Chapter 35 Jason
Chapter 35
My trainer says no more bread.
Jason
I ALWAYS HATED this sweater anyway. In fact, it doesn’t matter if the goo comes out or not because, when I get home, I’m gonna burn it. Burn it down! Burn it all down!
God, I drank too much.
Emmy. Emmy. Emmy. She called me Fat Thor. Where’s the exit? I’ve never been to this studio before. Have I been down this hallway already? Where is the goddamn exit?
I turn a corner and catch Emmy eyeing me as she dries her hair with a towel. I whirl in the opposite direction, but when there’s no exit door there, either, I’m forced to head back her way. I trudge down another hallway and get even more lost. I’m banging my forehead against the wall when she appears at my side.
“You’re not driving home, are you?” Her hair is wet and stringy and still beautiful. I know she’s mad at me, but her hazel eyes are soft. I’m not used to seeing her in black. She’s more of a color person. “I’ll call you an Uber.”
“I don’t want to leave the Alfa here,” I say to the wall.
“Then I’ll drive you home.”
I don’t want that. I don’t want her anywhere near me. It’s too hard. It’s too confusing. I just want to be home and be alone and not think. “No. I’ll just wait until I sober up.” The keys are in my hand, jangly and hard.
“Let me drive you, Jason. I want you to be safe. For Mattie.”
It’s hard to argue with her beautiful face, even though I’m angry. But she’s right. It’ll be a long time before I’m fit to drive. “Okay. But you were mean.”
Her hand touches mine, but just to take the keys. “Stay here.”
I lean against the wall and wait. She’s probably telling her daughter and her friend that she’s driving me home. She’s probably being all responsible. I feel irresponsible. I feel like a loser. I can’t even get myself home. And Mattie’s with me. Margarita has let me have him more often since the pregnancy, and he’s at home with the babysitter. Ugh, this purple stuff has a smell to it, like fifty-year-old Kool-Aid.
Emmy comes back and takes my elbow. “Okay, Jason, we can go.”
I love hearing my name in her voice, even though I know this whole situation is no bueno . She asks me where the car is, and I know the answer to that question. See, I’m not totally irresponsible.
“Why’d you park so far away?” she asks.
“Margarita always says that.” I know she’ll hate that answer. Good. I’m so mad at her. She used me. She got me fired from the best job I ever had. Why’d she do that? I thought she liked me.
It’s a long walk, and she wraps her arms around herself in the cool night air. She’s always cold anytime it drops below seventy degrees. There’s the Alfa on the curb, right where I left it. Everything is dark and wet. It must’ve rained. The streetlamps reflect off puddles in the street, and that makes me sad. Then it makes me queasy. Suddenly, everything in my digestive tract ignores the one-way signs, and I reach for the passenger door handle, lean over, and puke.
“Okay.” She lays a hand on my back. “It’s okay.”
She helps me inside and straps the seat belt across my chest. When she taps HOME on the GPS, I know I’m going to be okay. Bon Jovi roars over the speakers.
“Did you mean it?” I turn down the volume. “Does my playlist really suck?”
She smiles, and it’s beautiful and naughty. I forgot how beautiful and naughty it was. “No, I just said that.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m mean.” She switches the music to Duran Duran anyway.
We splash through a puddle as she pulls out. Everything smells like wet asphalt and minerals. I let my head fall back against the cold headrest and loll with the motion of the car. It feels good letting someone else drive. No, good isn’t the word. It feels like relief .
I close my eyes. Then I just say it. “I don’t know if it’s my baby.”
She turns the volume down until the do-do-do-do s are a barely audible buzz and the water under the tires is louder. “Did you do the math?”
“It’s possible, but… she’s been seeing someone else for a while now.”
Her face twitches like she wants to say something, but she’s being careful. I wish we didn’t have to be careful. I wish we could say everything.
“It doesn’t matter.” I spare her the trouble of figuring out what to say. “Even if the baby isn’t mine, she’ll still be Mattie’s little sister.”
“It’s a girl?” Her smile is weak, but there.
“Yeah.” I smile back. “It’s a girl.”
I wake up to her tugging on my arm, telling me to get out of the car. My head is swimmy as I cross the foyer and collapse onto the couch in the den. I smile and say hi to Leah on the way as Emmy mumbles something to her. I already paid Leah before I left, so there’s really nothing to mumble about. Something hard pokes at the soft flesh under my right thigh. It’s Possessed Baby. I toss her across the room, where she lands in the corner, mouth open, silently cursing me and all my progeny for eons to come. I close my eyes.
“Don’t go to sleep!” Emmy’s voice jolts me.
She presses something into my hands. It’s a sandwich.
“My trainer says no more bread,” I whimper.
“We’re way past that.”
I take a bite, tasting lunch meat and avocado and lots of mustard. She remembered I like mustard. I close my eyes and chew.
“I’m going to put Mattie to bed,” she says.
Mattie’s still up? I start to rise, but her hand is on my shoulder.
“Just eat,” she says. “I got this.”
I feel ashamed and small and like Fat Thor, but I eat the sandwich. I need to do better. Right now, though, I’ll just eat and try not to fall asleep before swallowing each bite.
The clock reads midnight when I wake up.
The TV is on. Emmy’s sitting on the floor on Mattie’s bean bag chair watching the ending of Rogue One , the part where the blast that kills them is coming and you know everyone is about to die. Jyn Erso and Cassian are gripped in each other’s embrace. It’s a moment you can’t look away from.
“I love this scene,” I say.
She turns to me, a tear in her eye. “I do, too.”
Four months have passed since our night together in this house, and I feel the weight of that. The weight of everything. I lick my parched lips.
“I brought you water.” She points to the side table.
I take a sip and then gulp the whole thing down. When I finish, she’s got more tears in her eyes. Something’s wrong. Something more than the stuff that I already know is wrong. “What happened?”
She holds up her phone. “They canceled the LA premiere. The red carpet. All of it.”
I can’t look at her as I set down my glass. My chest seizes up, and I don’t know why. It’s what I wanted, isn’t it? To not have to be at events with both Margarita and Emmy. To hurt Emmy the way she hurt me. Except now I just feel like an atomic dick. After all the terrible things I said and did, she took care of me tonight. Me and Mattie both. Someone has to really care about you to do that.
Maybe I was wrong about her. Maybe she didn’t take the pictures. And I can tell she’s truly sorry about that scene in the book. She apologized for it… I just haven’t accepted it.
“I guess I’ll go now.” She gets to her feet.
Reaching out, I catch her wrist. “Emmy, wait. I’m sorry.” I wish I had more than just words to offer. “I was an asshole today. No matter what, you didn’t deserve that.”
Two tears race like falling stars down her cheeks. She swipes them away. “I did deserve it, Jason. I exploited you in my book. I didn’t know you back then. I was just being selfish—you were right about that—but that’s no excuse… and then I did it again.”
I give a tight-lipped nod as understanding dawns. “So you did leak those photos?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “I told you that wasn’t me. I’m talking about the smoothie-after photo.”
“The smoothie-after photo?”
“You didn’t see it?”
I shake my head. She sniffs and swipes around on her phone. Then she turns the screen to me. I squint at it, bracing myself for the worst. All I see is Emmy with messy hair and a glass in her hand. “You’re on the wrong photo.”
She glances at the screen. “No, I’m not.”
I look again. “Are you talking about this one? Where you’re drinking a green smoothie and I’m a big blur in the background?”
She tsks. “My hair is sex-tousled. And you’re shirtless.”
“It looks like a Jamba ad. You can’t even tell it’s me.”
“Don’t you see? I posted it so people would pick up the innuendo.”
“It looks like you posted it so people would pick up a healthy breakfast.”
She smirks. “Smoothies aren’t breakfast, or don’t you remember?”
Her joke takes twenty pounds off my shoulders. It isn’t lost on me that she was worried about posting this silly picture, worried it might hurt me. Someone who cringes at a photo like this would never have shared those other shots with TMZ.
Shit. I’ve been unfair. Colossally unfair. I start to say so, but she beats me to talking.
“Jason, about what I wrote… I really am sorry.” Unshed tears magnify her amber irises. “I wish I could take it back.”
That awful scene in the book. When I read it, it was like a machete ripping through me. But I should forgive her for that. It happened a long time ago, and I need to get over it. I meet her worried gaze with my nonchalant face. “It’s okay. I was going through a bad time. That’s not really who I am.”
Her eyebrows go up. “Wow, did Jason Connor just admit he’s not a total jerk-in-the-box?”
“More like jerk-in-the-box adjacent.”
“No.” She shifts and looks me straight in the eye—no coyness, no teasing, nothing at all to get in the way. “Who you really are is a guy dedicated to his little boy. A guy who, when he does a charity event, gives it his all. A guy who is always the first to say yes to his friends and fans, no matter what. A guy who buys a smartwatch for a girl he hardly knows because he remembered she ruined hers…”
“Emmy…” I interrupt her, embarrassed.
“I’m not finished.” She sniffles and sits up straighter. “A guy who stands by a woman he doesn’t love, who’s pregnant with a baby that might not be his, just so she doesn’t have to do it alone.”
I don’t even know what to say to that.
Two tears slip down her cheeks, and each one is a knife in my chest. Her next words start out on a hiccup. “You’re a good person, Jason. You’ve always been a good person. I’m the real jerk-in-the-box. I can’t believe I was so determined to reach some vague idea of success that I was willing to hurt you to get there.” Her face crumples. “I’m sorry.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. I can’t let her do this—take all the blame.
“Hold up a second.” I sit up and take her hands in mine. They’re warm and small, and I want to hold them forever. “I love how you see me, Emmy, I do. It’s one of the many things I love about you. But when you met me, I was already neck-deep in quicksand. I did that all by myself.”
One side of her mouth quirks. “Yeah, well, I wish I’d been the girl to pull you out rather than shove you the rest of the way under.”
My chest tightens. I squeeze her hands and gaze straight into the golden-hazel depths of her eyes. “You were that girl. You did pull me out. You were the only one who could’ve.”
I want to kiss her, but my mouth is this unsavory place where salami and whiskey and puke breath are still trying to keep the party going. So instead, I bring her head to my chest and plant a smooch in her sticky waves. She feels warm and perfect in my arms. For a long moment, I just hold her, and she holds me, and we don’t say anything. I know it won’t make all our problems disappear, but right now, it’s everything I need and want and choose. To be with someone who makes me feel like five million bucks. Someone who sees things in me I don’t see in myself. Someone who could, maybe, with time, make me see them, too.
She likes long hugs. Even the sheepherders in Nepal know that by now, but eventually, I feel the gentle movement as she pulls away, and I know it’s the end of our moment.
“Jason!” She jerks away from me, her eyes glued on something across the room. It’s Possessed Baby, lying on the floor where I threw her earlier.
“Did she move?” I ask. “Please tell me you didn’t see her move.”
“No, but… her mouth.”
“Is there a big black centipede crawling out of it? Because she and I had a heated discussion about that.”
“Jason, no…” Emmy pushes off the couch, retrieves the doll, and begins to undress her.
“I don’t think she’ll like that very much,” I say nervously.
Emmy’s face goes dark, and her lips press together in a line. “I think I figured out where those photos came from.” She shows me the cracks in Possessed Baby’s skin where the batteries go, the little slot for the SD card, and the shiny lens deep inside her dreadful, gaping mouth.
Oh shit. “Mattie’s doll is a nanny cam?”
She nods.
“The doll Margarita got our son is a nanny cam? And she didn’t tell me?” I know it’s wrong to disparage a pregnant woman, but I aim a barrage of curses at Margarita anyway.
Emmy puts a hand on my chest. “Easy, big guy. Sun’s going down…”
“She leaked those pictures! She had no right!”
“She had no right, but it’s done.”
“We have to tell everyone… the media.”
Emmy shakes her head. “First rule of marketing—don’t resurrect bad press. Let it die, Jason.”
“But…”
“Trust me. It won’t change anything.”
I think about how angry I’ve been with Emmy for something she didn’t even do. How I threw a tantrum on the show today and got the premiere canceled. This was Emmy’s dream, and I stole it from her. Although maybe it’s not too late to make it right.
“Well then, Emmy Ellison, social media influencer extraordinaire…” I tuck a sticky lock of her hair behind one beautiful ear. “If we’re not going to clear your name, what insane stunt are we going to pull to get your premiere back on?”
She lays Possessed Baby face down on the couch. “I think I’ll just take Peyton on a studio tour and go home.” Her smile is weak. “Let’s face it. I don’t really fit in around here anyway.”
I blink at her in disbelief. “Are you kidding? I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more ridiculous statement, except that there’s such a thing as too many Jurassic Park movies. You were made for showbiz. You fit in here better than I do.”
Her mouth twists to the side. “I had my fifteen minutes of fame, but now it’s over.”
“No way!” I shake my head. “I don’t believe that. The world wants more Emmy Ellison, I’m sure of it. More dolphins telling their fortune…” She smiles. “More flames and skulls…” A half-hearted chuckle. “More awesome books and more sexy pool parties. I know I want more of all of those things, especially that last one.”
She hugs herself. She’s squeezing so hard that her shoulders tremble. “I think I’m done.”
“What about us?”
Her sad, little laugh is something I’ve seen actors struggle to imitate. Turns out pretending your heart isn’t broken is a really special skill set. “I want to be with you, Jason, I do. But the truth is… I don’t think it would work out no matter how hard we tried. Our worlds don’t intersect. You’ve got a baby on the way with Margarita—”
“I don’t even know if it’s mine.”
“Is that going to change whether or not you take care of her?”
I don’t say anything.
“I didn’t think so. And I wouldn’t expect anything different. Your dedication to Mattie is part of what made me fall in love with you, and I know it’ll be the same with Margarita and this baby. There’s no room for me here, Jason. Or Peyton. Because I have a child to think about, too.” She pauses. “Let’s face it. Your celebrity dance card is already full.”
My precarious world starts to fall to cinders around me. I don’t want to lose her. I know that now, but I don’t know if I can give her what she wants, what she deserves. The desperation must be written all over my face because Emmy touches my hand.
“It’s okay.” Her desert eyes flash like liquid fire in the den’s yellow light. “We always knew this story wasn’t going to have a happy ending.”
She stands up, and I roll to my feet and stand with her, face-to-face. The way she clutches the strap of her purse, the way her shoulders roll inward, I don’t dare touch her. I only have my words.
“Please don’t leave,” is all I can manage.
She touches my face. “You’re not my boyfriend, Jason. You’re just my celebrity crush.”
Then she turns her back on me and heads for the door.