Documentary (42 page)

              “Have a great holiday, everybody, and see you in San Diego,” Kai said to the group in his hotel suite, and they all cheered as he concluded his speech. A car would arrive soon to take him and Dylan to the airport so that they could fly back to Maui for a few days. After lots of hugs, small gift exchanges and goodbyes, everyone filed out of the room, except for Ashley.

             
“So, you
are
going to tell Nina about this, right? I’m supposed to report things like this, and I’m not about to get bitched out because you two can’t keep it in your pants,” Ashley said, pointing at them with the “V” she created using her pointer and middle fingers as she frowned. “That’s the only reason I’m agreeing to keep quiet, even though I don’t believe this didn’t get physical before Orlando.” Dylan had decided it was much better to leave out that little tidbit from the time Heath nearly walked in on them because they had made a pledge in earnest to stay away from each other back then.

“Believe whatever the f—” Kai began with a scowl as he shrugged.

“Thanks, Ashley. I really appreciate it,” Dylan interrupted, pressing out a tense smile after kicking Kai in the leg. “Have a great break.” Dylan followed her to the door and shut it. She breathed out a sigh of relief. Their talk had gone as well as could be expected. Dylan and Kai accepted responsibility for letting their relationship get far more personal than Nina had wanted, but Dylan had made the case that her work stood on its own. She had showed Ashley her online portfolio with all her short films, film critiques and analyses, and reminded her of how well the web series had been received by everyone. Maybe Ashley cared, maybe she didn’t, but she had bought herself a bit of a reprieve.

“Okay, so you don’t work here for the next…” Kai kissed her nose. “…Few days so…let’s go. Now.”

“Yeah…” Dylan said as tears built in her eyes. She should’ve been happier about spending time with him back in Hawaii, but everything from last night was weighing heavily her. She had been face-to-face with the guy she was almost certain had done something terrible to Erica, and Jeremy was walking around without a care. She was even more repulsed by him now than she had been after their initial meeting.

“Aww, baby, c
ome here.” Kai pulled her into his arms. “I’m guessing it all makes sense now?”

She nodded against his chest, sniffling. “I don’t want to pry…it’s not my business. And she doesn’t have to worry about me telling anyone anything that’s not mine to tell.”

“Neither of us is. You haven’t told anyone she was in my hotel room that morning in New York. I trust you,” he said, kissing her forehead.

“But I told Ja
mie about the phone call in L.A. So she knows you guys are back in contact,” Dylan admitted wistfully. “I’m sorry.”

“I know, and she brought it up to me. I told her you were mistaken. Erica wants to do everything on her own time. She’s been through a lot. It’s something she needs to deal with mostly by herself right now.”

“And I feel like an idiot for even…” Her chin began to quiver. “I was so worried about my stupid feelings. I didn’t even bother to see farther than them at all.”

Kai held her face and kissed her on the lips. “
You didn’t do anything stupid. You didn’t know. She knows you didn’t know. She knows what the situation looked like when you walked in my hotel room that morning. I told you, she told me to go after you that day and, well, you know why I didn’t.”             

             
“You’re not worried about Ribsy figuring it out?”

“Not really. So much time has passed.
And I think even if he does, he’ll be discreet. Right now, all I need is for him to help me make sure the group continues to freeze Jeremy out completely.” Kai pulled her over to the bed, they climbed in together and she snuggled up against him, putting her head on his stomach. “Well, at least you know why I always want to kill him every time I see him, but beating his ass really wasn’t my intention when we went out into the alley. I’m sure you know that crimes that happen in other countries, such as Thailand, can’t be prosecuted here because of jurisdiction. We, as in Erica and I, wanted audio and video evidence of him talking about an injury to his ear he had all of a sudden on the flight back. She just wanted to hear him talk about it ‘cause of some evidence that recently came to light in Phuket. We even considered that it might be useful in Thailand for the investigation, too, who knows.” He sighed. “Ill-fated plan though. Lek was supposed to just film us briefly so we could be identifiable, mostly Jeremy—so there was no chance anyone would ever think it was a fake—and then leave the prepaid cell phone where I told him, so it could pick up the audio we needed. Obviously, the microphone still works when it’s recording video. Then I wanted Lek to leave the scene so he wouldn’t be involved or hear what he wasn’t supposed to hear. Lek is loyal. He asks few questions. He’s the guy who would bring the shovel and dig the hole for you if you ever called, if you know what I mean. He has never asked me about the cell phone in the alley or about Erica calling that night in L.A.

“I told Jeremy I wanted to chat and catch up outside
. I also didn’t want him to get suspicious and think that I was recording him so I didn’t bring my own phone out there in case he asked to see it when and if the conversation drifted to Thailand. It did eventually. Jeremy ‘injured’ his ear so badly that last night, he needed surgery when we got back. I know it happened during the attack, but he made up some bullshit excuse about falling down while drunk when he was going back to the hotel after our last night out, when I asked him about it on the plane. We talked music briefly, and I said that it was good to see that his ear had healed and asked him to remind me how it happened. He explained, told me something completely different that time, but got agitated and defensive immediately. He didn’t admit to anything, but I thought at least I had a version of a story that would contradict evidence later, in case he ever found himself in an interrogation room. I stayed calm because I thought Lek had gotten the recording on the prepaid phone, and I started to walk back to the club’s side door, still talking myself down from possibly beating his face in. But then Jeremy said something else that pissed me off, and I completely lost it.” Kai ran his hand down her back.

“What did he say?”

He shifted against her and his tone darkened. “‘I guess this is really about me finally getting something you never could.’ That’s what he said. We had never talked about the rape or anything, but he was bragging about it. He just said it out of the blue. His tone was so serene and so eerie; I could hear him smiling under the words. Like he’d been waiting for that exact moment. Then he said, ‘Hey, you got something I cared about once, too, you know.’ It took me a few seconds but I realized he was talking about Evernight. That all these years, he was still pissed off. Can you believe that? He was hinting that he did that to her over
me
ending Evernight, taking what he cared about. How fucking sick is that? I can’t ever tell E that. As much as she wants to know why…I can’t tell her that it’s all my fault.”

 
“It’s not your fault, Kai,” Dylan said adamantly. “It’s all his doing. He’s just a really bad person. Scum. Even if you had burned the recording studio down to the ground and destroyed all your music, it still wouldn’t be your fault. Nothing in the world justifies what he did. He’s the problem. He’s the monster.”

Kai squeezed her arm. “We started fighting, baby, and all I could think about was Butch and how
he
thought it was okay to hurt my mom, too, in a different way, but still. That’s who Jeremy morphed into for me, and the more I hit him, the more I wanted to hurt him. And I started to wonder if I was any different from Butch. Butch shoved a broken beer bottle into a guy’s carotid artery because he wouldn’t let him win back the money he lost in a pool game, and then he left him to die. I didn’t want to kill Jeremy.

“
I hit him once or twice initially, and then started to walk away, but then he hit me. He got me good a few times, and we were actually fighting after that. I hit him and hit him and hit him. I stopped hitting him, but…”

Dylan sat up suddenly, almost infuriated with him as she straddled his waist. He was staring up at the ceiling. “Look at me.” His eyes drifted slowly to her face.
He looked vulnerable and confused. Placing her hands on the bed above his shoulders for support, Dylan leaned down until her nose was about six inches from his. “You are
not
your dad, Kai White. Don’t ever think about yourself like that. You are sweet and loving and protective. You’re kind and a good friend and an amazing person, even if you are a little crazy. Maybe it wasn’t the best way to go about things, but…” When Dylan caressed his face, he placed her hand to his mouth and kissed it. “…But you’re so far from what Butch was. You can’t ever say that again.”

“You really mean that?”

Dylan nodded anxiously. She did. Kai gave her a weak half-smile when he put his hands on her thighs. “Well, being his son sure made it easy to sell what happened after I kicked Jeremy’s ass. I think it helped me, actually.

“Once the dust settled, I knew people would get
nosy about what we had been fighting about. The press would start poking around, and I was afraid for Erica, that’s all that was on my mind. I had made a bad situation so much worse. If the truth had come out right then, it would have forced her to talk about something she isn’t ready to, and it would have focused on me as some hero, and
Erica’s
the survivor, not me, and I didn’t want her story to get lost in all of that. I still worry about that, actually. Anyway, it seemed logical to let them buy into an old rivalry between band mates if it meant protecting her. So I confessed that an argument over music royalties got out of hand, and let it go from there. No one really questioned it because of my past. Jeremy wasn’t stupid enough to deny my story. The video Lek got was useless for me. It was just of us fighting, and mostly me pummeling him toward the end, so I wiped our fingerprints off with my shirt and tossed the phone in a recycling container—one of those with the wheels—that was out there before I got arrested. I was in such a daze that I didn’t delete the video beforehand. Someone found the phone and posted the video.”

“Wait…
so what happened years ago? Ribsy mentioned it. He’s done this before?” Dylan started breathing faster. “Is that why you had his tour schedule?”

“That’s what me and Erica think. We were trying to compare it with any discussion on old Evernight or Jeremy Bunyan message boards online.
We just wanted to see if anyone had anonymously mentioned an incident. Obviously not to force them to come forward but to try to establish
something
that can get an investigation started here.”

“Oh my God.” Dylan buried her face in her hands. “Oh my God.”

“What happened years ago,” Kai said, as he pulled her hands away from her face and held them, “is all tied into why I left Evernight. I think I was nineteen or almost nineteen at the time…we were at a party at this music exec’s gigantic house. I was playing pool with a female singer, I’d had a bit too much to drink, and I needed to find a bathroom. And somehow in this dark, packed house, I see Jeremy walking with a girl. Well, she’s not exactly walking. Her head’s drooping and she’s kind of stumbling. I run up to him and ask him what he’s doing. He turns to me, looks completely caught off guard and says he was just helping her get some fresh air.”

Kai shook his head and gulped down. “The girl didn’t know which way was up
, much less concerned about air, and the door to the outside was in the complete opposite direction and some back staircase was in front of him, leading to a basement or something. I insisted that she go to the hospital. She’d had way too much to drink…but I don’t think he had. I think I may have prevented whatever he was planning. There’s no way to know, but I had a strong feeling.

“
Long story short, the record label was worried about lawsuits against this exec ‘cause of all the underage drinking going on there if something like that went public, and they said I was making a big deal about something ‘I may have seen’ while
I
was intoxicated—and I
was
drunk. In fact, they said I hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. Tons of drunk people were walking around the house with other drunk people, and I was letting my personal issues with Jeremy, about him hogging the spotlight and wanting credit for my songs, cloud my mind. They looked at me like I was just the hard partying, bad boy of Evernight
with the dead, fucked up family. And I
was
, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t credible. Jeremy spent weeks trying to convince me that I was wrong, and that he was just confused because the house was so big. Either way, I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was the final straw.

“There was so much in-fighting by that point, but we had kept it together for the sake of the music
and the fans, at least for a while. There was no amicable breakup or even a
strained
one. It was bad. Screaming and threats, bad. I wouldn’t renew my contract. I brought it up to the other members that we could be just as successful somewhere else with another label and make a three-member band. And he gave them an ultimatum: me or him, and I think they were afraid of the unknown, or they couldn’t trust me, given my history. They deserted me, so I took my music, everything I had ever created and was creating, and I said I would sue them if they tried to use any of it, and I left.”