Kiss the Sky (26 page)

Connor has his phone pressed to his ear while he grips the
man’s shirt. Every time he struggles, Connor throttles him with one hand.
Composed, tall and strong. He speaks quietly to someone on the other line.

I make out Connor’s words, “We need to keep this out of the
tabloids…Lily and Lo don’t need to know. They feel guilty enough for the media
attention…”

“What happened?” I ask
Ryke
who
nears the bed. Scott continues to just stand by the fucking door, watching.
It’s not as though this is being filmed. We’re in a
bedroom
, which means there aren’t cameras here.

“Daisy called me on her cell,” he says.

She stares at the ground, her face as pale as a sheet.

I shake her arms, not very maternal or soft, and she almost
blows over with my force. “Daisy? Talk to me.”

“He barged in my room,” she says under her breath.

I collect her waist-length hair out of her face, trying not
to freak out. “And?” I say, clenching my teeth.
If he put a finger on her…

Her gorgeous face contorts in a series of violent emotions.
“…he started taking pictures of me…I didn’t know what to do, so I called
Ryke
…” She shakes her head and tears splash onto the
floorboards. “…I’m so tired…”
 
I hold her
to my chest while she begins to cry.

I look up at
Ryke
, and he stares
at her with that same look I saw during the screening party. Concern. Dark
empathy.

“
Shh
,” I whisper to her, combing
my fingers through her hair. I rest my chin on her head and keep her close.

“…I’m so tired,” she says again, her voice trembling. When
our mother’s not preoccupied with Lily’s wedding, she pulls Daisy in five
different directions. She makes sure she’s booked for photo shoots, and for the
past three weeks, Daisy has been working tirelessly. If she’s not at school,
then our mom carts her to New York to visit her new modeling agency. I’ve
hardly seen her at all this month.

I even had to convince our mother to let me throw Daisy a
birthday party. She would’ve had to cancel one of her shoots so she could
celebrate. It took four screaming matches over the phone before I won out. But
that was just one free day I gained for her.

“What’s going on at school, Dais?”
Ryke
asks.

I glance over my shoulder to make sure Lily and Lo aren’t
here. At least they’re still sleeping.

Daisy chokes on a sporadic breath. “I…I’m fine…really.”

I exchange a worried look with
Ryke
.

He mouths,
It’s not
fucking good.

I know
, I mouth
back.

But what can we do? She has to finish prep school, and I can
only guess the kind of ridicule kids are casting on her. She’s famous now. Her
sister is a sex addict, and she’s been painted as a sex-addict-to-be. Her
photographs are everywhere—sometimes deliberately from modeling, other times
not consented from paparazzi. It’s an abrupt change from her old life, and none
of us can relate to her current situation. We’re all in our twenties, out of
prep school by now. We don’t have to worry about bullying like that.

“We’re going to take care of this,” I tell her. I’m going to
surround the fucking townhouse with security. We had iron fences and a guarded
gate at our home in Princeton. We should have had better things in place here.
“How’d he break through the front door?” I ask
Ryke
.

He glares. “I didn’t have time to fucking ask.”

My lips tighten. “Did he touch her?”

Ryke
stares back down at Daisy.
“Did he fucking touch you, Daisy?”

She shakes her head repeatedly. “No…I’m sorry…” She wipes
her eyes quickly and tries to bottle her emotions.

“Don’t you ever fucking apologize for another guy’s
offense,” he growls. He layers on a few more curse words as he glares at the
ceiling.

Wow.
Ryke
jumped up twenty points
in my book. Not for the swearing, to be clear. “When did you become such a
feminist?” I ask him.

“Since I learned my alcoholic father cheated on my mother.
Then he fucking left her so he could raise his bastard son.” The bitterness and
resentment pours from his harsh words.

“I shouldn’t have asked.”
His family tree is fucked up.
I smooth Daisy’s hair.

Connor pads over to us, pocketing his phone. He no longer
has the guy by the shirt. In fact, the man is gone. “Your father’s security
came and took him,” he tells me. “He broke through the front door with a bump
key.”

“We need—”

“Your father already hired extra security to stand outside.
He’s taking care of the incident quietly. No one will know about this unless
Scott decides to air it. He has footage of the man coming up the stairs and
through the hallway.”

I look for Scott, but he’s gone too.

“Lily and Lo…” Daisy murmurs, rubbing her eyes.

“They won’t ever find out,”
Ryke
says. “This stays between the four of us.”

And Scott.
But no
one adds him or my father’s name to the mix.

And we don’t ask why Lily and Lo can’t know. It’s what
Connor had told my father on the phone. The guilt would hurt them so much. The
crazed media was spawned from Lily’s addiction being publicized. But I bear
some of the guilt myself—for putting my sisters through a reality show with
awful security, for ditching their bodyguards. But I can withstand that guilt
and come out strong.

Lily and Lo can’t. They’re addicts. This is naturally going
to tear them apart, and they could turn to their vices to numb the feelings.
And none of us want that. We’ll be the walls that shield these terrible events
from them. We can endure the pain for however long they need to heal.

It’s what the four of us agreed to the moment Lily was
afraid to step out of the house and meet the world. The moment Lo looked sick
each time he tried to convince her to go outside and face the coldhearted
media.

There was a very dark point where we all believed they’d die
together. Where they’d call it quits. There were moments where I wondered how
any girl could endure what she was going through. And I think the only reason
they both didn’t leave the world was because they refused to leave it together.

Leaving separately—causing the other to suffer that horrific
loss—I doubt that was even an option in their minds.

[ 22 ]

CONNOR COBALT

“What is it?” I ask Rose while I pay for the check
at the crowded restaurant. The seven of us—Scott included, who feels more and
more like a tagalong as Rose and I grow closer—ate out at Valentino’s for
dinner.

The more popular
Princesses
of Philly
becomes, the more press has latched onto us. Besides the drones
of photographers outside, families in booths snap pictures of us with their
phones as we sit at a long table.

But that’s not why Rose’s brows have pinched together. She
cups her cell on her lap and concentrates on the blue-lit screen.

I hook my ankle to her chair and drag her closer to me.

“She’s relentless,” Rose says stiffly.

I read the text.

3 months and 24 days
–
Mom

“Should I even ask about wedding dress shopping?” Last time
I questioned about the cake, Rose almost went manic, spouting off things that
her mother told her in a discordant mess. I couldn’t understand anything she was
saying, not even as she spoke in French. She kept pacing in our bedroom and
breathing abnormally. It took me an entire hour to calm her down.

“Lily said she didn’t want to go,” she says. “I can get
Daisy and Poppy to be fitted for bridesmaids’ dresses without Lily there, but I
can’t just go pick out a wedding gown for her.” She stays relatively at ease,
so she must have thought of a solution.

“And?”

“I’m going to sew her one,” she tells me. “I’ve been
designing it for the past week. I think I can finish it in the amount of time I
have left.”

I don’t want to reiterate what Frederick has been telling
me, even though I know it’s true. She’s taken on too much. She’s not only
planning Lily’s wedding and her bachelorette party, but she’s been working
tirelessly on reviving Calloway Couture. She refuses to hire employees until
her profit margin increases, so she’s tasked with all of the social media and
inventory, not to mention calls from hopeful investors and department stores.

It’s a lot for one person to handle. I can’t see how
designing a wedding dress will alleviate any of her anxiety, but I’d rather not
be a hypocrite in this situation. My body is being fueled by Adderall. It’s not
the noble solution, and I wouldn’t want Rose to take it.

“I’m sure you’ll find time,” I say, trying to believe the
words so they don’t feel like such a lie.

“So do you really have a boyfriend or are you just fucking
with us?”
Ryke
asks Daisy as he tosses his napkin on
the table, servers clearing away the last of our dirty plates.

“Yeah, how come he’s never been in an episode?” Lo asks.

Daisy leans back on two legs of her chair and shrugs. “I
don’t know. Ask Scott.”

“Let’s not talk about production,” Scott says casually.
Maybe he has trouble not being a complete and utter dipshit because his eyes do
a number on Daisy—staring at her makeup-less face, her natural beauty enough
for him to stare longer and harder. His eyes even fall to her breasts, the
sides exposed in a Calloway Couture gold sparkling top, the neckline plunged.

“Eyes up here,”
Ryke
forces,
waving his knife towards his own face in a threatening gesture.

Scott doesn’t peel his gaze from Daisy, which is starting to
aggravate the fuck out of me. The public has been clear that they’re
overwhelmingly Team Scott in this fake love triangle. I think the last blog
comment I read said something like:
Connor
is getting on my mf-
ing
nerves!! What the hell does
Rose see in HIM?! Scott loves her
soooooo
much.
–
LadyBug345

I’ve also learned that many people want to fight me. I get
“I want to punch Connor Cobalt!” all the time. I almost choked on my coffee
this morning, laughing hard as I went through comments.
Behave, Connor. If you were my son, I’d wash your mouth out with soap.
–
DeeDeeJohnes

DeeDee
, I admire your fervor, even
if you’re not on my side. That’s what I feel with each disdainful remark. At
least these people care about something so deeply that they’re willing to shout
about it online.

An impassioned spirit truly paints the gray world with
color.

What the public hasn’t realized is that Scott has been
shying away from Rose more and more. He’s refocused his attention. Two days ago,
he showed Lily a
photoshopped
picture of her head cut
and pasted on a humping bunny. Some guy made it online, and it spread through
Tumblr
. Even
Celebrity
Crush
reposted the image on their website.

And Lily has been purposefully avoiding any criticism about
her or the show. Scott took it upon himself to change that.

Lo almost went postal when he came home to find Lily bawling
in Rose’s arms. Literally, I had to cover my hand over his mouth so he’d
stopped threatening to cut Scott into tiny indistinguishable pieces.

There was one benefit from this. Our mutual hate for Scott
has trumped any sort of disagreement we’ve had since the screening party. I’ve
seen only a small change in my relationship with Lo. When we joke around, his
features sometimes sharpen more quickly, as though remembering that I don’t
love him the way he probably believed I did. That I don’t even love Rose. He
questions what’s real and what’s fake between us now.

I wish he wouldn’t, but I can’t change what’s happened. I
just have to move on.

“Do you like dares, Daisy?” Scott asks, his eyes flitting
from her breasts to her face.

“Sure,” she says.

Daisy is considered a weak link in our group. But Lily is
definitely the most fragile. Scott is redirecting his attention on them. Rose
and I worry about how far he’s going to go to break her sisters and fracture
our group of six.

“I dare you,” Scott says with a creeping smile, “to go flash
the paparazzi when we leave.”

Ryke
tosses his knife onto the
table nearest Scott. It clatters in his lap. “I dare you to go fuck yourself,”
he sneers.

Scott just tauntingly keeps his gaze on Rose’s little
sister.

Daisy stands up and everyone goes rigid. “I dare all of you
to chill out. My top is staying on, thank you very much.”

I wrap my arm around Rose’s waist as we all rise to leave.
Savannah, Brett, and Ben are already on their feet, filming us.

But Rose points a finger at Scott. “You’re disgusting.”

“She had strippers at her seventeenth birthday party. Taking
off her top for a few cameras is nothing in comparison.”

“They were dancers, and they stayed fully-clothed,” Rose
retorts with a deadly glare.

“Let’s go,” Lily says in a soft voice. “Please, everyone…”

People in the restaurant are beginning to stare. Lo rubs her
shoulders.

I toss
Ryke
the car keys to Rose’s
Escalade since I’ve been drinking and she had a glass of wine with me. He
catches them easily and heads out first with Daisy. When Scott tries to stand
by her side,
Ryke
literally puts a hand on his chest
and forces him back.

“No,” he says. “You’re not allowed to fucking talk to her
for the rest of the show.”

Ahead of them, Daisy glances over her shoulder, and her lips
lift in appreciation. Scott must be annoying her as much as he is the rest of
us.

“I can do what I want,” Scott says, lowering his voice so
others can’t hear. “I own you and her. And these three behind me. Don’t ever
forget that.”