（one year ago）
Los Angeles
O n a suffocating Tuesday afternoon in late August, I lay prostrate on my couch sipping an iced coffee and half watching Arctic Worlds in an effort to cool down. Even with the curtains closed against the sun and the window unit in my bedroom chugging away, the heat remained thick as fleece.
Hunter stood at the window, peering through the drapes at the outside world. “There goes another one,” he announced as a man jogged by. “Shirt off. My God, look at that six-pack! That’s five so far today. Eight if you count the short ones.”
“This is why you should move back from New York and take the empty apartment on the first floor. It would be like old times.” Hunter had moved to New York for a part in a musical eight months ago and was now recording an album there as well, so I no longer got to see nearly as much of him as I’d have liked.
“But I get to stay for free on your couch,” he reasoned. “And this way you have a place to stay in New York, too. It’s like we’re bicoastal. Oh. My. God. Another one!”
“It’s the hiking trail at the end of the street. It draws them like flies.”
“We should get a baby pool and sit in the front yard,” he suggested.
“So you can out-six-pack them with your rock-hard abs?” I giggled.
“Yes.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me up to sitting. “We have to get out of this apartment. I’m dying.”
I groaned as he peered through the slit in the curtains.
“Speaking of dying, your plants don’t look so good, either,” he said. “Come on, let’s water them. It’s not like it’s any cooler in here. We can put up the umbrella, catch a breeze…”
Clearly he was not going to be deterred, so I filled the watering can and followed him onto the balcony, where he promptly stripped off his shirt, revealing rippling muscles under smooth dark skin. Two girls walking by caught sight of him, and one almost walked into a street sign. He waved.
“Too bad you’re playing for the other team.” I laughed.
I watered my poor shriveled plants while he leaned on the railing posing like Adonis awaiting his Prince Charming. I couldn’t help myself. I had to pour the water on him. He swatted at me, which only made me splash more on him. “I’m just adding to your allure,” I teased.
“Whatever,” he returned. “It feels good.”
An Uber pulled up to the curb outside my building, and a blond head emerged from the back. “Is that who I think it is?” He peered over the top of his sunglasses.
We watched as the driver helped Summer heft two huge bags from the trunk. “No way is that tramp getting my spot on the couch,” he said through his teeth as he waved to her with a bright smile.
“Oh, come on. You know you’re gonna pick up one of these hikers this afternoon and I won’t see you again for months.”
“You mean until you drive my ass back to LAX next week. ’Cause you know you ain’t getting out of that, girl.”
I laughed. Despite his bravado, Hunter was a gentleman, and he bounded down the stairs to help Summer with her bags.
She dragged herself through the door and flopped on the couch, looking the worse for wear.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Ugh.” She sighed. “Brian found out about Eric and kicked me out.”
Finally. I’d been wondering how long that would take.
“How did he find out?” I asked.
“A freakin’ condom.”
I stared at her, incredulous. “You did it in his apartment?”
“But the good news is, you were using protection,” Hunter chimed in.
“So stupid, I know,” she admitted. “But I’ve hardly seen him, I swear! He wanted to shoot pictures of me for this series he’s doing, and the view there is so amazing, and then, you know how it is…We got carried away.”
“So what are you gonna do?” I asked, as though the answer weren’t obvious.
“Can I stay here for a sec? Just until I get a job. I may die if I have to stay with Rhonda in the Inland Empire again. Pretty please?”
“You’ll have to duke it out with Hunter,” I said. “He has dibs on the couch.”
“I can just sleep in your bed with you.” She must’ve seen the hesitation on my face, because she added, “For just a little while, I swear.” She threw her arms around my neck and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you for having my back.”
“You don’t wanna stay with your new boyfriend?” Hunter asked.
She shook her head. “He lives in his art studio downtown, and he’s traveling a lot right now. I wouldn’t want to be there alone.”
For the past year I had mostly avoided discussing Eric with Summer for fear she might sniff out my sensitivity surrounding the subject and become suspicious. But finally the question begged to be asked. “What’s the deal with you guys, anyway?”
“I mean, he totally wants to be with me,” Summer said. “But he’s, like, broke. So I don’t know if it can go anywhere.”
“But he’s a successfulartist,” I said. “He doesn’t make any money from that?”
“I guess he does.” She shrugged. “He’s super weird about money. He never spends anything—he doesn’t even have a car. But he owns that entire building his art gallery is in. Apparently his family is, like, superrich, and I guess he has a trust fund and everything that he won’t even touch.”
“I can help him with that,” Hunter offered.
“Believe me,” Summer said, “if I can’t get him to spend money, no one can.”
Besides her nasty habit of stealing the sheets, Summer wasn’t a terrible roommate. It was nice to have someone to chat with over a glass of wine in the evening, and she was a neat freak, which meant she did the dishes and cleaned the place before I could even think about it.
Much to my relief, Eric never came around. Though I wouldn’t in a million years have admitted it to anyone, I’d been unable to ever totally let go of the time we spent together on the roof. I knew it was foolish—my logical mind recognized that he was a player and, even without Summer in the picture, he’d likely never have been with me—but my heart still curdled at the idea of the two of them together. In the beginning I’d tried to replace any errant thoughts of Eric with Dylan, but it hadn’t worked. Sure, I’d liked Dylan—and I imagined I would’ve been far more into him if I hadn’t met his brother first—but it wasn’t Dylan who turned up in my dreams. My obscenely sexy, stubbornly recurrent dreams.
Luckily, my dreams were the only place Eric turned up. He rarely seemed to be in town, and when he was, Summer preferred to stay at his place unless they were fighting, which they did regularly. I gathered both of them were incredibly jealous, but neither was particularly faithful. She threatened never to see him again over nudes he’d shot of other women or amorous text messages in foreign languages. He broke it off with her over dates she went on or new Jimmy Choos bought by a suitor. I could hardly keep up.
The theatrics were unusual for Summer; normally she had her guy wrapped around her little finger, and when she crooked it, he bought her baubles—or she dumped him for another man who would. But Eric had staying power regardless—or perhaps because—of his failure to bow before her. She was obviously more smitten with him than she cared to confess, and I daresay (in spite of her claims to the contrary) he was less with her, which drove her nuts. I had no doubt that if he actually wanted her to be his girlfriend, she’d have turned down the French Laundry with millionaires in Lamborghinis to eat ramen and ride the subway with him. For once in her life, the tables were turned. And this, I was ashamed to acknowledge, made me more than a tiny bit gratified.
One Saturday evening I arrived home bone-tired from a long day slinging drinks at the pool to find the door to my bedroom closed. I’d had to get up at the crack of dawn to drive Wendy to a physical therapy session for her broken leg, and was badly in need of a nap. But I didn’t want to nap with Summer. I wanted to nap alone.
Annoyed, I pushed the door open to find Summer fully nude on my white down comforter, posing seductively while Eric snapped pictures. I froze, rooted in place.
Making no attempt to cover herself, she calmly rolled onto her side. “Hey. We’re just doing a photo shoot. We’ll be finished soon.”
I blinked. Eric lowered the camera. “I’m doing a series on female erotica.”
“On my bed.” My voice sounded high and strange.
“It’s a good bed,” Eric said. “I like the iron; it photographs well.”
How the hell did neither of them realize this was totally weird? Having no idea what else to say, I backed out of the room, avoiding looking at Summer as I shut the door behind me, and walked blindly into the kitchen, where I poured myself a shot of tequila. I knocked it back, the booze burning my throat.
Had they fucked in my bed?
I knew I shouldn’t care. I’d stayed in hotel beds a million times, where God only knows how many people had done God only knows what. But it was my bed.
And why was I so turned on by the idea of Eric fucking in my bed?
Aaaah! I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to erase the thought, and when I opened them, Eric was standing in the doorway, gazing at me. “I like your garden.”
“Thanks,” I managed.
“Have you heard from my brother?”
“He invited me to London,” I said.
This wasn’t exactly true, of course. He’d thrown it out there the night I met him, a full year ago, but he hadn’t mentioned it the handful of times we’d emailed since, and if he had, it was doubtful I would have gone.
“Are you going to go?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“I’d love to shoot you sometime,” he said.
I pictured Summer nude on my bed. “No thanks.”
He glanced toward my bedroom. “Not like that. I’ve been looking for a queen for a series I’m doing. Your face, your attitude—you’d be perfect.”
Over his shoulder, I noticed Summer lingering in the hallway, now wearing a sundress. She draped her arms around him from behind and nuzzled his ear. “What are you guys talking about?”
“Belle modeling for me,” Eric said, not taking his eyes off mine.
I wanted to slap some sense into him, but all I could do was stand there gaping like an idiot.
Summer slipped past him and slid her arm around me, giving me a little squeeze. “She is pretty, isn’t she?” she asked, stroking my hair. And then lightly: “But you lay a hand on her and I’ll fucking kill you.”