Chapter 15

Author’s Note: It can’t all be paradise, can it? It never can be. Our group is going to be facing some challenges here. It’s going to test them. It’s going to show how they’ve grown. It’s going to show their continued weaknesses. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Tommy. The name haunted me. Hearing it again shook me to my core. It’s not that I felt threatened by him. Not even when Kat and Jess carried on with him behind my back did I ever really feel he was going to steal them from me. But he gave me the creeps. He was a bad guy. He treated both of them, but especially Kat, as disposable. He pushed their boundaries and, worse, tried to get them to do things that would harm themselves. All for his own amusement. I didn’t like Tommy. And I didn’t like hearing his name again.

But there was nothing I could do that night at Crystal and Jason’s. Jess was blitzed out of her mind. Part of her intention of taking the GHB had been to forget everything. Also, given the degree of her intoxication, anything I said would be unproductive. It would have to wait. So I threw myself into the party, perhaps too aggressively. My initial response was to guzzle Champagne and hit the cocaine repeatedly. That only stoked my anger, which I kept suppressed but still released itself to some extent in aggression.

I granted Katie’s wish to blindfold her and use her, and I used her roughly. And I did it in front of everyone. I left hickeys and bruises on her neck and breasts. I spanked her until dark red hand prints embedded themselves in her flesh. Katie adored it. She begged for more. She begged for it harder. You would have thought that no man had ever given her such tender, loving attention than when I faced fucked her immediately after pulling my cock out of her ass.

Kat and Rita both knew what was going on. They also knew better than to make it a topic for discussion that night, and I appreciated them for that. The night fundamentally was a blur, but not as much as the next day. Still drunk and wired, I got an urgent message from Petey. He needed me in LA as soon as possible. He had a jet waiting for me, and we had to talk. Face-to-face. Right away.

It was an unusual request, and through the haze of my anger and intoxication, I knew I couldn’t refuse it. I got on the plane. But I was pissed. I sent texts to Kat and Rita, but I left Jess off the chain. They didn’t respond because we hadn’t gotten home until dawn. The messages were more rantings than anything coherent. When I touched down in LA, around noon Houston time, I only had one response. It was from Kat.

“We’ll take care of it,” she wrote. “I love you. We love you.”

Take care of what? What did they know? How long had they known it? Fuck. I called Petey. He told me to take a shower and freshen up but to get my ass over to the office. By 10 a.m. LA time, I walked through the door. There was a young, perky brunette manning the desk near Petey’s office. That really gave her too much credit. She wasn’t an employee. She wore cutoff jeans and a crop top, smacked gum, and told me to go inside. Petey had taken to having a new wannabe actress playing at receptionist every couple weeks. He didn’t need them. He just liked to fuck them. And they liked to fuck him, if for no other reason than the pay was fantastic.

“John! John!” Petey said, bursting through the doors of his office. “You look like shit!”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Kat told me to expect it. You really need to get out of Houston. That place isn’t good for anybody.”

“Right now, I couldn’t agree more,” I said.

“I’ve got news, buddy,” Petey said.

I took a moment to size him up. He grinned with a maniacal confidence. He was happy. I realized how much more he was than his late father. I felt like slapping myself awake. But I shook myself free from the previous night and my fog to look at him.

“This has to be big,” I said. I was on cruise control to a certain extent. But his excitement helped shake the rust off me.

“Big? Fuck no!” he said. “It’s huge! Fucking huge!”

“You’re killing me, brother!” I said, pulling out of my fog and funk as adrenaline started to course through me.

“You know that we didn’t sell any back-end rights on Homecoming,” Petey started then stopped. “Well, maybe you don’t know that. Regardless, we didn’t sell anything but the theatrical distribution. It’s something dad wanted. He had a feeling. And it was a good feeling. He knew it was going to be a hit. So, instead, we were able to market it fresh. Doing that after coming off an Oscar sweep?”

“Near sweep,” I said, feeling obligated to speak up about Juliet’s snub.

“Near sweep,” Petey corrected himself. “Well, let’s just say we got ourselves into a little bidding war.”

“And?” I asked, my curiosity now fully piqued.

“Streaming rights alone are half a billion,” Petey said, a shit-eating grin charging across his face.

“Holy fuck,” I muttered.

“That’s right, my friend,” he said.

“Who got them?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” Petey shot back. “HBO. But the more important thing is that the deal closes this week. I highly recommend you take a look at your bank account on Monday morning.”

The math wasn’t hard to do. Half a billion, and I got ten percent of it. A shit-eating grin of my own materialized.

“This is just the start of it, my man,” Petey said.

“Jesus, Petey,” I said.

“Get used to it,” he said. “We’re going to have so many more mega deals coming up. You should seriously start thinking about sheltering yourself from all the tax implications.”

We laughed. It was all so preposterous, in a good way.

“Let’s celebrate,” I said. “I want to buy you a drink. Probably ten drinks!”

“I’m way ahead of you,” he said. “Get home and freshen up. We’re meeting Alix and a few of her girls at Spago at noon.”

“I never say no to Spago,” I said.

“Here,” Petey said, reaching into his top desk drawer. “You’re going to need the stamina. This is going to be a hell of a celebration.”

He tossed me a vial of coke, which I caught and pocketed. Petey had a car waiting to drive me home. The rush of adrenaline washed away slightly, so I hit a quick bump on the ride. My excitement regained its momentum. I did a couple more bumps and suddenly felt normal again, as if last night was a distant memory. The physical distance made that easier to imagine, but emotionally I could feel the wounds. I needed to call the girls.

As soon as I walked inside the house, I had Kat and Rita on the phone. Jess was still passed out from the night before. I hesitated to tell two of my three girlfriends. As with any major news, we had a general rule of discussing it as a group. But I felt like I couldn’t wait. Plus, it gave me the excuse of talking to Jess privately later.

“What is it, daddy?” Kat asked sweetly, her voice taking on a cloudy tone because they had me on speaker phone.

I gave a brief preamble about the Homecoming streaming and other-back end rights. Then I dropped the bomb on them.

“So, that means, probably by Monday, we’ll get our share,” I said.

“And that’s ten percent?” Rita asked.

I nodded, though I was alone and pacing in the house, and said, “That’s right. Fifty million dollars.”

“Holy shit,” Kat said.

“Fuck me,” Rita said.

“We need to celebrate,” Kat said.

“We need to talk about Jess,” I said reflexively and instantly regretted it.

“I told you, silly daddy, that we’ll take care of it,” Kat assured me.

“And you can tell Jess later and talk to her,” Rita said confidently.

“Okay,” I said, the reluctance obvious.

“Shouldn’t you and Petey go celebrate?” Kat said.

“Yeah, go to Spago!” Rita urged.

I laughed. “Are you kidding?” I said. “Did you talk to Petey? Because that’s exactly what we’re doing!”

“We knew,” Kat said with a giggle.

“Alix texted us,” Rita said. “Go shower up. I can smell you from here. And then go have fun.”

“Do all the things we would do, daddy,” Kat said.

They hung up, and just like that, the world felt a little less cloudy – enough so that I could compartmentalize what Jess had cried out last night and enjoy the day. Petey’s driver had waited for me to get ready so he could take me to Spago. I refreshed my buzz en route and had killed about half the vial of blow. As soon as I walked into the restaurant, I knew I was going to need the rest of it.

Petey stood up and greeted me with a warm bear hug after the stunning hostess escorted me to a round table in the center of the room.

“Welcome to the party, John!” he exclaimed.

Smiling up at me from the table were four stunning girls. Alix, of course, radiated her usual relaxed California charm. She had adapted so beautifully to LA; it was as if she had found her true home. Christy, our former flight attendant turned Infinity girl, sat to Alix’s right, and she shone in a tight, royal blue dress that seemed too slutty for lunch time. Next to her, our old Houston friend Serena wore an equally slutty dress in emerald green, which brought an extra edge to her enchanting eyes. The fourth girl was new to me. She introduced herself as Emma, and she was the picture of a tall, blonde, California girl. It was as if she had just come off the beach, thrown on a sundress, and easily slipped comfortably into the crowd at Spago.

“You’ve gone above and beyond, my friend,” I said to Petey.

“You only get nine-figure deposits so often!” he said.

“Well, some of us are only getting eight figures,” I joked.

“That seems like it’s still enough,” Alix said, and the table erupted in laughter.

Lunch was a treat. I didn’t realize how badly I needed it. My mind drifted away from Jess. I tried to come to grips with the massive influx of money that was coming in only a few days. There was no reason not to enjoy this rare break from the frenetic pace life had settled into. And Christy made it easy to succumb to that logic as she ran her hand slowly up my thigh. She leaned over to me with her thin-lipped smile.