Chapter 2 #2
“I had thought about it,” he said. “But that scout who came to look at me had a different idea. I’m old already. If I spent more time playing collegiately, then I’d be even older when I put my name in for the draft. Nobody’s going to choose a grandpa for their team.”
“How old are you?” I asked. “Thirty-six? Forty-one?”
“Hell, no! Do I look like that?” he demanded, turning on me incredulously. “I’m twenty-five. How old are you?”
“What do you think?”
He scratched his chin. “It’s hard to tell. You could be between eighteen and thirty.”
“That’s true,” I agreed, nodding.
“You’re not going to give me an answer?”
“I’m also twenty-five.”
“We’re learning more about each other,” he said. He reached over to my side of the car, like he’d done before. Once again, I didn’t flinch away and it was a good thing because he only wanted to shake my hand. “Callum Frazier,” he said.
“Rainey Desjardins,” I answered.
“Your name is as fancy as your job. Entourage,” he said, putting an accent on it. “How’d you get started in that, anyway?”
“My story’s a lot like yours.”
“Oh, yeah?” he asked. “You got involved in a gang and almost went to prison?”
“I meant the other parts.”
He let that go. “Why would your boss take off and leave you? Were you in some kind of money dispute?”
Was that the reason? “Damian does owe me,” I mused.
At the end of our trip, which Millie called a “junket,” he was supposed to have given me and Sage five thousand each.
But I knew that the financial situation had been getting a little tight.
Sales of his new album weren’t going that well, despite all the clubbing and promoting we’d been doing.
Last night—or was it the night before? Anyway, our first event in Indianapolis had been at a party that his label had sponsored with him as the host, and not too many people had shown up.
He had been plenty pissed off, although he had tried to hide it, and Millie had been worried.
We hadn’t stayed there for very long before bouncing off to another location and then we’d ended the evening at 20 Grand.
When I thought of the place, I remembered purple lights but I also remembered a hand creeping up my thigh…
no, that had been in the car, and Damian had laughed.
Callum was still talking about money. “Does that guy owe you enough that leaving you behind makes sense? You can still track him down once you’re home and get him to pay.”
I thought about going to the oversized door of the big house where I’d lived in Los Angeles and pounding on it, demanding my money. “He had given me cash along the way. It was in my purse that disappeared from the club.”
“That’s why you don’t have a phone. Or a wallet?” he guessed, and I nodded, although that part wasn’t true. I’d had cash in my bag but no actual wallet, like other people did with credit cards and old gift cards and faded receipts.
“Do you have a contract for the entourage?” he asked. “Any kind of guarantee?”
“No. So it’s really no harm, no foul for them to leave me here. Is that a football term?”
“Foul? Sure,” he answered. He seemed ready to continue asking me about Damian and working for him, but I didn’t want that.
I talked more about football instead. “Do you play a specific—what’s it called, a position?”
“I do. I’m on the offensive line,” he told me. “I guess you never did a lot of sports yourself.”
“No, but I go to the gym a lot.” Damian liked us toned but also skinny.
I was hungry now because it had been a while since I’d eaten, but I was able to deal with it because I was used to the gnawing feeling in my stomach and the dizziness that signaled a lack of food.
He’d had Millie watch me and Sage and report to him on our diets.
“I could run so fast from that dog because of Pilates and spin.”
“There are a couple of strays in my neighborhood and it’s bad enough that I called about them. No one seems to care.”
“I would have cared if it had bitten me.” I rubbed my leg, remembering the pain and the pressure when a dog wouldn’t let go.
“They’re scared of me,” he remarked.
I didn’t blame them. It was probably good for a football person to be so large, so tall and oversized.
He looked as if he also got to the gym a lot, like he’d done this morning—had that been this morning?
I considered, and yes, it had been. It was when he’d given me the orange juice bottle that I still carried in my hand.
“What do you do on the offensive line?” I asked.
For the rest of the way to his house, he explained his job to me.
He was one of the guys who stood in front of the quarterback to protect him.
Callum had to block the defense so his quarterback had time to throw the ball, and he had to push those defenders out of the way so that the running players on his team could move down the field.
He had to be strong and heavy, but also quick to react and agile.
“In terms of how fast I could get away from a dog, though? I don’t like my chances,” he told me.
“Your job sounds pretty fun,” I noted.
He laughed, a deep “heh-heh-heh” that also made me smile. “It is fun. I missed it a lot in the years that I wasn’t playing. I didn’t go back to football for the money, although that would be good to have. I went back for the love of it.”
“That’s nice.” It really was lucky for him to have that chance in Michigan.
“Do you love styling?”
“Huh?” I questioned.
“You said that you were a stylist,” he reminded me.
“Oh.” That career was more aspirational right now. “I mostly did it with Millie and Sage,” I explained. “Sometimes Damian, too. Sage was part of the entourage with me and she was extremely difficult to dress. They let me pick their clothes and jewelry, and do their makeup.”
That made me wonder how long it had been since I’d checked my own makeup…
I did remember that the fight in the bathroom at 20 Grand had kicked off around mirror access, but I didn’t have a clear picture in my mind of how I’d looked when I’d seen my reflection there.
And since that time, it had been hours and hours.
I flipped down the visor to see myself now.
Oh. Shoot.
“You’re a little worse for wear,” Callum commented.
“I am,” I agreed. My eye makeup had smudged, but not with a cute, deliberate, morning-after effect.
The iris parts of my eyes were very dark, and the black gunk smeared in the hollows around them made me look like a demon.
That was even worse because the white parts of my eyes were so bloodshot, probably from a lack of sleep but also due to Sage’s pills.
Those had made me very thirsty, which also showed in my face.
My lips were cracked to the point that they’d bled and my skin looked pale and papery.
My hair wasn’t good, either. It was golden color—usually.
Right now, it was a lot darker, probably from sweat and oil.
I had dirt on my arms and legs, black marks and generalized gray grime, and I also had cuts and a few bruises.
Some of those were old but my body makeup had worn off, and some were new from the night before.
My dress was crumpled and had that black streak on it from the ATV, and of course, I only had the hotel slippers to wear on my feet.
One of the slippers was bloody because the cut must have opened up.
It had been a rough twenty-four hours.
“Do you have a shower at your house?” I wondered, and he said that he did and I could use it.
That would feel good and I could also drink some of the water as I bathed.
I wondered if he had food to share but decided that I couldn’t ask right now, not when I looked so awful—except, my stomach had lurched at the thought of eating.
I would tackle that problem when I had cleaned up and was wearing…
that was another problem, because he hadn’t seemed to like seeing my boob when I’d accidentally exposed myself before.
He might have been gay, so my tits held no power over him.
He also could have been religious or super moral, so he wouldn’t like me to walk around naked in his house.
That was a bummer, because being naked was a great way to win friends.
But there were other things I could try to get him on my side, techniques I’d used on Damian that had worked for me.
We’d driven in a lot of traffic when we had first left the downtown area, but it thinned out as we got back to the neighborhood where he lived.
It looked even scruffier here than it had in the soft light of morning and I did see a couple of dogs lurking around.
One was in a yard, barking as we went by, but the other was standing in front of an abandoned building and sniffing.
It stared at the car as we passed and I avoided eye contact.
Unfortunately, we didn’t pass my shoes and when we got out in his driveway, I didn’t see them anywhere in the street. I couldn’t think of how far I had run last night when I was being chased—it had felt like miles and then Callum had shoved me into the back of his car.
“I can clean the blood out of here,” I mentioned, glancing at that area. “I bet that I can.”
“Later,” he answered. “Let’s eat first.”
That suggestion seemed to include me and my stomach lurched again. I stepped carefully, so I wouldn’t get any more blood on the driveway. You could see red smears there from when I had first arrived. I also stepped carefully because each time I put weight on my foot, it hurt.
He went around to his side door and a moment later, he popped back out. “Are you coming?”
I nodded, but he was already walking towards me.
“Here,” he said. “I’ll get you.” Then he swung me into the air, lifting me high and dropping me onto his shoulder.
His big hand grasped my thigh but it didn’t seem like he was trying to grope me, just that he was holding me in place.
He didn’t hit my head on the door when we went into the garage or on any of the ATVs, either.