Page 54 of Base Block

“I never did much on the holidays,” I said to the camera. “Not when I was a kid, because the family I lived with didn’t believe in celebrating them. They didn’t celebrate birthdays, either, but when I moved in with my grandma, that changed some. On Thanksgiving, we didn’t have a huge turkey and all the traditional stuff, but she did make an effort so it was different and special. For my birthday, she used to sew something new for me to wear…”

I looked down and saw that Maverick had rested his chin on my knee. “Hi,” I said warily. “What do you need?” I only realized that I was crying because I felt a tear slip down my face. “Is that why you came over? Can you really smell when I’m upset?”

I turned off the camera. I was going to have to delete that and now I’d have to redo my makeup. I checked to see if Callum had texted, since I turned off my notifications as I recorded. He hadn’t but I had gotten a message from Victoria, the woman who worked for the Woodsmen and who was my boss’s ex. That made a relationship with her a little weird, maybe, but Millie had remained in contact with several of the women who had been with Damian and that had been fine. Anyway, Beau and Victoria were very friendly, and she had been the one to get me my job.

She wanted to know if I was free to go out, to make it big and have some fun. “You must be lonely with Callum traveling to all the away games,” she’d written, and that was true. After a bye week, the Woodsmen had been on the road and they’d gone far. One game had been in Oregon and the other was in Oklahoma, and if there was a Hawaiian expansion team next year? He would travel even further and spend more time away.

I didn’t admit anything about loneliness to her but I did say that I would be happy to meet up tonight. I could—I jerked my head in the direction of my bedroom. Had I left the door open? Shoot! I got up and ran to see what Maverick was eating now, and I found him destroying one of the flip-flops that I’d bought months before in Indianapolis, my first non-Damian shoes.

“Stop!” I yelled, my voice going way too high to sound serious. He dodged and took off when I tried to grab it out of his mouth. The best part of my day came next, when I lured him into dropping it and then getting into his kennel by using bits of cheese. I shut the metal door and was happy that at least I was still a little smarter than he was and now, while I was gone, he couldn’t eat the entire condo.

Victoria and I met at a different bar than before, one that was downtown and Woodsmen-themed. I asked to see the latest pictures of her son and then she asked what I had been up to. “Hm,” she said as she studied the post-Thanksgiving dinner plan on my phone. “That seems like an ambitious menu. If you’re going to have so many people, why don’t you do a potluck? You could have everyone bring a dish from their area of the country.”

“That might work better,” I said, thinking of Heidi’s doubts about my oven space. A turkey and all the sides did present a big problem. I sipped my vodka and soda as I considered that and frowned, not at the idea of a potluck but at the taste of my drink. I would have preferred tonic, but this was less caloric.

Victoria had a large mug of beer and it wasn’t lite, either. She clinked it against my glass. “Thanks for meeting me. I was feeling so lonely,” she confessed. “I have one old friend left who isn’t attached, like married or definitely settled down, but right now she’s vacationing on some beach with her latest guy. She’ll keep him for a while and then move on.” She sighed. “I wish I was like that. She has so much fun and she has no desire for anything permanent.”

A beach sounded pretty good. I had talked big about not fearing the winter up here, but it had suddenly gotten a whole lot colder and as I’d driven to this bar tonight, a light dusting of snow had started to fall. On a faraway beach, I also wouldn’t have to deal with a dog that didn’t respect me. But in spite of all that, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere.

“I did a lot of traveling with my former job and I don’t want to anymore,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind taking a vacation when Callum is done with the season.” I wondered where he would want to go and then remembered Maverick. What would I do with him?

“Beau told me that you did social media stuff before,” she said. “That involved travel?”

When we’d created my résumé, Heidi had helped me to come up with the idea that I had been a social media consultant. That was partially a lie but was also true. I had done a lot of posting when I’d been with Damian—yes, Millie had directed most of it, but I’d had ideas. She’d listened to some of them.

Victoria had out her phone. “Who was the guy you worked for then?”

“Um, Damian,” I answered. I hadn’t checked his accounts in a while and I hoped there was nothing weird that she might see.

“No last name?” She scrolled.

“He wants to be famous as the only Damian in the entertainment business,” I explained. But when I’d gone to his real house in El Monte, far away from the mansion he pretended was his in Calabasas, I’d spotted some mail addressed to Damian Schardt.

“I’ve never heard of—oh.” I watched her eyes widen as she looked at her phone. “Wow. Is this you? I looked up your name and ‘Damian,’ and this popped up.”

I stared at her screen. Yes, that was me. It was me in one of the outfits that Millie had chosen, a really ugly bustier that was a terrible shade of red, much too orange but she hadn’t listened. “Nobody cares about the color,” she’d said, waving her hand. “They’re all looking at your tits.”

“That’s an old picture,” I said. “Very old. I was modeling and this is an outtake.”

She brought the phone close to her face in order to see it better. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

That had been a tough photo shoot. After the first few tries, Millie had made me close my eyes, and afterwards she had blurred and darkened the pictures to make everything undefined and hazy. It wasn’t an artistic choice, though. I had looked terrible but we’d had to post something that day, and Sage had been in even worse shape. She’d been lying on the floor of the bathroom, sweating and retching, while I had been able to sit and take direction—but my eyes had been totally bloodshot and my pupils had been huge. I looked stoned, and not in a pretty, fun way, like I was the life of the party. I looked like someone had dragged me off the bathroom floor where I’d also been prone, and that was because Matheus the bodyguard had been forced to do exactly that.

This really was one of the outtakes, like I’d said, so my eyes were open and there was no helpful editing. “I think that I was really tired. I don’t like that someone posted an old modeling shot of me,” I said. “I’m going to report it.”

“They tagged your account, the one you have with Callum. The caption says ‘Damian and Rainey Stormer’ and ‘This is Roxy Desjardins.’ One of the hashtags is ‘baked.’”

I was typing fast. “Hm. Well, people try to get attention.” This was not the kind of attention that I wanted for me or for him, though. “I don’t think it matters. No one will see that and think of me now. I’m not that person, not at all.”

“It’s weird that it says your name is Roxy.”

“Um, yes, that was a name I used for modeling but it was all so long ago that I don’t even put it on my résumé anymore. That picture is more than a decade old.”

“It couldn’t be that old,” she countered. “Aren’t you twenty-one? That was what you said, right?”

“Yes. No. I’m twenty-three,” I said and she looked confused. Why had I told her the wrong age? It was a dumb lie and everything I was saying now was also dumb. I picked up my drink and then put it down without tasting it. “I better get going. I don’t like to leave my dog for too long.”

“Oh, ok.” She also sounded confused. “Sure. We could go out another time.”