Going Sasquatch

  Copyright 2017 © by Jess Whitecroft All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover photography licensed by Shutterstock.

  No sasquatch were harmed during the making of this e-book.

  Going Sasquatch

  by

  Jess Whitecroft

  Chapters

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

  Also by the same author

  1

  I know all the gossip. Everything you think you know from TMZ or D-Listed? You don’t know it. Not like I know it. I know which Oscar winning up and comer says she’s on a low carb diet but is actually on a low food diet and has been supplementing her rare meals with crazy quantities of cheap Russian speed. I know which heavily muscled and heavily heterosexual action star once ran out of injection sites on his ass and ended up shooting steroids under his toenails. And guess who administered the injections when he was feeling too squeamish to do it? Yep. His long term – and very discreet - boyfriend. I know who binges, I know who purges, I know who spent way too much money on one of those Thai ‘cleanses’ where you hang out in a beach hut with a hose squirting coffee enemas up your ass for two weeks. You can lie to me and say you don’t know how you lost that weight or gained that weight, but the laws of thermodynamics don’t lie. I know everything about the bodies under my care.

  Or at least, I thought I did.

  That morning I had Chloe Park scheduled. Chloe was one of those people who got famous for doing some kind of impression of a heavily Photoshopped Bratz doll on Instagram. I dreaded Chloe. She was snotty, entitled and deeply insecure about her lack of talent, plus she often showed up with a drooling, unspayed French bulldog that was always attempting to bang Pepper, my assistant’s Pomeranian.

  “She’s not going to bring that animal again, is she?” asked Ivy. “Or I’m going to have to lock Pepper in the bathroom, and you know how she hates it.”

  “Or how I hate it,” I said. I had no idea a dog so small could do so much damage to a bathroom. Pepper weighed all of five pounds and yet within thirty minutes she had destroyed the bathmat and inflicted grievous wounds to the Squatty Potty. My private suspicion was that it was sexual frustration; she was secretly into the slobbering bulldog.

  “Yeah, well,” said Ivy. “At least this time it can’t jump in the pool. Or shit in it.”

  I glanced over at the empty pool, not ruling out the possibility of the bulldog scampering down the steps and popping a squat in the shallow end.

  At that moment the phone rang and Ivy answered it. “Hello, Finnegan Fitness, how may I help you?” I sidled towards the door but then the look in her eye told me I’d better stay put. Who is it? I mouthed.

  She covered the phone with her hand. “Angie Lorde.”

  “You’re kidding me?”

  “Well, it’s not her, but it’s her people,” said Ivy, and quickly returned to the call. Jesus. The Lorde was only one of the most powerful agents in town. What the hell was she calling me for? I was just a personal trainer.

  “Sure, we saw him,” Ivy was saying, flipping through her desk planner. “Thursday. It was definitely Thursday, and no, he didn’t have anything booked over the weekend. Why?”

  Who?

  She mouthed back. Chase.

  Fuck. Chase Morrow. My absolute worst client.

  Unlike all my other worst clients, Chase Morrow didn’t turn up hungover, bring his pets to poop in the pool, threaten lawsuits over the smallest muscle strain or go off on crying jags about how fat and out of shape he was. No, Chase showed up on time, stuck to his diet, gave one hundred and ten per cent in his workouts and always came clean when he was hurting instead of leaving it to develop into something worse, like a ligament injury.

  He would have been the perfect client, if only he didn’t leave me in such a state of profound sexual frustration that I was now projecting unrequited desires onto my personal assistant’s dog.

  “No, sure,” said Ivy. “If we see him we’ll tell him to call you. Maybe he just wanted to get out of LA for a while. Okay. Yeah. Bye.” She hung up. “Have you seen him?”

  “I wish.”

  “Not as much as me,” said Ivy, with a sigh. “He’s probably off taking a long weekend with some lucky-ass actress. Wasn’t he papped canoodling with Harper Kennedy like really recently?”

  “I don’t know. I thought Harper was gay. Last I heard she was hooking up with Kristen Stewart.”

  I hoped Harper Kennedy was gay, which was pathetic, because Chase Morrow definitely wasn’t. I’d had my hands all over that man, on his long, broad thighs, on his wide shoulders, his narrow waist. Anywhere I could legitimately touch under the pretext of correcting his form. And there were times when I could have easily disgraced myself by breaking down and attempting to lick him all over like an ice cream, but I didn’t, because not once did he give me a smile or even a look that could have been interpreted as a come on. We’d been half-naked and sweaty together more times than I could count, and all he ever gave me was a boner and even more masturbation material. I’d practically wrung my balls dry over that man’s abs; it was nothing short of a medical miracle that I was even still producing sperm.

  Just then I heard tires screech on my driveway and then in came Chloe, dog in her purse, drink in the other hand and her eyes hidden by a pair of oversized Aviators. “Hiiii,” she drawled, and handed the dog to Ivy without so much as looking at her. “I know I’m late, but the traffic was bad…”

  She lurched towards me and I got a blast of stale Bourbon. “And you’d been drinking heavily the night before?”

  “I’m fine,” said Chloe, with a belligerence that said she was at least still half drunk. “I have a really fast metabolism when it comes to booze.” She waved the drink at me. “And this is chia seeds. It’s got like a superfood and shit, so I’m good to go. Just point me to the yoga mat and let’s get going.”

  “Not until you drink some water,” I said, directing her to the fridge.

  Chloe waved the cup again. “Hel-lo? Antioxidants? Electrolytes?”

  “Yeah, and Brawndo’s got what plants crave. I know. Drink.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Drink.”

  As I passed the bathroom I heard panicked scratching. Pepper was already inside and wreaking havoc. I had mixed feelings. On one hand I didn’t want to spend all morning watching dogs bang and on the other hand I wasn’t sure if the Squatty Potty could take another pounding from a horny Pomeranian. “You’re going to have to put her on a leash,” I told Ivy.

  “Are you kidding me? You’ve seen her. She almost throttles herself.”

  “Almost. I can live with almost, unlike my bathroom accessories, which are about to die.”

  Ivy got up from her desk. The phone rang again but I pounced on it before she could grab it and stall.

  “Hello?”

  “Michael Finnegan?”

  I winced. Nobody called me that any more, mostly because I begged them not to. Somehow I wound up being born to the two people in the entire Western Hemisphere who had never heard that fucking song. “It’s Sean,” I said, having flipped my first and second name. “But yeah. Who’s calling?”

  “This is Angie Lorde.”

  The Lorde herself. Holy shit.

  “Oh,” I said. “Um…hi?”

  “Have you seen Chase?
”

  “No. Your assistant called my assistant. She went through this.”

  “Well, now you’re going through it,” said the Lorde, and she didn’t sound happy. But then she never did. Happy wasn’t her style, even when one of her most bankable action stars wasn’t missing. “When did you see him last?”

  “Uh…Thursday,” I said, starting to feel anxious. One of the first things that had struck me about Chase was how tight he was. Not in the physical sense (although he was that, too) but in the way he held himself together. He was as polite and contained off the red carpet as he was off it, and that was always a worry. Some stars you see it coming, the John Belushis, the Kurt Cobains. And then you get the rising stars who seem to have their shit together and their career going places and then – bam. Heath Ledger. “Has anyone seen him since then?”

  “No,” said Angie. “No sightings at all. He’s gone sasquatch on us. On everyone. On me.”

  I didn’t like to think what happened if you went sasquatch on Angie Lorde. I had a feeling it wasn’t pretty.

  “Did he say anything to you when you saw him last?” she said. “How did he seem?”

  Oh God. Now I was really worried. I glanced over at Chloe, concerned that she shouldn’t be hearing this conversation, but she was preoccupied, taking green-gilled selfies probably tagged justwokeuplikethis.

  “He seemed fine,” I said. That is to say, he seemed straight. I remember him leaning on Ivy’s desk, looking into her appointments book and making her blush. He was standing close enough for his arm to brush her shoulder, and I understood that blush all too well. I’d just survived three hours of being close enough to him to taste his sweat, feel the heat of his skin radiating against mine. And somehow I’d managed to keep my hands to myself and my penis in check. Somehow. “He did his usual workout, took a swim and left.”

  “And you’re sure it was Thursday?”

  Reasonably. Not that the day of the week had even occurred to me when I had Chase Morrow in my pool. I could have been on Mars and I wouldn’t have paid that much attention to the subzero temperatures, toxic gases and lack of oxygen, not with him all dripping wet and wearing nothing but a tiny red Speedo. “Definitely,” I said. “He took a swim. It couldn’t have been any day after that because I had the pool drained on Friday. I’ve got calcium deposits.”

  “How interesting for you,” said the Lorde. “Did he say anything?”

  “About the calcium deposits?” I said, half of my brain still revisiting the Speedo.

  Angie Lorde hissed like a vampire.

  “Right,” I said. “Sorry. No. Not really. He said he was having lunch with that writer. You know – the one doing his superhero trilogy thing.”

  “Oh,” said Angie. “Hacky McChickenfingers. I know. God, he probably took one look at the kind of dialogue he was going to have to try and sell and did a Peg Entwhistle swan dive off the Hollywood sign.”

  “Don’t say things like that.”

  “Well, you were the last person to see him.”

  Oh God. Why was my head now tacking an ‘alive’ on the end of that sentence? Fuck Angie Lorde. What a terrible human being. “Do you think he’s okay?” I asked, and Chloe stirred in her seat beside the fridge. The bulldog was writhing in her lap; it had caught the scent of Pepper, who was just down the hall being told off about destroying the bathroom. “I mean, is there reason for concern?”

  “I have no idea,” said Angie. “With me he’s like a Greek statue; beautiful and expensive, but you can’t rely on him in conversation. Does he talk to you?”

  “Um…sometimes. I guess?” Did he? I was trying to remember, but by this point I was beginning to freak out a little bit. A lot. Now that I thought about it, couldn’t Chase’s cool good manners be exactly the kind of thing that masked some deep-seated unhappiness? Or a pill habit?

  “Does he consider you a friend?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and I genuinely didn’t. Here I was, more than half in love with the man and I couldn’t even answer whether he thought of me as a friend. I knew Hollywood was shallow, but this was absurd.

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Stop saying you don’t know,” said Angie.

  The bulldog started to bark. Chloe shushed it. I felt like my head was about to explode. “I’m saying it because I don’t know,” I said. “For fuck’s sake, I’m a personal trainer, not a bounty hunter.”

  At that point the bulldog slipped its leash and took off in a skitter of untrimmed toenails. Chloe made a token effort to run after it, but her hangover suddenly took her out at the knees and she sagged, white faced, beside the fridge.

  “Look,” said Angie Lorde. “I don’t know if you know this, but I personally recommended you to Chase. And Julia Jones. And over half your client list, actually. I can un-recommend you just as easily.”

  “Oh shit,” said Chloe, who had just hit that spinny stage when you try to move too fast. I grabbed her under the arms before she hit the floor, the phone held awkwardly against my shoulder.

  “Are you serious?” I said to Angie. “You’re really pulling the ‘You’ll never work in this town again’ schtick.”

  “It’s not schtick, young man. It’s the truth. If you insist on being unhelpful…”

  “I’m not being unhelpful,” I said, wrangling the ragdoll-like Chloe back into her seat. In the same moment I heard Ivy yell ‘no!’ and Pepper came scampering coquettishly into the reception area, the slobbering French bulldog hot on her heels. “I’m just kind of busy right now.”

  “Never mind. If you see him tell him to call me.”

  Lady, I thought. If I see him I’m going to tell him to run very fast in the opposite direction from you. No wonder people joked about smelling brimstone whenever she walked into the room.

  “I’ll do that,” I said, and hung up, just as Chloe finally lost the battle with the contents of her stomach and vomited stale Jack Daniels and chia seeds all over my shoes and the floor. This sent the bulldog into a frenzy, because he couldn’t decide which he liked better – tasty throw-up or the prospect of pussy. He chased Pepper straight through the puddle and I heard myself moaning ‘No, no, nooo’ as the two dogs tracked puke all over my entire reception area.

  The smell was terrible. Pepper got covered in it. Finally Ivy managed to get a leash on her and she strained on the end of it, looking like something that got coughed up by a saber-toothed tiger with a heavy cold. I grabbed the reeking bulldog, retching all the while, and we all politely agreed that it would be better if we just canceled Chloe’s morning appointment and did this some other day.

  Just kidding. There were tears. And screaming.

  After getting rid of Chloe and calling in the cleaners, I went upstairs to my apartment to shower and change my clothes. I couldn’t stop thinking about Chase, who I hoped was probably just hiding from his horrible agent. When did I last talk to him? And about what?

  Thursday. He’d been talking to Ivy about those two idiots on YouTube who decided to do some kind of bullet-catch stunt with a book and a powerful handgun. In theory the book was supposed to stop the bullet, only it didn’t and now one of them was dead and the other being charged with murder. “What was the book?” Chase had said. “Because if I’m going to be trying to stop a bullet with a book then I want it to be The Lord of the Rings – the three volume edition. Or maybe something by Ayn Rand. Something long, thick and wordy. Don’t want to be walking out there with nothing but a prayer and a copy of The Great Gatsby.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with The Great Gatsby?” Ivy had said.

  “Too thin. It’s only about forty-seven thousand words.”

  I remembered thinking that was still forty-seven thousand more words than most people in this town had ever read. Chase Morrow was clearly more than just a perfect set of abs and an ass that would make the angels weep with lust, and that was always a problem if you wanted to work in Hollywood. When you were
constantly surrounded by beautiful dumbasses you were never hard up for eye candy or sex partners, but you’d always struggle to find someone to actually talk to.

  My mind kept going back to those dark places, to all the ways you could collapse under the weight of your own talent. Booze, pills, heroin, crack, weird experiments with autoerotic asphyxiation. And I liked Chase. I more than liked Chase, and I was starting to worry.

  He lived up Laurel Canyon way. I knew because I’d dropped him off some protein supplements once, when he was working on his first superhero movie. In spite of all my better instincts I drove up there and hung around outside, remembering when I’d been here before.

  It was a Spanish colonial style bungalow, with low red eaves and a lot of stained glass. Chase had greeted me at the door, wearing a pair of thin white pajama pants that made me wonder if this was it. Maybe he was about to make that move that I was sure kept on hanging in the air every time I had my hands on his body, every time my touch lingered just a second too long.

  And he looked beautiful in white. It set off his golden coloring, his slight tan and the shades of his hair, which was the kind of light brown that only had to so much as sniff sunlight before it lit up in shades of sand, copper and bronze. “Oh, hi,” he’d said, like he was just a person and not some Greek God slumming it on familiarly named streets. Zeus. Olympia. “Come on in.”

  By that point my fevered imagination had been running ahead of me. Why did he need me to come in just to hand him some flavorless protein powder? I thought this really was it, that he was about to turn around and say something like “Finn, we need to talk, don’t we?” and then we’d dive headlong into all the dirty, wonderful things we’d been aching to do to one another all along. I was beyond ready for this. I remember following him through the house, looking at all the doorways – edged in mosaic tiles of terracotta and blue – and wondering which one led to the bedroom where we would finally get to the point we’d been dancing around forever. There was a light sheen of sweat on his bare back, and his ass, barely covered by those white pants, was my masterpiece. I’d made him squat until he almost forgot his good manners and called me a bastard, but God, it was worth it. That donk looked amazing in superhero spandex. It was round and firm and beautifully muscled, and just to make you drool even harder it had dimples. Two little dents at the base of his spine. They looked like they were inviting you to rest your thumbs there while you squeezed his cheeks.