I take a deep breath and start the car.
This is the kind of fear that sits heavy on your chest—a fundamental, incessant anxiety like you’re stuck in a dark alley—it’s life or death, and your feet have forgotten how to run. You’ve glimpsed your salvation like a glittering empire in the distance, but you can’t fucking remember how to get there. Every moment you spend pondering, is a moment your goal drifts further away, the road becoming more and more complicated and hazardous until it’s gone.
My phone buzzes again. It hasn’t stopped with messages in the twenty minutes it took to get from the plane to the car. I grab it and scroll down, starting at the bottom.
Duane/Peak Ent: CALL ME RIGHT THIS MINUTE OR WE’RE PULLING OUT OF ROBERTS
Devon: Dude, seriously. I expected you a week ago. I need to talk to you about scheduling filming too.
Devon: you realize there’s a high school sweetheart trying to help her get over you, right?
I hate that one.
Sheila PR: Why do you keep doing this to me? You don’t pay me enough for this. Peak is breathing down my neck about damage control. I need a statement!!!!!!!
Duane/Peak Ent: Ok look. This is serious. Just call me back we can work this out — if it’s really over, we just need to schedule some photo ops, outings, we can cover. JUST CALL ME.
I stop reading and pull out onto the road following signs for the mainland. “Cover” my ass. Duane, from Peak Entertainment is looking to persuade, threaten, and cajole me back in line. Everyone is getting hysterical, but there’s a reason why I don’t call them back. Yet. Either Duane or my publicist, Sheila. They want me to put out a statement saying Audrey and I are fine, but I don’t want Keri Ann to see it. Not until I speak to her and tell her what’s going on.
But how can I find the courage to explain that even though I’d told her Audrey and I were over, I believed I had gotten her pregnant. With one hundred percent certainty.
The morning the news broke about Audrey cheating on me.
The day the pictures came out.
I knew about the cheating before Audrey knew that I knew, of course. She came to find me in my home gym where I was pounding up a ten percent incline with bricks in my back pack because I was just that pissed off. I’d thought we had a deal. I’d passed up a lot of women to stick to it, to respect Audrey privately and publicly and to not make her look a fool. For the most part, I’d managed to keep my dick in my pants, even though Audrey and my occasional sexual relationship had mostly fizzled out around the second installment of Erath. That was a long time with only sporadic sex.
Audrey was all hysterical and sorry and kissing me and undressing me. And call me a bastard, but my ego needed, no demanded, I show her what she was missing.
I was pumped up, sweating, and pissed off, in the middle of a work out, and I just did it. I fucked her. And I didn’t use any protection, something I had never done. I’d taken some kind of perverse pleasure from that fact. I was like a stupid animal staking his claim. For nothing. Wounded pride. That was it. And I was so disgusted with myself afterwards. I still am.
How did I explain that to a girl like Keri Ann. It would never even occur to her to use someone for her own gain. In any way. And I had used a woman in the worst and basest way possible. And then moved on to Keri Ann, and like the animal I was, decided to rid her of her virginity before abandoning her.
As I turn off the airport road, I let myself think about Savannah, what seems like a lifetime ago, in a secluded corner of that dark club. I’d been sitting, numbing myself with a bottle of Bushmills, while I figured out what I would say to Keri Ann, how I would explain. And there she was. I couldn’t believe my lying eyes. It was wishful thinking, surely. I mean, the way she was dressed—those legs coming out from the tight, short black dress, long, tanned, toned and ending in the sexiest shoes I had ever seen. Probably just because they were on her. Keri Ann didn’t dress like that, or even wear makeup. I seriously thought I was in a drunken stupor.
She’d looked so different. But God, she’d looked breathtaking. And I acted like an animal. Again. It was a primal response, pure and simple. I was on top of the guy before I could even process that I wanted to rip his throat out for touching her. Kissing her.
He kissed her.
I never wanted him to breathe again.
I knew, I knew, that it was because of me she was doing this. I had turned that amazing, pure, unaffected and untouched girl into the haunting siren who was bewitching every guy in the room and unknowingly asking to be touched. I could see it on their faces.