Cruel Summer (16 page)

“Do you feel better?” Vanity asked.

“I feel worse,” Dante admitted. “It’s actually starting to sink in now.”

“They’re just things,” Vanity said reasonably. “It’s
stuff.
You can replace it. At least you’re safe.”

Dante glanced around the room that was chockablock full of state-of-the-art electronics, expensive clothes, and pricey accessories. “
You
can replace things. I’m shit out of luck.”

Vanity just stood there, as if not knowing what to say.

Dante knew that they were worlds apart on the economic front. Rich girl. Poor boy. But those were old barriers of class. What about the emotional ones? Was he being fair to her? Were they really so different? On paper, they both came from damaged childhoods. His first instinct was to make them strangers when they could actually be soul mates. Maybe it wasn’t an issue of money. Maybe it was an issue of depth. He was a guy, a guy with a sheer force of will aimed squarely at the eye of the bull, and that didn’t leave a lot of room for complexities.

Finally, Vanity spoke. “Had you been conscious enough to fight for that stupid watch, you’d be dead right now.”

The sobering point reached him, and Dante sank down onto Vanity’s unmade bed. “You’re probably right.” He sighed. “It wasn’t just the watch, though. It’s what the watch represented.” His voice sounded wrecked.

Vanity opened her mouth to speak, then seemed to think better of it.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” Dante went on, rubbing his eyes, massaging his temples. “Shit, my head’s killing me.” He stopped for a moment to let the throbbing subside. “I believe I’ve got a shot at making it with my music. I
really
believe that. I just need someone to recognize my talent. And there’s so much bullshit out there. If you want to do hip-hop, then they expect you to be a player or a hustler or a pimp. But that’s not who I am. I didn’t have to do whatever to get by. I’m just a boring poor kid who does his schoolwork and works honest jobs and for the most part listens to his mother.” He laughed a little. “I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket. I’m not going to pretend to be a thug to get somebody’s attention. That’s not what I want to say.” He eased back onto his elbows and yawned out his fatigue and frustration as he arched his back and watched the muscles ripple in his stomach. “To you this will probably sound lame…but that watch felt like one step closer to where I want to be. When I wore it, I wasn’t just some wannabe with a drum loop and a few rhymes. I felt like I was going somewhere. And I felt like the right people would somehow see that.”

Vanity seemed fully engaged in everything that he was saying.

Dante had never really talked to someone this way, baring his soul, sharing his heart. It was intense. And he wanted it to go on. Usually, his deal with girls was one-dimensional. If they weren’t giving him ass, then they needed to go down. Or move on. But Vanity was a whole new world.

“What the hell’s going on here?”

Dante spun around quickly to see Simon St. John in the doorway of his daughter’s bedroom. If mixed-race boys could turn white, he would’ve been the color of a hospital sheet.

“Da-Daddy!” Vanity stammered.

“Is this what you do when you think I’m out of town?” he yelled, the veins in his neck bulging at the strain from his outburst.

“It’s not what it looks like. He just took a shower. I found him on the beach. He was robbed.”

“He
does
the robbing,” Simon St. John snapped. “I got a call from his SafeSplash boss. This thief stole jewelry from the Kelleys on Hibiscus Island.”

Dante shook his head, looking around for his old clothes. He couldn’t do this half-naked. Shit, he couldn’t do this at all. So Rob got tired of waiting for his volcano date and decided to have him fired on some bogus charge. Christ! What else could happen to him today?

“Daddy,” Vanity pleaded.

But her father cut her off with a savage look. “A working stiff? Come on. That’s slutty, Vanity. Even for a girl like you.”

Dante’s stomach did a nosedive. From a father’s mouth, those words were coldhearted. He watched the hurt and shame play out high on Vanity’s cheeks, and he wished that he could take it all away.

Simon St. John glowered at him. “Get the hell out of my house. And just try to leave with anything but the rags you came with. Just try. See what happens.”

Wordlessly, Dante ducked into the bathroom to pull on his jeans and slip on his shirt.

Vanity stood waiting for him when he walked out. “I’ll take you home,” she sad quietly.

“He can walk,” Simon said.

Vanity iced her father down with a defiant glare. “I’m giving him a ride.”

“I said—”

She cut him off midsentence. “I don’t care what you said.”

“Listen to me. I’m your—”

Vanity held up a hand. “Don’t even say it!” she screamed. “Stop kidding yourself. You haven’t been a father to me in years.”

And with that, Dante followed her out of the house.

There was a time to remain quiet, even when you desperately wanted to say something. Now was one of those times.

Silently, they drove, top down in her Mercedes SL500, sun blazing. With no explanation, she took him to the Miami Beach Marina adjacent to Government Cut.

Dante followed her onto the busy dock and into a private slip where a gleaming Cobalt 343 waited. It was thirty-four feet long and all-white with a single candy red boot stripe. Whoever owned it had no change left from a quarter of a million.

Vanity started up the Volvo engines. After a five-minute safety cruise, they were in the Atlantic. And that’s when she opened it up.

Dante stood by her side, feeling like the girl half of a couple as Vanity leaned into the wheel, the boat barely skimming the surface of the sea as it propelled across the water like a charging arrow in flight.

Impulsively, he reached out to stroke her cheek. In the beginning, it was just a simple gesture, a hurt boy offering affection to a hurt girl. But it became so much more.

There was a flash of pain on Vanity’s face, the disturbance of a bad memory still fresh in her mind. Still, she pressed into him, her mouth meeting his, at first just in quiet exploration, then more aggressively. Her tongue was wet, wild, and wonderful. It parted Dante’s dry, chapped lips, coating them with delicious moisture.

Now the Cobalt 343 was driving itself.

With a slow, deliberate hand, Vanity eased down on the throttle, never taking her mouth away from Dante’s. The delicate engines got quiet. Then more quiet. And suddenly, they stopped altogether.

Dante shut his eyes, panting a little as Vanity reached for his waist to steady herself against him. The weight of her caused him to fall back against the padded leather cockpit. She landed on top of him, teeth clashing, tongues at war, saliva flowing together. His blood was racing, pulsing, pounding. Exactly where it mattered. And this was only the first kiss.

Dante’s chest heaved, his nostrils flared, and he ached for her in a way that made it impossible for him to stop. Deep down, he knew that he should stop. Because this was far beyond a hookup. He could actually fall for this girl. Hell, he already was. It was intense, desperate, and so freaking complicated. But even as he thought this, his hands moved softly over the curve of her ass.

And then Vanity dropped down to her knees…so unexpectedly…and so exquisitely. She found the snap-button closure of his jeans, and her beautiful mouth lingered there, savoring the anticipation, breathing warm gusts of air onto the straining part of him.

This was his last chance to say no. But raw hunger kicked all good reason out the door. She wanted it. He needed it. And right now Dante didn’t care how much craziness had brought them here. Only an insane person would turn back now. So he cradled Vanity’s head with one hand, and then he drew down his zipper for her with the other.

When it was over, the stop messages in Dante’s mind were suddenly clear again. And like a fool, he chose to give voice to them right away. “I’m sorry.”

Vanity gazed up at him, a question in her eyes. On the list of things boys told her after favors like that, it was clear that “I’m sorry” didn’t have a place in the top ten.

“We should’ve stopped…I should’ve stopped. That was a mistake.” Finally, he got the words out.

And then something about the look on Vanity’s face told Dante that the worst day of his life wasn’t over yet.

M
ax waited in Lummus Park.

Under the shade of palms, he watched the inline skaters roll along the winding sidewalk, tanned and hard-bodied, pretty boys and prettier girls.

J.J. saw Max the moment Max saw him.

The struggling poser wore a faded ringer tee that featured a graphic of two beer mugs and the reassuring phrase,
TRUST ME
…
I
’
M AN ALCOHOLIC
.

J.J. stopped for a second to admire the departing end of three microskirted models. The look on his face said the sight was almost painful, but in a way that made it hurt so good. He loped over to join Max on the bench, sweet marijuana breath blowing through parted, Blistex-moist lips. “I thought you’d be curious.”

The “about what” hung in the air.

Max glanced down at the Sony HDV Handycam balanced on J.J.’s True Religion denim-clad thigh. Suddenly, the rheostat of his interest twisted up. “You didn’t say we were going to the movies. I would’ve brought popcorn.”

J.J. grinned, flicked open the tiny SwivelScreen, and hit playback.

The high-definition video was rich in color, vivid in detail, and explosive in content. That face. That body. That fame. Stripping, vamping, and doing all sorts of wonderfully nasty things.

The impact was nearly too much for Max to take. He tried to hide the fact that he needed to swallow. “How did you get this?”

“She was so wasted that she didn’t even notice the camera,” J.J. said proudly.

Max stewed in the boiling ice of a dilemma deep, dreadful, and destructive. But there was no stopping the brain schemes that had already cranked up.

Private sex tape.

Public fascination.

Major opportunity.

First Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. Then Paris Hilton and Rick Salomon. Now Vanity St. John and Jayson James.

J.J. seemed to be reading Max’s mind. “I heard that Rick made more than five mil off his Paris vid.”

At first, Max didn’t speak, even though he knew that every second of his silence only endorsed the conspiracy. But his torment was total. Vanity was his oldest friend. Their history was long and deep—the same schools, the same birthday parties, the same summer camps, the inevitable ill-fated romance, and the easy friendship that followed.

No matter how hard he fought to stay true to all of that, the business potential steamrolled over his personal feelings. This wasn’t a poker game to net a few thousand bucks or a warehouse rave to bring in twenty grand. This shit was huge and could pull down
millions.
And he recognized the sadistic irony, too, that the friend who christened him Baby Don would be the sacrificial lamb in his biggest Baby Don deal.

Finally, he dropped the mute routine and gave voice to the obvious potential playing itself out on the three-inch monitor. He just couldn’t resist. “Five million is chump change,” Max said. “We can make more.”

Christina was good at keeping secrets. She was gay and nobody knew it. She was in love and nobody knew that, either.

“Harajuku girls/I’m looking at you girls/You’re so original girls/You got the look that makes you stand out.”

She sang along to Gwen Stefani, her mind lost in iPod oblivion, her heart pumping hard, her body clinging to wonderful sense memories—the sound of her voice, the smell of her perfume, the smoothness of her skin.

But when would Christina see her again? When would she talk to her again? That’s all she really wanted to know. Not having the answers suspended her moods. She seemed to be hovering in a state of perpetual imbalance, preoccupied with thoughts of her with such intensity that it alternately invigorated her and left her completely exhausted.

Maji de!

Christina giggled to herself as the Tokyo-girl slang so naturally came to mind. It was the expression du jour among young Japanese women, used to convey surprise. The English translation was simply, “No, really?”

Christina was creating her own
shojo manga
called
Harmony Girl.

Maji de!

Christina’s mother would kick her out of the house if she knew the things that she thought and felt about a certain girl.

Maji de!

That girl was Vanity St. John.

Maji de!

Yes, Christina was in love with Vanity.

“You don’t look twenty-one.” The man studied the New York driver’s license suspiciously. And then he studied Pippa more suspiciously.

“Give it a go through E-Seek,” she challenged. “You’ll see that it’s real.”

Thank God for Max. His skills were so bang-on that she didn’t have to worry about this bloke calling her bluff. Her fake ID would pass any test.

This one had been created with sophisticated computer software, Internet sources, special inks, a shimmering hologram, and data encoding.

A Max Biaggi Jr. forgery could get you past the rope at any Miami club. It could endure police inspection. It could even survive high-tech verification devices. And right now, it would win over the manager of Cheetah, the strip club of choice for Miami’s high rollers.

If Tony Soprano ever decided to go through a year on the South Beach Diet and get hair plug implants, then he’d emerge looking like Vinnie Rossetti. The man was mobster-slick with an expensive suit, loads of gold jewelry, and a sexy, dangerous don’t-mess-with-me attitude.

Vinnie stared at Pippa.

Pippa stared at Vinnie.

To walk through these doors had taken some serious psyching up. But now Pippa was here—fierce, determined, and unwilling to turn back.

Money made the world go ’round.

Pippa couldn’t rely on her mum for spending power. She couldn’t count on her friends, either. The responsibility to make the necessary cash for extraordinary living belonged to her. And it was time to start owning up to that reality.

She glanced at the dark surroundings, taking in two long stages, a mahogany bar, a pool table, several private booths, and a mysterious upstairs area with
THE LAIR
spelled out in big, junglelike letters.

Pippa had the body. She had the moves, too.

“Come back tomorrow,” Vinnie said. “I’ll put you on-stage.”

Now she had the opportunity.

The cruelest part of the humiliation was that Vanity could still taste Dante on her lips as he gave her chapter and verse on why they shouldn’t be together.

“I just can’t do this…”

She was falling.

“Not against your father’s wishes…”

She was sinking.

“There’s too much at stake for me…”

She was fading.

In a life that had no shortage of them, this ranked high among her worst boy-girl moments. Way out here on Miami Beach, chivalry was dead in the water.

“Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?” Vanity asked. Her voice rattled with cold anger. And she didn’t wait for an answer before thundering on. “To have you say those things to me not five minutes after…
that
? Before we even get back to shore? God! I think I’d feel better about it if you just handed me a twenty-dollar bill and said, ‘Thanks.’”

Dante’s expression look pained. “I didn’t want things to go that far.”

As the tears started up, so did Vanity’s hatred. For Dante. For herself. For the mess that was her life. “And were you thinking this before or after you unzipped your pants?”

Dante glanced back toward the shore. Right now, taking a chance on jumping out and swimming for it seemed to be his preferred method of conflict resolution with her.

But Vanity’s mind was obsessing over ways to hurt him. Badly. “Why did I even bother with you?” She spun her rebuke not only with words but with haughty I’m-rich-you’re-poor body language. “This morning you were a beach bum. An hour ago you were a thief. Now you’re just a loser on the make. Do you actually think my father will
ever
give you the time of day? The only people who get his tap-on-the-shoulder-I’m-going-to-make-you-a-star bit are the unknowns that his A and R people discover. His opinion is this: If you’re so convinced of your talent that you’re out there stalking music executives, then you probably have no talent. You just have delusions.”

Vanity jumped behind the wheel of the Cobalt, roared the engines, and thrust forward on the throttle, the violent impact of takeoff flattening her against the white leather seat.

Sea rushed by. Speed raged on. The boat traveled away from the shore. Sixty miles per hour was now ancient history. It planed across the smooth surf at seventy. And rising.

Vanity shot a look backward.

Dante’s hands were white-knuckled on the guardrail as he crawled toward the cockpit, shouting against the whipping wind for her to slow down, real fear living in his eyes.

All Vanity could think about was how worthless Dante had made her feel. Her father had done the same thing. So had J.J. There had been others, too. But right now it was Dante Medina front and center. In the fog of her fury, he transmogrified into every male who’d ever hurt her.

Vanity’s next move was a symbolic one. She kicked high and hard with both feet, hitting Dante like a battering ram in the center of his chest. When the force of impact shot him over the side of the speeding Cobalt, she never looked back.

Out of sight.

Out of mind.

Out of her life.

And then Vanity St. John screamed a new world order into the hot Florida breeze: “Don’t fuck with me, boys!”

To be Continued…