Love, Chloe (36 page)

My stomach dropped as I watched them go, and I wondered if this was IT. The end of everything—my job, my apartment, and my relationship.

The crowd dispersed, someone turned off the Chloe lightshow, and Vic sped away with a glower. Carter and I made it to my door, and then just stared at each other: two awkward people with no clear direction.

“So,” he finally said.

“Yeah.” That was my brilliant response. I felt too tired and too emotional to discuss it all. A part of me was still upset about his lies, or omissions—the fact that he never told me that his parents owned the building we lived in, that he’d grown up just as pampered as I had. Along with being tired, I was vulnerable, rubbed raw by Vic’s public display of affection—an incredibly romantic proposal from a man I had once loved deeply.

“I’m gonna head in,” I finally said.

He didn’t like that. His mouth tightened, his hand came up and yanked through his hair, a sigh hard off his lips. “Chloe,” he said, and it was the end of the sentence, neither of us eloquent.

“I’m going to bed.” I unlocked my door and hoped he’d stop me. Rolled the strap of my purse over my shoulder, and gave him a moment of opening, plenty of time for something to be said. But he stayed quiet, and I stepped inside, then the door was shut and I was alone.

Truly alone.

Vic was fully gone from my life. I had seen it in the sag of his shoulders, the moment he had finally understood that I wasn’t his responsibility anymore. It saddened me that he’d gotten excited over the idea of a baby. That he had planned that big proposal with the thoughts that we could start a family—a life—together. Six months ago, it would have made my heart sing. Of course he’d assumed it was a Worth child. That was the type of man he was. Confident that, in the race of sperm, his would always win. But something had died between us, out on the street. Maybe it was the public humiliation of my snub, maybe it was seeing me turning to Carter and physically choosing between the two of them—I don’t know what it’d been, but something changed. I searched for feelings of regret, but there was none, only relief at the end of that chapter.

It made me a little nostalgic, a big chapter of my life to close, a chapter in which I changed a lot, grew up a lot.

I skipped a shower and changed into pajamas, crawling into bed, all of the lights off, the television dark. I lay there for a long time, waiting for sleep, trying to drown out my thoughts, so many
what ifs
floating through my head, trying to find places to settle.

I hoped for his knock, and when it came, I was out of the bed and ready, swinging open the door, my voice quiet considering the screaming of my heart.

Carter stood there, pajama pants low on his hips, his shirt off, every muscle on his torso tense as he stopped mid-knock. He looked at me and said nothing.

I stepped back and waved him in.

That night was one of our first without sex. He pulled back the covers and climbed in, pulling me beside him and close to his chest. Hugging me tight, his arm around my chest, his legs hooked through mine and he said only one thing, his breath against my neck, his heart beating a hard rhythm against my back.

“I love you.”

“I love you too.” It was my first time saying the words out loud, and they almost rushed from my lips. His arms tightened a little around me, and I felt the relief in his grip, a moment of hold before we both relaxed. I fell asleep there, in his arms, the murmur of the city loud outside the window, my body warm in his embrace.

Below us, on the floor where I’d carelessly dropped it, was my purse. Inside, my phone vibrated with each new tweet and Instagram post that mentioned me. As Carter and I slept, social media exploded.

Someone hammered on my door. The pounds were hard enough to wake us, the door shaking against its jamb. Carter jumped from the bed, moving to the door, and I groped for my phone, pulling the sheet around me, trying to figure out through a haze of sleep what day it was, where I was, and who the demon in the hall might be.

Carter spoke, his hands on the door, eye to the peephole. “It’s a woman.”

I found my purse, then my phone, and didn’t bother unlocking it, seeing a chorus of missed calls from Dante and Nicole. “Oh God,” I mumbled.

“She’s not going anywhere,” Carter remarked, the door shaking with a fresh round of knocks.

I tossed the phone on the bed and walked to the door, waving Carter aside and steeling myself. I pulled opened the door.

I’d seen fury in human form. I’d never seen
this
before. Dante stood behind Nicole with a warning on his face, but none was needed. Not when the woman before me sizzled with emotion. She glared at me, and I could see the edges of her psyche breaking. She was as close to killing me as sobbing in my arms.

“You …
bitch
.” The words spat from her mouth and I flinched.

“Nicole, I don’t know what—”

“Shut up!” she seethed, pushing forward, a sharp fingernail jabbing my shoulder. “Do you know what you’ve
done
?” She screamed the words, her voice shaking on the final syllables.

I didn’t feel like guessing. Paulo? Her pregnancy? The fact that I’d been sneaking Chanel non-organic treats?

“I’ve got the studio on my ass, the press on my ass, a heartbroken husband and Paulo is flipping his
shit
, Chloe.”

Ouch. So her pregnancy
had
leaked, as had her affair. “I’m sorry Nicole, it was a bad situation. No one should have overheard—”

“Overheard?” she seethed. “Not just
overheard
. There are a dozen different
videos
of you blabbing about my personal business. You’ve spelled out my entire life for anyone with an internet connection; you wouldn’t shut up.”

I got her point. Realized my fuck-up. And there, in my pajamas on a Saturday morning, finally decided that I didn’t care. Not about this woman. Not about her issues. Not about the consequences of her actions. I met her eyes and said, for the first time since she hired me, what I really thought. “You got yourself in this situation. You shouldn’t have cheated on Clarke. And you should have told him yourself that you were pregnant.”

She stepped closer, fully inside my apartment, and slammed the door shut on Dante’s face. I stayed in place and met her murderous stare.

Then, her mouth trembled and, oh my God … she was about to cry.

“Do you know how long Clarke and I have been trying?” she whispered. “All of the doctors, the fertility treatments…” Her words died, and she looked away, swallowing hard. She suddenly looked, in the harsh morning light of my apartment, old. Like she’d been up for hours, her eyes puffy, wrinkles not covered by makeup, dark shadows not covered with concealer. “Clarke would have been so happy to find out I was pregnant. That was
our
moment, Chloe. One for us to celebrate, one we’ve waited for seven years for.”

“If it’s
his
,” I pointed out. “Paulo—”

“Paulo had a vasectomy five years ago,” she snapped, her eyes hardening. “Not that
that’s
any of your business.”

Very rarely had I felt as much of an asshole as I did right then. And that was before I read all of the gossip articles, the tweets, and posts. That was before Nicole stiffened, her hand grabbing at her stomach, her face going pale. I watched her grope for the wall, her eyes darting to me in panic, and I barely caught her before she crumpled.

“I’ll call an ambulance.” Carter grabbed his phone and I sank to the floor, propping Nicole’s head up on one of my pumpkin pajama legs and shushing her. I didn’t know why I
shushed
. I thought it was, for some reason, soothing.

It wasn’t. For one, her cursing drowned out any effective soothing qualities. For another, Carter held the phone away from his mouth, mid-directions to 911, and told me to shut up.

So I did. I shut up and let Nicole curse me. I held her in my arms, and I prayed that her baby was all right. I had already messed this up. I couldn’t take any more consequences from my actions.

In the distance, there was the wail of a siren, the sound almost swallowed by its city.

I sat on the floor of the ambulance and stared at my shoes. Pink Nikes. They clashed horribly with my pajama pants. And I wasn’t wearing a bra, my nipples standing out in the cold air of the vehicle. In between my knees, my phone buzzed, Joey calling. I stopped its vibration and wondered what I would tell him and Hannah. Wondered if the secret of Paulo’s involvement would keep. I wouldn’t be the one to spill it. I had already, in the last twelve hours, done more than enough damage.

I didn’t know anything about babies or pregnancy. But I did know that the Moment You Tell the Father was a pretty big deal. So was the Moment You Tell Your Friends … and Your Mother … and Everyone Else. There were a hundred websites devoted to helping you break the news. Some people put plastic babies in cakes for an unsuspecting relative to break a tooth on. Some put a literal bun in the oven and hope someone gets the witty reference. Some flew banner planes, some rented billboards, but NO ONE wanted the news broke via an assistant’s blabby mouth on YouTube. No one wanted a thousand gossip sites running the headline
Who Is Nicole Brantley’s Baby Daddy
? I thought of all of the people that news hit. Clarke, her husband who didn’t even know about her affair. Her friends, those social maggots who would feast on this for years. Her parents, those society mavens who had earned all of their fortune on condoms, yet got all a flutter if her table settings didn’t include a fish knife. All of those people, everyone in her life, got her joyous baby news in that horrific fashion. Something ten years in the making … and I had ruined it.

I felt terrible. Even worse once I found out that Paulo wasn’t the dad. All of my texts back and forth with Cammie, all my soul-searching and inner debates … wasted. I had a moment of guilt over some gleeful moments where we had made fun of her predicament. Nicole probably wasn’t even
with
Paulo anymore. She probably got pregnant and kissed goodbye to that affair—fully focused on her new future.

The ambulance went over a pothole and I winced, my head hitting the side of the vehicle, my nerves past shot. Nicole held out her hand, asking for mine, and I took it. I held her hand and realized, my mind spinning through everything, that I was going to quit. In that moment, while gripping the hand of a woman I didn’t like, praying for her baby, the ambulance rough as it fought for its place in a city that didn’t budge, the right decision was clear. Life was too short, morals were too important, and I flat out didn’t like my job. I’d rather be back on Cammie’s couch, working for minimum wage, than be her assistant.

I didn’t say anything to Nicole. I figured it wasn’t exactly the time. With everything the poor woman had going on, she might need one dramaless moment.

We finally arrived, and I was sent to the waiting room. Clarke and Dante showed up and we sat there, the weirdest threesome ever, in the corner of the hell that was an NYC emergency room.

I watched Clarke as he sat in his seat, beside Dante, his elbows resting on his knees, his shoulders hunched, pulling the lines of his shirt tight. I didn’t know what to say to him. I felt like I should say
something
, but the shitstorm of drama that I had caused seemed too big, too impossible to resolve in the time that stretched before us.

He lifted his head and looked at me, and I saw the thin edge of emotion that he straddled. “The newspapers…” He swallowed, his beautiful mouth tightening for a beat. “They said that you said you didn’t know who the father was.”

The conversation that I had dreaded for a year was finally here. “Yes,” I managed, hoping he would stop talking, hoping we would go back to silence.

“Why?” He adjusted the end of one shirtsleeve, pulling it tight, his eyes dropping briefly. “Why wouldn’t it be me? Who else could it be?”

When he looked back at me, it was two sets of eyes in total. Dante also watched, every muscle in his body ready to pounce. This was a test. I realized it instantly. Not from Clarke. Poor, beautiful Clarke just wanted to know what the hell was happening in his life. But Dante, he watched to see what I was made of. I wished I knew. I looked down at my pink Nikes and bought a sliver of time.