Hitman's Hookup: A Bad Boy Romance (53 page)

Josh went back to moving pot stickers from the platter to his own plate with chopsticks. “She’s got a point, man.”

I had kept this secret for six months. I’d told
literally
nobody. It was why I hadn’t called Josh much. I didn’t trust myself
not
to spill the story once I heard his voice; and after all, I was fairly convinced that Hailey had bugged my phone. Tonight, I’d left it behind at the hotel on purpose. I stopped myself from glancing around the room as if Hailey were going to pop up from behind the sofa. I was only
sort of
paranoid.

“Okay. I’ll tell you everything.”

Amy and Josh had traveled to almost every continent in the course of their documentary careers. They’d seen more shit in seven years than most people see in a lifetime. They were familiar with my life dramas and the associated bullshit of Hollywood. But even
they
couldn’t hide their shock as I told them what had happened.

There was silence as they processed, the meal untouched by all of us and growing colder by the minute.

“Holy shit,” Josh swore out loud. “I – man. I don’t even know what to say.”

“So you haven’t had
any
contact with Olivia? Not a text, not a phone call? Nothing? You just…abandoned her?” Amy asked with disapproval.

“Did I have a
choice
?” I said, feeling angry. This wasn’t
my
fault but Amy was making it sound like I had done something wrong.

“Well, you could have gone to her at least. She has a right to know that Hailey Holliday illegally filmed a sex tape of her.”

I stood up, shaking. “Which would have done
what, exactly?
Hailey
has me
. She got me this time. There is no way out of this. I’m protecting Olivia. Jesus fucking Christ. I can’t believe you’re telling me that I did something wrong here, when this – all of this – is Hailey’s fault.”

I started pacing the living room.

“Sit down, Wilde,” Josh said, sounding worried. “We’re just trying to understand here.”

Amy cleared her throat. “I’m not trying to understand anything. I think you’re full of shit, Wilde.”

I spun around, nearly knocking over a three-foot-tall black ceramic vase filled with wooden sticks. “
Excuse me
?”

“You heard me. I think it’s not your baby. I think you know that, deep down. And I think that you should have let Olivia decide about the video.”

I laughed darkly. “Well, fucking twenty-twenty hindsight. Thank you. That’s just
so
fucking helpful.”

Amy wasn’t backing off. “I think that a part of you was afraid that you were going to hurt Olivia one way or another. And you were afraid of committing to her. Hailey was an easy excuse.”

“EASY!” I screamed. “
Easy
? You think it was
easy
to abandon the woman I love?” It was the first time I’d admitted that out loud since college.

Amy and Josh went silent. I felt like my body was going to vibrate through the ceiling. I stormed out of the dining room and into the hallway, ripping open the front door and marching past the elevator.

I ran down all thirty flights of stairs and out the side exit door. It was warm for November in New York – only fifty degrees. I was already sweating after running down the steps.

I had no idea where I was going or what I was doing.

So I just kept running.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

WILDER

It was another two hours before I realized where I was going.

I’d looked up the address a few hundred times over the last decade. I’d memorized it in drunken stupors at three in the morning. I’d visualized walking here from a thousand different starting points, mapping my way through New York City in my mind. But I’d never actually been here.

Now I was.

I stood in front of the giant, rolled-steel garage doors and took a deep breath. Then I pounded on them, the vibrating metal echoing down the mostly empty street. A few drunken people were stumbling home. It was nearly midnight. I didn’t know how I knew he would be here. But I felt it.

After about a minute, the doors rolled open from the piss-soaked ground upwards. Suddenly I was staring at my father.

He looked shocked to see me. He was wearing grease-covered jeans and a black t-shirt that looked like the same brand I wore. He had a black mark across his nose. His fading tattoos were visible across his muscular arms.

This was the guy I remembered. Not the suit-clad man in Italy. I almost felt like I’d taken a time machine to get here.

I inhaled and smelled motor oil and solder; just like my earliest childhood memories. “Dad,” I said simply.

He nodded his head. “Come in, Nicholas.”

I stepped inside the brightly-lit shop, enormous halogen-bulb-powered industrial lights hanging from the ceiling. A dozen black, wheeled tool cabinets lined the perimeter of the space. Motorcycle tires were organized neatly in long, metal racks. Hubcaps decorated the walls, and the shiny, painted white floor was almost spotless. I wondered how many times a day he polished it. Or had one of his staff polish it.

My dad shoved his hands in his pockets and looked everywhere except for my face. “First time here, isn’t it? At the new shop, anyway.”

I nodded. “Yeah,” I said.

The unsaid statement there was that this was the place he’d moved his business to within a year of my mom’s death. He’d barely been home in the months after she passed, and in that time had grown his business enough that he could expand. He’d invited me over and over again. I refused so many times that eventually he stopped asking me.

We stood in uneasy silence for a long time. Then my dad ran his hands through his hair. I realized that I was standing next to my future twin. It was almost like looking in a mirror.

“You want to help me with this bike?” he asked, still not looking at me.

“Alright,” I replied.

He motioned to my outfit. “You’ll probably get those fancy jeans dirty.”

I shrugged. “I have more. I’m not worried.”

He nodded. “Alright.”

The motorcycle proved to be as much of an icebreaker as was possible between the two of us. We worked mostly in silence, but it was a relaxed one. It turned out that I remembered the names of the various tools and bolts.

After about an hour, my dad stood up. “Want a beer?”

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t turn down a Coke,” I said.

He walked over to what looked like an old-fashioned soda machine but was actually just the exterior that had been renovated into a full refrigerator. He pulled out a Heineken and a glass bottle of Coke. He popped the bottle caps off against the edge of the countertop with one fluid motion of his hand.

I took the soda gratefully. “I never did learn how to do that,” I said with a smile. “Plenty of practice and chipped marble countertops at my apartment, though.”

My dad chuckled and took a swig of the beer. “It’s a God-given gift, apparently.” He started peeling off the label of his bottle. “Plenty of things you’re good at that I’m not, though.”

I had never heard my dad pay me a compliment in my entire life. I stared at him. I knew not to say anything. If he was offering his words freely, it was best to just let him finish.

“I’ve watched all your movies.”

“All of them?”

He nodded. “Front row. First showing. Even the midnight premiere ones. You’re really good, even when the movies aren’t.”

I laughed. “Thanks,” I said. “I had no idea.”

My dad shrugged. “How would you? It’s not like we’ve talked regularly.” He paused again. “Or at all. Not since your mother...” he trailed off, letting the sentence finish itself in my head.

I inhaled sharply and leaned against the countertop. Hearing my dad even mention her was almost too much for me to take.

“Nicholas,” he said, turning to face me. I could tell it was almost physically painful for him to look at me. “I loved your mother. Just not in the way she deserved to be loved. And I know that now. But she knew. She knew about Marcy.”

I felt my stomach turn over at the mention of the woman my dad had cheated with. “I told her. I wanted to be honest, at the end. Maybe it wasn’t fair of me to do that. But she said she just wanted me to be happy.” He looked away into the distance, over my shoulder. “I’ll never forget how hurt she was. Her face…” My dad’s eyes filled up with tears, his face twisted in pain. “I’m sorry, Nicholas. I’m just so sorry for leaving you the way I did.”

He stumbled forward and sobbed on my shoulder. I set down my soda bottle and patted his back awkwardly. I was fighting back tears of my own.

“I’m not going to tell you it was okay,” I said in a flat voice. “You’re not going to get that from me.”

My dad pulled away, wiping away real tears with the sleeve of his shirt. “I don’t expect you to. I just…I just wanted you to know.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

My dad gnawed on the inside of his cheek. “Why’d you come here?”

I weighed my options in my head. A huge part of me wanted to just clam up, finish my Coke, and go back to Hailey. Then I realized I hadn’t run for an hour through the streets of New York to work on a motorcycle with my dad. I was here because my subconscious knew that I needed it. I inhaled for strength.

“Because I fucked up. I just…I don’t know. I didn’t know where else to go. This seemed as good a place as any.” I turned around and walked over to the worn, beat-up leather sofa in the corner. I sunk into it, feeling the leather almost wrapping itself around me.

“What’d you do?” my dad asked, still standing across the room. It seemed that he’d already used up what little emotional reserves he had. I was okay with that. I needed physical room right now, too.

“I don’t know what you’ve read in the press, but most of it’s true,” I said.

My dad nodded. “I’ve been…keeping up with it,” he said.

“You have?”

He set down his beer and reached into his pocket to pull out a key ring. He crouched down and unlocked a cabinet, pulling out a four-inch black binder. It looked heavy. I leaned forward and saw that the binder was one of about a dozen identical black tomes. My dad walked over and tossed it on the coffee table with a thud.

I looked at him inquiringly. He just nodded. I flipped open the binder and saw my face staring back at me. I turned the clear plastic sleeves and saw approximately the last year of my life flash before my eyes.

There were magazine covers, article snippets, printouts from online gossip rags – everything. I kept flipping, eventually seeing grainy, on-set photos of me and Olivia. She was beaming with her hair in 1950s finger curls, laughing at something I had said. Fox was just out of frame; I could see his hairy hand.

I kept flipping. There was Gina spilling our secrets to the press. And then there was Hailey with my hands around her stomach on Instagram. I made it to the end; the last piece of memorabilia a hand-torn Page Six article speculating on what Hailey and I would be wearing to the movie premiere.

I rubbed my hands across my hair and stared up at my dad. “Everything?”

He nodded. “I think this might qualify me as Roman Wilder’s biggest fan.” A rare smile played at his lips. Then he turned serious. “Nicholas. I’d never want you to make the same mistakes that I did. Whoever it is that you love – you have to be with them. Life is short. Don’t waste another woman’s time like I did to your mom. It wasn’t fair to her most of all.”

I nodded slowly. “Are you happy, Dad?”

This time he gave me the fullest smile I figured he was capable of giving. “I’m learning how to be happy. You should, too.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

OLIVIA

The door of the limousine opened and it was like I was thrust into a world of nothing but blinking lights.

I tried to maintain a neutral expression, one of those “I’m smiling but not too hard” faces all the young actresses seemed to pull. My number one fear was flashing my underwear, which was a ridiculous thing to think about while wearing a floor-length dress.

My second fear was that the barely-holding, iron-grey ceiling of clouds above us all would open up into a cold thunderstorm. I saw that there were large black umbrellas along the railings holding back the fans and the press.

A few security guards were whispering nervously to one another while they looked upward. Apparently I wasn’t the only one concerned.

My dress had a five-foot silk train and the front skimmed the ground. I took the hand of Fox, who had apparently been waiting for me. He kissed both my cheeks grandly.

“You look absolutely stunning, my dear.”

I smiled at him. “You don’t look so bad yourself,” I said, indicating his messy bucket hat. “I see that the hat even goes with a tuxedo.”

Fox laughed. “When you’re a man and a director, you can get away with nearly anything clothing-wise.” He took a step back and smiled at me again. “You truly are a vision. Like you walked out of 1950s Hollywood.”

I could barely hear what he was saying over the people screaming at me. I patted my finger curl up-do nervously, hoping it would stay in place all night. I linked my arm through Fox’s.

“Let’s do this thing,” I said.

I tried my best not to look for Wilder, instead focusing on answering the interview questions. I couldn’t remember what I said even moments after I choked out answer after answer. I must have spun around a dozen times for photos. Halfway down the red carpet I heard raucous screaming from the crowd.

I knew that sound.

It meant Hailey was here.

Fox and I were between interviews. Janna, who looked stunning in a fitted, strapless black dress, handed me a bottle of water. I took it gratefully, surreptitiously glancing over my shoulder to see if my guess was correct.

It was. Hailey was a vision in a white, form-fitting satin dress that hit her at mid-thigh. Her pregnant belly almost looked like an accessory. Her makeup included dark-winged eyeliner and black lipstick; her blonde hair was in her everyday blunt-cut long bob. She looked like a punk rock swan princess.