Page 5 of Totally Wrecked
Her eyes, the color of forget-me-nots, look tired. What is going on with her? She’s now looking desperately at the exit, and chewing on her lip like a puppy with a slipper. Actually, she seems afraid.
“Brooke?”
She turns and I see I’m not mistaken, there is fear in those big eyes.
“Are you doing OK?” The Brooke I remember feared nothing and no one.
I watch as she rearranges her features. “Absolutely, just a little jet-lagged. I’ll probably head back to my room soon.” Her smile is thoroughly unconvincing. “Ooh, me old tired bones,” she adds, putting on an old lady voice.
“I thought you were starving—you’re not having dinner? ”
“Oh, right, yeah,” she replies. “I am. Can’t wait for food. Need some yummy in my tummy.”
As soon as she says that she goes red and clamps a hand over her mouth.
Is she on drugs?
I’m bothered about this, and I’m not sure why. It’s not like Brooke and I were friends. We were just fecking. And if she’s drugging, well surprise surprise, so is eighty percent of the industry.
But very uncharacteristically, I want to intervene. Why? Because she seems so vulnerable, and not the Brooke ‘Action’ Jackson I remember at all.
I take another sip of whisky, and try to think of an easy way to say, ‘hey, remember when we banged last year?’ but fail completely. I guess I’ll just remind her of the first time we met.
“This is pretty different from the ‘meet and greet’ in Alaska, isn’t it?”
She looks at me blankly.
“The party on the eve of the first day of filming? In Juno?” I add, trying to jog her memory. It’s got to be drugs.
The whiskey pauses on its way to her mouth, and her face blanches. “Oh, err, yes of course. Were you there? I mean, youwerethere. So was I, obviously.”
Hmm.“Yeah, I did the sound for all the Alaska challenges, if you remember, but then had to leave and the production company got Trevor as the replacement.”
I swear I can see her mind going a hundred miles an hour. “Oh!” she says at last. “That’s why you look so familiar! Why was it you left again?”
“Personal reasons—you don’t remember me telling you all about it?”
Brooke’s eyes widen and she looks like a deer in headlights.
“Right…” she says. “Yes! The totally personal reasons you told me about. Of course I remember.”
She contorts her face. Is she having a stroke?
“Yes!” she repeats, blinking rapidly. “So sorry for your…loss?”
What the feck? When we hooked up, it was over that weekend that I’d got the email from Stevie, telling me she was pregnant. Maybe why me and Brooke shagging has stayed in my mind; it was my last fling before becoming a new kind of man—a responsible father.
“I’d just discovered my ex was pregnant, so I was going back to New York to settle down and be a da.”
Brooke swallows several times, then smiles at me. “Of course! It was a joke, haha, about your loss of freedom. You know me, I love my freedom!” She gives me a manic grin. “So, how’s the baby?”
“Non-existent,” I tell her bluntly. Her face falls and I realize that sounds like the baby died, so I add to the statement. “Or rather he exists, but it turned out I wasn’t the father, and I wasn’t wanted, nor needed.”
Surprisingly, tears form in Brooke’s eyes. She reaches out and puts her hand on my arm. “Oh, Killian, I am so very sorry. How painful that must have been.”
Brooke’s unexpected sympathy kicks me in the gut. I’d been doing a good job of not really feeling much recently.
“To be sure, it was hurtful,” I mutter, downing my whiskey. All the whiskey is probably why I find myself telling her more. It’s an out of character move for me, so it has to be the whiskey—not Brooke Jackson, with her blue eyes brimming with sympathy. “I’d completely gotten my head around being a da, but Stevie, at the eleventh hour, told me this guy called Brett was the dad, and Stevie and Brett were going to make a go of it.”
