Step Wilde: A Stepbrother Romance (29 page)

Okay, that wasn’t the worst part.

The worst was probably the seventeen desperate messages I’d left on the hotel room machine that night when I’d waited for two hours at the restaurant alone and Wilder hadn’t shown up.

Okay, no, that wasn’t it.

The worst part was having to fly home on a commercial jet with everyone on the airplane and in the terminals on my four different layovers recognizing me as the bitch who had broken darling Hailey Holliday’s heart by stealing her man.

No, actually. That wasn’t it either.

The worst part was falling into a week-long Netflix coma at my aunt’s apartment while I stuffed myself with microwave macaroni and cheese and cans of unheated ravioli while I heard the whispering of the paparazzi surrounding my home.

Wait. Still not the worst part.

That week was followed by two months of only leaving the apartment to do laundry and go grocery shopping with my hair pulled up into a baseball hat and sunglasses on my face. The paparazzi had mostly cleared out by then.

The cashier still recognized me, though. She told me that Hailey Holliday’s second album had kept her from killing herself when she was nineteen, and who the hell did I think I was anyway? That same cashier kept telling me in loud voices that my credit card had been declined.

I’d left the store empty-handed with everyone staring at me and snapping pictures.

But still the worst part hadn’t come.

The worst part was actually the next day.

Lydia had come by with a pizza, a bottle of two-hundred-dollar wine, and the news that Wilder and Hailey were having a baby.

That was rock bottom.

It didn’t get any worse than that.

The next few months passed by in a total blur. Then one day, it was time to go to New York for the premiere. I could do this.

I knew I could do this.

Could I do this?

I rolled over in bed, my window flung wide open to a mid-November Los Angeles day. The birds were singing and the heat had finally broken. I’d lugged the window AC unit down to my aunt’s storage unit a few days earlier. I was hoping against hope that there wouldn’t be a second freak heat wave.

For now, I was just happy to have the window open. My stuff was mostly in boxes, my room in utter disarray. I’d managed to find an apartment near Echo Park that was barely larger than my bedroom now but had a view of the valley. My advance for the movie had finally come through. If I was careful, I had three years’ worth of living expenses to draw from without looking for another job.

My phone had been mostly quiet. I had begun to wonder if Hailey had worked her copious connections and had me blacklisted by casting agents. At that point I wasn’t sure if I ever wanted to be onscreen again. But I certainly wouldn’t have minded a script supervising position.

I got on my hands and knees to make one final sweep underneath the mattress. Tucked into the corner by the wall and covered in a good inch of dust so thick it looked like felted wool was a shoebox. I held my breath and pulled it out. It was bright red. I sincerely could not remember what was in there.

Right as I pulled the lid off of it, there was a knock at the front door.

“I’ll get it!” I yelled, happy to have a break from packing up. I dusted my hands off on my jeans and walked into the living room. My aunt was in her walk-in bedroom closet that was her painting studio. I knew that she wouldn’t feel like walking all the way to the front door.

I looked through the peep hole and saw a bob of silver-hair. I beamed and opened the door. Lydia was holding a donut box.

“Thought you might need a break,” she said, flipping her enormous, dark sunglasses onto the top of her head.

I grabbed the donuts from her and set them on the kitchen counter.

“Hug,” I said to her.

She dropped her enormous black leather purse on the living room floor and threw her arms out. I squeezed her as hard as I could, finally withdrawing my embrace after a full two minutes. I turned around and opened up the donut box, selecting my absolute favorite: powdered and raspberry jelly-filled. I took a big bite and nearly choked on the powdered sugar.

“Do me a favor and don’t ever snort cocaine, alright?” Lydia said to me sardonically.

I picked up the donut box and followed her back into my bedroom. She perched on the edge of my bed, which was now only a bare mattress on a metal frame.

“So I bet your aunt is sad to see you go,” she said.

I shrugged. “I was kind of getting the feeling that she’s more nostalgically sad than
actually
sad,” I explained.

“Where is she?”

“In her Fortress of Solitude, painting,” I explained.

Lydia nodded sagely. “Are you almost done?”

I nodded. “Just a few more things to pack up,” I replied.

“And you’re ready to fly out tonight?”

I motioned over to my suitcase. It hadn’t seen much action since Italy aside from a few overnights at Lydia’s apartment. Brian had moved out shortly after she’d returned. She seemed happy about it and had spent the better part of the last six months happily single.

“You have my dress and coat and shoes, right?” I asked her.

She nodded. “Already on their way to the city, actually. I sent them ahead to your hotel.”

I polished off the rest of my donut.

“So the fairytale ends tomorrow night, I guess. No more custom, designed-by-Lydia dresses shipped to my five-star hotel,” I said with a hint of bitterness.

Lydia raised her eyebrows. “That’s only assuming you don’t take any other jobs,” she replied.

“Yeah, the offers have
really
been pouring in,” I said sarcastically.

“Come on, Liv. The movie doesn’t even premiere until tomorrow night. I hope you charged up your iPhone. It will be ringing off the hook.”

I looked over at my brand-new, gold iPhone six plus that I’d splurged on. It didn’t ring much, but it had seen several thousand rounds of Candy Crush and all eleven seasons of
Grey’s Anatomy
. Twice.

I had a bad habit of not remembering to charge it; my last, crappy flip phone kept a charge for a week at a time. Lydia was constantly having to remind me.

“It’s right there,” I indicated.

“So you’re moving into your new place when you get back, then?”

I nodded. “The new tenant is clearing out Monday. Tomorrow is the premiere, then the day after that is the wedding, then I fly back to L.A.”

Lydia looked at me knowingly. “Have you spoken with…”

“No,” I said shortly. I didn’t even want to
hear
his name. “No, I haven’t. I managed to convince my mom that Gina lied through her teeth to the press for publicity. So my mom knows
nothing
about how little I talk to…
him
. I’ve kept her out of it because God knows she’d make a mess of any information I give her.”

Lydia nodded her head knowingly and reached into the donut box for a chocolate glazed with sprinkles, taking a thoughtful bite and inclining her head toward the shoebox.

“Hey I remember that box. That’s the one you had in our room in college.”

I scratched my head and knelt down next to it. “God, you’re right. It is. I must have shoved this under the bed right when I moved in.”

I pulled off a layer of newspaper from the top that hid the contents. It was a copy of the student newspaper from the last week before I graduated. I saw on the front cover a photo of Wilder. Well, not Wilder. He was clearly Nick there: slim, no tattoos, youthful face. Slightly messy hair.

I smiled in spite of myself.

“Lemme see,” Lydia said, reaching over.

I snatched it out of reach. “It’s just packaging. It’s nothing. I tucked it in here to keep the rest of the stuff from breaking, obviously.”

Lydia got off the bed and dove for it, grabbing the paper out of my hand and shaking it open.

“Let’s see what made you smile,” she said. Her eyes went wide at the photo. “Jesus Christ. You
kept
this? As what? A memory of the play you would have been in if not for that asshole embarrassing you?”

I sighed and dug back into the box. “It was last-minute packing; it must have been. You know how that week was before graduation. It was utter chaos. Packing, signing forms, cleaning, getting robes, finishing May term classes…”

I drifted off mid-sentence. Tucked between my favorite coffee mug with my alma-mater’s emblem on it (I’d thought I had lost it in my move) and a stack of photos was a rolled up piece of paper.

I put my hand on it. It felt warm, like it had a life of its own.

I knew what it was at once.

It was the note Wilder had scribbled the night we met in the coffee shop. The one that promised that I would fall in love with him one day.

“Oh God,” I muttered out loud.

I immediately regretted it. Lydia hopped off the bed again, leaving the newspaper behind. She grabbed the paper scroll before I could stop her. Maybe part of me didn’t want to stop her.

Lydia unfurled it with one hand, smoothing it out awkwardly against her thigh. Her right hand was still holding a half-eaten donut. Her fingers splayed across the text to hold open the paper. As she read the words, her eyes widened.

“You kept this?” she asked a moment later after looking at me in stunned silence.

I buried my face in my hands and nodded.

“
Why
did you keep this?” Lydia insisted.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. But I obviously did.”

I felt tears stinging at my eyeballs and tried my hardest to push them back. But then they fell in a waterfall. They wouldn’t stop coming. I felt my back heaving, my lungs gasping for air. In a second, Lydia’s arms were around me.

I couldn’t remember the last time that I had cried. It might have been years. I hadn’t shed a single tear in all of the months since this had all started. I’d mostly just felt numb. I don’t know how long we sat huddled on the carpet of my bedroom like that. The more I cried the more I
wanted
to cry, and the harder it was to stop.

I thought about my mother. I thought about my childhood. I thought about Wilder in the coffee shop, Wilder on the stage with me, Wilder’s eyes turning cold during the audition. I thought about all the jobs I hadn’t managed to get.

I thought about all of the nights I’d been alone with my aunt in this apartment. I thought about how all of that was about to end. I even thought about Italy: the movie set, the hotels, tangled up with Wilder all those nights in secret; the stolen glances on set.

I thought about waiting, all alone, at that restaurant.

I thought about how I saw their pregnancy announcement.

I thought about Meredith Grey and Cristina and all the shit they’d gone through on that fucking television show, and how even in the most poignant moments I hadn’t managed to cry.

I let it all out in a flow of wet tears and sobs.

Lydia held me through all of it.

CHAPTER FIFTY

WILDER

“I just don’t think it’s the best idea for you to be flying to New York right now. Did you even call the doctor?” I called from the bedroom, hoisting my suitcase onto the mattress and wandering over to one of the three walk-in closets.

I stared at the wall of suits. Hailey had given me only about eight feet of hanging space when I’d moved in with her. The rest of the spaces were filled floor to ceiling with her clothes.

Hailey was in her bathroom sitting in a director’s chair, five different people getting her prepped for our trip to New York. “He said it was fine,” she replied.

“Great,” I replied with no real meaning. I had been hoping that she would cancel, which was ridiculous. Like she would let me go to an event where Olivia was going to be without her as an escort.

I sighed and rubbed the bridge of my nose. A five-hour flight on a private jet with Hailey and her crew was going to give me a migraine, guaranteed. I foolishly turned around to tell a man who wasn’t there to pack painkillers for me.

It had been six months since I’d fired Harrison at the hotel in Italy, and I still found myself looking for him over my shoulder to help me with things. I’d been laying low since Italy. No jobs; only the publicity events that Hailey required me to go to.

I hadn’t hired a new assistant since firing Harrison. It was going to be awhile before I trusted anyone again with the intimate details of my personal life. Besides that, Hailey always had so many people in her house I couldn’t imagine the benefit in adding yet another.

I ran my fingers across my suit jackets until I came to a tuxedo. I pulled it down and smelled it. It seemed clean. Then I picked out a light grey suit to wear for my dad’s wedding. I’d been practicing cognitive dissonance over the last two months to prepare myself. I just kept imagining the wedding and pretending that Olivia
wouldn’t
be there.

It wasn’t fucking working.

Nights were the hardest. There had been so many times that I’d woken up at three a.m., quietly climbing out of bed and wandering Hailey’s thirty-thousand square foot mansion with my phone glued to my hand. I kept
almost
dialing Olivia’s number. But I honestly couldn’t be sure that Hailey hadn’t bugged my phone.

Besides that, it had been six months. What could I possibly say? I’d left Olivia in that restaurant alone for God knew how long. And on top of that, I’d ignored all of her phone calls to my hotel room. She’d stopped after the first night.

I had figured she would. She had too much pride to do anything else. I opened my underwear drawer and pulled out a handful of black boxer briefs, slamming the drawer shut angrily.

“Problem?” Said a cold voice from the doorway to the closet. Hailey was standing there in a silk white bathrobe, her pregnant stomach protruding through the silky fabric.

“Nope,” I replied, coldly pushing past her. I’d made her have three separate ultrasounds in the space of two months. I wanted to make sure she hadn’t been lying. But there was definitely a baby in there, and her fans couldn’t be more over the moon about it.