Everyone wantsto be the daughter of a movie star until someone leaks their parents’ sex tape.
“If I have to see my dad’s ass one more time,” I grumble to my best friend, covering my eyes and turning off the television, where entertainment reporters discuss a blurred image of his backside. “Seriously, Lola, there’s not enough therapy in the world.”
“But itisa great ass,” myformerbest friend says matter-of-factly.
I never should have video-called her. Seeing her expression makes this worse.
“Lola! Gross.” The bed creaks when I flop dramatically onto my back, bouncing a few times before coming to rest. A strand of my rose-gold hair sticks to lip gloss before I brush it away with a frown.
“Sorry, girl, but your dad is Robert Bloom. Millions of people are in love with him. You know they’d line up to take a bite out of that peach. He looks damn good for a man in his mid fifties, and I’m not even attracted to men.”
As if I could ever forget that half the world is in love with my dad. And the other half is obsessed with my mom.
“Yeah, well, the sex tape is fifteen years old, and he’s had a shit ton of plastic surgery.”
Lola’s piercing blue eyes widen and her perfect little button nose wrinkles. “On his ass?”
“Probably? I don’t know. We don’t discuss the extent of the work they get done. He and my mom both will show up on random days with bruises and bandages, and I don’t ask questions.” Neither of my parents had much work done when I was younger, but the older they get, the harder they cling to the fleeting glow of youth and the movie roles that come along with it. Even if it means they’re more filler than genetic material at this point.
Frankly, it’s a wonder either of them can make any kind of facial expressions.
“And your mom’s tits? Damn. You’d never guess that woman nursed an infant at one point.” Lola absentmindedly grabs one of her boobs and gives it a squeeze.
“That’s because she didn’t nurse me. I’m not even sure she could after her boob job.” And even if she’d been physically able, there’s no way in hell Vivian Marsh, the blonde bombshell and sex symbol with surprising dramatic range, would risk her body any more than necessary. It was bad enough she had stretch marks on her stomach from growing me. On her boobs?
A bridge too far.
“Either way, at least they look good. If my parents ever made a sex tape?” Lola shudders, and I crack a smile for the first time since the video leaked last night. “Like, I love my mom and dad, but my dad has the build of Santa Claus, and my momdidnurse a few babies. She could tuck those titties into her jeans, if she wanted to.”
“Jesus, Lols.” That mental image will be burned into my brain for a while.
“Just saying, it could be worse.”
I bang the back of my head on the mattress. “Sure. Yeah. It could be worse. There could be a horde of paparazzi camped out along our street, foaming at the mouth to get a shot of one of us taking out the trash.” Pushing up off my bed in my little cottage house on my parents’ estate, I move to one of the massive windows I normally love. They take up the better part of two walls and let in tons of natural light. Except now, they’re shuttered. I’ve drawn every blind in the house to keep unscrupulous photographers with ultra-telephoto lenses from getting a single shot they can sell to the tabloids or plaster online in one of the many Hollywood gossip blogs.
Turning the camera so Lola can see what I see, I crack one blind just enough to show her the growing mob of shouting paps. “Oh wait, thereisa horde of paparazzi camped out along our street.”
When I look at the screen, my best friend’s pretty face has lost its levity. Instead, sympathy bleeds out of every pore and turns her eyeballs into these wide, wavering, glittering things that look alarmingly like anime eyes. I seriously don’t know how she does that.
“I’m sorry, Indie,” she says seriously. “I know how much you hate the spotlight.”
Hatemay be putting it mildly.
My parents are both gorgeous specimens of humanity. Like, ethereally beautiful. They love the spotlight, and the spotlight loves them right back.
Me?
Somehow, it only seems to add ten pounds to my ass and shine a glaring light on how utterly ordinary I am compared to them. More than one article has been written lamenting the factthat two of the world’s most beautiful people combined genetic material and created someone so very average. And chubby. Which, in the eyes of the media, is akin to a mortal sin.
So, yeah, I hate the spotlight. I hate it so much that I’ve gone out of my way for the last decade to do everything I can to avoid it. But now? Not only are my parents going through a nasty, public divorce, but someone also leaked a sex tape I never wanted to know about, and public interest in my family is at an all-time high. Which means these vultures want to knoweverything, even if it has nothing to do with Robert and Vivian.
Once again, I’m in the crosshairs, and I desperately want to get out of them.
“I can’t even leave the house,” I tell Lola, pacing the length of my room. Normally, it’s my sanctuary. The deep phthalo-green walls, rich woods, and lush fabrics provide the perfect escape from the bright, too-perfect veneer of the rest of the estate and this whole damn city. It’s a calming space. One where I can breathe deeply and let my creativity flow.
Not anymore.
Most of the time, I don’t even want to leave my cottage, but now that Ican’twithout being mobbed? All I can think about is getting the hell out. And that’s not possible. Not without fighting for my life in a sea of boundary-crossing paparazzi.
