Artificial Love (The Goodbye Trilogy #2)
ARTIFICIAL LOVE
The2nd Part of
The Good Bye Trilogy
By Best Selling Saga & Suspense Author
Alisa
Mullen
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher – at alimullenbooks@gmail.com. This book both printed and in electronic format, is a work of fiction and all persons appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, other than what is described above, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 Alisa Mullen
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1503070684
ISBN-10: 1503070689
Back cover reviews are based on the novel, Plastic Confidence.
Cover Design by Margreet Asselbergs at Rebel Edit and Design
DEDS AND CREDS
~ To my assistant and kick arse friend, Melanie Weaver. You have been my rock and this book wouldn’t have happened without you in my life.
~ To Kellie Montgomery at Eye Candy Book Store for believing in me and Johnny’s story.
~ Thank you Amy Gamache at ROSE DAVID EDITING
~Thank you Carmen Comeaux, Brett Lewis, Jess Denlein, Kelly Byrne, Dawn Stanton, and Vanessa Lofton.
~ Thanks to the beautiful Margreet Asselbergs at Rebel Edits and Design for my awesome cover design. You are a miracle worker as usual. Next up, ELASTIC HOPE!
~ To MY Street Team, Boston Babes – “Find your words”
~For every reader that hates Johnny Lennox. I think that’s all of you.
“Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.”
- Thomas Merton
Prologue
Emily McDonald
I can’t be entirely sure, but I don’t think that being twelve years old was all that it was cracked up to be. I think I have always known that my adolescence was a bit…off. My twelve-year-old little self with the curious question about what being an adult was all about, shaped who I was. Who I am.
I grew up in Merrimack, New Hampshire. It was a good place to live for a long time. I grew up knowing nothing about death, lies, secrets, and the ugly in the world. Not many people knew about our sleepy little New England town, and I think that the community liked it that way. It wasn’t until Grace Miller was killed that our sleepy town found its way onto national television and in newspapers all over the country. It wasn’t until then that I wanted to rewind time and do things differently. I know I could have saved Grace’s life had I told her secret she told me only days before I left for camp.
I knew Grace in -- and out -- of the living world. She was pleasant to me, she trusted me, yet I don’t know what she saw in me. I knew what I saw in a friend like her. She was one of those popular girls that I secretly wanted to be like. My two best friends, Julia and Angela, well… we weren’t popular as a group, but I don’t think that either one of them cared about popularity all that much. They were fun to hang out with, even though I found myself accepting invitations to the more popular girls’ houses instead of hanging out with them all of the time.
I would blow it off, you know. I would make excuses. I’d lie.
No one knew about those secrets until Grace was dead and I became her victim. I mean, I think I was her only one. I’d never really know.
I was punished for those lies when I lost both of my friends one afternoon. In the span of five minutes, I played the Ouija board, and Grace was contacted; and however skeptical about that entire game and encounter with a spirit I was, the truth about the artificial girl I would become just five minutes later, well… Grace never left my side. From the moment her dad was charged with her rape and murder, Grace clung to me like she had in life. In her death, she clung to me just as she had when she cried on my shoulder in the gym locker room after I saw the traces of what that man did to her.
I lost my friends, my self-worth. And I gained a ghost who would remind me I always took the path of least resistance: I was the nice girl she expected me to be.
Grace’s appearances were scattered. There wasn’t any rhyme or reason to when she would make herself known to me. At first, it was writing on the bathroom mirror. Later, when my parents were reminding me to be a nice girl at the dinner table, I would notice her standing outside of our house, smiling and twirling, reminding me that I had better be that nice girl. After all, when my friends and I asked what we would be when we grew up, I got N-I-C-E. I thought I was pretty darn lucky, since Julia was going to be a slut and Angela – well, her word is still difficult to understand.
It wasn’t until I met Johnny Lennox that I found out I didn’t have to be nice anymore. Artificial. Fake. For sixteen years of my life that I would never get back. EVER. With Johnny, I spoiled that ridiculous façade. There weren’t reasons to lie when I was with him. I was raw, jealous, pissed off, and every feeling in between. It was the most alive I had ever felt, the closest to my truth, when I was loved by the biggest asshole on the East Coast. Johnny could never, ever be a regret of mine – even though I told the ultimate lie for him. Maybe his crime wasn’t as bad as a little girl gone and dead; but it directly involved me, and I’d be the reason he would be in a prison cell for ten-to-twenty years.
Chapter One
Johnny Fucking Lennox
(Day 717 sans Julia Delaney, ex lead vocals and guitarist of Love Sick Ponies)
I heard a soft snore coming from the side of my head. Female. I turned my throbbing head slightly to the left to see a head of long dark brown hair. Not Jules. I hesitated momentarily before following through with my regular daydream. Placing my hand on the girl’s hair, I started to pet it as though she were a fucking kitten. Of course, I knew it wasn’t Jules, but in my drunken splendor last night, I must have relapsed because of my co-dependent nature, a term from my current Dr. Psycho-babble therapist. We played a gig last night on Johnny Carlton’s Late Night Show, and that success made me think Jules should’ve been there for that milestone for the band. I honored her by hitting on the first girl with long, dark hair. I know: I was awesome like that. If she only knew how proud a moment it was.
Female turned over, and I flinched. Bad idea. She had piercings on every part of her face. Four in the eyebrows, one septum, three, I kid you not, in the cheek, and one in the lip. I scrubbed my hands over my eyes and told myself, once again, that I had to stop fucking Jules by proxy. It wasn’t working. This would be the absolute last time I would substitute a groupie for my ex-girlfriend. Maybe I’d even go abstinent. When in doubt, don’t… right? Yeah, this behavior was scaring even me, and I don’t get spooked. I get drunk.
I stretched and looked at the clock.
Damn, I had an appointment with Dr. Snooze in less than twenty minutes. I grabbed a smoke, a new habit I had picked up since Jules left.Failing to light the damn thing, while throwing on one of the band’s sweatshirts was pissing me right the fuck off.I pulled on dirty-laundry jeans to head out into the busy morning of New York City. I didn’t look nearly as pretty as I had the night before, but whatever. Fuck ‘em.
“Where are you going?” Female looked sad that we weren’t going at it again, I was sure.
“I have an appointment with my shrink,” I answered as I looked at the wall of Jules. I had developed over seven hundred photos at the local Walgreens and plastered them to my wall. Some were from when we were just getting to know one another. Some
were of her on stage. Some were of us as we played guitar together on the tour bus. But a lot of them were the photos that Mark, my private investigator, had taken on Martha’s Vineyard, where she has been living all of this time.
As part of my therapy, I took one photo down. It was a duplicate anyway. There were four more exactly like it when we started this stupid “exercise,” and I panicked when I saw there was only one more left of that particular photo. Dr. Butt-Face never did ask how many there were.
“Why are there so many pictures of Jules Delaney on your wall?” Female asked as she started to pull up her halter dress. Ugh, piercings everywhere. Everywhere. I mean, where Jules’ piercing were tasteful and stunning, this chick’s shit was excessive. I loved them. Jules was so beautiful.
“Research,” I answered flatly.
“Wow, she’s so beautiful. I hadn’t ever seen her in concert before she left the band. But Ethan is definitely a good fit for Love Sick Ponies now,” she went on.
I was about to lose my shit all over her. Ethan was a terrible replacement for Jules. Just fucking wrong in every way possible. Why didn’t anyone else see that? He couldn’t sing the songs like her. He certainly didn’t wear the low-cut, plaid school skirt I grew to love. Well, my male organ had grown to love it and often.
“Yeah, he is alright. Listen, I gotta go. It was nice to um…get to know you?” I asked. Normally, they were gone by morning, but I must have been too fucked up to tell her to get out when I realized she wasn’t Jules.
“Sure.” She looked pissed as she flew by me and opened the door. “My name is Christine, by the way. You might want to learn a girl’s name, instead of screaming out Julia when you come.”
Hell, I knew I did that. She wasn’t the first to get pissed, and she certainly wouldn’t be the last. I called out Julia. That was my form of dealing. Dr. Scratch-a-dick said we would get to that after we tackled the photo wall.
Luckily, I had remembered to charge my phone the night before. I plugged in the ear buds and started my Julia-playlist. She sang to me everywhere I walked in downtown Manhattan. It didn’t matter if it was snowing or raining. Her voice got me through each walk. It was a necessity that I had not told Dr. Pickle Cock about, and I still wasn’t sure if I was going to.
I made my way down Madison Avenue and noticed that a few people pulled out their phones to take pictures of me. I pulled my Red Sox hat down lower and steeled my expression for the public. No, I was not depressed, as the magazines kept insisting. No, I was not still in love with Julia Delaney. Lie. No, I was a happy bassist for the popular band, Love Sick Ponies. Yes, I was happy. I made attempts at a grin while I listened to Julia belt out “One Leg Up,” and I tried not to show the normal tear that fell down my face when I heard her last beautiful, illustrious note. She had been my rock. She was the only female constant in my life. It was too bad that I had turned her into a scorned and distrustful person the very night that she left my apartment forever.
Lionel Ritchie played about the sun and the rain as I stepped into the low-lit office. I took a seat and grabbed the first magazine I saw. I was five minutes late, but sometimes the good doctor had real whack jobs who required a few extra minutes. I could tell when they came out of his office, either looking like they had just been probed by aliens or their cat had just died. I never walked out looking like either. With my head high and no part of me showing any emotion, I made everyone know I didn’t belong here.
I only had a few months left on this state-mandated therapy until I was done. I got here, in this quandary, when I ran my car into a ditch after seeing her with Brennan kissing in their elaborate estate in Vineyard Haven. The cops said that my alcohol level was too high to give me just a warning pass. Instead they fucked me. I was tested for drugs weekly. I was not allowed to drive a car for like forever, and I had to see Dr. Fucktoid every week for almost a year. My mother, the loving therapeutic figure that she was, said that Dr. Goldman was one of the best. Golden, she had described him. Then she laughed, though I didn’t. He hadn’t done much that was “golden,” since Julia had not come back to me and since Julia had not realized that she still belonged to Love Sick Ponies.
I flipped through Fan Date magazine, and my heart stopped when I saw her beautiful smile. She was so happy, looking down at her white wedding gown while holding a bunch of wild flowers. I tore the page out, but not before I saw her slipping a ring on Brennan’s cocky-ass finger. Asshole. The guy totally manipulated his way into her life. He didn’t deserve her at all. He was a total douche who hurt her way more than I did. Well, at least as much. Okay, maybe cheating on her twice did trump a lot of bad relationship etiquette, but fuck it. She was mine.
My heart warmth dropped at least twenty degrees as I read the headline; “Mr. and Mrs. Julia Curtis”. Was that supposed to be funny? That was nowhere near a fucking joke. She wasn’t a Curtis. She was a Lennox. My Lennox. My name. My leg started to shake in its normal, agitated way. It continued to shake as the Doc came out to see me with ripped up pieces of the magazine and a scowl on my face.
“Good Morning, Johnny,” he said as he took in my disheveled appearance.
“Morning, Doc,” I answered numbly as I pulled myself up from the chair and threw the magazine down on the table. I put the ripped photo of Jules in her wedding dress in my pocket and breezed past him, heading directly to the chaise lounge on which I had fallen asleep countless times. Today, I was too fucking pissed to even imagine sleeping. I probably wouldn’t sleep for days knowing that the girl I once called mine, was officially married. Officially, happily married. I was so fucked.
Grunts of protest against what I knew was right found their way out of my mouth. I had to be finished. I had to move on. It was time, because Jules, at least the Jules I once knew, was never coming back.
Chapter Two
Mrs. Emily McDonald
(SIX MONTHS LATER)
My neighborhood friends always referred to me as Betty Draper from the television show, Mad Men. Do you know that character? She appeared quite put together on the show at first, so of course I was flattered. After I watched three episodes of her being a walked on, self-pitying, pest - I realized that was not a compliment at all. I was being mocked, as usual, so I simply smiled when they would bring it up again. Plus! That main character, Don Draper, was extremely promiscuous and didn’t care about his family at home.
Of course, that was not at all like my nice home. Michael, my adoring husband, cherished me and our home. Michael, however, did enjoy the show very much. He became an avid fan and that was kind of disheartening. I thought he would be just as disgusted with the cheating but we both knew better. At least, I did.
Cheaters had to have their own place in hell right next to liars – where I would end up, no doubt about that – if hell even existed. Being nice does not mean being honest, just in case you’re wondering. I imagine I’ve lied just about every day of my life. Doesn’t sound so nice? Quite the contrary because everything I do and say has always been to please everyone else. I’ve always believed in God but hell? I already live in it. It certainly couldn’t get any worse than my existence.
Now, now. We can’t be unpleasant for that long, so I put that smile back on my face now that I was headed in to town.
Michael and I lived in a beautiful home in Wakefield, Massachusetts just north of Boston. We bought it, tore it down, and then rebuilt it to meet our ideas of what the perfect home would be. We had a nursery all set up for whenever he told me it was time to stop using the diaphragm. We had a play room with pool and air hockey tables, as well as a bar for when we had our parties. Those were my favorite nights. I had a chance to meet all of Michael’s coworkers from his financial firm downtown.
Michael worked late nights so I always had a five course dinner waiting for him in the microwave. That way he would eat. I think he didn’t always get the chance seeing as he was a very busy lawyer for a financial firm, so I made sure that he got all of the necessary food groups in his one meal at home.<
br />
Today, I decided that I would make a lemon Bundt cake and bring his lunch to him. I put my hair up in a nice twist I had learned to do on You Tube. I made sure to wear my red cashmere sweater that he bought for me for my birthday. He said it accentuated my breasts which made me turn just as red as the sweater. Yes, I was top heavy but I hadn’t realized he enjoyed looking at them so much. Today I was sure that I was going to surprise him by wearing it. It really was a nice gift. All of Michael’s gifts were nice. He was nice to me from the moment I met him at University of New Hampshire. He was in our brother sorority and one night he asked me to dance at a party we were holding at Phi Theta Phi. The girls were supposed to ask the boys to dance but I was too shy so I sat in the corner, sipping on a wine cooler, and watched everyone. It was a nice night. It only got nicer when Michael danced with me song after song.
Five years later, we still danced in our living room from time to time. He was such a nice lover and a perfect gentleman when we were out on the town. He treated me like gold. When he told me that he didn’t want me to work, I jumped at the chance to make his meals, clean our house, and spend time thinking about our future together. It was only going to get better and I knew it.
I pulled out of our garage in the rain and immediately plugged his work address into the navigation system. The British male voice that spoke to me calmed my nerves immediately. I always got lost in Boston so I made sure the man would tell me exactly where to go. The aroma of the food was making my mouth water. I couldn’t wait to see the expression on his face. I had only done this one time before and he was elated to say the least. He even took the rest of the afternoon off to take me shopping.
Pulling into the parking garage, I rolled down my window to get the parking ticket from the automated machine and parked on the second level, three spots from the elevator. I worked my purse and the food with caution. I made my way down to the ground level and right into the Tower of Boston building where Michael worked on the seventh floor. I received the requisite badge from the security guard and headed up.