The Avoiding Series Boxset

by K. A. Linde

  “You…what?” he asked, nearly dropping the phone.

  “He’s ruined it all. He’s blacklisted me across the entire design market. I’ve been termed unhirable. I had a job offer for modeling in the fall, and they retracted it! They actually retracted the fucking offer!” she cried, unable to believe what she was saying. How could he be so cruel?

  “I hate to say this,” Frederick said, suddenly serious, “but…he didn’t ruin it all. You did, baby girl.”

  “What?” she asked, standing straight up off of the park bench in astonishment.

  “You walked out on him after all of that? Sweetheart, I’d do way worse!” he told her honestly. “If he’s going through the effort to fuck you over so thoroughly, he had it for you, and he had it bad. I’d go through hell and high water to make sure you were miserable without me.”

  “Fuck!” she cried angrily. “Can’t you just fucking sympathize with me? Why do you have to be so logical?”

  “Look, bitch, if you can’t take the heat, get out of the fucking kitchen!”

  “Fine! I will!” she yelled through the phone.

  “Whatever. You’ll come crawling back for more. I’m the only man you ever keep coming back to.”

  She felt that like a slap to the face. She needed to remind herself never to fight with Frederick again. He fought dirty, and she was too sensitive right now. What he was saying hurt! And all she wanted to do was stop feeling.

  “Just wait until you see what I do to my apartment,” she growled into the phone.

  “Find another designer to clean up your mess!” he snapped, the double meaning clear in his words. He hung up before she could get the last word in.

  Of all the things she had been expecting from Frederick, anger and judgment were not among them.

  Without him, whom else could she talk to about this? How could she make them understand that she had lost something special to her…something that had really mattered to her? People didn’t think anything mattered to her besides drinking and random hook-ups. How could she prove them wrong now? The industry wouldn’t let her stick with modeling, and it would all look like just another thing that Chyna quickly got tired of.

  She sat back on the bench, her anger seeping out of her like sand through a sieve. There was one person. One person who would understand what she had given up to get to where she was in modeling. One person who would understand what she was losing by giving it up.

  Her hands were trembling as suspense stole her stomach. This shouldn’t be so difficult. She used to talk to him every day.

  She waited for the line to click over to voicemail. He wasn’t going to answer. Just another disappointment. She heard him clearing his voice before anything else. It was so familiar that she nearly smiled.

  “Hey,” he muttered into the phone. “Now really isn’t a good time. Can I call you back?”

  She sighed. “Can we talk?”

  “I…uh, do you…think that’s a good idea? We kind of…” he trailed off.

  “Please,” she begged. “I’m not asking for much, just some of your time.”

  He paused, releasing a sigh that said he was going to give in. “When you didn’t call after you got back, I thought it was over,” he said softly.

  “Isn’t that what you want?” she asked, her desperation palpable.

  “How could you think I wanted that?”

  “You ended it.”

  “You were leaving.”

  She sighed, thinking about everything that had happened since she left New York. A lot of it was pretty fucked-up, but a lot of it wasn’t. She loved modeling. Wasn’t it better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all? Even if it hurt like hell?

  “I’m glad I did,” she finally responded softly, “but not that I lost you in the process.”

  There. She had admitted it.

  PRESENT

  Chyna watched Alexa walk away from her town car toward the airport. After her conversation with Adam earlier, she had felt a lot better about what had happened to her. She had wanted to tell Alexa about what had happened with Marco, Cassandra, Frederick—with all of them—but she had so much else to deal with right now.

  Going to this wedding was a terrible idea, and as much as Chyna had tried to talk her out of it, she couldn’t reason with Alexa. If Chyna had unloaded all of her problems on Alexa today, that would have been really bad for her friend. Chyna wanted to tell her, but timing was key. It could wait until she got back. It was just one week.

  Plus, Alexa was hiding things from her anyway. She wouldn’t tell her whom she had been secretly seeing. She thought she was so clever, but Chyna saw it all over her that she was into someone new. Eventually, she would get it out of her, but perhaps, that was a conversation for later as well. After that godforsaken wedding.

  Adam would be off work soon, and he had promised to come over to talk. She was picking up Chinese food, his favorite take-out. It felt really normal, and she kind of liked it. She needed some normal in her life after the whirlwind that had taken over.

  Carl drove her back to her place, and a weight seemed to settle on her shoulders as she took the elevator to the top floor. She’d had to keep it together for Alexa, but she couldn’t keep the act up. What had happened was eating away at her slowly but surely.

  She had officially hit rock bottom.

  Before this, she had never really known what it felt like. She had lost Adam of her own volition. Hope still sprung up between them, but she didn’t know what would happen once they started talking. Would the old feelings blossom again? Or, would he realize what she had known all along—that she wasn’t good enough for him? It seemed fitting, considering everything else.

  She had lost Marco. She had lost the Corsa contract. She had lost modeling all together. Frederick was mad at her, not that she thought that would last.

  Chyna hated sounding like the poor, little rich girl, but she had never put herself out there before long enough to let everything fall apart. It was an eye-opening experience to…fail.

  She heaved in a deep breath and entered her apartment. She stopped in her tracks at the living room. How had she forgotten that she was tearing the place apart? She and Frederick had gotten into a lover’s spat last week, and the place was still only halfway back to normal. She had threatened to take it back to its earlier form of distaste, but now, it felt dramatic. Staring at her messy apartment only made all the fresh memories wash over her.

  What had she been thinking?

  She had a lot of work to do.

  As she waited for Adam, she placed the take-out in the refrigerator and did something she should have done a long time ago. She walked through her living room and back into her massive closet. Hanging in the back, hidden behind hundreds of other garments, was the million-dollar dress.

  She removed it from the hanger and carried it back into the living room. She grabbed an empty box from her latest purchase that was discarded on her floor and placed it on her black leather sofa. She smiled forlornly at the dress as she fingered the precious material. That part of her life was over, and it was time to let go of the past. She sighed heavily, letting it all out.

  Carefully folding the dress, she placed it into the box, sealed it, and wrote Marco’s address on the shipping label. Once she mailed it tomorrow, that would be the end of it.

  Satisfied with her decision, she went about actually cleaning her apartment before Adam’s arrival. It wasn’t dirty. She still had housekeepers after all, but she was tired of the clutter in her life. She took the bamboo blinds and a few other random environmental pieces she had acquired on a whim and hid them in a side closet. She would get rid of them properly later. She grabbed a stack of old framed black-and-white photographs from the same closet, happy to place them back on the wall where they belonged.

  The collage she had built over years from collecting pictures of obscure locals finally came back into shape. She hung up the next one, adjusting it to make sure it was straight, and then grabbed o
ne of the last pictures. As she stood up and glanced at the picture, her breath caught, and she nearly dropped the picture.

  She had completely forgotten that she had brought back framed photographs from Milan. When she had returned to New York, she had been furious for even using all that space in her suitcase for them, so she had hidden them in that closet. She was a collector, and even then, leaving the pictures had seemed like a waste.

  But, staring at the pictures now was a reminder of what she had given up by leaving. She sighed, tracing the outline of the frame. Maybe she needed them now to remember how far she had come.

  The first one that she was holding in her hand was of the Naviglio Grande canal. All she saw when she looked at it was a blue Bugatti. She placed it on a nail in the wall, wanting to cling on to the remaining happy memories of Milan. The second one was from the coast in Genoa. She didn’t remember which day Marco had taken this one. She just remembered the happiness of spending time with people whose company she enjoyed. That one followed suit, and on the wall, it went. The final one she picked up was a photo shoot she would forever remember. It was taken from the window of Marco’s bedroom with the city skyline captured perfectly. He had hated it because it blurred around the edges, but she loved it because it illuminated the stars.

  She swallowed hard, deciding she couldn’t hang that picture. It wouldn’t be right. She had left her star in Italy, and now, she looked at a new night sky. Marco had made that as blatantly clear as her letter, and she was returning the dress. Her last link to him.

  The picture was replaced back into its hiding place in the closet where it belonged, and she finished up the rest of the cleaning. When the doorbell rang an hour later, the place wasn’t a hundred percent back to normal, but it was as close as it was going to get by herself. She had threatened to tear it apart to upset Frederick, but all she had done was put it back together herself. She needed to do that to the rest of her life now.

  Chyna opened the door and immediately burst out laughing. It felt good. “Is that Chinese?” she demanded.

  Adam shrugged, clearly not understanding her laughter. “I thought you might be hungry,” he said with a weak smile.

  She rolled her eyes with a smile on her face. “I am. Come on,” she said, walking through the foyer and into the kitchen.

  Adam followed behind her and placed the food on the island just as she pulled Chinese take-out from the refrigerator.

  Seeing that they had ordered the same thing, Adam burst out laughing as well. “Guess we both wanted the same thing.”

  “Well, yours is still warm,” she said, snatching a box of rice and some chicken concoction out of his hands. “So, I’m calling dibs.”

  “I assumed so,” he said, taking a seat on a bar stool and popping open his own take-out boxes.

  Chyna ripped open the chopsticks provided and dug into her meal. She was surprisingly hungry after such an exhausting day. Oh yeah, she hadn’t actually eaten her salad during her meeting with Cassandra. No wonder. Had she had anything today?

  They ate in silence for the most part. He chatted briefly about work, and she told him about Alexa’s plan in Atlanta. They both laughed at that one, knowing how her plans normally went. It was nice. Normal. Comfortable.

  She swallowed as much as she could eat, happy to be eating real food again. Her diet had been delicious but small, very small, and specific in Italy. Plus, they didn’t have Chinese take-out like this.

  Neither of them seemed ready to move on with the conversation. Even after they were both stuffed and Chyna had put the leftovers back into her refrigerator, they seemed hesitant as to where the conversation should go…where it should even begin.

  “Soo...” he said, trailing off.

  “Yeah. Soo…” she copied.

  “How was Italy?” he finally asked.

  Chyna chewed on her bottom lip and fiddled with her chopsticks. “A dream come true,” she told him.

  “Hey, it’s just me,” he said, reaching out and extracting the chopsticks from her grasp. “You can talk to me.”

  “No, really,” she said, dropping her hands onto the island. “It was a dream come true. Everything I wanted and more. I was actually great at something…beyond great at something.”

  “Then, why do you seem so down? How could it be everything you wanted?” he asked softly.

  She looked down and away from his probing eyes. She didn’t want to tell him, but isn’t that why she had asked to talk to him? She had been thinking about him before she even left Marco. And she had been an emotional wreck after they had broken up. At the time she couldn’t even figure out why. She still didn’t know why…not really. Nothing had ever hit her so hard. Except this. Maybe worse than this.

  “Because I messed it all up… like I always do,” she whispered the last part glancing up nervously into his hazel eyes.

  “Why do you always say that? You don’t mess everything up,” he told her placing his hand on hers reassuringly.

  “Well, I messed this up. I can’t model anymore,” she told him. The words felt tragic coming out of her mouth. And every time she thought about it, she felt like someone had punched her in the gut knocking the breath out of her.

  “Why not? I thought you said you were great at it. Won’t people notice that? I sure noticed your picture all over the city,” he said with a fake cough to break eye contact.

  “Because I…I, God!” she cried dropping her face into her hands. “That picture is the whole problem!”

  Adam sighed, reaching across the island and raising her chin with his hand. “I wanted you to be happy when you left. You thought it was the right thing, and I wanted to believe you. I thought when that picture was up all over the city that it had all happened for a reason. Now, you’re telling me that it didn’t?” he asked, trying to put the pieces together.

  Her bottom lip quivered as she stared up at him. How could she make him understand what had happened? “It did until I left.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to admit the truth. “Because I was scared.”

  His resolve crumbled at her admission. “What could scare you? You’re fearless. You charge into every situation head on ready to conquer the world.”

  “You think so?” she asked feeling very small in that moment.

  “I know so. You scare me sometimes with how you react to situations,” he told her. “And sometimes—I want to be more like you.”

  “You do?” she asked her brows furrowing.

  “Yes, Chyna. So what were you afraid of?”

  She swallowed trying to absorb everything he had just told her. He thought she was fearless. He thought she conquered situations. She had always thought the opposite. It was easier not to get attached, not to have anything she obsessed over, not to feel anything really. That way, at least, she never felt this.

  She turned her head away from him and looked out in her living room. Taking a deep breath, she finally answered him, “Failing.”

  “Everyone fails.”

  “Not me,” she told him.

  “Never?”

  “No. Never,” she said. “I’ve never put myself out there to fail. So I left, because I didn’t want to face the alternative. Then when I got here and saw the ads, I started seeing how much I messed up by not giving it a chance. Now I can’t model anymore. He blacklisted me,” she whispered the last part.

  “He?” Adam prompted.

  “Marco,” she said, meeting his probing gaze.

  “Ah, the fashion designer,” he said as if he knew where this was going.

  She took a deep breath and plunged forward. “We were together in Italy.”

  He nodded, pursing his lips. “I figured.”

  She cringed slightly at his reaction. She knew it would be there. “And, I left him without a good-bye.”

  “But, you think you made the right choice?” he asked.

  She bit her lip, thinking about the question. Leaving Marco, in the
end, was the right thing, but the consequences…that was a different story. “I know I did.”

  “And, it’s over?” he asked the loaded question but the easier one for her.

  “Yes,” she told him without hesitation. It was very over. “But, now I can’t model. All because I left.”

  Adam sighed, standing and coming around the island to wrap his arms around her. She turned to face him, burying her face into his shoulder. He stroked her hair back as she nuzzled into him, and he gave her the moment she needed to just feel.

  “Now,” he said, keeping his arms around her but pulling back so that he could see her face, “you are not a failure. Even if you were, it would be okay because you’re resilient. You bounce back. You are a beautiful, confident, accomplished young woman, and this one pitfall—because that’s all it is—will not break you. I promise.”

  A smile slowly returned to her face. “You think I’m beautiful?”

  “Was that ever a concern?” he asked, poking her in the sides playfully.

  “Maybe.”

  He gave her the look, and she giggled.

  “Fine. No.”

  “Are you feeling any better?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she admitted. She was actually feeling much better with him around. He alleviated so much of the weight that had been on her shoulders. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I’m glad you want me to be here…especially after the way I ended things,” he said sheepishly.

  “I thought you said it was…mutual,” she said. She hated that word.

  “You and I both know it wasn’t,” he admitted, dropping his arms from around her

  He walked out toward the living room. She followed him, surprised at how easily he had admitted that. She had been beating herself up about the break-up since it had happened. She had felt backed into a corner, having agreed with him accidentally. Yet, she couldn’t have imagined being in Milan with Marco while dating Adam. Things would have been very different, and maybe she needed her time away to see how she felt about him.

  The silence lingered between them. Chyna stood back and observed him before the photographs she had put up. Her heart ached as she watched him. Why had it taken her so long to see what was standing directly in front of her all this time?