Lovely You Read online

  But I was just standing there staring. Because below the hem of Joey’s shorts was an artificial leg. I hadn’t seen that. How had I missed that?

  “Scarlett!” Nate barked at me. “Let’s go.” I had been standing there like an idiot, gawking at Joey’s missing limb, with my mouth gaping open. God, I felt stupid.

  I trailed after them through the dark bar. Nate opened the door of the truck and gestured me into the cab, and Joey climbed in after me. We had only driven for a mile or two when he put his head back on the seat and snored.

  “Scarlett,” Nate said again, but softer this time. “Is it bothering you? Sitting like this?”

  I was pressed up against Nate’s thigh—

  “I mean his leg,” he explained. “Sitting next to where his leg used to be.”

  “What? No! Why would I care about that?”

  “Some people do. You were staring.”

  “I was just surprised,” I said, extremely embarrassed. “The bar was so dark…I hadn’t seen it. What happened?”

  “IED. Improvised explosive device.” His hand left the wheel and his fingers brushed over the scars next to his eye.

  “That’s too bad.”

  “A real shame,” Nate said, his voice hard. Then he sighed. “Joey’s had a tough time getting back to his old life. It’s been a few years now and the girlfriend problems aren’t new. Sorry he brought it up tonight.”

  “I didn’t mind that he talked about it,” I said. “His girlfriend must have been a real bitch to leave him after what happened to him.” And people thought I was bad.

  He glanced over at me. “She had her reasons. It’s been…hard. I don’t blame her, but I am sorry.” We were silent for another couple of miles, passing the markers along the highway. “You sorry about your fiancé?”

  “No. It was for the best.” I stared straight ahead and focused intently on the dark road disappearing beneath the tires. Things would have been different if I had stayed with Mats.

  “That what you’re so pissed about?” he asked.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Who says I’m pissed about anything?”

  “Me,” Nate told me. “I say it. You do act like you do want to rip someone’s head off.”

  “No, I don’t!” I snarled.

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  I calmed myself down. “I’m not upset about Mats. It was hard, because it was embarrassing to have happen in front of everyone we knew, and I hated explaining it over and over again. And I did miss having someone there, like a permanent plus-one. But I don’t miss him as a person, and I didn’t have a broken heart. Neither did he. He’s already seeing someone else and I heard they’re serious.” Maybe the beer had made me expansive. I hadn’t had anything to drink since I had gotten to Hawaii and it had gone to my head. “I never had anything like Joey was talking about at the bar, that kind of love. Like my brother has with his dumb fiancée, like they probably couldn’t live without each other.” I looked at some goats sleeping under a tree as we flashed by them. “I knew it wasn’t love, for sure it wasn’t, at my engagement party. One of the guests knocked another guy out because he insulted his girlfriend.”

  “You want men to fight over you?” Nate asked.

  “It was what the guy said after he did it. He just announced to everyone at the party that this was the woman that he loved, the woman he was going to marry, the mother of his children. It was like it was so obvious to him that they were meant for each other. It wasn’t that obvious to me, and I knew it wasn’t to Mats. So one morning, we were going to the gym and I said, ‘We shouldn’t get married,’ and he was so relieved. He said, sure, and went to work out without me. That was it.”

  “He felt it deeply.” Nate snorted.

  “Mats was too immature to do it himself,” I explained, “and he had been waiting for me to make the decision for him. He probably would have gone ahead and married me if I hadn’t said something, and then regretted it for the rest of his life.”

  “Chicken-shit?”

  “Definitely. No balls.” I looked at him. “What about you?”

  “Me? No, I have two. Big ones.”

  “Oh, my God.” I started to laugh, and it felt so good, like little trickles of light through my chest. “I meant, did you ever have someone serious?”

  At first he didn’t answer. “I did. I thought I did. I was married before I deployed on my first tour, but it didn’t work out. For the best, in the long run.”

  “Did you feel like Joey? Like you weren’t going to make it without her?” My voice sounded a little breathy, a little high.

  Nate looked over past me, at his unconscious friend. “He’s taking this pretty hard. He has some other issues…I don’t know. Yeah, I was upset. Drinking in a bar, telling some strange woman all my troubles, no. I didn’t do that. I was surprised you listened to all his bullshit.”

  “I thought he needed to say it,” I explained.

  “He did.”

  “Well, I have ears. I can listen.”

  Nate glanced over at me, and nodded slowly. Thoughtfully.

  We dropped Joey off at the house where he was staying with his younger brother, and Nate and the brother helped to carry him inside. Now I could scoot back across the blanket and sit in the passenger seat, but I didn’t want to. We didn’t say much as we drove past the security guard and stopped at my grandmother’s house. I expected him to stay in the car, but Nate got out when I did, and walked me to the door. My heart started to beat hard when I turned to say goodbye.

  “Call me if there are any other problems here,” he said, looking up at the house. “Call me during business hours,” he amended, “and keep it clean.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. The moon overhead was so beautiful. It made his eyes sparkle like an old onyx necklace my mom had that I had loved as a kid. My heart was beating harder. “Thanks for taking me out.”

  “That word is just rolling off your tongue now. You’re welcome.” When he smiled at me, the half-smile that illuminated his face like Christmas lights, I went up on my tiptoes and kissed him.

  It only took me a moment before I realized that he wasn’t kissing me back. He put his hands on my shoulders and gently put me down on my flat feet, away from his lips. He looked at me for a moment, and I could tell by the look on his face, it was a no. I was a no.

  “Scarlett,” he started to tell me, his voice apologetic, but I found the key in my purse and shut the door before he could say anything else.

  The next day I flew back to San Francisco.

  Chapter 3

  Boom, boom, boom. The beat shook through me.

  “I love this. Don’t you love this?” Klere asked me.

  That was what I thought she had said, anyway, but it was too hard to hear in this place and at any rate, I was too tired to care. She flipped her hair and bounced in her chair, then drained her cocktail and jumped up, swaying to the music, shaking her skinny ass.

  I turned the yawn that I hadn’t been able to stop into a wide smile. “I love it!” I yelled back at her.

  I hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it. Part of my job was entertaining people like her, the editors, the columnists, the fashion buyers, the stupid “influencers” who could make a difference for our brand. This woman could get us a lot of notice, if she wanted to. Klere was a blogger/model/fashionista/idiot with close to a million followers who hung on her every word and drooled over the meticulously crafted pictures she posted of herself in numerous gorgeous places around the globe. Of course, all these trips were paid for by companies just like mine, brands that were willing to pay for her seal of approval on her social media.

  I hoped I would lock down that seal of approval tonight. Otherwise I had just wasted weeks of my time, cajoling her, buttering her up, luring her to San Francisco with promises of gifts and parties and fun. I would have wasted a lot of company money, too, on those expensive gifts, on her first-class ticket, and her hotel room. There was also the thousand-dollar dinner we’d shar
ed with the San Francisco friends whom she hadn’t mentioned but who had materialized out of the woodwork and needed to go to the most expensive, hard to reserve restaurant in the city, and drink like fish throughout the meal. I needed Klere to come through for me with posts and mentions. My boss, Pascale, was still looking for a reason to let me go after the Hawaii debacle, and fucking this up with Klere would be a good one.

  Klere was still talking to me animatedly, but anyone would have known that even a bat couldn’t have picked up on conversation in the club we were in. I raised my eyebrows and nodded and smiled hugely again. “I love it. The best!” I told her inanely.

  She nodded back at me like she had read my lips and said something else before dancing off. I leaned my head against the banquette and covered another yawn with my hand. I had been up at five to work out, then in the office at seven. It was close to midnight now, and I was over it. In fact, I had been over it for a few hours, but this was my job, the one that I had been lucky enough to get back after my “sabbatical” in Hawaii.

  More like, this was the job that I got back because Pascale, my boss, was afraid of my mom’s friend, Juliette March. Juliette pretty much ran the beauty industry and the arts scene in our city, and she wasn’t afraid to 1) pull strings, and 2) squash people like bugs if they crossed her. Exhibit A was her former husband, who went from driving a million-dollar sportscar and living the high life in a mansion, to friendless and working in a discount shoe store in some little town in the Central Valley after she had run him out of San Francisco. Luckily for me, Juliette had pulled strings to get me back in at the fashion house where I worked, and probably made a few squashing threats, too. Yeah, luckily.

  “I’m surprised at you, Scarlett,” Juliette had scolded me, when I took her out to lunch to ask for her help, a few days after I had returned from the Big Island. “Running off to Hawaii to live out some escapist fantasy? You never seemed like the type to do something flighty and stupid. And now you want me to help you get your old job back, when you left them in the lurch for all those weeks, ignoring them reaching out to you.”

  Yep, all those messages on my phone that I resolutely hadn’t looked at. “I realize now that I was just being headstrong,” I had answered, lying, and gripping my hands together in my lap where she couldn’t see my nerves. “I needed a vacation and Pascale said no. I left anyway. It was a terrible mistake, I see that, of course. I hope that you’ll be able to talk to Pascale for me and remind her of all the good I did for the company.” Because Pascale wasn’t responding to me, and I was apparently persona non grata with all my former contacts in the business. If I wanted to work in fashion again in San Francisco, I had to pull out the big guns: Juliette March.

  “Stupid,” she had repeated, and I nodded as if I agreed that I’d made a terrible mistake in leaving. Really, if I hadn’t left then, run away to Hawaii, I probably would have lost my mind.

  “Juliette, can you help me get my job back?” I asked, and smiled at her.

  She had considered for a while, frowning at her phone and answering messages. She hadn’t even glanced up at the waiter when he came over, just held up her hand so he wouldn’t speak. “No, don’t ask me anything,” she told him. “My assistant already called in my order and it should be on the table within the next few minutes.” I wondered what it would be. Juliette never chose anything off the menu, and she always was onto some new food fad that would then sweep the nation. She had started us all on kale a few years back and probably what I would see in front of her today was what we’d all be eating in a few months.

  I had pointed at the list of salads. “Any of these, I don’t care which, dressing on the side,” I informed the fidgeting waiter, and he took off.

  Finally, she put her phone down. “Your skin looks great,” she remarked.

  “I’ve been using your Valencia peanut oil serum every night,” I lied, again.

  Juliette had considered me and I waited for her verdict. “I’ll give Pascale a call and see what I can do. I love your earrings,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I had told her. Thank you. Every time I said those words, I thought of…

  It didn’t matter, because the trip to Hawaii was over, and I barely remembered anything beyond the horrible sunburn that had made me swear never to go back. I would never go back.

  So thanks to Juliette March, I had returned to my old job in PR, and now, almost five months later, here I was back to the long hours, back to kissing ass, back to taking out ridiculous social media stars who didn’t know a fucking thing about fashion but I had to pretend to respect anyway. This particular influencer had tried on almost all our sample clothes in the showroom and stained some with her red lipstick that was a really, really bad shade on her. She’d had me crawling around to take pictures of her for hours.

  At least maybe Klere would use some of those pictures, the shots of her wearing our clothes, and then this whole farce would be worth it. When the photo shoot was finally over, just after practically every restaurant in the city closed for lunch but hours before dinner, I’d had to go out and get her a specific proso millet salad that she’d read about in someone else’s post about San Francisco and needed to have too. I had tried a bite in the car on my way back from the restaurant, which they had opened up for me after a substantial bribe, and a more disgusting item had never touched my lips.

  No, there had been one thing more disgusting: a certain man’s mouth had touched mine, a few months ago. That incident showed how low I had gotten—it was hard for me to believe that I had even let myself ride in his disgusting truck, on some bacteria-laden blanket, let alone that I had kissed him. Thinking about it now in this boring, loud club, I heated up with embarrassment and anger. But I barely remembered anything about my trip to Hawaii, anyway.

  I watched Klere for a while, writhing around on the dance floor, and I saw her head toward the door with a group of guys. Then she walked out right of the club with them, leaving her purse with me on the banquette. Mother fucker! I leapt up to follow her, my heart in my throat, and pushed through the crowd to get to the door too.

  “Klere!” I yelled. I saw her head with the terrible highlights getting into a car with the same group of guys. I ran, knocking into someone hard as I passed. “No!” I grabbed her shoulder.

  “What the hell?” she demanded, and pulled free. “What are you doing?”

  I grabbed the car door instead, blocking her path with my arm. “You can’t—”

  “Oh, you brought my purse! Good.” She took the $5,000 handbag she had probably gotten for free from some other poor sap of a PR person and started to get in again.

  “No, you can’t do this! Do you know them? Where are you going?” I panted. I was practically choking on the words.

  Klere just stared at me. “Are you my mother?” The guys on the curb crowded around, trying to get past me into the car. “They have some really good shit back at their apartment.”

  “You’re going there alone?” There were three of them, all big, all drunk.

  “I came here to party, right? Let’s go!” she called to the guys, and ducked under my arm to get into the car. They shoved me out of the way and followed her.

  “No, wait,” I said, but the door closed, and they pulled out. Didn’t she know what she was getting herself into? I took a few steps after the car as it took off down the block but then stopped myself. She was an adult. She could do what she wanted—and I didn’t even know her. My sole concern should have been how she could help me, not the other way around. How she could help the brand that I was paid very well to promote and help me keep my job by playing up her great time in San Francisco while wearing our clothes. That was all I should care about, and I shouldn’t waste any more time standing on some dirty sidewalk south of Market Street, staring after her car and worrying about where her bad choices would lead her. I got in a car and went home.

  I had rented out my house north of the city to my brother and his then-roommate, now-fiancée, when I had mo
ved in with my former intended, Mats, in his house in the Marina neighborhood. In my scramble to get out and get out immediately after our break-up, I had signed a lease on a sterile, newly-built two-bedroom near downtown. I’d decorated my old house in San Anselmo just how I’d wanted it; in the short time I’d lived there, I had made a lot of improvements to Mats’ house, too. But I just didn’t seem to have the will and inclination to do anything to my latest place. It was white, and bland, and blah.

  My most important, latest acquisition was an absolutely giant TV which I’d had installed right across from my other significant purchase, the most comfortable couch in the world. I had field tested about a thousand sofas then paid astronomical rush fees to get this one moved into my apartment the day I bought it. That was where I spent most of my time: curled on the wide cushions, under a soft throw blanket, watching all the sports channels on that comforting screen. I knew about cricket in India, Australian rules football, ultimate frisbee, sepak takraw, even wife-carrying competitions. It was truly amazing what you could see if you rarely slept and watched TV non-stop during the night. Besides those two essential furniture items, I had bought a mattress and box spring when I’d moved in, but I hadn’t touched the bed in months. The master bedroom had morphed into another closet with clothes and accessories everywhere, and that was fine with me.

  I kicked off my shoes now, dropped my bag, and stripped off my dress within five feet of the front door. I threw the dress into the pile that I was amassing to take to the dry cleaner when I had the time. It had grown to about the size of Mount Whitney and I didn’t know how I would be able to lift it to bring it in. Left only in my bra and underwear, I gratefully curled on the cushions and pulled the throw over myself, reaching for my best friend, the remote. I kept my phone balanced on the arm of the couch because I never went for more than a few minutes now without checking it. I was on-call practically all day, just as I had been before, but after Hawaii I felt like my situation at work was precarious enough that I couldn’t afford to miss anything, not one thing. Co-workers were amazed when I answered their emails at all hours, including the ones that started with lines like, “I just woke up and thought of this, don’t bother to get back to me until the morning.” I was usually up too, and I answered.