Sugar and Spice Read online

  Jesse craned his neck and told his crew to meet him downstairs. They complied without question, which was slightly unexpected. All of the camera crews Oscar had ever worked with were pushy and mean. They were the ones calling the shots, not the talent. Reality TV must have been wild, a whole new ballgame entirely.

  Once the crew disappeared from sight, Jesse leaned in close to Oscar, making him feel slightly self-conscious about his breath and his unwashed hair.

  “I’m sorry again,” Jesse whispered. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  Oscar shook his head.

  “I’ll be okay.”

  Jesse lingered for a moment longer, chewing on his bottom lip as if he were unsure of himself. Then he reached out to give Oscar’s hand one final squeeze.

  “Goodbye,” he said, before slowly slipping away.

  Oscar watched him move down the hall. His eyes were naturally very focused on Jesse’s perfectly sculpted ass as he got in the elevator and pressed a button. Then he looked up and caught Oscar staring at him. Oscar’s adrenaline spiked again, for like the fourth time since waking up, and he scrambled to get back inside and slam the door shut.

  “Everything is going to be okay.”

  He said the words out loud, but in his brain he could hear them in Jesse’s musical timbre.

  And everything was okay. It was just a misunderstanding, although how a film crew would mistakenly end up at the door of Hollywood’s most reclusive celebrity just by coincidence was beyond him.

  He glanced down at his fingers and clenched them slightly. He could still feel the ghost of Jesse’s soft skin against his. Real human contact. It was better than he remembered. It was like a freaking drug. And he had been clean for so long, but now all he wanted to do was lose himself in the newly-discovered sensation.

  It wasn’t good to dwell though. He knew he would never see Jesse again. Jesse would go on sharing his pretty, picture-perfect life with the world, and the world would keep eating it up. In a few days’ time, he probably wouldn’t even remember Oscar at all.

  Oscar sighed and carefully went about picking up the remnants of his broken mug. Luckily it had only broken into larger pieces that he could easily scoop up. He dug out the mop and cleaned the coffee off of the kitchen floor and the entryway. He then dug around in one of his junk drawers for some superglue.

  At first, he thought that maybe the mug might be salvageable, but once he started fitting the pieces back together, he realized there was a little triangular segment missing right down the middle, the part with his face on it. He looked everywhere, even moving the couch out of the way, but it was nowhere to be found.

  He thought then of the cameraman, subtly moving closer to him as he was having his attack. What if he’d swooped down and taken it? Was it possible that he could connect that shard of ceramic to Oscar’s current appearance? It had been sixteen years, but like, a face was a face... and he’d definitely reacted like he hadn’t wanted to be seen or filmed.

  There was a sinking feeling in his stomach and a tightness in his chest. His panic threatened to return, but he managed to stave it off by closing his eyes and remembering Jesse’s blue eyes,his words and the feeling of his smooth palm.

  Even if they did figure it out, there was nothing they could legally do about it without a release form, but that’s not what worried him. It was the length the network vultures would be willing to go to in order to acquire one.

  Oscar sighed and tossed the mug into the trashcan where it broke apart once again.

  Now the only thing he could do was wait.

  Chapter Two

  Jesse Sugar was sitting in the back of a limousine alongside all the adults in his immediate family. They were currently on their way to a charity event that was more about showing off how much disposable income you had than it was the actual charity. Jesse had tried to get out of coming. He doubted his presence would make a difference in the overall total at the end of the night, but his mother had insisted that it would make the family look bad if they weren’t all present and dressed in non-matching but perfectly coordinated outfits.

  Jesse’s sisters were the big money makers in the Sugar household. They each had a net worth of over a hundred million dollars and had practically invented the idea of a family-based reality TV show. If life was a game of chess, Leah, Katelyn, and Isabel would be the king, queen, and rook, respectively, whereas Jesse was more of an ancillary character, maybe a knight, or even a bishop on a good day. Sometimes he felt like he was little more than a shiny prop placed in the background of his sisters’ much more glamorous lives.

  “Could you pull over for a second, Francis?” Leah asked suddenly, looking up from her compact with scrunched brows. “I need to touch up my makeup.”

  “Won’t there be people who can touch you up at the event?” Jesse asked.

  Leah rolled her overly accentuated eyes and got to work sponging more powder onto her already packed face.

  “Yeah, backstage. There’s a red carpet we have to walk before that, dingus. The flash already makes my skin look too oily as it is.”

  It was Jesse’s turn to roll his eyes.

  “Did you seriously just call me a dingus? Where did you even learn that word? The classic movie channel?”

  Leah pointed at him with her beauty blender.

  “So what if I did?”

  “Children please,” said their mother. “Save the bickering for the cameras.”

  It drove Jesse insane when his mother went full “momager” like that. It was like the more successful they got, the more she viewed them as clients and not as her children. It was one of the many reasons he had gone out and gotten his own agent the second he turned eighteen. Angie wasn’t much better. She usually wanted him to do the same things his mother did, but at least he could fire her if he really wanted to. He couldn’t fire his mom from being his mom. Genetics didn’t quite work that way.

  Leah finished her makeup and Francis, with her permission, got back on the 101. Jesse crossed his broad arms over his chest and stared up at the limo’s matte black roof. If he squinted hard enough, he could see the thin plastic panels from which lights and a tiny disco ball could descend at the press of a button. He had the urge to press that button now, just for the satisfaction of mildly annoying his family, but he kept his fingers firmly planted at his side.

  It’d been over twenty-four hours, but he still couldn’t stop thinking about Oscar. He had these soft warm, almond shaped eyes that seemed to know everything and nothing all at the same time. The way his thin brown fingers had latched onto his as if Jesse was all that mattered in the whole world and the way he was able to smile and joke around so quickly after a panic attack. Jesse had fortunately only had a few of them in his lifetime, but he had not been okay for weeks afterward.

  Then, of course there was Ted’s little theory.

  “I’m telling you dude. That’s him. I’ve watched Garrett’s Guide seventeen times. He even said his name was Oscar!”

  Jesse wasn’t quite so convinced. All they had to go on was a name and a stolen mug shard. Making correct assumptions from inconsequential evidence like that only worked in shitty cop shows and Saturday morning cartoons. And yet, when his phone buzzed in his pocket he knew without looking exactly what the call would be about.

  “Hello,” he said, ignoring his sisters’ snickers. They all thought it was hilarious that he was trying so hard to run his own show when he could just hand it over to some producer like they always did.

  That was the point though. Jesse didn’t want his show to feel like just another superfluous Sugar family dramafest. He wanted to be proactive. To go out and reconnect with people from his past. To spend a lot of money on people who deserved it, try new things and connect with his viewers and prove to the world—and himself—that he could do more than just stand around in the background and look pretty.

  “Ted showed us the little clip he filmed yesterday,” said Allen, not one to mince words.

&nbs
p; Allen was a representative of Hillenbrand Studios, the network that produced all the Sugar family properties. He was also the man who, after countless years of begging, had finally greenlit Jesse’s yet-to-be-named side project.

  “And?” Jesse prompted, like a good little minion.

  There was a moment of anticipatory silence on the other end of the line and then a soft exhalation, a dead giveaway that Allen was more excited about what he was about to say than he would ever let on.

  “It took some digging, but we finally found out that the apartment you went to is rented by a man named Oscar Vega. We couldn’t find any information on the guy, not even a social media account. We called in a favor and got Oscar Hernandez’s old agent on the line and he confirmed that Oscar’s mom went by Carmen Hernandez Vega.”

  Jesse nearly dropped the phone. It was beyond unbelievable. He had met Oscar Hernandez... not only met him but scared him half to death.

  “We were able to look up his landlord and bribe him into giving us Oscar’s contact information. Said he’s a real whack job, and that he’s been holed up in that apartment since he signed his first lease twelve years ago. Apparently, he pays triple the rent just so his landlord won’t rat on him or kick him out. Lot of good that did him, poor sap.”

  Jesse pictured Oscar crumpling to the ground yesterday the moment he noticed the camera. He didn’t think Oscar was a whack job. He had to be suffering from some severe trauma. Brains were complicated things; if they weren’t, Jesse wouldn’t be spending thousands of dollars a month on therapy. He couldn’t help but imagine what it must have been like for Oscar, sitting alone in his apartment all that time, waiting to fade into obscurity, only to see his fame and the mystery surrounding his disappearance growing stronger with each passing day. It was irony at its cruelest.

  “So what happened with Oscar?” Jesse asked, fighting to keep the shock out of his voice.

  “Nothing yet,” Allen confessed. “We’ve been doing everything we possibly can to get him to sign the release forms, but he won’t budge. I would just tip someone off and take all the credit for finding him, but then we’d never get cleared to show your video of him.”

  There was a loaded silence.

  “What do you want me to do?” Jesse asked, voice hard and devoid of emotion. He was downright scary when he got like this. It was a side of him that no one except for his close friends and family ever got to see.

  Allen was not fazed.

  “Don’t be like that Jesse,” he asked. “Need I remind you that your show is on a trial basis? You aren’t getting a single episode past the nine we initially ordered unless the ratings are high and the public demands it. Do you have any idea what a clip of Oscar fucking Hernandez having a mental breakdown would do for you? You would be set, maybe even more than your sisters…”

  Jesse clenched his teeth.

  “What do you want me to do?” Jesse asked again, this time emphasizing every word.

  “You obviously had a good connection with the guy. You calmed him down better than anyone else could. Maybe he feels like he owes you one, and if he doesn’t, schmooze him and make him think that he does. Whatever you do, you better get him to sign the damn release forms before you wrap up filming, otherwise you’re done. Understood?”

  Jesse let his eyes fall closed as he took in a steadying breath. It was absolutely vile what Allen was asking him to do. The asshole would never see it that way, but Jesse sure did. Exploiting someone’s privacy and using their mental illness for monetary gain? It was the exact kind of soulless, heartless, Hollywood politics he was looking to avoid by producing this show for himself. He didn’t care if it was a flop and he got ousted from the network afterward. He didn’t care if he got blacklisted from show business entirely. He still wouldn’t stoop so low. If he was going to see Oscar again, he wanted it to be on his own terms.

  “I’ll take that into consideration,” Jesse lied and then hung up.

  He took his time putting his phone on silent and then slipping it back into his blazer pocket. When he looked back up, his family was staring at him with concern. The limo was parked near the end of the red carpet, and evidently had been for a while. They were all just waiting for him.

  Katelyn reached over and placed a gentle hand on his knee.

  “Is everything all right, Jess?” she asked.

  Jesse shook his head.

  “It’s nothing I can’t take care of,” he said. “Let’s get this thing over with.”

  With that, he plastered a fake smile on his face and trailed behind his sisters on the red carpet, pausing occasionally to pose for the pity pictures offered by photographers who weren’t lucky enough to grab someone more famous.

  Chapter Three

  Oscar flitted around the apartment with a large pitcher of water in hand. This had become a daily routine as of late. Get up. Get dressed like an actual human being, and water all of Jesse Sugar’s intricate apology bouquets. The first one had come less than three hours after the initial incident, and they just hadn’t stopped coming ever since.

  Another thing that had not stopped were the calls from every employee on Hillenbrand Studios’ payroll trying to get him to sign his life away. He had no idea how they’d gotten a hold of his number, but he suspected his landlord, Keith. The ungrateful bastard. Oscar knew he should’ve just bought the damn place from him. God knows he’d sunk enough money into it over the years to buy it three times over.

  He was just finishing up with the large clay pot full of sunflowers when there was a knock at the door. Oscar sucked in a breath and carefully set down his pitcher—he’d invested in a plastic one since he’d developed an affinity for breaking things lately. He wiped his palms on the front of his jeans and went to answer the door. He knew it was probably more flowers. He’d specifically told building security not to let anyone up unless they were willing to confirm they were just delivery people and show exactly what was in their parcel. Better safe than sorry.

  Today’s gift was not flowers, but a small cactus. Oscar accepted it quickly and mumbled a thank you at the startled delivery woman before slamming the door in her face. He was smiling before he even looked at the little card. He loved cacti. Always had. They reminded him of home, or whatever twisted concept of home he had left. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d seen one in person.

  He admired the plant a few moments longer before carefully untying the ribbon from around the base, revealing a 2x3 notecard. It read: “Sorry about all the calls from my network. They’re assholes. Don’t listen to them. Here’s my number if you ever wanna talk.”

  He’d provided the number and signed, or had the courier sign, the card with his initials, J.S., in big swooping letters. Oscar ran his fingers over the ink and stared at the number until his eyes started to hurt. All of the other notes had been sweet and encouraging, but this one was more direct and to the point. It seemed to say, just because you were vulnerable in front of me, doesn’t mean I think that you’re less of a person. The kid gloves were off, and Jesse still liked him enough to send apology plants. He wanted to talk to him. He’d left him his personal phone number even. Those were very valuable among celebrities, even D-list ones.

  Now, Oscar was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew that it was probably some sort of ploy to get him on Jesse’s TV show using reverse psychology, but it still warmed his heart. He loved the idea that somewhere out in the world was a cute and muscular blond boy who was thinking of him frequently enough to keep up a constant stream of living organisms delivered to his door.

  Oscar gave the cactus what was left of the water and dragged his laptop over to the couch. He’d been making his way through all the seasons of Spoonful of Sugar. It was way more entertaining than he thought it would be. Despite his best efforts, he found himself caught up in Leah’s boyfriend drama and Isabel’s makeup line and Katelyn’s eternal struggle to get pregnant.

  It felt just like watching a scripted soap opera, but with added bits of spon
taneity that crept up on you and always made you laugh. Oscar couldn’t imagine just sitting around all day with a camera following him around, urging him to do something entertaining. The most entertaining thing he ever did these days was jack off, and that wasn’t exactly advertiser friendly.

  Without a doubt, the most interesting part, at least for Oscar, was watching Jesse grow up. Jesse was the youngest Sugar sibling, and according to the internet, he was only seventeen when the show first started airing. That was nearly eight years ago.

  At first, Jesse clearly hadn’t wanted anything to do with his sisters’ TV show at all. He never wanted to be on camera and complained heavily every time the crew dragged him into an argument or barged into his personal space. Over the years, as his sisters got richer and richer, this reluctance morphed into gentle teasing and then escalated to the point where Jesse was everyone’s punching bag. Nearly every episode, even the ones he wasn’t in, had some sort of joke about him being dead weight or a mooch or a freeloader. It didn’t seem to really bother him, in fact he kind of embraced it. When he graduated from high school, he didn’t go to college. He didn’t get a job. He wasn’t interested in acting, modeling, or managing any part of his sisters’ empire. He was just there… getting drunk every other weekend, partying with hot girls and providing unintentional comic relief.

  Physically he’d made a complete transformation as well. He’d started out thin and willowy, the kind of kid that hadn't grown into his hands or ears yet. Then he’d had a growth spurt during his senior year. His face thinned out, his hair got thicker and he lost a ton of weight, only to gain it back tenfold in muscle a few years later. Still, it seemed impossible for him to shake the awkward teenager image. Oscar could relate. It was hard growing up in front of the cameras. Everyone was constantly trying to stuff the complexities of your very human existence into a tiny inescapable box. Jesse didn’t even have the excuse of playing a character to fall back on. People were just judging who he was now based on who he’d been in the past.