Chapter 12
Here came the sour dregs of beer, the milky coffee I’d been downing all morning.
I beelined to the single-stall bathroom, headphones still around my neck, and emptied it all into the clean ceramic toilet.
I felt a sudden chill and rubbed my arms as I remembered I was wearing Gabe’s airbrushed face on my chest.
From the moment I first saw him, I’d sensed that his face would be my downfall.
Gabriel Leighton, The Tiger Crew alumnus, working songwriter, aspiring pop-folk artist. The guy who stirred eggs so slowly that I actually liked eating them scrambled.
Who rested his chin on the top of my head when he held me from behind.
Gabe, who made me like hiking and hardware stores and really anything I was doing in his company, because I liked him so much it almost physically hurt.
Gabe, who’d said he loved me. Gabe, who’d admitted to his childhood crush on Maggie.
The facts turned like a kaleidoscope, realigning in my brain to tell a new story.
We had first met at the bottom of Maggie’s driveway.
He never wanted to come on set to say hi, despite the fact he had been friends with Maggie growing up.
I’d told myself he was embarrassed that her career had taken off while his was slower to launch, or else embarrassed that she had rejected him when they were thirteen.
I thought I might be sick again, but nothing came up.
The possibility of what I’d built with Gabe was a balloon we hadn’t tied, and all the air was whooshing out. It made me dizzy. It made me feel like I’d been played for a fool. After my dad’s second betrayal, I had sworn to myself that I would never again let another person make me feel like this.
All the time I’d thought Gabe wanted to talk to me—because of, what, my sparkling personality?—he’d actually been going after Maggie. He was still in love with Maggie. Who did I think I was?
Just remarkably stupid. Too dumb to realize that my bosses were sleeping together. Too dumb to know that the man I watched professionally 24/7 was cheating on his wife. Too dumb to see that the man I loved had always been in love with someone else.
My throat burned, and I figured I deserved it. I washed my hands with the bar soap, scrubbing far past the point of necessary hygiene. I willed myself not to cry.
The mirror hanging in the bathroom was a full-length with a bright-yellow frame, gifted by the wife of some guy on the production team.
It’s an art piece, the guy told everyone proudly.
It didn’t look like an art piece to me, not with my sorry self reflected on its surface, goose pimpled and haggard.
My hair, which I’d washed but not blown out that morning, crimped in awkward tendrils around my tired face.
I’d aged a decade in the past twenty-five minutes.
Bags under my eyes like bruises, my eyeliner smeared.
I looked like the morning after personified.
I looked like an unhinged Gabriel Leighton fan.
Tucking my hair behind my ears, I headed back to my logging closet. Where else was I going to go? Work was suddenly all I had.
The tape was still playing, and since I’d dragged my headphones with me to the bathroom, the sound came through the monitors in a rustling of wind, the occasional creak of the siding, the rev of an engine in the driveway nearby.
The space was empty again, innocuous, teasing me with its mundanity.
Part of me wanted to rewind, to watch Gabe’s hands on Maggie’s waist, hers on his shoulders, to ascertain I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. But I knew what I’d seen.
My phone lay face down where I’d dropped it, still flipped open.
I nudged it with a shoe, like it might bite.
Two missed calls from Gabe. How long had I been in the bathroom?
It had felt like forever. The date on my screen showed me the footage had moved into the next day.
Instinctually, I pressed the 10x replay.
All I could do was my job. All I wanted to do was my job.
If I just sat there doing my job for the six hours until end of day, I would not have to acknowledge that things had irrevocably changed.
Watching was the perfect buffer—I could sit in the safety of my voyeurism, avoiding my own foolish self.
If I kept watching, I did not have to actually do anything.
“Cassidy!” I jumped.
It was Gabe, solid, in the flesh. Unshowered, his hair stiff with yesterday’s gel, that pheromonal sweet-sweatiness that had drawn me to him from the moment we met. My chest clenched.
“How did you get in here?”
“The lady at the front told me where to go. You weren’t answering your phone.
” He moved to touch my arm, and I gave an infinitesimal flinch.
Gabe frowned. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple dipped.
“You forgot your wallet,” he continued, looking around at my empty popcorn bags, my coffee mugs and dented cans of Diet Coke.
“I figured I’d drop it by on my way to that good breakfast-taco place .
. .” Gabe’s voice trailed off as he examined the footage on my monitor.
I waited for him to realize what it was I had been looking at.
He didn’t. “Though maybe I should have done the taco place first, brought you some sustenance.”
He waited for me to speak. Normally I would have made a joke or would have kissed him. Instead I stood awkwardly, arms wrapped around my torso, lips pressed tight.
I’d barely processed what I’d seen of him and Maggie. I didn’t know what to do.
“Cassidy. Talk to me. Is everything okay?”
I closed the logging room door, an illusion of privacy. On the monitor, the sun came up in 10x speed.
Had he not shown up here, I could have dodged his calls and ignored him when he messaged me until he got the picture. We could have faded out, bittersweet but safe, rather than forcing a horrendous conversation. I fought the urge to turn my shirt inside out.
“I know about Maggie.” My voice was raw. I clenched my teeth to hold back tears.
Gabe froze, and this reaction told me everything.
I hadn’t misread their gestures. I hadn’t imagined the two of them there on the screen.
Gabe and I stood in the fusty logging room, with its slight scent of Lemon Pledge and stale Doritos, each deathly still.
This was it. Whatever this had been was over.
There was no more me and Gabe. There was me, and there was Gabe. A part of me had known that it was always going to end like this.
“Anyway, I’ll get this shirt back to you,” I said. “And whatever else you have at my place. Thanks for the wallet.” I was an ice princess. I had to be, or else I would start bawling.
“Wait,” Gabe said, still mentally catching up. “Cassidy, wait. Let me explain.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I get it. It’s fine.”
“Cassidy, let me—”
“I think you should go.”
We both left the studio, though I waited to be sure he was totally gone before telling Monica at the desk that I felt sick.
I went home and got straight into bed and lay there trying not to think about Gabe, trying not to replay that image of Maggie’s hand moving from his shoulder to his cheek, trying not to hear his plea: Let me explain.
His hands on her waist above her low-rise jeans.
The easy way she leaned into him. I had the most gigantic crush, he’d said.
Or was it massive crush? He’d been trying to tell me he was into her, that I was a stopgap.
His chin on top of her head, the same position he held me.
My phone buzzed with texts, but I didn’t look at them. What was there to say? I’d opened myself up, and look what it had gotten me. I hated that I cared.
I took a frowned-upon dosage of NyQuil and went to sleep.
Cassidy. Please call me back. Let’s fix this.
The next morning I cleaned my Glendale workspace, saging Gabe out of my life via disposal of three-day-old Cup Noodles.
I didn’t call him back. We had a Dustbuster in a tiny hall closet, and I knelt to get every corner, suck up every crumb.
Maybe the cleaning crew would thank me for lightening their load when they came through this weekend.
At the very least, I thanked myself—I was saying goodbye to old, gullible Cassidy without having to cut myself bangs.
When all was vacuum striped and new, I went back to my monitor.
I had a day or two of new stuff—Maggie taking a painting class, Jason playing poker—but I figured it could wait.
Today was not a day for how people presented themselves, the polished laughs and faux embarrassment because the camera caught them exiting the bathroom; today was a day to uncover what it was that they actually hid.
Sex. Everyone was hiding sex. Basically I had a treasure trove of Honeymoon Stage pornos. Lauren and Dan: sex for business; Sally Ann and Jason: sex for pleasure, until she needed something else, and then they stopped the sex entirely, it seemed.
I might have missed the glaring red flags in my own personal life, but I wasn’t going to miss clues about what had actually happened to Sally Ann. At least my own breakup hadn’t yet led to a murder.
I spun my wheels a bit, literally sliding in my desk chair.
Sally Ann was allergic to nuts. Lauren and Dan knew that Sally Ann was allergic to nuts. Maggie knew—she’d gone right to the EpiPen. Who else knew?
I, oblivious idiot who could apparently spend months with someone and never know the truth of them, had not realized the nut allergy wasn’t just another aspect of Sally Ann’s skinny-girl fad diet.
Everything said Sally Ann, nut-free, but it also said Brent, no gluten, and I’d seen him down three regular donuts in a row when under stress.
Had she told me and I’d just forgotten? But it wasn’t my fault.
I’d written down to the leave the nuts off the order.
This had to be Jason’s fault.