The Debt 3 (6 page)

“There’s too many people,” she yelled to
Jake over the noise.

Jake grabbed her hand and pulled her into
a waiting sedan nearby.
 
People
pounded on the doors and windows, but the driver was experienced and knew how
to get out of a tight jam.

Soon, they were driving and leaving the
crowds in the distance.

“You planned to have this car waiting for
us outside the restaurant?” Raven asked him.

Jake opened a mini fridge, pulled out a
tiny bottle of water and had a sip.
 
“Of course I did, I’m not completely new to this game.”

“Maybe from now on you could include me
in your plans—let me know what we’re doing and what I should expect.”

“No,” Jake said, smoothing the crease in
his pants.

“No?”

“It’s more real when you’re just
reacting,” he told her.
 
“You’re not
an actress,” he said.
 
“I can’t plan
everything out with you in advance or it’ll come off fake.”

“And I suppose this is all just acting
for you,” Raven said, folding her arms.
 
“Nothing’s real.”

“Isn’t that the point?” he said,
laughing.

“I guess it is,” Raven replied.
 
She turned and stared out the windows and
waited to get back to the hotel.

***

When they got back to the hotel, Raven
and Jake were met by a team of security guards as they pulled up outside.

There was a large crowd outside as they
arrived.

Raven looked at Jake.
 
“I guess everyone knows you’re here.”

He nodded and then looked at her.
 
“They know
we’re
here.”

“Nobody cares about me, Jake.”

His brown eyes studied her face.
 
“You might be surprised,” he said.
 
And then he turned towards the door,
gripping the handle as one of his security team stepped close to the car.
 
“When I open it, you get out fast and
come right with me,” Jake said.

His voice had a note of tension it, which
made her realize that this situation was perhaps more important than it first appeared.
 
She looked out and noticed the crowd was
raucous, and there were paparazzi battling for position to get a shot.

People were starting to actually push each
other, and someone fell and hit the hood of the car with a loud thump as they
went down.
 

Her heart started beating faster.
 
“Don’t leave me,” she said.

“Keep an eye out for Kurt—he should
be waiting for us.”

“Kurt?
 
Your manager?”
 
 

“Yeah, he flew in right away after we
spoke this morning.
 
He needs to be
here to coordinate all this publicity we’re doing.”

She tried not to think about his manager,
because even the thought of Kurt made her want to run as far away as possible.

Raven grabbed his arm.
 
“Promise me you’re not going to leave me
behind.”

Now there were people pounding on the
sedan so hard that it rocked on its wheels.

He looked at her.
 
“Come on,” Jake said, “its’ go
time.”
 
And then he was opening the
door and the crowd was screaming, the photographers were taking shots.

And for the first time, as she scooted
out of the car as close to Jake as possible—for the very first time she
heard her own name being called.

“Raven!”

“Raven, over here!”

“Just a quick smile Raven!”

“Are you two an item?”

“Jake, how’s Raven in the sack?”

“Slumming it Jake?
 
What about Courtney Taylor?”

“Raven, what do you think about Jake’s
comments?
 
Do you agree with him
that depressed people are losers?”

“Is the tour cancelled for good, Jake?”

“Did you cancel Boston because of Raven,
Jake?”

Raven held onto Jake’s arm as the
security team encircled them, trying to fend off the anxious paparazzi, many of
whom simply pushed cameras above the shoulders of the security guards, pointed
in Raven and Jake’s direction and began snapping away.

Cameras were pushing in at them from
every direction, but Raven just looked straight ahead at Jake, following him
the best she could, staying close behind him as they moved as quickly as
possible to the hotel entrance.

How
do they know my name already?
She wondered.
 
How?

The moment they got into the lobby, Kurt
was there, motioning for them to follow him.
 
The security team fanned out, making
sure that nobody impeded
their
progress to the
elevators.
 
Once at the elevators,
one security guard stood right outside the door while Raven, Jake and Kurt went
inside.
 
The guard continued to stand
in front of the elevator until the doors slid safely shut.

Raven was shivering from the jarring
experience she’d just had.
 
Jake
turned to her, his eyes concerned.
 
“Are you okay?” he said softly.

Kurt didn’t say anything, but Raven
couldn’t help but look at him.
 
Just
hours
prior, he’d threatened her very existence on the
phone.
 
She couldn’t talk in front
of him, and yet she couldn’t allow Jake to see just how uncomfortable his
manager (and closest friend) made her.

“I’m fine,” she lied.

“I know it’s a lot,” he said.
 
“I mean, I’ve had years to get used to
it and it still can get to be a bit much sometimes.”

“Just a bit?” she laughed.

Kurt shot her a glance that Jake couldn’t
see.

“Yeah, just a bit,”
Jake
said, joining her in laughing at the craziness of it all.

Raven was so disturbed by Kurt’s presence
that she wanted nothing more than to go back to her own room.
 
The moment the doors opened again on
their floor, she got off and abruptly made a beeline in that direction.

“Raven,” Jake called out, moving to
follow her.
 
In a few quick steps
he’d caught up to her.
 
“Hey,” he
said, “where are you going?”

“To my room, Jake.”
 
She kept walking, trying to put distance
between herself and Kurt.

“I thought you and Kurt and I could hang
out in my room for a bit, talk shop.
 
Discuss strategy.”

“Yeah,” Raven said, “the thing is,
I
really feel kind of sick.
 
I need to go back to my room and lay
down for a little bit.”
 
At her
door, she pulled out he room key, fumbling it a little.

“Raven, is something wrong?
 
Like, really wrong?” he asked, putting
his warm hand on her wrist.

“I told you—“

“I just want to be sure everything’s
okay.”

“I’m really frazzled.”
 
She swept her bangs from her forehead
and looked at him briefly, but she couldn’t meet his gaze.
 
He looked too concerned, too
worried—almost like he actually cared about her.

He
doesn’t really care about anything but whether his big plan is going to be
ruined.
 
The big plan that I
stupidly came up with in the first place.

Her door unlocked and she went inside,
while Jake stood there in the hall.
 
“I’ll come and check on you soon,” he told her.

“Okay,” she said, suddenly needing to be
alone more than anything in the world.
 
As she shut the door, everything crashed in on her at once.
 
She ran to the bathroom, feeling like
she might be sick.

She leaned over the toilet bowl and
waited for everything she’d eaten earlier to come up, and for a brief moment,
she was sure that it would.
 
But
then her jittery stomach seemed to calm, and she simply collapsed to a sitting
position next to the toilet, head hanging limply.

All of those photographers and reporters
out there—they’d known her name.

They’d known who she was already.
 
How was that even possible?

It was shocking, really, to feel the
ferocity of it all, like being slammed by a forty foot wave that you never saw
coming.
 
The scope of it was so much
bigger than she could ever have prepared herself to cope with.

Soon millions of people might know who
she was.
 
They’d be dissecting her
and talking about how she was too ugly, or short, or fat, or whatever people
would say.
 
She was sure none of it
would be good.

Raven wondered why she’d put herself in
this position.
 
To
help Jake Novak?
 
He didn’t
need her help, and besides, she wasn’t capable of giving him her help.
 
She was turning to jelly and nothing had
even happened yet, really.

Maybe it was time to have a chat with
Jake, to pull out of the deal.
 
Explain that she wasn’t cut out for the spotlight.
 
He would be better off trying to make a
go of it with Courtney Taylor or someone on his level.

Slowly, though, her breathing was getting
a little less shallow, and she felt her light-headedness giving way to just
sheer tiredness.

You’re
okay, Raven.
 
Nothing bad has happened.

Well,
not yet anyway.

Raven got slowly to her feet and left the
bathroom, went to the window of her hotel room and looked down, where she could
see the crowd still gathering.
 
It
was so strange to know that they were there, at least in part, to see her as
well as Jake.

She took out her phone and pulled up
Google.
 

Before, she’d sometime googled herself to
make sure that all of the old garbage from her past had been scrubbed from the
internet
and wasn’t still coming up.
 
It had been gone for years by now, but
she still occasionally checked just in case.

Just a few weeks ago she’d plugged her
name into Google and gotten less than five direct hits.
 
A race result, some article about her
old restaurant that used a quote from her, and then some white pages results.
 
That was it.

Hands shaking, she decided to search again.

When she typed her name in and hit search
this time, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

24,897 results came back.
 

She started to scroll through what was
coming up, and it was all basically social media stuff and bloggers talking
about how she’d been seen with Jake Novak.
 
How they’d gotten her name, Raven had no idea.
 
It was frightening to think that it had
all happened so fast.

In the blogs, they were saying she’d met
Jake on tour.
 
Raven got on Twitter
and searched her name, finding a lot of tweets of the pictures that had been
snapped of them leaving the hotel earlier in the day.

And most of the comments referred to her as
a “groupie.”

People seemed genuinely stunned that Jake
was hanging with a groupie when he could have had Courtney Taylor.

A lot of opinion seemed to think Jake was
trying to be spotted with a “normal girl” to help his image, make him look less
superior and arrogant.

That hurt a little, in part because it
felt as though onlookers were already catching on to the plan.
 
They couldn’t even believe that Jake
would actually want to spend time with Raven—he had to have an ulterior
motive.

It wasn’t particularly good for her
self-esteem.
 
There were comments
like, “ugh, she’s not even one night stand worthy” and worse.

Raven closed out of all the
internet
windows on her phone and put the cell back in her
purse.
 
She kept wishing that she’d
thought the whole thing through more, considered all of the ramifications.

But things had just happened so fast, and
Jake had simply run with the idea, and now it was happening.
 
She never should have suggested any of
it.

This was madness and it was already
backfiring.

Maybe Kurt had been right to try and
scare her off.
 
If only she’d
listened to him.

At that moment, there was a knock on her
hotel room door.

“Yes?” Raven called out.