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There was a long moment of total silence.
“You know what this means, right?” said Chase.
“That we don’t have to move out of this place?” Burke offered.
“Shit, in a week or two we could buy this place,” said Nathan.
I laughed nervously. Looking down at the screen, I did some quick math… and realized they weren’t kidding.
“All this,” Nathan swore incredulously. “From a single photo...”
He turned back from the screen and winked.
“Just imagine if we made a movie.”
Fifty-Four
KAYLEEN
What followed next was total insanity. Well beyond the scope of our wildest expectations, and our expectations had been fairly wild.
In retrospect we could never have possibly prepared for it, or guided it, or channeled it in any one direction. It ran fast and hard like a roller-coaster, twisting and turning, moving in whatever direction it wanted to at the time. All we could do was sit tight, hang on, and enjoy the ride.
And oh, what a ride it was.
A full month after our exposure in the tabloids, we were still reaping the benefits of the instant publicity. We’d been called out by name, first and last. Almost every aspect of our lives exposed; laid totally bare, for anyone and everyone to see.
Not that our lives were particularly interesting to begin with, because they weren’t. Individually we were rather plain. But together, as a quad-ruple (that’s what they were calling us), everything we did was interesting as hell.
We became minor celebrities, virtually overnight. No, scratch that. Definitely overnight. We were followed and photographed in all kinds of places, doing all sorts of things. None of it as racy or sexy as our time under the pier, but that was okay. There was st
ill plenty of PDA for the photographers to click their shutters on. Lots of three and four-way sightings of us doing everything from walking on boardwalks to eating in restaurants to seeing a few shows.
Every woman in the country wanted to know what it was like to be me, and some from other parts of the world, too. My email inbox was utterly destroyed, our physical mailbox stuffed full each day. I received everything from fan mail to hate mail, from gifts and letters of advice to pamphlets decrying me as a sinner and telling me I’d be judged harshly in the afterlife.
And as bad as I got it? The guys got it even worse.
Theirs, for the most part, was a rabid fan base of hungry, horny women. Photos of each of them had emerged, shirts off, looking as strong and beautiful and muscular as they actually were. Entire crews followed Nathan and I surfing, and it wasn’t until we’d changed beaches three times that we could finally be left alone.
We’d done interviews. A few, anyway. Nothing tremendous, but big enough to keep the momentum going while pushing the second and third book launches. Those went off without a hitch, reaching best-selling status even during the pre-sales. It was unbelievable, really. As thrilling and lucrative as it sounds.
It got to the point where we didn’t even need to do any marketing, but we hired a team anyway. For a short while, we had a publicist. We retained a lawyer. We even trademarked a few things, tucking them away for a future in which we might need to put out a line of T-shirts or something equally ridiculous.
But the truth of the matter was simple: we didn’t have to do anything anymore. Not after this. Not after the checks were cashed and the smoke cleared and all the dust stirred up by our ‘coming out’ photo finally, at long last, settled.
In the end, the books were considered a critical success. Triple Team kicked off compelling story, even beyond Juliana’s similarities to our real-life situation. By design, the guys brushed away offers for agents and publishers until after the third book had been finally released. It took them two months of sifting through competing offers to find the perfect fit, and to sign on for another three books to be written along the same vein.
As for me, I went straight back to doing what I’d wanted all along: attending culinary school. The residuals we received as a ‘quad-ruple’ didn’t come close to the book sales, but it was a significant enough chunk that I could put my business on hold. I spent even more time away from the villa than before, but that was okay. I was doing exactly what I loved, and the guys traveled a lot on their book tours anyway. Three different ones, to be precise.
Like I said, it was pretty crazy. A perfect storm of attention, money, and instafame. We took full advantage immediately, even though it meant being apart for a while. The guys were constantly out of state, but always in touch.
And in truth, it made us even stronger. Forced us to appreciate our time all the more when we were together, just the four of us.
And those times were the best of all.
As for my parents, that part was a lot harder to reconcile. It was my mother who came on board first, although very hesitantly. After a few lunches and a thousand stories about how great the guys were and how happy I was, she began to see things a little more my way. Everything she went home with she conveyed to my father, who at some point a few weeks later, finally started calling to talk to me again.
He never asked about the guys directly, and I never really offered. But he could tell I was happy. And I could tell he wanted me to be happy, which was the first big step for the both of us.
