Page 14 of Base Block

“She’s going to sleep in the garage,” I told the viewers, putting it down and shivering. Lastly, I picked up an old girlie magazine—ancient porn, in other words, which I opened and then closed, covering my open mouth with my hand.

“Grandpa had that dog in him!” I announced, laughing. “Callum doesn’t need these because he gets live shows.”

I winked along with video Rainey, exaggerated and silly. On the phone, I laughed again.

“Follow along to watch us make our move and Callum make the Woodsmen team!” video me said, and blew a quick kiss. It ended there but he still sat staring at the dark screen.

“What do you think?” I asked. “Millie always set up amazing lighting but I tried my best—”

“That was really cute,” he said. He sounded shocked. “It was funny and you looked beautiful.”

I started to smile like I had in my video. “You liked it?”

“You said that I’m your boyfriend.”

“It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to people if I told the truth. It was just easier,” I explained.

“Hell,” he said, but it was a “hell” of surprise, not anger. “You really think this will help me?”

“I don’t know if anyone will watch it. It’s hard to get traction,” I answered. “You told me before that the fans for that team are crazy devoted so I think the best shot we have is to market the channel as a Woodsmen thing. Hopefully, we’d get them talking about you and sharing the content. I wore the orange dress on purpose.”

“You don’t have anything else to wear.”

“I have the sweatshirt but I took it off,” I corrected. “I was thinking about making another video of us loading up the car. You can do this cute technique where it looks like—”

He interrupted me again. “What did you do with your foot to get this phone?”

I showed him a little and he said he had to go out for a minute. It didn’t take long at all before he returned. “Bryan’s sorry and he’s going to leave you alone. For the rest of your life,” he informed me.

“I hope you told him to watch the videos, when we get our channels going.”

“I did not,” he answered. He was back to sounding pissed off.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I didn’t think it was a big deal because it was only my foot. I won’t do it again.”

“You can do what you want,” he told me, but clearly, that wasn’t true. I couldn’t do things that upset him and just as clearly, my little show had made him furious.

“Why don’t we keep packing?” I suggested and he nodded. After a while, we were back to talking normally—normal for us in our two-day relationship, anyway. He asked me more about making videos (not foot ones) and I shared all that I knew.

“Millie was really the expert. She used to work in digital marketing for a production company before she came to be Damain’s assistant,” I explained.

“Sounds like that was a step down.”

“It was. But she didn’t have much choice because she got fired and she said that word gets around fast in Hollywood.”

“Word about what?” Callum asked.

“Her drug problem,” I stated. “She can’t go too long without a snort. But she functions really well on it, better than anyone else I’ve dealt with.”

“I can’t stand that shit,” he muttered.

We seemed close to getting into anger territory again. “Can you tell me more about Michigan?” I suggested. “About the place where the Woodsmen play? I’ve never been there.”

But he turned the questions back to me. “Where have you been? You said that you went to a lot of places with the entourage.” He still pronounced that with an accent, which was pretty funny. “You started out in Washington. What’s it like there?”

I told him about some of the places we’d visited but really, they’d all seemed the same to me. Millie, Sage, and I had flown in coach while Damian sat in first class. He’d liked to board immediately so that everyone on the plane would have to walk past him. He wore big sunglasses and drank champagne, usually while talking loudly on his phone, but then he pretended not to notice when people looked his way. I had doubted that many of them actually recognized him but if they happened to say something, he had refused to sign autographs.

Then we’d landed at another airport in another city and we’d gotten in cars to take us to another hotel where he had usually wanted me or Sage for a while. Later, we had gone out for the night and after we’d done all that a few times, I had realized that there was nothing new in any of the suites he rented or at any of the clubs we visited. The parties felt just the same and I had started to get confused about where we were—like I hadn’t remembered that I’d arrived in Indianapolis because the 20 Grand club looked just like two in Chicago, one before it in Minneapolis, and another we’d visited in Omaha. It was all on repeat.