After All

“Alyssa,” Emmett says to me. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine!” Where the hell am I going to go? Wait at the hotel to see if he gets bailed out or not? And who is supposed to bail him out? Is it me? Autumn? Will? How does this whole thing work?

“Ma’am, please,” the cop says.

“But we’re Canadian!” I plead. “You can’t do this! We have an amazing Prime Minister!”

The cop doesn’t care. “Then maybe your amazing Prime Minister will help bail him out when he’s done cuddling panda bears and doing one-armed push-ups or whatever the fuck you crazy people do up there.”

And then he’s leading Emmett over to the cop car and cuffing him.

Naturally, the crowd around the taco stand has their camera phones aimed at him and the whole event, including the snivelling paparazzi man who is trying to pick up the pieces of his camera, moaning in pain for dramatic effect.

“The Bruiser and The Blondie,” some girl says, speaking into her phone, “just got into a whole lot of trouble.”





Chapter 14





Emmett





I’d like to say I haven’t been in jail before but that would be a lie.

After my mother died, I went to live with my religious aunt in this shitty town of Mission and though she tried to her hardest to keep her tabs on me during high school, after high school it was a different story.

Once, when I was twenty and hanging out with my friend Matt (this was a few months before I landed the role on Degrassi), we were feeling rather rambunctious and doing a few lines of coke. We were bored, as we often were, and hanging out at Matt’s parents’ place.

Matt’s parents were used to me always being there and I think they felt a bit sorry for me because of my mother and my upbringing and my shitty aunt (she was the type of person at church who would watch how much money you were putting in the collection plate and then publicly chastise you if it wasn’t enough), so they didn’t mind me hanging out and we were pretty much left alone.

There’s not much to do in Mission. It’s a small town at the end of the road, lots of industry and a very religious slant. While I would work at the local video store and take the train into Vancouver for acting classes and the occasional audition, you had to make your own fun.

So we drank, did some drugs. That kind of thing.

This particular night, we did some lines and then let our boredom got the best of us.

My friend thought it would be hilarious if we went to the local donut shop and harassed the cops.

I know, I know. Made perfect sense at the time.

Then we decided it would be even funnier if we dressed up in his mother’s clothes. His sister had some wigs. We melded the two together.

So after we got all dolled up, we went down to Tim Hortons and started hitting on the cops.

We thought it was hilarious.

“Oh, I do declare, officer,” I’d say in my best Blanche DuBois.

They gave us plenty of time to back off and go away and yet we kept on pushing their buttons.

“My, aren’t you fellas so big and strong?”

Finally, understandably, we were arrested. I remember clearly, like it was yesterday, the moment we were at the station being fingerprinted and I looked over at Matt, who was wearing a pink, floral dress and had a red, curly wig half-hanging off his head, and I said, “Matt, you look ridiculous.”

Needless to say, we were let go in the morning, after spending a night in the cell dressed as women.

But the LA jails are no joke. Lucky for me, tonight I was shoved into the drunk tank with a bunch of frat boys who had passed right out and didn’t give me any trouble.

Fucking hell though, what a hell of a night it was. To go from the high of having Alyssa on my arm at the party, actually having someone I wanted to show off, that I cared for deeply, that I was proud of, to losing my temper on the paparazzi. I had the night planned out so differently.

First, we would get the tacos and fill our bellies since I know from experience that the food choices at LA events are pretty skimpy since no one eats in this town, then we would go back to the hotel.

And I know that Alyssa had been standoffish after the last time we had sex and I also know I admitted that I might just be a rat-bastard in the end, but the fact was, I wanted nothing more than to get her naked and beneath me again. It was truly the only time I knew that what we had was real, that each moan, each look, each touch, meant more than anything either of us could ever say.

When I’m deep inside her, there is only truth between us.

The thing is…she’s getting under my skin. She’s slipping into my veins, a poison, a drug, and like most foolish men, I’m too weak to stay away, to say no.

I want her. Every day. Every night. I want her in my bed, I want her in my arms. I want her sitting across from me at the dinner table, not just for the next two months, but…for as long as I can. When I think about Alyssa now, it’s no longer in terms of contracts. It’s no longer in terms of what should be, what’s supposed to be. It’s no longer in terms of what’s fake.

When I think about her, I think about just her. I think about what she does to me, what she means to me.

Honestly, she means the fucking world.

And I’m having a hell of a time expressing that to her because everything we have between us is supposed to be a lie. And if I was smart I would be keep it that way. After all, I told her about the kind of person I was, that I might hurt her in the end. But the truth is, I don’t want to lie anymore.

I want every single moment we share to mean something.

The only problem is, she doesn’t know the real me.

Though, fuck, she sure got a glimpse of that tonight.

I’ve always been very guarded with my private life. No one really gave a shit until I went on Degrassi and then the Canadian press started poking and prodding the boy behind Cruiser McGill. But that’s the Canadian press. They’re pretty bashful about it all. When they asked me about my parents, I told them both of them died when I was young and I was raised in Mission by my aunt. No one ever bothered to look into it. And there was no one from my previous life, the life on Vancouver’s east side, that would ever argue. Everyone except Jimmy is pretty much dead.

That said, it doesn’t surprise me that somehow someone would start digging and find the truth behind it all. I’m not ashamed. The problem with it all is that people get the wrong ideas. They start making assumptions. That’s where it gets dangerous.