Strangers (5 page)

Charlie decided he needed cheering up, something to take his mind off his problems.
Jen’s mobile was switched off so he rang her house, hoping he didn’t get her mother.

Arabella, Jen’s sister, answered.
“Jen’s out shopping.
She won’t be long.
Want to come over and wait?”

“Yeah, all right,” came out of his mouth, when he should have said no.
The story of his life.

Charlie looked at the woman lying naked next to him on the bed.
Arabella had a self-satisfied smirk on her face.
Then he looked at the two women standing in the doorway.
One was Arabella’s mother, Veronica and the other was Arabella’s sister, Jennifer.
Now he’d slept with all three.

“I think it’s time for me to leave.” Charlie stood up, not caring that he was naked and had the remains of a hard-on.
He grabbed his boxers.

Veronica glared at him and Jen cried without making a sound, fat tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Sorry, Jen,” he muttered, dressing as quickly as he could.

“You will be, you little shit,” Veronica hissed.
“My husband will make sure you never—”

“Work in this town again?” Charlie couldn’t help grinning.
He strode over and put his face close to hers.
“Maybe he’d reconsider, if I offer to tell the Sunday papers about the kinky sex his wife enjoys and how thirty minutes ago, his youngest daughter stuck her hand in my pants while I stood at the front door.
Probably captured on your CCTV camera.
If you get it on
The UK’s Funniest Videos
, use my share to buy yourself some wrinkle cream.”

He smiled his apology to Jen, but her mouth dropped open and she fled.

“Get out,” Veronica gasped.

Charlie escaped while he still could.

He’d been stupid again.
He liked Jen.
Well, he half had, until she got clingy, but her father was not someone he needed to piss off.
Malcolm Ward headed the music company Charlie used to be signed to.
He wasn’t going to be very happy if he got wind of how well Charlie knew all the women in his household.
And if Ethan found out, he’d kill him.
When
he found out, Charlie corrected.
So he was as good as dead.
Shit.

Charlie hadn’t even reached his apartment before Ethan was on the phone.

“Are you incapable of keeping your dick in your pants?
You’ve just finished a movie that’s going to make you a mega star and you’re pissing it away.
What the hell is the matter with you?
Has someone pressed your self-destruct button?”

Charlie switched Ethan off in mid-rant and called Justin.

“Fancy a pint?”

Charlie was already drunk by the time Justin got there.
A group of girls stood by the bar, egging each other on as Charlie stared at them.
Justin collected a couple of pints and joined him at his table.

“Don’t waste your time with them.
They’re all dogs,” Justin said.

“Because they didn’t take any notice of you?” Charlie continued to eye flirt with the ugly one to wind up the others.

Justin shook his head.
“If you winked at a statue, the fucking thing would go wet between the thighs.”

Charlie grinned, then turned his back and helped himself to one of Justin’s cigarettes.

“Thought you were giving up?” Justin asked.

“Buying them, not smoking them.”

“You’ll get us thrown out if you smoke in here.”

“Not until I’ve had a couple of drags.”

Charlie saw Justin’s eyes focus somewhere over his shoulder and turned to see the ugly one staring at him, her eyes wide open in excitement.
She looked like a pug, her nose all squashed up on her face, with tiny piggy eyes and wrinkles.

“Can I have your autograph?” She offered him a beer mat.

“Piss off,” Charlie said.

He heard her sob as she fled back to her friends.

“What did you do that for?” Justin stared at him.

“She didn’t say please.”

“You’re a mean bastard.”

He
was
mean.
He didn’t care.
He didn’t care about anything.
That was his problem.

“Word is, India died of an overdose,” Justin said under his breath.
“Enough coke in her system to keep you and me going for a week.”

“Fuck.”

“How about giving
me
your autograph?”

Charlie turned to see one of ugly girl’s friends.
Pretty face, dimples, vacant eyes.

“Sure.” He smiled.
“Lift your skirt.”

As he wrote on her thigh, she squealed with delight.
He handed back the pen and patted her on the bottom.

A moment later, there was a wail of fury.

“What did you write?” Justin asked.

“Robbie Williams.”

“You shit.
Want to go to a club?”

“Why not?”

Yet Charlie could think of hundreds of reasons why not.
The biggest one being he was tired of not being able to be himself.
He’d no sooner gone into the club than he’d been pestered.
Everyone wanted a part of him.
They had pictures of Charlie Storm on their phones, on their walls, in their hearts.
They knew the details about his body almost better than he did—his height, weight, collar and shoe size, blood group, the exact location of every scar.
He belonged to them.
He sometimes felt he only existed because of them and Charlie hated his life and hated himself.

He got a taxi home.
Being a sex god was exhausting.
He knew that sounded pathetic, but while he loved women, loved going out with them, loved fucking them, part of him was bored with it all.
Predatory females swarmed around him like flies on a corpse and that was what he felt like sometimes, a fucking corpse.

He’d had so many letters from women begging to sleep with him that he could have papered his entire house and shagged a different bird every day for years, probably for the rest of his life.
Plenty of them wanted to have his babies.
Charlie always carried condoms and let Ethan’s staff deal with his letters now.

The funny thing was he hadn’t slept with nearly as many women as people thought.
For a start, he hadn’t fucked Jody Morton, the leading lady on the Spielberg film, despite rumors to the contrary and her obvious interest in having him in, outside or under her trailer.
The idea of being bitten by a snake had been enough to squash the last.
Jody had a fabulous body, but she was too intense.
Charlie had been trying to prove something to himself by not sleeping with her, but he
had
helped himself to his makeup girl and one of the production assistants.

Although he knew he was fucked up, Charlie bridled at Ethan’s insistence that he see a shrink.
He didn’t need to talk about it because Charlie knew what his problem was.
He was unlovable.
Sure, women said they loved him, but they loved the idea of him, his face, the Charlie with his guitar singing
Angel Eyes
,
Just One Look
or
Fade Away
.
That was who they loved and the Charlie on the screen, even when he was a bastard, not the real Charlie because they didn’t fucking know him.
Otherwise, they’d have run screaming in the other direction.
He didn’t deserve to be loved.
He didn’t deserve to be alive.

Charlie only felt better when he was drunk or stoned or preferably both because it stopped him from thinking.
He hated his life so much it frightened him.

The moment he walked into his house, his phone rang.
Charlie’s heart jumped.
It was only ever bad news.

“We’re done,” Ethan said.

“What?”

“You heard me.
It’s over.”

“You’re fucking dumping me?” Charlie raged at his agent.

“I don’t know who I’m representing anymore, Charlie.
You’re not the same guy I took on.”

“Please, Ethan.
I’ll try harder.”

“It’s not working.
Every time I try to help you, you fuck up.
Even the shrink couldn’t sort
your
head out.”

“I’m not fucking psycho.”

“That’s a matter of opinion,” Ethan said.
“If you’d like to try another psychiatrist, I’ll recommend one, but you have to talk to them, Charlie, not sit there staring at the carpet.”

“It was supposed to be confidential.”

“Telling me you won’t talk is hardly breaking a confidence.”

“If I see someone else, will you keep me on?” Charlie said.
“Please.” He knew he sounded desperate and he hated himself for it, but he
was
desperate.
Without Ethan, he was fucked.

“No,” Ethan said.

“Say you’ll think about it,” Charlie asked.

“No.”

The rage rose in him like a tidal surge, boiling up, overflowing, spewing from his mouth.
“Ethan, you are a fucking, selfish wanker.”

“Fuck off, Charlie.
I’ve done my very best for you.
But Veronica Ward
and
her daughters?
For Christ’s sake, what were you thinking?
Sort yourself out.”

“You need me,” Charlie said in desperation.
“I pay the fucking mortgage on your place in Mayfair.
I paid for your fucking car.
I’ve bought you.”

“I’ve created a monster.” Ethan laughed.

“When I fucking kill myself, I’ll mention you in the note,” Charlie yelled.

“You’re not going to kill yourself, Charlie.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Charlie switched off his phone, threw it across the room and slumped on the couch.
Was Ethan right?
Didn’t he even have the guts to do that?
Charlie didn’t understand how everything had been so right and then gone so wrong.

After he and his band were spotted at a union gig by a guy from EMI, their rise had been meteoric.
When Charlie fell out with the others, particularly Jed, the arrogant drummer, and decided to go solo, Charlie shot into another galaxy, while the rest of the guys stayed on the same planet.
Then, once he got up there, he lost interest.
Charlie still liked writing songs, but he no longer wanted to sing in front of an audience.
He’d done the big festivals like Glastonbury and Reading.
He’d filled the National Exhibition Center.
He’d had more success in the States than Robbie had managed and without taking his kit off, but it hadn’t been enough.

Charlie had always liked acting.
He’d been in all the school productions.
He loved pretending to be someone else.
Given words to speak, he could taste them, roll them around in his mouth, spit them, dance them, blow them out.
He could enchant, disgust or seduce.
The three minutes as a twisted killer in his first film had been a bit different to his schoolboy Romeo, but Charlie had been hooked and discovered he was good at being bad.
No surprise there.
Furthermore, he found being paid to rape, murder and mutilate a huge turn-on—not that he could ever tell anyone, particularly not Ethan’s shrink.
They’d really think he was nuts.

The house phone rang and he glanced at caller display.
He hoped for Ethan, but it wasn’t a number he knew.

“Simon Baxter from
24/7
looking for your reaction to the claim that you supplied the coke for Justin Denton’s party.”

“What?”

“You deny it then?”

Charlie slammed the phone down.
It rang again almost at once.
This time it was a reporter from the
Sun.

“Any comment about fourteen-year-old India Westerby?
Sources tell—”

Charlie dragged the cord out of the wall.
Fourteen?
They’d said sixteen.
That was bad enough, but fourteen?
How could she have only been fourteen?
He raced into the bathroom and threw up before he reached the toilet.
He was retching and crying at the same time, lying on his beautiful limestone-tiled floor, covered in tears and vomit and wanting his mum, only he couldn’t have her because he’d blown that too.

He found himself looking for his “absolute emergency” stash and then threw it into the pan and flushed before he could change his mind.
The police might come round any minute.
He had to use his head, not trip out of it.

Everything had been his.
According to Ethan, Charlie was on the point of becoming the most lusted after heartthrob in the western hemisphere and he’d thrown it all away.
His mind ached with the stress of trying to figure out what to do, a way to put things straight.

At the end of a sleepless night, Charlie realized there was nothing he could do to make things right and only one way to make it all go away.

Chapter Four

Charlie yelped when his toes scraped against something and his fear made Kate panic.
She squealed and kicked out.

“Oh God, is it the shark?” she yelled.

Sand shifted under his feet and he sighed.
“Put your feet down.”

Kate gasped in relief.
“Oh God.”

Charlie watched her struggle through the waves and fall forward onto the beach.

“We made it,” she shouted and turned to look for him.
“What the hell are you doing?”

“Swimming back to my clothes.
It’s warmer in here than out there.”

Possibly true, though not the reason he’d stayed in the sea.
Charlie had left his clothes on the beach, including his boxers, though he wished he’d kept them on.
A couple of times something had brushed against his cock and whilst he didn’t mind being eaten when he was dead, he took objection to anything dining on him while he was alive, particularly if it started on the pieces of him that stuck out.
Not that much had stuck out since he’d entered the water.
The mere thought of a shark had terrified his tackle into retreating in a way he’d thought physically impossible.

Kate stood with her arms wrapped around her body.
He could see her legs shaking.
The wind blasted across the sand, whipping at her ankles.
All she wore was a white shirt, currently plastered to her skin.

“That way,” Charlie yelled above the sound of the crashing surf and pointed left.

As he swam parallel to the shore, he knew Kate watched him.
If he turned and headed out to sea, she’d follow.

Charlie recognized the place where he’d left his clothes, a large gorse bush at the back of the beach.
The sea had dumped the pair of them back not far from where he’d started.

“My stuff’s up there,” he shouted.
“Keep walking.”