“Take who?” Knox whispers.
“Vanessa. She’s gonna yell at me about my image. I’m so fucking hung over.”
Vanessa marches in the room like a general, commanding our attention. She struts straight up to my brother, grabs him by his shirt, and kisses him straight on the lips.
“Uh, um, what was that for?” he mumbles, still recovering from the shock of it.
“When you were in Vegas, did you have sex with anyone?”
“Uh, no,” he replies.
I roll my eyes at him, wondering why the hell he didn’t. He had his choice of hot women.
Vanessa gives him a radiant smile. “That’s what the kiss was for.”
He grins at her like a lovesick puppy, making me both want to puke at the sweetness of it and feel jealous at the same time.
“Speaking of kisses,” she says, coming to stand directly in front of me. “For the record, Ariela’s husband showed up unexpected, begged her to come home, and then kissed her. And in case you happened to see it when you came to pick it up and your stupid male brain thought otherwise, the kiss was unwanted.”
I look at the floor, realizing that this whole mess was because I jumped to a conclusion.
“Are you serious?” Jennifer groans. “She didn’t kiss him? Riley, you’re such an idiot.”
“I’m not an idiot. What the fuck was I supposed to think? His car was in the driveway. She’s at the door, holding her heels in her hand, giving him a kiss goodbye. I didn’t just think she kissed him. It looked to me like they just had sex and she was shooing him out the door before I got there. What do we even know about them anyway? Maybe this is all just a ploy to weasel me out of my money.”
“Right now, Ariela is the absolute least of your worries, Riley. We have a shit storm of bad publicity we have to deal with it. And blame Ariela all you want, but this is about you. Your life. Your career.” She stops chewing me out and appraises us. “Jeez, you all look like hell.” She points toward the conference table. “And somehow, I doubt what you’re going to see here will make you feel any better. Take a look at all the photos we’ve found on the web so far. Jennifer, you may be especially interested in looking at the laptop. You are currently trending on Twitter with a meme made from video footage taken of you at a strip club.”
Jennifer looks sick as she sits down at the table and clicks.
“Oh my god! What an epic fail!” She screams, then laughs, but then breaks down into tears. “My parents are going to kill me.”
Keatyn and Tyler come into the room, laden with bags. When they spread the food out, I see that it’s my favorite breakfast. The combination I taught Keatyn to love when she first tried it on my seventeenth birthday. Chicken and waffles.
“I figured you could use some hangover food,” Keatyn declares. “Why don’t you eat while Vanessa and I fill you in on what’s going to happen next. As you can see, your fun night in Vegas is all over the press. What you don’t know about are all the calls I’ve been receiving from our Board of Directors. They’re calling for your heads. They want me to cancel Knox and Jennifer’s contracts and fire both Riley and Dawson. Immediately.”
I choke down my food when I hear that the board wants me fired.
I know now why she ordered chicken and waffles. Because this is my last meal at Captive.
It’s even worse than I imagined.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8TH
Captive Films - Santa Monica
RILEY
Jennifer is shoveling food in her mouth while looking through the photos. She holds up one where she has wrapped a scarf around her head, tied her shirt up in the middle, and has a fake parrot on her shoulder. “When was this? I don’t remember this.”
Dawson answers. “After the first club, we toured the Strip in a party bus. You were convinced if you looked like a pirate you could get on the ship at Treasure Island.”
“And this?” she asks, holding up a photo of her on a thrill ride.
“That’s the X-Scream at the Stratosphere,” Dawson says.
“Did we all ride it?”
“Yeah, we went before the second club. Thank god, you were impatient and volunteered to go single. You came back covered in puke. I think I bought the picture. It’s classic, we can download it if you want,” Dawson says, eating and laughing.
Vanessa shoots him an evil eye.
“I mean, at the time it was funny.”
“I thought it was funny,” Knox says. “I remember doing all that. The second strip club is when things start to get blurry.”
“I’d like to try to piece together a schedule of your night,” Keatyn interjects. “Tyler, will you start writing this all down.”
“How will that help?” Dawson asks.