Chapter Three
After slipping out the back door of the diner and semi-successfully dodging the press—there was a lone photographer at the corner smoking a cigarette who got a few shots off before they noticed him—Hannah insisted on going back to her apartment alone. She needed to call her manager and her parents and Jackson and—
But she didn’t make it to her apartment. The cab pulled up in front of her building and was immediately swarmed by scandal-hungry paparazzi, the flash of their cameras blinding her as Liv and Jennifer tried to block the windows. Hannah ducked her head into her lap, folding her arms over her face, and forced herself to breathe. This was madness.
This is what you get for thinking you can lie and get away with it. There’s a reason he was known as the ‘bad boy.’ Idiot.
She hardly heard Liv give the cab driver new instructions, directing him to drop Jennifer off at her apartment in Two Bridges before continuing on to Brooklyn. Hannah wanted to argue. There had been a mistake. These photographers didn’t understand—she was just a Broadway actress. Broadway actresses didn’t get hounded by the press.
Unless they’re caught up in a cheating scandal with a former boy band member about to launch a worldwide reunion tour.
Shit.
As the cab slowed to a stop outside Liv and Daemon’s Brooklyn townhouse, the front door swung upon, the imposing figure of Daemon Chase filling up the opening, though he looked decidedly less imposing with a toddler clinging to his leg and an infant strapped to his chest. He held the door open for them and swept his gaze over the busy street before shutting it behind them.
Liv lifted the baby out of the carrier her husband wore, cooing into the bundle’s dark hair and chubby cheeks while Hannah followed behind, still too stunned to know what to do next. She’d tried to call Jackson from the cab but it had gone straight to voicemail. Her text messages were left unread.
Daemon pulled her into a side hug. “Are you alright?”
“I don’t understand what’s happening,”
she said for what felt like the hundredth time.
“I already talked to Micah. He’s on his way,”
Daemon said.
Hannah and Daemon shared a manager. It was how she’d met Liv originally.
“This will blow over. I’m sure by tomorrow—”
Liv stopped as Daemon shook his head, rolling his lips between his teeth. Hannah sank onto their couch, a squeaky stuffed duck protesting beneath her.
The doorbell rang and Daemon excused himself. “That’ll be Micah.”
Liv sat down next to Hannah, bouncing her youngest in her arms. “Are you alright?”
“I’m waiting for the anger to hit. I should be angry, right?”
But all she felt was numb. She’d trusted Jackson, fallen for his stories about cleaning up his reputation, tied her public image to his. It was the least she could do after he’d helped her pay for the expensive outpatient eating disorder treatment she’d needed, but now—
“I’ve been trying to get that little shit’s publicist on the phone for the last twenty minutes,”
Micah said as he blew into the room.
“Shit!”
Liv and Daemon’s oldest, a bright-eyed toddler with curly dark brown hair, echoes, clapping happily.
Daemon scowled at his manager as he turned up the volume on the Bluey episode playing on the television in the corner.
“Sorry,”
Micah said. He paused to drop a kiss on Liv’s cheek. “Hi, Liv. Hannah, have you heard from him?”
“He’s not answering his phone,” she said.
“Probably for the best. We need to distance you from this.”
“How? Everyone thinks we’re dating.”
“You could make a statement. Tell the truth,”
Liv offered.
“That’ll kick up another frenzy. Right now, at least, you look sympathetic. You’re the victim.”
“They’re hounding me out of sympathy?”
Hannah asked in disbelief.
“They want a photo of the devastated girlfriend to put on their covers. And in those stories, Jackson will be the bad guy, but if you admit you lied…”
Micah shook his head.
“Right. Not an option.”
Hannah’s gaze bounced between her friends and her manager. “So what do I do?”
Micah glanced uneasily at Daemon. “I think you just have to ride it out.”
“No,”
Liv said. “They surrounded our cab outside her apartment building. She can’t go back there when they’re like this.”
“It could be days before they settle down,”
Micah said.
“A week if there are more photos that haven’t been released yet,”
Daemon added.
“A week?”
Something at the back of her mind thrashed and flailed, trying to get her attention through the detached calm settling over her, but she couldn’t give in to that now. If she did, she’d never stop panicking. She could panic later.
Micah pinched the bridge of his nose, his thumbs dragging over his closed eyes. “Daemon’s right. And with the premiere only a few weeks away, there’s a good chance Jackson’s team will feed the fire to keep him in the press.”
“You think he did this on purpose?”
Hannah’s entire body went cold, her toes turning to ice in her shoes. Daemon and Micah exchanged another one of those glances. “What? Tell me.”
“I think you should stay here for a bit,”
Micah said. “Just until this dies down and it’s safe for you to go back to your apartment.”
“How long will that be?”
Hannah asked.
“A couple days,”
Micah said.
“I’m sure they’ll move on to something else by the end of the week,”
Liv said, though Hannah could hear the way the last word of the phrase turned up, the question she was posing to her husband, the only one of them who had been through this sort of thing before. Daemon rolled his lips through his teeth again, his eyes serious and stoic.
“You think it’ll be longer?”
Hannah asked him.
“No way to tell,”
Daemon said. “They’ll move on faster, though, if they can’t find you.”
Hannah shook her head. Nothing about this made sense. That morning she’d had the usual handful of photographers who followed her from her apartment to the diner, the ones who were hoping Jackson would magically materialize by her side—he was the one they wanted a picture of. Not her.
The bundle in Liv’s arms squawked and Daemon crossed the room in two steps, taking the baby from Liv’s arms and pacifying her with his pinky finger, rocking her and whispering to her with a low rumble.
Hannah eyed the baby in Daemon’s arms, the toddler dancing in front of the television, the adoring look on her friend’s face as Liv watched Daemon care for their child—it was beautiful. And she hated that it made her stomach twist with jealousy. She couldn’t stay there for a week, watching their perfect love, their perfect family. She’d lose the feeble hold she had on her sanity.
“I can’t just hide in Brooklyn. I have auditions this week.”
She turned to Micah, desperate for someone to say something that made sense, to tell her this had all been a mistake and she could go back to her life.
“You can submit a self-tape,”
Micah said. “Given the circumstances—”
Micah’s phone dinged and he dug it out of his pocket, his nostrils flaring as he read whatever message had just come through. He shared a look with Daemon.
“It’ll be great, Han. Like a week-long sleepover,”
Liv said, ignoring the strange tension crackling between the men.
“Liv.”
The warning in Daemon’s voice was so fiercely protective it made something inside Hannah crack, a bit of the flailing panic poking through.
“More photographs were just leaked,”
Micah said.
“How much worse can it get?”
Hannah said.
“There’s a second woman. Rumors of a third,”
Micah said matter-of-factly.
“Oh. So, three times as bad then.”
The doorbell rang again, and Liv and Daemon shared a confused look. “Are you expecting anyone?”
he asked her. Liv shook her head as Daemon handed her back the baby and stalked towards the front door. He glared through the window at the side of the door, then pulled a curtain closed over it, muttering to himself.
“You must have been followed,”
he said, returning to the living room. “There are photographers outside.”
“Here?”
Hannah stood up, but then realized there was nowhere she could go, so she fell back onto the couch.
“We need to get you out of New York,”
Micah said. “Just until the premiere.”
“I can go to my parents’,”
Hannah said, swallowing down the panic and doing her best to block out the steady litany of Ben & Jerry’s flavors buzzing in the back of her head, daring her to give in. If there was ever a time to stress eat, this was it, right?
“Your parents are in a major city,”
Micah said. “They’ll find you there too.”
“I—I—I don’t have anywhere else to go,”
she said, fighting back the sudden tightness in her throat, the press of tears behind her eyes.
“I know a place,”
Daemon said, his eyes bouncing between Liv and Hannah. “My brother lives in a small town in Rhode Island. He and his wife—”
“You’ll love them!”
Liv turned to face Hannah more fully. “Jamie is a chef and his wife, Tessa, is a baker.”
“Rhode Island,”
Hannah repeated, stunned.
Liv continued on as if she hadn’t said anything. “It’s the cutest town. Farmers’ markets and beaches and town festivals. It’s where Daemon and I got married. You’ll love it.”
“More importantly, the press aren’t likely to look for you there.”
“You want me to stay with your brother and sister-in-law, who I’ve never met, for two whole weeks?”
Hannah shook her head. “I can’t—”
Liv cut in, “They’re good people. It’ll be like a mini vacation.”
By myself. Staying with people I don’t know in a place I’ve never been while the paparazzi try to hunt me down. What kind of vacation is that?
“Unless you have a better idea…”
Micah trailed off.
"No. This will blow over. I appreciate the offer, but they’re not going to run me out of my own home. It will be fine.”
∞∞∞
It wasn’t fine.
If she thought there as an intimidating number of cameras outside her apartment before, it was nothing compared to the mob waiting for her when she returned home from Liv and Daemon’s. Thankfully, Micah had accompanied her, doing his best to shield her from the relentless press of the paparazzi as he helped her move between the taxi and her apartment’s lobby. He tried, again, to convince her to leave town, but she insisted she was fine, despite the way her hands shook.
Alone in her apartment, she tried to pretend her life hadn’t imploded at the hands of a self-centered former pop star. She’d thought they were friends. That they’d grown to understand each other during their months starring together on Broadway in Bridget Jones’ Musical. Clearly, she’d been mistaken.
“Hannah, honey, what’s going on? Are you alright?”
Her mother’s worry was somehow soothing, a familiar blanket she could wrap herself in even through the distance of a phone call. Her mother seemed no more flustered by the current media storm than she had when Hannah had sulked after being stood up for Homecoming sophomore year of high school. A gentle sort of concern always tinged with this-too-shall-pass practicality.
“I’m fine, Mom.”
She searched the cabinets of her apartment for a tea bag—any tea bag—as water boiled in the kettle on the stove. “It’s all a misunderstanding.”
“Hank! She says it’s a misunderstanding!”
her mother called to her father, forgetting, once again, to move the phone away from her mouth before she shouted into the other room. “Then you and Jackson are still together?”
she asked.
Hannah hesitated. “No. We’re not together.”
Had never been together.
Would never be together.
She didn’t say that part.
“Oh, well, that’s a shame. Are you sure you’re alright? There are so many photographs of you on the television.”
“Why are you watching that?”
“How’d they get that one picture?”
her father shouted in the background.
“What picture?”
Hannah removed the tea kettle from the stove, pouring the steaming water over the tea bag at the bottom of her favorite mug, the one covered in illustrations from Peter Rabbit.
“Hank, shush,”
her mother scolded.
“What picture, Mom?”
“There was one photo on the TV that looked like you weren’t expecting them to take it,”
her mom said.
“I wasn’t expecting them to take any of the photos.”
There’d been the occasional photographer in the months since she and Jackson had debuted their fauxmance, but nothing like this. Nothing that interrupted her daily life.
It’ll all blow over. By tomorrow, they’ll move on to something else.
“There, I texted you a link. But really, honey, don’t be too hard on yourself. No one photographs particularly well before they’ve put on their makeup.”
“What are you talking about?”
Hannah put her phone on speaker and opened the link her mother had sent.
Her screen filled with an image of herself, hair knotted in a messy bun on the top of her head, in an oversized Carnegie Mellon t-shirt and tiny black shorts. The same oversized t-shirt and tiny shorts she’d slept in the night before. This was a photo of her coming out of the bathroom that morning, the camera’s flash reflecting off the mirror behind her.
“What the hell?”
she said, taking the phone and moving across the apartment to the bathroom.
“What is it? Hannah?”
her mother asked.
But Hannah couldn’t answer. She was staring at the exact angle of the photograph in her hand and there was only one way that image could have been taken—from the fire escape outside her living room window.
Someone she didn’t know had climbed her building’s fire escape to take a photograph of her through the window. Someone had sold a photograph taken of her in her own apartment without her knowledge or consent.
Cold sluiced down her spine as she pulled the curtains closed, moving feverishly from one window to the next until she’d blocked out all the daylight.
“Hannah? What’s going on? Are you okay?”
her mom asked, her calm concern morphing into something more frantic.
But Hannah was not okay.
Her apartment was no longer safe.
“Mom, I have to go,”
she said, sinking onto the couch, still staring at the photograph, so unlike the sun-soaked images of the women in Bora Bora with Jackson. They didn’t have cellulite on their thighs. She zoomed in on the image, blowing up the offending appendage until it took up the entire screen.
“Why don’t you come home for a few days?”
her mom asked. “We could get lunch at that little bistro you like on Main Street.”
No, they could not get lunch at that little bistro, because the second Hannah showed up, the place would be overrun with photographers.
“I can’t do that,”
she said. She set her phone on the coffee table and clasped her hands in her lap, as though that could stop them from shaking.
She couldn’t stay in her apartment. And she couldn’t go home to her parents. She couldn’t go anywhere.
Where the hell was she supposed to go?
And why wasn’t Jackson answering his phone? How could he do this to her?
Outside, a car horn blared and she startled, shrinking further away from the windows.
“Honey, we’re worried about you. We’re not sure you should be alone right now.”
Because the photographers had taken a picture of her in her pajamas. Because there were already hundreds of comments with words like “cow”
and “disgusting”
filling the screen beneath her picture. Because this was exactly the kind of thing that would have sent her into a weeks-long binge/restrict cycle only a short time ago.
She forced a deep breath into her lungs and blew it back out the way her therapist had taught her.
“I won’t be. I’m going to get out of the City for a while,” she said.
“Oh, that’s great. Hank, she’s going to leave the City!”
her mom shouted.
“I have to go now, Mom. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
She ended the call and slid onto the floor, ducking down behind the couch, as though that could protect her from the white noise slowly flooding her brain, the strange out-of-body sense overtaking her. She sent off a quick text to Liv.
Hannah: Alright. I’ll go. How do I get to Rhode Island?
Then she curled into a ball on her living room floor, opening her audiobook app and letting the low, soothing voice of Slade Hardcastle wash over her.
From The Lady’s Knights by A K Wild, narrated by Slade Hardcastle
Lady Windtorn was unaccustomed to such attention. Her handmaidens had tsked and tittered behind their hands at the ample spread of their lady’s backside. “Such a shame she is so gluttonous,”
they’d say when they thought she could not hear.
But she had heard.
A lady should be petite,”
they’d say. “A lady should be docile.”
But Lady Windtorn was done being docile, and she had never been petite. If her alleged gluttony offended, then she would make herself the most offensive. Then, at least, she would not be forced to marry a man for the protection his name offered despite his distaste for her. If her fiancé could bed a serving girl the night of their betrothal ball without a care for discretion, then she could make herself unmarriageable.
That is how Lady Windtorn found herself one night the subject of the most enthusiastic affection she had ever experienced. These were no handmaidens who had laid her out on their refectory table, and her undressing had not been the perfunctory work of someone paid to worry more about the garments than their owner.
No, when Lady Windtorn lay back on the hard wood and allowed herself to be admired, it was under the gaze of a throng of knights. Sturdily built, war weary men who had no use for petite, docile creatures. Men who reveled in her softness, who devoted themselves wholly to her pleasure. Men who were happy to watch, to share, if it meant their lady was all the more satisfied for it. Men who followed the command of one alone, Sir Llewellyn, and he had made his command quite plain: they were to tend to their lady’s every need.
Let them call me gluttonous, she thought as she took Sir Llewellyn between her thighs.
“You needn’t fear, my lady,”
the towering knight said as he worked himself into her heat. “You are ours now. I will protect you.”