The Hollywood Project: Shuttergirl Part 19

"It's been so long, Laine."

"There are a hundred good reasons for that."

"Jake wanted to say hi."

"So he sent you? And you came like his little lackey?" I shook off Michael and approached my front door, which I hadn't locked in my rage about the loud guy upstairs. Stupid.

"Come on now, there's no reason to get nasty. He saw you with this guy." He waggled his finger as if to say he knew d.a.m.n well my companion had been in Toledo Spring Break. Each knuckle had a faded blue letter tattooed on it. Left hand RIDE. Right hand KILL. "He-well, we both, Jake and I-we were kind of impressed how you moved up."

I was about to give him a piece of my mind. The piece where I told him to get the h.e.l.l out of my face, leaving me the piece that wanted to cry.

Michael got between us. "It's time to go."

"Hey, man, I was just saying 'hi.' It's nothing."

"You said hi. Now you can go. And don't come back."

Foo pointed his finger like a gun, creasing the K in KILL, his fingertip an inch closer to Michael's face than it should have been. "Hey, I don't care who you are. I will mess you up."

Foo outweighed Michael by fifty pounds of muscle or more, and all I could see in my mind was an incident a decade earlier. Foo had kicked a decent-sized guy down a flight of stairs because he'd stolen a bunch of drugs. I didn't remember the details, only the bloodied condition of the thief's face as he rolled.

I got between them, because Michael wasn't getting kicked down a flight of stairs, and his face was not getting b.l.o.o.d.y. Not if I could help it. But I was too late. They'd decided in man-language that s.h.i.t would go down.

Michael acted first, pushing me out of the way firmly but gently, so that he could move a step closer to Foo.

Foo hadn't gone to private school or served on its board before he was thirty. He hadn't played varsity tennis or flown private jets. Foo grew up sleeping on the floor in a one-bedroom apartment in Westlake. Foo ate cans of beans for dinner, and was spending his days on Sunset Boulevard by the time he was eleven.

Foo punched Michael in the face so fast and hard it didn't make more than a pop sound, and the camera bag dropped to the floor.

"Foo, you a.s.shole!" I yelled.

Michael didn't waste a second. He acted as if he wasn't hurt at all, as if getting punched in the face by a two-hundred-fifty-pound biker happened all the time. He lunged for the guy, and I thought that he would die today, because just going for a monster like that, well, it was the best way to get your a.s.s kicked.

So I stepped up to pull them apart, all hundred thirty pounds of me. I must have felt like a leaf falling on Foo's shoulder. Michael was bent and twisted. Foo pushed him up against the wall by his throat. Michael's face was beet red from strain, and Foo pulled his fist back to pound that beautiful face into the wall.

"Foo! No!" I punched his back.

I heard a jingle of keys.

Michael held up Foo's keys by the carabiner. He'd grabbed them from Foo's belt loop when he'd attacked. Foo let go of Michael with his KILL hand, leaving his perfectly capable RIDE hand to hold down the smaller man.

Michael swung the keychain and threw it out the window. There was a moment of silence then a rattled clink as they hit the ground. "Fetch."

Foo dropped him to look out the window to the parking lot. I crouched next to Michael. He looked like h.e.l.l but was still focused on Foo.

"Gracie's all alone down there," Michael choked out. "And in this neighborhood."

"f.u.c.k!" Foo backed up from the window and looked at Michael and me. "I'll be back."

Was I sweating? Was my breathing shallow? I had to stop that. Stop. Project nothing but complete ownership of the world and everything in it. "Good, because I've got pictures of you and Jake doing enough s.h.i.t to put you both away for a long time. I'm looking for reasons to go to First and Main."

Outside, a motorcycle went by. Maybe it was Gracie. Probably it wasn't. But that was enough to get Foo's a.s.s in gear and out the stairwell door.

"Are you okay?" I asked Michael.

"Sure." As if telling the truth in a room full of lies, his nose started gushing blood.

"Jesus! Come on. Let me get you cleaned up."

I tried to help him stand, but he waved me off, getting to his feet by himself. Drops of blood splashed on the floor, and his white T-shirt was in danger of looking like a murder victim's. I grabbed the camera bag and put his arm over my shoulder even though he could walk fine. Like medic with a wounded soldier, I led him into my loft.

I kicked the door closed. G.o.d, I was so grateful to put a solid metal door between Foo Foo and me. I knew Michael had put himself in a terrible position, and my grat.i.tude expanded my heart wide enough to press against the brittle bars of my rib cage.

I led Michael to the sink and bent him over it. "I'm so sorry, Michael. Do you think it's broken?"

"That guy?" he said, breathing without his nose. He sounded like a kid, and it was adorable. "You hung out with a tough crowd."

I pulled a cloth napkin out of the drawer and opened the freezer. "I did. But not anymore." I wrapped the napkin around a handful of ice. "Okay, turn around. G.o.d, I feel so bad."

"Why?" He closed his eyes and pressed his b.l.o.o.d.y hand over my hand, pushing the ice into his nose, and curled his fingers around mine.

How could I think about anything but helping him at a moment like this? How could I worry, with blood between us, if there was still a chance I could have him after what had happened in the hall?

"Because it's my past that came and broke your nose," I said.

"Not broken." He leaned back on the sink, and I leaned on him. He put his free arm around my waist, drawing me closer.

"Your mother would never approve," I said, half joking.

"Probably not."

"I feel like I should explain." I said it while hoping the reprieve he'd given me in the car was still good and he wouldn't make me explain a d.a.m.n thing.

"Is he that not-first-love you can't talk about?"

"No, he's something else entirely." I blinked back a tear and swallowed a wad of gunk. I wouldn't cry over my stupid past when this guy was here bleeding for me. "I ran with his crowd after Breakfront. And I got out of it. I haven't seen any of them in almost nine years."

"You're hazardous, Laine. Have I told you that?"

"I think you said something about that."

"I like it."

I laughed. "We'll see how much you like it when your eye swells up."

"You should see the other guy." He removed the ice long enough to look at the b.l.o.o.d.y ice bag and shrug. "He looks fine."

"Is that what you're going to tell all your famous friends?" I put the ice back on him.

"I'm going to tell them I met this girl I used to know, and I had to have her. Even after I got punched in the face by some guy who was bothering her, I wanted her. And I'd do it all again just to have her put an ice pack on my nose and stand close to me."

"I hope it doesn't come to that. Come on. Sit down and take the pressure off."

He let me lead him to the couch. "Nice place," he said.

"Thank you. I had an exceptional month, so I bought it." I hoped I didn't blush, but I felt my face tingle with regret. I shouldn't have said that. My exceptional month had included a picture of him and his friends. Their images had sold for my down payment.

I sat him down and took off his shoes then turned his legs so he was lying down. He leaned his head over the armrest and laid his head back, holding the ice pack in place.

I saw something on my dining room table. Something that hadn't been there before. I walked toward it and breathed deeply.

Michael lay behind me with a face that would explode in the morning. That guy. That mark. That paycheck standing six one, he was all right. No one had ever done anything like that for me.

Looking at the table, all my grat.i.tude and relief dropped out of me as if it were a lead weight in a wet paper towel.

Eight by ten, on monochrome rag paper. The stuff only students and artists used. The stuff you learn on when you're learning to do it right. The picture's surface was mottled like a granite countertop because it had been a test print. The exposure went from dark to light across the frame with hard lines between. The photographer had figured out the exposure and didn't bother letting it sit in the fixer long enough.

Past the destroyed silver gelatin, the subject was visible. On a mattress, bare legs crossed, sat a girl of sixteen with very long mousy hair and grey eyes like old coins at the bottom of a purse. In her hands were a Bic lighter and a cigarette b.u.t.t that had obviously been salvaged from the ashtray to her right. She was too skinny, wearing a ribbed tank. Her nipples poked through the fabric, and the filthy sheets bunched between her legs covered only enough to show she wasn't wearing underwear.

"What kind of name is Foo Foo?" Michael said from behind me.

I glanced back. He looked like everything right in his jeans and bloodied white shirt, and I felt as if I needed to be drowned in bleach.

The girl in the picture peered across nine years of ambition, biceps dotted with fingertip-shaped bruises from the night before, beaten down but daring the camera to judge her for being who she was.

Foo's voice was fresh in my mind from the hallway, and I could hear him and how he liked it.

You like it, don't you, little s.l.u.t? Say you like it.

He'd been the first to slap my face while he f.u.c.ked me. Not the last. He said he didn't mean nothing by it, then he did it again.

Front hand, backhand.

Ain't you the sweetest wh.o.r.e. f.u.c.k you, wh.o.r.e.

The camera never lied. The girl in the ribbed tank was a worthless wh.o.r.e, and until Tom had taken that photo and forced me to look at it so many years before, I hadn't been able to see myself.

My cheeks stung looking at her. Me.

I flipped the picture over to find the note in half-dry Sharpie.

"Laine?" Michael said from a million miles away.

"His name's Enid," I said, flipping the photo over. "We called him Foo Foo the Snoo." I shifted toward the kitchen, holding the picture behind me. "He's friends with my foster brother. Not the one you met. Not Tom. Another one."

I got to the kitchen island. It was spotless, like everything else in my house. Why did I notice that now? Had Michael noticed? Did he think that was who I was?

"This other brother? He was Jake, so we called him Jake the Pillow Snake. Which is from Dr. Seuss. I Can Read with My Eyes Shut. It goes..." Casually, I opened a drawer in the island. Inside, spoons and forks were nestled in shiny sleep. I slid the photo on top of them as if it was normal to keep d.a.m.ning evidence with flatware. "'You can read about Jake the Pillow Snake or Foo Foo the Snoo.' See, they were partners."

And they shared everything.

"Are you all right?" He looked at me sidelong, as if that would give him a better view of my troubles.

"I'm fine."

He sat up. "I'm putting a bodyguard on you."

"You are not."

"Oh, I am, Laine. I am."

"He'd better run fast, because I'm going to work."

His phone went off, as if on cue. He ignored it. "You are not going to hang around dark alleys."

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I'd forgotten to worry about its silence. Between us, the phones were on fire, and we just stared at each other.

"You gonna get that?" I asked.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and silenced it before dropping it on the coffee table. "I mean it. You're not safe."

"Neither are you apparently." I sat next to him, and he leaned on me. I put my arm around him.

"Touche," he mumbled, kissing my neck. "But if you think I'm going to let you protect me-"

The napkin of ice threatened to fall, and I held it against his face. "I'm not going to sit here and defend my masculinity with a straight face. But I'm worried about you. And I feel responsible for you getting hit. If anything happens to you-"

"Nothing's going to happen to me."

"How do you know?"

"Everyone's watching me."

His weight became too much, and I leaned back. He adjusted himself as if his intention the whole time had been to get on top of me.

"You need a bodyguard as much as I do," I said. "You need to take these guys seriously. I don't..." I took a deep breath when he pulled up my shirt. "I hate putting you in this position. But he'll be back."

"Which is why I'm sending someone for you." He stroked my belly with his fingertip.

I turned to liquid physically, but a voice echoed in my brain.

Wh.o.r.e.

Slap, and a backhand.

Such a s.l.u.t.

"He's from my world. I understand what makes him and his friends do what they do. I understand how to get rid of them." I hated saying it. I hated how true it was and how I would one day have to come clean about all of it, and I couldn't, not with the rolling arousal between my legs and the vivid memory of getting f.u.c.ked and beaten by someone else. "You have more to lose."