The Last Thing You See (13 page)

Going to the Tipton Group Home and seeing a warm, nurturing, environment with mostly happy kids was a welcome surprise.  I vaguely remembered when I lived here and so-called important visitors arrived, we had to line up and not speak unless we were spoken to.  I didn’t make the association at the time of course, but what it had really felt like was lining up for a firing squad.

That Kaylee girl was a little sweetheart.  I was so happy she was going somewhere she was looking forward to.  Samantha had had a hard life and was walking a fine line between hope and hopelessness.

She said she was too old to be adopted now.  People who adopt kids as their own still seemed to want to
raise
them as well.  I didn’t know whether that was true or not, it certainly sounded like a possibility though.  Regardless, she thought she was going to be in the home until she turned eighteen and then she had no idea what her place in the world was.

Against the advice of my mother’s voice in my head, I had given Samantha my number and told her she could call me if she ever wanted to talk some more.  I wished there was more I could do, I just hoped she didn’t spread my contact details around.

With everything that happened immediately afterwards and in the following days, I had to have a good think when the text arrived asking if this was really my number and signed by somebody named ‘Sam’.  I confirmed and told her it was the first day of filming for Dark Fox Two, so I’d be away from my phone a lot but I’d always get back to her.

At first it was really tough to get back into character, into any character for that matter, but as the days and weeks progressed, I felt like I was back to normal.  Better than normal, actually.

The ground I’d walked on my whole life had always seemed shaky at best, but now it was solid.  I knew where I stood.  Once things settled down, I felt a surge of confidence unlike anything I’d felt before, regardless of how well my movies or my performances had been received by critics and fans.

Acting can be an embarrassing job.  Sometimes when you’re in these awkward situations, saying things that sound cheesy, with wires and safety harnesses and crew members everywhere, you think there’s no way this could be any good.

To give the best performances, you need to have no shame and throw everything you’ve got into it.  To scream, punch, kick, kiss, love, cry, and strut like another person, you have to let it all go and for the first time ever, I felt like I could really do that because the ground would definitely be there when I came back down.

The magic of the job was stronger than ever, and I felt like I was doing exactly what I was born to do.  I was being what Nick’s friend, Sex Change Steve, would have called his ‘true self’.  I wasn’t only fulfilling my own dreams, in a way it felt like helping my birth mother realize her dreams too.  And I was over the moon, slow-motion-running-through-a-field-of-flowers, in love.  That couldn’t have hurt.

The fight choreographer loved some of the moves I was able to pull off and some of the ideas I had, but with the movie filming officially started, my training sessions with Nick were over.  Of course, these days he wasn’t my trainer, he was my boyfriend and everybody knew it, so we didn’t need the excuse of Jiu Jitsu training to see each other.

Nick had a key cut for me so I could come and go in his apartment as needed, in case he was ever out working or at the gym or anything else he might want to do.  With my mom, my adopted mom, quietly smoldering with misplaced indignation, I spent as many nights at Nick’s place as I did in my own house.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her, or my dad and Orson, about having tracked down my birth mother.  I didn’t know how to broach the subject with things as they were between us.  Every time I came home, I hoped things would have smoothed themselves over, but they didn’t.

My dad did his level best to remain neutral, having always refused to be a part of the Harper-Bayliss-Movie-Star family business, and my mom always framed her rants in terms of the effect on my career rather than the fact that my relationship with Nick was my personal life.  That kept my dad pretty much out of it.

Orson seemed to be siding with my mom more as time progressed, though never to such an extreme level.  Maybe he felt like his role as unofficial security was being undermined by Nick, maybe he was just Big Brother protecting Little Sister.  I didn’t know.

I did my best to put it out of my mind.  Something would have to give, but until I could figure out the right combination of words that would make everything right in the world, I had more than enough that was absolutely perfect to concentrate on.

One of those things was Nick’s birthday, and I wracked my brains trying to think of what to get him for the big day.  A quarter-century seemed like an important milestone, but he was a tough one to buy for.

The idea came to me when I was randomly browsing the Internet on my phone while in my trailer.  An article was saying studies had shown that spending money on experiences, rather than material things, made most people happier in the long run.

It had something to do with the fact that we tend to look back on things like holidays with rose-colored lenses and remember all the good things about it rather than the long waits at the airport or the missed connections or carrying luggage everywhere.  With material things, like buying a new car, it tends to wear down with time and the reality of having it there, rusty and needing repairs, brings us down more than the old memory of the thrill of a new car brings us up.

Then I remembered something that Nick told me on the night of the Fans Choice Awards and realized I was in a truly unique position.  It was an insane idea, but surprisingly easy to organize.

The future.  It was something I hadn’t had any reason to think about in such a long time.  I’d been wandering around aimlessly for months before Harper came along and, for all intents and purposes, the future simply hadn’t existed for me.

Now though, it felt like there were decisions that mattered beyond the next breath and the next meal.  My plans from a year ago were out the window.  I wasn’t going to be career-military.

Could I live in L.A.?  Sure, I’d go anywhere where Harper was, but doing what?  The few hours I got with Johnny working on Jeremy Holt’s security team weren’t really enough.

Not that there was really any issue of making ends meet with Harper raking in untold millions per movie, but I needed to feel like I wasn’t just riding on her coattails.  A long-term plan wasn’t easy to come up with.

I talked to Johnny about maybe starting up a security business of our own.  With our know-how and Harper’s social circle, we might have been able to get some pretty good contracts, but he liked the haven of having a billionaire boss.   Plus he enjoyed all the cool gadgets and innovations he got to see as part of his job, or occasionally play with, like with that license plate software he showed me.

Other people were unlikely to pay me what Harper had for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu training before we became an official ‘thing’.  I couldn’t take her money when so much of the sessions got tied up with rolling around on the floor kissing her.

What’s more, other clients weren’t likely to pay for hiring the gym space either.  Taking that into account, it was probably a long way away from a profitable venture.  It would also be difficult to attract students as a purple belt when there were so many more highly qualified, and even famous, instructors already in the area.

Still, it wasn’t like the pressure was really on yet, and compared to the bleakness of before, these felt like good problems to have.  I had plenty of money left over from the sale of my parents’ house, and it would last a while.  Hopefully until a good idea struck me.

For the time being, regardless of the unknowns of the future, the present was a hell of a happy place to be.  For example, Harper was up to something for my birthday.

I tried to think of where I was for my last birthday and struggled to remember what exactly had happened.  It was possible that somebody was shooting at me though.  This was much better.

All week, whenever she stayed at my apartment, she was all mysterious.  She wouldn’t let me book a restaurant or anything, she said she had it all under control.

Tonight, she actually kicked me out of my own home, saying she needed about an hour to sort out dinner and she hated other people being in the kitchen when she was cooking.  I went on a meandering walk to the closest store to get a bottle of wine and took my time getting back.

When I returned, I tentatively opened the door a crack and sniffed the air, searching for some clue as to what Harper might have made.  I smelled precisely no food whatsoever, nothing except her faint perfume.

I pushed the door open further and stepped in, seeing no evidence that Harper had done any cooking.  What she
had
done was set up a lot of scented candles and turned the lighting way down.

“Hello?” I said, and received no immediate answer.

I put the wine in the fridge and walked towards my bedroom.  I was almost there when a sultry voice spoke from the shadows in the corner of the living room.

“I expected more impressive headquarters for a criminal mastermind like you, Marine.”

A match flared for an instant, lighting up the pair of dark eyes I knew so well, before it was set to another candle, which she put on a shelf before extinguishing the match with a dramatic puff of air.  The candle gave just enough light to reveal that standing in the corner of my living room, leaning with her back against the wall and one foot braced against it, was none other than Dark Fox herself.

Her face was partially hidden behind a thin black mask and framed by that glamourous brunette hair.  Dark make-up highlighted her lips and eyes, the former curled in a smirk and the latter watching me intently.

The black and grey top was strapless and skin-tight, dipping low at the front but otherwise in the style of classical Greek leather armor.  Separating her top from her skirt was a belt with the Dark Fox logo front and center, but I glossed over that due to the view slightly lower.

Her boots came up to just over her knees and her bare thighs disappeared under the hem of that short skirt, showing just enough skin to set my heart racing.  With one foot cocked up against the wall, her skirt was riding up even further than normal and I was almost disappointed when she dropped it to stand at full height and began to saunter towards me.

Harper strode like she was on the catwalk, each foot crossing the line of the other one as she stepped, giving her a sexy sway.  She took her time closing the small distance between us.

The transformation was insane, like the night of the Fans Choice Awards but so much more extreme than girl-next-door to movie-star.  She wasn’t just the Harper I knew and talked to every day, she wasn’t even Harper all dressed up for a big event, it was like she was channeling another person entirely.

The outfit itself probably helped.  It was obviously custom-made from some portion of the hundred-million dollar movie budget and far beyond what any normal person could rent from a costume store, but it was so much more than that.  Her mannerisms were different, the
attitude
of every movement was different, and the trademark Dark Fox sexual and physical confidence that bordered on arrogance was
all
there.

“What’s the matter?  Cat got your tongue?  Didn’t think I’d find you?” she asked, and pushed up on my chin with one finger, making my mouth shut with a click of teeth.

Harper put her hands on her hips defiantly with elbows way back, which pushed her chest out towards me.  I wanted to throw her on the couch right there and then, climb between her legs and take her hard and fast… but something told me I’d have a lot more fun if I played along.

“How
did
you find me?” I asked.

“Pffft.  Please.  Did you really think you could try to poison me and I wouldn’t beat your location out of one of your goons?”

“Poison?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Marine.  This look familiar?”

Harper shoved some blister pack of pills against my chest before turning, sashaying away, and then bending at the hips, pretending to be very interested in something on my coffee table.  Her skirt rode up, revealing tantalizing extra inches of her long legs.  The view must have been so close to the bottom of her ass, it was all I could do to keep my hands off of her.

I looked down at the blister pack in my hands, and I swore my heart stopped beating for about five seconds.  These weren’t some movie-prop cyanide capsules or something.  These were birth control pills, with several already gone from the packet.

“Are these your plans for world domination?” she asked, apparently commenting on my National Geographic magazine.  “Amateurish.  Like your attempt on my life.  There’s not a poison on this planet that can hurt me,” she finished, standing up and turning to face me.

“Well done, Dark Fox.  You survived the poison, you found my hideout.  It’s such a shame you’ll never leave.  Such a shame you’ll live out your days here as my plaything.”

“Oh really?”

“Really.”

“Well, let’s see if you fight as well as you talk.”

Harper narrowed her eyes and adopted a fighting stance.  I cracked my knuckles and did likewise.