BRIAN (The Callahans Book 1) (55 page)

Trina and Devon’s houses were as different as night and day. Trina’s wasn’t even a house — it was the top floor penthouse of a skyscraper.

She laughed at me when I commented on it. “I always made fun of Devon for buying that enormous house in the middle of nowhere. He barely even lives in it. I’d do well enough in just a studio apartment, but it’s important to keep up appearances. This place does just fine when I’m in town.”

It was a really nice penthouse — not that I’d seen my share of them to be able to compare and contrast. It had a breathtaking view, for one, and a tasteful smattering of furniture art, the emphasis seeming to be on not detracting from the cityscape that filled the floor to ceiling windows.

“I had it designed for me,” Trina said, shrugging as I gaped, trying not to press my oily face on the window. “I’m not that artistic, and I didn’t really have the time to focus on decorating a place I don’t see very often.”

“I’d never want to leave if I lived in a place like this,” I told her. “It’s gorgeous. Don’t you just get lost looking out the windows?”

“There’s not much time to be a homebody if you want to be successful in my business,” she said, grabbing a couple of beers from her glass-doored refrigerator for us. I noticed that they were the same brands of beers that were in Devon’s fridge, and that gave me significant pause. Did that mean she’d been out to his house recently? Had he just not cleaned out his fridge since they broke up and she stopped coming over? I accepted the beer she offered me and tried not to think too deeply about it. I was still immensely grateful for the escape she’d given me from Dallas, and the dance routine had gone viral in a huge way. It was all the Internet had been talking about, which was a relief after the double chin disaster.

“Okay,” I said, opening my beer with the hem of my shirt. “What is our plan going to be?”

She raised her eyebrows and clinked her bottle against mine. “What plan?”

“You’re the woman with the plan,” I said. “You orchestrated a dance routine and got a bunch of overpaid athletes to perform it across the country. If there’s a plan, you’re the one who’s going to come up with it.”

“I don’t have a plan, June,” Trina said. “The only plan is going to be catching Chaz in a lie, and that’s going to be impossible. It’s the only way we can get Devon to see what a dick his agent is — to catch Chaz in a really nasty, offensive lie. And that’s not going to be easy. Chaz is a bastard, sure, but he’s a bastard who covers his tracks.”

“You’re certain that he was the one who stole it?” I asked, still far from certain.

“June, who else would have done it?” she asked, exasperated.

“Well, you had my phone for a little bit, in the car, when you dropped me off at the bus station,” I said, hesitating on every word, horrified at myself. The woman had practically spirited me out of Dallas by making a couple of phone calls, and here I was, voicing my deepest doubts about her.

“Do you think I leaked the photo?” Trina asked me, setting her beer down on her minimalistic kitchen table for the sole purpose of putting her hands on her hips.

I shrugged, embarrassed but partly relieved to try to get to the bottom of this shitty situation.

“What in the world would be my motive?”

“You want the bounty,” I said. “Devon told me a photo of a celebrity looking like an idiot could be worth a lot of money.”

Trina held her arms out and turned around. “June. Look at this place. Do you think I’m interested in a few hundred dollars?”

“No.” That was stupid.

“Then why? Why would I leak some photo I didn’t even know existed until I saw it on Twitter?”

My skin crawled. “Because you wanted to be with Devon. You wanted to get rid of me.” I felt like the most ungrateful human being on the entire face of the planet.

Trina took my hands, forcing me to deposit my beer next to hers on the table. I expected a slap more than I expected this gentle gesture.

“I care for Devon,” she said. “I won’t lie to you about that. We were in love. Was the way we broke up shitty? Of course it was. Chaz was the reason we broke up. You can’t get any shittier than that. But do I want him back? No.”

With me struggling so mightily right now to hold on to Devon, my love for him helpless in its completeness, I found that last bit hard to believe. “Why don’t you want him back?”

Trina released my hands, laughing. “I don’t know, June. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise that we broke up. Maybe I should send Chaz a nice gift basket. People expected Devon and me to be together because we had such good chemistry onscreen. But you don’t marry your coworker just because you do good projects together, do you?”

“I guess not …”

“You’re damn right, you guess not,” she said, clapping me on the shoulder. “Breaking up with Devon sucked, but I’m starting to see that I wasn’t as happy as I could’ve been with him. We’re very different people, June. Even you knew that just from seeing the places we choose to be home. And let me tell you — my stock has kind of skyrocketed since the breakup. People think I’m almost accessible, and that makes me desirable. I’ve gotten more pitches now than I ever did when I was with Devon — one even for a celebrity edition of ‘The Bachelorette.’ Can you imagine how wild that would be?”

I shook my head. I definitely couldn’t.

“Devon’s a good person, but he’s not the person for me,” she said, shrugging at me and taking a long draught from her beer. “Now that we’ve got that awkwardness out of the way, can we get back to getting back at Chaz?”

“Yeah,” I said, relieved to drink from my own beer. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” she sighed. “It’s hard to figure out who to trust. Devon still doesn’t have it figured out yet.”

“I didn’t mean to be ungrateful,” I said, feeling ungrateful all the same. “I just … I don’t understand fully why you’d help me. I’m your ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend.”

“You’re a victim of the machine, is what you are,” Trina declared. “You thought the only thing that could be done was to pit yourself against me. That’s what society wants us women to do — work against each other instead of helping each other out. What did I tell you? I would never not help a woman just because I thought of her as competition. And I strive never to do that, either. We’re all in this together. If we’re not together, then who’ll look after us?”

“I’m so sorry.” I felt like a total asshole.

“Fucking enough!” she bellowed. “We have business to attend to. We have to figure out a way to solve this whole thing.”

“Yes, okay.” I composed myself as best I could, downing the rest of my beer in a few long gulps.

“That’s the spirit!” Trina returned to the refrigerator for additional refreshments. “Have you noticed anything else about the photo leak since we last spoke?”

“Anything like what?” I asked. “People have just been posting it over and over again.”

“Yeah, but have you been reading the stories?” Trina plucked at my elbow, indicating that I should follow her to her very modern white couch. I was terrified I’d spill beer on it, and sat gingerly.

“Of course I haven’t been reading the stories,” I said. “They’re garbage.”

“Some of them are really funny,” she said, keeping her mouth in a perfect line.

“Absolutely not funny. Not even a little bit.”

“I need you to read them,” Trina said gently. “Find out which story is the real one, and then maybe we’ll have a lead. At least we’ll have the gossip rag that got it right, and we can go forward from there.”

I blinked for several long minutes. “That’s … that’s actually a really good idea.”

“I have some good ones sometimes,” she said, smiling coyly. “Don’t let the patriarchy — or its views on my hair color — fool you.”

Much as I hated it, I plunged into the world of the celebrity gossip website. It was so ugly. Editors somewhere actually assigned stories on whether an actress was getting fat, or whether she’d picked the correct outfit to wear. Now that Trina had opened my eyes to it, I was starting to notice more and more how often women were actually pit against each other — who wore it best? Who said it better? Who loved him more?

Some of the worst stories were about the photo of Devon.

“Everyone wanted to know just what Devon Ray saw in June Clark, a highly ordinary pizza delivery girl,” one story sniped. “With this picture, we all know the truth, now: She’s been blackmailing him to stay with her. Weather the storm, Devon. We all know you have a double chin when you’re drunk, now, but at least you’re rid of her, hopefully.”

It made me feel like shit even if it wasn’t true. What was so wrong with me dating Devon? Why did that offend so many people? Was it jealousy, pure and simple? Was that all this trash boiled down to?

I read story after story, searching for the real one, cringing with each slight about my looks or my weight or my personal style. Lots of sites rehashed photos of me looking like an idiot at the airport, pulled along by Devon through a sea of people. Others preferred a video still of me ugly crying during the Kelly Kane interview. The prevalent theory was that I was unstable, that Devon was only with me for pity’s sake, or because I was tricking him into it somehow. How would that even work? I was confused as often as I was offended.

“I’ve been through all of them that I can stomach,” I announced after what felt like hours. Trina looked up from her own phone.

“Which rag had it?” she asked.

“None of them.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Which was the closest?”

“None of them had even a shred of truth, minus the basics: I took the photo, it was at the hotel in Dallas, the photo was of Devon. Hell, some of them didn’t even have that.”

“Really? That’s who, what, and where.”

“One article said it was a Devon Ray lookalike trying to break into Hollywood,” I remarked. “Had an interview with someone and everything.”

Trina burst into laughter, and I had to join her.

“I told you some of them were funny.”

“That was the only one,” I told her. “Seriously. That shit is awful.”

“Okay, then, riddle me this: What is the real story?”

I swallowed. “If I tell you, and I see it online tomorrow, you’ll only expose yourself.”

“I thought we were past that, June,” she groused. “You’ll never see the story online if I’m the only one who knows it — and if no one else does.”

“No one else but Devon.”

“And has he told Chaz?”

“I don’t have a clue,” I said honestly. “Don’t you think one of these websites would've had the real story if Chaz had known it when he leaked the photo?”

“That’s true,” Trina reasoned. “Okay. Lay it on me. Don’t spare a single juicy detail.”

“I delivered Devon’s pizza. He was day drunk. The hotel room was a fucking mess. And all I could see was a hot, famous actor standing in front of me, being nice even though I was basically drooling on myself with stupidity. He invited me into his room because I asked for an autograph for Nana. And then he made a pass at me.”

Trina’s eyes bulged very nearly out of her face. “He what?”

“We almost kissed,” I clarified.

“Was it consensual?” she demanded, her face turning redder and redder by the second.

“I was … attracted to him, if that’s what you’re asking me,” I said. “I wanted it to happen until I realized how drunk he was. Then, he acted like a jerk and I took the photo — with flash — to get him away from me.”

“He can be a mean drunk,” Trina said. “That doesn’t excuse him from being an asshole to you, though.”

“It worked out, in the end,” I said. “He came over to my Nana’s house to apologize — he really just wanted me to delete the photo — and something stuck. I don’t know. I didn’t want to like him and I did, and he wanted me to like him and fell in love with me in the process. It’s a weird, ugly beginning to our relationship, and this whole photo leak is a weird, ugly interlude. I just … I love him. I can’t not. I wish I could stop. I wish I could just disappear from all of this and go on my merry way.”

Trina shook her head. “You can’t do that. Chaz would win, and I am done with him winning all the time.”

“But none of the websites had the real story,” I said. “We can’t prove that Chaz fed the vultures.”

“Yes, but now I have a plan that will trap him,” Trina said, grinning at me. If I wasn’t almost certain she was completely on my side, I would’ve feared for my life and my reputation.

“What is it?”

“You have to trust me completely. And you have to do what I say.”

I exhaled heavily. “Okay.”

As soon as Trina explained her thought process, I began to really believe it would work. What followed soon after was a ton of unexpected laughs as she coached me through acting exercises and possible dialogues. Trina was as wickedly funny as she was savvy and well connected. Woe be to the individual who had her as an enemy. I actually started to feel bad for Chaz by the time she gave me his number and had me dial it.

My stomach churned in spite of all of the preparation as it rang once, twice, three times …

“Chaz, I’m in trouble,” I said the moment he answered his phone, cutting off even his cautious greeting. Trina gave me a thum
bs
up.