14. Lauren
CHAPTER 14
LAUREN
L auren leapt out of bed the second her alarm went off. It was early, but she didn’t want to start her jog feeling groggy. She had spent too much of the night planning what she was going to say to Wesley on their morning jog, and she was already running on about three hours of sleep. For one, she knew she wanted to apologize without admitting fault, and that would be a delicate balance. Not something to attempt after only being awake for ten minutes.
She went over and over what she wanted to say to him as she did her stretches and warm-up exercises. Just because she didn’t want to outright lie to her mom — and she didn’t feel wrong in having that boundary — it didn’t mean she hadn’t made any mistakes. She should have been more careful at the ball in the way she interacted with Wesley. Her mom wouldn’t have noticed their relationship if Lauren had been more careful and been less friendly or maybe even less flirtatious with Wesley.
She had stressed herself out most of the night, worrying that she had ruined everything, and she needed to talk herself back down before confronting Wesley again. When she’d gotten her hair just the way she wanted it, she picked out her most flattering workout clothes and went looking for her tennis shoes. She wanted to look nice, thinking that might win him over if nothing else did.
By the time she left her apartment, her heart was already beating as hard as it would be after the morning jog. But she pushed herself forward the way she always did. She jogged her normal route, expecting Wesley to come up alongside her any minute now, but he never did. Once or twice she glanced behind herself, thinking maybe he was just keeping a distance because he was still angry. There was definitely someone jogging behind her. It just wasn’t Wesley. Lauren stopped at a park bench to let him pass.
But the man behind her didn’t pass her by. Instead, he stopped, did some stretches of his own, and waited for her to resume the jog. She was about to head into a more secluded offshoot of the trail, and she wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to follow. So she called to him. “Are you following me?”
To her surprise, the man nodded. He was a young man, maybe in his twenties, and clearly in pretty good shape. There was no way she was going to outrun him if he decided to give chase, but the fact that he had answered so clearly and without hesitation made her second-guess her own worries. Then she remembered what her mother had told her the night before. Anne felt Wesley could not adequately protect Lauren if he was in a relationship with her. She felt emotional involvement would only be a distraction. And Wesley had warned Lauren that her mother would likely try to end the relationship.
“Who are you?” she asked the man behind her.
He approached slowly. “I’m Ben Sharp,” he said. “I’m your new security detail.”
“Did my mom send you?”
Ben nodded, and Lauren wanted to scream. Not at Ben. He hadn’t done anything wrong. She wanted to scream because Wesley had been right, and she had been wrong. Her mother was capable of doing something like this. She’d separated the two of them. And Lauren could almost hear Anne giving Wesley the talk about staying away from her daughter or else.
Poor Ben looked confused. “Were you expecting someone else?”
“Yes,” Lauren snapped and then felt bad again. “I mean I had a bodyguard I was comfortable with, and I thought I’d be jogging with him this morning. But apparently, my mom doesn’t want me to be comfortable.”
“Sorry.” Ben shrugged and looked genuinely sympathetic.
Lauren sighed. “It’s not your fault. You’re just doing your job, and actually, I should thank you for that, shouldn’t I?” She sat on the bench and slouched. The jog suddenly seemed like too much work for the amount of energy she had. “Have a seat,” she said to Ben.
He sat tentatively.
Lauren held her head in her hands and groaned. “She really is going to meddle with everything just long enough to ruin my whole life, isn’t she? I’ll have to fake my death and change my identity to get away from her. I’ll have to wipe my digital footprint and move to somewhere more unplugged. Say goodbye to New York, Lauren,” she lamented. “Say goodbye to America. I mean, that’s the only way to deal with someone who just doesn’t listen, right?”
Ben fidgeted, clearly unsure what to do with the information he hadn’t asked for but was being given anyway. “I’m… not sure,” he said at last.
“Don’t worry about it.” She stood and stretched. “Let’s finish the jog anyway. And don’t worry so much about hanging back.”
Back at the apartment, Ben insisted on riding up with Lauren and sweeping her home. It felt strange to have anyone other than Wesley looking under her bed and in her closet, going out onto her balcony to ensure no one was waiting out there. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but he wasn’t who she wanted to protect her. She was furious that such an important decision about her current life wasn’t even hers to make.
When he was finished sweeping her place, Lauren thanked him and sent him on his way. Then she made herself breakfast and proceeded to mope for a good part of the morning. She felt awful and angry. She wanted nothing more than to confront her mom about this, but she resisted the urge.
After several hours, though, she couldn’t resist any longer. She picked up her phone and dialed her mom, who couldn’t even be bothered to answer her cell. She probably had it on silent or do-not-disturb like always. Lauren paced around her apartment for several more minutes before she finally decided to call her mom’s office. Someone picked up right away. It was her mom’s assistant.
“Anne Bartlett’s office, this is Maria speaking. How can I help you?”
“This is Lauren Bartlett. I want to know what the hell is going on with my personal bodyguard. He didn’t show up this morning.”
There was some shuffling of papers while Maria checked over the information she clearly had. “I don’t see a no-show in the books here. Are you certain security wasn’t there? Maybe he was just extra discreet. We requested that the company’s most reliable man be assigned to you. If he didn’t show, we should let his boss know, so she can check in on him.”
“Security wasn’t a no-show,” Lauren clarified. “Wesley Pierce was. He was supposed to be my bodyguard. Instead I wound up with some guy named Ben.”
“Ah.” More papers shuffled in the background. “Yes, Ben has been assigned to you during the day from now on. Wesley has been reassigned. We’re sorry it didn’t work out with him.”
“It was working out just fine!” Lauren shouted into the phone. “Mom just freaked out because I liked the bodyguard too much. I want him back, please.”
Maria took a deep breath. “Ms. Bartlett, I wish I could help you here, but you have to know that these decisions are not mine to make. You’ll have to contact your mother about it.”
“That’s what I’m doing right now,” Lauren said, her frustration becoming more and more audible in her voice.
“I mean her cell, Ms. Bartlett.”
“Just call me Lauren, will you? I’m not my mom, and every day I’m more grateful for that.”
Maria slowed her speech as though she were talking to a misbehaving child. “Lauren, then. Your mother has requested that she not be interrupted with calls today, and she gave me no exception to that request. If you want to speak to her, I recommend calling her directly. I’m sorry. There’s nothing more I can do.”
She was right, of course. It was about time Lauren stopped taking her anger out on someone who didn’t have the power to help her. But after she hung up with Maria, she started pacing again. It wasn’t right to just blame her mom for Wesley being reassigned. Maybe he had requested it. Maybe he didn’t like her as much now that she had let their relationship out of the bag.
Well, wondering about it all afternoon wasn’t going to do much to confirm her suspicions or comfort her. She picked her phone back up and called Wesley. It took him way too long to answer for her liking, considering the flips her stomach kept doing with every second that passed.
“Howdy, Lauren,” he said when he picked up the phone.
“Wesley. Hi. I had kind of a weird morning. I missed you on my jog, for one. Was wondering whether you know what’s going on. I have my suspicions, but I wanted to ask you just to be sure we’re on the same page.”
“Well…” His voice was quiet, subdued, and far too serious, which worried her more than a little. “I mean, it’s probably exactly what you think it is. I’ve been reassigned to your mother. I’m on Anne Bartlett’s personal security detail, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed.”
Lauren was shaking. “How could she?” she murmured, mostly to herself, but she had no doubt Wesley had heard her. First, Anne had sabotaged Lauren’s acting career, and now she was sabotaging Lauren’s love life. Did she not want her daughter to have any future at all? No chance for a career or a family even? “I can’t believe it,” she added.
“Believe it,” Wesley said. His voice was colder than she’d expected it to be. “Seriously, Lauren, what did you think was going to happen? I told you this would be bad. I’m just grateful I was only reassigned rather than fired. This could have been so much worse.”
Lauren’s heart sank. More than ever, she wanted to straighten things out and apologize. She hadn’t meant for him to suffer consequences like this. It had been thoughtless, careless for her to act the way she did. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am. You were right, and I should have listened to you. I shouldn’t have trusted my mom to be reasonable about any of this. Why did I? She hasn’t been reasonable in the past. It was… so stupid of me.”
“I’m not going to argue with you there,” Wesley said, and his tone made her want to cry. She supposed he was trying to sound angry, but to her, he just sounded hurt.
She sat down at her breakfast bar with her phone. “I feel like we need to talk, Wesley. Can we meet somewhere? You pick the place.”
“What’s there to talk about?”
That one sentence hurt Lauren more than all the rest put together. Somehow, she’d thought there was a chance she could repair the damage her mom had done to her relationship with Wesley. She’d been certain it wasn’t that fragile, but now she was starting to doubt herself. She cleared her throat and fought her panic. “Our… our relationship. Us. I thought we could figure this out together, you and I. What we have… it’s too good to throw away over something so small. Isn’t it?”
On the other end of the line, she heard Wesley sigh. He was irritated, clearly. “Look,” he said after a moment of silence. “What we had… It was just a bit of fun, wasn’t it? It wasn’t that serious. It was a risk we both knew we were taking, and we lost the gamble in the end. Although, I think I potentially lost a bit more than you did. We’ll see how my boss deals with the situation after this job is through.”
“But—”
“Don’t worry about it, Lauren. I don’t blame you entirely. It was just as much my fault as it was yours. okay? So relax. The world isn’t coming to an end or anything.”
Except, to Lauren, it definitely felt like the world was coming to an end. The last two weeks of her life had been filled with more happiness than all the rest. Because of Wesley. She’d fallen for him for real. She even caught herself thinking about their future together, from time to time. But he hated her now. Even if he didn’t come right out and say it, she knew he hated her.
“Okay,” she whispered into the phone. “I think I get it now. I must have misjudged the situation. Well, I hope things don’t fall apart for you anyway. Thanks for the good time, I guess.”
“Sure thing,” he said, and he hung up the phone.
Lauren sat in stunned silence for several minutes after that. Then the idea that everything had just fallen apart hit her like a ton of bricks. In one evening, over one stupid fight with her mom, she had lost the one good thing in her life. Finally, she broke all the way down. She cried and cried, mentally berating herself the whole time. Why did she invariably screw up everything that went her way? She felt like such an idiot.
She tried to watch a movie to get her mind off things, but nothing was really sinking in. So she turned off her monitor and wandered into her bedroom. Without bothering to brush her teeth, change into her PJs, or turn out the lights in her living room, she climbed into bed, curled into a ball under her covers and continued to cry like a baby.
She felt betrayed in so many ways — not just by her mom, but by Wesley, too. Somehow, he’d made her believe that what they had was special, that it was something real that could last. It hadn’t been just a bit of fun to her, and she felt so humiliated that she hadn’t been able to properly read the situation. She was usually so good at reading other people, but Wesley had fooled her good. Well, she wasn’t about to let him do it again. She was done with having ‘a bit of fun’ with anyone, especially anyone connected to her mom in any way. She grabbed her phone from her night stand and immediately blocked his number.
There. Let him try to fool her again. She would show him that she wasn’t going to allow him to break her heart twice. She was done with him, done with games, and done with being thrown away over one stupid mistake, one misstep at a party.
“I hate you,” she muttered to her darkened phone. But whether she was talking to Wesley or herself was a question she wasn’t really prepared to answer.