Unstoppable (Fierce) (28 page)

I shook my head.

“Two years ago I was on top of the world. I had it all. Fame. Money. All the women I could bed in every town I could conquer. It was everything I always thought I wanted. What I really wanted was to matter to someone. For someone to give a damn and mean it, and never leave.”

“You had that,” I reminded.
“You had Andy.”

He shook his head. “Inside I was still
a scared little boy, wondering what I could have done so wrong that my own father would leave and never come back. That was the truth of my life, Jordi. I just didn’t know it at the time. I had spent my whole life filling the holes with stuff from the outside world that I never really healed this one gaping, open wound. Instead I covered it with the safe adulation of strangers. They only got as close as I let them. And it medicated the wounds, however briefly. I wanted all the love without the risk, which meant I had no idea how to love at all. Andy started the healing process by giving me what I wanted and what I needed, but that scared the shit out of me for a long, long time. The stakes were higher. If I disappointed her, it wasn’t just some one-night-stand I never called back. It was someone I cared about, that I needed in spite of myself. Hurting her inevitably reinforced all those negative feelings I had harbored for so long.”

He stroked my hair with his hand. “You think you’re not good enough, but baby you are. You’re good enough to be successful, to have your dreams come true… to be loved.”

I shook my head, unable to stop the tears if I wanted to. He drew me into his arms. “I see you settle for so much less than you deserve, as if it’s some kind of penance you should pay to be special. Jealous little liars sold you that line of bullshit, people intimidated by how great you are destined to become. You think it’s an accident that you were the one born with that voice? You were meant to stand out. You were meant to shine. It’s beyond you, baby. It’s going to happen one way or the other. They want to tear you down so they can build themselves up, but the honest truth is they can’t destroy you. Only you destroy you, by believing them. Don’t make the same mistake I did and tear it all to shit.”

He pulled away to look me in the face. “Don’t waste the same time I did. Don’t destroy your health, your body and your future the way I did. And don’t squander love like I did, Jordi. In the end you’ll just regret all the time you can’t get back.”

I stared into those eyes. “I don’t know how to fix what I’ve broken, Vanni,” I whispered.

“You have to fix what’s been broken
in you
,” he said.

I had to chuckle. “You make it sound so easy.”

“It’s easier than you think,” he assured. “Just take it one step at a time.” As I tried to ponder on which step that would be he offered his suggestion. “I think you should leave Eddie.”

My eyes shot to his as he continued. “Iris told me that things are more serious than you let on. She’s concerned about your safety.”

“I’m fine,” I lied immediately and automatically. “He wouldn’t raise a hand to me.”

“Wouldn’t he?” Vanni challenged. “If he can hurt you with his words, he can hurt you with his hands. It’s really kind of inevitable.”

I shook my head again. Eddie was an asshole; I was the first to admit it. But he wasn’t a threat to my personal safety. I said as much to Vanni.

“That’s the root of the problem, isn’t it?” he countered. “You think his being an asshole is in any way OK. If it hurts you, it’s not OK.”

“It’s complicated,” I tried to explain, but there was no way he would understand unless I told him the truth. Given all the ammo the tour had given PING, Eddie was in a better position than ever to take us all down with that leaked video.

I still needed to protect Jace and Graham and Vanni and the tour. So what if I took the hit? I was used to
it by now, hence all the padding.

“I used to say that, too,” Vanni replied.
“When I was thrust into a fake relationship to cover up my boss’s affair. Meanwhile Andy’s heart got obliterated in the process. Nothing is worth that.” He paused only for a second. “What is Jace worth to you?”

I thought about denying it, but there was no point. Vanni read me like an open book. “Every hit that I take,” I said softly.

Vanni sighed as he pulled me close. I felt his exasperation, but there was little comfort I could offer him or me. These were the choices I had to make. I owed him 100% on the stage, but I could promise him nothing more than that.

He was called to the stage for his intro, so he reluctantly left. He made me promise that I would stay and perform the encore, and I couldn’t really refuse. We exited the room together, just in time to see Shelby heading toward her dressing room for a costume change.

Her eyes darted from him to me, processing this strange new data suspiciously. I ducked my head and followed him out to the stage, where I watched him perform from the sidelines until I could grit through the encore performance an hour later. It was awkward and tense, despite my best efforts for the show to go on.

I didn’t stay for the impromptu M&G that night, and PING ate it all up.
Social media was ablaze with reports almost as soon as the concertgoers dispersed.

Thanks to the technology I held in my hand with my smart phone, I was able to watch it all unfold.

DIVA BLOWS PERFORMANCES, CONTINUES TO SNUB FANS!

Celebrity blogger Miles O’Rourke used his flaming red pen to embellish my photos for the PING website, showing horns on my brand new alternative rock image. He had all the juicy backstage gossip, which included snide little innuendo that I was getting plenty of private time with the lead singers of the show…that happened to be men, anyway.

“
Conspicuously absent from these private powwows is Shelby Goddard, Jordi’s only female competition on tour. Sources say that things have been strained between the feuding females since Jordi slammed Shelby’s song choices for boring the audience. Seems the Fierce females are BFFs no longer
.”

Masochistically I ended up scrolling to the bottom of the blog to see what the fans were saying.

“
Who does she think she is? Just because she got pity-voted into the finale she thinks she can treat Shelby like shit
?”

“
Shelby is a lady who treats her body with respect. Jordi doesn’t know how to handle that so she goes to the other extreme. She thinks it makes her alternative. All it shows is how pathetic she is.
”

“
Nobody is going to the tour to see her fat ass. She needs to get over herself. Srsly
.”

By the second nigh
t in Atlanta, I was greeted with stuffed pigs being thrown on the stage. Apparently irate fans thought I needed to be taken down a peg or two. I was in tears when I knocked gently on Vanni’s hotel room door. From the look on his face, I knew he had read the same reports I had.

He invited me into the room and walked me to the sitting room of his suite.
He offered me a bottle of water as he sat next to me on the plush sofa. He tried to comfort me, crooning that no one deserved to be treated so harshly or so poorly, and that was when I finally let the torrent loose regarding my past and what happened with Shane.

What, truly, did life/fate/destiny feel I deserve if they threw me to the wolves as a six-year-old child?

He was horrified with my story, which I edited to leave out some of the gorier details because I couldn’t look into his face and tell him what Shane had forced me to do. I still felt so ashamed. He brought out his computer and set up a video chat with Andy, who listened tearfully to my story.

Neither one of them knew what to say or do to comfort me, aside from telling me that they loved me and would never let anyone hurt me again.

Little did they realize there was nothing anyone could do to prevent it. As long as I was legally bound to Eddie, I was tied to these same ghosts from my past.

As humiliated as I was by what Shane had done, there was no way I could force the words out about a possible sex scandal with Jace.

What would it say about me that I went from being an innocent child abused by a family friend to being a wanton slut who slept with someone outside my marriage bed?

I couldn’t risk it. I wouldn’t risk it.

We stayed up long into the night talking, until I passed out, exhausted, on the sofa. When Vanni walked me out the following morning, in the same rumpled clothes I wore from the night before, I knew how it had to look. But Vanni told me that no matter what PING said or didn’t say, as long as we knew the truth, and Andy knew the truth, then they couldn’t hurt us.

Even he couldn’t have predicted the look in both
Jace’s and Shelby’s eyes when they nearly bumped into us in the hallway just as they were coming back from breakfast. Jace looked at my disheveled appearance, and how Vanni’s arm was draped across my shoulder, and made his own conclusions.

They were easy conclusions to make, given it wasn’t that long ago when he was the one walking me from his hotel room.

There was a tense standoff before Shelby grabbed his hand and led him silently toward their rooms. Vanni stared after them. “Do you want me to talk to him?”

I shook my head. There was no point. Let him think I was banging the entire crew. Maybe his hatred would be easier to bear than his disappointment.

I walked back to my lonely room and packed for the next stop on the tour.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Las Vegas, Nevada

April 5, 2012

Thanks to all the unwanted press I got in Atlanta, Eddie was back in the game by the following week. He was furious at me, especially when rumors leaked that I had spent the night, once again, with Vanni Carnevale. “I guess Andy wasn’t fat enough for him,” he sneered as he killed another beer while he packed.

Graham was likewise concerned, and called me to his offices during my L.A. layover the first part of the week. I assured him that nothing had happened with Vanni, and that Andy and I spent the better part of that night video-chatting. He wasn’t especially convinced, but I also knew there was a lot of history there.

What bothered him more was that the tour was drawing so much negative press over needless controversy. He tried, much like Vanni before him, to draw the true crux of the issue out of me. If I ever came close to telling Vanni the truth, I found myself especially tight-lipped with Graham, knowing that he could pull the entire tour altogether if he chose. It was his label, his money and his reputation on the line, and I found that particularly intimidating. Legally Jace and I had violated the morality clauses in our contracts. He would be acting well within his best interest to minimize the damage of a potential scandal.

And nothing rocked our country quite like a sex scandal.
Sex tapes had haunted people with far more recognizable names than I had, but unlike Paris Hilton or Pamela Anderson, I wasn’t crashing anyone’s search engine as they tried to track down nude photos of me.

Only Miles O’Rourke might be interested, with his snarky sense of humor and his evil red highlighter.

This would cripple me further, and God only knew what it would do to Jace.

Graham passed me off to Maggie, who checked in with my progress on my “journey to health,” as she liked to call it. Diets were temporary solutions to long term problems. She wanted to see me make changes in my behavior, which would then result in changes in my body.

There had been changes in my body, all right. I knew from her pursed lips as she noted the number behind me that it hadn’t been good. She indicated I sit in the chair opposite her desk. “I hear things have been a little rocky on tour,” she stated simply, easing me into what I anticipated to be a difficult conversation.

“You could say that,” I muttered.

“I know it’s easy to fall back into bad habits when crisis arises. And you’ve certainly been under new stresses with your limited mobility and your back. So it’s only natural that you resort to what you know for comfort. I won’t lie to you, Jordi. These numbers concern me.”

I nodded. I had made peace with the larger sizes I had to wear, feeling once again comfortable in my clothes. It made it easier to deny that my weight was once again skyrocketing. This wasn’t pre-menstrual bloat. I could feel in my body that I had gained more than ten pounds in a few scant months. “I’m sorry, Maggie.”

She linked her hands on her desk. “You don’t have to apologize to me, Jordi. This isn’t a failure. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just a step back. You can change this by taking the same steps forward you made when we started this journey last year. Even the smallest step forward is still progress.”

“It feels like a failure,” I admitted.

“That’s because you determine your value based on your size. You’ve given yourself this one criteria to pass or fail. Like I’ve told you before, this is not what measures your worth. They’re some numbers that will go up and down and change throughout your entire life, even more so if you’re fixated on them.” She studied me for a moment. “But that’s not the message you keep hearing, is it?”

I shook my head sadly.