by Piper Lennox
Clara: What did you do?
Ewan: Googled your name.
Frankly, I’m surprised he didn’t do it sooner. After our date last night, Georgia and I spent a good hour combing his social media. Doesn’t everybody run at least a cursory check on people they’re interested in?
Clara: Ah. Well, I don’t think that’s crazy. But I’m worried you might think I’m crazy. Reviewing makeup and stuff for a living.
Ewan: I think it’s fantastic. You’re doing what you love. Your videos from Tokyo are my favorite.
We chat for a while longer, mostly about the places we’ve traveled to or hope to visit soon. Before he says goodnight, he asks if Bowie and I will be at the dog park tomorrow. I tell him yes. “See you there. But full disclosure: I’m really only interested in seeing Thor.”
Ewan texts some laughing emojis, then a moon. “Goodnight, beautiful.”
My blush stretches all the way from my toes. I stare at his words and let myself get swept up in this feeling.
Unfortunately, it’s almost immediately interrupted by another text from Wes.
“Goodnight.”
I blink. Then I stare. My brain takes this word and turns it every which way, trying to make sense of it as though it’s not plain English. As though it’s not fifty-percent identical to the message Ewan just sent me.
I don’t write back.
I do, however, spend the rest of my waking hours wondering why I keep thinking of that text instead.
Eighteen
“Can you hurry up, please?” Clara motions impatiently to my laptop, which is still booting up on the kitchen counter between us.
“What’s your rush? Bowie’s still distracted with that bone you gave him.” We look to the patch of sunlight in front of the balcony, where my dog is flopped into a useless, adorable heap of fur and teeth. The bone is clutched between his paws.
The second I gave it to him, after picking him up from the kennel once Delaney was safely on a plane back to Cali, he snuggled up with it and refused to let it go.
“Thanks for that, by the way. And all his tennis balls,” I add, which makes Clara look at me like I’ve lost my mind.
“Welcome, I guess.” She flops her purse onto a stool. “Though I didn’t do it as some kind of favor to you. You’re just lucky you’ve got a cute dog.”
“I know.” I reminded myself of that plenty, this weekend. Every time I saw the bone and tennis balls on my dresser, I had to tell myself she gave the dog a gift. Not me.
Probably completely in spite of me, actually.
The computer pings. I wait until the desktop icons flash into place before opening my browser.
When I pull up my sister’s video and show Clara, she shrugs at me.
“Yeah, so? That was the goal of making me link to it, right—more views for her?”
I don’t answer, instead opening another tab and pulling up my video.
“Good for you.” She folds her arms on the counter and leans her weight against it. I stare at her breasts the whole damn time, not really caring if she notices. She either doesn’t, or ignores me.
“You remember the basketball game?” I know she does, but I decide to pull up some articles with those photos anyway. “All three of our channels and social media saw boosts from that.”
She looks beyond bored. “People just like drama.”
“They come for drama, but stay for good content.”
“Then I wouldn’t get too attached to your new viewers.”
“Goddamn, Hurley, will you stop whipping your wit out for two seconds so I can tell you my idea?”
Instead of looking angry, she looks amused. I think she likes it when she sees how much she gets to me. Sometimes I’d swear she’s making a game out of it.
Guess I can’t blame her. I do the same thing.
“My idea,” I say, closing the laptop and leaning across from her, “is to do all that again. But on purpose, this time. Stir shit up by design.”
“We’re too old for catfights, Durham. Much less fake ones for internet points.”
When she starts to push off from the counter, I grab her elbow and pull her back. Fear brightens her eyes, like she thinks I might kiss her again.
I really want to, actually. She’s got on pink lipstick today, and I’d love to see how it looks smeared off against my mouth. And a few other places.
Focus.
“What’s the only thing people love more than good drama?” I ask.
Clara taps her chin, pretending to think. “Nothing?”
“Romance.”
She gets a great view of her own brain, with the eye roll this causes. “I’m not pretending to be your girlfriend.”
“You don’t have to.” I nod at my closed laptop. “Everyone else will pretend for us. All we have to do is give them a few vague hints, and suddenly we’re getting fucking shipped left and right. Both of us win.”
“You and your sister, you mean. Not to sound arrogant, but I’m already ‘winning’ just fine without this kind of stunt.”
“You do sound arrogant. Unbelievably pompous. I’m surprised your head still fits in that hat.”
Reluctantly, she smiles.
“Please?”
There’s that crazy look again, like she thinks I’m completely devoid of manners. “Are you asking me?” She picks at some polish on her pinky nail. It’s plain black, but the tips are silver. Glittery silver. Of course. “Or are you telling me?”
I push off from the counter and straighten. “Will you say yes if I’m asking?”
“No.”
“Then I guess I’m telling you.”
“Seriously, Durham, this sounds like a horrible plan. My sister—”
“Your sister,” I say loudly, “isn’t your boss.” I pause, halfway hating myself for the words before they’re even out of my mouth: “I am. For seven more weeks, at least.”
Wistfully, she looks at my computer.
“Just hints?” she asks, chewing her lip. “Things I could pass off as you and me just...being friends?”
“Well, friends with the promise of becoming more. Gotta give the rumors some kind of fuel. But yeah. And look, you can even tell Georgia that...I don’t know, I approached you. That I like you, I’m the one pursuing you—and you’re just being nice. She’ll buy that.”
Clara looks up at me. The hair peeking from underneath her hat is a paler pink than usual, and catches the sunlight behind her like a strawberry stain. I stare at it longer than I stared at her chest.
“Guess I don’t have a choice.”
The sadness in her voice gets to me, almost to the point I tell her to forget it.
Almost.
I grab my phone. “We’ll start with this one. I’ll post it first.”
Clara steps up behind me to watch. Her perfume, that lemon-mint one again, wraps around my throat like some gorgeous snake I might just let strangle me.
“Whoa.” Suddenly, she’s reaching around me to snatch the phone. “Where did you get this?”
“You don’t remember?”
When she paces to the sofa, I follow and sit beside her.
It’s a selfie we took during the masquerade party, after a round of shots in miniature plastic coconuts. Behind us are the fuzzy outline of string lights and a bluish moon, with blurred figures in the crowd we’d already forgotten was there. It felt like just us on that deck.
“Oh, my God,” she whispers, zooming in. “Yeah, I remember this now. The guy said—” She shuts her mouth, breathing a moment before continuing. “You said...that you wanted something to remember me by. And I remember thinking, ‘Why does he need to remember me?’ I figured once we were done...doing whatever, we’d take off our masks.”
Her recollection is quiet, but she quickly gathers enough anger to toss the phone into my lap. “I should have walked away the second you stopped me from lifting yours.”
“That would’ve ruined the fun of a masquerade party.”
“Don’t. Okay? Wha
t you did was so low. You knew who I was the entire time, but you didn’t even give me the courtesy of knowing who you were.”
“If not knowing bothered you that much, you wouldn’t have put my dick in your mouth.”
Her side-eye could melt the phone right out of my hands. “I was drunk.”
“So was I. More so than you, in fact. I still went down on you fully aware that I was doing it.”
She crosses her legs. I wonder if this conversation is getting to her, too. Thank God I’m in jeans.
“And by the way,” I go on, actually getting a little pissed off, myself, “you didn’t try to lift my mask until after. When we were making out, falling asleep...that’s when you did it.”
“Yeah. And you stopped me. Which just proves you knew who I was the whole time.”
I mumble my response.
“What?”
“I said,” I snap, pressing my fingers against my eyes to fight a headache, “‘not until you came.’”
Clara swallows. Other than Bowie’s incessant fucking chewing, it’s the only sound in here.
“You really didn’t know?”
“I...suspected, when we kissed. But no. I didn’t know for sure until later.” I look at the photo again. “I mean, you had a mask too. It was dark as hell on that deck, you and a bunch of other girls had those wigs on, you were in this dress that looked absolutely nothing like what I’d seen you wear before.... And it’s not like I could really hear your voice. The whole time, we were whispering to each other or shouting over the music.
“But out in the cabana, as soon as you....” My heart pounds, threatening to crack its way out of my chest. “You made this noise that just sounded so...you. Just this quiet moan. I knew it was you, once I heard that.”
I swallow the dryness in my throat. Truth is, it wasn’t just her moan that clued me in. Everything about Clara’s orgasm revealed it to me. I had no idea why the tremor of her thighs against my head or the way she pulled her nails along my scalp felt familiar—but they did.
Not in the way things feel familiar when you’ve already experienced them. Just when you know, deep down, you were supposed to.
I don’t tell her this, though. It would freak her out and give her the wrong idea. She wouldn’t understand.
Shit, even I don’t understand it, and I’ve had over a year to figure it out.
We don’t speak for several minutes. I blatantly adjust myself when the strain gets to be too much, which gives her some freedom to clear her throat and uncross her legs.
I stare at the photo again, then open Instagram and create a post.
“How’s this?” I slide her the phone. She studies the picture longer than she needs to.
“‘Miss this,’” she reads softly, nodding as she passes it back. “That’s good. Not too much info, short....”
Chewing her lip again, she holds out her hand. I give her the phone.
She adds a hashtag—“Throwback”—and removes her tag from the caption, putting it into the actual photo, instead. Then she adds a black-and-white filter.
“Good call. Make it look like ancient history.”
“It is.”
My headache drills back twice as hard. “True.”
She hits Share.
Nineteen
“What the actual shit is this?”
I wince at the sound of Georgia’s voice, tunneling straight through her bedroom door and into the locked bathroom—where I’ve managed to make a dime-sized bald patch behind my ear in the twenty minutes I’ve been home.
Sweeping the hair into a tissue, I flush it and start the water. “What?” I call casually, with my dry toothbrush shoved in my mouth.
“Open the door.” Her voice is much closer now, seeming to flow its way through the lock. “Look at this.”
My pulse is in my sinuses. After pretending to finish brushing my teeth, I brace myself with a breath, put my hat back on, and step into the hall.
Sure enough, she’s got her phone in her hand, screen filled with the photo Wes posted earlier.
She’s not on Instagram, though. It’s Twitter, and from an entertainment blog’s profile.
Wes Durham and YouTuber Clara Hurley—feeling nostalgic?
“This was screenshotted from his Instagram,” Georgia spits, pointing to the cropped portion that still shows his original caption.
Our caption, I guess. We did write it together.
Since I’m no good at faking outrage, I choose my latest standby of “not technically lying.”
“I saw it already.”
“And you’re not pissed?”
“Of course I am. But Wes won’t take it down.”
As soon as I start for the living room, she’s at my side, scrolling through every Retweet. “Where did he even get this photo?”
Tightness hits my chest. I tell myself it’s indigestion. “It’s from the masquerade party, after Stream Summit.”
“I know that, Clara. I meant, how did he get this picture? Why did you take a selfie with him?”
“It’s not like I knew it was Durham.” My voice gets squeaky. Good: she’ll think I’m sufficiently upset about the photo, versus nervous at having to explain it. “He was wearing a mask. We all were.”
Georgia’s on Instagram now, shaking her head and breathing hard as she pulls up the original post. “Jesus. ‘Miss this.’ And he fucking tagged you in it. The balls on this guy.”
My eyes swing to my phone, resting on the corner of the coffee table like I hope it’ll fall off and shatter. I kind of do. At least then I wouldn’t have to post the video Wes sent me between my lunch date with Ewan, and my afternoon meeting with Sasha and Georgia at Royale.
“Post this tonight or tomorrow,” his message read. The video was of a plain navy blue screen, complete nothingness.
“??” I wrote back. “Nothing there.”
“Turn it up,” he texted.
I’d stopped in my tracks outside the Rue Royale building and huddled against the wall, turning up my volume and pressing the phone hard to my ear so I could listen over the city noise.
It was an instrumental clip—slow guitar and a steady, light drumbeat.
“End of a song I’m working on. Use a good caption,” he wrote, when I was in the revolving doors feeling like my head was spinning worse than my body. How the hell did I end up in this mess?
I know, if I’m going to post it soon—which I have to—I need to lay the groundwork with Georgia, first.
Telling her the full truth isn’t an option. She wouldn’t really kill Wes (I think), but she’d do something to exact revenge. And while I’d like to hope Wes wouldn’t release my secrets over something my sister does....
“He’s not that bad.”
Georgia sweeps her eyes to me. “What?”
My face is on fire. I have no idea how she’s not seeing it. “Yeah, I mean...he’s a jerk—”
“And arrogant? Obnoxious? The biggest fucking tool bag outside a Home Depot? Come on, Clara, throw the sainthood application aside for two seconds and tell me you’re not forgetting what he did to you at the Coast Awards.”
The fire skims down the rest of me. Underneath my hat, the patch I made stings in a quick rhythm that matches my pulse. “That was years ago. He didn’t even know who I was.”
“Okay, then how about the fact he’s never been even halfway decent, to either of us, at a single conference or convention?”
For a moment, I think about pointing out that she often comes out swinging at any event where we might see him. We take pride in the fact we stay out of the usual influencer feuds and drama—but there are a few that could easily die down on their own, if not for Georgia’s legendary grudges.
Of course, she doesn’t declare anyone an enemy until they act like one.
So I keep my mouth shut, because she’s got a point.
“Clara.” She gets quiet. With Georgia, that’s usually a bad sign. “Do you like him?”
“This again?” For some reason, my
fake laugh doesn’t come as easily as the last time she asked.
“It’s just...first the shoutout to his sister, and now this? It’s hard to understand why you’re suddenly pulling a one-eighty on him.”
“I’ve never disliked him quite as intensely as you have,” I remind her, which makes her laugh in her throat. I actually dislike very few people, and the ones that I do get a mere fraction of ire compared to what Georgia can give.
“Like you said,” I go on, these technical truths loosening on my tongue, “he’s arrogant, obnoxious.... He’s rude to us. He’s constantly telling publications he wants to keep his life private, but here he is with a music channel. Who does that?”
Georgia laughs again, louder now. “Don’t forget that Tweet he posted about you.”
I think back, then blink with surprise. I had forgotten it, oddly enough. After Georgia slapped Wes for cutting in line at Comic-Con, years ago, he Retweeted some clickbait article about me that had the headline, “Clara Hurley’s quirky-girl look: too much?”
All Wes wrote in his portion of the Tweet was, “Yes.”
“Maybe he’s just grateful we linked to his sister’s video,” I shrug, after a moment. “I’m sure it did his channel a few favors in the process.”
“Hoping we’ll do it again—yes, that I could see. Grateful? I think you’re betting far too much on Durham having a soul, with that one.” Georgia looks at the post one last time, then scrolls down to check out the rest of her feed. “Maybe he likes you.”
“Sure,” I snort. I hate how, out of everything I’ve said during this conversation, that response happens the easiest and fastest of them all—even though it’s exactly what Wes suggested I lead Georgia to believe. In his mind, it seemed like a perfectly plausible explanation.
In my mind, it sounds ridiculous.
Wes doesn’t like me. Maybe he’s attracted to me sexually, but that doesn’t mean he likes anything about me other than my body and what it can do to his. Maybe it’s a conquest thing, or some love-hate perversion.