Twenty-Six
Leah
C ARTER MATHESON SEX TAPE!!
For the thousandth time, I stared down at the caption, printed in bold offensive letters, across the magazine cover. Beneath the title was an image of Carter in bed with… me. Parts of our bodies were blurred out with these ridiculous looking stars. But it was painfully obvious it was us, though the actual image wasn’t in the best condition.
“She’s torturing herself right now, Rome,” hissed Melanie, outside the bathroom door. “You have to do something about this video!”
Huh.
I didn’t know they were talking again.
And was that… was that cellulite on my thighs?
No, no, they must have added that in.
Fuckers.
“Well, if you can’t stop the video from circulating, then maybe you can find out who’s responsible for putting it out there! This is illegal!” She listened to his response before growling out, “What kind of person anonymously posts up a celebrity sex tape without wanting to get paid? That’s bullshit. You tell Carter to give her a call and sort this mess out.”
I wondered just then what Carter was thinking.
Would he call?
Would I answer?
She knocked on the bathroom door after getting off the phone with him.
“Leah,” she said sweetly, “please, open this door.”
I was in the tub, soaking among raspberry scented bubbles. The magazine itself was positioned on the toilet, facing me. I stared at it for minutes on end, hardly listening to Melanie’s pleas.
“Seriously, babe, I know it’s bad, but you can’t go through this alone.”
I sniffed and rubbed my eyes. Not crying. Just… you know, the soap got in my eyes, so… yeah.
“I have to open this door, you know,” she continued. “You’ve been quiet too long, and I don’t want to find out you’ve killed yourself.”
I wouldn’t kill myself over something like this, but I wanted to dig a hole to the centre of the earth and hide out there for a few years.
A minute later, the door clicked open and she strode in, holding a knife she’d used to jiggle the lock. She set it down and stood there, hands on her hips, looking at me buried under layers of half a bottle’s worth of bubble bath.
“You alright?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, absently gathering a stack of bubbles together. “I mean, the whole of North America has probably seen my bare ass, but, you know, that’s life, right?”
“It’s a very nice bare ass,” she replied on a high voice, trying to make me feel better.
“Yeah, it is,” I acknowledged, trying to believe in her bullshit.
“I mean, you look like you did squats with that ass.”
“I didn’t.”
She took a seat on the toilet and snatched the magazine. She gave it another look over before tossing it out the bathroom door. I felt a little panicked. Staring at it seemed to viciously add to my need to torment myself, and without it, I didn’t have a logical excuse to keep at it.
“So, you have a sex tape,” Melanie went on with a shrug. “Who cares? So do half the celebrities out there.”
I stared at her emptily. “I’m not a celebrity, which makes this worse. I don’t hide out in my mansion with my crew of other rich famous friends. I’m in normal-people-ville, and I have a target on the back of my head. Everyone in this town will have heard of me by now. I’ve had to unplug the damn phone so it’d stop ringing, and worst of all, I can’t even face Marlena and Harold about this crap because of how freaking awkward it’ll be.”
She stared at me sympathetically. “It’ll blow over, Leah.”
“Not anytime soon.”
She was silent for a moment. Then, “Can I ask you something?”
I shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
“Why didn’t you take Carter back? I mean, if he’s the one telling you for once that he wants more, how can you turn the other cheek?”
I sighed. “Because I’m scared. I don’t want to love and feel pain again.”
She pursed her lips in thought. “But that’s what love is, right? It’s painful and beautiful.”
“Then why aren’t you with Rome? He broke up with his fluff Alicia.”
“Alyssa,” she corrected with a look of disgust.
“Whatever.”
“I’m not with Rome because he’s a materialistic asshole now,” she explained simply.
“Is that right?”
“Yep.”
“Liar.”
She rolled her eyes. “This isn’t about me, anyway. It’s about you shoving your soulmate out of your life after he’s done something you’d been longing for him to do since you were ten years old.”
“He’s too late.”
“Yet you slept with him.”
I exhaled miserably. “Yeah, I slept with him.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to feel that connection again.”
“So, then, you led him on.”
My eyes narrowed at her. “I led him on? I definitely didn’t feel like that.”
“This is what he did to you for a long time, right? The whole friends-with-benefits thing. He wanted to have a piece of you, but he was too scared to have all of you. So then you’d have this amazing sex where you felt so close to each other, and then, when the world came back on, he didn’t want anything more than friendship.”
“Get to the point.”
With a sad smile, she said, “You’ve turned into him.”
Ouch.
“Shots fired, Mel,” I whispered.
She looked guilty. “I’m sorry, but you know you get only honesty with me, right?”
I swallowed hard. “I know.”
“I can feed you bullshit—”
“No, I need to hear this, too.”
I blinked back my stinging tears again. Stupid soap.
With another sniff, I looked away from her, staring mindlessly at a spot on the tile wall.
Had I really turned into him?
When the silence got to be too much, she stood up and left me alone.
*
Did I watch the sex tape?
Of course.
And I was pleasantly surprised by how non-explicit it really was. I mean, sure you could see us through the blinds, but the view was pretty far away, and when the person did try and zoom up, it got blurry.
I cringed at myself wearing the trucker hat, riding Carter slowly. Thank God you couldn’t hear words.
My chest tightened when I saw his hands moving up my bare back. It looked so sensual and affectionate. When I had bent down to kiss him, he’d wrapped his arms around me, and it looked almost like we were cuddling for a moment.
Until he started pounding me with his enormous dick.
Sigh.
I watched it only once, grateful they hadn’t at least caught our first session together. There were a lot of nude pictures of Carter, and he’d hidden from the spotlight since it had come out.
Articles of Molly hit the magazine stands too. Melanie came home with the latest one. The cover had a lightning bolt shooting through it and on one side there was a distraught looking Carter, and on the other, there was a constipated looking Molly. The caption above read, “Rockstar Heartbreak, the Beat of Love is Over for These Two.”
The beat of love?
Vomit.
Could you be any cheesier?
And then, lo and behold, there was a school picture of me below. Of course it had to be my worst one. God forbid they pick the more photogenic pictures. No, they had to riddle my articles with crap shots of me.
Rome was correct.
They had leafed through my entire life story, right down to every ugly detail.
I avoided it like the plague, and after a few weeks, it really did die down the way Rome had predicted. Dave was no longer needed, and the money I’d been given to tide me over had run out.
I was officially on my own now.
The days passed.
So many days.
Until I could walk around without being recognized or hounded.
Until I could finally breathe and attempt to put my life together.
I found a job, steered clear of the news, and distracted myself.
There was a light at the end of the tunnel, after all.
Shame the tunnel was lonely.