Heartless Page 2

  “Wow,” she said. Like a gargantuan dork.

  The scales glistened in the firelight—kind of gorgeous really, in an exotic, god-of-the-sea way —and Naomi wanted to melt into Jordan right there. She wanted to lose her own shape and turn to liquid, soak into those scales and become a part of him forever and ever as he moved through the ocean waves, and oh, was Naomi ever glad she wasn’t saying this out loud. Seriously, wow was bad enough, but this . . .

  Naomi caught a sudden chill up her back, as if someone was watching her, someone in the darkness, and when she glanced around the fire, she saw Corinne and Sean were gone. When did they leave? A minute ago? An hour? Time wasn’t moving the way it was supposed to. It half rushed, half oozed, like those clocks in Salvador Dalí paintings.

  “Are you okay?” Jordan asked.

  “Yeah.” She closed her eyes, started rubbing them again. “I’m . . . I’m fine. I’m just . . . I . . .” Naomi’s heart was doing this weird jumping thing. It reminded her of Vanessa’s washing machine, how it always hopped up and down on the tile floor once the spin cycle started, shaking her aunt’s entire laundry room and kitchen. Jesus H. Christ, Vanessa would say, it’s like there’s an obese robot doing the pogo in there.

  That was what Naomi’s heart felt like—a chubby little robot, hopping around inside her chest, only scary-fast. She started to think, What if my heart explodes? Because that really did happen to some people, didn’t it? They could be doing something perfectly normal—shopping for groceries or whatever—and one of their internal organs would up and explode.

  “Naomi?” Jordan said.

  She was sure she’d read about this on the Net. Exploding organs, caused by some rare, undetected childhood condition. Undetected. Meaning you didn’t know about it—nobody knew about it until it was too late. She heard herself say, “I think I need to see a doctor.”

  “A doctor?”

  What if Naomi had a rare, undetected childhood condition, and her heart exploded from it right now? What would it feel like, that half second just before it happened, that moment of knowing?

  “It can hit you hard the first time,” said Jordan.

  “I’m . . . I feel like . . .”

  “I know. I feel weird too. Just try and go with it.” Jordan took one of her wrists, gently moved her hands from her eyes. Her vision was blurry from all the rubbing, so she blinked a few times. Her hands and arms were glowing pink, like they were made from neon. “Take a deep breath,” Jordan said, “in and out. . . .”

  Naomi did. Her heart slowed a little. She looked at the fire and saw . . . just a fire. No scales or neon or tentacles.

  “Better?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.” And for a long time, they sat there, just breathing.

  “Jordan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you . . . do you have to leave tomorrow? I mean . . . could you maybe stay a couple more—”

  “Listen, Naomi,” said Jordan. “I wasn’t going to say anything but . . .” His words trailed into the smoke.

  “What?” You can tell me and whatever it is . . .

  Jordan sighed. It was a labored sigh, the way a sick person would breathe. When he finally spoke, his voice trembled. “This town. San Esteban. I know it’s beautiful on the surface, but it is really fucked up. There’s . . . weird stuff going on, stuff I’m guessing you don’t know about.”

  That wasn’t what she’d expected him to say at all. “What kind of stuff?” Her heart started to jump again. With each word, it wedged farther into her throat.

  “I never should have come back here. And you . . .” he said. “You’re young. You need to be careful.”

  She could now feel her heartbeat in her ears, her lips, her throat. She swallowed hard to tamp it down. “You’re trying to mess with my head, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sorry. Forget I ever said anything. I’m just . . . I’m tripping, is all.”

  She turned, looked at Jordan’s face. She started to tell him it was okay, just don’t do it again. But then two long white fangs emerged from his mouth, a forked snake’s tongue darting out between them. “Sssssssorry,” he hissed.

  Without thinking, she was up on her feet, running away from the fire, away from Jordan, who was hissing her name. Scrubby plants scratched at her legs and loose dirt flew into her face, rocks pushing through the thin soles of her sandals. It was as if the whole desert was trying to hurt her, and then there were those footsteps nearing, Jordan howling, “Come back!” Jordan the Fanged Snake.

  Naomi kept running, but her heart . . . It started slamming into her ribs, slamming hard, as if it wanted out now. Naomi thought, It’s about to explode.

  It was the last thought she had before everything went black.

  Naomi dreamed of an angel standing over her. You are safe, the angel said. And then there was a spotlight aimed at her face. When she cracked her eyelids, Naomi saw the spotlight was the hot sun, and she was thirstier than she’d ever been in her life. Her tongue felt like a wad of dried clay, too big for her mouth. Her eyes stung terribly and her skin throbbed—her face, her neck, the tops of her legs. She had no idea about the time, but from where the sun was in the sky, she figured it was at least ten in the morning. And Naomi was lying on her back with a third-degree sunburn in the middle of an agave patch, somewhere in the desert that bordered San Esteban.

  “Hello?” she called out. Her voice was barely above a whisper.

  Corinne and Sean—they had to be looking for her, right? Unless they’d gotten lost too. And Vanessa . . . she would be freaking out for sure.

  Naomi struggled to her feet as last night flew back at her—some of it, anyway. That whole exploding organ thing . . . What had she been thinking, doing peyote with a college student? What had made her think she could handle that?

  “Great,” Naomi said to no one. Her lips stuck to her teeth. She ran her tongue over them. They were cracked and crusty and tasted like salt. She recalled, for a moment, what Jordan had said, about weird stuff going on in San Esteban. She thought about his sad, knowing eyes, how he had called after her as she’d run away. . . .

  Best not to think about Jordan anymore.

  She had to find the path, the dead bonfire, something she could identify so she could get on the trail that led to town. She had to make sure everybody made it back okay, and apologize to Vanessa and cry on her shoulder until her aunt felt needed enough to leave Naomi alone.

  Then, finally, Naomi could do what she really wanted to do, which was smear aloe vera all over her body and drink every bottle of water in the house and get into her bed with the stuffed turtle she’d had since childhood and sleep for a week or, better yet, the entire summer.

  She stumbled between the cactuses and through a sparse area, dusted with tumbleweed, empty Pepsi cans and a few sick-looking prickly pears, Bimbo Bread wrappers stuck to their quills. She tried to remember landmarks around the bonfire. She and Corinne always made their bonfires in areas that were easy to distinguish—near something tall like a jacaranda tree or a century plant—so they’d be able to find their way back to it should they wander. But this time, they’d let the boys choose the place. Dumb idea.

  She kept walking, trying to ignore the vicious headache, that swimmy feeling, like she might pass out all over again.

  Finally, she saw something that might have been the bonfire. It was about thirty feet away, near a blooming century plant, even though she hadn’t remembered one of them being there last night. Century blooms were incredibly distinct looking—they shot into the air like cell phone towers, thirty, forty feet high, bright yellow blossoms clinging to their sides like an afterthought. . . . Usually, if you set up camp near one, you remembered it. But then again, there was a lot about last night she didn’t remember. She moved closer, hoping for the bonfire with her whole body. Before she realized it, she was in a desperate, stumbling run.

  Ten feet away, though, she knew it wasn’t the bonfire. Could be a pile of old clothes, she thought. U
ntil the smell socked her in the face.

  She heard the hum of flies first. Then she saw the splayed legs, the outstretched arms, the blood, so much of it, so dark it was close to black. . . . He was still wearing his flip-flops, but the rest of him was . . .

  “Jordan!” It came out a scream—an animal scream that ripped open her raw throat and tore at her insides and used all the breath in her body. . . . A scream that made her think she might lose her mind right here in this spot—because it couldn’t get worse, nothing could ever be worse than what she was looking at. . . .

  And then she saw Jordan’s heart.

  ONE

  ONE WEEK LATER

  Hayley Caldwell threw herself on her father, Matthias’s, lifeless body. As she tried in vain to pull the fire poker out of his chest, her hot pink backpack landed awkwardly on his face. “Please don’t die, Daddy!” she shrieked. “We were supposed to be a family again!”

  “Cut!” yelled Jerry, the director. “Beautiful, Tiffany. Let’s take a ten-minute break, and then we’ll do it once more, without the backpack.”

  Warren Clark, aka Dr. Matthias Caldwell, opened his eyes. His hand wrapped around the poker, he struggled up to standing and groaned, like an unusually good-looking zombie. “I need a new shirt,” he said. “There’s way too much blood on this one. It pulls focus from our faces.”

  “But, Warren . . . We’re trying to go for realism, here, and with this type of killing—”

  “This isn’t Reservoir Dogs, Jerry.” Warren glared at the director. The klieg lights sparked in his blue eyes. His back was perfectly straight, the poker jutting out from his powerful chest in a way that almost seemed accusatory. “Think about it,” he said. “We’ve got Pampers ads.”

  Jerry’s shoulders dropped. He glowered at his feet. “Good point,” he said finally. “I’ll . . . I’ll talk to wardrobe.”

  Always the alpha male, thought Zoe Greene, who was covering the shoot—Matthias’s shocking final scene on The Day’s End—for Soap Opera Headquarters magazine. Even on his last day at work, Warren Clark’s got to have his way.

  God only knew why she found that so attractive.

  As Warren started off the set, he looked right at her and winked—a perfectly acceptable gesture for an actor to give a known member of the soap opera press, she knew. But how could he be so confident that people would take it that way? Didn’t he think they might possibly see it as a sign that he and Zoe had been secretly sleeping together for the past four months?

  Zoe made a point of pulling out her steno pad and pen, of turning to the show’s publicist, Dana LeVine, and asking, “How do you spell the director’s last name?” As if to prove she was all-business, that there was nothing, absolutely nothing going on between her and Warren Clark, no matter how hard her heart happened to be pounding right now, no matter how much blood was rushing into her cheeks. No, Dana, my interest in him is purely professional. How could you even think that Warren and I . . . ?

  “S-m-i-l-o-w,” said Dana. “By the way, that . . . little interchange between Warren and Jerry? It wasn’t for the record.”

  Zoe rolled her eyes. “Give me a little credit, Dana. Headquarters has Pampers ads too.” She jotted down the director’s name.

  “I know, but your boss—”

  “She won’t find out about it.”

  Dana smiled. “Thanks, Zoe. You’re one of the good guys.”

  “Yeah. It’s a curse. . . .”

  Tiffany Baxter (aka Hayley) headed past them for the dressing rooms, wearing a look of boredom so pure, it bordered on comatose. Zoe watched her—this dewy fifteen-year-old girl with a salary triple her own and, no doubt, a boyfriend she could tell her coworkers about—thinking, Would it kill you to smile?

  “You want a quickie with Warren?” Dana said.

  “What?”

  The publicist peered over the tops of her red-framed half-glasses. “Quick interview. While he’s waiting for the new shirt.”

  “Oh . . . Yeah, sure. That would be great.” Get a grip. Now. Part of it was the absence. Absence, abstinence . . . whatever. After opting not to renew his contract with The Day’s End, Warren had promptly jetted down to Mexico, where he’d spent three weeks at his second home in San Esteban. Last chance to take my paid hiatus, was how he’d put it, but to Zoe the time apart was agonizing. There had always been something addictive about her physical contact with Warren, a need to be with him that trumped pretty much everything she’d ever thought about herself. (Sleeping with the star of the soap she covered wasn’t just unethical. It was completely ridiculous.) After nearly a month without him, though, her logic was shot. And Zoe was suffering the worst sort of withdrawal.

  It was a good thing she could write Headquarters puff pieces in her sleep, what with these loops running through her head—Warren’s voice, Warren’s hands, Warren’s lips and tongue and breath and heartbeat. His size, his power, the way he could lift her so easily . . .

  Whenever anyone mentioned his name at the magazine— and that was often—Zoe would feel it coming on, that blush. It was so embarrassing—like she was growing up in reverse, coming out of age. She couldn’t believe no one noticed, especially Headquarters’ editor-in-chief, Kathy Kinney. Nothing got past that woman.

  “Come with me,” Dana said. “You okay? You look—”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Flushed.”

  “It’s the blood,” Zoe said quickly, “on Matthias’s shirt. I’m kind of squeamish.”

  Dana smiled. “It’s not real, you know.”

  As the publicist led her past the set and down the narrow flight of stairs to the actors’ dressing rooms, Zoe took a deep, steadying breath. Not for the first time, she wondered what was making her react this way. Was it the excitement of this clandestine relationship—or was it the dull safety of the rest of her life?

  Five years ago, her day-to-day had been anything but boring, anything but safe. Would she have fallen this hard for a soap star back then, when she was covering crime stories for the Daily News, when she was living her dream and the blood was real and there were no Pampers ads?

  She was better off now. Stultifying as Headquarters could be (and really, how many times could you write about the same character dying and coming back from the dead before some part of your brain snapped in two?), it beat what her so-called dream job had brought into her life, into the lives of innocent people. . . . She shut her eyes, willed the memory out of her head. “I hate blood,” she told Dana. “I really do.”

  “Your eyes are incredible.” As pickup lines went, it wasn’t the most original. Plus, Warren Clark was too blond, too perfect, much too confident . . . not Zoe’s type at all. But the timing . . . It was the timing of that line that had hooked her.

  Each editor at Headquarters covered a different soap, and Zoe had just been switched from One Life to Live to The Day’s End. He was her first Day’s End interview. She’d known who Warren Clark was, of course. But outside of a one-minute conversation four years prior in the press room at the Daytime Emmys with event flacks hovering around him like a cloud of gnats, they’d never again met or spoken face-to-face.

  Zoe had been sitting next to Warren on the leather couch in his dressing room, interviewing him about Matthias’ recent bout with amnesia—and oddly enough, right up until he fed her that line, she’d felt as if she was the one in charge.

  Zoe asked him a few preliminary questions, then looked deep into his eyes with that serious, I’m-hanging-on-your-every-word gaze she knew daytime actors loved—the one her boss, Kathy, called the “Barbara Walters thousand-yard stare,” the one that got them right in the soul, practically forced them to open up, and asked, “Warren, have you ever thought about what it would be like to forget every—”

  That was when he had said it. Interrupted her, as if his mind could no longer contain the observation. Your eyes are incredible. Then he’d looked away. Pulled his gaze off Zoe and threw it to the floor and said, “I’m sorry. That was inappropriate, w
asn’t it?”

  “No. I mean . . . it’s kind of . . . surprising, but—”

  “I couldn’t help it.”

  “You couldn’t—”

  “Because I want to drown in them.”

  “Oh . . . um . . .”

  “Your eyes.”

  “I—”

  “See, I figure if I’m going to be inappropriate, I may as well go the whole nine yards.”

  And Zoe just sat there, smiling like a fool. She was such a sucker for good timing.

  Four months had passed since then. Four months and three weeks. Had Warren really missed Zoe when he was in Mexico? He’d texted her that he did, but did he mean it? Did he feel the lack of her? Did he crave their bodies together the same way she did?

  Or was it just the secrecy of their relationship—the we-really-shouldn’t-be-doing-this aspect—that got him off? Now that he’d quit the show and there was no longer a conflict of interest with her job, would his feelings cool down? And where would that leave her?

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do without Warren,” Dana said.

  “Me neither.” Zoe cleared her throat. “I . . . I mean, does it have to be so definite? Couldn’t the writers have left Matthias’s death a little more open-ended than a fire poker in the chest?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Warren thought the character had run his course.”

  Zoe looked at her. “That decision isn’t up to Warren, though.”

  “Come on, honey. Every decision involving Matthias is up to Warren, you know that. They’d never recast Erica if Lucci left Kids, they’ll never recast Dr. Caldwell. Some stars are bigger than their characters.”

  Zoe copied those words onto her steno pad—Some stars are bigger than their characters—thinking for the millionth time what a strange turn her life had taken. A hot, secret affair with the male Susan Lucci.

  She and Dana were in Warren’s dressing room, sitting on the same leather couch, where Zoe had conducted that first interview. The couch dominated the place—oxblood, overstuffed—like something you’d find in a wealthy psychiatrist’s office. It was the one semiluxurious thing in this small, spartan room, and it was there for practical reasons. Warren often worked late and needed to take naps, and he couldn’t sleep on something uncomfortable. Otherwise, there was nothing but a sink, a makeup mirror with a chair in front of it, a small table stacked with highlighted scripts and unopened fan letters. The walls were bare. “I never want to be one of those actors who make their dressing room into a home,” was how he explained it.