Everlasting Bad Boys (30 page)

A month later…

B
eth was awfully glad she’d given in. He was right about the oral sex not causing her to turn different colors. His magic tongue could practically dissolve her and vice versa, but that was okay. The glow they experienced was no different from a standard-issue postcoital glow.

She’d been just fine afterward, thank you. And she was still fine. Humming as she walked down the street, a relaxed bounce in her walk, she was pretty much walking on air these days. In contrast to everyone else at SpectraSign, now that they were rushing through the last phases of completing the massive sign.

It was being installed under wraps, on top of the building where she’d had the panoramic view of Times Square. Justin spent most of his time there.

He was—the thought made her hesitate—not doing so great. His inexhaustible energy was being drained by his insistence on attending to every detail personally.

Late at night, wrapped in his arms, she would whisper the sweet word, “Delegate,” in his ear, hoping he would hear it subliminally while he slept. It didn’t seem to help.

His sleep was restless and he usually woke up in a bad mood. Not like him. Not like him at all.

Justin had finally offered an explanation.

“It’s the sunspot cycle,” he explained. “Every twelve years, there are suddenly a lot more of them and it changes everything. My energy level goes haywire. Up. Down.” He seesawed a hand through the air. “I get a little manic and I don’t sleep well.”

“Is it just you? I thought that happened to everyone in New York.”

He’d shrugged. “Could explain a lot of things. It’s not all bad, you know. Way up north, the aurora borealis goes crazy—it’s much more intense. Turbocharged ions howling in from outer space, woo hoo, and all that. The colors are stronger and the patterns get wilder and it just doesn’t stop.”

He was talking faster and faster, not seeing her worried look.

“We could go up to Alaska. Or Sweden. Hang out and watch the northern lights and forget all about this crazy sign for a while. Something about it is getting to me. Maybe I wasn’t born to sell blue jeans. What do you think? I really want to know.”

But he hadn’t even listened to her answer. She’d vetoed the all-expenses-paid trip to the tundra he’d proposed and pointed out that she didn’t think it was the sign that was making him crazy. He had a whole company full of dedicated geeks and visual freaks to help make that happen.

No, he had to be right about the sunspots. And he was more than a little manic. Beth wasn’t happy about that. She was having second thoughts. Even third, fourth, and fifth thoughts. She really couldn’t imagine introducing him to her father while he was in this state, although Dave Danforth, mild-mannered cartoonist, probably would be thrilled to have a son-in-law who could harness all the energy in the known universe when he wanted to.

Son-in-law?

Where the hell had that ominous phrase come from?

The great day came. The wraps came off. He didn’t want her to see it before it was dark and he insisted on being the one to put it through its paces. The project team from SpectraSign had left him to it, at his insistence.

He stood at a high table in front of the sign, looking a lot like a conductor at a podium. The laptop that controlled the special effects of the enormous sign was on the table and he rested his hands by it, a minute away from switching on the sign. The fact that he hadn’t combed his hair for a few days added to the messy air of genius.

“It’s finished. My magnum opus,” he sighed. “What do you think?”

“I haven’t seen it yet.”

He started typing on the laptop. The screen lit up and she saw that it was a miniature of the giant sign. Whatever he did on the laptop would be instantly replicated above him.

He summoned up colors first, in shifting, swirling patterns. Then random things. Flying taxis. Sharks in sunglasses. Motifs appeared and disappeared with dizzying speed.

“Fun, huh?” he murmured. His eyes were glowing.

A breeze whipped her hair up around her face and she pushed it away. “Wow,” was all she said, looking up at the sign.

In its final, complete stage, it was forty feet high, composed of hundreds of vid screens that fit together like a mosaic. Justin pushed a button. “Enough of that.” The sign went dark. “Here comes the Blue Blaze man.”

The multiple vid screens shimmered to life again, each showing a piece of the jeans-clad male model for the ad campaign, as if someone had taken scissors and cut up an old photo, then blown it up to building size.

The pieces of the photo came together as the male model strode slowly across the field of waving wheat toward the battered 1930s pickup.

Tinged with sepia, the familiar scene they’d seen being shot in bits and pieces came to coherent life. Edited, it was compelling. It seemed to have come from an authentic old movie, rich with atmosphere and poignant longing.

“What is he supposed to be doing again?” Beth asked Justin. The theme music swelled and reached a crescendo when the male model stopped and looked toward the horizon.

“I forget. Searching for America. Or true love.”

“Here she comes now.”

The long-legged female model walked toward him, her jeans a more feminine version of his. The camera came in tight on his crotch, then hers.

The models caressed each other’s bodies with lingering strokes that the final edit made the most of by repeating endlessly. The result was actually quite erotic.

Beth ran to the edge of the roof and looked down at Times Square to see if anyone was watching.

It was working. There was a knot of people craning their necks and commenting.

She ran back to Justin, who was entering keyboard commands into the laptop that controlled the gigantic array of screens. He played with the color, with the movement of the models, freeze-framing moments and wiping others away in an instant.

There was a rhythm to his improvising that was very sensual and he worked fast. Then faster, intensifying it. Beth went back to the roof’s edge. The crowd below had grown much larger in just a few minutes and was oohing and aahing appreciatively.

The images of the Blue Blaze jeans campaign changed constantly, but the concept—a man, a woman, a truck—was so simple to begin with that the effect of the rapid changes was hypnotic. At least Justin seemed to be a little hypnotized. His fingers stayed on the keyboard while he looked up at the sign, as if he was creating music only he could hear out of thin air. He was riveted to what he was doing, his glittering eyes reflecting the brilliance of the display.

Beth tugged at his sleeve. “I think you should stop.”

“No,” he said without looking at her, “this is a blast.”

“But Justin—”

“No,” he said again and shrugged her off.

Beth studied his profile, alarmed now by his degree of absorption. It was like she wasn’t there at all. It was like he was drunk. On light. On color. The sunspots, millions of miles away, were most definitely getting to him.

“Let’s take a trip,” he said again without looking at her. He reached a hand sideways, fumbling for hers and missing. “This is great. Yowza. Shazam.” He jabbed a button. “Look what I can do. I’m on a sunspot high and I don’t want to come down. Everything’s moving. I want to move with it. I want to jump right in there. C’mon.”

“Nothing doing. I’m staying right here.”

“Okay, I’ll go in alone.” He put both hands on the keyboard and keyed in commands so fast she couldn’t tell what he was doing.

And then, in less than a second, he was sucked into the laptop screen…and suddenly reappeared in the sign, forty feet high.

“Justin, come back!” she screamed.

He looked down at her, oddly flattened out but very much himself. The models in the movie had vanished. Justin strode through the waving wheat and propped his foot on the bale of hay, having a great time in his own personal movie.

“How do I look?” he asked her, laughing hugely.

“Way too big! Come back here!”

He frowned. “I don’t want to.” He unbuttoned his shirt and whipped it off. “Women of the world, check me out!” He grinned down at Beth. “Feels good to be gorgeous.”

“Don’t you think you’re getting a little carried away with yourself?”

“I like getting carried away. Being forty feet tall is great. Hey, guess how long my dick is—”

“Be quiet, Justin!” She hoped the crowd hadn’t heard that. SpectraSign could kiss the Blue Blazes account good-bye forever if she couldn’t shut him up and get him out and calm him the fuck down. “I don’t really want to know!”

He stayed inside the sign while she looked at the laptop and tried a few keys. She tapped one, not familiar with the keyboard commands he used to control the enormous sign. Nothing happened.

She tapped another and the sign went completely black. She gasped in horror. What the hell had just happened?

“Beth?” It was just his voice. Disembodied. She looked around wildly but he was nowhere on the roof.

“Beth?” he said again. He sounded kind of nervous. “Where are you? Where am I?”

Oh no. He had to be trapped in that goddamn sign. She had to get him out.

The breeze carried the voices of the crowd below, dispersing. “Show’s over.” “That was cool.” “Who was that guy at the end?”

If you only knew, she thought despairingly. Beth looked up at the black mosaic of screens and wondered if there was a way in.

Suddenly she realized it wasn’t just the Blue Blazes sign that had gone black. All around her the signs of Times Square were fading out one by one, some popping off, some fading away.

The streetlights faded out. The ever-present rumble of New York City died away, because the subway trains had stopped on the tracks. The lights in all the buildings winked out.

Somehow, his fooling around with the laptop had started a chain reaction in the city’s electrical grid. Justin had caused a blackout. A big one.

The mutters she could hear from the street below confirmed it. All five boroughs involved. No power. Nothing. People stuck in elevators, trains. Traffic lights gone dark. No red, no green, no yellow. Just nothing. Times Square could have been a dark canyon in the middle of nowhere.

Except for the tiny, lit-up screens of thousands of cell phones bobbing in the crowd below, the greatest intersection in the world was plunged into blackness.

“Beth?” Justin said quietly. “You there?”

She looked up. His voice
was
coming from the screen above her. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m still here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You oughta be, Justin Watts. And when I get you out of there, you’re going to be even sorrier.”

“Call Wind,” his disembodied voice said.

“How?” she snapped. “I don’t have a cell phone. And every line out of New York is already jammed. Can’t you hear what people on the street are saying?”

She held up a hand to hush him just in case he could see her from inside the screen. “Then listen.”

Apparently he was calm enough to obey. They both heard the complaints of no service and the occasional jubilant shout when someone got a call through.

“That’s not what I meant,” Justin whispered. “Just call him. He’ll come, I swear.”

Beth shook her head. “You call him.”

Justin’s voice echoed softly through the air above her, saying his friend’s name as if he were breathing it.
Wind. Wind.

And in another second Windham Devane was standing next to Beth.

“Hey,” he said. “Got the word. Is that fool trapped in there?”

Beth just gaped at him. “How’d you know? How’d you get up here?”

“He called, I came. Not the first time I did a favor for him. But this is going to be a big one.” He smiled at her, untroubled. Beth couldn’t help but smile back, worried as she was.

“We have to get him out.” She looked up at the black mosaic. “Fair warning. He’s out of control.”

“Guess so. You don’t sound like you want to get him out, girl.”

“He’s been acting so crazy!”

Windham nodded. “It’s the sunspots. They do it to him every time.”

“I don’t even want to know. This may not be the time to bring it up, but this superpower crap is getting to me. I want a real man.”

“Justin’s as real as you want him to be,” Wind said.

“Hey, spare me the freaky little metaphysical asides, okay?” She sighed. “I don’t know what to think any more. But I guess we’d better get him out of there.”

What if he stayed huge? What if he stayed flat? Was it possible to slither through a laptop and blow yourself up to gigantic size and still remain human?

Beth reminded herself that strictly speaking, he wasn’t human.

“Step aside, please.” Wind took over the laptop from her. “Walk me through this, Sunny Boy,” he called up to Justin inside the sign. “And brace yourself on re-entry. It ain’t going to be easy.”

“Whatever it takes.”

“When you come on back through the circuits we can deal with this blackout.”

“You mean Justin can fix it?” Beth asked him.

“Maybe. We won’t know for sure until we can get him out, though.”

Justin’s voice issued the keyboard commands and one by one, Wind carried them out. “Is that it?”

“That should do it,” Justin said.

Nothing happened. Beth and Windham stood there looking at each other.

“Shit,” Windham said. “Okay, one more time. With feeling.”

He tapped in the commands again and the huge sign above them rattled. Justin stepped out of it at one corner.

“I created a desktop shortcut,” Wind explained calmly. “That’s why he didn’t come out through the laptop screen. I was afraid he would bust it.”

Justin shook his head like he was trying to clear it. He’d left his shirt back in the movie and was still bare-chested, Beth saw.

He looked around, a little dazed, spotted the two of them and ran over. “What happened? All the signs are black!”

“You done triggered a blackout, fool,” Windham scolded him.

“Oh my God.” He looked searchingly at Beth. “I got a little out of control, didn’t I?”

“No, a lot.”

“Guess it’s time I turned into a hero.”