Forbidden: A Standalone (43 page)

But I didn’t want to want to.

I wanted to feel the all-over everything of a really clean high and the freedom of a new dick, but I had a voice in my head telling me to just go one more day without them. I’d done good work. Don’t throw it all away.

And the other voice in my head said, “It’s for a good cause. You can do what you want one more time. Just one more time… to save Jonathan.”

Fucking voice.

***

I didn’t know how to walk that razor, and once the flake started flowing, I had no way to keep my balance. It would go however it would go.

Elliot came to my place after his day at Alondra. I peeled off his clothes, and he watched as I removed mine. Every time we fucked, he got a little bossier, a little more dominating, a little rougher. He’d never be Deacon. But if I wanted Deacon, I’d be with him.

The sun had set completely when he wrapped himself around me.

“I need to get back in,” I said. “Before Warren figures out a way to get to Jonathan.”

“We’re watching him. Don’t you trust me?”

“I trust you, but I don’t trust the world. Can you take me in? Commit me? Just say the therapy is going bad?”

“You’d have to be a danger to yourself or others.”

“Tell them I’m a danger to myself.”

“But you’re not. You’re a danger to me.”

I rolled on top of him. “I admire your faith. I admire how you want to do things the right way.”

“You say it like you can’t do the same.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that I was incapable, only that I was outside those rules. For better or worse, what had bound other people had never bound me.

“I know you won’t save me from myself,” I said. “If I’m doing something stupid, I have to just do it and face the consequences. But this is different. This is my brother, and you know as well as I do that he’s in no position to deal with this himself. And I’ve got nothing on Warren. No proof he intends to do anything, and what are you going to do with a psycho’s fucking intentions anyway? So we can muck around with the authorities all we want, and what happened to me is going to happen to my brother. I won’t have that on my head. He was brought up the same way I was, and I know what it’s like. He needs time to grow up, and Warren’s going to take it away from him.”

He kissed me. “I admire your nobility and your loyalty. It’s beautiful. It makes me crazy about you. But it makes me afraid for you too. If you go back in, you’re separated from me. I don’t want that ever again. I want us going forward, not back.”

I kissed him. He bit my bottom lip, gently keeping me from moving away.

He was right. My thinking was too literal and limited. Maybe there was another way to do this.

fiona

I
’d done the unthinkable. I’d spoken to outsiders about what happened between the privileged. We were the mafia. We were the law. We did not break the silence about what we did to each other.

“Is Baby here?” I asked Jack.

His chin was scratched raw under his lip and his hair had a bald patch. He kept playing with the area around it. “I don’t know where she’s at.”

“What about Karen?”

“Nah, man.”

“What’s wrong with you?” I slapped his hand away from the bald patch by his ear. A hair was trapped between two fingers.

“They won’t even talk to you if you find them.”

We were on a Hollywood rooftop with a pool and pod chairs, twelve stories up. The roof was surrounded by three-foot-high stone walls that made you feel like you were about to fall onto Sunset.

I wore a bikini like all the other girls. Below us, the lights of a movie premier cast shafts into the sky. The music was low, the paparazzi waited in a pack on the sidewalk, and limos lined up around the block.

“Jackey!” Baby came between us, putting her arms around Jack. Her pink bag was open like a mouth spitting hundreds. Her chin was striped with pink scratch marks. “Do you have any more tar?”

“A little.”

“Hey,” I said, “I was looking for you.”

She ignored me and whispered in Jack’s ear. He swallowed. She moved her hand between his legs, and his eyes fluttered closed. Derek pulled me to the dance floor before I had to witness whatever it was Baby would have been happy for me to witness.

I turned. “Don’t leave before I talk to you,” I said to Baby.

She didn’t even look at me when she held up her middle finger.

I called Karen while I gyrated against Derek. No answer.

Derek pulled up my bikini top while we danced, running his thumbs across my nipples. I pulled it back down. Derek’s hands on me snapped me into a clarity where Elliot saw me with another man. I felt what he would have felt. I thought what he would have thought. The pain was palpable.

I wasn’t there to hurt Elliot. I was there to talk to Baby. I needed to feel her out, see if she thought Daddy Chilton would cut a deal before his son turned into a PR nightmare.

“Have you seen Karen?” I asked Derek.

He put his arms around me and swayed his hips. “Nope.” He untied the back of my bikini top.

“Jesus.” I pulled away, feeling for the strings. “Quit it.” I tied the top back together.

“Is this what it is now?” he asked in my ear. “You’re a prude
and
a rat?”

Funny how not doing a bunch of drugs or fucking anyone who asked was considered weird. Or how telling the cops you were raped made you an outsider. But who could blame him? We had procedures in our world, and I wasn’t following them.

“I’m both and more, asshole.” I noticed a little mark on his chin, and I poked it. “What’s this? Is this Jack’s shit?”

“You should try it. Might make you normal again.”

I nodded. It was probably fantastic. A high like no other. I turned and faced the pool, dropping my phone onto my little red chamois. Derek grabbed me from behind and I kicked him back. My foot landed near my phone and skidded, knocking it into the pool.

Crap.

The phone went vertical and accelerated to the bottom, landing soundlessly. I dove in. The water was bath warm, and the underwater lights made the black, and now useless, device easy to find. I scooped it up and swam for the surface.

When my head popped up from the surface and I felt the cold air on my face, saw the stars above, heard the sounds of the fans and people downstairs, I felt a gratitude and happiness for my simple existence on the earth. It was like being high, but not like that at all.

“Did you hear about Karen?” someone said next to me.

I snapped out of my reverie. It was Arrow.

“Hear what?” I asked, flipping my phone open. Yeah. Useless.

“Her parents found coke in her sheets and committed her.”

“She’s in Westonwood?” I waded to the edge and tossed my phone onto the tiles.

“Guess so.”

“Huh.” I lifted myself out of the water and pivoted until I was sitting on the edge. Karen was inside. She needed it, and I was glad she was getting help, but I wished it was anywhere but Westonwood.

“Hey, Fee,” Arrow said from the pool. “You look good.”

“Really?”

He’d taken me by surprise, sincerity all over his face.

“Yeah. Kind of, you know. Together.” He nodded, eyes narrowed as if seeing something for the first time. “Kinda cool.”

“Thanks, Arrow. You’re all right.”

He winked at me and leaned back into the water, swimming away from my all-rightness.

I got out of the pool and snapped up my chamois, leaving a path of water drops and wet footprints through the bar.

The locker rooms were paneled in dark teak and floored in warm matte marble. Orchids marked the empty spaces between the sinks, and the lockers weren’t even locked for the private party. I flipped mine open.

I had to tell Elliot that Warren was after Karen, but my phone was useless. I tapped the back, pushed the green button, shook it for whatever that was worth. The black screen just mocked me.

I heard a laugh I recognized from one of the shower stalls. Outside it, on the floor, sat a pink Prada bag.

“Baby!” I said. “Can I use your phone?”

I need to tell my therapist your brother is going to rape Karen as payment for amphetamines.

The shower door popped open. Baby was naked, back to the wall, finger between her legs. Her other hand scratched her lower lip. Jack stood against the opposite wall, watching her.

“If you can find it in my bag,” she said, and under her breath, she added, “bitch.”

Jack snapped the bag away and held it out of my reach.

“Jack,” I said, holding out my hand, “a minute. It won’t take a minute.”

“You called me a nerd when we were in the nuthouse. Who’s the nerd now?”

“You’re still a nerd, Jack. Own it. Now give me the bag.”

“If I’m a nerd, what are you?”

“I’m a prude and a rat.” I reached for the bag, but he snapped it away. Baby still danced in a shower stall with her fingers between her legs.

“Kiss Baby, and I’ll give you the phone.”

“No.”

“No?” Baby asked. She acted as if I’d just stuffed Santa back up the chimney.

“I’m just not in the mood.”

I could have explained there was someone in my life I didn’t want to hurt. That kissing another human being would jeopardize a relationship that already wasn’t supposed to exist. But I didn’t have the energy, and I wanted the phone.

“Never mind,” I said. There were a hundred phones on the other side of the door. “Baby, when you’re done here, I just want to talk.”

“About?”

“Your brother.”

She shot out a little laugh through the thick soup of her high. “You talked enough.”

I shot a look at Jack, who had put the bag down and was rubbing black stringy tar out of a little glass jar.

“He’s going to be embarrassing. I can take it all back. Say I lied. But I need a meeting with your dad.”

She smiled. “You Drazens all have daddy issues.”

“Open,” Jack said. She opened her mouth, and he tucked a bit of tar between her gum and lower lip.

Baby continued, “Every time Warren fucks someone else, it’s one less time he fucks me.”

I absorbed what she said but didn’t have time to react before I was fed the image of Jack putting his tar-coated finger between her legs. She gasped. Groaned. Her eyes went wide, and she cried out then came with a shriek.

“Holy
shit
!” she said then thrust her hips forward and came again.

“I tell you what,” Jack said to me. “For the purpose of scientific inquiry, I didn’t see you take a drink yet. I want to see how this stuff works on clean blood.” He scraped the jar of the last of it. “You give this a shot, and I’ll make sure my uncle gets you a meeting with Daddy Chilton. He’s in town until Tuesday morning, I think. Then he’s filming in like Zululand or something.”

Baby was still in the throes of ecstasy.

“Was that safe? To put it on her clit like that?”

“No clue. It works on membranes. I’m experimenting with adding a little K before I go wide. Come on.”

Jack actually could get the meeting through his uncle, who was a studio head and a big player in the Hollywood old boys’ network. And he could get it soon.

“You better come through, or you’re going to be the sorriest nerd in California,” I said.

Baby groaned and slid down the wall.

“Open up.”

“You’re putting it where everyone else does,” I said. “Lip only.”

I opened my mouth. He wedged his finger in the front and slid it across.

“I always liked you, Fiona.” He took his finger out.

“I never disliked you, Jack. But I’m starting to.”

I had more to say, but my thoughts were drowned out by two things: Baby screaming “Make it stop, make it stop,” then clenching, thrusting, pushing against the wall, and my brain flooding with an explosion of endorphins. I had the most unmotivated sense of well-being and bliss I’d ever experienced. This was more than an orgasm. More than emotional happiness. More than a feeling of safety and joy. It wasn’t like coke, where I felt
like
God, or LSD, where I thought I
saw
God.

I became one with God in a blinding eruption of love.

I couldn’t even feel my body.

I was trying too hard to get out of my skin to engage a sound or feeling. It was like blacking out without the blackness. Losing consciousness without sleeping. Being engulfed in a light so bright it wasn’t visible.

A quiet voice in the light said, “Never, ever do this again.”

At the end of that thought, I became aware of my face at the top of my chin, where the gum curved into lip. It itched a little, then like mad, growing into a fury of tingling deep inside the muscle.

When I scratched it, I tipped, and something in me said I shouldn’t fall over, whatever I did. I became aware of weight on one elbow, and realized I was on my hands and knees. Lifting a hand to scratch had thrown off my balance.

I got up on my knees and clawed my chin.

“Fiona! Get down!”

The voice sounded like a stereo turned down then up then down really fast.

A blue light cut through the black light.

Then a red light.

And a blue light.

And the sound of a
whop whop whopping
helicopter.

Deacon, who shouldn’t have been anywhere near that rooftop, had a voice that reminded me of feeling safe and right when I felt most vulnerable. I opened my eyes. Or maybe they were already open and I decided to use them to see.

On my right, just below me, Deacon raised his arms. “Get down. Just get down.”

On my left, a twelve-story drop onto Sunset Boulevard.

“Baby,” I said. “Is she okay?”

“She’s fine.”

The music had stopped. An ambulance was parked outside, flashing its lights, and the paparazzi were huddled across the street with their black Cyclops eyes looking at me.

“You’re lying,” I said. The itch in my chin was furious.

“Come down, and we can talk about it.”

“I’m scared.”

“You don’t have to be,” he said.

“I can’t stand up.”

“Fall. I’ll catch you.”

I tipped a little to the right, then more, and fell into white sheets on a thin mattress with a white light humming over me.