Elastic Hearts (Hearts #3)

by Claire Contreras

  I nodded. “Thank you. Can you bring me coffee please? I feel like I’m about to pass out on my desk.”

  She stood. “Sure. You want me to hold your calls for an hour?”

  I closed my eyes. That would be nice. An hour powernap on my couch. My eyes popped open, trained on the couch across from my desk, and suddenly all I could do was picture me sitting there and Nicole riding me. Fuck. I shook my head.

  “No.”

  “Okay. I’ll be back with the coffee,” Corinne said in a singsong voice as she walked out.

  I wasn’t sure why I was suddenly picturing Nicole and me all over my office, but ever since she came in that day and I was assigned her divorce, she was all I saw. Originally, it had taken months to stop seeing her everywhere when I walked in. Back then, for concentration purposes, I’d had half a mind to trade offices with Bobby, but he had a shit view of the parking lot and the street, and I had the ocean, so I sucked it up and stayed. Now I wish I would’ve traded. I’d rather see grout than deal with thoughts of fucking my client. My beautiful, spirited, off-limits client.

  THE SECOND TO last thing I needed was to see the news that Nicole was staying with Gabriel everywhere. Everywhere. Every magazine, every news outlet, even the major ones that were supposed to report real news were talking about it. Apparently they’d become the it thing to talk about since Nicole was being painted as the fan who caught the star. Bullshit. It was all bullshit. He wasn’t a star when she met and married him, but I guess they’d forgotten that bit, or they didn’t care since this sold more stories. I waited the week out. They’d gone to the premiere on Wednesday night and I’d been dealing with the gossip since, but I had more important things to do like finish up my other case, and it was like Corinne said, she’d only agreed to a couple of things, one being the premiere. As her attorney, I had no right to be upset about it. That didn’t mean it stopped the feelings of annoyance and discomfort from spreading and sticking, though.

  I liked to think I was pretty good about leaving my work in the office, unless I had something major pending, but this thing with Nicole felt like it was taking over my life outside of work. On Sunday, while I was straightening up my house, it was all I could think about. As if on cue, my phone vibrated in the pocket of my sweat pants. I stopped washing the plate in my hand and switched off the water when I saw Corinne’s name on the screen. She rarely ever called me on weekends. If we had things to say to each other, it all went through email. I answered it quickly.

  “Umm . . .” she said. “Are you watching the red carpet by any chance?”

  It took me a moment to understand what she was saying. I didn’t remember what was on tonight, but I reached for the control and switched on the TV nonetheless.

  “No. What am I looking for?” I asked as I flipped through channels.

  “Golden Globes,” she said. I stopped on what I assumed was the event when I saw a woman wearing a fancy black dress holding a microphone and smiling. My heart dropped into the pit of my stomach when she held that microphone up to Gabriel Lane, who was standing beside her, looking larger than life, and then Nicole, who was standing beside him, wearing a red dress that hugged all her fucking curves, looking like she belonged in my bed.

  “What the fuck?” I growled. The Globes wasn’t part of the agreement.

  “I wasn’t sure if this was added to the original addendum,” Corinne said.

  “Fuck no, it wasn’t.”

  “Okay. Well, I’ll let you go. I just wanted you to see it just in case.” She paused. “Do you think they’re maybe getting back together and she’s unsure?”

  I swallowed back my impending growl as I looked back at the screen, back at Nicole, who was now holding Gabriel’s hand as he looked down at her with a smile. I was going to kill her. I was going to fuck her and then kill her. What the fuck was she thinking? What the fuck did I want her to be thinking? I didn’t even know anymore. I couldn’t be sure. But the thought of those red lips on anybody else but me was enough to drive me fucking crazy.

  “I don’t know. I’ll get to the bottom of it,” I said.

  “May I make a suggestion?” she asked just as I was hanging up.

  “What?” I said, my impatience clear in my voice.

  “Maybe ask William?”

  “What a great idea, Corinne. Let me call her father, who happens to be my boss, and ask him if he knows what the fuck is going on with my client. I’m sure that will bode well with the whole ‘maybe you can become partner when this shit is over, Victor’ thing.” I paused to take a breath. “I’ll handle it.”

  I closed my eyes and started counting backward from ten. I felt like any moment a vein would pop out of my forehead, or my neck, or my fucking arm with the amount of force I was using on my remote control.

  I called my sister to see if she was watching. Maybe I should watch this with other people present so I wouldn’t end up trashing my entire fucking house.

  “Mia and Jensen are here,” my sister said upon answering the phone.

  Shit. I’d forgotten our friends were coming into town.

  “Are they there right now?” I asked.

  “Yeah, they didn’t bring the kids, though. We’re watching the Globes. Want to come over?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be there soon.”

  I’d picked up the keys, a bottle of wine, and started walking to my car before we’d ended the call. When I got to my sister’s house the front door was slightly open, so I knocked loudly and stepped in, closing and locking it behind me.

  “In here,” Estelle yelled.

  “Oh God,” her best friend Mia groaned, and then caught sight of the bottle in my hands and perked up. “Oh. He brought wine.”

  I scoffed as I leaned over to kiss her cheek, and my sister’s. “Now we know the way to Mia’s heart isn’t corny love stories, after all,” I said, referring to her husband, and my other best friend, who was a writer and had made it his life goal to write stories about Mia, even when they weren’t together. Fucking pansy. “Where is Jensen anyway?”

  “Out back with Oliver, smoking a cigar.”

  My eyes nearly bulged out their sockets. “Oliver is smoking?”

  “No. Jensen is. Oliver’s probably lecturing him on how bad it is.”

  I chuckled, handed over the wine, and headed that way, but stopped when I got to the door and turned back around. “What do you guys know about Nicole Alessi and Gabriel Lane?”

  Mia’s smile widened. She tucked her short blonde hair behind both ears and sat up straight. “Well, aside from the fact that he’s so hot,” she said, and as soon as the words left her mouth Jensen opened the door behind me.

  He looked at me and smiled, greeting me with our usual handshake and hug before looking at her again.

  “I know I’m hot, babe, but you really need to stop telling everybody you see.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m talking about Gabriel Lane. He’s so fucking dreamy.”“He is. Did you see the pictures of his vacation in Mexico a few months ago? Holy shit. I mean, if his swimming trunks—” Estelle said.

  “Would have gone a little lower. I know,” Mia finished with a half shriek, half laugh.

  I shook my head, making a distasteful face. “This is what you’re married to?”

  “We all have our vices,” Jensen said with a shrug and a laugh.

  “Hey,” Oliver said, walking in. He frowned when he saw me. “I didn’t hear the bell.”

  “That’s because you psychos left the door unlocked and open again. I don’t understand how you live. This isn’t 1920, and you don’t live in the middle of nowhere. Didn’t you get the email about all the burglaries?”

  “Oliver installed a camera system,” Estelle said as she poured herself and Mia each a glass of wine. She paused. “Who else wants wine?”

  “We need something stronger than wine to watch this shit,” I said.

  “So we save the cigar I brought you for later?” Jensen asked.

  “When does this start?”


  “Officially? In thirty minutes,” Mia said.

  I looked at Jensen. We had thirty minutes to spare. Once we were outside, we closed the door and sat on the chairs out in the porch. He handed me my cigar and the lighter.

  “How’s work?” he asked, blowing out smoke from his cigar.

  “I need my drink, or something with a more calming effect than this for me to talk about it right now,” I said, holding up the cigar. He laughed.

  “I was going to stop at a shop on the way here, but Mia thought Bean would have a heart attack.”

  “Nah,” I said, laughing because none of us had done anything like that since college, but loved to joke about it now that it was legal in California. “That shit is natural. He’s good with the natural stuff.”

  “Noted.”

  “How’s the book doing?” I asked.

  “Pretty well,” he said, putting his cigar down and swatting the air away, which meant he was basically blowing it all in my face. I put mine down as well and put it out slowly. I’d finish it another time. “How’s the single life? Still not bored?”

  I smirked. “How’s married life? Insanely boring?”

  “Fuck, no,” he said, laughing. “Being with someone every day doesn’t make it boring.”

  “We were once on the same page about that.”

  He shook his head. “We were once young and stupid. Some of us grew up.”

  “I grew up,” I said defensively, taking the bait. He knew how much I hated when people put things like getting married and being a grown-up in the same box. “I have a house under my name. I have a car under my name. I’m hopefully about to make partner, if my client doesn’t fuck it up for me.”

  Jensen’s eyebrows rose, his eyes appraising me momentarily, dropping to my curled fists and back up to my face. He smiled. “Did I hit a nerve?”

  I exhaled loudly and slumped back in my seat, looking out to the horizon. I focused on the water that was just a few feet away from us. Not that I could see it, but I focused on the sound of the waves crashing.

  “I’m representing my boss’s daughter in her divorce,” I said. I looked at Jensen from the corner of my eye after a beat and caught his mouth hanging open.

  “The one that you—”

  “Yeah.”

  “The one you basically told things would never work out between the two of you?”

  “Yes,” I said, my voice growing more impatient.

  I wasn’t one to kiss and tell, but I’d told him and Oliver about our first wild encounter because even I’d had a hard time believing it had happened. This hot girl walking into my office and locking the door behind her to seduce me, and actually achieving just that. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the way she went from having a regular conversation about the office to asking me if I’d ever fucked anyone on my desk and settling herself between my legs. And inching up her skirt . . . and licking her lips as she placed her legs on either side of me . . . and saying, “Do you want it, Mr. Reuben?” in that sultry tone of hers. Fuck. Me.

  “Damn. Well, at least it only happened that one time, right?” Jensen said, cutting my thoughts short. I swallowed, suddenly feeling the need to drink a gallon of water. Or the wine I’d brought.

  “Yeah, at least,” I said, though my mind went to the second and third time she’d come by to visit, and then the last time.

  That last time haunted me after I’d found out she’d gotten engaged. Will had told me she’d only known him a few weeks; that he asked her to marry him overnight and she’d agreed; that she was head over heels in love with him, and every single one of those things bothered me. At first I thought it was just weird for anybody, especially her, to agree to marry somebody that quickly. Then, I wondered if it had anything to do with me and the way I’d dismissed her. But she’d seemed so nonchalant about it, smiling and saying she knew it was just a good time and she’d enjoyed it as well. A part of me expected her to come back again, and when she didn’t, and then I’d heard she’d gotten engaged, it dawned on me that it was really our last time together. And all I could do was hope she didn’t visit me, thinking we could be just friends, because I really didn’t know how to argue with her and not have it end in sex. And now that I knew she possibly felt more for me, I wasn’t sure what I felt for her. This version of me felt like he was ready for that. For something more. For something real. And as stupid as it fucking was, I thought maybe I could have it with Nicole. Maybe in another life. A different time. Our timing was complete shit. I sighed and looked over my shoulder, where Mia was waving at us to come back inside.

  “I guess the show’s starting,” I said, standing up.

  “So you’re representing her?” Jensen asked. “In the divorce.”

  I nodded.

  “You don’t look too happy about it. Is it a tough case?”

  “It’s surprisingly easy, at least it was, but as usual women complicate the shit out of my life. We’ll see.”

  Jensen laughed as we walked inside and sat around the television. I took out my phone to check my emails while the show started, but put it away when somebody turned up the volume.

  “Oh my God! There he is. Isn’t he hot? Like for real,” Mia said. I looked at the screen and saw Gabriel as he spoke to another actor on the carpet. I didn’t see Nicole anywhere.

  “He looks gay,” I commented.

  The guys laughed. The girls scowled.

  “You’re just saying that because you’re his wife’s divorce lawyer,” Estelle said. “Wait. What’s going to happen now? Does all the work you did go out the window because they’re back together?”

  That was the question of the century, wasn’t it? Nicole was on the screen shortly after, looking so fucking beautiful that the only thought in my head was that I wouldn’t mind having her as a psycho ex-girlfriend. The thought surprised me. I tried to push it down.

  “I’m saying it because he’s an asshole, and they’re not back together,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I added that bit for them or myself, but it felt like it needed to be voiced. Both Mia and Estelle shared a look before looking at me. “That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

  “He doesn’t seem like he’s an asshole,” Mia said. “Nicole is beautiful. Is she that pretty in person?”

  I nodded, swallowing, trying not to think about just how beautiful she was. Just how good she felt.

  “That’s his mom,” Mia said, pointing at the woman walking beside Nicole.

  Gabriel’s mom? Jesus fucking Christ. What a happy family. And that was just about when I decided to send Nicole a text message. If she wasn’t going to answer my calls from the office or Corinne’s calls and voicemails, I was going to start hounding her via text. And I hated anything that could be used in a court of law as evidence, which included text messages, but fuck it. Desperate times and shit, like my sister and Mia liked to say.

  If I had to sit here all night watching them on screen, I was going to make sure her discomfort matched mine.

  IT WAS BAD enough that I was stuck in this award show, and much worse that I’d given myself strict orders of staying one hundred percent sober throughout. The only good thing about the entire thing was that Gabe would most likely win the award he was nominated for, and it was for a movie filmed during a time when things were still . . . okay between us. Maybe they hadn’t been okay then, but I still had hope. I guess that was the difference. Forgiveness always feels like a possibility in the presence of hope. Hope of which we had none now. Not enough, anyway.

  The second good thing about this experience was that as I walked the red carpet with him and he joked around about the cameras flashing—the way he’d done when we’d attended our first red carpet event together—I realized I hadn’t seen him as more than a friend or stranger for a long time. I think we lost that magic somewhere between picking up his vomit, dealing with his incoherent insults, and suspecting his infidelity. Despite all of that, I wished him well. I wished this guy, the one walking with me tonight—the sober
and unassuming one—to have a good life.

  His mom, Deborah, was with us tonight, so while Gabe went off to do his rounds talking to people, she and I found our seats. He joined us soon after, settling in the seat beside me, closer to his male costar in the movie he was being recognized for. Deborah kept pointing out the different celebrities that kept walking by, and when she wasn’t doing that, she was begging me to stay with her son. It was such an uncomfortable conversation to have with someone who loved a person the way only a mother could.

  She didn’t know about the drugs, and that was something I couldn’t bring to light. But she knew about the women, or at least as much as anybody could know about the women, which was that they were definitely around. If the tabloids had it right half of the time, he’d been sleeping around with more women than I could name. How he found the time to do it, I would never understand. How the women hadn’t cared that he was married was intolerable. To Deborah, that didn’t matter, because to her marriage meant standing by your man, even when he was off screwing everybody with a vagina.

  I understood her standpoint, I really did, but it was something I understood the way I understood statistics in college. I got it, but didn’t apply it in my life. It shouldn’t have to. I grew up in a time when women didn’t need men. We didn’t need somebody to make money for us, or give us orgasms, or even impregnate us. We had the ability to make our own money, buy our own dildos, and go to a clinic. And fuck anybody who thought we needed to put up with the bullshit a man brought into our lives without questioning it. I was thankful when my phone vibrated in my purse and I was able to excuse myself from the conversation as I pulled it out.

  I frowned at my screen when I saw an unknown number, and then a message that read: We need to talk. - V

  My heart started to race. I shoved it back into my clutch before anybody around could catch the words. Who the hell would send me that? I looked at Gabe, who was being overly friendly with his co-star, Lina. It wasn’t him. I thought about the people in my life, men and women, who would have been watching me, and looked around. Nobody seemed to be looking at me. My phone vibrated again.