could get a dozen Devon Rays sold in a box—each with different names and hair colors, maybe, but practically the same model.

“Different…I don’t know,” Nana mused as I turned on the car. “Like there’s something special about him. Like he’s hungry for it. Like he’s going places.”

Going places. Sure. Like in my cheap, oil-splattered khakis.

Today wasn’t even a good appearance day for me. I didn’t have bad hair days or bad pimple days or bad makeup days. My bad days came in full-on attack. Try as I might, I couldn’t brush out a lump from my ponytail this morning, and I had a big fat pimple appear on my cheek sometime overnight, necessitating a glob of concealer. Being in my 20s had done nothing to stem the occasional blemish. I’d even tried to distract from it by pulling some of my hair out of my ponytail and letting it hang down over my ears, which just made me look vaguely sloppy. My makeup hadn’t looked right, and I somehow got to the end of my clean work clothes and was forced to wear both my polo shirt and khakis from the time the deep fryer in the kitchen at the pizza place spat hot oil on me.

It wasn’t a good day at all for my physical appearance, and yet a movie star had hit on me, tried to kiss me, and heavily implied that he wanted to do so much more.

None of that made sense. It was probably a testament to just how drunk he was when I arrived with his pizza. I hoped it made him gain five pounds.

I pulled up outside of our little house, one of many crammed into the crowded neighborhoods surrounding Dallas, and sat in the car for a while. It had only been a couple of hours since I left the hotel in a huff, and now it seemed like my encounter with Devon Ray had only been a dream. Could it have just been some trick of my imagination? I reached for my phone and opened the photo album, laughing as Devon’s ugly mug popped up. No, that had been real. I had the crappy picture to prove it.

Nana was usually such a good judge of character, too.

She would be thrilled to hear that I’d run into her favorite actor. I didn't have to spoil that with the details.

I turned off the car and got out, snagging the spare pizza I hadn’t delivered to surprise Nana with. She was on a hospital-mandated diet, but I was a firm believer in having a little fun once in a while. Nana would enjoy the pizza, and being happy was really the most important thing.

I frowned as I navigated my way up the deteriorating sidewalk leading up to the house. Something needed to be done about it, but I was no construction expert. It had been a community effort to build the wheelchair ramp up to the house to allow Nana more mobility. I’d written an essay about her need while I was still in school, and the neighborhood had raised the funds to help us complete it.

For as big as Dallas was, the neighborhoods that it was made up of could be extremely personable. When a need presented itself, the people who lived here rallied around it, making sure it was taken care of. Before the ramp was built, Nana tended to fearfully maneuver the wheelchair down the concrete steps to the front stoop. She left little black marks of rubber on the edges, and I was always afraid she’d be dumped out of her seat while doing it, suffering a terrible injury.

Maybe I could just get some concrete mix at a nearby home supply store and figure out the sidewalk by myself. And the house could really use a new coat of paint. That was something I could definitely do—slap paint on wood.

Beyond the wheelchair ramp, though, the house where I grew up remained virtually unchanged. It was a two-bedroom, one-bath home perched on a tiny patch of grass, all of it surrounded by a chain-link fence. I always wanted a dog for that yard when I was young, but Nana convinced me that it would be cruel to keep an animal in so little space.

I expertly balanced the box of pizza in one hand as I unlocked the front door with the other. The stoop needed to be swept. I’d put it on my list of things to do. That list was always much longer than I thought it could possibly be, much longer than I thought I would ever get done, but I found a way to march through it, even when I was bone tired.

“Nana, I’m home,” I announced loudly, closing the door behind me with my foot.

“In here,” she called back, and I knew she’d wheeled herself into the living room to enjoy the last of the day’s sunshine.

She was a sassy dresser even in her advancing age, and today’s wardrobe choice was no different. Her pink shirt had flashy spangles and sequins, and she’d even pulled on dark leggings I’d gotten her for comfort.

“Nana, you could’ve told me you wanted to dress up today,” I said, frowning at her with disapproval. “I would’ve helped you before I went to work. What would’ve happened if you’d fallen while getting into those leggings?”

“I would’ve gotten up,” she said, preening. “You think I look nice?”

“You always look nice,” I told her. “What’s the occasion today?”