Where I Belong (The Debt Book 2)

by Molly O'Keefe

  That I couldn’t quite rise above my desire not to feel anything. I was a pendulum constantly swinging between wanting too much and wanting nothing.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  He was lying down on the bed, picking up the clicker for the TV, with the plate of our leftover lunch on the bed beside him. “Take your time. I’ll be here.”

  Every inch of my life with Tommy was covered in drama, a string of moments so far from normal it was almost funny. But this, leaving him in his underwear, about to turn on the TV and finish a sandwich after he’d fucked my brains out—it was what other people took for granted.

  What some women complained about.

  And I would take it if I could. I would grab it in my hands and never let go.

  If he’d let me.

  7

  Beth

  I stepped out onto the shadowed patio overlooking the moon-splashed ocean and the rigs lit up like golden Christmas trees among the darker shapes of the Channel Islands. Either the satellite had swung by overhead and was gone or my assistant had decided not to text anymore, because the phone was silent.

  Inside the house I saw the TV on and the shapes of the dogs on the rug in front of the door.

  And since I didn’t need to worry about Pest getting chomped on, I put her down on the patio, where she acted like the slats of wood under her feet might blow up if she left all four paws down on it at the same time.

  “Go on, Pest,” I said. “You’ll be fine.”

  She took me at my word and did a very funny mincing run to the far edge of the patio, where the hillside was dirt and grass and, from the way she was behaving, full of good-smelling things.

  If she rolled in some dead animal, Tommy would not be pleased.

  I kept one eye on her and called up my assistant, Beth’s number. She answered right away.

  “Please be Jada,” she said in a kind of breathless murmur-laugh.

  “It’s Jada.” The name I’d grown so used to felt completely weird to say.

  “Oh my God, oh thank God,” Beth said. “You’re okay.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Your mom doesn’t have you?”

  “She doesn’t. She’s trying but she doesn’t have me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m not…I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to tell you,” I said, leaning up against the railing. “I mean—”

  “No. I get it. I totally get it.”

  There was an awkward silence between us, and what I’d done to her in Los Angeles was looming so large in my head.

  “I’m so sorry, Beth,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said in that typical way she had. Brushing off everything.

  “No. No, what I did was so shitty.”

  “It wasn’t you. Not really. It was the drugs.”

  “Yeah, but the drugs were me too.” I took a deep breath. “I think… I was hating myself. And hating what I was doing, and I didn’t want someone I like and respect and admire as much as you to watch me sink so far down.”

  “Jada,” she said, and I could hear the tears in her voice and for a moment we were quiet.

  “It means a lot,” I said. “That you answered my texts.”

  “We were friends, remember? Before all this shit happened.”

  “Oh my God,” I said with a sigh, putting my head in my free hand. “I can’t remember anything before all this shit happened.”

  “You want an update?” she asked.

  “Do I?”

  She laughed. “No. But you should get it anyway.”

  My assistant filled me in on my mother’s continued efforts to stir up shit about me. With my ongoing silence it wasn’t just gossip magazines interested anymore. The Today Show had done a segment on my disappearance.

  “Have you seen any news?” she asked. “Or been on Twitter? Your Facebook page?”

  “No. I have no phone or laptop. It’s been kind of…nice, actually.” If you’d asked me two weeks ago if I could survive without my laptop and my phone, I would have said it was impossible. Ed Sheeran always made such a big deal about not having a phone, and I’d rolled my eyes at him behind his back. But he was right. It was nice not having that leash.

  “Well, don’t look. It’s a dumpster fire, for real. You’re better off just being oblivious.”

  “Oblivious of what, exactly?”

  “Everyone’s talking,” she said, her voice apologetic. “Liz, Ben… all those people you thought were your friends.”

  “I never thought they were my friends,” I said, pinching my nose. “I knew they were using me.”

  “They’re all over the tabloids, telling all kinds of lies.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. This was just part of the payment for what I’d done. That explosive rise to the stratosphere. It didn’t come for free.

  “It kind of gets worse,” Beth said.

  I laughed. “Of course it does.”

  “The cops came by my apartment,” Beth said. “Asking questions.”

  The cops. Shit. That was worse.

  “What did you say?”

  “That you’d been using, but as far as I knew you were somewhere getting clean and healthy.”

  “Well, that’s true.”

  “I also told them that your mother was a liar and a control freak and a terrible doctor.”

  “Also true,” I said.

  “But because I didn’t know where you were, they seemed to think there might be more to your mom’s story. And…there’s still more,” she said.

  At this point it was almost funny. The utter destruction of my life.

  “Goody!”

  “Sherman dropped you.”

  It wasn’t anger, exactly, since I’d thought it was sort of inevitable, but it was the creeping, twisting, agonizing pain of shame. I’d had everything, and I’d thrown it away.

  “There are other managers who would snap you up in a heartbeat,” she said and that was true, but coming back from this was going to be one hell of a slog.

  “Okay,” I said with a deep breath, putting one foot in front of the other. I’d get out of this hole. I would. Somehow.

  “Can you tell me when you’ll be home?” she asked.

  It was time to put a deadline on this. To set up an expiry date for when everything went sour.

  “Two days,” I said and then immediately wished I’d said three. Four. A week.

  Years.

  Because now I only had two days to figure out what I was going to do with my mother. My life.

  And Tommy.

  “You want me to set up some meetings?” she asked.

  “Beth… are you sure you want to work for me? I treated you so badly.”

  “Of course I want to work with you. But with one condition…”

  “Name it.”

  “You start using again and I’m out. For real.”

  “Agreed.” So agreed. So totally agreed.

  “Okay! Let’s set up some meetings. A few maybe. Just to see. The most serious and reputable of the bunch?”

  “That sounds good. I’ll see you in two days.”

  We said our good-byes and hung up, and I stood at the railing, watching Pest sniff every board that made up the patio like she was trying to figure out a puzzle.

  “Two days then?” a deep voice asked out of the shadows, and I turned toward the corner where Peter always had his chair set up. His newspaper and his coffee.

  I hadn’t seen him in the shadows. And he’d heard my conversation.

  “Two days,” I said, heat in my cheeks, thinking of what I’d said to Beth. “You could have told me you were there.”

  I sensed, really, rather than saw his shrug. And then a gleam of a glass and the clinks of ice cubes.

  “You’re drinking?”

  “Whiskey. Want one?”

  “No.”

  I wouldn’t be drinking. Not for a long time. Not until this ache I had in the back of my throat was gone. This
desire for the curtain that drugs could pull over the worst of my life, hiding all the flaws and all the mistakes I’d made from myself for at least a little while.

  “I almost told Tommy,” I said. “About you.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Because I wanted to be loved for a few minutes.

  “You should have let me tell him at lunch,” Peter said.

  I was glad I hadn’t. Because it would have cost me everything that happened after. And those memories had to feed me for a long time.

  “You thinking of leaving this mountain and never telling him?” Peter asked.

  “I’d like to,” I said with a laugh, but it wasn’t funny to Peter because he stood up fast and crossed out of the shadows to stand next to me at the railing.

  “Why do you want to lie to him, Beth?” he asked.

  “Because the truth is hard,” I said with a gasping, frantic laugh.

  The truth was so hard and I felt like I was in danger of being crushed by a million rock hard truths.

  “You lie to that boy and you’re as bad as me,” he said.

  “You’re not that bad,” I whispered, forgiving him because I wanted to be forgiven too. “Your reasons weren’t malicious. Or evil. They were just desperate.”

  “You think he’s going to see it that way?”

  “He might,” I said, more hope than anything else. “If we explain it the right way.”

  “What’s the right way?” he asked. “He’s already been here a day and we haven’t told him. Worse, now we’ve lied to him. And I think about that boy sitting in an apartment for days—” His voice cracked, and I did what I’d never done with Peter: I touched his shoulder. I put my arm around him.

  For a moment he stood still in my half embrace. Like he was ready to reject it. But then he hung his head and slumped just slightly into me.

  “You tell him, Beth,” Peter said. “Or I’m going to.”

  I nodded, swallowing down my fears. “I will.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  “Tomorrow,” I agreed.

  8

  Beth

  He was asleep when I went back up to the room, and the coward in me was relieved. The television was on, casting blue shadows over the walls. The plate beside him was empty, and he lay sprawled half in, half out of the covers, like he’d just drifted off.

  He’s tired, I thought, tender and sad.

  I set Pest down on the floor, and before I could shut the door behind us, she’d taken a flying leap up onto the bed and climbed up on his chest.

  He woke with a startled huff, his eyes taking in the room even as his hand came down, holding Pest to him. He looked like he was ready to do some battle.

  “It’s just me,” I said softly, my voice matching the shadows. I walked to the bed and stroked his arm, the warm skin over the hard muscle of his shoulder. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Hey,” he said, shifting as if to sit up. “Everything okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Don’t get up. Go back to sleep.”

  He sighed and relaxed back against the bed. “So fucking tired. I can’t believe it.”

  “You’ve been sleeping in a chair for like three days,” I said with a small laugh. He’d been sleeping in a chair, having sex, driving or fighting. He should be tired. It was in fact hard to believe he’d been awake this long.

  His eyelids were drifting shut again. “Just… everything’s okay?”

  “Fine, baby,” I said. “Let’s get you under the covers.” I moved the plate off the bed and pulled back the blankets, revealing the crisp white sheets. He was still wearing his blue boxers, and his skin looked smooth in the shadows from the TV. Like he was made out of blue pearl.

  A treasure.

  He sighed as I pulled the covers over him, and he was back asleep right in front of my eyes.

  In the bathroom, our toothbrushes were in a cup. His red, mine yellow. It was cute. Like a scene out of a movie, something that would tell the viewer that this couple was happy and close.

  They didn’t care if their toothbrushes touched, that’s how intimate they were.

  The owners of these touching, cheerful toothbrushes were not a couple that would lie. That would keep secrets from each other.

  I scrubbed my teeth, and when I was done, I put my lying toothbrush back in the cup.

  I slid between the sheets with Tommy, facing him. Watching him sleep. He looked younger in his sleep. The hard lines between his eyes were gone. The crow’s feet from working out in the sun all the time, also gone.

  With my thumb I touched his skin.

  He was, at this moment, so dear to me. So impossibly special.

  We were sleeping together. In the same bed. Just sleeping. Like an established couple.

  Would he snore? I wondered.

  Would I?

  Oh God. What if I had a nightmare?

  Well, neither the snoring nor the nightmares were likely tonight. My brain was turning too fast in my head to let sleep come.

  I rolled onto my back and grabbed the remote control. I arranged the pillows behind my back, let Pest jump up on my tummy and flipped through the channels, over and over again.

  Tommy

  I blinked awake, something feeling…not wrong. Just not totally right, either. I opened my eyes to find Beth beside me, and I was, for the moment, filled with a kind of giddy happiness. A wild sense that I’d lucked out somehow. I’d been standing still for so long, moving not at all in fear of the world turning around on me. Coming up to bite me in the ass. But it seemed the world was turning in my direction for once.

  “Hey,” she whispered, noticing I was awake. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “You didn’t. What are you doing?”

  She sighed. “Just watching TV. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Anything good?” I asked, stretching and rolling to my back to see the TV.

  She was watching the news, and there was a clip of a YouTube video and a woman in a mermaid costume.

  It was her.

  I sat up, suddenly wide awake. “Turn up the volume,” I said, and she lifted the remote and hit the button with her thumb. “I haven’t seen this.”

  “They’ve been playing it pretty steady the last few hours. It seems my disappearance has hit the national news.”

  I had to admit, the makeup did an amazing job. Her freckles were gone. The shape of her nose was different. Her face looked longer. Her hair was a wild blonde wig. She even wore contacts, white ones that were eerie and magical all at once. She was painted a shimmery green and blue color.

  If I’d just seen this video, I never would have thought it was her. It wouldn’t have occurred to me.

  “I can’t…I can’t believe your makeup… I mean, you changed the shape of your face even.”

  “Shading and highlights do most of the work. Losing the freckles. The contacts help.”

  “All to hide from your mom?” I asked.

  She was silent for so long I finally turned to look at her, the real her in my bed, not the creation of her on the screen.

  “I think…I think I was hiding from everyone,” she said. “I told myself it was about my mom, but I think it was really about me.”

  She looked at me, the liquid of her eyes reflecting the flashing lights of the television.

  “About you, what?” I asked.

  “Hiding from myself. Hiding from what I wanted. Hiding from what happened to me in that office.”

  “Beth,” I sighed.

  “I mean, I told myself I was okay because I didn’t know how to not be okay. If I wasn’t okay, my mom was right about me.”

  That sounded so plausible it made me so proud of her that she could see that in herself. “But…there’s more, too. You know? If it wasn’t me up on the screen, if it wasn’t the real me but some version of myself I’d created up there, then I could still be safe. I couldn’t be hurt. Not really. Because I’d shown someone myself, my real self, and I got so fucking hurt.”

>   She was talking about me. About us.

  And it was true. We both got hurt. Amazing how I’d thought she’d moved on, but in ways she’d been as stuck as I’d been.

  The screen changed, the video over, and the two anchors from a popular entertainment show were talking. The screen behind them showed a picture of Beth in Walmart from a few days ago trying on sunglasses. Beth lifted the remote like she was going to change the channel.

  “Wait,” I said, putting my hand on her arm. “What are they saying?”

  “Same thing they’ve been saying for the last few hours. I’m on a drug-fueled mission of self-destruction. I’ve always been prone to theatrics and erratic behavior. As a teenager I’d gotten in trouble with police and been sent to a foster home for court-placed juveniles.”

  “Oh my God,” I breathed. Her whole life was the news. Every single mistake she’d ever made thrown up on the screen to be dissected and torn apart. “Beth—”

  “Oh wait,” she said with a sharp smile. “Here’s an interview with one of my ‘friends.’”

  I recognized the new person on the screen as the man that had been in the bed with Beth when I grabbed her from the house in Santa Barbara.

  “I knew Beth very well,” he said with a smug tone that made me see red. “A lot of us did.”

  I gaped. In ten words he’d slut-shamed Beth on national television.

  “I didn’t sleep with that little fucker,” she said. “I didn’t sleep with anyone on my team or my crew. Like it was a rule I had. But no one will believe me now. And even if I did sleep with them, even if I slept with every single person—why does he get to judge me? Why does anyone?”

  “Beth,” I sighed. “I’m so sorry.”

  “None of it matters,” she said in a tone that implied all of it mattered. All of it mattered a lot.

  “How long have you been watching this?” I asked.

  She sighed and then winced. “I don’t know. Too long probably. You’ve been asleep for a while.”

  I took the remote from her hand and turned off the TV. The sudden silence buzzed. “You’ll never get to sleep listening to that crap.”

  “I’m not sure I’ll get to sleep anyway.” She sighed heavily, her hands resting over the sheets pulled up to her chest. “I’m so fucking tired, but my brain won’t stop. At all.”