Chapter 31
Laine
I loved him. The thought of selling his image, even with his permission, seemed like a violation of our intimacy, of us. It would be willingly letting everyone into my life. Not just leaving the door open but putting a big “Open for Business” sign out front.
I should have been able to sell the pictures from the loft without his permission or anything else. I should have been perfectly comfortable shipping the digitals off to YOU mag, collecting coin, and seeing him the next day. He’d asked for his life a hundred times over, and I was just harvesting the leftovers of his fame.
But I’d changed. I’d had more than a few intellectual runarounds about why I should continue to be who I was and do what I wanted, but all the usual arguments fell flat against the texture of who I was becoming.
And who would that be?
I’d resisted it as long as I could, but looking at him, with his hair flattened on one side and a touch of sleep lingering in his eyes, I couldn’t imagine being a paparazza. I’d heard how deeply he groaned when he came and felt his touch in the middle of the night. He was just a man and a better man than most. I hadn’t captured that betterness until the pictures in the loft upstairs, and those were mine alone. They were private.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how I would figure out who I would be, but in the moments before I had to worry about money or identity, while he was still with me, I let myself get excited at the prospect of reinventing myself.
His phone rang from somewhere in the bedroom, probably inside a pocket. He reached for me, and I taunted him with a laugh, running naked to the living room to get my bag. I grabbed it from the guest house door, taking a second to admire the view. I pulled the pictures off my server and put them onto my phone. They were film, so they had defined grains that looked tactile, even on digital.
He was already on the phone when I got back to the bedroom. He stood naked against the door to the patio, his body as flawless from the back as the front. I crouched on the bed, my back to the headboard. Michael didn’t look happy with what he was hearing.
“Okay, I’ll be right there. Thanks for letting me know.” He tapped off and stared at his phone for a second before looking at me. He tossed the phone on the bed. “Last night, I sent Carlos to take the money and get the pictures. He did, but he got stopped at a DUI checkpoint. He had to tell them he was carrying a weapon, and so, because it was Tuesday or for whatever reason, they checked the car and arrested him for possession of child pornography.”
I covered my face with my hands. “Oh, God. What should we do?”
“You shouldn’t do anything. You’re the victim. You don’t need to show your face anywhere, and you shouldn’t. But I need to go take care of this.”
“I’m so sorry. Can you tell Carlos I’m sorry?”
He was already getting dressed. “You didn’t do anything, Laine.”
I didn’t do anything. Nothing but get Carlos arrested because I hadn’t taken responsibility for Jake earlier. I should have gone to give him his money and been done with it. Now Michael had to go explain that he had wanted the pictures, all because I couldn’t see what I’d been given when I was fostered by Orry and Mildred Hatch. I only saw that the sweet boy I liked left me. Now that sweet man had to step in front of his bodyguard to get him off the hook.
“You’re going to have to say you were the one who wanted them,” I said.
“Yep.” He buttoned his pants with a faraway look. “I don’t know if there’s a way to keep your name out of it. They’re going to ask me why I wanted them.”
“What if I say I was eighteen when they were taken?”
“Lying will only make it worse, and I don’t want you involved.”
“Michael, really? I couldn’t be more involved.”
He crawled onto the bed, shirt half buttoned, until he was close enough to kiss me. “Really. You’re protected until you speak. So just hush until someone with a badge asks you a question.”
“I hate this. I hate that I caused you trouble.”
“I knew you were trouble when I saw you on that balcony at NV. I wanted you then, and I want you now.”
He had so much to lose, and I was poised to take it all away. He kissed me tenderly, and I wondered who he cared for: the screwed-up paparazza who was nothing but trouble or some fantasy of a woman he was going to save from her past?
I wasn’t comfortable with either option, but I didn’t know what I wanted to be loved for either. What was it about me that I wanted to hold up and say “love me for this and not that?” Nothing I could think of. I had nice hair. I could run in heels. I took a good picture quickly.
“Laine?”
Michael snapped me out of my trance.
“Sorry. I should go. They’re going to come find me and ask me questions.” I gathered up my things. “I had this friend. Sister. Whatever. The cops found out about some shit her dad had done. Her fosters opted her into notifications, and the rest of her life, the phone rings every time he has a probation hearing or her picture shows up somewhere.” I gave a fake little laugh that sounded hollow and nervous. It seemed to echo off the walls and unfamiliar corners. Not my bed, not my pillows, not my pictures, not my view.
This was going to explode. Michael Greydon, official famous person, found trying to obtain pictures of me as an adolescent. His intentions had been innocent, and no one would care.
I was a victim now. I wasn’t the sole owner of my life. I wasn’t in control, and I didn’t have power over the land. I was weak and wrecked, a puppy on the yellow line, waiting to get hit or be saved but unable to move. I hated it. I hated feeling like a target someone had hit and everyone else wanted to rescue.
Naked in the middle of the room, hugging my bundle of clothes, I must have been a sight to Michael in his movie star jeans and celebrity smile. I must have looked like a lost china lamb.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said, putting his perfect hands on my bare shoulders. “They’re on paper. He told Carlos the versions he sent you were the only digitals, and he took them with his camera phone. They won’t be around. I’ll explain what happened. It’ll be done.”
“No, it was supposed to be done years ago, when I left. And it was. Now I have to explain everything to strangers. It was hard enough to explain just to you. And once I walk out of here, they won’t let me near you until you’re cleared. Trust me. I know the system.”
I stared straight in his face, but I couldn’t see him. I had no idea what he was feeling or thinking. I couldn’t feel past the need to run away and do something, anything.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying my best to be comforting when all I wanted to do was leave. “This is going to be a pain in the ass for you, and it’s my fault.”
“You need to stop saying things like that.”
“Well, it’s because of me. You can’t deny that. So listen, thank you for helping me with this. You’re a good guy, and you did something amazing for me that you’re going to pay for. You have to go, and I have to go. Let’s just get on with it.”
As if on cue, there was a knock on the door.
I jumped out of my skin. “The gate?” I gasped half a sentence.
“My damn publicist.” He kissed my cheek tenderly and walked to the front.
I went into the bathroom to dress. Through the door, as I hitched up my lace-topped stockings, I heard voices, not the whisperings of two men who worked together but something else. Something more terse and businesslike. I wrestled with the zipper on the back of my dress, contorting myself into a knot rather than walk out the bathroom door undone. When I did walk out, a new scene awaited.
The bedroom door was closed. The sheets were twisted all to hell, as if two people had been entwined in them all night long. A middle-aged woman stood in the room with her hands folded in front of her. She wore a blue sweater with beads around the neck and a navy skirt that ended right below the knee. Her light brown hair was darker at the roots, and her black shoes had a sensible low heel.
“Are you Laine Cartwright?” she asked.
Could I say no? Could I deny everything? Could I laugh and ask how anyone could think a man like Michael Greydon would knot up the sheets with Laine Cartwright?
“Maybe,” I replied, unable to hide my hostility.
“May I speak with you?” She pointed at a chair as if she was the one who had fallen in love in that room a few hours earlier.
I realized she was going to tell me about the pictures. She was going to say Michael had bought them. She was going to ask my age and about Jake and why I’d been a fuckdoll when I was fifteen. I didn’t want to answer any of it. I didn’t want to hear a bad word about Michael, and I didn’t want that room tainted with those years. I wanted that space, that bed, the air, and all of it to only hold love.
“No,” I said. “If you want to talk to me about the pictures, you have to take me to First Street. I want all of it recorded, because I’m not repeating it.”
She nodded as if the request wasn’t unusual.
“And I’d like to call my lawyer.”
“You’re not being accused of anything,” she said. “But of course, that’s fine. Would you like to call a friend to come with you?”
I hadn’t expected that. I figured I’d go alone to the precinct like a criminal, get questioned in a cold, hard room, and take a cab back to my empty loft. But I did want someone to go with me. I wanted to lean on another human being for strength and comfort, and I wanted it to be Michael. I pressed my lips between my teeth, holding back the choke and blubber that gathered in my throat. He was the last person I could ask for, and he was all I wanted.
Who would a normal person ask for? Their mother. I barely remembered mine. I’d visited her twice in a grey room with aluminum folding chairs and a card table. She’d tried to squeeze all of life’s lessons into half an hour, and I remembered none of them. Stay out of trouble. Value yourself. Don’t let a man run you. Blah blah blah. Goddamn her. What useless high-handed crap it all was.
My mother was supposed to teach me to do something, cook, get an apartment, go on interviews, balance a checkbook. But Irving had taught me how to do that, and how to pay quarterly taxes, calculate focal length, go on an interview. He’d cosigned my first checking account, helped with the deposit on the apartment I got after I left Jake, gave me a trade I could use to support myself.
“I do,” I said. “I do have a friend I want to bring.”