Bootycall 2 - J. D. Hawkins Page 0,27

into a fast enough trot to keep up with the world around me. I really regret knocking over those eggs now.

I look around the apartment as shouts and calls from outside grow louder, the tense fear that they instigate forcing me to snap into ‘organization’ mode.

“Something’s up, Dylan. Maybe that’s why you kept getting calls this morning. Check your phone.”

Dylan paces a few more steps, his eyes almost bloodshot with anger now, before my words seem to sink in. He pulls his phone out of his pocket.

“It was Larry. You’re probably right.”

I pull my phone out of my bag and see that Frankie has also tried to call me so many times that my missed calls are almost in the triple digits. A vague memory of sleepily turning my phone to silent and pushing myself back into Dylan’s embrace tiptoes into my mind, and I slap my phone out of frustration. I dial Frankie back.

“Oh my God! Is he there!? With you! This is either the best or worst timing of anything ever!”

“Frankie! Slow the fuck down! What’s going on?”

“You don’t know? You don’t know?!” she screams, her voice like a high-pitched whistle.

“For fuck’s sake, Frankie! Know what?!”

I hear Frankie hyperventilating on the line.

“It’s…the…Dylan…Fuck it. Look, Gemma, you need to go online and see this thing. You need to see the pics. I…I can’t explain this…I mean, I can’t believe you didn’t know!”

I stride to my desk and open my laptop, while Dylan curses into his phone. I open up a browser and take a deep breath.

“Ok, Frankie. What should I look at?”

“Um. Shit, Gemma, just look at any fucking gossip column and it’ll be on the front page! Go to Perez Hilton. No! Wait, he’s mean. Bad idea. People. Try People. Wait. No. TMZ. They’re live-blogging it. TMZ.”

I shake my head and sigh as I clench the phone between my shoulder and ear and go to the website.

It’s there alright. Multiple times. I click on the top story.

Scandal Update: Dylan Marlowe’s Secret Love Child!

The pictures are plain, simple, boring. The kind of thing that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone in most cases. To me, though, they’re a fucking atomic bomb. Dylan playing with a kid in the park. Dylan holding the kid in one arm while the other is wrapped around a dark-haired woman who’s obviously the mother. Dylan and the kid eating ice creams and smiling.

“Did you see?! Can you see them?! Talk to me, Gemma!”

I scroll down, my vision blurring for entirely different reasons now. Occasional words pop out from the fuzzy lines of black on white. Secret payments. Three years old. Close to the mother. I hit End Call, drop the phone to the floor and push my chair out, slowly backing away from the screen as if confronted with a monster.

I look toward Dylan, the room spinning around me as I turn my head. He notices me, dropping the phone to the side as if the strength has disappeared from his arm, his face open, waiting, expectant.

I shake my head. At him. At the computer screen. At everything.

“What is this, Dylan? What’s going on? Why didn’t you tell me?”

His breath quickens to a pant. His eyes narrow and harden. He looks at his phone, pushes a button, and stuffs it into his pocket.

“Dylan?” I say, feeling like my voice is coming from deep at the bottom of some well.

He looks at the computer, then back at me.

“Dylan,” I say, and it sounds like the word ‘help.’

His jaw clenches, he rolls a shoulder, and then he marches out of the door and into the crowd of hungry press like a bowling ball of unstoppable motion. I watch him go.

Chapter 9

Dylan

Kavanagh’s is a shitty bar. You can find it tucked away between an abandoned theatre with graffiti scribbled over the tragically big doors, and a pawn shop that only opens at night. It was built during, and never really escaped, the Great Depression. It’s cheap enough for the bums to spend their begged quarters in, and so poorly signed that if you didn’t know it was already there, you’d never find it. Only the loneliest, thirstiest, most aimless men find a place like this – the password is desperation.

The rules are written in the floor, battered and worn from work boots and heavy thoughts, in the craggy, inward-looking faces of the men there, and it’s always men, commiserating, regretting, and hurting as only men choose to do – alone. The rules are that you don’t talk to