Wild Eyes

4

SKYLAR

I have a thing for hands. I won’t even deny it.

Men’s hands, specifically. The way the tendons on top flex and ripple when they strum at a guitar. The way they use up the entire length of a microphone handle. The way they can be warm and gentle on my skin.

I’ve dated famous people. Artists and musicians. Handsome men, influential men. And yet, I’ve never found myself as obsessed with a man’s hands as I am with the ones wrapped around the steering wheel of the truck ahead of me.

The steel grip on my bicep as he threw us to the ground.

The scratch of his callouses against my skin as he told me it would all be okay.

The tattoos on his knuckles that I stared at every time he scrubbed his beard.

I can hear my dad in my head, clear as day, warning me away from a man like Weston. He’d be overly concerned about the person I’m dating tarnishing my pristine America’s sweetheart reputation.

Respectable men don’t get tattoos a shirt can’t hide.

But what about heroic ones? Ones with dusty blond hair and muscles that make their shirt look just a little too tight through the shoulders.

Weston Belmont saved me from a grizzly bear. Saved me from myself, really. From my own naiveté.

A smarter girl would be captivated by his bravery, or his deep voice, or his quippy one-liners.

Not me. I’m following him down a backcountry road in the middle of the Canadian wilderness, daydreaming about his big f*****g hands. I make a mental note to follow up with my therapist about this too. I have to be diagnosable. It has to be a coping mechanism of some sort.

Do daddy issues give you a hand kink?

I scoff at myself before muttering, “God, Skylar. You really need a people detox.”

And it’s true.

Or at least that’s what I told everyone when I packed up and left. Some might say that fleeing Los Angeles is running from my problems. Others might think it’s rude to show up unannounced for an unconfirmed job.

Me? I’m calling it fleeing the world’s most humiliating breakup.

I’m calling it desperation.

But I also have a plan. One I have kept secret from my parents, who work as my managers, as well as my agent, who is mostly just their paid puppet.

I’m going to record my own album. And I’m not going to tell a single soul about it. I don’t want their input. I don’t want their opinions. This project will be by me, for me.

I am desperate for a fresh start. Desperate for a change of scenery. Desperate to escape the chokehold my life has on me.

And I mean a literal chokehold.

One where my throat goes so tight that every word fails me. Put a mic in my face, turn a camera on me, or trot me out in front of an audience, and your girl goes blank. All I can do is blink and giggle. My mouth goes dry, and I do my absolute best “bimbo impression,” as a recent headline called it.

I’m not even sure if they’re wrong anymore.

My most recent speechless moment came as I tearfully left a restaurant after enduring the aforementioned breakup. I walked out into a sea of questions.

“Skylar, what’s wrong?”

“Skylar, did something happen with you and Andrew?”

Something.

I scoff again in the quiet car. It was something all right.

Something I can’t confess out loud.

I’ve always prided myself on being an honest person, but what if everything about me is fake? The world thinks they know me, but they’ve been spoon-fed a lie.

I’ve been spoon-fed a lie.

My life has been turned upside down, and I don’t have a single soul to talk to about it. The truth is just too humiliating to acknowledge.

I definitely can’t go public with it. Not yet anyway. The press would eat me alive. The fans would either pity me or mock me—neither of which I want.

It’s funny how I can be surrounded by so many people who profess to love me and still feel so utterly alone.

So my new move is staring into a camera blankly, feeling like my lungs are full of concrete and my throat is swollen shut. The only thing more difficult than finding the right words to say is catching my breath.

Yes, a girl who has performed in front of millions of people, who sings and dances and says all the right things, now shuts down in front of cameras.

My jaw clenches as I physically brace to endure the mental beating I’m about to give myself, but the pickup carrying the man with the nice hands signals, prompting me to do the same. He turns at a weather-stained wooden gate that opens onto a freshly paved driveway, and I follow his lead.

A thick frame of emerald pine trees entirely blocks the property beyond, and without even thinking about it, I press the button to roll down my window, letting the fresh country air into my car—into my system.

“Too slow!” Cherry squawks from her cage on the backseat. This bird loves car rides.

“It’s a driveway, Cherry. I have to go slow, you rebel.”

“Too slow!”

I chuckle and crane my neck to see where we’re headed, pushing away the anxiety cropping up. Where would Cherry have ended up if a grizzly had eaten me on the side of a backroad? Another humane society? A zoo? One of my parents, who would have marched her out before the press like a commemorative spectacle?

All the options are truly too awful to contemplate, though I already know they’ll keep me up when I’m lying in bed tonight. As sad as it sounds, Cherry, the sassy African grey parrot with a penchant for swearing, might be my only friend in the whole damn world.

The driveway weaves and turns, and there’s something cozy about the press of trees and the scent of soil and crushed pine needles wafting through the window. I suck in a deep breath and feel incrementally better.

So I keep doing it.

Three seconds in.

Three seconds out.

An image—clear as day—of Weston’s sky-blue eyes boring into mine as we breathed together on the asphalt flashes through my head. I wanted to clamp my eyes shut and hide until that moment of terror was over, but I couldn’t look away.

He’d trapped me. But being trapped in his gaze soothed me in a completely unfamiliar way.

“Too slow!” Cherry bitches some more, drawing me out of my head just as the trees dissipate.

I gasp as the landscape filters in before me.

Ford’s emails prepared me for a picturesque setting, but this is surreal.

The property is set on a gentle slope. Straight ahead is the main building with its wraparound deck and freestanding copper mailbox that matches the copper roof. Although the siding looks like old barn wood that’s been preserved, there’s something grand about the place. It’s rugged but elevated.

Above that, it’s trees, rocks, and deadly cliffs, all topped off by the bluest sky. No haze, no pollution—just pure, unfiltered blue. Like Weston’s eyes.

But it’s the view of the lake beyond that truly enchants me. It’s downright breathtaking. So still that it makes me feel like I could walk across it. Or skate—if I knew how. The water appears navy, transitioning to a teal hue where the sun sparkles against the surface.

Next to the big truck, I jam my car into park and flop back against my seat to soak in the surroundings.

It feels totally unique. There’s no sterile polish or obnoxious white pillars. No fountains or valets. In fact, there are no people as far as the eye can see. My body relaxes as that realization hits.

Until Weston Belmont pops up out of nowhere and startles the s**t out of me.

I must have zoned out and missed him rounding my vehicle, because his big, manly hands are here, propped above my window as he peers down at me. “You gonna just sit here all day?” he asks, right as Cherry squawks, “Go away!”

His head swivels sharply to eye her up—black beak and bluish-gray feathers with a splash of red at her tail. “What is that?”

“You mean, who is that? She’s my parrot. Cherry.”

He blinks twice before blurting, “She’s rude.”

I can’t help but laugh. “You have no idea.”

“She’s rude,” Cherry adds in a mocking voice that has me pressing my lips together and wincing.

“Sorry. She has an extensive vocabulary, and her s**t-talk is legendary.”

All the man does is stare at my bird with a furrowed brow before shaking his head. Then his hand taps on the roof of my car as he draws away. “Right. Well, the office is in there.” He hikes a thumb over his shoulder. “I can introduce you if you’d like. Otherwise, I’ll be on my way.”

“Go away!” Cherry says. Again.

I grimace as I open my door and step out. Weston doesn’t move back. He stays exactly where he is, towering over me. Filling out his T-shirt in a way that artsy city boys just…don’t. My eyes catch on the hole in the fabric on his left pectoral again and the glow of golden skin beneath. The golden skin of a man who spends his time outdoors with no shirt on.

I come from the land of pale skin and spray tans, so there’s something mesmerizing about what might be beneath the cotton material. I sweep away the urge to wiggle a finger through the opening to find out for sure.

But men—especially men who catch my eye like this one—are the last thing I need in my life right now. I swallow and take a new vow of celibacy because d**k will not help my predicament.

Then I peek up into his bright blue irises. They’re so electric that if he weren’t standing before me, I’d scoff and make a dismissive comment about how anyone can have eyes that color with Photoshop. Everything can be altered to look a certain way. Nothing is real.

But his eyes are.

He is.

I clear my throat, realizing I’ve been gawking for too long. “Well, I wouldn’t put it like Cherry. But truth be told, you’ve done more than enough for me today.” I smile softly, watching him regard me with a level of intensity that makes me squirm. “And this is something I need to do on my own,” I add quickly, nodding, more for my benefit than for his.