I was about to round the corner and turn onto my street when a limo pulled up at the curb and the passenger door flung open. My eyes widened, and I stopped in an instant. My dad was no Liam Neeson, and if I was going to get kidnapped, I very much doubted I could be saved. I turned around to look at the person getting out of the vehicle. It was Lily, dressed to impress in what looked like a cocktail gown. She seemed to be alone.
“Can I help you?” I cocked my head. I wanted to be strong, but I was tired, hungry, and annoyed. And pissed at myself—so pissed that I’d let myself get carried away with a man like Célian Laurent. I usually made smart choices. I was a salad girl, and he was a deep-fried cake.
“Me? No, though I’m sure you’ll do it at some point once you get fired and have to become a waitress to support your slutty ways.” She walked toward me on her high heels. The limo driver looked the other way, like he couldn’t watch the scene. Her sentence hadn’t even made any sense. I folded my arms across my chest.
“Why are you here?”
“To tell you to back off.”
“If Célian doesn’t want me, he’s welcome to tell me himself.”
I didn’t agree with any part of that sentence. I was no longer sure I wanted him anyway, and at any rate, it wasn’t entirely clear we were even together. But I’d be damned if I’d let her boss me around like that.
Lily kept coming until she was chest to chest with me. She was much taller and a little leaner. Most of all, she was meaner.
“You’re ruining his life, Jade.”
“Jude,” I corrected. She’d seemed to love my unique name before she’d known her fake fiancé was sleeping with me.
She rolled her eyes, like I was an idiot for even pointing that out. “Whatever. You butting into his life means he’s losing everything he cares about. He doesn’t have any family of his own. We were his family—not to mention the network. You are toxic to him, and he’s trying hard not to hurt your feelings, but whenever I call him, he comes back.”
My face heated, but I said nothing. I didn’t believe her—not completely, anyway. Yet her words got to me. I started walking toward my house, bypassing her on the sidewalk. I felt her turning around behind me.
“He’s going to be back in my arms by the end of this week.”
“Good luck,” I shouted back, not turning around to face her.
“You’ve always been a fling! A meaningless one-night stand that got stretched into more because of the circumstances.”
I smiled bitterly. Yes. That I believe.
At home, I made Dad his vegetable soup for tomorrow, following the recipe they’d given me through his program. I was cutting a carrot into depressingly small pieces when my dad hollered from the living room.
“Would you look at that? Your boyfriend is famous.”
The first thing that popped into my head was that Milton had been arrested for killing a prostitute. He was so clean cut and morbidly middle class, it seemed like something he’d be capable of doing. I nicked my little finger when the thought of Célian sprung into my mind.
Was he in trouble? More importantly—was I supposed to care this much?
“How do you mean, Dad?” I tried to keep my voice light.
“He looks good in a tux, I’ll give him that. Of course, if I was as tall as LeBron James, I would rock a designer suit like nobody’s business. You have to see this, JoJo.”
I placed the knife on the chopping board and wiped my hands on my jeans, walking over to the living room. I stood behind the sofa, so Dad couldn’t see me. Good call, considering the horror I knew had plastered itself on my unsuspecting face as I realized what I was looking at.
It was a gossip show rerun from earlier in the day. Some New York socialite had celebrated her birthday and rented out half the left wing of some glitzy hotel. She’d ordered a cake the size of a house—literally, an actual house—and someone from the Guinness Book of World Records came in to measure it. As the camera spun around the horrendous excuse for a sponge cake (“It took over five hundred sacks of sugar and six hundred pounds of flour to make the cake…”), it caught some of the guests at the party. And there was my very own Waldo, who’d been missing in action for the past three days.
Lily’s arm was looped around Célian’s.
He smiled.
She clapped.
They looked happy.
Happy like record stores and stone skipping and stolen iPods could never make him. Happy like his fiancée had just helped him save his news channel.
“Who’s the girl?” Dad scratched his bald head.
“His fiancée.” Rocks. The admission felt like swallowing rocks.
Dad twisted his head, frowning. “JoJo?”
I nodded, squeezing my eyes shut so he wouldn’t see the pain swirling inside them. I wanted to run to the cemetery down the block where my mother was buried and throw myself on her tombstone and tell her I wished she’d really cursed me—so my heart would be lonely and hungry, so it wouldn’t be linked via an invisible string, like a balloon, to a man who was too good at sucking the air out of it.
“I thought you two were together.” Dad brushed his fingers along my arm.
“I thought so, too, Dad. He decided to get back with her earlier this week.”
“Idiot.”
I knew he meant Célian, but the same could be said about me.
The whole world had warned me about him, and I’d chosen to stick my earbuds in and ignore them.
“Well, I’m pooped. I’ll finish your soup tomorrow morning before I go to work.” I dropped a kiss on his head, escaping to my room.
I checked the messages on my phone. There were none.
I set my alarm for six in the morning and buried myself under the covers.
Lily had spent the evening with him, then paid me a visit to warn me she was going to steal him back.
She could keep him.
I walked into my office with a fresh cup of coffee and another new suit that cost fuck-knows-how-much so Brianna wouldn’t have to move her precious ass an inch. Kate was sitting behind my desk in my office, but I didn’t have it in me to kick her all the way back to the newsroom with my Oxford still stuck between her ass cheeks.
She didn’t look up from her laptop as I approached. “The dog house is all the way down, to your left, at the nearest Petco store.”
She rubbed her eyes, causing a streak of black eyeliner to run down her cheeks. She looked like she’d been sucking dick for twenty years straight without taking a break—haggard, hair frizzy, with red blotches covering most of her skin. Her gray shirt had at least three different sets of unidentifiable stains.
“You look stunning, by the way.” I slid her my cup of coffee.
“Well, you look like the asshole who’s about to get dumped and fired on the same day, so I wouldn’t go around offering sarcastic compliments.” She shut her laptop, tucked it under her arm, and stood up.
I followed her with my eyes as she made her way to the door. If she thought she was walking away without explaining her behavior, she was gravely mistaken.
“Stop,” I commanded. She did, her back to me.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I leaned against my desk.
She didn’t turn around. “I stayed here all night.”
“Why?”
“Have you not checked the news in the last fifteen hours?”
Alarm trickled into my system. If the mayor had decided to go into cardiac arrest on the first day I decided to unplug, I was going to be ushered to a room right next to him.
“Get to the point,” I bit out.
“Check your phone?” She spun on her heel slowly, arching a patronizing eyebrow.