7. Marc
Marc
“C ould you pass me a piece of mango?” Serena asked. “I’m too tired to move.”
Marc picked up a slice with his fingers—they had no cutlery—and held it to her lips, wiping away a dribble of juice with a thumb and licking it.
Serena was one of only a handful of women he’d grown to care for since he left Abundance.
Sometimes, he wished she weren’t engaged to Owen, but other times, he was glad they were just friends because he’d never love any woman the way he loved Phae.
The two women were very different. With Serena, what you saw was what you got, while Phae was a Pandora’s box of surprises.
What felt like a lifetime ago but in reality was probably less than an hour, their captors had moved them to a different room and finally switched out the rope binding their hands and ankles.
Now they were handcuffed. The metal bracelet circled Marc’s left wrist and attached to a length of chain, and the chain in turn was fastened securely to a wooden post in the wall.
Serena’s position was a mirror image. Had Havana chosen sides deliberately, knowing Marc was left-handed and Serena favoured her right?
Marc wasn’t sure the collective had planned that thoroughly.
When he’d complained about the single mattress in the middle of the room, Havana had actually apologised and said they’d have brought two if they’d realised Marc and Serena’s on-screen hookups didn’t extend to real life.
Why did so many people believe everything they saw on TV?
Marc tried giving the chain a tug, and although the single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling swayed, the post held firm.
“I wouldn’t,” Serena warned. “I think that post’s holding the roof up.”
“Wouldn’t that be ironic? If they’re not planning to murder us, but we die of head injuries?”
“Can we not talk about death?”
“You want another piece of mango?”
“Not really.”
But Marc offered a sliver anyway, and she ate it.
Was it breakfast? Lunch? Dinner? He’d lost all sense of time.
Every minute felt like a year. They’d spent most of a day travelling, he thought, and then recorded take after take of their hostage video.
Havana seemed to fancy himself as a director as he fussed over the lighting and instructed Serena to “look upset, more upset, no, not like that, we don’t want people thinking we’re monsters. ”
Earlier, the blonde had brought a plate of rice, fried tofu, and banana slices—basic, but not as basic as the slop buckets in two corners of the room.
Marc had experienced worse on camping trips with Booker, but Serena was mortified about the situation, and if these assholes had rigged up hidden cameras, he’d sue their asses off in court, from the afterlife if necessary.
“So, what else do you want to talk about?” he asked. There was no point in shouting for help. Havana had told them to scream as much as they liked—there was nobody around to hear.
“Your email password?”
Damn, he’d walked right into that one.
“I think I’d prefer the fractured skull.”
“C’mon… Phae always comes first?”
“Her idea of a joke. I was out hunting with her older brother one day, miles from home and creature comforts like a phone signal. Every once in a while, we’d pick up a bar or two, not enough to make an actual call, but emails arrived occasionally and we could sometimes send texts.
I kept getting recovery codes—you know, those security messages that mean some jerk is trying to hack your email? ”
“My email got hacked once. Whoever did it sent a message to everyone in my contacts list asking to borrow ten bucks for food. Three people sent the money, another half dozen replied to ask ‘what the heck?’, Mum ordered me groceries, Grandpa Ken called to suggest I get a proper job, and Uncle William complained about me using ‘bucks’ instead of ‘pounds’ and told me America was a colony of Great Britain and not the other way around.”
“Nobody managed to access my email—I sent Phae a text, and she switched my password for a longer one.”
“And you never changed it? That’s a bit…”
“Obsessive?”
“I was going to say ‘weird,’ but…”
“Fine, I’m still hung up on her.”
“You really haven’t seen her in a decade?”
“She’s been avoiding me.” Marc lay back on the mattress, one hand tucked behind his head in lieu of a pillow.
“And you haven’t tried, I don’t know, moving on the way she has?”
“Phae hasn’t moved on. She’s still single.”
“How do you know that?” Serena groaned. “Tell me you haven’t been stalking her BuzzHub page.”
“She doesn’t have a BuzzHub page—she doesn’t use any social media at all—but I’m still friendly with her brother and her stepmother. I’m supposed to be going to their place for Thanksgiving if we ever manage to get out of here.”
“So you might see Phae?”
“I won’t.”
“She doesn’t get an invite?”
“She does, but she sent the usual excuses and said she’d swing by the following weekend to catch up.”
“So she’s skipping Thanksgiving with her own family? That’s dedication to the cause.”
“Her tenacity is a trait I used to admire. I swear, I thought landing my first big movie deal would be something to celebrate, but she just flipped out and said she needed space to think things through. One minute, she was asking me to move to North Carolina with her, and the next…” Marc made a cutting motion across his throat with his free hand.
“North Carolina? Does she have connections there? Family?”
The mattress springs dipped as Serena settled beside him, her head propped up on a hand. At least they were friends. This situation would have been even worse with a stranger.
“No, nobody. Remember last Easter when I mentioned Phae’s father? How he came up with some bullshit inheritance condition that meant Phae had to serve in the Army?”
The drunken conversation in London was the first time in years that Marc had spoken about Phae with anyone but Kitty and Huck, and it had been surprisingly cathartic.
“I don’t understand how a father could put their child in danger like that.”
“With Rex, it was all about control. His will said that his sons would only inherit the family trust if one of his children served their country for three years first. Booker, her older brother, was two years into his three when he died, and Phae sacrificed her own dreams so her younger brother could inherit, even though she didn’t get a cent. ”
“But I thought she served three years?”
“Sons only, remember? Of course, Huck offered to split the money, but Phae turned him down. Said she was doing just fine on her Army salary and Kitty—their stepmom—should use the trust to take care of Huck and herself. That was when Phae moved to the new unit.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I must’ve replayed our conversation a million times in my head.
She told me she’d realised the Army was where she was meant to be, not LA, but I thought she’d change her mind.
I mean, we were set to be financially secure, and until Booker died, she wanted to become a biologist and study medicinal herbs.
” There wasn’t a plant or tree in rural Nebraska that Phae couldn’t identify.
“With the movie money, I could have bought us a home, paid for her college tuition, made sure she never had to work, but no—she decided she’d rather run around and shoot at stuff.
Two weeks later, her engagement ring arrived in the mail. ”
Did Marc sound bitter? That’s because he was.
He’d offered her everything she’d ever said she wanted, and she’d thrown it all back in his face.
Her actions were proof that you couldn’t choose who you loved.
A thousand times, he’d told himself to move on and forget her, but his heart wouldn’t let him.
“Did she discuss it with you first? North Carolina? Her change in career plans?”
He shook his head.
“Then maybe the relationship had run its course?” Serena said gently, squeezing his hand in sympathy.
“That’s what her note said.” It had arrived with the ring.
“That we were at a crossroads. She didn’t want to change direction, so she couldn’t ask me to either, but she’d always care for me.
I tried to quit the movie, but my attorney said the contract was airtight and advised me not to throw away everything I’d worked for.
Honestly, I thought Phae would come to her senses and return home once she’d gotten the wild hair out of her system, but she never did.
” Marc bit out a laugh. “For years, I kept the same private cell number just in case she reconsidered, but then a stalker got ahold of it and started calling me three hundred times a day.”
“Yikes.”
“There were texts too. Photos.” Marc grimaced at the memory. “What’s the female equivalent of a dick pic?”
“Ugh,” Serena said, but her lips twitched. “A clit pic?”
“Does that really rhyme?”
“I guess not. A…flap snap?”
“Can we change the subject?”
The phone was gone, but there was still an email pinned to the top of his account on the off chance Phae chose to log in and snoop.
He’d written all the things he wished he could tell her in person—a rambling essay of apologies, life updates, and regrets that he added to whenever he’d had a drink or two.
Meanwhile, her cell number had been out of service for a decade, and his emails to her bounced back.
“What was Phae like growing up?” Serena asked. “As a person, I mean.”
“Strong. Wilful.” Another laugh. “A better actor than me. When we were kids, she was a real tomboy, always climbing trees and ripping holes in her pants. Her dad used to take us hunting, but when she hit her teens and turned out to be a better shot than he was, he decided she should stay at home and focus on more traditional hobbies for a woman. Cooking, sewing, that type of thing.”
“From what you’ve said, I can’t see her enjoying that.”
“She hated it. She started baking laxatives into his food. Not enough to send him sprinting to the bathroom after dinner, but enough that he thought he had IBS. The man went through four doctors and even had a camera stuck up his ass, but none of them ever worked out what was wrong.”
“Wasn’t that a little mean, doing that to her own father?”
“If you’d met Rex Roebuck, you would’ve done the same.
And when she wasn’t sneaking over to my place at night, she used to stay up altering his clothes.
Nothing drastic, just half an inch here and there so he figured he was putting on weight.
He hired a personal trainer and shit himself out jogging one day. ”
“That’s… She has the mind of an evil genius.”
“Yeah, she does.”
“I’m really sorry it didn’t work out.”
“So am I. But now when I look back on things, I see that we were doomed from the day her father died.”
“The way you speak about him, I would’ve thought his passing was a good thing.”
“It would have been if her older brother hadn’t killed Rex and himself in the process.”
“ What? ”
“I’m not one hundred percent certain, but maybe eighty-five.”
“What happened?”
“Rex was grooming Booker to take over the family business, after he served his three years, of course. They were on their way home from North Platte after a meeting.”
“What kind of business?”
“Real estate. He started out as an estate planning lawyer, then discovered it was more profitable if he owned the property himself. In New York, he would’ve been called a slumlord, but in Nebraska, he was just a ‘prominent local businessman.’ Anyhow, Booker was driving that night when their vehicle hit a tree. ”
“You think Booker crashed deliberately?”
“The Army screwed with his head. He should have been seeing a therapist for his PTSD, but Rex didn’t believe in therapy. Well, apart from conversion therapy, which meant Booker was so far into the closet that you’d have needed a search party to find him.”
“That’s messed up.”
“Welcome to my life. Booker was never going to be who his father wanted him to be—a loving husband with an obedient wife and five kids to carry on the family line. Phae wasn’t maternal, and Huck gets nervous talking to new people, especially women.”
“What did Rex think of you?”
“He thought Phae could do better. He only agreed to pay for her college on the condition that I stayed behind in Abundance. I would have done it too, for her.”
“What happened to the company after he died?”
“Phae helped Kitty to sell Rex’s car collection to fund renovations. A manager runs things, and they haven’t put the rent up a cent since the day that asshole died. A final ‘fuck you’ to the man we all grew to hate, although Kitty would never use those exact words.”
“Phae sounds like quite a woman.”
“She was. Still is, probably. Fuck, I hated the idea of her joining the Army. She told me to relax, that she’d become a culinary specialist or work in logistics and I should follow my own dreams for three years while she fulfilled her duty. She used to send me rent money.”
The memory seemed absurd now. He’d written her a cheque with interest once he began earning enough himself, but she’d never cashed it.
And nor had she become a military cook. She’d always been cagey about exactly what she did in the Army, but it was something to do with human intelligence.
Then one of her colleagues had let slip that they’d been shot at, and that had led to a fight.
Marc had flown home to LA early, angry and hurt.
Maybe that was why he’d signed the damn movie contract? He hadn’t been thinking straight.
Serena tucked an arm around him. Nothing suggestive, just an offer of comfort from a good woman who’d become a good friend.
“I know from experience how hard it is to move on, but I hope the grief gets easier to take.”
Grief? Yes, that fit. Phae was still alive, but their relationship was dead in the ground.
“I’m glad you got a second chance with Owen.”
“You’re a good guy, Marc. Fate will bring you happiness someday.”
“We should try to sleep. Fuck knows what will happen next.”
“Will you put your fingers in your ears if I use the bucket?”
“Of course.”
Marc did as promised and closed his eyes as well. If a screenwriter tried turning this into a movie script, it would get tossed out for being too farfetched.