Tissue Paper Wings

Logan wasn’t sure what brought him to the sprawling contemporary mansion nestled in the Hollywood Hills, but he knew he was there for all the wrong reasons. His brain was working overtime, trying to rationalize this seemingly simple decision that ran layers deep, deeper than he’d ever care to acknowledge.

I’m just here for a friend. I’m only here because she asked me to stop by, he thought to himself as he stood in the doorway, eyes the color of Hershey syrup scanning the crowd of Hollywood stereotypes for that one face he was so desperate to see.

In reality, it was all just torture, and he knew it. Masochism was no foreign concept to Logan Mitchell, but it was difficult for him to recognize that need, to match his urges to any term in a glossary. It was an odd feeling of helplessness, of losing his sense of control because for once, Logan Mitchell was leading with his heart instead of his brain.

The mansion, filled with all of its budding starlets, wannabe Brad Pitts, and furniture torn straight from the latest interior design magazine, belonged to none other than Dak Zevon, star of the Varsity Vampires series and number seven on this year’s People magazine’s fifty most beautiful people. Dak Zevon also happened to be dating his Varsity Vampires 3 co-star, up-and-coming actress Kandi Jenkins, who just happened to be Logan’s best friend.

The same best friend he just happened to be hopelessly in love with.

And Logan didn’t stand a chance.

Even more mindboggling to the boy was why he’d agreed to bring his on-again, off-again girlfriend Camille along. Honestly, he wanted to just shake it off as a moment of weakness. Though he didn’t really care for her in the romantic sense of the word, there had been a flicker of frailness in her usually strong deep brown eyes at the mention of Kandi’s name and the party, and Logan felt as if he had to cave in. He had to prove that he wasn’t a bad boyfriend, even if he didn’t come to the party with the best of intentions.

Logan felt as if he were trapped in a life-sized game of Jenga and every move that he made was like removing another block, the same way his breathing would hitch in his throat as his fingers pried that skinny wooden block from the pile, silently praying that it wouldn’t all collapse around him.

“I don’t know why you wanted to come here anyway,” Camille said, stealing a glance at her own reflection in the mirror on the wall before tousling her dark curls. “Kandi Jenkins is nothing but a wreck.” She rolled her eyes as she spat out the name. In an effort to hide her jealousy, she forced a more nonchalant tone as she continued. “Honestly, it’s gotten to the point where I just feel sorry for the girl.”

It seemed that the more time he spent with Camille, the more she seemed to get under his skin.

Her grip felt like a tourniquet around his arm, and he was trapped, eyes still searching the crowd for any sign of Kandi. Even as he spoke to Camille, his gaze seemed to flutter around her, but he never really looked at her, almost as if he refused to acknowledge her existence.

“She’s not a wreck, she’s my best friend.” He wanted to tell her that she’d probably end up in the same sort of situation if her acting career was half as successful as Kandi’s, but he kept that comment to himself. “You didn’t have to come with me.”

Logan knew that, in Camille’s mind, she did feel like she was forced to tag along, like she had to be his babysitter. He couldn’t be trusted around Kandi, and though he’d never been unfaithful to Camille, there was this unspoken knowledge between them that, if given the opportunity, he would leave her for Kandi in a heartbeat. Camille was just his fallback, the girl he ran to after the girl he cared about became involved with a movie star. He knew she’d never reject him because Camille was so damn crazy about him, and though he wasn’t exactly crazy about her, being with Camille was safer than putting his heart on the line to be with Kandi. Being with Camille was better than being alone while he watched Kandi try to find her happily ever after.

“Whatever,” she replied, and for the first time that night, he felt her fingers loosen around his arm. “I’m gonna go see what Jo’s up to.”

He could tell that it killed her, the thought of leaving him to his own devices, but being around him and watching him so obviously pine over Kandi exhausted her.

As his vision focused in on each makeup-coated face, stared into each pair of mascara-curtained eyes, Logan couldn’t help but think back to a time when things weren’t so complicated.

Logan and Kandi had been sprawled across the beige carpet in the living room of her apartment, flipping through one of those lame teen celebrity magazines and searching for themselves. It was silly, but she’d just gotten her first interview published. Logan had snatched the Pop Tiger magazine from James and dropped by to surprise her. She’d left the door to the balcony open, and he could still remember how the breeze felt cool against his bare arms.

“I actually learned a lot from that interview,” he had laughed to himself. “You know, I never pegged you as a hip-hop fan. Oh, and remind me when basketball season rolls around to bring you with us to the next Lakers game.”

The blood had rushed to her cheeks as he threw her own words back at her, but then she shot him a grin, tugging at the neckline of her sweatshirt. “I’m a complex person, Logan Mitchell. Maybe you’re just too used to the shallow girls that hang out around here.”

His eyes fell to the page in her grip. “Maybe that’s it.”

“So what about BTR? Are you guys in here?” she’d asked as she flipped through the next few pages. “Uh oh, what’s this?” she teased him, gazing over at him from above the pages before continuing. “’Dating Do’s and Don’t’s with Logan Mitchell.’ This should be interesting…”

Logan couldn’t say anything, he just rolled his eyes, but as much as he tried to play it off, he couldn’t hide the way his cheeks had flushed pink.

“Like, I seriously wasn’t aware that you went on enough dates to be able to make a list.”

“Hey!” he protested before letting his voice return to a more casual tone. “I go on dates.”

“Like when? When was the last time you went on an actual date?”

His brown eyes turned upward as he racked his brain. “I go on dates.”

“Okay, whatever you say, dating guru.”

Her southern drawl had tugged at the words, and a fire truck’s siren punctuated the statement as it rushed off into the night.

That night, she told him she had started acting as a means of escape, because by immersing herself in a world that wasn’t her own and seeing life through someone else’s eyes, all of her own problems became trivial in comparison. That was before she’d started dating Dak and before Logan went back to Camille, back when fame was shiny and new and their relationship was easy. It was a time when the two of them could’ve been together, but he couldn’t work up the nerve to make the first move. The underlying fear of rejection was just too strong.

Kandi had hope that in this life, there were survivors, that even in the most thoroughly fucked circumstances, there was always a chance that a phoenix would emerge from the rubble.

Logan Mitchell was no phoenix, just a boy built from flesh and bone, so easily destructible.

And rejection was the easiest way to tear him apart.

As he wove through the throngs of beautiful people sipping champagne from glass flutes and tropical liquor elixirs from hollowed out pineapples, Logan finally spotted Kandi. Surrounded by stick-thin, bleached blonde wannabe model types, the one head of brunette locks leaned forward, her face sinking into the comforter for a moment before reemerging, her widened eyes a more vibrant mahogany. Her hands gently pushed the mirror over to one of her sidekicks, who sculpted the pile of crystalline snowflakes with a platinum credit card in brief, choppy motions.

Surprisingly, the cocaine didn’t frighten Logan. He was in a band. He’d been on tour, had seen some of the crew members snorting the substance in the back of the tour bus at night after the younger boys had fallen asleep. It was the look imprinted on her face that hurt and struck like a punch to the gut, the way her fair skin lacked its glow, cold and powerful like electricity.

Though the features were the same, the girl whose gaze locked onto his in that instant wasn’t the girl that he’d fallen in love with. This wasn’t who she was. Deep down, a part of him knew that she had been slowly falling apart since that night: the last night the two of them had hung out together alone, the same night she had confessed her true feelings for Dak.

The two of them were on the roof of her apartment building, with Los Angeles nothing but a blur of traffic and city lights beneath them. He could remember how the wind had whipped through her hair as she hugged her knees against her chest, and her honey-brown eyes had remained focused on the concrete beneath her feet. Logan had spent the majority of his seventeen years of life at a complete and utter lost for words, so her despondent expression was all too familiar to him. He just never expected to see the look he usually wore so well mirrored in her eyes. He’d never seen Kandi so guarded.

Desperate to get any sort of response from her, he asked, “So…how are things with Dak going?”

With the way she diverted her gaze, he could tell she was lying. “Everything’s fine.” A moment of silence lapsed between them before she added, “I mean, it’s not perfect, but no relationship is perfect, right?”

“Does he make you happy?”

Two pairs of brown eyes locked, and a sigh escaped her lips before she finally answered his question. “Honestly…no. Not anymore. It used to be okay, in the beginning, but now…Now I’m beginning to feel like there’s nothing there.”

Logan nodded, though he could tell by her hopeless expression, by the way her teeth gnawed at her lower lip, that she was still holding something back, hiding the nasty details from him. She didn’t want to feel the judgment in his stare, and Logan had made the mistake of criticizing her decisions before, so he could understand why she was hesitant to spill her thoughts to him now.

But there was still that part of her that needed to confess, to get all of the stress that she’d kept bottled up for inside for so long off her chest. Despite everything they’d both been though, how much they’d both changed in the short span of only a couple months, Logan was still her best friend.

He watched her walls fall down.

“Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I just feel like Dak doesn’t care about me, like he’s using me or something, which wouldn’t make any sense since he’s the Dak Zevon and everything.” Her fingers formed air quotation marks around his name for emphasis. “He keeps trying to take things further physically, and that scares me because…I don’t want to do those things with him. I feel like I should want to, but I don’t.”

Logan remained quiet, unsure of the right words to say, the words she needed him to say.

“Logan,” she said as she held his gaze. “I feel like I’m in love with the idea of dak, but I don’t really love him, and I don’t know what I should do.”

“Break up with him!” Logan could hear his own voice scream in his head, but he couldn’t force the words from his lips.

When she didn’t get any form of response from Logan, she continued. “Maybe I’d be better off alone.”

“Kandi, you deserve better than him.”

As always, she didn’t seem to listen to him. Despite her issues with Dak, he had some sort of charm that kept her with him, an appeal that Logan just couldn’t understand.

Logan was a little boy lost in the intoxicating whirlwind that was young Hollywood.

Now her hair was pulled up into some sort of elaborately braided updo, her eyelids weighed down by layers of smoky violet eyeshadow and heavy fake lashes, too-nude lips pursed as cocaine moths fluttered around in her thoughts. As she carefully climbed off the bed, he noticed that her short frame was cloaked in a dark purple one-shoulder dress, too red carpet for her usually effortless appearance.

But as she approached him, her bare feet taking each stride boldly, he couldn’t muster up the anger or disgust to be appalled. His feelings for her were still perfectly intact, and they refused to shift or budge.

She didn’t offer him any words or any sort of greeting, just pressed her lips forcefully against his, stunning him like a taser to the chest. The heels of her palms grazed his temples as her fingers threaded through tufts of espresso locks, and though he knew he should break away, he couldn’t. It was a hungry kiss, steeped with desperation, and Logan felt like he’d been struck by lightning, like a fulgurite: gritty on the outside with his insides hollowed out in one brief strike.

Though this was everything he had ever wanted, he was still left feeling somewhat unsatisfied.

All the blocks were falling down around him.

It was a complete and utter train wreck. His ear was filled with a chorus of shouts and a string of high-pitched swears, the soft skin that covered his cheekbone met with the sharp sting of Camille’s palm, and this time, she wasn’t just being melodramatic. He couldn’t say that he blamed her.

The room seemed to spin around him, a dark blur of laughter and the burning stench of alcohol. When Dak’s fifty most beautiful people fist collided against the side of Logan’s face, he felt no pain, just shocking numbness. A few of the actor’s friends came crowding around him, holding him back and trying to calm him while Logan made his way through the crowd, dragging Kandi along behind him, the instinct to save her taking over. Logan wasn’t looking for a fight. He just needed to escape, and he was taking her with him.

Camille had already left the party in a flurried frenzy, and even though he knew as he watched her storm out that door that he should chase after her, he couldn’t bring his feet to move. He didn’t care. He’d never cared about her. It was always Kandi.

Kandi was shouting at him as the car sped through the hills and out onto the freeway, screaming his name repeatedly, begging him to slow down, but her voice became nothing but white noise as he grew accustomed to the throbbing of his head in his skull.

All of the boys, aside from Kendall, of course, had sort of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with their temporary mother Ms. Knight. She gave them all of the guidance and support that their own mothers were too far away to give them, but she was in no place to truly discipline them because they weren’t her own, and for the most part, they gave her no reason to need to punish them beyond the typical no television, no Xbox, or taking away their cell phone for a week. So when Logan marched in with a devastated girl in tow, heading straight for the bedroom he shared with James, all the middle-aged woman cold muster up was a quizzical flicker in her soft green eyes.

James was out for the evening, no doubt on a date somewhere in the city, probably trying to snag another girl’s v-card to add to his collection, so the bedroom was empty Logan headed straight for his dresser, tossing Kandi one of his old t-shirts from JV hockey and the most tasteful and least worn of his boxers that he could find. His eyes traced the wood grain as she changed behind him. Though he could’ve easily watched her reflection in the mirror, he didn’t. That wasn’t him. Plus, he didn’t want to take the chance of catching a glimpse of his own battered face in the process.

“You’re staying here tonight.” His voice sliced through the empty air between them, an unlikely edge of assertiveness seeping into his tone.

She didn’t protest, she just stared at the stretch of navy comforter in front of her, though he could tell by her expression that she wasn’t really focusing on anything.

Logan took a seat beside her on the edge of his bed, his own stare trained on the toes of his sneakers. He’d never been that guy, the guy that took risks, the one that stepped out of his comfort zone, and now that he’d done the one thing he was the most fearful of, he wasn’t sure what to think of himself or what to think of his relationship with Kandi. He’d never been one to let his impulses and emotions drive him; Logan relied on rationality, on his ability to reason through everything in his life. Now that he’d abandoned that way of thinking, he didn’t know where to go from here.

As she came down, he could her the change in her voice, the frantic and hysteric tone slowly reverting to soft and slow lull. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” He flashed her a halfhearted smile despite how his jaw ached. “What are friends for?”

She forced out a laugh before allowing her head to rest on his shoulder, her hair brushing against the skin along the crook of his neck. Her phone vibrated in her lap, and she quickly glanced down at the screen. Her expression stiffened as she read the message. “It’s Dak.”

Logan was hesitant to say anything because he wanted to gauge her natural reaction to the news without the input for him, but the silence was unnerving. “What did he have to say?”

“He wants me to come back.”

Logan was about to ask her what she was going to do, but before he got the chance, her brows furrowed, her fingers clenching her cell phone for a moment before she threw it against the opposite wall. That thud as her phone bounced off the wall expressed more than she could ever say with words.

And it was that night that he realized that things would never be the same between them, that they could never be just the best friends that’d both tried so desperately to be. There was something more there, something in the way that he had to rescue her and in the way that she kissed him, and all of those little somethings housed feelings that neither of them could ignore any longer.