Chapter Twenty-Five
Jason
Her phone was ringing; I could hear it. She just wasn't picking up. I sighed, tossing my phone on the bed next to me. I got up, kicking a balled up wad of paper on my way to the chair that sat near the windows. The room looked like I had been living in it for months, not just the past few days. I hadn't had housekeeping come through, and it was getting out of hand. The floor was covered in crumpled copies of magazines. Tabloids. I hadn't even known that there were so many different tabloid publications. The pictures had spread like wildfire, and it looked like everyone had published them.
It wasn't just in print; they were all over the internet too. I ran my own social media, and it had been a total shit show. The women, I had had to learn their names from the stories because I hadn't remembered them from that night, Gabby and Chelsea, they had been milking the fuck out of their fifteen minutes. They were both aspiring models or something so, great for them. At least someone was getting something out of this.
She had seen them; there was no way at this point that she hadn't. Once something was on the internet, there was no way of getting it off. None. And the magazines? I knew that Shelby didn't read that trash, but she did go to the store. All she would have had to do was leave the house, and she would have seen one. It was like they were everywhere, I didn't even know how the hell they were in production at all since so many blogs ran the same content.
It didn't matter; the damage was already done. I had had shit written about me in the past but nothing like this. I had been smart enough not to get caught in the past. Lake had been using the connections he had to try to get different places to print follow-ups saying I didn't know who the girls were. The stories had said all sorts of shit. Since there hadn't been much story to the pictures, people had taken the liberty of making up their own. All it had been was me and the two girls. They had seen me earlier with Lake, and they had been hard to get rid of. That had been it. After getting trashed, I had gotten back to the hotel, and I had woken up in that bed, alone. I had been drunk, but not drunk enough to bang those women.
Yeah, where the hell was Shelby so I could tell her that? Right, she wasn't picking her motherfucking phone up. I had gone to her apartment and rang the bell for five minutes straight; she hadn't been home. She had fucking disappeared. I knew that I had fucked up and that she had been mad when she had walked out of dinner, but she hadn't been this level mad. Not ignore-me-for-an-entire-weekend mad. I didn't get it. How the hell could she walk out on me like she did and not even let me explain myself? You know what? If she hadn't done that, then I never would have ended up at that club with Lake. I wouldn't have met Gabby and Chelsea, and we wouldn't be in this mess right now. None of it.
I was fucking furious. Why wasn't I getting anything from her? If she wanted to ignore me, whatever, a lot of women did that shit, but like this? She wasn't even at her house; she had left her place to get away from me. That fucking stung. I wanted her to do something, call me just so she could call me a son of a bitch to my face. I didn't want this. This shit meant she didn't give a fuck. Instead of talking to me first, she had skipped that step and decided to dump me.
Shit, why not? Everyone else had. I had tried to talk to Victoria on Friday to ask for a recommendation. The bitch laughed. She had laughed and hung up. Apparently, she had seen the pictures; she was how I had found out that they were out there. I had my computer on my lap; I hadn't shut it down since I had last sat down to use it. There were several browser tabs open, most of them showing apartments for rent in the area. I had started my search in New York, and I don't know, maybe it had been the optimism everyone tended to have at the beginning of things before shit started getting hard. I had thought that New York was overpopulated, but L.A. was a damn close second.
All I wanted was a place near Shelby's, but I would settle for one that I could get to in under a twenty-minute drive. Those places weren't many. The places in that group that I could get within my budget were even fewer. I should have said something to Shelby about us living together because now look at this shit. Finding an apartment was almost as hard as getting her to call me back. If she picked the fucking phone up, maybe she'd have some goddamn advice for me. This shit was impossible. At the same time, the buyers who had been interested in my penthouse in Tribeca hadn't offered anything near my asking price.
Everything had just stopped. I had hit a wall and everything, my whole life, had gone up in flames. I had nothing. I didn't have a home, I didn't have Shelby or our son, and I didn't have a job. Judging from Vic's reaction, I was thinking maybe my days in broadcast journalism were over. I had enough of a catalog to get by without her recommendation, but following this shitshow, there were going to be few stations that wanted that attached to their name.
Of everything that was gone, the job was the most replaceable. I could last a while longer without one; I had enough socked away to do that and anyway; how many people these days stayed in one job all their lives? That wasn't how the job market worked anymore. I had gotten my degree wanting to go into broadcast, but TV was just one part of journalism. Earlier in my career, when I had just been starting out, I hadn't had that many writers work with me on stories. I had had to do a lot of it myself. Talking to Lake after the call with Victoria on Friday, he had been telling me that Hollywood needed writers more than it needed talent. Whether it was writing for commercials, TV, movies, another news outlet, it was an evergreen skill.
I had taken his advice, but not really in the way that I figured he had intended that I take it. I mean, I liked writing and apparently I had a chance to do it again. I wanted another job, but I wasn't that excited to start writing for other people. Not yet anyway, so I was doing it for myself. I had bought a domain and started writing. At first, it had been unfocused, rambly stuff about New York and L.A. and what moving was going like. The more I had written, the more I found that I had to write. I had been doing that for most of the weekend when I hadn't been doing damage control or trying to contact Shelby.
People in my position talked a lot, but it was generally about other things and other people. No one outside the business really knew what it was like being at the center of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and how celebrity factored into all that. I thought that was pretty interesting; I figured other people would too. Maybe Lake was right, and I could figure out a way to write full time. I had enough to live on so I wasn't worried about a job just yet. A house actually would have been good though. I'd want to have one of those to live in before I got a job.
Yeah, that was that. Everything. I basically had my whole life in this fucking hotel room. I started typing instead of restarting the apartment search. Stalling on the disappointment for a least a couple hours. After that, I'd try Shelby again.