Still, I kept it up. “Alix, you should see some of the crap I’ve had to bail some of my clients out of to prevent them from getting into the papers. One guy I had to forward nearly a hundred thousand dollars at one point after he’d gone nuts in Las Vegas at the poker tables. He ended up forking over his entire signing bonus to me because of it, but he stayed out of the tabloids and off the league’s trouble list. Trust me, pro sports leagues are not too keen on their athletes losing a ton of money in Vegas. Not since Pete Rose, at least.”
Alix broke out in a huge, relieved smile, and my suspicions were confirmed even more. Before I could process that, however, she threw her arms around my neck and hugged me, her body pressed against mine in a way that had me thinking less about what trouble she might be in and more about what sort of trouble she could cause for me.
“Oh, Kade, thank you so much!” she said, laying her head on my shoulder. I returned the hug semi-awkwardly, my body aware of how beautiful the woman pressed up against it was while my mind kept reminding me that Alix was my stepsister. “Seriously, I so owe you for this one, and more than just the cash.”
“We’ll talk about that later,” I replied, carefully extracting myself from her limbs. “But if I’m going to get you the cash, I’d prefer to use the internet at a place I can trust.”
“Or my place would be good too,” Alix said. “If you don’t mind, I mean. Besides, there’s a little Indian place near there that I’d love to take you to if you don’t mind.”
I thought about it. Facing the drive back from Orange County to Los Angeles, we’d get back somewhere around lunch time, and we’d had a pretty light breakfast. Still, the ocean was calling to me, and I wanted to enjoy the Southern California beaches again. Oregon has some beautiful coastline, but it wasn’t the same. “Where’s your place located?”
“I live in Hermosa Beach,” Alix said. “It’s not ocean-side, but you can cut through to the ocean in about a mile, or we could go down to the Hermosa Pier. Are you still into surfing like you used to be?”
I laughed, thinking back to my high school days. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done that, Alix. Besides, I doubt I’d find a place that would have a board for rent right now anyway. But I wouldn’t mind going over to the Hermosa Pier.”
“I’d love that,” Alix said. “Okay, so plan set. We go back to my place to park, walk over to Hermosa Pier, and then after lunch and an afternoon by the sea, we can take care of the rest. You know, Kade, you’re pretty awesome, you know that? A girl could search her whole life for a guy like you.”
“All it takes is the right circumstances to happen, I guess,” I replied, momentarily shaken by Alix’s words. I couldn’t let her see it though, so I cracked a smile. “Then again, knowing my luck, I’d end up with a total blonde like you or something.”
As we drove north along the PCH toward Hermosa Beach, my mind wandered to places that it wasn’t supposed to, places that I had set up iron-clad walls to prevent myself from visiting. The problem was, for all of the taunting I’d given Alix, the reason I had was because she was, in so many ways, the woman of my dreams. Despite her bitching toward Layla and Dad, she was normally sweet and innocent, kind to almost everyone she met. I’d once gone to an industry party she’d been invited to soon after she turned eighteen, just to see what the fashion industry was like. Despite the glamour, despite the outfits and the supposedly beautiful bodies, most of the people there were miserable pains in the ass. There was more backbiting, snippy comments, and just unhappy people than I had ever seen gathered together at once. But through it all, Alix was kind and nice to everyone, even when they were being mean to her.
I realize many of my own comments to her were just as bad as what the fashionistas said that night. And yes, I realize that makes me a hypocrite. I couldn’t help myself, and at the time I thought it was better than what the alternative was.
When we got to Alix’s house, I was surprised. I’d expected, like most young people in Los Angeles, that she’d be living in an apartment. Instead, I parked my Lexus in front of a very nice little two-bedroom bungalow. “I didn’t realize when you said you had your own place that you literally meant you had your own place,” I said as I put the car in park. “When did you get this?”
“About a year ago,” Alix said with a smile. “I was sharing an apartment with some girls in Torrance, near the Fashion District, but I couldn’t put up with one of them. She insisted on smoking as a way to control her weight for shoots, and every time she was booked for a runway show the apartment smelled horrible for two weeks. I tried everything, from leaving my windows open to air fresheners, but it just didn’t work. Derek gave me good advice. I picked it up as a bank foreclosure, and as long as I live here another four years, I can get tax write-offs on it before flipping it and making a profit, or I can turn it into a rental property.”