Lovely You

by Jamie Bennett

  “You don’t have to say anything to him if you don’t want to. It’s your choice. I’ll tell him that you’re ok, because you are, Scarlett. You just have to stop punishing yourself for this. You have to stop all the things you’ve been doing to hurt yourself.” He took my face in his hands and looked at me. “You’re ok.”

  I pressed closer to him. Maybe I was, or maybe I could be. Maybe I was already partway there.

  Chapter 16

  It had been a few months since I had been back to my old house north of the city, the one my brother and Lanie rented from me. When we turned into the driveway, I spotted Brooks at the window, and before I got my car door open, he was standing on the porch, waiting, arms crossed, tension pulsing out of him like a neon sign. At first, I tried to fake a smile but then I stopped. I had decided to try to be a little more honest with my feelings, because, as it turned out, keeping everything suppressed and hidden hadn’t been working that well for me. And I no longer felt like I was going to scream, or scream and hit someone, or run off into the sunset while screaming and hitting someone. I was moving in better direction.

  It had been a strange few days. Joey had arrived right after I went through my whole breakdown, opening the door to me sobbing in the hallway with Nate keeping me on my feet. He had utterly freaked out, seeing me that way, and without really meaning to, I told him my whole story too. I had just meant to calm him down, to show him that I wasn’t sick or dying and that Nate wasn’t either. Somehow it was easier to say it the second time, and I knew that Joey, who had done a few things he wanted to be forgiven for, might understand how guilty I felt.

  He had understood, but telling him hadn’t worked to calm him down, not at all. Nate had to physically prevent him from running out and trying to find whoever had been in that hotel room with me to kill them with his bare hands. Then I got worried that getting so worked up was going to affect his health. Pia had been worked up too, so I took her into the bedroom to lay down with me and Nate. Joey sat on a chair that I had recently unearthed from beneath a pile of clothes. He just wanted to keep an eye on things. The four of us in that tiny room had to have been a funny sight if anyone else had walked in, but I was glad that they were there. With Pia against my back, and Nate holding me closely to him, and Joey watching over us, I fell asleep, and I slept like the dead.

  I hadn’t woken up until the evening, apparently making up for the months of insomnia. When I finally did roll myself out of the bed, I felt almost sick from all the crying, all the emotions. And still, three days later, I was on a razor’s edge of breaking down again. I had cried when I went into my office to explain to Pascale that I was going to leave my full-time—way past full-time—job with the company, and to my utter shock, she had started to cry, too.

  “I’m so sorry to lose you!” she blubbered. “The hours you put in…so many hours!”

  I nodded. It had been a lot. Too much.

  She grabbed my hand to look at my wrist. “Oh my God, these bangles are gorgeous.” She hiccupped. “We’ll never find anyone with your sense of style. Never!”

  “Javier is amazing,” I told her, wiping my eyes with the tissue I now carried 24/7. We looked out her glass door at him (and the rest of the employees) spying on us. They all put their heads down. “If you give him a full-sized desk, I think he’ll do great things. I’ll still be around to help if you need me.” She had taken me up on that offer. So now, we were working on a contract that would allow me to continue to do some work part-time, and supervise special projects, and keep me with a little income while I started my next venture. I told everyone at the office that I was moving, because I was. I was really going to do it.

  But first, I needed to square away more things, with my sister, and my mom, and my brother. I had started with Zara, the day before. We had met for lunch while her kids were at school, and it had been a mistake to try to make amends in a public setting. Both of us had ended up crying so hard that we made quite the scene in the restaurant and the waiter had to bring us a pile of extra napkins.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you about Bradley! I’m sorry I thought you would do that to me, and I know you wouldn’t,” Zara had sobbed, and I had apologized too for being distant and weird and abrasive and mean and all the other ways I had acted over the last few months. Bradley and Zara were living apart, the kids were confused, Zara was a mess. She blamed a lot of his problems on the alcohol, and he had gone into treatment, which was great. I didn’t put as much on his drinking, but I hoped he would quit and it would make a difference for him—for them. It was clear to me that Zara wanted to make their marriage work. I just wasn’t going to be able to be around him, probably ever, and I told her that. She seemed to understand. I didn’t mention that if Bradley so much as looked at me sideways, Nate had said that he would kill him, and he meant that sincerely.

  I had left it undetermined in my mind if I was going to share with her what had gone on with me, and in the end, I hadn’t. Zara was too sad, too wrapped up in her own problems, and feeling so sorry for the way she had acted toward me. I didn’t want to pile onto her misery. And I didn’t get into it very much with my mom, either, when we met up at her house. I just said that I was sorry to her, also, and that I was working on things. We had both cried enough to fill a bathtub, even without me going much farther than that.

  And now, after all that crying, I was at Brooks’ house. I was going to have to talk to him, really talk to him, and I had brought Nate as my reinforcement. I was afraid that my brother would freak out more than Joey did, and I just needed the support.

  My car door was open; Brooks was waiting on the porch; I didn’t get out.

  “Scarlett.” Nate reached over and unclicked my seatbelt. “Let’s go. He’s not going to bite you.”

  Instead, Brooks came down from the porch and nearly squeezed me to death in a hug. Which set me off crying, again. Thank God Lanie wasn’t there, because she cried at the drop of a hat, and the two of us probably would have flooded the house. But it did remind me of something.

  “What I’m going to say, you can tell Lanie, ok?” I said as we went inside. “You guys probably shouldn’t have secrets.”

  “Thank you.” Brooks motioned us to the couch, and then he actually took out a pen and paper.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  He was surprised. “I’m going to write things down, facts, dates, et cetera. If we want to bring the police back in—”

  Nate plucked the pen from his fingers and shook his head. “Worry about that later. Just listen.”

  Brooks nodded slowly, and he sat back in his chair. “Ok. I’ll listen.”

  “First.” I took a big breath and tried very, very hard to hold in the tears. “I want you to try not to get mad at me. Because I’m already angry enough at myself. I just can’t—please don’t get mad at me.”

  I heard Brooks inhale, preparing himself. “Ok. I won’t get mad at you.”

  So I held on to Nate’s hand, and I talked to my brother. I explained how I hadn’t loved Mats, not like how Brooks loved Lanie, but how it still had been hard when we broke up. Hard because suddenly I was alone, and in a new house, and everyone was telling me to get back out there, to meet someone, that I was such a beautiful girl, there had to be a guy for me. “I was trying to make an effort but it was like I was only partway there, not really into it. I started drinking more—I was trying to get in the mood, I guess. To make myself happier, relaxed, fun like I used to be. It didn’t work. Mom kept trying to fix me up and I finally decided to go.”

  I told him about that night, what I remembered, what I had pieced together. I realized I was trembling and clenched my muscles, trying to stop. I told Brooks and he listened. His face looked frozen.

  “I’ve been so angry.”

  My brother nodded slightly at me.

  I couldn’t think of how to explain it. “It made me just so furious that it had happened to me, that I had let it happen—”

  “No.” Na
te looked at me. “No, you didn’t let that happen. They did it. They were in control of the situation, not you.”

  “That’s what it is. I didn’t have control anymore. My body felt like it didn’t belong to me, like it had betrayed me, or I had betrayed it. And then there were guys walking around, going out to eat, going to the beach, and there I was just—just…” I stopped. “I was just all wrong. I was so angry,” I repeated helplessly, not knowing how to put it into words.

  “I understand that feeling,” Nate said. “It’s a terrible thing when you lose control, when your life gets out of your own hands. When your own body isn’t even under your control. I got angry, too, when that happened to me. I raged.”

  I looked at him. “That’s what I’ve been feeling like. Like everything has been out of control, especially me. I haven’t been able to control my mouth and I say the worst things.” I turned back to my brother. “I’ve said them to you, Brooks, and I’m sorry. To Lanie, to Mom. I wrecked my car. I haven’t slept right or eaten right and I haven’t been able to face anyone, my old friends, because I’m so different now, and because there are stories going around…”

  “Stories?” Brooks had been taking all this very quietly, masking whatever he thought. But now he sat up straight and his hands clenched into extremely large fists. “What kind of stories?”

  “Some of them—some of the guys there that night—they must have talked. About me, about what happened. And I saw one of them, it must have been one of them, a few weeks ago. He remembered me.”

  My brother got up from the chair. “Who.”

  “Sit down,” Nate told him. “You and I can discuss taking care of that later.” He shot Brooks a look.

  “I don’t want anyone to get into any trouble over this. Either of you,” I said, glancing back and forth between them.

  “You don’t need to worry about it,” Nate said. He kissed my knuckles, which were white from clutching his own hand so tightly.

  “I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me,” my brother said. He looked bleak. “I kept asking you—I kept insisting that you were angry at me because I got engaged to Lanie and you weren’t the bride anymore.” He put his face in his hand, covering his eyes. “Fuck, Scar. That whole time, I was yelling at you. Why didn’t you tell me how stupidly wrong I was, if only just to make me shut the hell up?”

  My throat was very, very tight, like my vocal cords were piano wires. “I couldn’t tell you.” I tried to cough to loosen my throat but it didn’t work. “I didn’t want you to know. And I was acting horrible, so I deserved it that you yelled at me. When you announced at Christmas that you were getting married, I ruined it. You guys were so happy and excited and I ruined it. It felt like I was losing you, like I had lost myself. Like Lanie was taking you and Mom, and I was such a mess, who would want me, anyway? Only Bradley.”

  That was a mistake to say. Brooks’ face started to turn red.

  “No, no, forget that,” I said quickly. “Forget that part.”

  “I wish you had told me.”

  “I love you so much and I didn’t want to disappoint you,” I said my voice getting very high and wavering, and then I did start to cry again.

  “What? Why would you disappoint me?” Brooks shook his head back and forth. “No, of course not.”

  I wiped my eyes and tried to say it all while I could still talk. “I didn’t want you to think of me like I was a victim, I wanted you to be proud of me, always.”

  “Scarlett, I am.”

  “I knew you’d blame yourself somehow, like it was your fault because Dad died and you didn’t do a good job, and it’s not. It’s not your fault.” I could barely say it, but I knew it was true, so I forced the next words through my tears and out of my mouth. “It’s not my fault, either. No matter how I acted or what I drank or didn’t drink, or took or didn’t take, I didn’t want that to happen to me.”

  And my big, strong, tough brother, the one who had always been the rock I leaned on, started to cry. “I didn’t want to make you sad,” I sobbed, but he grabbed me off the couch and hugged me.

  And then I knew that things were going to be all right between me and my brother, no matter where in the world we were living, no matter who we married or didn’t, no matter if we fought and yelled and got mad or if we laughed and cried. Because that was what love was.

  ∞

  Two weeks later, all my loose ends were tied up. I had a contract to keep working with Pascale and my old team, just a few hours a week, just to supervise. I had been in contact with Klere to wish her well, and to let her know that our brand would support her in the future, whether she posted more for us or not. I had finally been able to convince Pascale of the value of that decision: even if we weren’t really big-hearted and generous, it was better to appear that we were, because Klere still had a lot of followers. In fact, more than before, because people were really into her new, somewhat-introspective posts, #cleaningitup #reehab.

  But personally, I really did hope for the best for her, and when I wrote to her, she answered me really quickly saying thank you. She added that if I ever came up north to Los Angeles again, I should definitely stop in to see her and Jerry. They were going to get married when their 90 days were up. I decided that if I did ever visit her, I was going to bring the gift of a globe, with gold stars marking our positions on the earth.

  I had been talking a lot with my college friend Daria. I had been thinking that our old plan, our fashion website, might still be something worth pursuing. Luckily, she agreed, either because she had gone back to work and it was terrible, or because she actually thought it was a good idea. Either way, she was on board, and we were going to try it. We could both work from home, which was good, since I wasn’t moving to Los Angeles to her, and she wasn’t moving to Hawaii. Where I would be living, starting today.

  I looked out the rounded window of the airplane as we backed out of the gate at the airport. I was really doing it, not with a single bag with a bikini stuck in the zipper, but in an orderly, neat way, the Nate way. My apartment was packed up and most of my belongings were on a boat moving across the Pacific. In just a few moments, I would be going that way, too.

  My family had come to drop me off, and it had been hard to say goodbye. Very hard. In fact, I got a little weepy just thinking about it, because apparently my crying gene had kicked in, and now they could just call me Lanie, that was how little I was able to hold it together.

  I sniffed and touched my eye on my sleeve. It was ok, because I wasn’t wearing much make-up that could smear. I had streamlined my look to leave the fashion house behind and it felt nice to see my face in the mirror rather than a lot of product. Plus, I only spent an hour getting dressed now, which gave me a lot more time to do other things with Nate. It still took me 56 minutes longer than it took him, though, and that included his shower.

  The plane thumped as we moved out of the gate and toward the runway. “Is she ok?” I asked Joey.

  “Pia? She’ll do fine. She was good on the way over here.”

  I reached down to the floor of the airplane and scratched her black fur. I had decided that I was going to get a dog, after I moved out of my temporary home at my grandma’s, and I got my living situation stabilized. I loved Pia so much, though, that it was going to be hard to find a dog who could compete with her. “Sweet girl,” I whispered, and she wagged her tail. I would just visit her a lot at Joey’s brother’s house, where he was going to stay when we got to the Big Island. I felt this was going to be very temporary too, because Kiana and I had been talking a lot and I knew that she wanted him back with her, and on top of that, the ring that Joey had picked was just gorgeous. I had cried the whole time we had been at the jewelry store and Joey had to explain about a thousand times that no, I was not the bride. And also, no, I was not sorry that I was not the bride, I was actually happy-crying.

  “You’re a basket case,” Nate had told me, and kissed me in front of everyone. “Is that the kind you like, then? Like,
silvery?” He’d squinted at it, pursing his lips.

  I had thought about the time and effort I had put into getting the perfect engagement ring from Mats. The setting, the stone, the way he proposed—it had all been carefully scripted by me. “I like silver, gold, and anything in between,” I’d told Nate. “I just like you.”

  I stopped petting Pia on the floor of the airplane and sat up to kiss him, rubbing my nose across the scars on his cheek. He picked up the armrest so I could cuddle closer. We were totally #cupelgoals.

  “Did you tell her, Jedi, or did you think she was going to read your mind like you did hers?” Joey asked Nate casually from my other side.

  “Tell me what?” Oh, no. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” I demanded.

  Nate leaned forward and glared at his friend. “Why don’t you stay out of this, Rabbit?”

  “Tell me. Tell me right now,” I said. “I insist!”

  “Oh you do, do you?” Nate laughed. He seemed to do that more and more. “You insist, Scarlett B? My beautiful flower?”

  “Watch it with the flower references,” I muttered. Joey still didn’t know about my name. I raised my voice. “Tell me. Immediately.”

  Nate sighed. “I was going to wait until we were on the beach at sunset. Or up on Mauna Kea at night under the stars. In other words, somewhere beautiful, not in this dirty airplane.”

  “Nate! You better tell me, right now. No secrets between us.” My heart had started beating hard in my chest. The plane taxied up to the end of the runway and the engines cranked up to a roar.

  “Ok, Scarlett…” he lowered his voice to a whisper, “Begonia.” There was a long pause. “I was going to tell you something good. I hope you’ll think it’s good.” He kissed me again, hard. “I was going to tell you that I love you. That’s it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah.” He looked annoyed. “That’s it.”

  “He already knows that you love him,” Joey announced. “It wasn’t a mind-reading thing. I knew it, too, everyone can see it. Do you have any gum?”