Chapter Seventeen
“That was fun,” Eddie muttered as the elevators doors closed.
Because they had the mirrored and marble vestibule to themselves, Quinn slumped against him and let out the breath she felt as if she’d been holding for the better part of the last twenty-four hours. “Fifteen minutes.” She glanced at her watch to confirm that’s really all it had been. “Hard to believe the fate of my career came down to a fifteen minute meeting with a room full of suits.”
“One you nailed.” In the reflection of the doors, she watched his face split into a grin while he loosened his tie. “The executive producer relaxed as soon as you walked into the room. When you took off your jacket, the director’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.”
She mustered up a weak smile. “That was kind of the point of the outfit.” After adjusting the skinny strap of the low-cut, curve-hugging white dress she’d chosen for the meeting, she shrugged on the matching, fitted jacket. There’d been no point in playing coy. Hell, she would have worn the leather cat suit—or nothing at all—if that’s what it had taken to secure the role.
“Well, it worked. But you also blew them away with your level of preparation. You delivered a strategic reminder that while they might be able to get another actress who looks the part, nobody else would know the role as well as you. Mentioning how excited you were to work with the director didn’t hurt, either.”
A discreet ping announced their impending arrival at the first floor. A second later, the elevator landed like a cloud and the doors opened with a muted whisper. Eddie stepped aside to let her precede him into the soaring glass box of a lobby.
“If it weren’t for the fast talking you did yesterday, I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to show them.” She stopped and turned to him. “Thanks for working so hard to rescue this deal. I owe you.”
He buffed his nails on the lapel of his designer suit. “It would have been their loss.”
“Damn right,” she agreed, because people expected confidence from her, “but thanks anyway.”
Beyond the walls of windows, afternoon sunlight simmered off the Burbank sidewalks. She led them toward the exit while he added, “Are you sure you’re cool with doing the interview with All Access tomorrow? It would be good to get you in front of cameras sooner rather than later, to counteract the leaked photos. But I can push it back a couple days if you want a little more time before you step into that whirlwind. Once the first interview airs, everybody else is going to line up to talk you.”
“Tomorrow’s fine. I’m ready to get to work.” She slipped dark sunglasses on as she walked through the door he held for her.
“Are you?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?” On the sidewalk, she paused and let the Southern California sun warm her. She was freezing. The cold that had settled into her bones yesterday evening had turned arctic as she’d sat in the back of an air-conditioned town car on the way to the airport. It had stayed for the flight, through fitful attempts to sleep, and during today’s meeting. Part of her was thankful. When the chill finally lifted, this numb sensation insulating her might leave with it. Then she’d really have to feel. And while she might have welcomed the heat of anger, or even gnawing worry, she feared what lurked beneath the protective layer of ice was a crushing pain of loss.
“You’ve taken a couple tough hits in rapid succession. I’m not questioning your professionalism, but I want to be sure you’re okay.”
“Always.” She offered up what felt like a brittle version of the patented Quinn Sheridan smile and brushed nonexistent lint from his shoulder. “Eddie, I’m always okay.”
As good an exit line as any. She stepped back, and fought to keep the smile in place. “Later.”
He caught her arm, tucked it under his, and steered her across the pavement. “I’ll walk you to your car.”
“Uh…okay.” Her high heels and their height difference required her to take a couple quick steps to match his pace. “Something else on your mind?”
“Yep.” He slowed as they approached her SUV. Their reflection appeared in the tinted windshield. “Have you talked to Luke?”
His name had the power to make her miss a step. “No.” She looked down and dug through her purse for her key. “I don’t plan to. He earned a permanent place on my shit list by selling me out.”
“He didn’t.”
That snapped her attention back to Eddie. “You know who did?”
“Not yet. But I know it wasn’t Luke. There has to be some other explanation.”
She found her key and hit the button to unlock the door. “I get that he’s your friend and all, but you should know he never denied it.”
“He doesn’t have to. I know he didn’t do it. The man is made of ethics. He’s also extremely careful. I trust him, and you can, too.”
The certainty in his face only made her want to burst into tears. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I’m not the kind of girl who inspires a hell of a lot of caring from anyone.”
“That’s not true. You’ve got a family fairly inept at demonstrating it, but you can’t take their shortcomings and project them onto the rest of the world. You’re not being fair to yourself, or Luke.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She started to shake as the truth of those words sank in—little shivers that, ironically, signaled the melting away of her icy fortitude. Before she fell apart in a studio parking lot, she wrenched open the car door and climbed behind the wheel.
“Quinn—”
“It doesn’t matter,” she repeated, cutting him off. “If I’m right, Luke fucked me. If you’re right…” She broke off to absorb the stunningly sharp stab of pain. “If you’re right, I fucked myself, because he’ll never speak to me again.”
…
Good news never came at two in the morning. Quinn had known as much before she’d picked up the phone, but walking into a police station an hour later only confirmed it. She posted bail on Callum’s behalf, and then waited another hour, all the while thanking God she was sitting in a police station instead of a hospital or a morgue. Eventually an officer brought her brother out, looking pale and hollow eyed under the harsh fluorescent lights.
They both held it together until they were ensconced in the privacy of her SUV. As soon as he shut his door, she turned to him, and even though she’d spent the wait time coaching herself to stay calm, the emotional rollercoaster she’d been on for too long simply bottomed out. She smacked his shoulder, and yelled, “So help me God, Callum…”
“I know. Jesus. Ow! Quinn, I’m sorry. I screwed up. I am so…fucking…sorry.” Then he buried his face in his hands—hands so grimy, even the gloomy interior of the car couldn’t hide the dirt—and for one hysterical second, she wondered just how they fingerprinted people nowadays. Then he broke down in silent, body-wracking sobs.
She’d wanted to see remorse from him. Wanted actual tears, and uncontrolled sobs as evidence he knew what he’d put her through with his choices—what he’d put the whole family through. But now that he was sitting in her passenger seat all wrung out and shattered, she couldn’t help gathering him up. He was her brother. Her twin. They’d never existed independent of each other. Their mom had a grainy gray-and-white ultrasound image of them snuggled up together in the womb and whatever link had been forged way back then still tethered them, despite the way their paths had diverged. She never planned to cut that tie.
“It’s okay.” She tightened her arms around him, and pulled him close, startled at how much it felt like hugging a bag of bones, despite the oversize black hoodie he wore. He buried his face against her shoulder, and cried out a torrent of guilt, fear, embarrassment, self-pity, and maybe…hopefully, some relief. Hot, wet tears soaked through the gray cardigan she’d thrown over her T-shirt and cut-offs. “It’s going to be okay,” she whispered again, and kissed the top of his head. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Uh-uh.” He drew away, but didn’t look at her. “It’s not okay, and we shouldn’t go anywhere yet. You don’t know. I did something bad, Quinnie.” He sniffed and wiped his eyes, focused them on some point beyond the windshield. “A real doucher move.”
Mostly to assure him nothing would shock her, she said, “Did you lie? Did you steal? Callum Sheridan, did you sell your body for drugs?”
“No.” His denial was quiet. Ominous. His eyes darted to hers, and then away. “I sold yours.”
Now it was her turn to draw back. “You did…what?”
“When I left Foundations, I hooked up with Damon and Bhodi. Remember them?”
Vaguely. Bhodi was another actor who’d aged out of the spotlight in his teens. Damon, as far as she could tell, was a periodic drug dealer and full-time fuckup. She nodded.
“We partied for a while, but then we needed money to keep the party going. I might have been throwing your name around to look like hot shit—I probably was. Anyway, Damon ran into this friend who had a friend who works for some Gawker-type site, and she had big brown eyes and a baggie of coke, and kept talking about how maybe we could work something out if I could give her an inside track, and I kind of…” He looked away again and squinted out the windshield into the darkness.
“You kind of did what, Callum?” But her heart crashed into her ribs because she already knew.
“I kind of said that I thought I could guess your cloud password—just FYI you need to pick a better one than last name and our birthday—and then next thing I knew, we had more shit, and pictures of you in your underwear were all over the internet. I’m really sorry, Quinn,” he went on quickly. “I understand if you want to walk back into the police station and press charges for identity theft, or hacking or whatever. I don’t care. I have it coming. I’ll do whatever it takes to make you forgive me.”
A landslide of thoughts tumbled through her mind. She gripped the steering wheel to get her bearings, but slowing the rush long enough to pick a sensible reaction out of the torrent felt next to impossible. “I’m not going to press charges against you, Callum. You’re my brother, for Christ’s sake, and you have a problem. But I can’t continue being collateral damage to your recklessness. That can’t happen anymore. ”
“I know.”
She barely heard him. “I have to protect myself. I can’t trust you.”
“I’ll change. I swear. I’ll win your trust back.”
“You…” Luke’s voice replayed in her head, and shaped her reply. “You have to earn it. You have to go back to Foundations, and you have to finish this time. That’s step one.”
“I know,” he repeated, sounding miserable but strangely resigned. “I can’t do this anymore, either. I can’t stand myself, Quinnie. I can’t stand that I hurt you. Again.”
Hurt her? Hurt seemed like an insufficient description of the state she was in. Emotions churned to the surface. “I blamed someone else. Someone important to me.” Tears scalded her cheeks. “I called him a bastard to his face and pushed him away.”
“I’ll talk to him—”
“No!” She took a deep breath, and tried to clear an image of that disaster from her mind. She really would be picking her brother up at the morgue if she let Luke get within striking distance of Callum. “No. This isn’t something you can fix.”
“This is the guy you were cozy with on Paradise Bay?”
Exhaling helped her release her death grip on the steering wheel. “It wasn’t like that. He came as a favor to Eddie—to help me salvage my shot at Dirty Games. But for Eddie cashing in a chip, he would have chosen to have nothing to do with me.”
“Then he’s an asshole, Quinnie. I’m not saying that to justify my fucking things up for you, but any guy who doesn’t thank his lucky stars to be near you doesn’t deserve your time. You’re smart, fun, and you’re determined. People like Eddie call in favors for you for a reason. You’re the real deal, Quinn. I mean it. You have your shit together. Even when we were small, and I was the star and you were Callum Sheridan’s sister, I knew there was something inside you—some core of strength. Hell, I don’t know how to explain it. It’s something I didn’t have.”
“My shit is together?” She almost laughed at how off the mark her brother was, but, then again, he spoke from the perspective of a guy who’d just walked out of a jail cell. “Not really. Luke knows better. He saw the absolute worst of me—an ungrateful, argumentative woman with a self-defeating streak a mile wide, hiding her insecurity behind pride and a fuck-you smile. For some reason he stuck by me anyway. He pushed past all my defenses, and actually gave a damn about me. And I paid him back by calling him a lying bastard and accusing him of betraying me. No explanation I offer can undo that.” She swallowed the truth like a bitter pill. “There is no fixing this.”
The weight of that was too much to bear. She rested her aching head against the seatback and let the stinging tears flow from beneath her closed eyes.
Something soft touched her face, disappeared, and then returned with more insistence. Belatedly, she realized Callum was wiping tears from her cheek with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.
The little-boy sweetness of the gesture threatened to shatter what was left of the heart she’d broken to pieces all on her own. She ducked away. “Jesus, don’t even. Where has that thing been?”
The snide comment earned her a sheepish laugh. “I’m pretty sure it’s yours,” he confessed, and continued drying her tears. “I borrowed it when I was living with you. Sorry. I’ll get you a new one.”
It was just pathetic enough to wring a laugh out of her. A tired one, but still. She opened her eyes and looked at him. “In the grand scheme of things, I’m not too concerned about replacing a sweatshirt.”
He gave her a patient, almost wise smile. “It’s not really about replacing the sweatshirt, it’s about making amends—acknowledging the harm and restoring justice as much as possible.”
She sniffed, and then gave up and wiped her face with her own sleeve. “Making amends, huh?”
“Yep. We learn about it in recovery. Some mistakes can’t be undone, but you can always make amends in some way. It’s how you fix things.”
“You think?”
“Mmm-hmm,” he replied in his version of Yoda’s simultaneously guttural and sing-song-y voice, and poked her in the shoulder. “Fix things, you must.”