“Fuck,” Ash swore, bringing his arms up on either side of me, his head down over my face. “Get the fuck away!” he barked out over his shoulder.
More flashes. “What you up to, Ash?” a male voice called out, taunting, knowing.
“Show us who you got there, Ash!” another voice called out.
Oh God, this was a nightmare. What had they seen? What had they caught on camera? On video?
“Come with me,” Ash said to me, quiet, quick and urgent. He grabbed my hand hard and pulled me with him, holding me to his side. Shielding me with his coat, he propelled us forward. I could hear voices calling out, see more flashes, feel the push of foreign hands
“Stay the fuck away from her!” Ash thundered out as he rushed us forward, somehow breaking through the throng and getting us curbside where we ducked into a waiting taxi. They followed us right up to the car and I almost thought a few might try to get in with us, but Ash slammed the door shut and barked out the name of our hotel to the driver. He sped away into the night.
I shook as Ash held me to his chest. “Fuck!” he exploded. “I’m so sorry, Ana.”
“What do you think they saw?” I hated how scared my voice sounded, but damn did I feel it. What would come out from that on video? What would everyone see, my boss at the library, my piano students, my younger cousins? My parents? Hot tears sprang to my eyes and I sank my head into my hands.
“Ana, I’m so sorry. Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”
“No, no.” I shook my head. No to both questions. No, they hadn’t hurt me, but no, I wasn’t all right.
“Damn it!” Ash pounded his fist against the door of the taxi and the driver turned his head around in concern.
“Tout va bien,” Ash reassured him, then added some more stuff in French. He spoke French on top of it all. Add that to his list of lady-killing attributes. The list was long and it had made a complete fool out of me. So much so that I’d let him finger me nearly to orgasm on a public street, begging for him to fuck me. Oh my God, did they have microphones good enough to pick that up? Would there be audio to go along with it all?
By the time we got to the hotel, cold panic had set in. A lone photographer waited for us by the entryway. So they’d figured out where we were staying, too. Ash glowered at him and swept me in underneath his coat.
Up in the hotel room, the two of us paced the living room like wind-up dolls set in opposite directions.
“I can’t believe this!” I cried out, feeling sick to my stomach.
“I’m going to kill them,” Ash spat out, fists by his sides, seething with rage.
“What do you think they got?” I asked, wincing at the memory of everything I’d said. All that dirty talk. Had I told him I loved feeling sore because he’d fucked me so hard? Dear God.
“Nothing.” He fisted his hand in his hair as he paced. “They got nothing. I think they got nothing.” He stopped in front of an armchair and roared out, “Fuck!” He gave the leg of the chair a violent kick. It shot right out, the leg detaching from the furniture and launching into the air where it hit the wall and left a small dent. The chair toppled over to its side.
“Ana.” He came over to me, urgent, grasping my shoulders hard. “I’ll make this right. I swear I will.”
“I can’t do this, Ash.” I shook my head. “I can’t do this.”
“What do you mean?”
“All the cameras, all the time.” I was shaking and crying, a sick pit in my stomach. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Fuck!” he yelled. He spun around and smacked his palm into the wall so hard a painting fell to the floor. A gorgeous ancient-looking painting in an ornate, gilded frame.
“What are you doing, Ash? Are you trashing the hotel room?”
“Yes, I’m trashing the goddamned hotel room!” he yelled as if it were his God-given right.
“What are you, a toddler throwing a tantrum?” I yelled right back at him, all my fury now unleashing on him. He was the one who’d put me in this position. He should have known better. He’d been in the celebrity spotlight for years now. He shouldn’t have exposed me like that.
“How could you do this to me?” I screamed, seething with anger. “How could you let them catch us like that?”
“I’m sorry, Ana!” He tore his hand through his hair looking tortured, frenzied.
“That doesn’t change anything!” His apology wouldn’t rewind time and take video down off the Internet.
“Fuck!” he roared again, kicking a baseboard.
“Kicking things won’t help!” I yelled at him.
We stood there, panting, looking in separate directions. Only minutes ago we’d been pressed up against each other, panting for entirely different reasons. That seemed a lifetime away.
Emotions stormed through me. He looked so wrecked, I wanted to reach out to him, wrap my arms around him, kiss the pain away that I saw etched there on his face. But then a hot wave of shame rose up through me, bubbling over the top until I felt tears stinging at my eyes again.
“I think I just need…” I brought my hands to my face. I didn’t really know what I needed. But that was the problem, I needed some time to figure shit out.
Maybe I could go outside and take a walk. I always felt better after a walk, brisk on a city street. A walk always managed to clear my head.
“I think I’ll take a walk,” I said out loud. I still had my coat, gloves and boots on and I headed toward the door.
“Are you crazy?” Ash asked, bringing his hand to my arm. “They’re out there waiting for you.”
I stopped in my tracks. It was like some kind of a horror movie, as if zombies were clustering at our front door. I couldn’t go outside or they’d eat me alive. I was trapped. My eyes went wide.
“I’ll head out.” Ash decided, heading toward the door. “I’ll give you some time on your own. If it’s what you want.” He paused, standing, looking at me distraught.
“It’s not that I don’t want you around,” I protested. “I just—” Hands to my face again, I closed my eyes, wishing everything could go back to the way it was. But, like in a horror movie, that never worked. When I opened my
eyes again, it was still just me and Ash in a hotel room freaking out over the fact that paparazzi had just taken pictures of and possibly videoed me nearly coming on his fingers.
“You don’t want me around,” he finished for me. “I get it.” Hand to the doorknob, he turned to say one last thing. “I never wanted to hurt you like this. I never meant to pull you into all of this with me.”
“But you did,” I said, quiet and filled with regret.
He looked at me and swallowed, grim. Then he left, the door closing behind him with a click.
The second he left, I felt worse. I knew he hadn’t actually wanted me to get humiliated in public like that. I shouldn’t have lashed out at him. It wasn’t his fault.
Or was it? He’d deliberately brought me into his media circus, invited me in with the express purpose of getting more attention, elevating his profile, filling the airwaves with scenes of our romance. A sickening thought occurred to me. Had he wanted that moment to be captured? Maybe he’d intended for it to get leaked? Hot and heavy, if our little piano duet got nearly a million clicks, what would this one get?
Shrugging off my coat, I poured myself a drink of water and sank down on the couch. What a mess. I wondered if footage could already be online? If I took out my phone and clicked. Would incriminating pictures or video already be loaded and running?
I wasn’t ready to find out. I sipped my water and told myself to breathe. Just breathe. Maybe I’d over-reacted. Maybe they hadn’t captured anything, just some dark, shadowy photos and you couldn’t even tell who was in them.
But then what? Say this all blew over, a tempest in a teapot. What then? I’d slipped into a little fantasy world, tucked into this hotel room with him, lulled by the day and a half we’d had in Paris under the radar. But that wasn’t his reality. Ash’s real life was stalked and filmed and dissected. And from what I’d seen in the tabloids in the past, he gave as good as he got. He slept around and partied all night and trashed hotel rooms. Just a minute ago he’d kicked the leg right off of what looked like an antique armchair.