Held: A New Adult Romance (20 page)

 "I know this isn't an easy decision to make," she said.

 I sniffed. "Understatement."

 "We offer a full range of counseling services here, whatever your decision. Also a full free STD screening."

 I nodded slowly. "Why would I...?"

 "It's usually recommended," she said, folding her hands.

 "I'm not a slut, if that's what you're saying."

 "No, that's not what I'm saying at all. We offer free STD screening and rape counseling as part of the service."

 "Who said I was raped?" I said, scowling at her, but her face said it all. And my defensiveness was just the final nail in the coffin. I still wasn't ready to admit that he'd done something to me without my consent. You couldn't ask consent for every little thing in bed, could you? Really? It seemed absurd.

 She told me I had time to think about it, and that I should, so I went home with nothing taken out of me except for a couple of vials of blood and some pee. I was still pregnant. The worst part was that I didn't feel a bit relieved. If this was a Lifetime movie then surely this was the moment when I decided to keep the baby, and raise it as a triumphant single supermom. Only that didn't happen. I just felt like an immovable obstacle to the rest of my own life.

 The next few days were rough. I stayed in bed and stared at the TV. Everything felt unreal, like I was moving through a thick fog. Nothing really connected with me - not the pictures on the TV screen, not the flavor of the food that Everglade kept trying to make me eat. I was so far sunk in apathy that I didn't care that she was screening my calls - she must have been, I figured, since Justin had gone quiet.

 Then the clinic called and told me I had gonorrhea.

 I called Justin. It went to voicemail so I figured I'd leave him a little something, just like he'd left me. I think I said something like "Congratulations - you have an STD," and probably told him to fuck himself. It felt like the last straw. Knocked up, dropped out and diseased - a perfect trifecta of suck.

 Everglade asked me if I was thinking about killing myself, but I told her not to worry. I honestly wasn't. Suicide would have required some level of self-hate, and self-hate would have required a mental effort that was currently beyond me. I had nothing more to give - no more anger, no more outrage, no more pain.

 Justin turned up one day when she was out – another one of those weird little twists of fate that made me wonder if somewhere there was another universe where I was okay and he was still alive. If Everglade had been there...well. When they told me afterwards I wondered if in
that
universe she and I were both dead.

 He looked tired and beyond unhappy; that is to say he looked so much like I felt that I took pity on him and let him in. Or maybe I felt I owed him. After all, I was carrying his kid, and his disease.

 I don’t know. It was stupid. You know the expression ‘misery loves company’? It was like that. If we couldn’t be happy together then we’d rather be miserable together than apart.

 He followed me into the kitchen and I started to make coffee. For once he sat quiet, defeated. When I turned back to him he looked like he’d been gouged out, and there was nothing left but a sort of exhausted, confused emptiness. Or maybe I was just projecting.

 I tried to figure out what to say - how many other girls were there? Why did you take the condom off? Have you had a test? Did you get antibiotics? A million and one things I couldn't say, because they all sounded so clinical, so practical. None of them touched on what I really wanted to say and I didn't have the words for them anyway, not at the time. Why are you here? Why are you determined to take everything that I have, everything that I am, when you can see as well as I can that neither of us have anything left to give?

 Instead I said, "You look tired."

He looked up at me with this expression of awful, aching need, his eyes filled with such loneliness that my heart - the heart I thought had gone cold and dead as ashes - swelled and stung in sympathy. "I can't sleep without you," he said.

 I started to cry, partly because I hurt and partly because I was relieved to hurt at all. And I knew what he meant. I couldn't count the number of nights I'd lain awake, missing him, missing the way he curled around me like I was a treasure. He got up from the table and took my hands, and I cried all the harder, only to have him kiss away the tears. "I'm sorry," he kept saying. "I'm so sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I love you so much."

 We went to bed then. I let him reinfect me and didn't care - just so long as he kept me held in his arms. I cried over the sob stories he'd fed me, the ones that let me see him as a lonely, abandoned little boy who needed nothing more than my love.

 When Everglade came home and found us, I'll never forget the look in her eyes. It said 'You're drowning and I can't save you.' She threatened to call the police again, so I grabbed some clothes and told Justin we'd go up to Big Sur, to talk and fix things. You can tell I was in no shape to do anything of the sort - I hadn't even told him I knew he'd given me an STD, or that I was pregnant. But that was how it was with him - I'd get caught up in moments and forget about the bigger picture. We were such poison to one another that I guess it was inevitable that one or both of us would end up dead.

I toss the cigarette end out onto the roof. The sun is gone now and Jaime sits patiently in the dark, waiting to hear the next chapter of the sad, sorry mess I made of my life. He must be one of the few people in this town who doesn't know this story; I'm a legend for all the wrong reasons, like poor Sharon Tate or that Entwhistle girl who took a nosedive off the big sign, back when it still read Hollywoodland.

 “He died there, didn’t he?” he asks. “Up at Big Sur?”

 I nod.

 "I'm sorry," I say, because I don't know what else to say. Did I take him there because subconsciously I wanted to wash it all away somehow? Or did I just panic and it was the only place I could think of to go? Either way, it was bad taste at best, downright ghoulish at worst.

 I press my back to the fading warmth of the window. He sits as stiff and neutral as Dr. Stahl, and I wish I had his attention the way I had it before. How easy would it be to just walk over there, sit in his lap and start up all over again? I know I could distract him - I think he wants me almost as much as I want him - but he came here to find out the truth. And God knows I owe him that.

 "The place looks good, don't you think?" I say. "You'd never know anything happened there."

 "No," he says. I can see him clearly in the orangey smog glow that passes for night over Sunset. His expression doesn't alter, but then I think there's a wet glint in his eye.

 "I'm sorry," I say, again. "I don't know what I was thinking, taking you to Big Sur. I don't know if I was even thinking at all."

 He shakes his head. "It's okay. You were scared. I get that."

 "No. It's not okay. It's fucked up."

 Why can't he be like other people? Why can't he just look me up on the internet and find out the sordid details for himself? He gets up from the chair and I hear him coming closer, coming up behind me. "Amber," he says, and touches the top of my arm.

 I shake him off. I know how easy it would be right now to fall into each other, do it right here on the floor. The sense-memory of his skin almost overwhelms me, like I can already feel him, his bare hips in my hands, his body sweet and solid and wholesome. Too good for me. Too good for anyone. I could love him so easily that it scares me.

 "I didn't mean to do it," I say. "I had to."

 "Had to what?" he says. "Drive to Big Sur?"

 My throat burns with the effort of holding back a sob. I've never said this before - not in these words. There's always been a reason for it. Couched in legalese. "No," I say. "Not that. Justin."

 "What about him?"

 "I had to do it," I say. "I had to kill him."  

 Chapter Nineteen

Jaime

Did I see it coming?

 Maybe. There's only so much gossip you can tune out. Deep down, all this time I knew there was something going on with Amber, something far worse than the usual rehab and eating-disorders baggage that goes along with being a Hollywood kid.

 And I hate myself for wanting to draw away from her. Hate myself for thinking for even a second that she had been planning it all along. I've watched too many old movies, where the ice-cool blonde turns out to be the killer all along. She's not that blonde and she's not that cold.

 "Do you believe in hell?" she says. "Damnation, pitchforks. Mortal sin. All that shit."

 It's so quiet I can hear myself swallow. "I don't know. Not as much as I should, I guess."

 "I thought you were a Catholic."

 "I am. I never said I was a good one."

 She sighs, so close to the window that her breath mists the glass for an instant. "But that's a straight to hell thing, right? Killing a person. Go straight to hell, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars?"

 "I guess," I say. "I expect there are get-out clauses. Why does it even matter? I thought you were an atheist?"

 She opens the window again and lights up another cigarette. Her hair looks like it could use a wash and her lower lip is chewed ragged enough to bleed, but there are still dumbass parts of me that don't care that she's crazy, don't care that she killed a man. She's still worth it.

 "I don't know," she says. "I sometimes wonder if I'm broken inside. I don't..." She runs her tongue over her upper lip. "I guess I should feel worse than I do. About him."

 "Amber, what happened? What happened when you went up to Big Sur?"

 She gathers back her hair and sighs. "He'd been holding back," she says, after a short pause that lasts forever. "He knew - about everything."

 "He knew you were pregnant?"

 Amber nods. "Yep. He'd been watching me. Following me. He knew I'd been to the clinic. But he didn't know that I hadn't had the abortion."

 I let out a breath I didn't even know I was holding. She's told me enough about this guy to feel like I know him, like I know how he'd react. It's not a pleasant thought.

 "He had the gun all along," she says. "It's possible he was planning to kill me when he came to the apartment, but I said something he wanted to hear. Isn't that funny? Everglade always said I was stupid to forgive him or try to understand him, but in the end I think it might have been the thing that saved my life. I took him to bed, told him we'd go to the house - and he went along with it."

 She sniffs hard. Her eyes glitter. "Because he still loved me," she says. "Everglade was wrong about that too. He did love me, even if it was twisted and wrong and crazy. He still loved me enough to believe I'd want to die with him."

 "Die with him?"

 Amber tosses her cigarette out of the window, turns back towards me and then moves wide around me - in a half-arc that takes her to the chair in the middle of the room. There she sits, straight backed.

 "He used to sleepwalk sometimes," she says. "He had very vivid dreams - nightmares, sometimes. He said it was part of the price he paid for being creative. We used to sleep in the most ridiculous positions - wrapped around each other until our limbs turned numb. I was afraid to let go of him, in case he got out of bed and started walking around in his sleep. He used to scare me, Jaime. He was like a different person. Or maybe that's just what he was like all along - I don't know. Like I say - I was an idiot. So many things about this man - all ways that nature says 'Do Not Touch' and I was just...fuck it...so into it. I thought he was deep. I thought he was complicated. I thought he was broken and that I could fix him."

 She slumps and rubs her forehead. "I thought he was sleepwalking," she continues. "When he woke me up. We went straight to bed when we got to Big Sur - it was a long drive. It was twenty past three - I remember looking at the clock and thinking that was weird. If he was going to have some kind of wig out in his sleep then it always happened between three and three thirty. Strange time of night - just...dead time. No time, you know? Like when you're a little kid and you wake up at that hour - and it's like everyone in the world has been asleep forever and will never wake up. Do you know what I mean?"

 I nod. "Yeah. I think so."

 "He was staring at me. Like so hard that I could feel his eyes burning into his face even while I was sleeping. I snapped awake and there he was, just staring across the pillow at me. It was dark but I could see him clearly. I could see his eyes were shining, like he was about to cry or something."

 She takes a breath and swallows. I feel like I should go over there - touch her hair, hold her hand, do something - but I'm afraid that if I do she'll stop talking.

 "He said 'When were you going to tell me you'd killed our baby, Amber?'"

 "Jesus."

 She shakes her head. "He'd been sitting on that for I don't know how long. Fucking psycho." This comes out in a sort of angry, frightened spit, and for a moment her eyes shine bright. She rubs a hand over her mouth. "Then I felt it - under my chin, right here." She presses two fingers under the point of her chin. "He had the gun right there. He was going to blow the top of my fucking head off, and it's so stupid, but all I could think of was please don't let him fuck up my face too badly. All I could think of was my Dad, and how much worse it was going to be for him if I didn't have a face for him to kiss goodbye when they found my body.
If
they found my body."

 Tears start to run down her face. I move towards her, but she holds up a hand.

 "Don't," she says. "Please don't. It's hard enough having to remember that I did that to you."

 "Amber, it's forgiven. Forgotten. You were panicking."

 She shakes her head. "It doesn't matter. There's no excuse, not for me. Not when I know what it's like to feel that scared."

 I go to the chair and kneel at her feet. "It's okay. It's done. We're both here. We're both safe. Please - go on."