Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
To Do:
- Leave dog poop in Brad’s car?
- Figure out how to start over
“Why are the garage walls vibrating?” Luke’s voice rang out, louder than usual over the whining guitar of an emo song. “And why is Winston wearing a rainbow wig?”
Claire whirled around, a chocolate chip cookie clutched in her right hand. A half-empty bottle of cabernet sauvignon dangled from the other one. The world was swimming, but at least she wasn’t having a panic attack. Alcohol to the rescue.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“I would. That’s why I asked.” He pulled the wig off Winston and set it on the couch. If he noticed the eyebrows they had drawn on Rosie with eyeliner, he didn’t say anything.
The bottle hit the end table with a clunk. She picked up a hot pink party hat. “Put on your hat, fancy boy. It’s a pity party.” She wrestled the hat onto his head. The elastic slapped against his Adam’s apple, but he didn’t even wince.
“Luuuuuuke!” Mindy continued bopping to the beat, hair gathered into a top bun and stunner shades hiding her green eyes. Her cheeks ballooned with cheeseballs. Orange dust particles settled over one of Sawyer’s shirts, which draped down to her knees. She took a swig out of a bottle of rosé.
The anxiety Claire had carefully been ignoring all day had reached a fever pitch the second she came home and saw Brad’s binders sitting on the kitchen table. Self-medicating with wine and cookies was not as effective as she had hoped. They had been fired. Fired . All because she couldn’t trust her client. Where could they go from here?
Claire poked Luke in the chest. “Lemme tell you what happened. You know the thing I was worried about? The whole Brad-might-fire-me thing? Guess what happened. I’ll give you three guesses.”
Luke narrowed his eyes. “He didn’t.”
“Bingo.” She booped him on the nose, then stared at the ceiling. The tears she had been fighting back with early 2000s pop punk music were threatening to leak out. She picked up the wine bottle again. “I don’t know what I did to piss off the big guy upstairs, but it must have been a doozy.”
Mindy whirled around like she had just been struck by a great idea. “We should set his house on fire.”
“No,” Luke and Claire said together. The last thing she needed was to be arrested for arson.
Mindy went back to dancing, and Luke turned to Claire. He cupped her face in his hand and brushed a calloused thumb down her jawline. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged and took another swig out of the bottle. “It’s okay. It’s only my entire career. Down the toilet. All because I spied on a middle-aged man doing the cha-cha. And now his receptionist is taking over and she’ll either drive it into the ground or take credit for all my ideas. This is fine. Everything’s fine.” A giggle escaped. It didn’t even sound real.
“We could burn the saddle,” Mindy whispered loudly. She pointed to the corner, where the saddle they had painstakingly distressed to match Karen’s childhood one rested.
“Does leather burn?” Luke asked.
“It does if you have enough gas.” Mindy slid her stunner shades down and wiggled her eyebrows.
Claire considered it for a millisecond. It would be freeing. “Nah, we’ll probably need to sell it.”
Mindy pouted. “You guys are no fun. I’m going to go pack.” She disappeared down the hallway. It had taken all of fifteen seconds after arriving home for her to book an earlier flight to West Haven.
Claire yawned. Even her bones were tired. The twenty-minute catnap she’d had the night before clearly hadn’t helped.
Luke took a step closer. “Hey. It’s going to be okay.” So serious for a man wearing a hot pink party hat.
She stared up at him. “I think you’ll find the kennel full of three-legged dogs in Pennsylvania begs to differ.”
He took her by each arm. His touch was like fire, but she was drowning.
“No, they won’t.”
She raised an eyebrow. “No? You don’t think they’ll mind being brutally murdered?”
“They won’t be. Don’t get mad at me.”
She crossed her arms. “Why would I be mad at you? Did you make out with Olivia after I left?”
“No. I made a donation to the shelter.”
Her eyes narrowed. “How much?”
“Enough to get them through a year. Plenty of time for you to find your next big thing.”
She turned away from him and buried her hands in her hair. Relief warred with rage. The shelter was her responsibility to save. Not Luke’s. “So you knew I would get fired. You didn’t believe in me.”
“I believe in you. But I also believe Brad has a mega ego and can be pretty impulsive. I just didn’t want you to have another thing to worry about.”
Claire sniffed and stiffly uncrossed her arms. Luke pulled her into a hug and stroked her hair. “Thank you,” she said, muffled against his chest. He had bought her some time.
He moved back and looked her in the eyes. “I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but everything’s going to be okay.”
“It’s not going to be okay. My warehouse is gone, Luke. My biggest client dumped me. I have a gigantic loan that I now have no way to pay. Our interview was a disaster, so now we don’t have anyone to help us look for more California clients, which we desperately need to help replace the lost income from Brad. Oh, and let’s not forget that ESA won’t leave me alone.” They had been quiet since the parking lot incident. That couldn’t be good. She shelved it to worry about later.
“Right,” Luke said. “That reminds me. Since Mindy’s leaving after your interviews are done, you’re not allowed to leave the house without me. It’s not safe.”
Claire grunted. She had no intention of following that rule.
His eyes searched hers. His strong arms pulled her back in, and she burrowed into the clean scent of his T-shirt. “We’ve faced worse odds. You’re not alone. You’ll find new clients. And now you don’t need to answer the phone at three a.m. when Brad’s calling you with an idea.”
Claire sighed. One of Brad’s binders sat on the coffee table, taunting her. He had easily been her most aggravating and opinionated client. But she had created something beautiful. And now Karen wasn’t going to get her perfect moment. The proposal was way too complicated for someone with no background in event planning. Claire could barely handle all the moving pieces and she had an assistant and capable team. What chance did Brad’s receptionist stand?
“Look at me.” Luke pushed her back, firmly gripping her arms again. “Who are you?”
She frowned. “Did you have a stroke?”
He shook her gently. The cabernet sloshed in the bottle. “You’re Claire Freaking Hartley. Say it.”
She squirmed. “I don’t want to.”
It didn’t feel true today. Claire Freaking Hartley wouldn’t have gotten fired by her biggest client. She wasn’t sure who she was anymore.
His green eyes burned. “Say it. Tell me who you are.”
“A failure. A wildly irresponsible, wine-drunk idiot who couldn’t plan her way out of a cardboard box.”
His grip tightened. “Stop. Say it.”
He wasn’t going to stop. “Claire Freaking Hartley,” she mumbled.
His head tilted. “I can’t hear you.”
“Claire Freaking Hartley,” she said, a bit louder.
He raised his eyebrows. “One more time.”
The wine bottle hit the floor. She pulled her rainbow party hat off and slingshotted it at a framed poster of the movie Goodfellas .
“ I’m Claire Freaking Hartley ,” she shouted over a drum solo.
His mouth twisted up into a half-smile. Her own mouth curved in response, acting completely independently from the mental freakout she was having. And yet, maybe it was still true. Maybe she was still Claire Freaking Hartley. She wasn’t going to let one overly-sensitive, gold-pinky-ring-wearing control freak ruin her life. She had escaped a serial killer, for god’s sake. Surely she could find a way around this financial pickle.
Luke kissed her forehead. “That’s right. Now put your pants on, we’re going out.”
She had been inching toward the whiteboard, eager to put a plan to save the business into motion. “But?—”
He shook his head. “Later. Let’s go.”
So bossy today. She found a pair of jean shorts in a basket of laundry she had yet to put away.
“Where are we going?” she asked as he steered her out the front door and down the steps.
“You’ll see.” Typical Luke.
They got into the car. Thankfully, there were zero ex girlfriends climbing the drainpipe. Luke flipped through songs on his phone until he found Claire’s favorite metal song. Her body thrummed with the double bass. Bar by bar, her anxiety quieted.
The sun hung low on the horizon. Neon lights flashed by. Luke’s thumb brushed small circles over her knee. She wound one arm through his and, for once, focused her attention on the city instead of her phone. They passed a Thai place, and the intoxicating smell of drunken noodles stirred her appetite.
“Is there food where we’re going?” The chocolate chip cookie had been delicious, but it was definitely lacking protein.
Luke nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. Maybe they were going back to food truck central.
“How was your day?” She hadn’t even asked.
“Less dramatic than yours.”
She bumped his shoulder. “Come on. Tell me something. I could use the distraction.”
He glanced at her. “Are we seriously not going to talk about what happened this morning?”
This morning? What was he talking about? Oh, right. His ex-girlfriend trespassed while clad in lingerie and a plastic smile. How polite of him to remind her.
“What, the Olivia thing?” Claire scoffed. “I’m over it. I’ve lived and lost a thousand dreams since she fell from the roof like an oversized bird of prey wearing Victoria’s Secret. She is at the very bottom of my ever-growing list of problems.”
It was true. She hadn’t even bothered to check Olivia’s Instagram for her inevitable sob story. “You would tell me if I had something to worry about, right?” she asked.
Luke frowned. “What are you talking about?”
She folded her hands in her lap. It was like the alcohol had evaporated from her system. “A year and a half ago, you wanted to spend the rest of your life with her. And this morning, she climbed your drainpipe.”
He sighed and seemed to be thinking hard. “I was in a weird place after my dad died. I came home when my enlistment was up, drove across the country so I didn’t have to see my brother.”
Claire bit her lip. Luke’s brother, George, had pulled their father off life support before Luke could get home from Afghanistan. She had forced the two to hang out during a painfully awkward dinner party that culminated in her incapacitating George and forcing him to leave. But things had seemed marginally better at Thanksgiving.
“I did some night classes and bartended while I started my first project,” he continued. “Anyway, Olivia was simple, safe. At first, anyway. Then with all the influencer bullshit, she got addicted to drama. That was our entire relationship, day and night. Accusing me of cheating, picking fights, trying to make me jealous, turning my friends against me.”
And then he had proposed. Not that Claire could judge—she had spent nearly one-eighth of her life with a sentient, Doritos-dusted beanbag with gamer’s thumb.
“That sounds exhausting,” she said carefully.
“It was. So no, you don’t have anything to worry about. Here we are.” He pulled into a parking lot.
“Where are we?” She sat up and looked around. A yellow sign several yards away read Will Rogers State Beach.
“Oh! The beach.” She had been so tied up with Brad’s proposal that she had never even managed to put her toes in the Pacific.
The sea breeze hit her the second she opened her car door. Salt spray misted her face. Not even the tantalizing smell of the cheesesteak food truck in the parking lot could have derailed her from her first Pacific sunset. She kicked off her shoes and tossed them in her purse. Luke’s hand found hers, and they trudged barefoot through the sand to the edge of the water.
A trail of light skimmed across the waves, leading to the setting sun. Cotton candy clouds stood like sentries, guarding the view of the stars that, in West Haven at least, would have peeked out.
A few young families and a handful of elderly couples strolled the beach, but when she turned to look at Luke, they might as well have been the only two people on the planet.
He was still here, even in the aftermath of her greatest career failure. He hadn’t yelled at her or left her to go to poker night like Jason would have. He had built her back up, stepped in to take care of what she couldn’t do alone, and pulled her out of her self-pitying nose dive. It was a level of security she had never known. Warmth and gratitude flooded her.
“Here,” Luke said.
Claire glanced down. He held a Tiffany-blue sticky note with the Happily Ever Afters logo at the top. Brad was scrawled in Claire’s handwriting, followed by his phone number.
“Found it in my car. Thought you could symbolically toss it into the ocean. I know you love to burn stuff, but”—he paused, gesturing around him—“there’s pretty much always a burn ban.”
“Damn gender reveals.” She started to crumple the note, then stopped. “What if a turtle eats it?”
He raised one eyebrow. “You know as well as I do that you only use biodegradable sticky notes.”
He wasn’t wrong. Brad’s name stared back at her, a stark reminder of the hell that was the last twenty-four hours. She pursed her lips and squashed the paper into a tight ball. Frigid water tickled her toes as she stepped to the edge of the shore. Her arm stretched back like she was about to release a javelin. With all her strength, she flung the note.
It immediately blew back on the breeze and bonked into her nose. With a frustrated grunt, she plucked the note from the ground. Was it her imagination, or had Luke taken a step away? She threw the note again, harder this time. It landed on the damp sand behind her.
Her hands balled into fists at her side, and she looked up at the cloud canopy. Why was she being punished? Stalked, abducted, harassed, psychologically scarred, fired, and now she couldn’t even throw a stupid piece of paper into the stupid ocean?
As if on cue, lights turned on down the beach. It must have been about half a mile away. What was it? Her stomach clenched, and she squinted. She would recognize that wheel anywhere. The second stop from Brad’s proposal—the Santa Monica Pier. It jutted out from the beach, mocking her with its colorful lights and theme park screams.
Her purse hit the sand with a muted thump. She took a step into the water. The cold curled her toes. She waded deeper, shredding the note into tiny pieces as she walked. Waves lapped at her knees. The cool tendrils of the Pacific snaked around her, soaking the hem of her shorts.
The intrusive thoughts she’d been fighting crept back in as she methodically shredded the note. She had worked so hard. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Was it even possible to overcome a setback like this? Could this be the end of Happily Ever Afters? Was Brad posting a scathing Yelp review right now? It just. Wasn’t. Fair.
A wave crashed directly on her. Her knees buckled like they were made of cardboard, and sand bit into her palms. Water surged past. Now her shirt was soaked. A strong hand tugged on her arm, but she jerked it back.
“No. I’m doing this.” She clambered back to her feet. She turned sideways as the next wave slapped at her, sending a spray into the air. Deeper she staggered until the water was up to her chin. She opened her hand. Tiffany-blue confetti scattered into the sea, calmer here behind the breaking waves. The paper drifted away. Finally.
She stood for a moment, allowing the ocean to buffet her back and forth. She kicked off the sandy floor and stretched onto her back. The colors of the sunset drifted away, bleeding into the inky blackness of night. For just a moment, she allowed herself to simply be still.