High Risk Love (2 page)

“I thought you were going to drop me, the whole way I kept waiting for you to let me go,” I said, the words slurred with the pain that wrapped itself around my heart.

He opened his eyes, still a vibrant green—just like mine—and so full of life that if I looked at them, I could forget the truth; I could believe for a minute we were still kids, having one of our late night talks over a shared chocolate bar stolen from Mom’s stash. Not curled on a tiny hospital bed, whispering our last to each other.

“Jazzy,” he said. “Don’t let this stop you. You have to live, really live. Don’t be afraid to love because you might get hurt, because you might lose someone. Keep dreaming, keep believing. Promise me that. It’s important to me. Don’t just do what you think you should, do what your heart wants. Please.”

Lips pressed tight, I nodded. I didn’t want him to spend his last few minutes worrying about me. But I couldn’t promise him anything; I couldn’t see past losing him. His sickness and imminent death were like a tsunami wiping out my life as I knew it; there was nothing past the destruction for me that I could see. So I changed the subject. “Do you need more painkillers? Maybe it’s just a bad night.”

I stared down at him, and his lips trembled as he tried to keep smiling. “It’s not just a bad night. I can feel my body just . . . letting go . . . shutting off. Tell Lily I’m sorry. I wish I could have been more to her, that we’d had more time.”

I clung to him, his breathing slowing with each inhale, his body twitching in small spasms as if to give me a visual to go along with his words. Shutting down. Turning off. Over. Gone.

No, no, no.
Not yet, I wasn’t ready yet to say goodbye, not again, not so soon.

“Ryan, Lily is on her way and you can tell her yourself. Please, try to hang on.”

“Trying . . .” He whispered, his eyes closing once more. “I’m sorry I’m hurting you Jazzy, I am. You were always my best friend.”

I let out a choked laugh. “Even when you duct taped me to the kitchen chair?”

“Especially then . . . most especially . . . love you . . . .”

He sucked in a lung full of air, his body stiffening, and I held him tight, unable to stop the sob that escaped me. With a last release, his body slowly sunk into the bed, a final shiver running the length of him.

“Ryan?” I touched his face, turning his head toward me. The pulse in his throat was gone, the beeping of his machines slid to a steady drone, flat-lining. Ryan’s pain was over, his body done with this world and all the heartache it inflicted on people.

And mine. Mine was just beginning.

Jasmin

I
needed this job. Ryan had been gone six months and the bills had continued to pile up. They’d climbed higher while Ryan was in the hospital and now they were overdue. The house we’d bought together was in jeopardy of being foreclosed.

The bigger problem for me though, more even than the foreclosure, was that I was broke. I had less than ten bucks in my bank account, and my credit card was completely maxed out. I’d lived on it the last six months—stupid I know, but I’d been too buried in my grief to care. I hadn’t realized I was making things worse until it was too damn late.

If I didn’t get this job, I would lose everything.

My right knee jumped and vibrated as I sat in the uncomfortable chair next to the other applicants who’d already gone through. I was the last of the bunch, except for a guy about my age sitting on my left. Glasses and mussed up light brown hair that looked as if perhaps there was gum stuck in it somewhere, he had a smattering of acne across his forehead and a pair of ears that were bright red along the rims. Like a permanent blush.

I couldn’t still the bobbing of my one knee, and the applicant next to me gave me a look over the top edge of his glasses. “Nerves will shoot you in the foot, you know. Not that you’ve got a chance at the job, not with me in the running.” He gave me a smile that was a bare tightening of his lips, and a whiff of too much cologne, used to cover the fact he obviously hadn’t showered lately, spilled off him.

“I’m Paul, maybe I can hire you as my assistant.” He smiled broadly at me, a greasy smile that I had to stop myself from smacking off his face.

“Thanks, I think I’ll pass.” What a jerk. I half-turned my body so I didn’t have to look at him and concentrated on more important things. Like keeping my body from shaking; I was not weak. This would not break me. If I could bury both parents, and my brother, I could damn well deal with an interview. I let out a slow breath. The fear slowly subsided to a dull roar in the back of my head.

Forcing myself to be still, I looked around the hallway;
Wild Child
was a relatively new magazine for extreme stunts, stuntmen and daredevils. All of them crazy, in my opinion. Not that I was all too keen on taking pictures of people deliberately putting themselves in danger, but I was running out of options. My gut clenched at the thought of seeing people in death defying situations, and I gave myself a mental shake.
Wild Child
was growing fast and I’d been lucky to get even this far in the application process.

Of course,
that
had nothing to with me and more to do with the fact that my best friend, Lily, was the receptionist for the manager doing the hiring. Thank God for BFFs. Not that I’d ever say that to Mr. Acne next to me.

My camera bag at my feet, a meager writing sample and the small portfolio were all I had to prove that I could hack it as the fledgling magazine’s full-time photographer/interviewer. I was praying that no one actually asked to see my camera. In its glory days, it was the best on the market, but that was years ago. Now it would be considered mediocre at best and it had developed a finicky attitude. Like erasing pictures at random, or deciding not to turn on. Or off. Oh, I knew I was in too deep on so many levels; I had absolutely zero experience with a magazine, let alone one of this size. With only a handful of photography classes under my belt, I didn’t have a lot to put on my resume. There hadn’t been much extra money after Mom and Dad had passed away, neither one of them even had life insurance. They couldn’t afford it. So Ryan and I had to make do with what we could, paying off the debts with the sale of our parent’s house and then starting fresh together with the little bit of money left. The house we’d bought was small, old, and needed repairs, but the price had been right. We’d had just enough for the down payment—and nothing for the repairs—but neither of us minded. A place to call home was what it was, and to Ryan that had been more important than anything. He didn’t want to be a drifter, floating from town to town, as so many musicians did. Ryan wanted to have a real home, a place to lay his head at night, a place that was his and no one else’s. At least he’d had that for a little while.

But his cancer had pushed me into a hole that I was going to have to dig myself out of on my own. I could do it; it would just take time. There was no quick fix, no wealthy relative to help me.

Desperation did wonderful things for motivation. That, and the pittance I got from my retail job, had combined to bring me to this point. I’d even considered selling Ryan’s car—his baby; it had meant more to him than anything else. He and Dad had worked on it for years, putting it together a piece at a time, weekends and evenings spent tinkering in the garage. The car was not only a piece of Ryan, but a piece of my father too.

At the last minute, I’d convinced myself to hold off. The cherry red ’69 Falcon was the final piece of the men in my life, and I couldn’t bear to see it go. Besides, even if I sold the car, all it would do is hold the bills back, not pay them off.

The rush of heat and tears started, and I bit the inside of my mouth. No, I would not cry, damn it! Mr. Acne had moved so I could see his face again, and he gave me a smug half smile. I grit my teeth and again kept my hands still so I wouldn’t lash out and slap his stupid face. If Lily could function, so could I.

I thought about my best friend and wondered if she was lying to me about all the dates she was supposedly going on. My suspicion was she was told me what I wanted to hear. The problem? She’d loved Ryan her whole life, and losing him before she could even tell him . . . I think it broke what was left of her heart. I hadn’t been able to tell her yet what he’d said at the end. Ryan had said to tell her when the time was right, and right now, Lily was still grieving too hard to hear his final words to her.

Swallowing hard—I forced myself to think of other things like flowers and puppy dogs, anything that had nothing to do with Ryan—I jerked upright when a gruff older man I knew was Kevin McCall, the department manager, called my name. Grabbing my bag, I breathed in through my nose, out through my mouth, which was supposed to be calming—at least according to Lily. All it did was leave me light headed and I wobbled in my heels as I walked toward the office door. Mr. Acne chuckled under his breath, but I heard him loud and clear, the slimy, conceited jerk. Plastering on a smile, I stepped into the office and lowered myself into the seat my—hopefully—new boss indicated.

Throwing himself into the broken back leather office chair on his side of the desk, Kevin, as he introduced himself to me and asked me to call him, glanced over a few sheets. He was a big man, thick around the middle, obviously well fed. But he had kind eyes and Lily had spoken well of him, said he was a sweet guy with a soft spot for sad cases. Like me and Ryan. Crap on toast, at this point I would take anything to not have to go back and work for the chain store where I had to put up with people who defined the words ‘white trash’ for minimum wage.

“Your references are good, but you don’t have much actual experience. Your writing sample was straightforward, to the point, with some clever insights. Let me see your portfolio,” he said, leaning across the desk. I lifted the thin volume off my lap and handed it over to him. Most of the pictures were of Ryan, some before he was sick, some during his last months. I knew each page by heart as Kevin flipped through them, saw his reactions and knew which pictures he was looking at.

His face tightened and frown lines deepened over his eyes on the second to last page. “That’s my brother,” I said. “Right before he died.” The picture he was looking at showed Ryan in profile, one eye and his hand held up as if to ward something off in front of him. The lines in his face, the image of the IV buried under his skin, showed the cost of fighting off the cancer. Yet, even with that, there was light in his green eye, a spark of defiance. It was not my favorite as it reminded me too much of the inevitable, no matter how hard you fought, but it was still a damn good picture.

“You have raw talent,” Kevin said, closing the book and leaning back in his chair. He steepled his fingers and pressed them against his lips. “I worry about one thing though.”

Was he going to give me a chance?
Please, please, please!

He continued to stare at me, his eyes thoughtful. “The men, and some of the women, you’ll be taking pictures of, they are . . . .” He rolled his eyes skyward as if seeking the answers from the ceiling.

I tried to help him out. “Unpredictable?”

“No.” He snorted. “Though that is true of them too. I’m worried because you are a beautiful young woman.”

I blinked several times. “I hope this job isn’t based on looks.”

Kevin laughed and leaned back. “If it was, you’d get the job.” I flushed and he went on. “It isn’t though, which is important. You would only get the job because of talent.” He tapped my closed portfolio. “No, I want to give you a chance to see if your talent comes through. But . . . the men in this industry are wild. Not just in their stunts, but in their lives. They’ll come onto you. A lot. And here at
Wild Child,
I won’t have my team sleeping with
any
of our interviewees. Do you think you can handle that?”

A bitter laugh rippled out of me. After losing Ryan, and both my parents, the last thing I wanted was another person in my life that would break my heart when they died on a stunt gone wrong. “I am not looking for anything, sir. And if I was, the last place I’d look would be at a bunch of men who seem to be intent on killing themselves in spectacular ways.”

Kevin smiled and reached his hand across the desk. I quickly reacted, reaching to meet him part way, shaking his hand.

“Good. Then we’ll give this a trial run. I want you to go and get some good shots, and the story, behind this guy. He’s the best in the business right now. So in demand you are going to have to follow him to his movie set. The thing is, we don’t actually know a lot about him. His past, how he started in the stunt industry. Shit, we don’t even have a picture. He’s come up so fast in the ranks over the last few years it’s like he’s showed up out of nowhere.”

My new boss handed over a small folder that I opened up almost reluctantly. My first interview’s name was Jethro ‘Jet’ Sterling. Good Lord, who named their kid Jethro? He must have had the crap beat out of him as a kid. I wondered if that was why he’d gone into being a stuntman. Maybe to prove himself? Already my mind whirled with the possibilities of how the story I would write to go with his pictures would pan out.

I scanned Jet’s stats: 225lbs and six foot two, but nothing else. He had a good six inches on me. I made a mental note to bring my boots, the ones with the two-inch heel. No pictures of him, though; looked like Kevin wasn’t kidding there.

“So, Jasmin Vargas, are you ready for your first assignment?” Kevin smiled over at me.

I shut the folder and smiled back, though I could feel the hollowness of it on my lips. This was the break I needed; the money was good and it would keep the debt collectors at bay. It was all I could ask for, all I needed. “Yes, sir. I am. Is Mr. Sterling on set now? Do you want me to leave right away?”

He handed me another paper, flicking it with his fingers as I took it. “He’s here for a week.” He waved his hand in the air, indicating this new page. “Then he’s off to Vancouver for his next movie, in case you don’t get everything you need on the first set. I’ll have your tickets waiting for you at the airport as well as your hotel reservation.” His eyes softened. “Lily told me a bit about your situation, so I’ve also included a check with a small advance that should cover your expenses while you’re there.”