Name Your Price
Chapter 1
Olivia Martin could not pinpoint the moment she became the type of woman who wanted to throw dishes, but it might have been when she met Chuck Walsh. Together, they had only two speeds: tearing each other’s clothes off or tearing each other’s heads off. And that morning, someone was going to get decapitated.
“Well, that’s just fine !” Chuck bellowed, arms out as he danced his bare feet away like she might actually let loose the coffee mug in her lifted hand. He’d hardly had time to pull on his pants before they began shouting. She was scantly better in her underwear and his tee shirt she’d grabbed from the floor as they had, in fact, just finished tearing each other’s clothes off.
“ Fine? It’s fine ?” Olivia yelled, and set the mug down before she did anything else she’d regret, given she was already roiling in self-directed rage for sleeping with him. The mere thought of smashing the mug into his kitchen floor filled her with a satisfying rush, but she let it go. If only she had the same willpower to resist when it came to him.
The dishes were utilitarian at best anyway—something to stock Chuck’s cabinets in an illusion of domesticity when the man lived off fancy restaurant menus and set catering. She could smash up his whole West Hollywood apartment with a bat, and he wouldn’t care. If she really wanted to hurt him, she needed to go for the miniature city skyline of skincare products lining his bathroom sink. Creams and balms and serums made to preserve his gorgeous face in a state of tempting perfection. Or his closet. As much as she loved tearing his clothes off, Chuck loved putting them on, and who could blame him; he looked hot as hell in anything he wore.
They hadn’t even made it to his bedroom that time. They’d done it right there on the kitchen floor in a heated makeup session that turned Olivia’s messy world right side up for all of ten minutes. Ten minutes of Chuck’s hands and mouth, his obscenely flawless body, his knowledge of her body like a cartographer tracing his favorite map. It had been perfect, like it always was, and she’d expressed her appreciation for his skill by digging her nails into his back and kicking the floor in repeated thuds the downstairs neighbors could surely hear.
And then Chuck opened his mouth and reminded her what they had been making up over in the first place.
“ Yes , it’s fine if you never want to talk to me again because, quite frankly, I can’t take this anymore!” he said, and threw out his arms in a dramatic show. His wingspan took up half the granite and chrome kitchen. He lived in an apartment well above his means, something truly better suited for an A-lister, which was part of the reason he was so broke.
But Olivia was hardly one to talk. She was broke too.
Olivia grumbled again, feeling cheated that she was the one who’d come over to break up with him , and not only had they just slept together, but now he was turning himself into the victim.
He was a magnetic, irresistible, but ruinous force, and she knew what had to be done. Even the Titanic sank, after all. And something as big as what they had together, something electric but fraught with arrogance and egocentrism—belief that their problems would resolve on their own without any work—was always destined to sink anyway.
But she couldn’t deny that the spark was still there, would probably always be there. Standing there in his kitchen, Chuck looking so good barefoot and shirtless in jeans that it should have been illegal, she felt her body aching for him. She sensed the urge in him too. She saw it in the way his tongue flashed over his lips while he stared at her, chest heaving from all the shouting. Even though they’d just had each other, they could never get enough. Even if it killed them both.
They were fire and gasoline—or they had become as much. Back when they’d met, when Olivia had come to interview him for an actor spotlight feature in Mix , the entertainment magazine she wrote for, there’d been an instant spark. She’d found herself agreeing to a date that same night and immediately passed the interview assignment to someone else because she knew after one afternoon with him that they had no shot at a professional relationship. The spark quickly exploded into an all-consuming addiction of fighting and making up that she’d tried and failed to kick multiple times over the past six months, but Chuck was so loyal that extracting him from her life left Olivia considering calling an exorcist.
If she was honest, though, it was as much him not leaving as it was her not letting him go.
Until now.
“I can’t believe you didn’t show up!” she shouted, her renewed anger back to boiling now that her blood had stopped speeding from being tangled up on the floor with him.
“ I was busy ,” he said, repeating his useless defense from earlier.
Olivia scoffed and folded her arms. “You knew about the party for weeks , Chuck. You had plenty of time to plan.” Memory of the disappointed look on her beloved grandmother’s face from the night before stabbed her in the heart all over again. “I reserved a special room at her favorite restaurant. I even got permission to invite her best friend from the care home. You were supposed to be there but instead left me alone with two octogenarians wearing their best pearls and wondering why they’d been stood up!”
He flinched at each truth she volleyed at him.
Instead of listening to his excuses last night when he finally called hours later, she showed up at his apartment bright and early this morning to give him a piece of her mind.
She ended up giving him her body too, but that was neither here nor there. What mattered was that it was the final straw, and they were done. Over. No more Olivia and Chuck.
“What was so important that you skipped my grandmother’s birthday party?” she asked, knowing his response would not measure up. Not unless he’d been rescuing kittens from a burning building and donating AB negative blood to save lives at the same time.
“I had a last-minute audition,” Chuck said. He lifted his arms and let them fall at his sides.
Olivia glared at him. It was plausible since they’d gone to dinner while the sun was still high in the sky to suit the guest of honor’s meal schedule. And she knew Chuck had been struggling to find work lately because of the recent incident that had given him the reputation of being difficult on set, so he was likely to jump on any opportunity he had.
A moment of weakness got the best of her.
“Did you get the part?”
Chuck chewed his lip and silently stared at the floor in response.
Olivia instantly regretted her sympathy and went back to fury. “ Argh! ” she growled, and snatched her denim shorts off the floor to step back into them.
“Where are you going?” Chuck called after her when she marched for the front door.
“Away from you, once and for all!” she said, and wrenched open the door.
He followed her and took their argument into the hallway. “Liv, I said I’m sorry for missing the party. I’ll write Grandma Ruby an apology letter. I’ll send her flowers. I’ll—”
She whirled on him and shouted, “You can’t fix this, Chuck!” She turned and jammed her finger into the elevator button. Thoughts of taking the stairs to get away from him faster tempted her, but ten stories seemed like nine too many in that moment. “You always do this! You’re so obsessed with your career that you can’t see beyond your own nose. You forget there are other people in the world—namely, me !” She reached out and pressed her palm to his bare chest to prevent him from following her as he was wont to do. The brief contact was regrettably pleasant, and she told herself it would be the last time she ever touched Chuck Walsh.
Chuck had different ideas because he followed her into the elevator when it arrived anyway. “That’s not fair, Olivia. You know I’m killing myself to make it in this industry, and I have to take opportunities when they come up.”
“Well, they always seem to come up at the worst times, Chuck.”
“You know I can’t control that. Not all of us have the industry dangling at our fingertips like you do.”
She turned to him with a sharp glare. “Do not go there.”
He flinched for the slightest second, knowing he’d toed a line that was off-limits. Then his eyes narrowed into a cool glare. “Why am I always the bad guy? You think you’ve done everything right in this relationship?”
She folded her arms and stared up at the ceiling, not wanting to hear it. She watched the floors light up as they sank lower to the ground.
Chuck faced her with his hands on his hips, seemingly unperturbed that he was about to arrive half naked in the building lobby. “What about how you never let anyone help you with anything? Or how you turn everything into a competition that you have to win all the time? Or the way you leave toothpaste in the sink and use the last of the coffee and have horrible taste in music?”
She gasped, most offended by the final remark. The other things were half true, but her taste in music? Line. Crossed.
“Now you’re just being mean,” she said as they arrived in the lobby with a ding .
Chuck spilled out into the room behind her, a modern tile and stone space, with his arms out and still arguing. Her flip-flops smacked against the shiny floor. Heads turned from the few other building occupants who happened to be coming and going. They were so wrapped up in arguing with each other, the staring hardly registered. “I’m not being mean, I’m being honest!” Chuck said.
Olivia stopped near the round table in the lobby’s center and caught a whiff of the freesias billowing from a vase there. She turned and Chuck almost ran into her from following so closely. Already breaking her no-more-touching promise, she jabbed her finger at his chest. “You want honest , Chuck? Okay, let’s play this game. How about how you leave the toilet seat up and I fall in, in the middle of the night. Or how you never do the dishes. Or how you bend over backward trying to keep everyone happy all the time—”
“Yet it somehow never seems to work with you.”
“—or the way you sleep through every movie I want to watch—”
“Stop picking boring movies, and I won’t fall asleep.”
“—or how when you chew, it sounds like rocks in a dryer—”
“You know I have a mandibular disorder.”
“—or how you take up the whole bed lying diagonally—”
“Sorry I’m six foot three.”
“—or how you leave on every light in the house . My electricity bill is higher on the nights you stay over.”
“Well, that won’t be a problem anymore either because—”
“ WE’RE DONE! ” they said at the same time.
They’d reached the lobby doors. Olivia pushed through them onto the sidewalk bathed in morning L.A. sun, the gauzy bluish kind that made one acutely aware of the city’s air quality.
“You know what your real problem is, Olivia?” Chuck said, having followed her yet again.
This man. She swore.
“You never finish a fight. Look, you’re even running away from this one right now. How is anything ever supposed to get better if you don’t stick around to see it through?”
His honesty was too bright in the morning light. Taking a microscope to herself was not on the day’s agenda, which had already fallen so far off course she’d need a crane to get it back on track. She was supposed to be broken up with him, a clean cut. Goodbye. Not whatever this dramatic drag out into the street was. Though she should have known that what had started with a spark would end with a blast.
Had she not been so caught up in arguing with him, she might have noticed the young man across the street filming them with his phone.
She turned to Chuck for what she swore to herself would be the last time. She was used to him digging in when they fought, but by the look on his face, he was finally at the end of his rope too. “Well, I guess I’m running one last time because this is over!”
“Oh, it’s so far over it’s like it never even started!” he seethed.
Olivia’s blood boiled again. She hated seeing the satisfaction he was getting out of the demise of their relationship. She’d wanted the upper, righteous hand. She’d come to do the dumping, and to her horror, the dumping was mutual.
“It’s so far over, you couldn’t pay me to get back together with you !” she retaliated. Her voice bounced off the high-rise apartments and echoed across the street.
Chuck scoffed like she’d wounded him. They were both strapped for cash—for very different reasons—so the insult carried an extra punch.
“At least give me my shirt back!” he shouted.
In a fit of rage and honest indifference—her dignity was shredded by now—Olivia stopped and peeled his tee shirt over her bra. She wadded it up and threw it at him.
“I wouldn’t get back together with you for a million dollars !” she added for good measure. She poked him in the chest again, also for good measure, and stomped off toward her car.
Chuck pulled his tee shirt back on. “Baby, there’s no price high enough!” he said as Olivia sank into her seat and cranked the engine.
She lowered her window and threw her middle finger in the air as she drove away, flipping off the whole scene in part as a final act of solidarity with Chuck Walsh because for once he was right: there was no price high enough.