What in the world had just happened?
I blinked in surprise, having gotten lost in the moment, and found the attendants I had forgotten about cleaning up and packing away equipment. Noticing pressure on my hand and between my fingers, I glanced down to see Garrick’s hand clasping mine. With a chuckle, he tugged me off of the background tapestry.
“So. About that talk,” he prompted, eyes tracking across my face, my neck, and back to my lips.
Shyly, I looked away. What else was there for me to say? My body and my logic warred against one another in the thick of his presence. I needed time to regroup.
“May I take you to dinner?” he asked. “I know this great place called Jordy’s Café. We checked it out one night downtown. Erica showed us.”
The time had come. He’d made his move. It was up to me to step up to the plate or flee in the opposite direction.
Slowly, dumbly, I nodded.
He grinned, relief and pleasure shining in his expression. “Would you like the others to come? Or can it just be you and me?” And judging by the gleam in his eyes, he had a preference for the later.
Dinner wouldn’t hurt, right? It was just dinner.
“You and me,” I answered. “Can we meet there?” That way I’d have an out. It wouldn’t look like a date, should any paparazzi get a snapshot. Erica had mentioned going out again tonight to mingle with some peers in the business. Perhaps she wouldn’t mind dropping me off and swinging by when her business had concluded.
“Sure,” he obliged with a grin.
We agreed to meet there in half an hour, parting ways to get changed and, at least for me, to find a place to vomit out all the butterflies.
Garrick
Anticipation burning a whole in my gut, I trotted out of the photography studio. Max, one of our local lighting guys, had loaned me the keys to his car. He had a tech party to attend this evening and wouldn’t be needing it. Plus, he owed me a favor for covering the cab home the other night. Hitting the unlock button on the keychain, I saw the headlights of his Dodge Challenger light up at the far end of the lot.
I was still reeling from my interaction with Gwen at the photo shoot. She’d looked stunning in that gown, her luscious lips so kissable I could have cried. Until I’d touched her. Connected with her. The way she’d looked at me—God, it had filled me with a pride I’d yet to experience.
The sun had set, little Albuquerque blanketed by a pale purple night sky, alluding to just enough time to stir up trouble before the real parties began. Things were finally coming together. I'd meet Gwen at Jordy's, where I'd take her on a real first date. I'd have a real conversation with her. I’d introduce the real me, and slowly lure her out of her shell. What we could be, what I really wanted and fervently yearned for her to want too, would become tangible.
At last!
"Garrick?"
That voice stopped me in my tracks, ripping me out of what I could only describe as euphoria and hurtling me into Hell. I knew that voice. I'd never forget it—a purr issued from lips like rose petals, plump with additional injections of collagen. I turned toward to the girl who’d spoken and her perfectly enhanced breasts, my feet positioned at the edge of the battlefield that had become the space between us, my body primed for a fight.
"Rachel," I replied mechanically. What was she doing here? How did she get here? How did she…?
She straightened from the stucco wall where she had been leaning, or lurking more accurately. Her armor consisted of designer jeans and a scoop neck, all of which hugged her perfect, surgically modified body too well. I struggled to keep my eyes on her face as she approached, the click of her heels like the sound of a miner's pick ax. I felt cold and hot, frozen and boiling. Hatred and nostalgia swirled through me in a molten mass of
yuck
.
"Hi," she gushed.
I hadn’t seen her for two years. For the first few months, every night before bed, I’d work myself into a sweaty, seething rage, stewing over all the insults, all the shit I wanted to fling at her. And now, for the life of me, I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Why so quiet, sugar?” she asked with a windy giggle and a flirtatious shimmy of her sun-tanned shoulders. She met me in a hug, which I did not return.
This couldn’t really be happening. I had to be dreaming. Or nightmaring.
Wake up, dammit!
“How have you been?” she asked, hands fawning over me, touching my cheeks and hair as though nothing had changed. “I’ve missed you. When I heard you were in town, I just about died of surprise! I’m down visiting a friend in Old Town. Maybe you know her. Tina Orchatta? You look just superb. I hear
Straightlaced
is going fabulous.”
Oh, yes. I recognized the name Tina, some friend of Rachel’s from high school. My senses came roaring back when I felt my back bump up against a Chevy Suburban. I’d been walking—no, retreating—and had fallen directly into her trap, without realizing it. I had to seize control of the situation before this man-eater had me for dinner!
“I’m so sorry about what happened between us,” she confessed with a pout. Like a viper, her hand drifted down to my inner thigh, where she pressed hard and crept upward. She leaned in, dusting her lips over my jawline and neck.
“Sorry?” I repeated dryly, eyes focused over her head.
She nodded as she pulled back, her eyes boasting a sickeningly insincere sheen of fresh tears.
Wide eyed and incensed, I tried to process the word. “You slept with my brother.” Clamping my hands on her upper arms, I shoved her away. “We had been steady for four years. I was on my way to asking you to marry me. Sorry doesn’t even begin to cut it, Rachel.”
“He made me, Garry,” she insisted quickly. “I told you that. I gave in once and he started blackmailing me. I made a mistake, sugar. Can’t you forgive me? Even after all this time apart? My heart aches to hold you again.” Reaching out, she laid her hand on my chest. I knocked it away.
“Don’t touch me. I believe that about as much now as I did the first five times you fed it to me,” I sneered.
She huffed, assuming a pout. “Why are you being so mean? Here I came to make amends and heal old wounds, and you’re determined to carve new ones.”
“I have no interest in you,” I informed her, coming up from the car and straightening my rumpled shirt. Gwen flashed through my mind. “I’m seeing someone new.” It slipped out before I could catch myself, and from the subtle shift in her expression I knew I had just made a strategically lethal move.
“Excuse me?” she growled, as if no one on the planet could compare to her. And a little over two years ago, I would have whole-heartedly agreed. After the strange darkness faded, Rachel balked, giving the impression that the lightest gust of wind could blow her over. “Who?” she demanded, staking her fists on her hips.
“That’s none of your business.” In the next instant, I saw Gwen emerge from the photography studio with Erica, fishing her keys from her purse, beside her. My eyes betrayed me with that glance, and how I corrected myself too rapidly afterward.
“Oh,” Rachel hissed with an unspoken threat, poisonous glare locked on Gwen. “Isn’t that cute.”
“You stay the hell away from her,” I warned quietly.
She sighed and fluffed her hair. “Just as you’ve risen in popularity over the last two years, so too have I, Garry. I’ve got all sorts of connections these days. We’ll see how long you and your new squeeze last. It would be such a shame if something popped up and tarnished her reputation.”
I tightened my fists. “Rachel, I swear to Christ. I will bury you.”
Unaffected and confident, she stepped into me. “I’m going to have you back, Gar-bear. You remember, I’m sure, just as well as I do that I always get what I want. Ta, sugar.” She tapped the tip of my nose with a delicate boop of her taloned finger, winked, and sauntered off, leaving me to roil in my anger.
In a fog, I walked to Max’s car, yanked open the door, and slid into the passenger seat. I slammed it shut and locked the doors on the off chance that Rachel would appear again like a creature from a horror movie. My mind couldn’t make sense out of what had just happened. There was no worse moment on the galactic timeline that Rachel could have appeared. Just when a silver lining had peeked out over my horizon, her clouds descended.
Was this some sort of sick, cosmic joke?
I sat back and gritted my teeth, trying to will away her image, her scent, and the sound of her voice. But the horror of discovering my brother’s betrayal and Rachel’s infidelity crashed over me. In a matter of seconds, she had reduced me to the shocked shitless nineteen-year-old I had been.
It happened on a Friday night. I was supposed to attend a cast party for
Blast Zone
, and had called Rachel to invite her. Saying she felt under the weather, she told me to go ahead and have fun—to text her when I was on my way home and that she’d wait up. We had moved in together the Christmas before, and had shared an apartment since. I drove to the party and stayed for half an hour before I grew bored and realized making appearances wasn’t worth it if I couldn’t see her at the same time. So, without texting, figuring I would surprise her, I sped home. I even stopped at the store to pick up a gallon of Rocky Road and a bottle of pink moscato first.
Yeah. That was how whipped I was.
She loved sweet things. And I didn’t mind doing stupid stuff like that for her. When she was happy I was happy. I figured we could have our own cast party on the comfort of our sofa. Lastly, I picked up a Redbox movie. I couldn’t recall the name now. I unlocked the door to our place and walked in.
I found Rachel on our couch alright—with her legs wrapped around my older brother, Dominic.
I had blocked out the rest. I vaguely remembered shouting, throwing a few punches, smashing the moscato on the counter, and hurling the gallon of ice cream at the television. And Rachel, standing in the midst of it all, had cried buckets of tears before it was through. The image I remember most distinctly was standing up from beating the tar out of Dominic, looking into her face, into those summer sky blues, and realizing that none of those tears were for me. They weren’t even for my brother, jeans still down, who lay on the floor cradling his broken nose. They were for her alone. She had been caught. And life as she knew it had ended.
So, I packed a duffle, walked out of the apartment, and never looked back. I didn’t tell my parents about what happened. I couldn’t bring myself to ruin things that way. I couldn’t tell them why I didn’t show up at Christmas anymore, or attend mass on Easter Sunday. The two bonds, family and true love, that I had held tantamount to God as the most unshakable forces in the universe had both come crashing down on me the same night. I had been planning to propose the following weekend on Thanksgiving Day.
To escape, I booked a Caribbean party cruise instead, my family under the illusion I was working on a last minute shoot in Cancun. Ever since then, I hadn’t stopped partying. I hadn’t stopped living in the fast lane. The quicker my life sped by, the sooner I left her behind.
How had she caught up with me?
The answer bubbled up in my brain, and so did the memory that I was supposed to meet Gwen at Jordy’s in five minutes. But I was no longer in a good place, no longer the smooth operator thoroughly engrossed in taking Gwen on our first date. I knew that if I went now, I’d screw up everything. I would soundly flout the one chance she had given me to prove I was worthy of her. Yet again, potential bonds would break apart before my eyes. I tried to talk myself into going, tried to shove my buzzing, clamorous feelings into their box labeled
Past
and get over it.
But I couldn’t.
Because I still hadn’t dealt with Rachel’s betrayal. It was a bridge I hadn’t reached the end of yet.
Fishing my phone from the pocket of my jeans, I dejectedly punched in a text to Gwen. I couldn’t call her. She’d hear it in my voice.
So sorry. Something came up. Rain check?
I waited for a reply for ten minutes, staring at the screen with bated breath. Finally, she replied. Heaving a sigh of relief, I opened the message.
Don’t bother
.
Gwen
“I can’t believe I fell for it,” I mumbled lethargically, staring blankly out of Erica’s passenger side window. The day’s exhaustion settled into my bones. All I wanted to do was curl up in bed with a warm blanket and a whole cookie sheet of gooey cinnamon rolls.
“Honey,” Erica said from the driver’s seat, reaching over and giving my leg a pat. “You really shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”
Swiveling around to face her, I glared. “You saw him with that girl. You know exactly where he went and why he canceled. He didn’t even have the decency to call me because they were probably already locking lips in the back of her car.”
Erica set her mouth into a grim line and I could tell she stood in the midst of a heated mental debate with herself. “I know this looks bad, but I didn’t get that vibe from him. He’s really not like that. Besides, I can’t even picture him with a girl that plastic anyway. He’s into you. He thinks you’re gorgeous. Have you seen the way he looks at you? Just wait until those pictures come out. It was like you two were the only two people in the world during that photoshoot. Even I was close to swooning—”