Page 48 of Star Struck

Lissa looked sharply towards me. ‘Yeah, well. Maybe that was just meant to be, you ever think of that? I’ll live, I am living. Things are going pretty good, don’t waste your tears on me.’ Her gaze flicked from me to Jack and back again. ‘You save yourself, Brit boy. I got the feeling that you both got a lot of saving to do, maybe you can save each other, I don’t know. But I’m not a part of it any more.’

Jack smiled. It was one of his nice smiles, a genuine expression that softened the whole of his saturnine face. ‘Hey, Lissa Zimmerman, you’re a really nice lady, do you know that?’

‘Don’t shout so loud, you’ll ruin my rep. Now sign here and give us both our freedom.’

I left them arguing good-naturedly about final terms and settlements and other such technical details, and went back to my room, to bed. Alone, whatever Felix might have suggested.

Chapter Twenty

After Lissa left him, papers tucked under her arm, he turned out the room lights and stood in the darkness, feeling every inch of his skin dance with the need for nicotine. Geth hadn’t told Skye anything. That much was obvious from the way she was still speaking to him, still willing to be anywhere near him. His tongue prickled and the roof of his mouth was dry as the craving swept across his nerve endings; masochistically he refused to let his fingers wander towards the pack on the bedside table. Used the unfulfilled need to punish himself for all of it, the sharp needles of want niggling his nerve endings, like a dentist’s drill. He should give up smoking, he knew it. Quitting the alcohol had taught him that the pain came early and left late but it still left, eventually, and it left a better, cleaner, more responsible life behind it. Giving up was easy, whatever he’d told Skye.

It was what the giving up meant that was difficult.

You didn’t just give up the substance; you gave up everything that went with it, the lifestyle, the friends, the feelings. And he was very much afraid that he couldn’t lose any more of those and still function as a human being.

Okay. So, he was safe a while longer. Just let it be a while longer, let him talk to Skye, tell her in his own words, let her make up her own mind what to think about him.

Jack ran a hand through his hair as he stood at the window watching the neon motel lights send their shimmering messages out into the waiting desert. The bright lights that meant nothing, shining into the empty dark. He’d always thought of himself as a bit like that empty darkness, a hollow, infinite space that would never fill with light. But now . . . now Skye was starting to make him see that he didn’t have to be like this. That he didn’t want to be like this, not any more. He wanted to throw himself open to her, let her in, let her brightness illuminate all those dark corners that had festered over the years.

But is wanting it enough? He wanted a new life, but that was easy. Enough money thrown at the situation and it would resolve itself. Back to Britain, back to the little farm on the edge of the moors, back to writing the books and protecting himself from the outside world, that would do it. Just feeling . . . now that was harder. After all, with feeling the good stuff — and with Skye he rather thought there’d be a lot of good stuff — would come the memories of the bad stuff. Memories he lived with by never giving them room to turn round, like caging a savage bull. Keeping them so carefully guarded that he remembered them under controlled conditions. Letting her in would mean letting them out.

He took half a step towards the dressing table, then stopped, the pain of denial blocking everything else. Would letting everything out be so bad, really? Wouldn’t it be better to wipe the slate clean, bring all that darkness from inside himself into the light, where it might lose its power to hag-ride him every night through his dreams?

The urgent desperate need died back as he relaxed. Skye. Yes. Not despite her scars but because of them. Because she would understand.

Chapter Twenty-One

I hid in the room until the following evening, with the assistance of a kind of ad hoc room service, who brought me, rather oddly, a plate of toast, two hard-boiled eggs and an enormous pan of something which resembled paella. I wasn’t about to attempt any outings downstairs, not when I might run into Gethryn, either sober or drunk, and the few times I ventured up the corridor and knocked on his door, Jack hadn’t been in his room.

I did my make-up with shaking hands. Gethryn would be there tonight. I’d have to look him in the face, knowing him for what he truly was under the glamour of show business. Knowing him for the drunken letch who used his screen persona as bait, a man for whom the word ‘no’ was an aphrodisiac. I shivered at how close I might have come to being forced into something I didn’t want, wondering how many other girls had fallen for Gethryn’s patter and then found themselves trying to gloss over something that hadn’t been consensual. Wondered how many had pushed the memories away behind the signed photographs he handed out like boons. Did they tell themselves that they’d wanted it? Because of who he was?

It was almost like a mini panic attack, this sudden flushing of my system with adrenaline, the desire to pee every ten seconds and the great Stomach Rebellion which made me feel alternately sick and as though everything I’d ever eaten was going to fall out of my bottom if I so much as coughed. When I checked my face in the mirror, I saw that I was almost green and my scar stood out like a bone marker under the make-up, thrown into relief by the lighting and the foundation, streaking down my forehead, splitting my eyebrow in two and stuttering to a standstill across my cheekbone. I couldn’t go anywhere like this.

I began struggling out of the dress, unlacing the bodice-strapping across my chest with both hands to save time. When I heard the knock at the door, I held the velvet up against me in an attitude of Victorian shock. ‘Who is it?’

‘Who were you expecting?’

‘Oh, Jack . . .’ I pulled the door open, still attempting modesty with the flapping bodice, ‘I can’t go to the ball, I really can’t. Don’t try to make me. If you go down now I expect Ruth will still be free and she’ll . . . accommodate you,’ I finished, my mind suddenly flashing unwanted images of Jack being accommodated by another woman.

‘Hey.’ Jack held out a hand to shut me up. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He came in and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Take your time.’

I looked at him. He was wearing his pyjama bottoms, tightly fastened around the fly I was glad to see, bare feet and a T-shirt which was more crumple than fabric, and bore the legend ‘Sweet . . . maybe. Passionate . . . I suppose. But don’t ever mistake that for nice.’ ‘That’s a Doctor Who quote.’

He inclined his head, gravely.

‘But . . . what the hell were you going as?’

He flipped his glasses from where they were hooked into the neck of the T and pushed them on. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

I began to giggle. ‘Oh, my God, you’re going as yourself! That’s brilliant.’

‘Glad you think so.’ The glasses magnified his eyes and made the little flecks that danced within them look like slices of sunlight.

‘Yeah. Cheating, but brilliant.’

The black lace showed against his throat under the baggy neck of the shirt, and I found that I was staring at it. The darkness of it made his skin look very pale. ‘What are you staring at now?’

‘The thong around your neck. Do you always wear it?’

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