Star Struck (13 page)

‘That's no way to talk about you,' I giggled as she sashayed outside, walking carefully and swinging car keys from one finger.

‘Hey, too right, no-one's
ever
called me little. But I was hoping to hang around for the results of the quiz, find out if I … I mean, if
you've
done well.'

‘Oh, those won't be released until later. Go off and make use of all that sexual energy you've got burning a hole in your underwear. After all, if you've even started to contemplate doing the lusty thing with Mr I'm-so-hetero-it-hurts Tudor-Morgan, you need to calm it all down or you are going to get into
so
much trouble.'

‘Well, yeah, but I kind of told Jared that I'm up for a rematch tonight, and that is a man you do
not
want to disappoint. You would not
believe 
…'

‘Fe. Just go.'

‘Will you be okay here on your own?'

‘I'll manage.' I flicked a finger at him and headed away. It probably looked as though I was going towards Meeting Room Two, with its queue still snaking in an orderly way out through the doors and half-way across reception, but at the last minute I diverted and headed up the stairs back to our room. At the bottom of the staircase I peeped back. Felix was draining a furtive scotch at the bar as though fortifying himself for the afternoon and I really hoped Lissa knew what she was letting herself in for, hanging around with him.

Once alone in the room, I felt a brief burst of self-pity which I tried to squash down. After all, Gethryn seemed to like me, didn't he? I lifted my shirt and looked down my body at the intricate web of scars and stitch marks left by the accident, marks like cracks in droughty earth, and wondered what he'd say if he could see these. There had been an episode late in Series Two, where Lucas James had rescued a badly burned woman from a downed Shadow craft. He'd spoken such words of consolation and acceptance that I'd watched the DVD over and over until it started sticking on that scene. He'd talked about how no-one should be defined by the way they looked, that it was
who they truly were
that defined them; their memories and their actions. She'd died, of course; all Lucas' women had a tendency to keel over before the end of the series – it was a high-risk job being the chosen partner of a man who fought such battles for justice and understanding for other races.

I traced a finger over the scars.
Nothing in life is truly perfect, and those who pretend to be are covering up something nastier than these.
I could hear his voice as my lips mouthed the words that were etched on my brain, along with the image of Lucas James holding his lover, gazing down on her damaged body. Words I'd clutched for the comfort they brought when I was at my absolute lowest. No-one was perfect. No-one. You could see my imperfections, that was all. And they could be overlooked too, by the right man.

There was a bang on the door and I let the shirt fall. ‘What?'

‘Skye? You in there?' It was Jack. ‘Have you seen Lissa?' He was inside the room, panting and dishevelled, as soon as I opened the door, scanning the floor as though I'd got her hidden under the boards. ‘She's been drinking, gone off with her car keys. We'll be pulling her from the wreckage …' My face must have gone rigid, because he added, more gently, ‘Metaphorically speaking, obviously.'

I told him about Lissa and Felix heading off to get the car and he swore inventively for a minute. You could tell he was a writer. ‘We could go after them.'

‘Can't. I don't drive.' He paced up and down for a bit. ‘And I can't call the cops, she'll get done for drunk driving, and the last thing I need is more of that kind of thing hanging over the show.' He paused. ‘Not that the show is the really important thing, obviously.'

‘We could take Felix's car.' The keys were sitting on the little bedside cupboard. ‘It's not great but …'

‘I just want to find them, to know that she's safe. Get her back. Everyone knows she's my agent, I don't want rumours flying around about her … about
me
, I mean, I know we need press coverage, we
need
them, pull in the advertisers, but …' He stopped pacing and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Oh God, I'm doing the talking thing again, just punch me in the mouth, Skye, for the good of us all.' His hands came round and he hid his face in them. ‘I need sleep.'

‘Jack?'

A quick head shake. ‘No, nothing. Sorry, Skye. Don't even know why I'm here to tell the truth, I just sort of panicked and …' He shrugged and chewed a nail.

I made a huge, a monumental, decision. Jack would probably never know how big. ‘I can drive.'

Maybe he did know. Or guessed. ‘And have you driven lately?'

‘Not
lately
. As such. But I can.'

‘Skye, have you driven
anywhere
since the accident?'

‘I …'
You're such a crap driver. Useless, Skye. Pathetic.

He gave me a long, dark look. ‘I can't ask you to do this.'

‘But Felix is my friend. Let's go.' I picked up the keys and almost ran from the room. I didn't want to give myself a chance to change my mind, to feel the terror that I knew was going to come flooding in somewhere. It was bad enough being a passenger, how much worse was it going to be getting behind the wheel?

I found out, when I sat in the hired Ford, with the seat burning through my trousers, my hand shaking so hard that I couldn't start the bloody thing.

‘Skye. Look. Maybe I panicked too soon. I'm sure they'll be fine.' Jack was hunched up on the other side of the car, legs too long for the pathetic footwell.

‘No. I can do this.' I gritted my teeth so hard I could hear grating inside my head. ‘I have to stop letting the accident rule my life. I drove before, there's absolutely no reason why I shouldn't drive now.'

‘It's been a long time for you, hasn't it?'

I thought back over all the things I couldn't now do. Of all the things I
didn't
do. ‘Yeah, but you don't forget.' The key shook, chiming against the keyhole as my nerveless fingers tried to turn it again. ‘You don't forget,' I repeated.

Jack gave a strange kind of laugh. ‘The roads are dead straight though. Boringly straight. Even smashed out of her tiny, Liss can drive these roads.'

The engine caught, and my shaky leg eased off the brake. ‘Do you want to do this or not?' I had to push down on my knee to stop the shaking. ‘Because I'm going to find Felix. If you want to find Lissa, then stop whining and come with me.'

‘My God, you're bolshy, aren't you? Don't know how Felix puts up with it.' Jack half-smiled at me. ‘All right. If you're sure. But take it easy.'

The car juddered as I tried to pull away in ‘Park'. I'd never driven an automatic before and I kept pulling at the non-existent gears when we started moving. Jack remained manfully silent while I swore and raged and used the anger to stopper the fear and prevent its escape. The car was too small for terror
and
the two of us. Finally I got the measure of it, practicalities meaning that I had to focus on driving, not my fear of driving, and we headed up the highway, cutting slowly through the dust and the heat. For some reason having Jack next to me calmed some of my more immediate nerves; his quiet presence had a reassuring air about it, despite his occasional muttered swearing. The little air-conditioning unit groaned and emitted high-pitched squeals at heart-stopping moments – it was like driving a television studio audience.

‘There.' Jack suddenly grabbed my arm and I nearly drove off the road. ‘They just turned down that track.'

‘Are you sure?' Everything was dust-coloured, even the sky, occasional little scrubby bushes beside the road, and one lone cow who watched us zigzag slowly past her, with sad, dust-coloured eyes.

‘Well, there
could
be more than one pink convertible out here but somehow I doubt it. Turn left, here.'

He reached across me and pulled the wheel so that the car swung out across the non-existent oncoming traffic and bumped onto the rutted side-road which led, apparently, nowhere. We jolted along it for about a quarter of a mile and then, in a dip, we found them.

I couldn't go near. Couldn't even drive past. I pulled up a hundred yards back and sat with the window down in case I was sick, watching Jack cautiously approaching the other car, which stood, with the roof up, at an angle to the roadway.
Felix. Felix could be dead in there. Don't be stupid, the car hasn't hit anything, hasn't rolled. It's just standing there. No-one can be dead in a car that's just parked …

A couple of minutes later Jack was back. He climbed back into the passenger seat without a word, slumped down with his head in his hands and gave a huge sigh.

‘Well? Is she okay? And Fe?'

‘Skye.' Jack didn't look up. ‘They are in that car, banging like rabbits. You want to go and ask him how he is, you be my guest, because I am not going to interrupt.'

We sat silently for a moment. ‘Are you all right?' I asked eventually, when my eyes had grown tired of fixating on the slowly rocking pink car in front of us. ‘I know you said you and she weren't … well, you know … any more but you did seem really worried about her.'

He stopped rubbing his hands through his hair and stared out too. ‘She's my agent, she does all my paperwork and besides I … ah, never mind. So, yeah, I worry about her. Especially if she's going to go off on one with the best part of a bottle of vodka inside her.'

We sat a while longer, watching the pink car, waves of heat coming off it in all directions. The rocking subsided, returned and then stopped.

‘We'd better wait, follow them back. Make sure nothing happens.'

‘Jack, there's absolutely nothing on these roads apart from squashed … whatever those grey things are. She's not going to hit anything bigger than a pebble.'

He gave me a hard stare. ‘But if she does? It's not just Liss and Felix on the line here, Skye, it's the whole reputation of the show. My show. Something I've pulled back from the brink, and there are journos out there all agog for the details, all wanting to poke around and find things out and pull us all down into their own particular version of hell, and it's all I've fucking got, right now, so please don't start telling me that everything will be fine, that it's all okay, all right?' A shaky hand pushed his hair away from his face and he looked down at the floor. ‘Sorry. I'm sorry, none of this is your fault; you've done nothing but try to help. I shouldn't be such a miserable bastard to you.' Then he surprised me by giving me a small, sheepish grin. ‘Should I?'

‘They're moving,' was all the response I could come up with. His shamefaced vulnerability gave me a curious, achy feeling.

We waited until Lissa and Felix had driven a large loop around us and regained the main road before we followed. They were driving at about fifteen miles an hour, we had to match speed, and so the slowest car-chase in the world began.

‘They'll be sobering up around now.' Jack had lit a cigarette and was puffing out of the window, letting the heat in but at least considerate enough not to force me to breathe his smoke. ‘Listen carefully and you might be able to hear the sounds of terrible embarrassment.'

‘Don't tell me you've never had stupid drunken sex with someone you didn't really fancy?' I managed to tear my eyes away from the road for long enough to give him a thin grin. ‘You look like the type of guy …'

His eyes were sudden and black on me. ‘Do I?' Smoke formed a veil between us. ‘Are you sure about that, Skye?'

It was suddenly hard to lift my eyes from the steering wheel. ‘I don't know, do I? I know nothing about you at all, Jack. Even your Wiki page just has some sketchy stuff about you being born in Leeds and being a bit … reclusive.'

‘A bit reclusive. Yeah. You don't get phrases like solipsistic intoxication psychosis on Wikipedia.' Jack turned away and stared out of the window at the unfascinating landscape beyond. ‘And I have no idea why I'm talking to you about it.'

‘Because I'm here?'

He turned back, his eyes immense. His gaze moved over my face, slowly, not lingering on the scar as people usually did but travelling from my eyes to my mouth and back up again. ‘Yeah,' he said, and his voice was a bit croaky. ‘Yeah, that'll be it.'

Silence fell, broken only by my occasional swearing, as we inched along behind Felix and Lissa, with our engine complaining at the slow speed all the way. If Lissa's tyres had had markers on they would have described a series of 33s, as the car covered almost the entire road's surface in its attempts to go straight. At last we both reached the motel car park and the pink car slewed into two-and-a-half spaces, parked at an angle. The driver's door flew open and Lissa stuck her head out to puke on the gravel.