Heartless Few Box Set

by MV Ellis

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, unfortunately. She’s broken things off. I think she sees the video as evidence that Arlo’s been cheating. He had asked her to move in with him, and she’d said yes, but then this happened and now she’s refusing to have anything to do with him—won’t even talk to him on the phone. I guess after walking in on the two of you together the way she did, she’s hypersensitive when it comes to anything to do with you. To say he’s taking it badly is an understatement.”

  “Shit. Is he okay?”

  Not that I needed proof, but the look of genuine concern on her face told me that there was no way she intentionally leaked that video.

  “I don’t think so. I’m sure he will be, but right now, not so much. I mean, it got to the point where he was so fucked up, I actually called Mom, and the guys and me staged a kind of intervention. I genuinely didn’t know what else to do. I’ve seen him hit it hard before—for weeks on end, even—we both have, but this feels different. He’s more destructive and more despondent than he’s ever been. The only silver lining to this whole situation seems to be that he’s throwing himself into writing what I can already tell is going to be our best album yet. But that’s no consolation if he loses his fucking mind along the way, though, you know?”

  She nodded slowly, clearly mulling over everything I was saying. I watched her reaction carefully as I delivered my next bombshell.

  “I think he’s genuinely in love with London, and for the first time, he’s hurt in a way that only love brings about. It’s like he’s going through shit that the rest of us experience in our teenage years, and it ain’t pretty. It’s at a point where if he doesn’t come good soon, I actually don’t know what I’ll do.” Marnie looked pained, her expression tinged with regret.

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  “God, I feel like utter shit about this whole thing. I mean, I know I didn’t send that video to anyone or do anything with it, except take it when I shouldn’t have, and keep it on my phone when I should have deleted it. Still, it doesn’t take a genius to see that if I hadn’t shot it in the first place, none of this would be happening. What’s worse is that when he told me we couldn’t screw anymore, he told me it was because he was falling for London, and when I looked at him, I could see it radiating from every pore. It was like he had literally turned into a different man overnight. I should have just walked away there and then. This whole situation is just one bad judgment on top of the other on my part.” She looked increasingly distressed.

  “I know Arlo can be a next-level dick sometimes, but it doesn’t stop me loving him like family and wanting the best for him. Both of you, in fact. I hope you know that and realize that, despite how the timing makes it look, this wasn’t some kind of crazed revenge porn attack, or whatever.”

  “I know I literally just said otherwise, but I honestly didn’t think that for a minute, Marns. I know you’d never do anything to intentionally hurt either one of us, and I think deep down, Arlo does too. This is Arlo we’re talking about here. I think maybe he just needs to lick his wounds, sort his shit out, and work out how to fix the situation with London. In the meantime, he’s focusing on you as the cause of all his problems, but I know he’ll snap out of it.”

  “Still, it’s a fucking mess. And I caused it. Fucking typical.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t brush me off. Why did you say that?”

  “It just seems to be the story of my life—lurching from calamity to crisis to catastrophe. I have the reverse Midas touch. Instead of gold, everything I touch turns to crap.”

  “That isn’t even remotely true. Name one thing that has gone bad, apart from this.”

  “My career.”

  “Your contract ran its course. You didn’t ruin anything. All good things come to an end, and clearly your time with WMM is one of those things. But you didn’t do anything. You worked solidly for years and did an amazing job.”

  “That’s true, except for now that the video’s out there, nobody will want to touch me with a shit-smeared stick. I mean, it was bad enough after the agency dropped me. Nobody has called with work since. If I was old news then, I’ll be untouchable now. One saving grace is that I’m locked into the Studio Cinq contract for another eighteen months, which means there will be a few more campaigns to come once the dust settles on this whole thing. That will at least keep my portfolio up-to-date until I get more work. Not to mention that the guaranteed cash will save me from burning through all my savings just to live. Down the track, I guess I’ll have to look at managing myself, which is the last thing I want. I have no choice right now though, so I’m going to have to put on my big girl panties and get the hell on with it. It is what it is. And what it is, is a hot fucking mess.”

  “I’m sorry, that sucks. However, it’s still one thing, not everything.”

  “My parents.”

  “What? How the fuck could you in any way be held responsible for what happened to your mom and dad?”

  “I couldn’t stop it. I should have been able to stop it.”

  “You were a kid, for Christ’s sake. There’s nothing you could have done.”

  “You don’t know anything about them. Or me. I should have been enough to stop it.”

  “Marnie, think about what you’re saying. You were thirteen fucking years old. What the hell could you have done?”

  “You don’t know the full story. I should have been enough to make them stay. It wasn’t a car accident that killed them like I told everyone. It was a double suicide.”

  “I know.” She looked beyond shocked.

  “What do you mean, you know? How can you? Nobody does.”

  “I mean, when you arrived at school, I was pretty much obsessed with you. I wanted to know everything about you—not that I wanted you to know that. So I asked around, did some digging, and eventually found an article on a Michigan local news site. It didn’t mention you directly, I guess because of child privacy rules and whatnot, but it mentioned your parents by name and the fact that they were survived by a daughter.”

  “So you’ve known since day one?”

  “More or less.” Shock turned to anger.

  “Then why the fuck didn’t you say something? All those times you listened to me roll out the story about the car crash to everybody I ever met like a psychopathological liar, and you never thought that maybe you should let me know that you knew? What the hell is with that?”

  “I figured that if you’d wanted me to know, you would have told me. I mean, I had no idea what they were, but I guessed you had your reasons for wanting to keep that fact a secret. It wasn’t my place to go messing with that. Besides, I was that stupid shy kid. I had no fucking idea how to broach the subject to you, or any of the things that were on my mind for that matter, so I thought it was just easier to keep quiet and do my best to be a good friend, so that’s what I did.”

  She slumped against the couch, looking utterly crushed.

  “I should have been enough of a reason for them to stay. To try. But I wasn’t.”

  I reached out and pulled her into my arms. Hugging her to my chest.

  “Marnie. You were a kid, their kid. They should have wanted to love and protect you above anything else. They should have been there for you no matter what. The fact that they didn’t and weren’t is about them, not you. It’s not your fault. Surely you can see that?”

  “They loved each other so much, in a way that was so toxic, that I’m not sure that they ever really loved me. I always felt like I was an unfortunate outcome of their love who they tolerated rather than welcomed. Their world was all about them. I was never a priority, never a consideration. Mia said she’d always worried about me, even voiced her concerns to CPS on a number of occasions, but there was never quite enough negligence for them to intervene. Almost, but not quite. Despite the drug-taking and other reckless behavior, they were still apparently within the margins of ‘acceptable treatment.’
It’s so fucking messed up. I mean how bad a parent do you have to be to lose your kid?”

  I shook my head in disbelief at how the system could fail a child the way it had Marnie.

  “I guess you could say that their negligence was of the benign variety. They didn’t actively or intentionally do me any harm, but on the other hand, they sure as shit didn’t go out of their way to do me much good, either. Especially as I got older. By the time I was eleven, I was solely responsible for myself. How is that considered okay?”

  What she was saying made me so angry, it was all I could do not to fly into a Hulk-like rage. What kind of asshole fuckers treated a child the way she was describing? If they weren’t already dead, I’d want to fucking kill them.

  “So as an adult, you can see that they were 1000 percent in the wrong, yeah? They let you down. Badly. You’re not to blame, or in any way responsible. Sounds like they did whatever suited them, regardless of the fact that they had a child. Look, I have no idea of their history, but I’m guessing that there were mental health issues. Nobody in their right mind does what they did, surely?”

  “It was drugs more than anything, but for my mom especially, there were definitely ongoing underlying mental health problems also. I think she self-medicated with drugs, and over the years it got out of hand. From what I could tell, my father was so under her spell, he would have walked into a burning building if she’d gone in before him. Did I ever tell you that he changed his name to match hers? They were never married. Harloe is her family name. When I was born, they gave me her name, and he changed his named by deed poll to match. He was estranged from his own family because of his association with my mom, so he didn’t want to honor them by giving me their name. If they’d done things the standard way, I’d be Marnie Nguyen. To this day, I’ve never had any contact with his side of the family.”

  “Wow. That’s wild. No, I knew nothing about any of it. The only information I had was what was in the article, and that was very brief.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not something I wanted to share with anybody and open myself up to even more ridicule.”

  “I wouldn’t have told anyone or ridiculed you.” I smoothed her thick, sleek hair over and over, loving the feel of it under my hand.

  “I know that now, but at that age, I was too busy trying to be ‘normal’ and keep a low profile to see it.”

  “That’s a lot of heavy shit for one kid to carry.”

  “Ya think? It was like a boulder on my back.” She laughed a little then, I guessed trying to lighten the vibe.

  “I feel so bad that I knew and never tried to help.”

  “Don’t. What you did was enough. You showed an interest, took me under your wing, included me in shit. You and the rest of the guys made me feel like just another kid, which is all I ever wanted. You’ll never know how much that meant to me. To be able to go to school for six hours a day and almost forget the train wreck that was the rest of my life was priceless.”

  “I can’t even begin to imagine. Our dad dying hit both Arlo and me hard—especially Arlo—but we at least had the support of everyone in our lives to help us through. If we hadn’t had that, I doubt we’d be where we are today.”

  Twenty-Nine

  Marnie

  I woke up the next day feeling so much better than I had in weeks. Months even. Although materially, nothing had changed—my life was still a shitshow of epic proportions—somehow my perspective had shifted. Spilling my guts to Luke the night before, telling him about my parents and the shit I’d been carrying for so long, and not have him run in the opposite direction had lifted a huge weight from my shoulders. I felt lighter and more optimistic. Though I’d been wallowing for months since Wildefire decided not to renew my contract, I still had decent savings, I had the Manhattan apartment and Mia’s house. Even better, I still had the Studio Cinq contract. I still had options.

  The night before, Luke and I had finally collapsed into bed hours after our heavy conversation and more soul-searching. We’d been physically and emotionally spent to the point where we’d stayed partially clothed, and although I was wrapped tightly in Luke’s arms when we fell asleep and had woken up the same way, there had been nothing sexual about our need to comfort each other physically. The sun streaming through the open shutters had roused me prematurely, unlike Luke who was sound asleep and snoring faintly next to me. I had tried to lie still in the hope that sleep would find me again, but it hadn’t worked, so I decided to get up and get a jump on the day.

  I slipped out of Luke’s embrace and turned to look at him, almost losing my breath. He was outrageously good looking. Of course I knew that, but sometimes it was as though I’d forgotten and was only reminded again by actually looking at him. Today was a rare opportunity to see him in repose. He looked so relaxed and happy in comparison to his normally serious demeanor. A slight smile played on the corners of his shapely lips. I wondered what he was dreaming about that made him smile that way. I was mesmerized by his eyelashes as they fluttered on his cheekbones with every inhale and exhale. The urge to kiss him was so strong I had to leave the room before I made a total fool of myself.

  I grabbed some clothes from the closet and threw them on at double speed—one advantage of being a has-been model was that I could get dressed faster than the speed of light. I was going nowhere and was trying to impress nobody, so I flung on the first things that came to hand—short-shorts and a crumpled, oversized shirt. Panties, no bra.

  I headed downstairs, flicking on the coffee machine as I passed through the kitchen to the back door. I slid the bolt across and headed out to the backyard. It was a jungle out there. I’d neglected it, and the whole house in fact, since Mia died five years earlier. Even still, the yard was definitely my happy place. I had so many happy memories of hanging out there on weekends and during school vacations, spending time tending the garden with Mia. She had the greenest of thumbs. What she didn’t know about plants and flowers truly wasn’t worth knowing, and she’d passed on a lot of that knowledge to me. I just loved helping beautiful things grow.

  Deciding I was going to tackle the unloved mess and restore it to its former glory, I headed to the shed and grabbed the gardening gloves, cutters, and rake. It was on like Donkey Kong. I got to work, and before I knew it, I was deeply engrossed in what I was doing, and all other thoughts had flown to the back of my mind. As I hummed my way around the garden, pulling up weeds and throwing them into the garden garbage can, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of harnessing the calming powers of gardening before. It was such a simple and obvious solution that I wanted to slap myself for being so blind. It would have been so much healthier than sordid sex with Arlo, or bingeing and purging.

  Of course, it wasn’t something that I could do in my compact Manhattan apartment. I did have some large plant pots on the balcony, but tending them didn’t give me the same satisfaction or feeling of peace I got from taking care of the garden here. I really hadn’t spent much time here since Mia died, but now I couldn’t really remember why not. Sure, I’d travelled a hell of a lot, so I wasn’t always around, but in the times in between, there had been nothing stopping me from coming here whenever I needed to get away from it all.

  In fact, I should have packed up and come here weeks ago when life had started to get too much. Instead, I had spent weeks on end wallowing in self-pity, indulging in destructive behaviors, and climbing the fucking walls. Sometimes I was my own worst enemy. Scrap that. All of the time.

  “Morning.”

  The unexpected sound from behind me had me jumping almost a foot in the air, and as I was bent double at the waist at the time, the movement caused me to overbalance. I had weeds in one hand and my cutters in the other, and my reflexes weren’t quick enough to save myself before tumbling headfirst into the gardenia plant in front of me, ass a mile in the air. Shit. I heard chuckling behind me and quickly scrambled to my feet, spinning angrily.

  “What the actual fuck, Luke? What are you doing? You nearly scared
me half to death!”

  “I wasn’t doing anything, merely enjoying the outstanding view.” He smirked cheekily, and it reminded me so much of Arlo that part of me had the strong urge to slap him in the face.

  A much larger part of me was rendered speechless and senseless as I drank him in, in all his bare-chested glory. Holy fuck a duck. He was almost too good to be true—sculpted to perfection with just a handful of strategically placed tattoos across his tight, tan chest. Even his bed hair, shaggy and sticking up at odd angles, looked sexy as all hell. What appealed to me the most though was that all that sexiness came wrapped in a disarmingly gentle and caring vibe—even when he was being kind of an asshole.

  “The view?”

  “Yeah. You bending over in those shorts should come with a government health warning. I almost had a heart attack when I first came to the door, but I’m good now.”

  I was sure the blush rising in my cheeks could be used to fire up a stoplight in a power outage, it burned so brightly. Before I could think of a witty enough comeback to shut him down, he quickly changed the subject.

  “Here, I made you coffee.”

  He knew the way to my heart. All could be forgiven of a hot guy wielding hotter coffee. I wiped my brow, suddenly aware that in the time I’d been outside, the sun had risen fully and was now really quite hot. I’d worked up a sweat without even realizing it. I approached him to take the coffee. I’d need water too but was happy to start the day with a much-needed injection of caffeine. I reached for the cup he held out to me, and as I took it from him, our fingers brushed together. Awareness shot up my arm and through the rest of my body. Holy shit.

  I didn’t know what to do about it. Sure, we’d slept together a couple of times now, but it had always been in emotionally charged circumstances, not the least being the first time, when Luke had then told me instantly that he’d regretted the situation and fled. In the cold light of day, I wasn’t sure what to say or do, if anything at all. I assumed that Luke was having a similar conversation in his head to the one playing out in mine. Stalling for time, I finally spoke.