AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Excellent,” she says with smile.
We chat for a bit before the director of marketing and the CEO of the House of Carlisle arrive. All in all, the meeting goes well, and I sell them on the fact that my troubled past is behind me. I leave the meeting feeling as if I stand a genuine chance against whoever else they’re considering.
When I reach my car, I text Jimmy again, but he still doesn’t respond.
My anxiety level rises and all I want is to blow off some steam, so I track down Trina and Courtney and head over to their place.
Chapter Fifteen
JIMMY
We don’t wrap on set until almost ten o’clock at night, and after a shower in my trailer, I can no longer put off thinking about what I’ve been avoiding all day—my mother.
Why is she calling after all these years? Where has she been?
My dad used his fists to settle any disagreements and that included ones with my mother, so I shouldn’t have been surprised she took off when I was fourteen. What surprised me was that she hadn’t taken me with her.
I expected her to return home for days that turned into weeks. Finally, after a few months, I realized she was never coming back and that I had been left to deal with my dad on my own.
My dad didn’t take kindly to her leaving and took it out on me more than a few times. The teachers saw the bruises. They had to have—one time he gave me a black eye and a swollen jaw—but they never asked me about it. I probably would’ve lied anyway, knowing that social services would take me out of my house. That would have left Lilah to fend for herself and we were inseparable, even then.
I plop down on the leather couch in the trailer, palming my phone. Keane sent me the number to reach her. I haven’t seen or spoken to Darla in fifteen years—I can’t imagine what she has to say.
With my elbow on my knee and my head in my hand, I stare at her name on my phone, feeling… I don’t even know what. A mixture of trepidation, anxiety, and anger.
Before I can stew any longer, I press the number and hit the button to call her. As I put the phone to my ear, my knee bounces over and over.
A woman answers with a cigarette-rippled voice I’d recognize anywhere. “Hello?”
“It’s me.” I don’t want to call her mom. She doesn’t deserve the title anymore, as far as I’m concerned.
“Jimmy?”
I cringe. Everyone called me Jimmy when I was younger. These days, only Lilah refers to me as Jimmy and that’s how I like it. It’s something special between the two of us. Hearing Darla say the word tarnishes that somehow.
“It’s James now,” I say with spite in my voice.
A chuckle rings through the line. “That’s right. I forgot you’re a big Hollywood hotshot now. Congrats, my boy.”
“What do you want?” Being on the phone with her, even for this short amount of time, isn’t good for me. I feel as though the past has swallowed me whole.
Is this what Lilah feels like all the time? I’m able to push away everything that happened on that mountainside most days, but she never can.
“Can’t a mom call to catch up with her boy?”
The phone makes a sound under the tight grip of my fingers. “Not when she abandoned him as a teenager and left him alone with an abusive asshole for a dad.”
Her response is silence.
Silence I’m not filling. She’s the one who reached out to me. She had to know this wouldn’t be a happy reunion.
“I want to apologize for that.” Darla sounds sincere, I’ll give her that.
“What did you think was going to happen after you left? Who do you think he took it out on?” I seethe.
“Jimmy, I—”
“James.”
