Page 73 of Sweet as Sin (Bad Habit 1)
“Don’t fuckin’ hang up!”
I’d never heard him so angry. Even when he was screaming at the paparazzi, even when Brody and A.J. had walked in on us in bed. His fury crawled right through the line and grabbed me around the neck, squeezing. I couldn’t answer. But I didn’t hang up.
“Tell me where you are! I’m comin’ to get you!”
A lone tear tracked its way down my cheek. “No, you’re not. You pursued me and convinced me she wasn’t your girlfriend. Then you fucked me and told me you’d always take care of her. You love her, Nico. You have history. You have her picture next to your bed! You even have the same tattoo!” My voice was getting shrill. “How am I supposed to compete with that? How can you expect me to want to?”
The sound he made was part hiss, part growl. There was a loud bang, then he let out a string of curses. “Tell me where you are!”
Alarmed, I sat up straight. “What did you just do? What was that sound?”
“Probably broke my fuckin’ hand punchin’ this wall, is what I just did! Tell me where you are so I don’t break the other one!”
“I’m not taking the blame for you acting crazy, Nico! If you want to be stupid enough to ruin your hands so you’ll never be able to play the guitar again, that’s totally on you!”
There was another loud bang, and another. He made a sound like he was gritting his teeth against pain.
“Nico! Stop it!” What was the matter with him? Was the man off his meds?
“Tel
l me where you are!”
Another loud bang, and suddenly I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t take this kind of drama.
“Stop hitting things first!” I waited a moment. He seemed to be listening to me, because there were no more loud bangs. “Okay. You want to know where I am? Here’s where: out of your life.”
For the first time since we’d met, I hung up on Nico Nyx.
It felt like I’d just cut off my own arm.
I worked. I ate. I slept. I made it through the next three days without checking my phone again, or dying, though it really felt like I would.
Then on the final day of the shoot, life decided it would be super fun to drop a nuclear bomb on my head.
I was applying contouring powder to the knife-edged angle of a model’s cheekbone in one of the hotel suites that had been set up for makeup and wardrobe. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, snapping gum and fiddling constantly with the pink bedazzled phone in her lap, tweeting and Facebooking and all the rest. She clicked a link on the screen, and a song began to play. Her nose wrinkled in distaste. I tapped it with the handle of my brush.
“Don’t scrunch your nose. You’ll get bunny lines and will have to get Botox when you’re twenty.”
Obviously, I was feeling a little stabby.
“I can’t believe anybody likes One Direction, they’re such a bunch of little boys?”
The model, a wafer-thin El Salvadorian girl ironically nicknamed Gordita—Spanish for “chubby”—had the habit of ending sentences at a higher pitch than the beginning, so it always sounded like she was asking a question. I made a noncommittal noise and started working on her other cheekbone. They were so sharp they could draw blood if I accidentally touched them with my finger. I wondered what the last meal she’d had was. Probably water and an olive, followed by a piece of sugarless gum for dessert.
When I turned to get the eyelash glue from the vanity beside us, she squealed.
I whirled around, expecting to see a spider on her arm, or at the very least a cheeseburger that had made a sudden appearance on one of the trays of Evian an assistant was circulating through the room, but she was staring at her phone, enraptured by whatever was on the screen.
“Omigod! It’s Bad Habit’s new video! It was just released!”
My stomach did this funny thing where it tried to crawl up my esophagus and escape. Forgetting the lash glue, I plastered myself to Gordita’s side, watching over her shoulder.
And there they were, in all their rock ’n’ roll glory. Bad Habit.
It struck me for the first time how apropos that name really was. Greedy and unable to resist temptation exactly as if I were an addict, I stared with my mouth open as the video I’d made with Nico came to life.
Watching it was so surreal. Even on a four-inch screen, I could see the combustible attraction between us. The tension in our bodies, the way we looked at one another, even the way we didn’t look at each other all screamed “want.”
