King of Her Desire

48

Gerri reached across me to hand Sochi her cell. And Sochi clicked, tilted her head and then handed it to me with this little smile on her face.

But my head was throbbing so bad I almost couldn't look at the screen until she clicked on something and I heard voices that made me go, "Whoa..."

It was part of the battle we'd just had in my trailer earlier that day. Matt and Aaron, sparring.

And Gerri said, "Well, sometimes we have these long, convoluted conversations that she's totally left out of. So I record it so she can listen later. Only this time...well...Matt speaks a language we'd all better get real good at translating. I mean, my God..."

She looked as tired and sad as I felt when she said that. So I leaned to take hold of her hand and said, "We'll land on our feet, okay? We always do."

And Kelli, who'd fallen asleep on my lap up there in the balcony of the hall where the big event would be held that weekend, opened her eyes momentarily to look into mine. They were worried, my weebles. They'd been worried way too much over the past few weeks, I thought.

So I kissed the top of her head and said, "We're leaving pretty soon, okay?"

She didn't answer. She just closed her eyes. And Cody slid over a little bit, too. Onto my arm. He tended to konk out into a deep sleep that took him away from whatever was wrong.

Carli, on the other hand, was wide awake, hopping up and down the same set of stairs over and over and over again. But since we were the only people up there, I just let her.

I was more concerned about how long they were keeping Elliott onstage. She didn't have to sing full voice for long. They were just getting everything programmed—sound, lights...all that.

And she looked good. Even after the mess we'd been through earlier—maybe because of it. Put some pep in her step, throwing down like that. Pinked up her cheeks, too.

I hated leaving the other people involved wondering WTF, though. Wanda, I shot a text to but she'd already heard something "in the wind." So had a lot of the crew. And I felt like Remy knew, too. Something about the way she'd carried herself the whole time.

I'd been tempted to send David a text as well. A jokey one asking him if he still needed a handyman. I talked to him sometimes. I keep my bridges open because life can flip you over into ditches sometimes. You're cruisin' along and...screeeeeeeech...

But I wasn't freaking out completely yet. I knew how to work the CPS system well enough to get us through the rapids.

They'd do the pufferfish act for a while for appearances sake. And then the case worker would start to slack off once she heard the whole story about all the stuff I'd been doing.

Chasing after us would seem like a waste of time and resources even to her bosses. Who were always scared something bad would happen to a kid on their watch. Kids died or got heinously abused all the time and the press ate that shit up. They had a horrible rep, CPS.

The only thing that worried me, honest to God, was that I was going to become one of those people who'd seen how the other half lived and could never get used to not living that way ever again. The ones who held court in dive bars, blathering about the one stunt gig they had 'way back when friggin' John Wayne was still alive.