Page 38 of Mad for Madison

Few things made me happy anyway. The money in my bank account didn’t—it only made me feel less dread. Painting didn’t exactly make me happy—it only slowed my heartbeat and my spinning mind. I didn’t have friends who made me happy. Not that I didn’t like Tris, Rome, Lane, and Oakley. I liked them a great deal, but I had never let them in. It had never been their failure that we weren’t friends. Only mine.

I never let anyone in.

I gave up my body gladly as a price for my safety. To be seen naked and in the act of most intimate and vulnerable passion—even if my expressions and moans were mostly fake—was to have no secrets at all. It was to have nothing private left to me. But that was a price too high to pay. So I walled off my heart, my hopes, my happiness, and I stored it someplace deep and dark where only I knew it existed. Until the day I forgot.

The brush barely touched the canvas. The lightest moves did it. It was a finished piece and the one I was proud of. Naked, beautiful, melancholic, tranquil. Bradley was all those things and more. There, on my canvas, he was like Caravaggio’s wet dream with perfect proportions, a healthy body, spotless skin, and tender expressions.

It had taken ten nights to do it. Some nights, I simply wanted to throw the thing away and start over. On other nights, nothing could stop me. Like when several neighborhoods lost power, and I worked by the lights of the candle.

The painting was complete. Looking at it, I realized that I really had forgotten when I’d put my heart and hopes. I had forgotten that I had done it at all until Bradley showed me.

He was the reason I caught myself smiling at nothing. He was the reason I spent my time in my little studio instead of meeting with producers. He was the reason I woke up every morning with ideas of the future, not the fears that the past would catch up with me.

I didn’t feel like I was running away from the threat of disaster, poverty, and sadness. I felt like I was running toward something instead.

I washed my hands and fixed my hair after changing my clothes. Low-simmering anxiety hadn’t left me alone all day. I had been nervous to meet Lily, but it had worked out great. I hadn’t been nervous at all to walk through a crowd of adult film stars and directors, donors and fans, knowing that every singleone of them had seen what my face looked like at the height of my orgasm. Yet tonight, I was dreading it. I was dreading walking into Neon Nights, where Bradley worked, where my roommates got together, and where strangers might recognize me. Most of all, I was dreading taking Bradley’s hand in mine and kissing it for everyone to see if they cared.

“I don’t want us to hide,” he had told me. He’d assured me that he wasn’t in a hurry, but he couldn’t pretend forever. “You make me too damn happy to keep it all for myself,” he’d told me after I had taken him to an underground cabaret that brought old Berlin back to life.

What are they going to say behind your back?I wanted to ask him.What will they think about you dating a porn actor?Because I could live with people’s split opinions just fine. I knew that every person who praised me for my talent also pitied me for having to make porn to make a living. I didn’t care. I knew where I would tell them to put that pity.

But Bradley wasn’t ready for such exposure. Even if I had been avoiding Jett’s phone calls for the last two weeks, I carried the mark of my career everywhere I went. It was a stain, a taint I didn’t mind on myself when I was alone, but one I detested spreading on those I cared about.

I balled my fists, took a deep breath of air, and walked out of my little heaven.

Neon Nights was lively on Saturdays. When I entered it, the crowd was thick, and the music was low. It was early for the dancing and the big acts. People mingled in small groups and large. Behind the bar, the sexiest man alive. I watched him shake the cocktail he was making, tossing the shaker from one hand to the other, flipping it, turning it this way and that, and chatting in that flirtatious way of his with two girls and two guys at the bar. A little further away, familiar faces lined the bar. Tristan and Cedric wore casual clothes for a night out, so neither one wason duty; Roman and Everett were debating something fiercely; Luke and Rafael looked at each other seductively as if they hadn’t been married for half a year and dating for a decade—I wasn’t sure it counted as a decade or as a week, but they’d been colliding across the world since they were eighteen. Even Zain was there with the Baron of Manhattan, Dominic Blackthorne. To my greatest surprise of all, Lane and Oakley were there, standing next to one another with their heads still on their shoulders.

I wondered how many rounds it would be before they ripped them off.

Roman was the first to spot me. He lifted an eyebrow and waved me over. “It’s like sighting a dodo bird,” he told Everett just as I neared the group. My gaze lingered on Bradley, who looked up at me and grinned, his cheeks unmistakably reddening.

“How are you boys?” I asked after winking at Bradley and turning my attention back to Roman.

Roman cocked his head and looked at me as if to make sure I was real. “You know, there are prophecies written about this. ‘And he shall come uninvited, undragged by his peers. And he shall have a drink with friends. And it shall be good.’”

Everett, who had once been a devout Catholic until the mental abuse of it had split his family apart and brought him to the brink of implosion, threw his head back and laughed out loud. He was a big, handsome guy, and seeing him laughing always surprised me. I had seen him before his relationship with Roman had begun, often standing near the door of Neon Nights as if ready to run away if spotted, and I had seen him brooding in his loneliness. This happy Everett was the polar opposite.

Was that what I looked like to the more observant among them?

“Am I really that absent?” I asked.

Tristan spun on his bar stool and supplied the answer. “Yes. But we love you anyway.”

I was lucky that Cedric found Tristan’s comment cute enough to give him a kiss so that nobody’s attention remained on me. Did they love me? They couldn’t. They barely knew me. I’d kept myself distant from them for so long that they couldn’t have seen anything to love in me.

Bradley drew my attention, although it was Roman he was trying to reach. “Would you mind? Just for a minute.” And Roman hopped onto his feet and picked up an apron, swapping places with Bradley without hesitation.

Everett rubbed his hands greedily and announced he was in the mood for the most complicated, most frustrating, and hardest cocktail to make they had on the menu, and Roman threw his hands up in defeat, saying he needed to go back to see if they had any fresh saffron left. Everett’s mischief caused enough uproar at the bar that Bradley and I managed to sneak away from them almost unnoticed.

“Missed you,” I said.

Bradley kept his smile away as much as he could, but those words always made his eyes glimmer.

I cocked a side of my mouth, unable to resist it. “How was your day?”

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” Bradley said.

My heart leaped. “Same. I finished it. The painting.”

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