Pride and Pancakes

by Ellen Mint

  “Bar, Barry, stop. Stop, okay. It’s not whatever you’re thinking. Dreading as you do. It’s…” Different. Amazing. Impossible.

  The duffel bag splattered to the ground, Barry rounding on him fast. “Not what I’m thinking there, Romeo?” He hauled up his ancient phone and pressed it awake.

  All the blood drained from Tristan’s face as he stared at a picture of himself. All of himself. His naked body was illuminated by the firelight with a guitar the only thing keeping the picture from being X-rated.

  Tristan’s eyes bugged out as he grabbed the phone and squeezed it tighter and tighter. He wished he could strangle the image away. “No,” he snarled. “No.”

  It was her picture. The one she’d taken of him when he… When he’d been vulnerable, when he’d laid out every guarded secret to her in the hope that she’d understand him. Not the music, not the songs, not the poster image. The man hiding below all the focus-group-determined glitz. He’d wanted her to see it all and know him. He’d thought she’d understand and, maybe, feel the same.

  It was all a lie!

  “Got that this morning from Thorn, asking for confirmation it’s you in there. Please tell me…” Barry said. A great sigh sputtered through his mighty cheeks. “Look, I don’t want to be all nagging Nancy here, but…”

  “This will not happen again,” Tristan swore, hurling the phone at Barry. Stomping for the bedroom, he froze in his shaking tracks as the traitorous reporter stepped out.

  She was all smiles, unaware that he knew. That he was on to her cruel trickery, playing him for the fool and cutting him deep without a second thought. And what did it matter? You gave her everything she could need to destroy you. Fuck!

  “I think I have…” she said, before staring up into his face. He knew it was red in a boiling rage from the heat bubbling off his cheeks. The look sent her scampering back, her bag swinging between them for protection.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t believe I was stupid enough to fall for it,” he cried, his hands wringing dead air. “To believe a word out of your mouth, out of the mouth of anyone who’s only looking to cut a person into bite-sized pieces and sell them for a quarter a click.”

  “Tris…Tristan?” the liar whispered, darting her gaze around the cabin in an impressive simulacrum of fear.

  “I was wrong about you,” he cursed. “You’re worse than scum—at least that serves a purpose in this world! Barry!” As he turned away from her, his heart hardened against the ghost of tears rising. Tristan focused on his manager. “We’re leaving.”

  “Nice to see you sobered up,” Barry declared. Bag in hand, his manager grabbed the coat off the hook. Tristan was boiling on the inside, the rage sustaining him as he marched to the door. He had to get out of there before she spun that same magic that had ensnared him. People like her always had an excuse for everything they did.

  “How will I leave?” she asked and he heard the worry in her voice. The same one that had squeaked that she couldn’t skate, that she needed his guidance, his help. For a second, his heart tried to bleed for her, but Tristan glanced down at the bandage around his palm. He’d shed enough for her already.

  “I don’t care,” were his parting words, Tristan all but running out into the snow. The cold tried to penetrate, but his skin was obsidian, hardened from the magma levels of rage burning through his body. He focused on the anger, clung to it, because otherwise he might feel his heart fracturing into a thousand icicles. Without a second look back at the cabin, or the lost woman standing in the doorway, Tristan leaped into the snowplow’s cab and forgot he’d ever stayed there.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Congratulations, Beth, you fucked everything up.

  She’d managed to get one of the plows to help tow her car to the interstate, which had been annoyingly clear of snow. After that, nothing more than a long, heartbreaking drive back to her editor’s desk. Which was when she’d figured out what happened.

  Oh, he’d been ecstatic about her ‘intimate portrait’ of Tristan Harty. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Why hadn’t she remembered he could see everything in that folder? Why hadn’t she stopped it from uploading? Why had she even taken the picture in the first place?

  In her state of shock, she’d shouted that Thorn couldn’t use the picture. It was hers, under her copyright, and she wasn’t going to allow it. Boy, had that been a big mistake. The happy editor feasting upon the scandalous muck had turned vengeful. So she’d been left with the ‘or else’ threat.

  Write what she knew about Harty, use the image or something just as good, or else that was it. That was her ultimatum, destroy his life or lose her job.

  “Gah!” Beth screamed into a pillow made out of an old AC/DC shirt. She sucked in the cloying scent of Febreze while doing so, causing her to hack to breathe in cleansing air.

  “What is it?” Madeline called, running from her little en-suite office to check on the worthless pile of scruff that had slunk into her apartment.

  “Lamenting every horrific decision in my life. It’s taking some time,” Beth admitted. Dressed in requisite sweats tattered from mourning, she had her legs tucked under her while merging with Madeline’s armchair.

  “You’re not the first person to mess things up,” good, kind, diplomatic Mads said. She playfully tousled through Beth’s unwashed hair. It’d been a week since the cabin, seven days of bitter sunshine through the gray city. And all Beth had to show for it was an empty sheet of paper and a broken heart.

  “I mean…” Madeline left the useless lump of human dough to check on the cardboard box set up with a heat lamp. “It can’t be all that bad. It was just three days.”

  “Yup. Three days.” Only three days. Shit, in this city people didn’t even think they were exclusive until it’d been a year and the parents had met them. Three days was nothing. A drop in the bucket. Seventy-two hours she should be able to drink away.

  Why did it hurt? Why did it feel like she was breathing in ash and eating glass? Why did she have to beat herself up with every thought of not only him but her entire career on a knife’s edge?

  Admitting to her sleeping with Tristan in the article might be good for Thorn but it’d hamstring her in an instant. Yet, if she didn’t mention it, she’d surely be fired. Or there was the truth about him. His ex-fiancée dead of an overdose, her body discovered by him. His twin sister also dead. Two lives he wore like an albatross around his neck even if neither had been his fault. To have the media question it, to bring it up to him endlessly on press stops, to wear him down… It’d crack him, send him back into hiding, or worse.

  “What are you going to do?” Madeline voiced Beth’s thoughts.

  “I don’t know.” She covered her head with the pillow, crouching deeper into her lap.

  On one hand, he was someone she’d met for a long weekend. There were seven billion people on the planet. Stepping on one’s toes for her own success was normal. Expected. She owed him nothing. She certainly didn’t owe him her job.

  “He’s so infuriating! Not giving me a damn inch before exploding like that!” Beth cried. No word, no warning, no explanation. Just running out of that door as if she’d transformed into Medusa. As if she couldn’t calmly tell him what had happened by accident.

  “Sounds like a real peach.”

  But he had been. Okay, not at first. That had been the most sardonic, acidic man she’d ever suffered. In the middle, when he softened, that had been someone Beth had never known before. Someone she couldn’t escape. Maybe it was all in her head. Maybe her punch-drunk heart was making it all up to torture herself.

  Beth flipped from the tawdry picture trapped in her phone like the curse it was back to the phone number. His phone number. Private, he’d said. No way would he pick up now. She didn’t even try to call, fearing that all she’d get would be a cussing out.

  “What are you doing?” Madeline asked, peering closer to the phone so her red curls spilled against Beth’s cheek. Her fr
iend was nosy, but Beth was grateful she was here, even more grateful that she’d been allowed to spend the past week with Madeline instead of her three roommates who’d groan at her moping.

  Beth sighed. “Thinking.”

  “No, you’re prolonging the pain. Yank that damn thorn out already. Delete him. Forget him.”

  As if it was that easy. Her thumb hovered over the trashcan symbol, aching to press down. To wipe all memory of Tristan first from her phone, then her mind. His lean body, his nimble fingers, his gentle lips. Gone in a snap.

  Mad pressed down, making the decision for her. “Oops,” she said sarcastically while walking away.

  Beth stared numbly at where he had been. Her address book shuffled around, another H taking the place of one Harty, Tristan. Almost as if it never happened. She’d never interviewed him, they’d never been trapped in that cabin. He hadn’t saved her from the ice, pressed his body to hers in the heat of the shower, run his fingers through her hair while teaching her to play guitar. Erased.

  “You know what you need,” Mads said while bustling through the kitchen that always smelled of cat litter. Beth tried to watch her friend, but it was all a blur until Madeline appeared beside her. “A kitten.”

  Without any warning, Madeline placed the three-week-old kitten on Beth’s chest. The weak baby mewled in surprise, Beth cupping her hands around it, but it didn’t seem happy. “I don’t think it approves of the lack of breasts to cuddle on.”

  She glanced at her very well-endowed friend, who waved her hand through the air and laughed. “Marshmallow will be fine. All they need is a bit of love and…constant attention, food, warmth, more food. But the love, that’s what gives them a fighting chance.”

  This one had been found in a sewer grate, crying for its life. No doubt some heartless monster had tried to flush the baby away, but Madeline had been there to save Marshmallow. Beth tipped back, keeping the fragile kitten resting on her sternum. From behind, Mads leaned closer to run her pinkie over the kitten’s head. It could barely crawl, still struggling to gain weight, but at its new mother’s touch, it reached for her.

  “They make a mess like you wouldn’t believe. And they stink beyond belief sometimes, but…” Madeline trailed off as she stared at the kitten. One of the dozens she’d saved over the years. Pictures of them covered her walls, all adopted to forever homes once they were safe on their own. They might leave her home but never her heart, no matter how little time she had them.

  Beth glanced up at her friend and smiled. “But you can’t turn ’em away.”

  “Could you?” were Madeline’s parting words as she returned to cleaning up her mess of a kitchen. Having to tend to such a young kitten caused nearly everything else to fall by the wayside.

  Wafting her pinkie over Marshmallow’s brown-striped head and back, Beth took in the helpless baby. Aching to save them, to protect and shield them from everything, even those beyond someone’s reach… “No,” she whispered, “No, I couldn’t.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  For the first time since arriving home, an idea blossomed in Beth’s fractured heart.

  * * * *

  You’re carrying on like a moon-eyed prepubescent who had his first crush stomp on his heart. Man up, already.

  Tristan plucked at the C string so sharply it bit into the edge of his callus. He barely flinched at the pain. Instead, he took to pouring his wounded soul into the harmonic vibrations. A small part of him knew he was being a right ass, dressed down in hoodies with ripped sleeves and grunting when anyone looked at him askance. That Boston interview would have been a disaster had they not also brought on the newest sugar glider at the zoo, who’d taken a liking to nesting in Tristan’s hair. The fear of sugar glider nuggets plopping down the sides of his head was a good excuse for his sour face.

  And why? For what reason are you tormenting your friends, your colleagues, the various news crews who have to pretend to like you?

  Brown eyes and a wry smile ensnared his imagination. The anger hadn’t sustained him, not for long. Maybe a day or two after abandoning the cabin. Now, two weeks since their freedom, since her betrayal, all he felt was despair. And there was no good reason for it.

  Three days. Tristan knew it. Barry wouldn’t cease prattling on about it, when not trying to gin up a plan to save his ass when the article hit. It was due today, nine a.m. no less. Wake up. Brew a pot of coffee. Take a shower. And wait for my world to fall apart.

  Tristan prepared by shutting off all his electronics, staring out of the hotel’s window at the bleak midwinter landscape and strumming his fingers until they bled. Everyone knew not to bother him. He’d told his mother to hole up for a few days with her stacks of books rather than face the once-friends and neighbors gossiping about her wayward son. What would Beth say about him?

  He frowned at her name slipping past the blockade and adjusted in the chair. One leg dangled over the padded armrest, tipping the guitar up into a less than useful angle. Not that it would matter how badly he played. He didn’t want to do anything but sulk.

  Pretentious? Most certainly. She adored that word.

  Callow? On occasion.

  Aloof? He couldn’t help that image even if he wanted to stop it.

  Broken, beaten, alone.

  His hand slapped to the guitar, the healed palm barely registering as he tried to screw back in the fear percolating in his brain. He didn’t care if she spoke of their unfriendly greetings, of how he’d dismissed her out of hand. It was facing every eye knowing his history, every hand wringing itself over his trauma that sent dread racing through Tristan’s body. He couldn’t handle it. Even telling her had been…

  ‘What in the seven hells were you thinking?’

  That had been Barry’s screed on their drive out of Vermont, out of the cabin and away from a lie. But it’d been a comforting lie, a cozy one where for a brief weekend Tristan had pretended that he could trust. Confess to someone who seemed to understand.

  But no. Soon, the internet would see him stripped, both in the metaphorical and literal sense. Try as hard as Barry did, Thorn wouldn’t refuse to publish the image they had. Not that Tristan expected much from the old manager faced with this new world order. Sensationalism won out even in a scratch-my-back deal.

  A pigeon landed on the windowsill, its head bobbing as it tried to find relief from the bitter winds. Mid-December wasn’t kind to anyone.

  The rattle of the door handle and the dangling chain caused Tristan to sit up. He raised his chin but didn’t turn to see who entered. There could only be one person. Instead, he picked back up that song without a tale, trying to will his brain to make gold out of dirt.

  “Tris,” Barry muttered, scrabbling into the hotel room. He paused and flipped on the bathroom light as if checking for ghosts or serial killers before stopping behind Tristan. “It’s out.”

  “I assumed, what with the lack of an apocalypse in the forecast,” Tristan said, his voice cold as he continued through the music.

  After Barry unwound his scarf, Tristan watching the man’s flushed appearance reflected in the window, he sighed. “You’re gonna want to read it.”

  Tristan snorted cruelly. “Isn’t that what you’re here for? To keep me from facing reality?” At least for a few more hours. He wasn’t even at lunchtime yet, though the minibar was down two tiny bottles of vodka.

  “Look, it’s blowing up. Going all viral and stuff,” Barry said, a shiver crawling up Tristan’s spine. So it was worse than he’d feared. A part of him had hoped that he was such a small fish, the collective internet would shrug. “And I think you need to see.”

  The man foisted his tablet on Tristan, but he wasn’t having it. “Barry, I am not in the mood to deal with—”

  “Read the damn thing already!” Barry ordered as if it was life and death. How much money had Tristan’s foolish dick cost him? Was there a calculator app open on Barry’s phone that was determining that very number? Canceled tours, aborted deals,
maybe even the album itself in jeopardy if this grew gargantuan?

  Sighing, Tristan placed his guitar on the hotel table and picked up the tablet. His traitorous gaze found her face tucked up in a little square by the byline. Ms. Beth Cho. Still beautiful, despite everything she’d done. He felt a smile churn in his gut from the preserved one in her headshot. Grow a pair, Harty, and walk to your own execution.

  Scrolling down, he noticed that at least the first image wasn’t of his naked body straddling a guitar. It was one of him taken by the Christmas tree in the on-loan suit. The pocket watch dangled in his palm—he hadn’t been able to cease playing with it—but the look on his face was serenity. Most would probably see it as a man gazing out across the horizon, but Tristan recognized his previous self finding something intriguing, or funny.

  It was a lovely picture to have chosen. But there was a lot more meat to the article, and they could have hidden the ‘money shot’ on the next page. Taking a breath as if he were about to plunge into an icy lake, Tristan read.

  Hair unwashed, clothes astray, fingernails scratching masterpieces across the rotting walls—this is the fabled tortured artist. Throughout history, we’ve been sold the romantic idea of the artist struggling against every force in the world thrown against him or her for the sake of art. As if the amount of pain suffered is the only way to truly judge art’s worth. While the impoverished who defied the odds to reach the stars holds an allure in this society, it is mental illness and its cruel clutches that infests so many starving artist stories.

  “People believe that to make great art, an artist must be tortured. They must know and face in their lives such great turmoil that it plagues them every night. And should that pain be medicated, treated, alleviated from them, so too will the art vanish. This is a lie.