PLAYED - A BRITISH BAD BOY ROMANCE (36 page)

I shook my head.

No. He’d knock Steven out if he were here.

“Of course,
Trent
doesn’t listen to
reason, either
,” Steven continued. “He’s
gonna run this entire thing into the ground for a hot piece of ass, isn’t he?
It’s not even just
him
you’ll drag
back down into the dirt with yourself. You’ll be taking the whole band with
you.”

My breath caught in
my throat.

“No…that can’t…”

“If I were you – and
I am
so glad that I’m not
– I’d ditch
town. It’s still fresh in his head. Trent hasn’t
totally
invested in you. You’re still just some groupie to him, you
know? You can get out without hurting his feelings.”

“But that’s not
true,” I answered sadly. “We talked so much… he went out of his way to try and
prove how much he cares…”

“And you
fell
for that? What are you, fucking
eighteen? Do you know how many girls that asshole has made feel special right
before he rips their heart out?”

The sound of his
raucous laughter was like a pail of icy water to my face. It snapped me out of
the daze I’d been in for the last few days – no, the last few
weeks
.

I’m just a distraction.

A liability.

His laughter started
to die down, and Steven looked at me with something that vaguely resembled
pity.

“You see it now,” he
told me sympathetically. “How stupid you’ve been. You thought you could
change
him? You
seriously
thought that you would be the one girl in the world who
would
improve
him?”

I turned away.

I spoke the only
words I could.

“I don’t have any
money,” I told him.

“Of fucking course
you don’t. Do you think he’d just leave you his credit card or something? He
doesn’t trust you, honey. He never really has.”

The words stung. I
wanted to run and hide and never come back up for sunlight.

 
“I can’t get a bus without money.”

Steven went silent.

I looked up at him,
afraid that he was angry. But no… he was merely calculating, weighing options
in his head.

“Listen. Pack your
shit. I’ll take care of the bus ticket. And I’ll even toss you a few hundred
bucks to get you on your feet when you’re there.”

“You would… do that?”

“Of course,” he told
me. He wasn’t smiling. “You think I’m a bad guy? I’m just doing my fucking job.
Ironing out the creases. Cutting off loose ends. It’s what I’m
supposed
to do. Doesn’t mean I’m a
prick. Trent just paints me that way because he doesn’t like it. Who would? I’m
sympathetic…”

I nodded quietly.

“Like I said, pack
your shit. I’ll have you on a bus in the hour. Where do you need to go? Back to
Riverton, or wherever it was called?”

 
“No,” I shook my head. “I can’t go back
there… Not after the way I left…”

“Smart thinking,”
Steven agreed. “Maybe you’re more intelligent than I would have figured. So,
where are you going instead? Pick a spot, honey. I can have you on a bus to
Miami, or Philadelphia, or wherever the fuck you wanna go.”

I sighed heavily.
There was only one other place in the world for me… one other place where I
knew I really
deserved
to be. It’s
where I should have been all along.

A place so terrible I
shut it out.

A place so awful I
never thought about it.

I took a deep breath.
“It’s time I went back home.”

Chapter 25

Trent

Two Days Later

I knew something was
wrong the second that I stepped foot into my house. Compounding, rising
dread
twisted its way up in the back of
my head, like smoke in the darkness.

I’d felt it from a
mile away.

And I didn’t like it.

“Angel?” I called
out.

No answer.

Maybe she’s asleep,
I wondered. I couldn’t bring
myself to believe it, though. No…something was definitely wrong.

I dropped my things
at the door, scouring for any signs of a break-in. The front door was unharmed,
and I didn’t spot any broken windows on my way to the stairs.

Hopping two at a
time, I ascended up to my bedroom.
Our
bedroom.
Flicking on the light, I peered around the room like a hunter sniffing for
prey.

There was nothing out
of place.

No signs of a
struggle.

Except…

My heart sank as soon
as I spotted the letter on the bed. Scrawled in girlish handwriting, I first
spotted her signature at the bottom as I snatched it up under the light.

Trent,

I’ve enjoyed our time together. I really have. But it’s time for me to
let you be who you need to be. We both know this wasn’t going to last… Please
don’t hate me. And don’t look for me. You won’t find me.

Angel

My hand clenched, but
I restrained myself from shredding the letter apart in the instant.

And there, on the
pillow?

The tablet I had
bought her while we had been on the bus. It was just sitting there, as if it
weren’t hers. She’d left it because she’d honestly thought it didn’t really
belong to her.

Fury built up inside.

Boiling, pulsating
anger.

No,
I snarled to myself.

You don’t get to do this to me.

Irrationally, my mind
boiling with pain and regret, I felt like I had just been stabbed – right in
the fucking heart. The knife twisted again and again as the letter fell to the
bed from my lifeless fingers, and I fought the whipping storm of emotion that
was threatening to tear me apart.

No
, I repeated to myself with rising hostility.

This isn’t happening.

This CAN’T be happening.

But something didn’t
add up.

Through the hatred and
the anger, a small spark of rationality spoke through. Like a calming knife
through the bubbling, snarling flesh of my fury, it cut through the bullshit
and whispered something into my ear.

She wouldn’t do this.

I paused, letting the
thought continue on. It was calming, soothing, but most of all…it sounded like
it was making sense.

This isn’t Angel.

Not without interference.

Not without the right push.

Something had
happened…and I was going to find out exactly what. But I didn’t have to think
long or hard before a single name popped into my head.

Steven.

He’d hated her from
the start.

What was the word
he’d used?

Liability.

I picked up the
phone, forcing a friendly smile across my face. It was one of the hardest
things I’d had to do.

“Steven! Are you
around?”

“I’m kinda in the
middle of something. Where are you?”

“I’m just picking up
my car,” I lied. “I should be home in about forty-five minutes. Think you can
meet me there?”

“Now’s not a good
time, man.”

He sounded
apprehensive.

Which told me I was
right.

“It’s important. I
think you’re right about Angel – she’s a liability. Time I cut her loose. But
you, being my PR guy and all…mind backing me up?”

“What? R-really? But she’s…I mean, uh…”

“Steven, stop fucking
babbling. She put herself up in a hotel and she’s on her way to my place. Can
you come straight over?”

“I’m not so sure this is a good time…”

“C’mon, Steven. You
and I, we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. Help me out here and I’ll make it
worth your while.”

“…Alright. Half an
hour?”

“Sounds good to me.”

About thirty minutes
later, there was a knock at my door. Through the peephole, I could see the
lanky, condescending fucker.

“Door’s open!” I
called out, muffling my voice and taking a step out of the way.

The door popped open.

A moment later,
Steven walked in.

“H-hello? Angel?
Trent?”

I stepped forward
from behind the door, slamming it shut. He barely had time to turn before I
grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and slammed him up into the wall,
knocking a large photo frame down and shattering the glass.

“Trent –
buddy
– what the fuck are you–?”

Roaring with anger, I
threw him across the room. He hit the ground hard, trying to scramble to his
feet as I rushed towards him.

“
Back the fuck off–
” he started.

I landed a solid
punch against his cheek, sending him sprawling into my sectional couch. As he
struggled to climb back up, I jumped on him, landing a knee in his chest and
knocking the breath from his lungs.

“Oof!” he cried
painfully.

As I started to hit
him repeatedly, Steven tried to dislodge me – first by force, then by throwing
weak punches, and finally by attempting to scratch me.

I finally climbed off
of him, and he lunged forwards. But instead of reaching me, he slipped, hitting
his head on my coffee table.

With my anger barely
controlled, I pulled his sniffling, shaken form up from the ground.
Half-expecting him to be whimpering, he was instead snarling – broken but
angry.

“You fucking piece of
shit,” he growled.

I held him by the
shoulders, my enraged eyes matching his gaze with enough strength to apparently
surprise him.

“What. The. Fuck.
Did. You. Do.”

“
What
?” He snarled back.

“Don’t make me ask
again, you spineless, backstabbing, limp-dicked son of a bitch.”

Steven’s furious
sniffling began to settle, and he looked at me with a mixture of fear and
absolute irritation.

I have to give it to him.

At least he doesn’t back down.

Maybe he’s less spineless than I thought.

“Angel, right?”

I nodded angrily.

His face curled into
a shit-eating grin.

“You had me worried
with your little phone call. Sorry Trent. Your lovebird is long gone by now.”

Because I couldn’t
afford for him to lose consciousness on me, I delivered a strong punch to his
gut. He crumpled to the ground, moaning and clutching his abs while I stood up
and popped my neck.

“
That’s
for not answering my question,” I told Steven coldly.

I pulled him back up
from the ground, half-supporting him on his knees in front of me.

“Let’s try again.
What. The fuck. Did you. Do?”

Steven’s painful,
defiant glance flipped up towards me. I could already see bruising and swelling
starting to settle in.

He was going to look
rough tomorrow.

“You
know
what I did,” he mumbled. “She’s a
distraction. A ticking time bomb. That bitch is your motherfucking Courtney
Love. You have
other
people depending
on you. The rest of your band, the roadies, the label. Ever since you snuck her
onto that bus, your performances have been
shit
.
Critic opinions, not just mine. And then there’s the paparazzi thing.”

“
What
paparazzi thing?”

Steven laughed
painfully.

“Have you not been on
the Internet at
all
in the last
couple of days? It’s been all over the gossip sites.”

I pulled him closer.

“Tell me. Now.”

“I’ll do you one
better,” he chuckled before wincing with pain. “I’ll show you. Let me down.”

Reluctantly, I
relinquished my grip.

Once he’d pulled
himself up off of the floor and fished his phone out of his pocket, he did just
that. He showed me what had happened.

The article.

The pictures.

The interview.

I read carefully,
twice over, before handing him the phone back.

“This is nothing.
It’s fixable.”

“It’s a little harder
than that,” he told me.

“No. No, it’s not.
This is your job. You run public relations for us. You manage us. Well, you’re
supposed
to, but you’re so fucking
terrible at it that I can’t believe we got stuck with you…”

Steven opened his
mouth to retort but, after one glance at my eyes, he closed it again quickly.

“So you showed her
this, then.”

Steven nodded.

“And you made up some
bullshit to make her go away?”

“It wasn’t bullshit,
Trent. What makes this girl different? You left her here the first chance you
got. No money, no friends, and a backpack full of clothes. Leaving was
her
choice. All I did was lay out the
facts.”

“The
facts?
”

“Everything I told
her was true. You can believe that I filled her head with complete shit, but my
job is to keep this train moving.”

“My
girlfriend
isn’t some piece of dead
weight to be cut loose,” I growled menacingly, advancing upon him.

I was so furious that
I hadn’t even realized the Freudian slip.

“Well, you have your
professional opinions, and I have mine,” Steven snarled with a slight hiss of
pain. “All I know is, I did my job. You know, you’ve been a hock of shit since
day fucking one. Always making shit difficult. You’re a real piece of work,
Trent Masters. This is the worst fucking gig I’ve had in years!
And I represented The Spitting Pigs,
drug-fueled orgies and all!
”

I grabbed him by the
back of the neck and pulled him close, one last time.

“Steven…
where is she.
”

“I don’t know.”

“Wrong answer,” I
replied, wheeling my fist back.

“No! No!
Wait!
”

He feared for his
life now.

“
What?
”