Chapter 28 Monk
TWENTY-EIGHT
Monk
Rarely have I felt more ridiculous than I do right now, scanning the crowd on the Hollywood Forever lawn. Seems like everybody and their mama is out for the one-time showing of Brown Sugar.
The idea planted itself in my head like a bad seed last night. Meekah bludgeoned me with questions as soon as Verity was out of earshot.
“Is that her?” Meekah demanded.
“Is that who?”
“Verity Hill. That vibe you guys got going on is like a neon light. Is she the reason you could never get serious about any woman I’ve ever known you to date?”
“I haven’t dated that many women.”
“My point exactly,” Meekah retorted smugly. “So is she the one who got away?”
If I ever believed there was such a thing as “the one,” it would have been Verity, but she ruined that.
So, why you here looking for her?
“I’m not looking for her,” I counter under my breath, shifting the blanket rolled beneath my arm. “She don’t own this flick.”
I pull the brim of my baseball cap down a little lower. I’m not in the mood to socialize. This is some bullshit. I’m going home.
“Monk?”
The sound of my name with that tentative note, in that husky voice, stops me.
I look up from beneath my cap and come face-to-face with the woman I’m absolutely not here to see.
“Verity.” I think I sound suitably surprised. “Great minds think alike, I guess.”
“Uh, yeah.” She shifts a white paper bag from one hand to the other. “Banging my head against my laptop at home wasn’t getting me anywhere, so I thought, why not?”
“I know how that is.”
“You told me once that it all came naturally to you. Remember? And music was always easy.”
“Shiiiiit. That was before every song had a deadline.”
“Nice to hear the great Monk Bellamy is mortal.”
“In the end, I’m just a man,” I say with a smirk. “Though you got the ‘great’ part right.”
“And still so modest,” she laughs.
I used to live for that laugh. Hard to believe it was once an everyday occurrence, but I’ve gone years without it and had almost forgotten the sound.
“What you got there?” I tip my chin to the bag she’s holding. “Anything good?”
“Not really. I already ate dinner. I swung by a bakery to pick up some chocolate éclairs and iced coffee.”
“Okay. I’m in.”
She tilts her head and grins up at me. “I don’t recall inviting you.”
“I mean, I’m here.” I gesture to the bag. “The coffee’s here. The éclairs are here.”
“Using me for my éclairs.” She huffs a sigh. “I guess I’ll share.”
“Generous. So you gonna say all the lines like you used to once the movie starts?”
“I don’t…” She pretends to think about it. “Probably, yeah.”
“I figured.” I look around until I spot a clear patch of grass among all the seated moviegoers. “Wanna set up over there?”
By the time my blanket is spread out, I’m second-guessing the decision to stay.
To hang out with the woman who arguably hurt me as much as anyone in my life ever.
Sure, we’re forced to be on set together sometimes, but this was me actively seeking her out.
Going out of my way and against my better judgment on the off chance that she still loved Brown Sugar enough to venture out tonight.
“You thinking mighty hard over there,” she says, setting out a pink bakery box of éclairs while we wait for the movie to begin.
“I was thinking about the fact that we’re watching a movie in a graveyard,” I lie.
“Not on graves, though. We’re grave adjacent at best.”
“Some people get bent out of shape about movies being shown at this cemetery, but some of the greatest figures of film are buried here. Rudolph Valentino and Cecil B. DeMille. Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.” I point in the direction of the actual burial site.
“Burt freaking Reynolds is resting in peace over yonder. We’re talking Smokey and the Bandit. ”
“You know who’s not buried here?” Verity doesn’t wait for me to guess.
“Hattie McDaniel. Her last wish was to be buried here among her peers, but her request was denied. It was a segregated cemetery, and just like she wasn’t allowed to sit with her peers the night she won her Oscar, she wasn’t allowed to rest with them, either. ”
“Damn. I’m shocked and yet not.”
“Took another fifty years before this place was sold to someone willing to honor her request. She’s still buried over in Angelus-Rosedale, but now there’s a monument here to commemorate her.”
“Shit like that really puts what we’re doing with Dessi Blue in perspective.” I pause, considering whether I want to open this box of messy feelings. “I’m glad we agreed to put the past behind us so we can do this film. It’s too important. It’s bigger than us or our differences.”
“Differences,” Verity repeats, swallowing the last of her éclair and shuttering her expression. “We both know it wasn’t simply a ‘difference’ that came between us. If we’re going to put this behind us, then I want to be clear about what happened and what we’re moving past.”
I grit my teeth, but smooth out my voice. “Look, there’s no need to revisit the details.”
“Not details, no, but maybe just clearing the air. I know it doesn’t make much difference, but I never… I wouldn’t… I didn’t sleep with him, Monk.”
The faint sound of the preshow playlist music, the chatter of our neighbors, the distant hum of street traffic—all of it fades and there’s an antenna tuning everything else out and into Verity’s words.
She draws in and releases a long breath, looking straight into my eyes, no filter or wall up.
She’s showing me all of her, the way she used to.
The way we used to before we truly understood how vulnerable loving someone that way makes you.
We didn’t know to cover up, to conceal. Not with each other.
“I’d been drinking,” she goes on. “And you know I could never hold my booze, but it was a strange night. This isn’t to make excuses. I’m just telling you what happened. I never got to do that. You left Top Dog, and then when I came to the apartment, you wouldn’t let me—”
“I know what happened,” I cut in, not sure the rage won’t well back up if she makes me live through it all again.
“No, you actually never knew.” She looks down to her lap where her fingers twist and turn nervously. “I made awful choices that night, but I do know I didn’t sleep with him. I didn’t sleep with anyone else while we were together. I told you then, but just wanted to make sure you believe me.”
I don’t respond, but grip and twist my discarded baseball cap because I need something to do with my hands. I only wish there was something to do with my heart because it is thrashing in my chest as her words land on me.
“Why have this conversation now?” I ask, still not looking at her.
“I tried to tell you before, but you wouldn’t—”
“Wouldn’t listen.” I squeeze the back of my neck and train my stare on the blanket spread beneath us. “I know.”
“If I had seen you with someone else in the position you found me in, I would have responded the same way you did. That would have qualified as cheating to me, too. We were… We were exclusive.” She blinks rapidly, hands twisted in the hem of her shirt, like I’ve seen her do so many times when she’s agitated.
“You were mine and I was yours. I understood what that meant. I deserved to lose you, and I know it hurt. I just want you to know…”
A tear streaks over the smooth slope of her cheek. She brushes it away so quickly in the waning evening light I’m not sure I didn’t imagine it.
“I know I was the one who broke us,” she goes on. “But I was left in pieces, too. For a long time, I felt so guilty that I didn’t allow myself to feel that.”
“To feel what?”
“Heartbroken.” Another tear slips over her face, but this time she doesn’t bother to swipe it. “Just because I was the one who threw it away, doesn’t mean I didn’t lose it, too. I was in a really bad place, and on top of that, I lost the most important person in my life.”
“What kind of bad place were you in? If we’re unpacking it all, can you tell me that? Was it like what happened when you were out here in Cali for college the first time? Junior year?”
Something akin to panic flashes across her face, but it’s gone before I can pin it down.
“Y-yeah, same kind of stuff,” she stammers. “Overwhelmed and not sure how to handle it.”
“Relationships should be like driver’s licenses,” I say, redirecting the conversation, sensing she doesn’t want to discuss what happened junior year.
She never does. “The same way you can’t get on the road to drive until you’re sixteen, seventeen, there should be a license to have a serious relationship.
Not allowed until your frontal lobe is fully developed. ”
“I know, right?” She sniffs, swiping at the last of her tears and aiming a rueful grin at me. “It’s the body’s bad joke that we start getting horny and thinking about sex a whole-ass decade before most of our brains are fully mature enough to deal with the consequences of it. Of getting it wrong.”
“You mean sex? Getting sex wrong?”
“No.” She looks up from the remnants of éclair she’s shredding into a napkin. “Love.”
Who knows if things would have been different had we really discussed it then, when I stormed out of Top Dog and she left Finley so abruptly before we got to talk?
There was no chance for explanations. No time to forgive, so my fury and betrayal have been preserved in ice like some prehistoric creature that no longer belongs in this era.
But tonight, it’s not the residual bitterness or the anger gnawing at me.
It’s a desire that I’m not sure ever went away.
A perverse wanting. I’m still desperate to drink her down, even knowing that first sip was laced with poison.
I have no idea what to say in the face of her brave vulnerability. It feels like something between us is being repaired, and my frontal lobe may be good and developed, but I’m still liable to get this wrong so I take the coward’s way out.
“Well, uh,” I say, turning my attention to the screen. “Looks like the movie’s starting.”