Lovely You Read online

  “I thought you had just taken your pills and wanted to hook up.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, I may as well just fuck Jerry if you don’t want to. He’s sitting at home humming and jerking off, waiting for me, and it’s probably easier just to be with him and not to have to deal with someone else. Like, I’m used to Jer.”

  “Yeah. It sounds really romantic.”

  Klere stared at me, then she started to laugh. “I don’t want romance. I can get that from the guy in Quebec. That’s in Canada, to our west,” she explained, then looked at me as I shook my head. “North,” she said firmly. “Let’s go.” I followed her slowly down the alley and away from the club, through the tangle of dirty streets and back to my car. Of course, Klere knew about an after-hours bar, too, and I drove us there very slowly, still feeling like I wasn’t really better yet, still thinking about the fingers on my hips, digging in and holding me. I didn’t know if that was what had done it, but I kept feeling like I was going to be sick again.

  I pulled it together to get things done. We sat at a little table and plotted out the posts she would put up, the composition of the pictures and the text below. We drew up a calendar of when she would use each one and put reminders in her phone. I drank club soda so I would stop feeling so nauseated and she had most of a large bottle of scotch as we talked.

  I dropped her off at her black house around three, to go and have sex with her dirty, whinging boyfriend. “Maybe next time you come, we can go to the beach and greet the day,” she said as she got out. “But I probably won’t ever see you again, so as we say in Quebec, au revoir.”

  “Sure. See you later.” I drove back to the hotel and took a long shower, washing away the sweat, the puke, and the drug residue I had probably picked up from Klere. I stood with the water pouring down my body, still remembering the feeling of the bodies packed around me, the hands on me, feeling and groping and touching. I got out of the shower as fast as I could and threw up again.

  Shit. I sat on the tile floor, dripping puddles around me, fighting down the nausea. This was more than just being upset about the club. I tried to think of what I could have eaten to get so sick, but whenever I thought of food, my stomach went wild again. I stood to rinse out my mouth at the sink and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

  Dark circles and bags under my bloodshot eyes. Pale skin, maybe even a little green undertone. Colorless lips, hollow cheeks. There it was. The truth was starting to surface. I looked hard into my own eyes and then watched my chest heave up and down as I breathed faster and faster.

  Ten minutes later, my hair still wet, my clothes shoved into my bag, I was on the road in the rental car going towards the I-5, and headed back home.

  ∞

  I leaned against the wall next to my apartment door as I looked for my keys, since I didn’t have the energy to hold myself upright anymore. I’d had to park the rental car about five miles from my building and walk, dragging my bag. I’d stopped to puke along the way—in fact, I’d stopped to puke several times in my race through the night up through the Central Valley from Los Angeles to San Francisco. I was exhausted and feeling like I might not make the next few feet to the couch to lie down and then never, ever get up again.

  But Klere was up, because I’d been reading her first post as I drove, and it was perfect. She wore our clothes and posed with a sketchbook in her leather sling chair with succulents behind her, pencil in her mouth and pensive, like she was planning what to design for us next rather than staring at what I now knew was really in front of her in the med room: the giant drug cabinet. But she looked gorgeous, and clean, and the text and hashtags were all exactly right. The post was racking up comments and attention.

  Pascale had seen it too and had been trying to get in touch with me, sending happy face emojis and leaving voice mails that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to listen to. On Monday mornings, she was with her trainer. She had a thing for him, and calls while she was working out while he was there were filled with interruptions of soft giggles and compliments about his strong muscles that I just couldn’t take this morning. I sent her a text as I drove over the Altamont Pass (and stopped to vomit) saying that I wasn’t feeling well but that Klere was on track and I would be in on Tuesday. Just after this fun interlude, Daria got in touch also, saying that she hoped I wasn’t as sick as she and Ivo were, and she was assuming that it had been something in the take-out vegetables from our dinner together because Iris hadn’t touched them, and she was feeling absolutely fine. I was glad that at least Iris had avoided this spew-filled torture. I could only think of one time when I had felt physically worse.

  Standing in my hallway now, it was like all the energy that had gotten me to this point had deserted me. I almost slid down to the carpeted floor; I couldn’t find the keys; I could barely bring myself to knock. Listlessly, I brought my fist up and hit at the painted metal and a moment later, Joey opened the door.

  “Scarlett? What are you doing here? I thought you were in Los Angeles!” He stared at me.

  “I’m back,” I told him, and I stumbled inside, dragging my bag across the floor.

  “Did you get an early flight?”

  “I drove,” I answered, just as shortly. “I wanted to come home. Hi, Pia.” She wagged.

  “Are you all right?” He tried to help me with the bag but I kept on going, straight into the living room.

  “I don’t feel well.” I lay down on the couch and looked for my blanket.

  “Here,” Joey said. “Did you want this?” He took it from the new chair and spread it over me. “Can I get anything for you?”

  “No. Thank you. Is Nate here?”

  “He went out for a run but he’ll be home soon.”

  I must have fallen asleep some. At least, I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the nausea for a while. I opened them when I felt someone taking off my shoes. “Brooks?”

  “It’s Nate. What are you doing back here, sick as a dog?”

  “I drove,” I explained. “I got sick from the vegetables.” My stomach turned over just talking about them. Never, never would I eat vegetables again. Never.

  “You got sick from what?”

  Rather than try to explain, I searched in my pocket for my phone and opened it up to Daria’s messages. I closed my eyes again as he read through.

  “Food poisoning,” he summed it up. “You don’t look so great.”

  I pulled the blanket over my ugly face. “Leave me alone.”

  He didn’t. He got me crackers, and chalky medicine to drink, and water. Pia lay across my legs for a while and I slept pretty fitfully. I had listened vaguely to the sounds of Nate and Joey coming and going, talking quietly, the door opening and closing.

  But when I opened my eyes in the late afternoon, I definitely felt an improvement. I tested it by sitting up slowly. Ok, I was still fine. I stood and wobbled. Maybe I would stay on the couch.

  “Better?” Nate asked from across the room. He was sitting at the table with his laptop open on it. I had the fleeting thought that he looked so cute while he was working, then immediately remembered how I didn’t look cute myself, not at all. I put the blanket back over my head.

  “I’m fine,” I said, the fabric muffling my words. I listened to his very quiet steps approaching and then he pulled it away and looked into my face.

  “Your lips are cracked,” he said. I covered them with my hand. “You need to drink. Can you keep it down?”

  Could anything be less romantic than discussing your vomit? “I’m fine,” I repeated.

  He got me a big glass of water anyway, and sat on the coffee table across from me. “I can’t believe you drove all night, by yourself. That was a dumb move,” he said.

  “I made it, didn’t I?”

  “You have to take better care of yourself,” he said. He put his hand on my leg and squeezed gently. “I almost had a heart attack when I came in and Joey said you had driven up here, sick like this. No one even knew where you were. What happ
ened last night?”

  I told him about going to Klere’s, about the crowd of dancers, about getting sick. “But I got Klere to sign the contract. She’s already posting for us. So I did it.”

  Nate did not look happy or appeased. “You did it, sure. But look how you ended up.”

  “Have you ever heard of kicking someone when she’s down?” And I was still pretty down. I looked at the shirt I was wearing, noticing some disgusting stains. My hair was full of knots and tangles. And I was sure my face was…it was probably as bad as it had been the night before in the mirror.

  “I’m not trying to kick you when you’re down. I’m trying to get you to think before you act. Driving alone through the night with no sleep, while you’re sick?”

  Well, when he put it that way. “Yeah, ok, next time I get food poisoning, I won’t drive six hours on my own.” Nate stared at me, hard. “I need to go change,” I said, pulling away from his hand and standing up without swaying like I had earlier. “I can’t take myself.” I looked into the master bedroom as I passed it. “Where are Joey and Pia?” I called back to him.

  “They went to the doctor.”

  “You didn’t want to go?” I asked.

  “I wanted to stay with you.”

  All right then.

  The second shower did make me feel better, but I refused to look at myself in the mirror when I got out. I didn’t want to see the same scary apparition that had stared back at me in Los Angeles; I didn’t want to know if the truth of me was coming out on my face. But I was sure that I needed to do some major repairs before Nate saw me again, which meant that I was going to have to look, and also that I needed the bag I had dragged into the living room when I had arrived after my terrible drive. “Nate?” I called, cracking open the bedroom door. “Can you bring my bag here?” He didn’t answer and I put on underwear and a t-shirt over my wet body and went out to find it for myself. He was back at the table, looking at the laptop, and now also talking on the phone.

  “No, you have to be on top of that. I don't want to hear it,” he was saying. I tried to take the bag and quietly pull it toward the bedroom with me, but of course he heard. His eyebrow went up when he saw me and his mouth dropped open as his gaze moved up and down my body. “Uh…” he said into the phone, and the doorbell rang.

  I dropped the straps and went to peek through the eyehole. And there was my brother, Brooks, looming and angry, right outside.

  Chapter 12

  I opened the door, my blood boiling up, ready for battle. “What?” I greeted my brother.

  He glared at me. “What in the hell are you doing at home? You don’t work anymore?”

  My neighbor across the hall chose this moment to come out with a bag of recycling. She looked at Brooks’ ass appreciatively and then sneered at me. We’d had an issue about me giving out the door code a little too easily for her liking and she held a grudge.

  I flipped her off. “Come inside,” I told Brooks, and yanked on his sleeve. I slammed the door behind him, right in my nosy neighbor’s face. He followed me as I stalked into the living room and Nate said into his phone that he would have to call back later and stood up from the table.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked my brother, wheeling on him so fast that I made myself feel sick. “How dare you come here after ambushing me over the weekend?”

  “Ambushing? Talking to my sister at a nice restaurant is an ambush?”

  “Tricking me into going to lunch with you and your spineless fiancée, yes, that’s an ambush. Telling me that you weren’t going to grace me with your presence anymore, that I was going to be shunned and excluded from our family, yes, that’s an ambush.”

  “Don’t call Lanie names! And when did I say that you’re excluded from our family?” Brooks seethed, his voice rising to a yell. “If anyone—”

  “Hey.” Nate’s voice cut through our noise. “This is her house.” He didn’t yell back, but he made himself heard, and both Brooks and I shut up momentarily. Nate turned to me. “Calm down and hear what he has to say. And he’ll say it calmly too,” he continued, and shot my brother a look.

  Brooks looked like he wanted to murder us both. He opened his mouth and closed it, breathed hard, then spoke again, his voice back under careful control. “Scarlett, why haven’t you been answering me?”

  My chin went up. “I don’t have anything to say to you. I blocked you.”

  “What are you doing home right now?”

  “Not that it’s your business, at all, but I had food poisoning.” As I said it, I thought about the last time I had told him I’d had “food poisoning.”

  Clearly, Brooks remembered too. “Oh, really?” he asked, his words smothered in derision. “Again? Sure, I’m sure you do. I remember before when you suffered from a case of ‘food poisoning,’ when you were in the hospital last fall and no one would tell me what the hell was going on. That was just before you had a breakdown over Christmas dinner, then had to go on the unexpected vacation to Hawaii. Is that what’s happening here, again? Are you planning on taking off and running away, going to rehab, going on a bender, doing whatever the hell you were doing without letting anyone know what was wrong with you?” He swallowed hard.

  “Of course not!” I answered, irate. “I’m sick, you asshole! I threw up about a thousand times. Do you want me to do it again now, on you, to prove it? I’d be happy to!”

  “If you’re expecting to pick right back up with your life like the last time you checked out, it won’t work. Juliette won’t be able to get your job back for you. You’ve burned the last bridge with her.” He looked me up and down. “Are you really here drinking with this guy, holing up in your apartment to have a private wet t-shirt contest?”

  Nate was hearing all of this, all of this crap about me. I looked down and saw the t-shirt I had thrown on after my shower plastered to my chest. I folded my arms over my breasts and felt my face turn bright red. “Screw you, you fuckwit!” I burst out. “I—”

  “That’s it,” Nate cut in again, his voice like steel. “Scarlett, enough with the name-calling.” He turned to my brother. “She’s sick and she’s missing work today. That’s about all you need to know. No matter how worried you are about her, you can’t come over here and act like this, bullying her.”

  Brooks opened his mouth but Nate just shook his head. “Nope. This is done. The two of you act like you’re about ten years old. She’ll talk to you when she’s ready, not before. You can show yourself out.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I had never, ever heard anyone stand up to Brooks like that. Because 1) he was so big, most people just bowed down to his superior size and 2) usually he was on the right side of things, so it was like arguing with the Pope or Jesus or something.

  Brooks kept staring at Nate, and I had never seen my brother physically attack someone, but I had a terrible feeling I might pretty soon. “You have a lot of fucking nerve,” he told Nate. “Staying here and living off her. And what the hell were you doing on my mother’s porch with her? I walked in on you unzipping her dress.”

  Nate just looked right back at him, not intimidated at all. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’m not doing anything to hurt Scarlett.”

  “I’m supposed to trust you with my little sister?” Brooks said furiously.

  “Yes.” Nate nodded. “You’re going to have to. Time to go. Come back when you can act like a man instead of an angry little boy.”

  Which was exactly what my brother had said to me, that I needed to grow up. I had to admit, it felt pretty good hearing it used against him, instead.

  Brooks looked at me, then back to Nate, and threw up his hands. “Fine. I called you repeatedly this weekend, I went to your office this morning and the receptionist said you were sick. I’m not trying to fight with you but every time we’re together now, that’s all we do. You make it impossible for me, and maybe we had it right at that lunch. Lanie and I will move to Texas and until then, we should just stay apart.” He didn’t look
angry anymore; he just looked defeated. “Maybe I’ll see you sometime.”

  I nodded and stood looking after him until the apartment door shut behind him, then I sat down suddenly on the couch and put my face in my hands. What in the hell was I doing?

  “Your brother loves you a lot,” Nate commented. He sat on the coffee table again, so our knees touched.

  I peeked through my fingers. “He just said that he’s moving away. He doesn’t want to see me anymore, ever. I don’t think he cares about me at all.”

  “Baby, it’s pretty clear, isn’t it?” Nate’s hand rubbed up and down my thigh. “He came running over here because he’s worried about you. Don’t you think he has other things to do on a Monday morning than bang on your door and tangle with me? And you called him a fuckwit.”

  “He is!” I protested. Nate frowned at me. “Mostly, he is,” I modified.

  “Why, because he wants to marry the woman he loves, and not have his sister fight with her all the time?”

  “Because he chose her over me! You weren’t there. You don’t know what happened before.” The last part ended on a mumble.

  “So tell me. Tell me, Scarlett.”

  I had already said enough. “I’m going to go for a run,” I told him, and started to get up.

  “No, you’re not.” His hand pressed down on my knee. “Do you hear yourself? You’re literally trying to run away. You spent the last twenty hours throwing up your guts and not eating, barely sleeping. Stay here with me.”

  I looked at him for a moment and then I just held out my arms. He got that grin, the half-way, sideways one, and sat next to me on the couch, nestling me into the circle of his body.

  “Did you figure that you could distract me?” he asked, and laughed softly into my wet hair.

  I closed my eyes and leaned against his chest. “I’m not trying to distract you. I just wanted you to do this.”