More Than A Game

By:  Julie

 

Serena Taylor never thought of her musical career as any more than a game. But then, she never treated anything as though it were serious.

 

She started off just like the rest of the young pop stars. She was blonde, skinny, and perfect. She had a catchy song. The only difference between her and the rest was her boyband-based management.

 

They produced her, managed her, everything. The girl was fifteen when she started, just like Britney Spears. Her management wanted her to be the same.

 

But it all changed.

 

The little girl grew up, with a little help from someone on the inside, and she discovered that it was more fun to play up to the bad girl side than to the squeaky clean image that they had provided for her. She discovered the downsides of fame, the drugs, the drinks, and the sex. And she enjoyed all three.

 

She lived her rock star lifestyle in the public eye. Everyone knew, but no one could prove that Serena Taylor had ever been in the possession of illegal drugs. They couldn’t prove that she’d had abortions that were the results of one-night stands. They couldn’t prove that she’d had a baby, as the press was so inclined to believe, when she’d gained weight and disappeared from the world. They couldn’t prove the rumored brawls with Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears.

 

The only thing they could prove was the drinking. Serena wasn’t like AJ McLean; she didn’t think that the amounts that she drank were wrong. She didn’t believe that Justin Timberlake having to carry her out of a club was bad. She just thought it was normal. And for her it was.

 

“It’s going to stop,” Justin had told her, up in her hotel room, on one night when she had gotten particularly drunk. And she even had a bottle then—vodka—and was taking drinks even as he yelled at her.

 

“I’m not doing anything,” she replied, her words slurring together and not always making coherent sense, but Justin had had plenty of experience figuring out what she was saying when she was smashed.

 

“Rina, you ARE, and you don’t even realize it,” he said.

 

“No!” she shouted, drunken tears in her eyes. Inside there was still enough of her left to understand what he was saying. “I’m not doing ANYTHING to me!”

 

“Then stop drinking,” Justin said softly, sitting on the end of the bed.

 

“I can’t,” she said, her voice cracking as she spoke. “It does this to me.”

 

“What does?” Justin wanted to know. Serena waved the bottle in the air, gesturing all around them.

 

“LIFE!” She shouted. “MY LIFE DOES THIS TO ME! Everything. The people. The bitchy women around me. Fake people like Britney, and my having to live a LIE so that you can protect her because she’s a fucking lesbian and no one can know,” Justin cringed. He hadn’t known that Serena knew about that. “YOU fucking do this to me!”

 

She threw the bottle at him, and even though she wasn’t totally gone, how far she was inebriated caused the bottle to hit on the wall behind his head, above the bed, and shatter. Vodka splashed over his back and he closed his eyes. Serena turned and ran for the doors.

 

“RINA!” He shouted, getting off the bed and going after her as she stumbled down the hall to the elevators. “SERENA! WAIT!”

 

Justin slammed into Joey Fatone out in the hall, and fell backwards onto the ground. In the ensuing scramble to his feet and to get Joey out of his way so that he could continue after Serena, she had made it into the elevators. He would have to wait.

 

She wasn’t in the lobby when he made it down there, and when he asked, people could only point him in the direction of outside. He heard the tires screeching before he made it to the huge glass doors at the front of the building.

 

~+~

 

Later on, they’d say that Serena was too inebriated to know where she was running. Justin knew better than that. Everyone had expected Serena to die in an accident caused by her drinking. There had been situations before, with other people, where everything had been blamed on Serena and she’d taken the head because she had been drunk.

 

Like all the other times, Justin knew the truth.

 

Just like he knew that before Serena had been provoked to do things that she’d done, he knew that Serena’s running in front of a car had been no drunken accident. She hadn’t been so sloshed that she hadn’t known exactly where she was going.

 

Serena Taylor had meant to end the game that night.

 

And she had done exactly that.

 

Justin always knew everything that happened behind the scenes. He knew what was truth and what was fiction, what was fiction believed as truth, and what was truth that was believed as fiction—or truth that couldn’t be proven.

 

Justin knew that someone now had to go and get Serena’s son, and had to take him in.

 

He wondered whom he could get to do that. He knew that it wouldn’t be the father. He knew the father far to well to think that he would ever have time to take care of the child. That was why he hadn’t ever had anything to do with the child, or so Justin liked to believe. More likely, it was self-protection—the man didn’t want to be seen with the baby or Serena.

 

Of course, was anyone really going to want to take in a baby that looked exactly like his father?

 

Justin smiled to himself. It was time someone took responsibility for Serena’s baby boy, because she couldn’t before and she certainly couldn’t now.

 

But Justin could.

 

It was time that the blonde haired, blue eyed baby boy spent time with his father.

 

The End

 

Tell Julie what you thought of this story!