by Anne Malcom
I grinned at her. “Glad to see you want to see me succeed for the right reasons,” I replied, sipping my martini. The brush of the bullet I’d just dodged was rather uncomfortable.
As was being less than honest with the only person who knew everything about me.
Who I never lied to.
She frowned down at the mess she made before shrugging it off. “What can I say? I’m an excellent friend.”
“I can’t say it’s exactly my chosen career,” I said, trying not to stare at my phone as I changed the subject, more to distract my errant mind than anything else. “I want to write about something more than clothes, shoes and makeup.”
Rosie’s eyes bulged. “What’s more than that?”
“Only social inequalities, people in power taking advantage of those not, the prices of healthcare?” I rattled off.
She waved her hand. “That would all be so….”
“Real?” I finished for her.
“Dull,” she said with narrowed eyes. “Haven’t we had enough of real in our lives, Luce?” Her eyes lost the teasing glint that was ever present, except in rare moments when she lowered her shields. “I don’t think you need to go looking for examples of how cruel life can be, letting that sink into that heart of yours that you like to think is so hard. We’ve done our quota. We’ve seen the ugly. We’ve survived it.” Her eyes watered. “Though not all of us.”
I reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “Three years tomorrow,” I said quietly.
It was the whole reason we were here at Laura’s Maye’s bar at sunset, at her favorite table, overlooking the ocean. We didn’t do anything on the day. We weren’t ready to face that. Instead we got shitfaced and did our best to get ourselves so hungover that the next day our hearts didn’t hurt so much remembering that our gentle-hearted friend was taken from us in the most brutal way possible.
It didn’t work.
But we tried.
We endured.
What else could we do?
She squeezed back. “Sometimes it feels like two seconds,” she whispered. “Like she was sitting in that chair”—she nodded to the one closest to the open window—“not five minutes ago, and Bull’s just dragged her away because he doesn’t want us dragging her along to the latest crazy scheme we’ve dreamed up.” Her voice was small, so different than the strong woman wearing the thick eyeliner and a Ramones tee used as a dress. Those black-rimmed eyes were focused on the waves. “Sometimes it feels like the pain is so raw that I swear I have to look down to my middle to make sure no one has shot me without noticing. Then other times it feels like it’s been twenty years. Like I can’t even remember what she used to look like. Like maybe I dreamed her up and it was only ever you, me and Ash.”
Ashley couldn’t face this. Sitting here drinking, pretending the elephant wasn’t really in the corner.
We had coffee this morning. And then we pretended the elephant wasn’t sitting amongst the booths in the coffee shops.
“She was real,” I whispered. “And she’s looking down, smiling. I’m sure.”
Rosie blinked away her tears. “I hope she’s not looking down too often, or she might get more than she bargained for.” She gave me a jaunty wink. That was it. “Blink and you miss it” kind of moment.
Rosie losing it. Giving in to the weakness of loss that brought even the strongest to their knees. She was stronger than all of the men she grew up with combined. She carried the same demons they did, but she did it with heels on and a mischievous smile. She was the glue that kept that place together. Sometimes I reasoned that was why she embodied a different persona on the outside every day. Like maybe if she didn’t resemble the same person any given day, the demons wouldn’t find her.
They found everyone.
That was the problem.
I gave her a grin that was just as fake as hers. “Tell me about the latest, then?”
She shifted in her seat. “Well, he’s a model. Editorial, not catalogue, obviously.” She flipped her hair and sipped her drink, glancing around the half-full bar. “And he does the most amazing thing with his—”
She abruptly cut herself off, eyes focusing on something at the bar and turning hard.
I followed her gaze.
Not something.
Someone.
That someone being Luke, the deputy sheriff of our fair town, the enemy of the Sons of Templar… oh, pretty much since high school. Well, he was Cade’s enemy in high school. Then when he got the badge he made it his mission to bring down the club.
At any cost.
Rosie’s heart might just be that price.
He’d had it in his large hands ever since… well, ever since he began to hate her family, her brother and everything her family stood for.
And he was completely blind to that. They say love is blind. Not true. It was hate that made the person the blindest to everything.
His large hand was currently on the small of some blonde’s back. A blonde wearing a very short rip-off Herve Ledger dress and knockoff Jimmy Choo’s. She was leaning into him in a way that said she so wasn’t his sister.
That and we’d known him since high school. He didn’t have a sister.
“And—” Rosie gulped down her drink in one swift swallow—“let’s just say his tongue should get awards from women everywhere.” She gave me a sneaky smile and then looked to my almost-full glass.
She pointed to it. “You gonna drink that?”
I shook my head.
She snatched it and drained that too.
“Zee,” I said softly.
“We’re not speaking of it,” she snapped firmly.
“It’s been a decade of not speaking of it. Maybe talking—”
She abruptly pushed back her chair, the motion so rough that it tumbled to the ground, the sound drawing the attention from the sandy-haired, muscled lawman at the bar and his bottle-blonde date.
She glared down at the chair as if it had done her a personal affront, then bent at the hips to snatch it off the floor.
Her dress, that was technically a tee, rode up with the motion, exposing the curve of her butt that was accentuated by some truly kickass suede Prada booties.
My Prada booties. The universe was looking out for us when it gave us taste in shoes we couldn’t afford but the same size feet.
Luke’s eyes, which had been drawn by the noise, stayed for the view.
I didn’t miss the hunger in them before Rosie straightened. He lingered just a hair too long before moving his attention back to his scowling date.
Rosie hadn’t noticed, too busy trying to pick up the broken pieces of her heart along with the chair.
“I say we hit a club. Dance. Make bad decisions. Wake up with those same bad decisions and then exchange notes over a greasy breakfast,” she suggested, forgetting for a moment what tomorrow was and the fact that we didn’t do anything on those mornings. Or maybe she wasn’t forgetting. There was only so much turmoil the brain could handle at one time; it was a defense mechanism to block out the rest.
I knew what she was doing. Saw the slight shake to her hand as she put it on her hip. The tightness of her blood-red painted smile.
The look of someone still intent on running. Even if it meant when she stopped it would all be that much worse.
So, I did the only thing a best friend could do.
I ran too.
I pushed my own chair back, keeping it upright. “What are we known for, if not our excellent taste in clothes and our even better taste in bad decisions?”
We walked out without a second look.
Well, Rosie did.
I gave Luke a sideways look, and his eyes lingered on Rosie’s back before he met mine. He gave me a slight nod before turning back to his date.
He might have been stationary but he was running too.
Though, who wasn’t?
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Bad
Decisions
Hey.
So, I know I said to find another pen pal, but that was sober Lucy. This is new Lucy, the one who has had enough cocktails to find the sense that she lost, or lose the sense that she found.
I’m running.
And I’m tired. Do you ever run? Like not recreationally, but for survival. Like if you stop running, you don’t know if you’ll survive what catches you? I’m sure you don’t. Because you’re a big strong soldier man who probably is the thing that does the chasing. Or you could kill whatever it is (the chaser) with enough force on a pressure point.
Side note: Can you do that? Kill someone with just a touch?
Maybe I don’t need to know the answer to that. I’ve got a friend. He got killed and nothing even touched him. Or maybe everything did. Burned him up to ashes, and it killed him. Except he’s still around. Walking. Talking. I don’t know if that’s the good news or the bad news.
Anyway, the thing that did that? The person who did that? Her name was Laurie. I knew her since… well, since I’ve been here. On this earth, that’s the here I mean.
Her mom and my mom were in the hospital together. Our birthdays are… no, wait, were three days apart. We used to have joint parties. Though it was funny because she always wanted pink and princess and I wanted black and… not princess.
We alternated. One year we had Cinderella, I was Maleficent, and the next we had a Darth Vader, she was Leia.
Our twenty-first party was in one room, and we split it down the middle. Half yellow, half black. Even the drinks.
It was tradition.
Until three years ago. Three years ago today. I can say today because it’s exactly 12:01 a.m. Today. The worst today in the history of todays.
She died today. Not today today, but three years ago today.
Did you know that someone who lived their life in pinks and yellows and was afraid to kill spiders could die in an angry and violent, vile way that even the worst of us don’t deserve?
Yeah. I didn’t think someone so good could attract people so bad. That they could touch that.
They did.
They ended it.
Today.
And that just sucks.
But I wanted to say, that kiss? It was the first time I stood still in three years.
Since, before that, actually.
Since him and the ice and the blood and the chaos.
Please make it back so we can stand still again.
Always Lagerfeld’s
L
I stared at the screen, despite the brightness of it puncturing my throbbing head like a jagged needle. Since today was still technically a work day, and I had a story to file, I’d grabbed a quick and greasy breakfast with buckets of coffee with a bright-eyed Rosie and a healthy Ashley. Rosie was only bright-eyed because she’d yet to go to sleep.
We’d decided to brave the elephant this year. Because we had to endure. And all we had was each other.
So we’d had breakfast, Ashley completely sober and Rosie still drunk from the night before.
Me? I’d made the rookie mistake of slinking off from the club and not staying up long enough to run from the hangover.
I was sitting at the computer, coffee in hand, hangover in head and now, regret coursing through every part of my body. That was also accompanying the pain that was ever present but near unbearable on this particular day.
“Fuck,” I hissed at the computer.
Lauren, the features editor, glanced at me over the rim over her thick glasses. “Let me guess. Tequila?” she asked, taking in the bloodshot eyes that even coffee and concealer couldn’t hide.
The rest of me was more or less put together. The thing with all black was it made you look like you had your shit together even when you didn’t. That and eyeliner.
I glanced at her. Perfectly buttoned, not a hair out of place, her white shirt crisply ironed, her pencil skirt a demure length. Her heels elegant yet sensible.
She was my complete opposite. She didn’t drink.
Coffee or wine.
Didn’t believe in hems above the knee and thought the best way to blow off steam was a good book and a cup of non-caffeinated tea.
AKA my worst nightmare.
In theory.
Somehow, we’d become some version of friends, despite not understanding each other. Maybe that was why.
I resisted the urge to slam my head at the keyboard. “I wish,” I groaned. “Tequila I can handle.” I glanced at her. “Have you ever sent a drunken text and then wanted to curl up and die reading it in the morning?”
She smiled, her clear-painted nails around her mug of chai. “No, I can’t say I have,” she replied, not unkindly. “Though, by your expression, I’m guessing you did?”
I glanced to the screen. “No, I’m thinking this is worse.”
She squeezed my shoulder. “I’m sure it’s not all that bad. And anyway, the man who gets a message from you in the middle of the night is not likely complaining.”
She walked away in her sensible shoes to her perfectly ordered desk and left me in my stiletto heels, amongst my cluttered papers and fucking train wreck of a life.
I put my head down on the papers.
A drunken text was one thing.
Maybe some regret at putting that eggplant emoji, or seeing the “sent and opened” Snapchats and the horror of not remembering what the photos were.
All of those weren’t a deep enough medium to cause enough trouble. Maybe send a naked picture that you didn’t mean to send.
Naked flesh at the end of the day wasn’t overly important. Everyone had it, and if I did say so myself, mine wasn’t exactly anything to be ashamed of.
That e-mail, on the other hand…. That was a whole different kind of naked.
A naked I hadn’t even been in front of my best friend, and she’d given me an emergency bikini wax in Mexico on spring break.
I barely even knew him.
And I spewed all of that. All of those feelings I kept carefully shoved in that junk cupboard everyone had in their mind. You know the one, where you threw every thought you didn’t know what to deal with or that was just too darn dangerous to leave floating around?
Yeah, it had all come tumbling out and went onto a screen, across thousands of miles, and landed itself in the inbox of a certain soldier with whom I shared exactly one kiss.
I didn’t even know his last name.
A quick google gave it to me.
Keltan Brooke.
He was famous. Or could have been, according to the article from nearly fifteen years ago in a New Zealand paper. He’d been a star rugby player and had been set to get into the national team, the All Blacks—ah, I get the e-mail name now—but decided to join the army.
The bing from my inbox stopped me from further Internet stalking and reverberated through my pained head, then brought with it the sound of mortification.
For once, I actually hoped it was a work e-mail.
I snapped my head up and almost knocked my coffee over in my eagerness to click out of the article and into my inbox.
Marty, our sports editor, stared at me. I wasn’t clumsy.
Or frantic.
I was collected. Calm. Not sensible, everyone knew that, but even when I was crazy, I threw people off because I did crazy things with sanity.
Now I was acting very… human.
Lucky wouldn’t know what to do with me, considering cyborg Lucy stopped existing when Keltan was involved.
A series of clicks showed me it wasn’t work.
I groaned.
Another sideways look from Marty.
I glared at him. “Don’t you have a feature to do on a jock who threw a ball to another jock?” I snapped.
His eyes went back down to his computer.
Marty was a little scared of me.
I took a deep breath.
And looked at the keyboard.
“Man up,” I whispered to myself.
So, I looked at
the screen.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re – Bad Decisions
Snow,
You know how I said they didn’t shoot deserters? How I said that I almost wished they did because I’d rather a bullet than a cage?
Fuck the cage.
And the bullets.
I was pretty darn close to risking both of those after reading that.
You seem like you’re fighting a battle much worse than the dirt box I’m in.
And I hate that, babe.
That the world was dark and cruel enough to take your friend from you.
Want to know a secret?
I’m running too.
I think we all are.
Want to know another one?
You’re wrong. I know that’s not a very sane thing to say to a woman, but I’ll be brave and risk it. I’m not stronger than you, babe. I’ve seen it, what you’ve got behind your eyes. Might not know your birthday, or your last name or your favorite color—though I’m guessing it’s black—but I know the important thing. Saw it the minute I laid eyes on you. You’re stronger than me. And most of those fellas in that club.
You’re more equipped to deal with what you’re runnin’ from than any of the other fuckers. We shoot things, lift iron and fight to trick ourselves into thinking we’re able to fight them off, whatever ghosts we’ve got.
We’re not.
I’ve lost someone too. And I run every single fucking day from the reminder of that. But I don’t run away from the fight. I run into the battle that got him lost in the first place, thinking I might find the sense of it.
But you know what? The most sense, most stillness I found?
Tasting your lips.
Kissing you.
Talkin’ ’bout Cinderella while you scared me with your zombie impression.
I’m comin’ back, babe. Be warned. You’ll be the first place I run to.
So I can stand still again.
PS: I’m also coming back to find out whoever “he” is. And I warn you, I don’t order hitmen either. I do my own dirty work. Especially when it comes to you.