Felice
Felice woke with her body curled around Pierce and her phone blinking and shaking like an earthquake. She groaned, her eyes sticky and red from lack of sleep. What time was it anyway?
Reaching for her phone, Felice groaned again. Notifications filled up the bar above the lock screen which prominently displayed the time: 4:00AM. What the hell? It’s 2 in the morning back home; who on earth would be up that late?
Clicking on the first of the messages, Felice groaned for a third time, the words hitting like a freight train. It was Jennifer’s number, and the message read: “Your ex Clay is the biggest fucking douche in the whole damned world.”
Shit. Felice laid back down, cuddling closer to Pierce and turning her screen away so that the light didn’t shine in his face. She muted the ringtone in case more messages came in, then started sorting through the mass of texts and missed calls, trying to piece together what happened.
With a collection of profanity-ladened messages from Jenny and a few, slightly calmer messages from her mother, Felice was able to piece together that Clay Patterson, the slimy asshole he was, started contacting all of his media friends, spreading around Felice’s association with a criminal. Apparently, someone had filmed Pierce being dragged out of the Gala and Clay had paid him for the footage so he could sell it to the highest media bidder.
Sighing, Felice climbed out of bed. Pierce rolled over onto the spot where she had been lying almost immediately, groping for her warmth on her side of the bed. Smiling softly down at him, she kissed his forehead gently. Then she stepped out onto the balcony that overlooked the city. While ugly during the day, the darkness gave the city a kind of beauty that it couldn’t hope to pull off in sunlight. The glittering lights were all done up in whites and bronze, cutting through the darkness like knives. Felice was high enough up off of the ground that the ugly parts were all hidden, from the scent of garbage to the spray painted streets. From up here, everything looked orderly and clean.
Taking a deep breath, Felice shivered a little in the cold, morning air. Without shoes on, only in her longline bra and some boy shorts, she was instantly frozen. But the cold helped her wake up, and she braced herself for the conversation ahead.
Dolores picked up after just two rings; she must have been waiting by her phone. “About time.”
“I was sleeping. Like a normal person would be at four in the morning,” Felice said by way of a greeting. She waited in silence for her mother to start.
“Clay Patterson — ” Dolores started, her voice filled with anger.
“Is an asshole,” Felice said, her tone a match for her mother’s.
“He’s ruining your reputation, and just as the season finale for the last season is about to play out. Just when filming is supposed to start on the next season.”
Felice rolled her eyes. “Of course all she would care about would be ratings.” But she said nothing, waiting for her mom to finish.
“Clay has been telling anyone that will listen about Pierce’s past, and is going to be selling the video footage to the highest bidder.” Her mother sounded calm, but the undercurrent of rage was threatening to undermine that calm.
“I don’t care what he does. But if you’re worried about your precious show more than what I want, then you can make one of our people bid on the video then destroy it. Without it, there’s no story. Just rumor; once Pierce is acquitted, this will all dry up and blow away anyway. No one will care.” Felice wasn’t sure that was true, but she wanted it to be true. She needed it to be true.
For a long moment, Dolores was silent, making Felice nervous. “Don’t you think it’s better just to let this man go? There are plenty of other fish in the sea, my dear.”
Rage set her blood to boil, every muscle in her body so tense it was quivering. Felice took a deep breath, then quietly answered, “No, there are not. I’m going to stick this out with Pierce no matter what; I don’t give a shit about your show, your reputation, our ratings, or anything else but Pierce. He’s all that matters. I love you, but if being a part of your stupid reality show is going to separate me from the man I love, I’m going to pick Pierce, every time.”
Silence. Felice braced herself for whatever lecture her mother was about to scream into her ear. But nothing happened. Dolores was silent for so long, Felice had to pull her phone away from her face to see if she’d hung up on her. Finally, her mother answered. “Well then, you finally stood up for yourself. It took you long enough.”
Felice was speechless.
“I’ve been hoping you’d stop acting like a doormat and start acting like a Steel Dom one of these days,” Dolores said, sounding like she was smiling. “Good for you.”
“Thank you?” Felice was still in shock. After being bullied by her mother all of her life, all she would have had to do to make it stop was to stand up to her? “I should have done this way earlier.”
“You’re welcome, darling,” she said without pause. “Now, we have to figure out what we are going to do about all of this. I like your idea about forcing someone to buy the media for us, then pitching it. We can force him to sign a nondisclosure contract that — ”
“That sounds great,” Felice interrupted, yawning hugely for her mom’s benefit. “I’m sure you can figure it out. It’s important that I stay here and focus on Pierce’s case, okay? I know you can take care of it better than me, anyway.”
“If you think that’s best.”
“I do. Thanks, Mom. Good night.” Felice hung up before Dolores could rope her into something. She was already shaking a little from denying her mother once; she wasn’t sure she could handle doing it twice in one conversation.
Taking a deep breath, Felice leaned over the balcony, studying the dark city for a moment. A breeze cut across the balcony, reminding her again that she was out in the cold with very little clothing on, and her feet ached with the cold. She went back inside, hoping the bed was still warm enough to keep her from freezing to death.
# # #
Pierce
“He did what?” Pierce asked around his toothbrush.
Somehow, miraculously, Felice understood him around his mumbling with his mouth full of toothpaste. “He’s been spreading rumors around about me and you. Something about buying some video of what happened at the Gala. I doubt such a video even exists, but we’re looking into it.” She paused for a second, her heated brush/straightener thing pausing halfway back up to her scalp. “Well, I’m not looking into it. I asked my mother to take care of it.” She resumed combing her hair, running the brush through her waves with deliberate slowness. Pierce had never seen such a thing and was fascinated by the process.
After finishing his teeth, Pierce rinsed out his mouth before turning back to Felice. “Your ex is an asshole.”
“No kidding,” Felice whispered, looking down at the floor. “Sometimes I wish I would have never met Clay Patterson, but then I wouldn’t have had an excuse to be out in the desert, setting a car on fire. So you never would have given me that ride home.” She smiled, her eyes filled with a dark sort of something that pulled at Pierce’s own heart. When had he become so mushy?
Pierce just smiled in reply before turning back to the matter at hand. “So Clay is trying to make himself into your only avenue for salvation. If you stay with me, it will look like you don’t care if your boyfriend is a murderer or not. But, if you go back to him, you will be redeemed in the public’s eye, making himself into a victim. What a creep.”
Felice nodded, nibbling on her thumb with a kind of wide-eyed lack of self-awareness that spoke of a long-time anxious habit. Pierce wrapped his hand around her wrist, pulling the hand away from her mouth. Felice's too-wide green eyes looked up at him, barely focused on his face through the shadows of her thoughts. “So, what do we do?”
Laughing, Felice pulled her hand away and turned to walk over to her suitcase. She was wearing this silky little matching pair of white-lace underwear that made Pierce’s cock stand at attention. There was an unconscious grace about her that swayed her hips and made Pierce want to pounce on her for a replay of last night.
“Nothing,” she answered, nonchalantly. “Mother will handle it.”
Pierce raised his eyebrows, surprise pulling him away from his intense study of her ass. “Oh?”
Felice laughed a little, then nodded. “I told her I didn’t want any part of it; I didn’t care what the whole world thinks about us. If she wants to fix my reputation for the sake of her precious show, she can do it her own damn self.”
“And what did Dolores have to say to that?” Pierce asked, crossing his arms over his muscled chest, leaning back on the doorframe as he watched her shimmy into a sundress.
Her brows furrowed a little as she turned away from her suitcase to look at him. “You know, she was completely cool with it. She told me that it was ‘about time I stood up for’ myself.” Blinking, Felice frowned, then went back to her suitcase.
Chuckling, Pierce headed back to the bathroom to finish getting ready for whatever it was that Felice had planned for the day. He stared at himself in the mirror, looking for any hint of whatever it was that Felice saw in him. But he could find no trace of whatever good she saw in him. Perhaps it would be better if she returned to Clay anyway, even just until this died down, just to save her reputation.
But Felice didn’t even seem to consider that a possibility. So Pierce kept his mouth shut around the idea, leaving it alone. At some point since he met her, Felice had grown up and started taking responsibility for all the things that were happening to her. Perhaps Pierce had grown a little, too. The pre-Felice Pierce probably would have never surrendered to the police no matter what.
“Now-Pierce is doing all sorts of things that then-Pierce would never have dreamed of.” But maybe change wasn’t such a bad thing.
Instead of starting a fight with the woman he was in love with over Clay, Pierce decided to change the subject. “So, what are we doing today, Felice?”
“A tour,” she answered, a wild grin on her perfect lips. “I’ve never been here before, and I expect to see everything you think is important for an outsider to see. Then, maybe, when we get back to Nevada, I’ll take you on a tour of my turf.”
“When we get back to Nevada, not if. I wonder if she even knows what she just said,” Pierce thought, a smile lighting up his face. Felice was still talking, but he was no longer listening. Instead he focused on those words that lit his heart on fire. “When we get back. When, when, when.”
Felice picked up her purse and started out the doorway. She opened the door to their hotel room, checking to make sure she had everything. After a moment, she looked up at Pierce, curious. He smiled after her, picking up his wallet and a few other odds and ends from around the hotel room.
He followed her out of the door and realized that he really liked the sound of when.