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Rocky frowns, worrying her lip and then licking it. I’m about to open my mouth again when she takes me by the hand and pulls me out of the main living room with everyone else and straight into her bedroom.
She shuts the door behind us and drags me over to the bed, where she pushes me to sitting. I grab her hand and tug her down beside me. She’s the one who needs to get off her feet, not me.
When she doesn’t speak immediately, I feel the need to apologize.
“I’m sorry.”
Her eyebrows draw together, but I keep going.
“I’m really sorry for making this harder on you than it already was, Rock. I know you didn’t plan this any more than I did. I know you had things going on—important, great things. I don’t want to get in the way of any of that, and if inserting myself into everything is too much—”
She shakes her head and squeezes my hands. “I’m worried about you, Harrison. Not me. Everything you’re getting yourself into. I don’t know if you really have any idea how cruel they can be.”
“I’ve been watching you for weeks now, Rock. And I grew up in a house that contained the cruelest-worded, always critical man. I’m not scared of anything a group of strangers can bring my way.”
“They’re going to attack you personally and go after your family—”
“Family’s all dead, Rock. You and the baby—and my friends—are the only family I have left, and I’ll be damned if I don’t do everything I can to be there for it every day of my life.”
“Okay, but—”
“But nothing, baby. This is it. The beginning of the end.”
“So, you really want to do this?” she asks, her voice small. “You want to be the man standing beside me at all the awards shows and events and all the other bullshit that revolves around Hollywood?”
Truthfully, I want to be a hell of a lot more than that, but I’m trying not to put the cart before the horse this time.
“Yes,” I say without hesitation.
“Okay.” Rocky’s responding smile rocks my world. “Boy, I sure hope you’re ready.”
When it comes to her, I think I just might be ready for anything that’s tossed my way.
Raquel
Round and round the merry-go-round of show business goes. Scandalous articles, magazine covers, online fodder—it’s freaking everywhere and has been for the last three weeks nonstop.
From Virgin to Magdalene, the headlines read. Suddenly there are two fathers? another article questions. We guess Raquel Weaver isn’t really the good girl everyone thought.
But the show must eventually go on. It doesn’t matter that my ankles feel like sausages or that I’m hanging on by a microscopic mental thread or that I’d definitely prefer to bury my head in the sand and stay there forever. All that matters are the appearances we’ve promised and the damage control we can manage.
At least, that’s what I’ve been told.
Heidi says showing my face is the only thing that’ll save me at this point. Getting out there, smiling like I always do, and telling the world that everything they’ve read is trumped-up garbage. I’ve apparently had long enough to lick my wounds while the press frenzies around me, and any more silence would be worse than another faux pas.
But the strategy to get out there and interact with the sharks feels remarkably thin now that I’m here, on the red leather sofa of the Gary Bull Show with no steel cage to save me. I know the questions won’t stop at a simple denial of contempt. Gary is going to want gory details about my twisted affair with two different men, and he’s going to put me on the spot to give them.
My phone buzzes from its spot tucked under my leg, and I almost jump through the roof of the studio, it comes as such a surprise. Without any real friends or family, I hardly even carried the phone anywhere with me before our trip to New York last week.
But after spending time with Harrison’s wildly endearing friends, Lord Almighty, things have changed. For one, I’m far, far more versed in the world of euphemisms than I ever expected to be. If I’m ever given a popquiz on the many fantastical names for human genitals, there’s no way I can lose.
In addition to an expansion in my vocabulary, I’ve also experienced an expansion in my circle of friends, just as Harrison said I would.
I’ve gotten dozens of cute baby gear suggestions via both email and text from the ladies, and Caplin and Thatcher, two of the most boisterous of the group, have taken to sending me messages…as the baby. Advice, jokes, a simple hello, how ya doing?—all of it is said in the supposed voice of my unborn child.
It’s kind of creepy and a lot weird, but I have to admit, it’s also the funniest thing I’ve ever read in my life and the most part of something special I’ve felt in a long time. For all the A-list events and needless groveling, I’m really starting to realize I’ve been horrendously lonely for the majority of my life.
