And then I saw him, coming for me - a man with a camera. "River!" he yelled. "River Andrews!"
I held my bag up to cover the side of my face, but he was taking pictures. He was the only one, but I knew there would be more. I backed inside the hotel door. Didn’t this place have security?
People were staring, and I felt a flush of shame.
Everyone knows, I realized. They have to. It will be all over the TV. I swallowed the bile I felt in my throat.
The photographer followed me inside, persistent, and I shielded my face from him. Then I heard someone shriek, a female voice. "That's River Andrews!"
Shit.
I turned around. I'll go back the way I came, back toward the elevators, I told myself, get one of the front desk staff to do something.
But instead I ran into him.
My palms hit his chest, and I felt him grasp my elbows. I knew the photographer was taking pictures of us, something that would wind up plastered all over the papers, something that women could point to and say, See? She was whoring around on Viper after all. That stuck-up bitch deserved everything she got.
I knew all of this, in the back of my mind. But right there, in the moment, with his hands on me, everything stopped. All of the other things going on faded, instantaneously, into the background, this blur of white noise. He looked at me, this wrinkle between his eyebrows. I couldn't tell if it was a sign that he was worried or annoyed.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
I shook my head. "No," I mumbled. "I need to get out of here. The camera...I just...can't."
He didn’t say anything. He let go of me, stepped forward, and yanked the camera out of the photographer's hand.
"You're going to regret that!" the photographer yelled. "I'll fucking sue your ass for assaulting me! That's a thousand dollar camera!"
The photographer lunged toward us. Before I could blink, he- my savior-punched the photographer in the face. I just stood there staring, paralyzed. I had to force my mouth closed.
His friends moved between us and the photographer, and I felt his hand on my arm, and heard him speak. "My car should be out front," he said.
I didn’t know exactly why I did it, but I walked with him out the door of the hotel. I could feel eyes on us as we left, and I saw someone with a cell phone, recording, a pretty brazen move, considering this guy just punched someone in the face for taking photos of me. The valet wasn’t back with my car, and I felt my rescuer's hand on the middle of my back, guiding me forward. He pointed. "Right here," he said, opening the door and shielding me from the stares of onlookers as I slipped inside his car.
I shouldn't do this, I thought. It's stupid. I don't even know his name. It's amazingly, mind-numbingly idiotic. He could be anything, this man. A fucking stalker. A serial killer.
And yet, as I sat back against the passenger seat, a feeling of calmness washed over me.
What the hell was I doing?
I was driving my 1969 Mustang GT convertible home to West Bend - that's what I was doing. It was my fucking baby, the thing in life that mattered more than anything in the world to me. And she was in it, this girl whose name I didn’t even fucking know.
I was driving out of Vegas, like this was a normal fucking road trip. Except I just had just stolen a photographer's camera, punched him in the fucking face, and had a girl in the passenger seat who was the most breathtaking thing I'd ever seen in my life.
So, all in all, it was a normal day in the life.
Hell.
Obviously, she was someone important, some kind of star or politician's daughter or someone in the limelight. I had no fucking clue who she was.
She had to think I was such a dumb shit.
I mentally began to index the movies I've seen, tried to remember the last thing I saw. Was she a movie star? Maybe she was on TV. I couldn’t remember the last time I actually watched a movie.
I'd been focused on other shit.
Like my leg. Running again, working out. Getting my shit together.
I stole a glance in her direction. Her face was forward, her hair messy, the strands blowing back in the wind, nearly vertical. I wondered why she cut it all off.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the kiss. I was hung over as hell, my mind sluggish, weighed down by the booze from last night. But I couldn’t think about anything except my skin against hers.
She turned, and I jerked my head away, my eyes on the road, casual like I did this every fucking day, whisked some chick away in my convertible when she was being assaulted by the paparazzi. Whoever she was, she was out of my league.
League, shit. We weren’t on the same fucking planet, me and her.
I would drop her off somewhere, probably wherever her limo was going to pick her up, and be done with her. Then I was going to go about my regular fucking business, go home to West Bend, and deal with all of my bullshit.
She didn’t belong in my car.