Page 18 of Dirty Like Dylan

He was definitely gone.

How the hell did he get here? He definitely wasn’t on that ferry I was on. A private boat, then. One he clearly wasn’t gonna offer to drive me back to the city on.

At least he wasn’t kicking me out on my ass, so that was something. It was dark out now, and the temperature would be dropping fast.

I opened the fridge—sneering at the nice couple in the photo, who’d duped me—and discovered he wasn’t lying. The fridge was entirely empty. Other than a bottle of ketchup, a bottle of mustard, an almost-empty jar of dill pickles, and a bunch of random beers that filled up the produce drawers.

What the hell? Liv had told me, quote, Don’t worry about food. Which meant I hadn’t brought any with me.

Maybe humiliating me and starving me was payback for my shitty performance at today’s shoot?

I helped myself to a pickle and shut the fridge. I figured Ashley Player owed me at least as much for staring at me like that. The vivid memory made me full-on shiver.

Gross.

It also made me wonder if he liked what he saw when he saw me naked… which was all kinds of fucked up.

Because who the fuck cared if he liked—or didn’t like—what he saw?

As I looked around the house now, evidence of him was everywhere. This was such a bachelor pad. Why hadn’t I seen it? There were no little-boy toys in the second bedroom. The bathroom was stocked with dude magazines. Big, sparse leather furniture and plaid linens were abound. There wasn’t a feminine item to be found.

I drew the line at opening his bedroom drawers, but I did open his closet. Nothing but dude clothes, and very little of it. A couple of black T-shirts and a hoodie hung up, and some jeans folded on the floor. Maybe Liv was right; he never really used this place.

At least he’d let me stay the night instead of evicting my ass. He wasn’t exactly nice about it, though. More like I was a major imposition. Which I supposed I was. Unintentionally.

I tidied up his bathroom and cleaned out the tub, so there was no trace of my trespass left. I put my backpack in the second bedroom, stewing as I called my sister and she didn’t answer her damn phone. Then I dug a half-eaten granola bar out of my bag, the only food I had with me. I ate it, and just felt more hungry.

I checked the time; it was almost seven-thirty. I hadn’t eaten since noon.

I tried Liv’s number again. She didn’t answer. Very possibly she was working late. Or ignoring me?

This time, when the call went to voicemail, I said, “Is this because of that time I told Kelly Bannerman that you were straight, and she started dating that blonde girl, and you got all sad for like the whole summer? Because I was eleven years old when I did that. If this is payback, well played. When I catch the ferry back tomorrow, we will have words. Oh yes, we will have words.”

As I hung up, my stomach rumbled and Ashley Player’s words replayed in my head. I’ll sleep next door. Come over if you need food.

Yeah. Fat fucking chance.

I had no idea what was “next door” other than Ashley Player himself, but that was plenty of a deterrent. I hardly felt like spending an evening with him and his asshole friends.

Better to starve.

On second thought, I took one of his beers out to the front porch and enjoyed it in the twilight as I sorted through the images from the Underlayer shoot on my laptop. I was hardly gonna ask Ashley if he had a Wi-Fi password I could use, so I snooped around the house until I found his modem and lifted the password from the sticker on the bottom, so I could get online.

As I uploaded the images to the cloud, I helped myself to another beer. I stared at a couple of the photos I’d taken of Dylan in his dressing room—by far the best ones. Other than converting a few of them to black-and-white and tweaking the contrast a bit, they needed zero retouching. I sent the very best of them along with the other ones to Liv.

I doubted Underlayer would be interested in those photos, since they didn’t show off their ridiculous rock star set and lighting, but I wanted Liv to see what I was doing in Dylan’s dressing room. To see that it wasn’t all for nothing. That I had the talent, if not the other skills necessary for today’s job.

Then I had another beer.

I flipped through some of Ashley Player’s shitty guy magazines, checking out the photography. More photos of hot girls, cars and music equipment than I could ever want to peruse.

Then I went to bed, mildly drunk and hangry.

Chapter Five

Amber

I woke up the next day to noise from next door.

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