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Chapter One
They say when you meet the one, you’ll just instinctively know. That wasn’t the case with me and Trevor. He wasn’t normally my type, yet he somehow swept me off my feet.
If I had married Trevor, I would be a widow today. But we never took that step, and now, it was too late. Now he was nothing but ash. There wasn’t anything left but an empty home, a half-filled urn, one cold side of a king-sized bed, and the sprawling nothingness inside me where grief should have been.
I had loved Trevor, hadn’t I?
My dreams were a jumbled mess; imagined images of the car accident I hadn’t been allowed to see, memories of Trevor’s voice whispering my name as our limbs tangled together, the stark white paper of his death certificate, our dark home lit by candlelight, and the sterile, shining steel of the morgue where I had been asked to confirm his identity just from the platinum ring he had been wearing.
I was in such a knot of love, death, and aching loneliness, and I wasn’t sure how I could ever untangle it all.
When you hear the phrase “I was swept off my feet,” it evokes images of being whisked away from some humdrum life and inserted into a fantasy world with the perfect person beside you. In the beginning, I had felt that way, so lucky and infatuated, but as time wore on, the luster wore off, and I was left missing my time in Dallas as an independent woman. I like to think if things had continued on, as usual, I would have found it within myself to leave. Yet, when Trevor died, it was as though I had been woken out of a deep sleep by a cold bucket of water thrown over me.
I missed him. I felt bereft. But also, I felt free.
And then there was the guilt. I cared for Trevor. I was sure of that. But despite how much I felt for him, I still felt overwhelming relief that he was no longer here.
The last time I had felt free had been the last night I had spent single, standing on the balcony of my apartment in Dallas, watching the sun set through the patchwork clouds. I had been independent, with my career at its height.
My youth was an unfinished puzzle, but I was slowly putting together the pieces of who I was. I was coming into my own.
Where exactly had I fallen off the right path, only to end up an almost widow at my age? If I traced it all back to the beginning, I guess my first fuck up was going to the garden party.
Leaving Los Angeles and moving to Dallas had been a risk, but necessary to break all the old habits holding me back. I flourished faster than I had ever expected, but keeping up with it all wasn't easy. Living the LA lifestyle can wear a person down.
Everyone kept telling me that moving to Dallas at that point in my career would be a mistake. It would ruin me. But I wouldn’t hear it.
I wasn’t going to let anything get in my way of becoming a star. Back then, I had my entire future plotted out. Eyes on the prize. But the universe had other ideas.
Being away from the center of production, I had to work extra hard to get noticed and to attend more networking events than I might have had to if I still lived in LA.
If I wanted to get the attention of those in charge of production, then I had to make sure I was at the events those people were at. No matter how annoying or lame those events were.
This meant flying back and forth from Dallas to LA for work. Sometimes it would just be for a few days to shoot a movie, but at least once a year, I made a longer trip, staying four to six weeks in a row.
My life changed during one of those trips. Whenever I was in LA, I tried to attend all the industry gatherings that I could. I had to get as much face time in as I could while I was in town.
The one event that sealed my fate was a garden party, of all things, hosted by an investor for a major studio. If you wanted a chance to be cast in one of the studio’s movies, then you had better attend their events. They used the parties as their way of scouting talent for upcoming productions.
A lot of the industry stars were there, all vying to get the attention of the right people. This was before OnlyFans was a thing, so if you wanted to make it in the industry, you needed to be cast in movies. The more movies you were in, the more money you made. That’s just how it worked back then.
This particular investor was a pretty big deal. He not only put a lot of money into a big industry studio, but he was also an investor in the company that put on the big awards show each year.
This wasn’t unusual, though. All the players in the adult industry were connected by subtle webs, and I needed to make myself an unforgettable string in said web.
I remember everything so clearly, wondering if I had made a single different decision, would it have changed the course of my life?
If I had worn a different dress or put my hair up instead of wearing it loose, maybe I wouldn’t have caught Trevor’s eye, and it would have been a different girl staring sleeplessly at the ceiling in an empty house, caught between sadness that the other side of the bed was empty and relief that whatever craziness Trevor had roped me into unknowingly was a thing of the past.
That night, before the party, I dressed for success. I had perfected the art of chit-chat with producers, directors, and photographers, of course, but whether or not I got work also depended on how elegant and alluring I could appear leaning up against a wall or drinking from a wine glass, chin tilted and back arched just so. Visuals were everything.
I basically had two separate closets; my regular clothes and the clothes I wore for work. It was a necessary evil. It wasn’t like the clothes I needed for work were all that practical in my everyday life.
I pulled a dress from that latter closet, slipping it over my head and tugging it down until the fit was perfect. It was a body-hugging slip dress, so dark green it was nearly black, shimmering and silky, ending above my knees. It was simple, but that was the goal.
My body, and the way it would look in my clothing, was the focal point. Because how I looked in an outfit spoke volumes about what I would look like out of them.
Makeup was the same, applied to appear natural but also to showcase where shadows would fall beneath my cheekbones and the poutiness of my mouth. I was a beautiful canvas looking for an artist.
