by Piper Lennox
While I organize my thoughts, I mess with the buttons in the steering wheel. The radio blinks on and off. I stare at it; she stares at me.
“How would you feel if the very first video you and Georgia ever uploaded,” I say at last, “was your most popular one to date? Not just that—but basically the only thing anyone knew you for, no matter what you did after? And then, to top it off, you get all these people who don’t want you to try and do anything else. They’d rather you just stay stuck in the past, trapped in the bubble of that one damn video forever.”
Darkly, I laugh. “But, oh, can’t embrace it too much, because then you’re just a has-been who’s milking the big break he got years ago, and you should just stay the fuck away from everyone forever, I guess.”
When my rant ends, I don’t realize I’m actually that angry until Clara puts her hand on my leg, and the heat of her palm makes it relax.
“That’s actually a really good way to put it,” she says softly. “I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with that. Sounds like you can’t win, no matter what you do.”
“Exactly.”
“But I still think I’m right—that you should at least acknowledge the show a little bit. Be Efron about High School Musical. Not Pattinson about Twilight.”
“I hate that I even marginally understood that.”
While we pass sprawling traditional houses, a few wineries, and a golf course, she lays her head on the ledge of her open window and shuts her eyes. The hair sticking out from underneath her hat flutters in the breeze, and I suddenly wish she was as comfortable out in this world as she is around me—that she could take that hat off and enjoy the wind and sunshine and water like everyone else.
“Just don’t fight it so much,” she says. “And show your softer side. If you start posting more songs like what you played this morning, I promise: you’ll get views, followers—and you won’t even need a fake friendship with me to make it happen. Hell...it might even get you some girls.”
“Unless you’ve got a hundred clones out there, I could give a shit about what girls I do or don’t get.”
Her smile should be a comfort, but it’s too tight. Almost forced, like she doesn’t quite believe me.
Maybe that’s not the kind of thing she wants to hear from somebody who’s just a good time. Or a means to an end. Namely, the end of the arrangement neither of us dares mention anymore. I’m not sure I want to find out why.
“All right, well,” I say, clearing my throat, “how do I embrace it, without glomming onto it?”
“Just talk about it casually when it comes up. Like...okay, when did you learn guitar?”
I think. “When I was seven or eight, maybe.”
“So you were on the show back then, yeah? You could share a quick story about playing guitar on set, at the beginning of an upload or something.”
“I never brought my guitar onto the set.”
Except for once—then never again.
Clara recoils a little at my tone, even though I didn’t mean to take one. “Okay,” she says slowly, “but you see my point: work it in wherever it feels natural. Don’t actively avoid talking about it. And, holy shit, you’ve got to stop telling fans who take selfies with you not to use the Chases hashtags.”
“Those tags are a nightmare. Nothing but screencaps and memes of the show.”
“Yeah, but people like them. And they end up tagging the photos anyway, so just let it happen. Same with all the interviews you do, where you get up and leave the second a reporter mentions the show. It doesn’t exactly paint you in the best light.”
“I asked you for a channel audit,” I tell her, “not to decimate my entire life. Christ.”
“They’re interconnected, Wes. Like it or not, the platform you have now is built on Cut to the Chases. People know your name because they knew Charlie Chase first. If you want your channel to succeed, or even just to get your music out there and do what you love? You have to play into their preconceived image of you, a little.”
“Is that what you do?” I challenge.
“I don’t get stopped half as much as you do, but—”
“Yeah, you do, Clara,” I laugh, trying not to sound as bitter as I suddenly feel.
“Are you kidding? That show was a household fixture during millions of childhoods. It still is. People recognize you way more.”
“Recognize, maybe. Stop? Gush over? Ask for photos and autographs? No. I’d wager it’s about the same amount.”
As we come up to the turnpike, Clara pulls her dress hem down to her knees. I watch her twist all her rings frontward.
Her head rests on the window ledge again as she studies me, silent.
“The difference is that you’re a rising star,” I tell her. “I’m a falling one. We just happen to be passing through the middle at the same time.”
Thirty-One
“Told you you’d love it here.”
“You were one-hundred percent correct.” I grab his wrist and pull him into another boutique. I haven’t bought much, but I love combing the shelves and admiring everything, just the same. “Do you hate it as much as you predicted?”
“Yep.” As the air conditioning cools our damp necks, I feel his hand press into the small of my back and guide me into a corner, behind some postcards where we get just enough privacy for a breath-stealing, knee-weakening kiss.
“But, as I also predicted,” he whispers when it’s over, “I love watching you love it.”
As strained as the car ride was, I have to admit that everything else to follow has been perfect. He bought me earrings I stopped to admire in a vintage store, kissed off all the sample gloss I tried in a pop-up boutique, then quietly smiled while I spent at least thirty minutes smelling every last candle in a shop that, according to the owner, curated the finest farmhouse-chic goods out there.
“Bet you’ll never find a fifty-dollar candle anywhere in a real farmhouse,” he whispered to me, as soon as the woman walked away. “Especially one that smells like…ew, rosewood and fig?” He took a whiff, then shoved it back at me while I laughed.
Most of the time, though, he simply watched me, with a soft kind of reverence that made me blush every time I noticed it.
But now the tension’s back.
A couple on the other side of the store stares through the racks, whispering. They definitely recognize him.
“Don’t fight it,” I remind him.
“They’re not coming up asking for an autograph,” he hisses, taking a pincushion from my hands, tossing it onto a shelf, and pulling me out the door. “They’re just fucking staring.”
“So? Let them. Who cares?”
“Says the girl in full-makeup and a hat when she gets in the pool.”
On the sidewalk, I jerk my wrist out of his grasp. It hurts my arm more than it shocks him, but I don’t care.
It feels like years since I’ve felt this towards him, even if it’s only been a couple days: rushing, hot anger.
He drags his hand down his face and sighs skyward, eyes shut. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Not so sure you didn’t.”
“Clara, it wasn’t—”
Behind us, the shop door rings. We turn as the couple who was staring shuffles past...but not before the guy snaps a photo with his phone, far less subtle than he thinks.
Wes gapes at him. “You fucking serious, dude?”
I grab his arm as he starts after the guy, but he’s out of my hold faster than I tore out of his. “Wes, don’t.”
He slaps the guy’s phone from his hands and bunches his shirt up in his fists; the girl calls for help while I try to pry Wes off him.
Wes is still screaming at him, calling him more names and cursing a streak bluer than any I’ve heard from him before, which is really saying something. The guy yells back, but he’s not much of a match for that anger. I’m not sure anything is.
Then I see the girl getting out her phone, aiming it at them. Readying to hit Record.
“Wes.” I
slap his cheek. “She’s gonna film this, Wes, let’s go.”
His eyes slide to me, then pivot to the phone she still doesn’t quite have ready, before I see his hands loosen on the guy’s shirt. His feet resume their contact with planet Earth, and his lungs resume their regularly scheduled breathing.
I’ve already got Wes by the wrist, dragging him down this adorable street like a kid who just ran off in a grocery store.
As soon as we round the corner, I spin to face him. “Nice. Good to see you took every word I said to heart.”
“Those weren’t fans, Clara. They were fucking stalkers.”
“Okay, don’t flatter yourself. They were....” I lick my lips and study the asphalt like it’s got the word inscribed in a manhole cover. No luck.
“I get this shit all the time.” Wes nudges past me, digging for the car keys. “You have no idea what it’s like. That’s why—sorry, not sorry—your jolly little spiel about ‘embracing my past’ isn’t gonna fucking fly. People want to see Charlie Chase, they can get the hell out of my face and log onto Hulu. Fuck them.”
My heart’s in my throat.
But fire’s in my stomach. And for once, I think I’d rather let that win, instead of my common sense, starry-eyed morals, excessive empathy…whatever it is that makes Georgia tell me I’m “too soft.”
“So did you really want my advice, Wes, or do you just want to advance your career? Is that what all of this is?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he asks, freezing with his hands in both pockets, still on the hunt for his keys. “What’s ‘all of this’ supposed to mean?”
“You and me. Us. This entire trip. This entire....”
Relationship. Say it.
I can’t say it.
Is that what we have? Shouldn’t I know that answer by now?
Something beeps nearby, startling me. It’s the rental car. I didn’t even realize we were beside it.
“Get in.”
“No,” I snap, before doing it anyway, because I can’t think of what else to do.
“Okay,” he says, laughing through his exhale as soon as the doors are shut, “I don’t even know where to begin with what you just said.”
My hands are shaking. I sit on them.
His hands outline the wheel, sliding on it the same way they’ve slid over my skin so many times before. Too many times. Not enough times.
“You think I’m using you to boost my career?”
The hurt in his voice rings through his fury. I refuse to let it break my heart.
“You have before.”
“Yeah,” he spits, “with a few stupid posts.”
And lunch with your mother, I think, that just happened to get captured by some paparazzi. I’ve prayed nonstop Georgia won’t find the photos on New Set.
“If I was that much of a fame whore, I’d take the easy route and do the reunion. Not latch onto a Youtube makeup blogger.”
“Then why did you ask me for an audit?”
“Believe me, I’m sure as hell regretting that now. And you know what? I don’t think this”—he motions to me, I guess to indicate my entire outburst—“is because I decided your little ‘embrace it’ speech won’t work. I think it’s because you still can’t believe someone would actually want you. It’s about your insecurities.”
“Insecurities? You really want to take this thing down that road, Wes? I’m not the one who can’t even talk about one damn show I did, years ago—”
“Thinking your sister is so much better than you,” he shouts over me, until I just plain run out of lung capacity to properly shout back, “because she happens to not have this one tiny flaw.”
“Right. The tiny flaw that’s only controlled my whole life until now. The insignificant little habit that had kids calling me a freak whenever it got really bad, and guys calling me ugly. The thing that pushes people away from me, and right at my sister.”
“Or,” he says, “the thing that makes you push people away.”
Wes cranks the ignition. The rumble underneath us calms me, but not much.
We’re silent until we’re about a mile from Theo’s place. When I roll my window down, he rolls it back up.
“No. We’re talking about this. I can’t believe you think I’m only with you because of my channel, or to get media attention.”
“You were only my ‘friend with the promise of becoming more’ for media attention,” I remind him. The way he shuts right the hell up should be satisfying. It isn’t.
At last, we’re back. The car ticks patiently in the silence of the driveway after Wes cuts the engine.
“Look, Clara,” he says. He tongues his cheek and runs his thumbnails in the grooves of the steering wheel. “That wasn’t how I made it sound.”
“Just business,” I manage, hating that the tears have officially caught up with me. “Right?”
Just a good time.
Just a great fuck.
Just cold, hard business in a world where it’s screw, or be screwed.
And when it comes to Wes Durham...I don’t know why I keep letting myself fall face-first into the latter.
“Don’t,” he says quickly, when I reach for my door handle. I follow his eyes to the side of the house.
Van and Juniper are talking—yelling, actually, from the looks of it—in the ornamental grasses sweeping against the large glass window to the dining room.
Maybe it’s a thing with these guys. Bring girls to the beach for a few fun nights in their uncle’s fancy house. Looks like Juniper and I are learning some big lessons today.
Don’t trust a Durham. No matter how smooth the lines or swoon-worthy the eyes. No matter what they do to us in the dark.
“Was it just business for you?” Wes asks, suddenly.
I tear my eyes away from Van and Juniper to study him. Instead of messing with the steering wheel, he’s now clipping and unclipping his watch.
“I mean, I could easily sit here and accuse you of the same thing—that you only got with me to get your email back.”
“Wow.” Forget the audience: I need air.
As soon as they hear my door open, Van and Juniper start and vanish deeper into the side yard.
I turn back to Wes. “If that was my plan, I would’ve blown you the second I entered your apartment. All right?”
“Hey, just proving a point.” He bites his lip again, raising his eyebrows at me as he climbs out, too. “If I’m a whore for fame, why couldn’t you be….”
The heat of the driveway rises to meet me. Choke me.
“Say it.”
He shifts his jaw, shaking his head.
“Come on, Wes, say it.”
Even when I’m right up against him, he won’t look at me. “No. I realized halfway through that it’s not what I wanted to say.”
“That I’m a whore for that email?” I prompt, ducking my head so he’ll have no goddamn choice but to look at me. “That I’m a whore for my own fucking email message that you knew wasn’t meant to go to you? That you held onto, all this time, to manipulate me into doing whatever you wanted?”
Finally, his eyes lock with mine.
“I don’t have the email, Clara.”
His breath is ragged. He pushes his hair out of his face, leaving his hands behind his neck as he shuts his eyes.
My pulse embeds itself in my eardrums. My feet move, putting distance between us the rest of me can’t make.
“I deleted it,” he says, “about five minutes after it got into my inbox.”
Thirty-Two
When I look at her, her eyes travel between mine.
“You’re lying,” she whispers.
Before I can reach for her, she turns and storms into the house.
“Clara.” I catch up with her on the stairs. “I’m telling you the truth.”
“Why the hell,” she laughs bitterly, halting on the landing, “should I believe you?”
I hold my tongue until we’re in the room, door shut, even though I
’m positive anyone left in this house can hear us just fine through the air vents.
“Because I’m crazy about you.”
She stops, but only for a moment, before tossing her suitcase on the floor and ransacking her drawers. Everything gets thrown in, heaped wherever it fits and shoved down where it doesn’t. It’s the exact opposite of how she packed my suitcase before we left.
“Already fell for that once,” she says softly.
No: just quietly. Low and held close. But not soft.
Not darling, with syrup behind it and the edges filed down because that’s who Clara is, even when she’s snarky. Even when she’s spitting poison, it’s the sweetest death you could hope to have.
But this...it cuts me to the quick.
“Forget the cabana.” I bend down, knocking her suitcase shut and pulling her towards me. “Forget everything I ever told you before this week.”
“Not sure I want to make it that convenient for you to keep lying to me.”
“Why are you so terrified at the thought of someone falling for you? Huh?” I grab her shoulders. “Because your dad left? Because up until now, you’ve only seen guys fall for your sister? Or because they start to fall for you, then they see this”—I slip her hat off her head; she flinches, holding her breath—“and aren’t man enough to see past it?”
Eyes shut, she holds out her hand. “Give me my hat.”
“Tell me why you don’t trust me. After all the things we’ve told each other that we’ve never told anyone...after making each other feel better than anyone else has—how can you not trust me?”
Her eyes open. They’re glassy, but flare when she locks them on mine.
“How can I trust someone,” she says, “who either pretended he kept my email...or who’s lying about deleting it now?”
She pulls back, slipping herself from my hold as she sits on her heels.
My hands drop. I take a breath. “Do you know why I pretended?”
Already, I can tell there’s no way in hell she’ll believe me. And I can’t even blame her.
But I’m still going to try.