Chapter Forty-One Los Angeles
The photographs went up three hours after Vivienne left.
Piper was eating a bowl of yogurt, shattered crystal littering the marble floor of his entryway, when Vivienne called.
“It’s up.”
“Where?”
“Riley’s Patreon.”
“Okay.”
“Tank is fifteen minutes out. He’s staying with you tonight.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t open the front gate. Don’t look out the window. Don’t answer any number you don’t recognize. If the landline rings, which it’s going to, don’t pick it up. I’m on my way.”
“Okay. I have a landline?”
“Piper, please stay funny in times of fucking chaos, always.”
Piper hung up first as he calibrated the anxiety surging through his body.
By seven, the first news van was on the street.
By seven-fifteen there were three. By seven-thirty the TMZ live stream was up, and a cameraman was standing on the sidewalk across from the gate with a ring light on his rig and was narrating, loudly, to an audience.
Piper had closed every blind in the house. He had turned off every interior light except the one in the kitchen. He was sitting on the couch in the living room with the television off and a glass of Chardonnay on the coffee table, and his phone face-down on his thigh.
The street outside had a sound it didn’t usually have. The hum of running engines that did not belong to people who lived there. The intermittent click of a long lens. Piper had spent most of his entire adult life on show, but this was different. This was an ambush.
Tank came through the side gate, and through the side door off the kitchen. Tank walked toward Piper holding a grocery bag with a look that said everything was going to be okay. Piper’s eyes started to fill with tears.
“Dude, I am all cried out,” Piper said as he wrapped his arms around Tank.
“Fuck dude, we need to get you together. You eat?” Tank laughed.
“Yogurt.”
“That is not dinner, at least eat a fucking Uncrustable.”
“I know.”
Tank opened the grocery bag and started unloading. Two sandwiches. A bag of chips. A bottle of Gatorade. A six-pack of beer.
He looked at Piper across the island.
“This is a lot?”
“I know.”
“Right answer.” Then, “Piper, we can’t let them win.”
“I know, but I was never ready for all of this all at once.”
Tank put his hand on Piper’s shoulder.
“This is not about you, it’s about them. It’s about all their insecurities and internalized hatred. I only care about one thing, and that’s for you to be happy. Fuck, I know you are famous, but does that mean the public can own you?” Tank gave Piper a look.
Piper could feel what Tank said deep in his being, and tears began to build in his eyes again.
“I know you and Noah are together, I’m not fucking dense. I mean, I’m not exactly crazy about your choice of men. He is our division rival, but I have never seen you happier than when you’re with that asshole.”
Piper laughed, brushing tears from his eyes.
Tank embraced Piper. “We will get through this, like we get through everything. I promise. You hear me, Piper?”
“I do, thanks for always showing up. Let’s drink.”
***
Piper didn’t sleep that night. Tank watched him like a hawk. They watched playoff games, Netflix, Bravo, and drank all the booze that was in the house. Piper sat on the couch with his eyes on the wall behind the screen.
They had watched the entire first season of Real Housewives of Atlanta, and Tank was enamored with Shereé Whitfield. He thought about launching his own clothing line for men, Tea By Tank, which made Piper laugh hysterically, but told him he would happily be an investor.
***
Somewhere on the second night, when Piper had been lying still long enough that his body had stopped feeling like his, he thought about the young dude at the pool house years earlier.
He hadn’t thought about him in a long time.
He had been twenty-one. He had known Jayson for three weeks. He had ended up in a pool house at two in the morning kissing a young guy his age who said he was a model. He had been at one of Jayson’s parties, which were filled with beautiful young guys and the men who paid for them.
The guy was smart, muscular and funny. Piper loved funny guys more than a jacked body or model face. Jayson had met him at a runway show in Paris.
He didn’t remember the guy's name.
He had tried to remember it. He couldn’t.
He had told himself, eventually, that the name had not been important.
He had been drunk. The kiss hadn’t meant anything.
There had been, for sure, other guys who had kissed guys at that party and hadn’t remembered names either.
That’s what that kind of party was for. Piper had told himself this.
The guy had died the following day.
Overdose was the word in the news item Piper had found on social media. Overdose at twenty-one, a promising young model, no foul play suspected, and the family asked for privacy. The drug was one the guy had told Piper, in the pool house, he hadn’t touched in his life.
Piper hadn’t gone to the funeral. He hadn’t known him well enough, that was what he had told himself.
He saw the obituary and had remembered how much he had made him laugh.
Jayson had asked him once if he was sad that the man had passed.
Piper knew not to tell him he felt anything toward anyone for fear of the repercussions.
Sitting in his house surrounded by the press, in a media prison, he did not want to be the next victim, he had too much to live for now.
He was going to make damn sure Noah wasn’t the next victim.