Heartless Few Box Set

by MV Ellis

  Now life had brought all its Technicolor joy and pain my way, it turned out I was not such a selfless soul after all. Funny, I always thought that, despite our physical similarities, temperamentally, Arlo and I were like chalk and chicken, but now it seemed like we were more like chalk and charcoal—similar in crucial ways, while different in others. He always used to say that we were the same, but in fact, I was worse because I seemed nicer than I really was. I was increasingly beginning to believe he might be right.

  “Shit, man, that’s rough. I wish you’d come to me with this sooner, instead of carrying it all yourself. I could have… I don’t know… even just helped you sink a few bottles or something.” Even with the way I’d been caught up in Marnie, surely I could have managed that.

  “Yeah, I know, but I think this is something I just had to go through alone at first, to get my shit straight. Or straighter, at least. The only person I told was Mom.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said I need to man up and get my girl. She’s right.”

  “You’re going to Australia?”

  “No. I’m giving her the space to do her thing. Cool off, get her head straight about the baby and me, and spend quality time with her parents. All of that.”

  “So that’s your ‘plan,’ to do nothing and hope she comes to her senses?” My voice sounded harsh even to my own ears.

  “No, you dumb knucklehead, that’s not my goddamned plan. Do I look like a fucking chump to you?”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to say something funny, but Arlo gave me his trademark “if you value your teeth sitting in your head, don’t say a fucking word” look, and I decided to keep my thoughts to myself.

  “No, dude. When have you ever known me to sit back and do nothing? In any situation? If I’m going down, I’m going down fighting. You know this. When she gets back here, I want her and our baby in my life, and while I have a pulse, I’m going to make sure that happens. But if this is going to work, she has to think it’s her idea. If she feels backed into a corner, she’ll take off again. I need to show her that she wants and needs me in her and the baby’s lives, or it’s all over. Jesus, I never thought it was possible, but that woman has a harder head than I do.”

  Cue a volley of our trademark banter back and forth, baiting Arlo and making light of the situation. Stevie in particular was on fire. I was still in awe of his sober transformation since his most recent stint in rehab. He was always funny, that was just his shtick, but before he cleaned up his act, he was also a sloppy and unreliable drunk—as fun and lovable as always but a total liability, even on a good day. I was glad that the fun parts of his personality had remained while the downsides of Stevie, the party guy, no longer plagued us. It genuinely seemed to be the best of both worlds.

  Arlo was the one to bring things back to real talk.

  “She said she doesn’t care if Marnie and I did or didn’t get together again after I was with her, but I’m calling bullshit on that. Of course it fucking matters if I cheated on her, and with Marnie of all people. If I can categorically prove that I didn’t fuck Marnie or anyone else after we were together, it’s one more thing going for me, instead of against me.”

  I bristled at the mention of Marnie but tried to remain composed with a neutral expression on my face. I zoned out for a while, thinking again about her. I really didn’t know what to do to try to help her, apart from what I’d already done. My ears pricked up when I realized Arlo was still talking about her.

  “Basically, I want to shut the whole incident down and show London that it doesn’t mean shit—it’s just an unfortunate and badly timed blip. Really meaningless and really badly timed. The sooner we forget about it and move on, the better. The lawyers are on the case as we speak, and I’ve told them to spare no expense and leave no stone unturned. I want this thing gone so we can move the fuck on with our lives.”

  The undertone of his words was clear: Marnie was meaningless. Hearing him talk about the woman I’d loved for most of my life like she was nothing more than an irrelevant annoyance made my blood boil beyond belief. Even if I didn’t feel the way I did about her, she was our friend and had been for years. For Arlo to diminish that to almost nothing reminded me of the differences between us that I had momentarily been convinced didn’t exist.

  I stared him down as though he was shit on my shoe but remained silent. Sometimes the best way to get through to Arlo was to say nothing. For some reason, he seemed to take more note of the silence than of words. I think it spoke to his need to believe that everything he did was his idea, carried out of his own free will. There was nothing he hated more than being told what to do.

  Arlo ranted and raved about raining the full weight of the law down on Marnie, even though his legal people had confirmed that, just like Marnie had said, though she’d more than likely shot the video—a fact she had actually never denied, it was almost equally likely that her phone had been hacked and she hadn’t been the one to leak it to the press.

  So many questions. When had he found out this gem? Why the fuck hadn’t he said anything sooner—to me, and more to the point, to Marnie? If he knew she wasn’t responsible, why the hell did he want to carry on pursuing the case?

  I continued to swallow the words threatening to spill from my lips, literally almost choking on them. It wasn’t subtle, nor was the way I curled my hands into fists, dying to swing a punch. Jake had also been correct about my total lack of game face.

  “Something to say there, douchey?” As predicted, Arlo had picked up on my anger.

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.” I knew that if this exchange wasn’t going to end in punches and bloodshed, I needed to choose my words extremely carefully.

  “Well, come on, dear brother of mine, don’t keep me hanging, I’m all ears. Shoot.”

  I wasn’t too far gone yet to realize that, with my increasingly darkening mood, if I didn’t keep my temper in check, this could genuinely be the beginning of the end of the relationship between the two of us.

  “Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m wondering if you shouldn’t cut Marnie some slack instead of going all A Few Good Men on her ass with a lawsuit. I mean, it just seems a little harsh after all these years of friendship. Surely there’s a better way to deal with the situation?”

  “Are you for real right now? You’re reminding me about the years of friendship between us? Is that some kind of sick fucking joke? Where were those years of friendship when she was recording us fucking without my knowledge? Or how about when said footage was leaked to the press and drove a wedge a mile wide between me and my woman and our unborn child. Where was our friendship then? What about when I was trying to contact her to talk about it and she completely ghosted me?”

  She ghosted me too, and now that I saw how low she could slump at times, I wondered how she’d coped during that time she was alone. What a fucking mess.

  “She didn’t know about the baby. Nobody did.” I tried for neutrality in my tone but wasn’t sure I managed it. The other boys were notably silent.

  “But she knew I was serious about London. Am serious about her. She was the first person I told, for fuck’s sake.”

  The way I looked at it, nobody here was blameless in this situation. Not Marnie, not me, and definitely not Arlo. Not even London, in some ways. But some of us were more wrong than others.

  “She’s really sorry for what she did.” I spoke quietly, it was either that or scream like a crazy person. As ever, I opted for calm and collected over expressing my true feelings.

  “She can tell that to the judge when she finds herself in court over it.” I saw the visible shift in his demeanor as he slowly put the pieces of the puzzle together. “Wait. How do you know all that?”

  That was the $65 million question. Poker face, don’t fail me now!

  “I’ve seen her.”

  If rage were a volatile gas, Arlo would be a canister about to blow and take the whole building with him.

  �
�What the fuck did you just say? Because it sounded a hell of a lot like you admitted to having seen Marnie. But that can’t have been it because that would make you a two-faced Judas motherfucker, posing as my responsible, loving, and loyal twin brother.”

  “I have.”

  The match met the gas, and Arlo lunged across the room at me. That was his typical MO. Why the fuck I still bothered to be restrained and keep us from hammering six shades of shit out of each other on a regular basis was beyond me. Lucky for all concerned, the rest of the guys had seen this routine a thousand times before and had been watching wearily as it unfolded, ready to spring into action if and when needed. Boy, were they needed. I was in no mood to play the pacifist Luke card at that point, for once. I was out for blood just as much as Arlo. More so maybe.

  The others did their human shield routine between the two of us, while I had no qualms about continuing to fan the flames of Arlo’s indignation, telling him how I’d worked out that Marnie was at Mia’s place on Long Island, then gone looking for her there.

  “Why the fuck didn’t you say anything? I specifically asked if you would tell me if you knew anything, and you said yes, you fuck stain.”

  Thirty-Three

  Luke

  He had a point, and the honest answer was that for once I hadn’t been thinking about Arlo. Even though he was front and center of this messy drama, unusually, recently I had been way more focused on Marnie and myself than on him. Marnie’s accusation that I structured my life to suit his whims echoed in my mind. She’d been right of course. That’s how it had been for as long as I could remember—quiet twin on the back burner behind the overbearing and domineering Arlo.

  Over the years, we’d gone through periods of struggle to adjust the dynamic between us, but things always seemed to revert to the status quo in time. This time the shift had felt more significant and long-lasting. I had the strong sense that for better or for worse, we were about to pass a point of no return.

  “Yeah. I know. And at the time you asked me, I genuinely didn’t know where she was. Then I went to her, and I discovered that she’s not in great shape. She’s… maybe she’s having a breakdown, or a midlife crisis, or some shit. I don’t know, man, but I do know that she feels terrible about what she did and all the trouble it’s caused. That definitely wasn’t her intention. I know it looks bad, but I wasn’t doing it to betray you. I honestly just didn’t think it would help anyone—you, her, or London—to have you unleashing your wrath on her, so I made the call not to tell you. I mean, what were you going to say to her anyway? Were you going to try to get her to sign an affidavit explaining the nature of that video to London, or what?”

  “Honestly, at that stage, I hadn’t gotten that far in my thinking. I had no fucking clue. I just knew I was angry as shit.”

  Gramps always joked about Arlo being a sociopath, and lately I was genuinely starting to wonder how far off base he was with that hypothesis. He could be so effortlessly callous. At times, I actually found it scary. But then at other times he would say or do something that redeemed him completely, like how he’d overcompensated for my crippling shyness throughout our schooling—playing the role of shield and protector, providing a buffer between me and the rest of the world. He was nothing if not a paradox—an infuriating paradox.

  “Right. So you can understand that exposing her to you in that state of mind would have hurt her.” I spoke as though explaining a complex concept to a preschooler. I supposed that with Arlo, trying to make sense of complex emotional situations was a little like that. “I made the call not to let that happen. I also honestly wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t say or do something that both of you would both regret. Ironically, I was trapped between a rock and a hard place, trying to look out for both of you.” I saw the light in Arlo's eyes flare yet again. This conversation wasn’t going well, and the only way from here seemed to be down.

  “Hurt her? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, right? You’ve seen what this whole thing has done to London, and therefore to me, and you want to worry about hurting her? You get that she’s the antagonist in all this, right? The one who betrayed my trust?” Did his narcissism know no bounds? He was un-fucking-believable.

  “Yeah, I get it, but I worry about her… and want to protect her regardless. Even more so now that I know you’re planning to fucking sue her ass from here to China. I mean, Jesus, she’s fragile as fuck and hanging on by a thread as it is. Dragging her name through a court case would probably break her completely, not to mention the financial implications. She’s done well from modeling over the years, of course she has, but her contract has ended and the future for her is uncertain. A lawsuit like this would be water off a duck’s back to you, but it could ruin her in so many different ways. Is that what you really want?”

  “Maybe she should have thought about someone other than herself when she shot that video, and then there wouldn’t have been anything to protect her from in the first place.”

  He was totally right about that, and she was the first to admit that she was in the wrong, but Arlo’s refusal to see how his actions played a part in creating this drama was killing me and making me want to kill him. It takes two to tango, as the saying goes, and Arlo and Marnie tangoed for fifteen years. Yet even now when the shit had well and truly hit the fan, he obviously viewed her as nothing more than an incidental pawn in the chess game of his life.

  She may as well have been a blow-up doll for the way he’d failed to consider her feelings and emotions throughout this process and refused to see things even slightly from her point of view, even when it was being explained to him in simple terms. His intellect wasn’t the issue, so I kept coming back to Grampas’s assertion that Arlo had sociopathic tendencies. If this was how he thought it was acceptable to treat a friend from childhood, God help his enemies—they didn’t stand a fucking chance.

  “Man, I know we have our moments, but you’re my brother. My twin fucking brother, and you want to put her before me. Really? You’re meant to have my back, but you really dropped the brotherly love ball on this one, big-time. You know, I may not have always liked you at various points in our lives, but I always thought I could trust you. Turns out I was a fucking fool.” It seemed that he didn’t lack emotional intelligence after all. The issue was more that he saved the fucks he had to give for those issues that got him fired up, and pretty much ignored everything else. “What kind of Judas motherfucker puts some chick before their own flesh and blood? Their twin?”

  “‘Some chick’? It’s not some chick, Arlo. It’s Marnie. She’s practically family. You’ve been sleeping with her since you were fifteen, remember?” Jesus. Christ.

  “So? Who gives a crap? She’s still ‘some chick.’ I don’t care if I was fucking her for a hundred years. Apart from London, they’re all just some chick. Don’t you get that?”

  If only I could kill him and not ruin my own life. Seriously, if I knew I could do it and get away with it, I’d seriously consider it if it was an option. Every time he opened his crazy, selfish mouth, he kicked my rage up another notch. I was sure my face was crimson as the anger spread through me like white-hot molten magma, eating me alive from the inside out. The vein in the side of my temple throbbed as I cracked my neck from side to side—it was one of the handful of mannerism we shared.

  “Wait. Dude. How long?”

  What now?

  “How long what?” Again, I feigned nonchalance, and again I was fairly certain I was fooling nobody, least of all Arlo.

  “Don’t play games with me, Luke. How. Fucking. Long?”

  “Always.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Always. From the very start. The first moment. Remember how she and I met when she was new at school? She transferred from out of state when her parents… died, and she had come to live with her grandmother. I was assigned as her buddy, which was a godsend—there’s no way I would have approached her otherwise. You were out for two weeks with… chicken pox, was it? S
omething like that. Another gift from the gods—no offense, but I had never been so glad to see you sick.”

  As I spoke those pivotal words, it was as though a weight had been lifted from me. Arlo looked nothing short of murderous, but I was relieved. If this was it, and he was about to tear me limb from limb, at least the truth was out there, and I wasn’t going to my grave with my love for Marnie hanging between us like an ax about to fall.

  “I felt something as soon as I laid eyes on her, and I know she felt it too. We just clicked from the very start. We had two glorious weeks together without you in the picture, and I was all in from day one. I fell for her like a sack of shit off a cliff. In all my clumsy teenage innocence, I wanted to make a move, wanted to do something more than just think about her 24/7, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. You remember how I was, right? Cripplingly fucking shy.” I was on a roll. Once I opened the can of worms, I had nothing to lose in filling him in on the whole sorry story.

  “Then you came swaggering back into school like you owned the joint, which you kinda did, radiating confidence and taking no prisoners, as ever. I’ll never forget the way she looked at you that first time, like you’d just hung the fucking moon. She was a moth to a flame. She never stood a chance, and neither did I. The rest, as they say, is history.”

  “Man, I can’t believe you could keep this from me. Something this fucking major in your life. Why the hell have you never said anything?”

  “What do you mean, why haven’t I said anything? Don’t you wonder why you haven’t seen anything? How this could have been right here, under your nose, and you had no fucking idea?” I really did wonder what fucking planet he lived on for him to have overlooked something that the other guys seemed to have noticed way back when it first happened.

  “Were you ever going to tell me? More to the point, have you told her?”

  What kind of dumb-as-fuck question was that? I wanted to laugh in his stubborn, selfish, blinkered face. Instead, I focused on keeping my cool and answering him with as much calm as I could muster, which admittedly, at that point, wasn’t very much.