Page 9 of Royal Crush
All I could ask now was who had failed him? Who allowed a child to be beaten down so badly they looked like this?
Several links down, there was an interview a few months after the cast had been announced for this godforsaken circus of my life. And in spite of my determination to stay out of Aleric’spersonal business, I clicked on it. It buffered, cycled through three ads, and then his face came onto the screen.
Shit. Iknewhim. Well, I sort of knew him. It took me all of four seconds to recognize him as the guy from outside the studio today. The one with the cigarette who had clearly known who I was yet mouthed off to me anyway.
I’d liked that guy, damn it. I didn’t want him to be Aleric King.
That afternoon, he’d been wearing long sleeves, but in the interview video, he had on a silky button-up, the sleeves rolled to the elbow. His tan, slightly hairy forearms were covered from elbows to wrists in tattoos.
They reminded me of my own.
I traced my ink as I watched the interviewer take a seat in front of him.
His posture was relaxed, but I’d made it a habit of studying people, and I could see the tension he was holding in his body. And from the way his jaw ticked and how his eyes darted around as if looking for an escape, I could see the reality of what he was feeling: he wasn’t just nervous. He wasscared.
“Thanks for joining us today. You must be really excited to have gotten this role.”
“It was unexpected,” he said.
His voice was the same as it had been today. A low, rich rumble, nothing like my own, and I wondered if he was going to use an affect when playing me. I couldn’t say I liked him any better than before, but I did like the sound of his voice. I could listen to him all day, which was a thought I did not want to be having.
I realized I was fixated on his lips and forced my gaze to his eyes, which was almost a bigger mistake. They were nothing short of gorgeous with rich, dark, thick lashes.
Christ, save me.
“I think we can all agree on that one,” the woman said with a laugh. “No one was expecting your comeback.”
Wow. She really just said it like that? What a bitch.
I saw his barely there flinch. “I know I’ve been gone a while?—”
“Kicking an addiction, right?”
His face paled. It was barely noticeable under the makeup he was wearing, but I could still see it. “That was a long time ago. I’ve been focusing on other parts of my life, but I felt like it was time to get back to what I really loved.”
“Has the studio been worried at all? The last time you were on camera?—”
“No,” he interrupted. “They’re not worried. I was a kid when everything happened.” His voice was very tense. “I just turned thirty-three. I think it would be odd for the studio to hold a childhood mistake against me for this many years.”
She cleared her throat awkwardly, and part of me wanted to cheer. This was still not the man I wanted to play me. He was the last person in the world I would have picked.
But something about him spoke to me.
Something about him said that if it had to be him, I wanted him to succeed just to spite all the people who didn’t want him to grow past his mistakes. Assuming they were mistakes. I was starting to doubt the stories of him being a drug-addicted teen diva who didn’t listen to authority figures.
I knew psychology well enough to know that kids who went down that path were created. Someone had done that to him.
And it made me angry, although I was still not on board with this whole thing.
I hit Pause on the video, and it stalled on his face. He wasn’t looking at the camera, but he didn’t need to. I didn’t need a direct gaze to see the pain and sadness and humiliation in his eyes. He’d come on to this program to talk about his futurelooking brighter, and all they wanted to talk about were his past failures.
And the ways that the people who were meant to protect him had let him down.
I hated that I understood. That I empathized. Sympathized. Mostly because he was a symptom of the problem I was facing right now. I’d written my book as a way of coping. A catharsis to remind myself that in spite of the pain and exhaustion and—if I was being honest with myself—fear of dying young, I was still strong enough tolive.
I didn’t want that dramatized and plastered all over streaming services. I didn’t want to see some gorgeous, able-bodied man wheeling around pretending to be me for some award-induced nod to stroke his ego.
Yet, I felt for him.
