Unleashed: Declan & Kara (Unleashed #1-4; Beg for It #1) (77 page)

My phone buzzed again.
With a deep down-to-the-bones groan, I stumbled across the room to
retrieve it. I still didn’t get there in time to pick up. The
screen announced that I had 15 missed calls, 10 from my agent, four
from my PR firm, one from my older brother.

Uh-oh. My big brother
never called unless it was to give me shit. I’d done something to
screw up. What was it?

My phone rang again in
my hand. My agent. With a sigh, I picked up.

“Yeah?” My voice
creaked out, gravelly and hung-over.

If words came across
visually, his would be bright red and all caps. “WHAT THE FUCK?
YOU’VE FUCKED UP ROYALLY THIS TIME!”

“Goddamn it, Joel, do
you have to yell?” I rubbed my face with my hand. It was too early
for this shit. Wait, what time was it anyway?

“DON’T YOU TELL ME
TO QUIET DOWN! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING LAST NIGHT?”

“What are you talking
about?”

That made him pause.
“You don’t know yet, do you?”

Aw, shit. “What now?”
I’d clearly been up to something, but it wasn’t the first time
I’d gotten into hot water. That was why I employed a full team to
keep the Ash Black show on schedule.

“Watch it on YouTube.
It’s already got two million hits.”

“How do I—?”

“Type in your name.
It’ll come right up.”

I sat down on a chair.
I had a fe uld be better to be sitting down when I saw this. But,
again, it wasn’t the first time I’d had footage of me leaked
doing something naughty. People might tsk and wag their fingers, but
they loved it. It was all part of my persona. Right?

My agent was correct, a
video popped right up under the title “A**hole Ash Black”. Only
35 seconds long, someone had caught it on their camera phone, a
perfect shot. Mandy Monroe and me in a fancy restaurant last night.
Tears streamed down her lovely face. I looked shitfaced, shadows
under my eyes, my black hair tufting out in crazy angles.

Listing slightly to the
left, I leered at her and asked, “What, are you gonna do? Cry?”

Her lower lip wobbled,
those famous big brown eyes brimming with tears. “Why, Ash? Why?”
she pleaded.

“You’re an idiot,”
I slurred. “And what’s worse, you’re boring.”

“But I thought…”
Her voice trembled. She brought her shaking hand to her heart. “I
thought you were the one.”

I burst out with an
evil villain’s laugh. Did I really laugh like that? More of a
cackle, really.

“I’m out of here,”
I declared, standing up and kicking over my chair like a twit. “Go
crying home to Mommy.” My sorry ass stumbled on out of the frame,
leaving Mandy alone at the table for two with silent tears of pain
traveling down her perfect face.

The girl deserved an
Oscar. It had been staged, all of it. I knew that the second I saw
it. I’d been in the media spotlight long enough to know, no one
held a camera phone that steady, at that perfect an angle, with the
sound quality so excellent at exactly the right moment without it
being a set up. It had all happened, that I knew as well, but she’d
arranged the whole thing right down to having someone seated nearby
to film it.

“Have you seen it?”
my agent asked. I’d forgotten he was still on the phone.

“Yeah.”

“This is a disaster.”

“It was a set up.”

“You and I know that,
but the rest of the world doesn’t. And don’t act like you didn’t
say all that shit. You know you did.”

Sure, I’d said all
that. I remembered now, all of it. Mandy and I had had a rip-snorting
fight earlier that evening. It had started out stupid, something
about how I’d said she looked pretty in a dress instead of amazing
or breathtaking or some over-the-top shit like a character out of a
Harlequin romance novel. It had escalated into a tantrum over how I
didn’t appreciate her enough. She’d thrown a glass vase against a
wall, screaming that a miserable, washed-up hack like me was lucky to
be with a bonafide superstar like her. No camera phone had caught
that, though.

It was genius, really.
Mandy had obviously known I was going to break up with her. She’d
realized she’d milked all of the press she could out of our
relationship. So she’d decided to go out with a bang. She had a new
album coming out filled with love songs and this would give her just
the boost she needed to score a few out-of-the-gate chart-toppers.
Hats off to her.

“Mandy Monroe is
America’s sweetheart,” my agent told me. Like it was news.

“I know.” I rubbed
my brow.

“You just broke her
heart.”

“Yup.”

“You tore it up and
threw it in her face. And it’s all on video. This is bad, Ash.”

“People love it when
I’m bad.” I tried to defend myself, but even to me it sounded
weak.

“Not this kind of
bad. This is not going to go over well.”

I had nothing to say to
that one. I could practically see Joel shaking his head in
frustration.

“You had to dump the
coalminer’s daughter. On YouTube.”

“Shit, you have to
put it like that?”

“Listen, there’s
going to be backlash. It’s going to be big. We have to figure a way
out of this one.”

“That’s what I pay
you the big bucks for, Joel.”

“You can’t make a
joke out of this, Ash. You fucked up good. Clean up, fly back and
meet me at five o’clock.”

“I’m supposed to
head to New York today.”

“Why? Your next show
isn’t until next week and it’s in L.A.”

“Family stuff.”
This coming weekend I had my family’s huge holiday party. It wasn’t
the kind of event I normally went in for. Black tie, so that was a
big strike against it. Plus it involved my family, which guaranteed
that it would suck. But my grandmother required mandatory attendance
at the annual Kavanaugh holiday party. Even a rule-breaker like me
had to comply. She might be the only person I really listened to. If
you met her, you’d get it.

“Well, come to S.F.
today, go to New York tomorrow. We have to get a plan in play. I’ll
have Lola and Nelson meet us and…aw shit.” His voice trailed off.

“What?”

“You’re the number
one hashtag trending on Twitter.”

This wasn’t going to
be good. “What is it?”

“#HatePlayerAsh.”

It wasn’t the first
time I’d inspired my own personal hashtag. #DoMeAsh #HotAsh,
#FuckMeAsh. I was used to those. But this, though? This was new. And
it was blowing up.

With a groan, I sank my
head into my hands. I didn’t mind making messes so long as I didn’t
have to clean them up. But now I stood with a sponge and a bucket and
knew I’d have to get down on my hands and knees and scrub.

Ana

“Is this the one
where they fly? I really like it when they fly.” A little girl
wearing a giant snowflake sweater and fairy wings looked up at me.
She couldn’t be more than four years old and she couldn’t
pronounce her ‘r’s so “really” came out “weely.” She was
perfect.

Kneeling down, I
studied the book jacket.
Rudolph
the Red Nosed Reindeer
. “Well, the reindeers fly, if
that’s what you’re thinking about.”

“Are they mean?”
She turned to me with gravitas, the weight of the word “mean”
filling her brown eyes.

I could not tell a lie.
I nodded. “At first, the other reindeer are mean to Rudolph.” She
frowned in response. “But it ends happy.”

After another moment of
consideration, she grabbed it. “Yes,” she declared. “And the
fuff-flies.” I’d also helped her find a book about a family of
butterflies. She marched off in her boots to a young woman engrossed
in her cell phone. Her nanny, I assumed. In this part of SoHo I met a
lot more nannies than parents coming into the children’s wing of
the library. We were in an extremely affluent corner of the city,
tucked into an amazing brownstone with gargoyles and lions sculpted
into the edifice. Too bad our branch was so short on funds we were on
the chopping block to close.

I’d already been
furious over the cutbacks on our hours. How could a library with a
children’s wing not open until noon? Didn’t they know how early
in the morning little kids woke up? They started their days at six,
sometimes five a.m. The very latest we should open our doors was nine
o’clock. Even by then, I bet we’d have a few exhausted caregivers
standing outside with strollers desperate to come in and give the
kids something to keep them entertained.

But last week our boss
had gathered all of us together to tell us that, no, we wouldn’t be
getting end-of-year bonuses. And, surprise, due to lack of funds we’d
been short-listed for closure. We’d find out for sure in January.

You’d think in a city
with this kind of money there’d be enough to keep the libraries
open!

I felt a small tug on
my sweater. A little boy with short, black curly hair looked up at
me.

“Hello, may I help
you find something?” I smiled down at him.

“This is my truck.”
He held up a green, plastic dump truck and demonstrated how it could
move. “His name is Oscar the Truck.”

I couldn’t stay
grumpy, not for long. I loved this job. It paid nothing. I got little
kids’ snot on me almost every day, especially now that it was
December. I spent a lot of time engaged in nonsensical exchanges
about random facts and made-up stories with preschoolers. But I loved
it. At least one thing, and sometimes a whole lot of things, made me
laugh every single day. And I never tired of seeing a little kid get
engrossed in turning pages, cuddled up in the cozy corner of pillows
I’d created, their little faces lighting up with delight.

My career choice had
left my parents underwhelmed. Here I was, 24 years old and already
resigned to a lifetime of obscurity and penury. They’d raised me
for much more, enduring great personal sacrifice, and they liked to
remind me of it. Also, they liked to remind me of the millions of my
ancestors who’d died under Stalin’s rule. But that was kind of a
given for Russian immigrants, the references to the homeland, the
starvation and freezing and hardship I’d never know because I was
such an American.

I knew my parents loved
me, their only child, born to them when they were already in their
40s. My mother liked to tell me that I was a miracle child. They’d
immigrated to upstate New York and toiled, year in and year out, to
make a better life for me. They’d poured their resources and
energies into training me as a classical pianist, paying for every
lesson, driving me to countless recitals, helping me prepare for
competitions and soloist showcases. When I’d started studying at
the local community college I’d declared music as my major and
they’d still kept the dream alive.

But it wasn’t my
dream. I loved music, but what I loved was the feel of it, the joy,
the rush. Not the rigid, relentless execution of a flawless classical
performance. I wasn’t knocking classical music—look at my
playlist and you’d find as much Stravinsky and Prokofiev as you
would Coldplay and Ash Black. But what I’d grown up with was cold
and sterile, not the beating, pulsing energy and passion that
breathed life into music.

The funny thing was,
though, I now got paid to be a demanding, rigorous piano teacher. I’d
earned my degree in library sciences and been working as a children’s
librarian for a year now, but to make ends meet I taught piano to the
sons and daughters of wealthy New Yorkers.

My shift ended at five
because the library closed at five. No money to stay open longer than
that. I pulled on my winter coat, hat, gloves and boots and headed
out into the subway system to the Upper East Side where families paid
me more for a half-hour’s piano lesson than I made in five hours as
a librarian.

“Hello!” I stomped
the slush off my boots and removed my coat, leaving them in the
mudroom of an austere penthouse apartment.

“Anika.” The
housekeeper stiffly greeted me.

“Please, call me
Ana.” We went through this every week. The formality of this and so
many of the families I worked for killed me.

“Colby is in the
music room.”

Imagine, New York City
real estate as expensive as it was, and this family was by no means
the only one I worked for with a music room. A whole room devoted to
a huge grand piano! Other families had it on display in their
gigantic living rooms. Not one of them had an upright pressed up
against a wall in a crowded corner, like I’d grown up playing.

I coached Colby through
her lesson, stopping her when she lacked technical precision,
encouraging her to add more feeling like we were following a recipe
for blueberry muffins and you could drop in a teaspoon more of
passion. I’ll tell you what this girl needed, and it wasn’t my
pushing her. She needed to zip up into a snowsuit, head over to
Central Park with some friends and have a good, old-fashioned messy
snowball fight. She needed to laugh until her belly ached.

Problem was, all of her
friends were busy doing exactly what she was, working with
highly-paid tutors and coaches and teachers grooming them to
perfection. And that’s what I was paid to do, too. So I did it,
pointing out a few passages where she could make improvements. But I
worried that after I left she’d stay up until three a.m. completing
her homework and then practicing and practicing some more.

After several more
lessons much the same, I finally emerged out onto the city sidewalk
free at last. It was only around 20 degrees, but the wind wasn’t
blowing too hard so I decided to walk a few blocks. I lived in
Brooklyn so eventually I’d have to get onto the subway, but
Manhattan at night during the holiday season pulled at me like an
unopened Christmas present. All the lights and wreathes and garlands
beckoned, drawing me down toward the gleaming storefront displays
that started up as I walked south on Madison Avenue toward midtown.