by Tash Skilton
“Look, I . . .” I’m not sure what to say. We are firmly in uncharted territory here. “I’m here if you want to talk,” I say unconvincingly.
“I do,” she says, and I see some color return to her face along with her composure. When she speaks again, she’s back to her regular bored, snarky voice. “I want to talk about your fuck buddy and why I had to find the news out from a group text instead of social media, like God intended. Geez, Nina. You really need to reactivate your profiles.”
I stare at her. “Uh. Didn’t some stranger on the internet just totally shatter your confidence?”
She ignores me. “So. How is he?”
“Who? Sebastian? He’s fine.”
She rolls his eyes. “No, I don’t mean, how is he doing? I mean how is he? As a loverrrr. Spill.”
“Ew, no,” I say, though I’m pretty sure a faint blush is creeping up my cheeks as I’m imagining two days ago, when he surprised me in the shower. There’s something very delicious, and very hot, about being in the beginning of a relationship and already having the convenience of living together.
“I knew this time it was finally going to happen,” Sayeh says smugly. “Now that he’s the convenient one.”
My erotic flashback dissipates in a cloud of imaginary shower sex steam. “What do you mean?”
She shrugs. “He’s your roommate, right? It’s easier to just be together and get all the sexual tension out. I mean, I don’t know what’s going to happen after, once you reach your four-month time limit. But for now, it makes sense for you.”
The waiter comes over and places our drinks on the table. Sayeh immediately lifts hers up and gives me a wry “Beh sala-mati.” But I’m frozen.
“That’s a really shitty thing to say,” I reply.
She takes a sip as she nods slowly. “Maybe. But it’s honest.”
I shake my head, pick up my own drink, and take a swig. She is exhausting.
“Baba told me he ran into you,” she says.
“Yeah. Now, you want to tell me how I’m in the wrong there? Considering I was ten when he left and he was the adult?” It boggles my mind that they talk so regularly, that she would know about our run-in just last night.
“Maman was never the same after he left,” Sayeh says.
“No shit,” I say bitterly.
“You guys thought I was too little and maybe too self-absorbed to see it, but I saw. How everything made her cry for years. How she kept those wedding pictures of them up.”
“I hated those pictures,” I say.
“I know.”
“Why would you keep up a shrine to someone who shattered you?” I say.
“Because before he shattered her, he made her complete,” Sayeh says simply.
“And that’s precisely why it hurt so much,” I agree. “But she prolonged it. She could have chosen to hate him instead of continuing to love him, to pine for him.”
“Could she? Can you choose to stop loving someone?” Sayeh asks.
“Sure you can,” I say, finishing off my inordinately expensive drink way sooner than I expected. “I’ve done it plenty of times.”
Sayeh looks at me. “Someone you loved. Really, truly loved?”
This night is a mess. I want another drink but then again, more alcohol probably won’t make it better. Sayeh and I are on thin ice as is. Sebastian and I are on . . . not thin ice exactly but something murky that’s making me feel uncomfortable. I should probably just go and sleep it off.
I check my watch. It’s eight p.m. It should take me an hour to get home, which is around the time I told Sebastian I’d be back.
“I should go,” I say as I dig into my purse for my wallet.
“It’s an expensed meal. Don’t worry about it,” Sayeh says. “Do you need a ride?”
Yes, but also, no. I just want to be independent for once and call an Uber . . . a regular, no-strings-attached Uber, who can silently drive me home and not judge me or my life.
“I’m okay,” I say. “By the way, I like the script font. Etched into the powder. I know you didn’t ask for my opinion. . . .”
But Sayeh is looking up at me in surprise. She opens up her folder again, flips through the pages, stops at the one I just described, and points to it. “This one?”
I nod.
“Yeah,” she says, with a small smile. “That’s my favorite too.”
CHAPTER 33
SEBASTIAN
A few nights later, Nina and I are settling in with some take-away on the couch—I’m too tired to cook, and she’s too tired to taste anything that hasn’t been vetted—when her phone dings with a news alert. She glances at it and her body goes rigid.
“Holy shit.” Nina scrolls rapidly. “A guy was arrested outside Vasquez Studios this afternoon.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It says he was caught trying to break into one of the cars in the lot, looking for scripts or something. He had a crowbar and a knife.”
A horrified laugh explodes from my mouth. “Whaaaaat?”
Her eyes get bigger. “Apparently, he’s been camping out overnight, or I guess, hiding out to be more accurate, in one of the rock formations with a pair of binoculars and a notebook, spying on the cars that come and go, writing down their license plate numbers.”
“That could’ve been my car he tried to break into! What if I’d had the briefcase attached? Would he have tried to chop off my hand?”
“Oh my God.” Nina slides into my lap and curls herself around me.
I pat her back, feeling dizzy. “It’s okay, because they caught him, right?” I keep the next thought to myself, that there’s no way he’s the only one.
Nina kisses my neck and hugs me even tighter. “Is it worth risking your safety for this show?”
If I hadn’t gotten this job, Nina and I might never have crossed paths again. We’d be two ex-friends living in the same city without knowing it. But we did, and we’re together, we’re in love, and we’re both working at the show that created us, really. It has to be worth it.
Although, if I could change one thing, I wouldn’t have disappeared on Sam and Matty. I have to pay better attention to that stuff, yet without insulting Nina in the process. Our argument’s been put to rest, as far as I can tell, but it could’ve just as easily erupted. It’s a fine line I’m walking lately, and I’ve never been good at balance.
* * *
We doom-scrolled Twitter, TMZ, and various fan sites long past midnight, looking for updates on the would-be thief, but there was little trustworthy information out there.
My text to Janine received a low-key, Don’t worry, stuff like this happens all the time; the public doesn’t usually hear about it.
Shockingly, this knowledge didn’t make me worry less.
I do my best not to wake Nina at five-thirty a.m., but as I’m slipping out of bed, she panic-flails in her sleep. “Huh? Bees? Leeches?”
“It’s okay. Go back to bed. I’m getting an early start,” I whisper.
I haven’t been to the gym since Nina and I got together over a month ago.
At first, I was cocky about it, like, “Who needs exercise? We’re burning calories every night, hardy-har,” until it dawned on me that burning calories wasn’t why I went to the gym. Short-lived catalog modeling notwithstanding, my workouts were about my mental health, not my abs.
I feel sluggish and groggy all the time. Nina and I stay up later than we should most nights, “burning calories” or watching TV because we both have a list of shows from the past five years that we want to see the other person’s reactions to. In theory, it’s a wonderful way to spend our time, if we didn’t have other obligations or responsibilities, but the reality is my sleepless nights are wreaking havoc on my ability to function; and that’s with the three cups of coffee I down like medicine throughout the morning and the two cups I choke back in the afternoon, guaranteeing I’ll be up late again each night.
The cycle of caffeine abuse.
I’ve reached the dessert portion of my cookbook brainstorming, so it’s unhealthy sweets and treats 24/7 to boot.
Operating on four hours of sleep, I nearly drop a fifteen-pound free weight on my foot in the gym, which prompts visions of me in a hospital bed, leg in a cast, zonked out in a private room. How luxurious would that be, to enjoy a deep, fulfilling snooze all by myself?
Wait, WTF?
The implications of such a bizarre fantasy shake me from my stupor. If a smashed limb sounds preferable to my current situation, that’s a blaring indication I need to make changes.
I can’t shake the feeling that if Nina’s awake, I should be, too, basking in our togetherness. I don’t want to miss a single instant with her, not when I lost her for so long. Not when I could conceivably lose her again at any moment.
Maybe I can convince her to hit the sack early tonight, at least.
The possibility calms me down just long enough for the universe—as manifested through my iPhone—to get wind of my tranquility and beep with a calendar reminder: We’ve got tickets for a screening at the Arclight tonight.
* * *
“Fuck, it’s burned.” I dump the blackened monkey bread into the trash and slam the oven door shut. “I have to start over.”
“We’re going to miss the movie.” Nina’s dolled up, standing by the door.
“I know, but I promised Matty I’d have his good-luck monkey bread for him tonight. It’s his traditional good luck snack before his baseball game tomorrow.”
Nina vibrates with impatience. “The bread doesn’t have magical powers. He’ll understand. Come on, let’s get going.”
“I can’t.” I tug my oven mitts off and face her. “Can we catch it over the weekend instead?”
“This is the only time the screenwriter’s doing a Q&A, so . . . I’ll report back.” She opens the door to leave.
I wipe the sweat off my brow with my wrist and follow her, propping the door open with my foot. “You’re still going?”
“Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to it all week.”
“Okay. Have a good time, I guess.”
“We’re allowed to do things on our own, you know,” she says.
“Right, but then how come you were upset when I made plans with Matty and Sam?”
“I wasn’t upset you made plans.”
“You kind of were, Nina.”
“Can we talk about this when I get back?”
I keep my voice soft and steady. “I’m really asking.”
“Okay, CliffsNotes version, I’m not upset that you want to make your friend good-luck sugar bombs or whatever. I’m annoyed that you let it take precedence over plans we’d already made. If you had told me you’d be busy tonight, I’d have known not to get you a ticket.”
“I thought I could juggle both things.”
She squeezes my hand. “It’s fine, I’ll see you when I get back.”
The next day after work, I purchase a fancy stationery set from the Beverly Hills store where Millie bought her pen, along with a wax seal kit for Nina.
Presenting her with it feels different, though. It’s not a spontaneous gesture born of affection or the desire to see her smile. It’s an apology, and a blatant one at that.
“Another gift?” Nina says. She sounds . . . weary. “That’s nice of you, but you don’t need to be blowing your paychecks on me like that.”
“I saw it and thought of you. It was on sale. No big deal.” Lie. Lie. Lie.
She places the stationery on the bookshelf and tucks her hand in mine to lead me to the spare bed. It’s more of a storage unit at this point, so we shift books and other detritus aside to make room so we can sit.
“What’s going on with you? Last night you were so worried about that—bread.”
The gap in her cadence tells me a choice adjective was removed.
“You know Matty would’ve understood, don’t you?” she presses, her brown eyes searching mine.
I look away, because I can’t have this conversation and look at her. “I have to be careful, that’s all.”
“You do a lot of things for them, grocery shopping and cooking, and that’s great of you, but what do you think would happen if you didn’t try so hard?”
“I don’t have so many gobs of friends that I can get rid of them and grow new ones, okay? The ones I’ve got mean the world to me. You of all people should know that.”
“I do. I just feel like we make plans and you agree to them but then the day arrives and you’re all discombobulated, like it’s so perplexing that—what?”
I tuck a silky strand of her hair behind her ear. “I love that you used the word ‘discombobulated.’”
“Yeah, well, I’m a full-on wunderkind.”
“I’ve never doubted it for a second.”
I drop to the floor and hug her around the waist, pressing my face into her belly. She strokes my hair and I lean into her touch.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur.
It’s my most frequent phrase around her lately, and I hate it; that I’ve done so many things that apparently require apologies, and also that I can’t seem to stop.
We live together, spend pretty much every night and weekend together, yet I feel with each passing day we’re drifting further apart, snapping at each other, or refusing to have certain conversations. The problem is there’s nowhere to retreat, regroup, or lick our wounds.
Maybe the edict is true: When the highs are this high, the lows are going to be correspondingly low. But lurching from one extreme to another is exhausting.
Nina slowly unbuttons my shirt cuff and rolls up my sleeve to reveal the handcuff marks from the briefcase. She presses her lips to the raised, red bracelet, tracing the circle, her lips like aloe, and I close my eyes.
“You don’t have to try so hard with me, either,” she says quietly.
CHAPTER 34
NINA
The next few days feel normal again, almost. We’re blowing through seasons of old shows on Netflix and Hulu every night. Sebastian refrains from buying me any new gifts, which is a good thing. The stationery set remains unopened on the bookshelf and I wonder if I can eventually press him to return it, but I also don’t want to bring it up and ruin the little bubble we’ve created again.
Because things also feel as fragile as a bubble, as if one wrong move and our rainbow-colored orb will burst, leaving us with nothing. I feel uneasy, but I try to channel it into something more productive. Per Lou Trewoski’s advice, I’m working on a spec pilot—a sitcom about the disastrous behind-the-scenes world of an epic sci-fi/fantasy show reboot. I mean, they say write what you know, don’t they?
This leaves me with an excuse to retreat into the office for hours at a time and, when I do, I can feel myself relax, release tension until my body slumps down in the old orange desk chair. It’s tension I don’t want to closely examine. Sebastian is the best friend I’ve ever had. I’m crazy about him and insanely attracted to him. This should be perfect. This is perfect. Inevitably, I end my train of thoughts right there and save the rest of the drama for the page.
Tonight, we have a date to go see Matty play baseball. His girlfriend and Sam are also going. I think it’s a little bit of a make-good for Sebastian acting like they weren’t my friends too. I’m looking forward to hanging out with all of them, and Matty’s girlfriend, whom I haven’t met yet.
Maritza ends up being really nice, her baby bump just barely showing, and her bronze skin offset by a casual black dress and white Converse. When the boys leave to get us snacks, I start up a conversation.
“So how are you feeling?” I ask.
“Pretty good,” she says, lightly touching her belly. “Now that the first trimester is over. You know . . .”
I really don’t know but I nod anyway, then try to change the subject to something I can contribute to. “Sebastian tells me you’re a teacher?”
She nods. “Kindergarten.”
“My mom taught second grade,” I say. “So you must really
like kids?”
“I do. Though . . . I have a feeling they might be easier to deal with when they’re not yours.”
I laugh. “That’s what my mom always said.”
“You guys thinking about having kids one day?”
“Who?” I ask, caught off-guard. “Oh, you mean me and Sebastian?”
She gives me a confused smile. “Um, yeah.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say, waving my hand. “We’ve only been together a little over a month.”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” she says, looking flustered. “I thought Matty said you’d been together almost ten years.”
“Oh, no. We’ve known each other that long. But we were just friends. . . .” And then we were nothing. And now we are . . . everything?
I’m luckily diverted from having to explain too much by the arrival of Sam, who’s gotten back before Sebastian.
“For my favorite ex,” he says, handing me my container of crinkle fries.
I snort. “Thanks.”
“Wait. Did you guys date too?” Maritza asks, looking between us. I can tell her perception of what she thought was Matty’s normal group of friends has suddenly been thrown for a loop.
I laugh. “Only for a minute.”
“Excuse me,” Sam says. “But it was ten days.”
“Ten days of sticking our tongues down each other’s throats,” I add.
I hear a throat clearing behind me and look to see Sebastian carrying an armful of hot dogs.
“Um . . . what are you guys talking about?” Sebastian asks.
“Freshman year,” Sam says as he reaches out to help Sebastian distribute the rest of the food. “We were giving Maritza some context.”
Sebastian eyes me with a look I can’t quite recognize. Is he actually . . . mad? Jealous? I turn to Maritza to clarify further. “Anyway, once we had a couple of conversations . . .”
“Once we came up for air,” Sam says, looking over at Sebastian and chuckling.
“We pretty much realized we should just be friends,” I finish. “And then we all became friends.”
“I see,” Maritza says. “Until recently. When you and Sebastian became something more?”