MARCH 2003 #3
I swallowed. “You seem to care a lot about her for someone who was just trying to hook up with me.”
He shrugged. “Of course I care about her. And I wasn’t trying to hook up with you, Nadine.
I like you. A lot. Not like that,” he flushed a deep red at my arched brow, and I suddenly felt rather awful for teasing.
“I just … I’m the type of person who has to like someone before they can even think about dating and romance, you know?
I like you, so it felt like the sort of thing I ought to consider.
But I don’t think your friendship is some sort of runner-up offering, if that’s what you’re concerned by. ”
“I’m not,” I assured him.
“I just want you to know I care. You can come to me—and I’m glad you did in London. How is everything going?”
I caught the weight. The implication.
Was I still on the verge of a relapse?
I don’t know. I didn’t think so—not as I had been, desperate to numb it all. As awful as it was to admit, the guilt was fading. I was still traumatized by it—bodies and blood and broken bones are horrific. But Joel was horrific too.
I regretted my involvement, but not, perhaps, that it had happened at all.
Did Harper feel the same?
“I’m good, I think. And thank you for London.”
“Anytime, Heywood. You know that.”
We fell quiet, but I could feel pressure mounting until all at once I blurted: “I’m seeing someone.”
I hadn’t meant to—hadn’t thought that was where this was going, but Caleb was just so damn easy to admit things to. A confession was burning on my tongue, demanding utterance. And that’s the one that leaped to the forefront, the secret spilling over like it had to make room for the darker truth.
He looked up, frowning from beneath his curls. “Oh?”
“They’re not … not the sort of person I can be seen to be seeing.”
His scowl deepened as he considered all that might mean, and before I could allow him to wander down another path, I added. “She’s not the sort of person.”
“Ah,” he said—and then he smiled. “Well, congratulations, Heywood. Are you happy?”
And I was.
Deliriously happy.
“Yes,” I said.
I’m just not sure that I should be.
———
When I got in my car, my phone was flashing.
I flipped it open to five missed calls from Harper.
My heart seized up in my chest, my ribs pulling inward, everything on the verge of collapse.
I sat in Caleb’s driveway hitting the Call button, but it didn’t even ring, and she hadn’t left a voicemail or punched in one of her regular sorts of illegible texts.
(She used abbreviations no one else did and acted baffled when I couldn’t decode them.
I wouldn’t have been surprised to receive TKATW or G2J: they know about the woods or going to jail.)
Joel, surely. She’d be in Canada by now, so whatever it was it couldn’t have happened in London.
I forced myself to twist the key, to put the car in drive.
I didn’t need Caleb coming to check on me and becoming more involved than he already was.
I could phone Ruchi when I got home. She could speak to Adrian or her network or wherever it was Ruchi pulled answers from because she always had them.
My hands were shaking on the wheel, but I repeated my next steps like a mantra until my own gates opened, and there Harper’s Lamborghini sat.
“Harper!” I called, bursting through the front door.
She stood at the kitchen island, stirring something in a glass. She wore a satin negligee, a silk robe thrown on top, and she’d clearly just washed her hair because it was braided and damp.
“What are you doing here?” I breathed, coming toward her, ready to gather her up into my arms, but she stilled me with a glower.
“I thought I’d surprise you. But you were at Caleb’s.”
“What?”
The stirrer clinked against the glass edge. “You were at Caleb’s. You told me you didn’t sleep with him. So why were you—”
“I didn’t sleep with him,” I snapped. “I have no interest in sleeping with him. You’re Harper fucking Moore and I’m Nadine Heywood, who is possibly competing with you in my life? You’ve been at the heart of every action I’ve taken and every thought I’ve had for more than a decade.”
She stilled. Softened. Bit her lip and then I was beside her, taking her hand, knowing it was the vulnerability I was soothing more than her concern.
“How did you know I was at Caleb’s?” My voice was gentle, and she didn’t hesitate with her reply, didn’t hide it. She sounded almost weary.
“I put a tracker in your car.”
“Harper …”
“I know,” she said, turning, leaning her forehead against mine.
“You don’t trust me?” I asked.
“Of course I trust you. I just … I don’t know how to do this.
We’ve spent so long obsessing over each other, tearing each other apart—doing hideous things to each other …
” She swallowed and turned my hand over to run a finger over the pulse jumping in my wrist. “I can’t care about you less than I did.
I only know how to want you in a way that’s obsessive and perilous and toxic.
I’m going to want you so much I’m going to ruin this. ”
I thought of my alerts for each shred of news bearing her name. Of the way, even now, my mind still wandered the same way: to what she was doing, where she was, what she would think of each and every thing I did.
“I’m only upset I didn’t think to plant a tracker on you first,” I admitted.
She laughed, a sharp quick exhale. “We’re too awful to do this properly.”
I clutched her wrist. “I want you awful.”
I didn’t want pure from either of us. I wanted messy, tainted, interesting. From Harper, I dreamed of consuming, debilitating, virulent love. She was too fascinating for anything less.
She looked up, our faces still so close, those thick fans of lashes her only defense. “You deserve so much better than this. I’m not sure I even regret all the things we did to each other. It’s not healthy.”
“No. But who cares? Healthy would bore you and break me. We were always going to consume one another; let’s at least enjoy it.”
I was, if anything, relieved that she felt it too. I didn’t want to dial my emotions back for her, but if hatred had tilted so completely to adoration then I could not expect those other facets of it to fade. The possessiveness. The need to be all the other cared to see.
This was never going to be a tranquil sort of happiness—quiet, peaceful, a contented sigh at the end of a tiring day. It was going to be as passionate and destructive as ever. But that was what I yearned for, just so long as it was the two of us bound together and afloat in the churning currents.
When our lips met, that’s how it felt: like the tide of the world was crashing down and she was the last safe shore.
———
In summer, Harper began crying in interviews.
Having held her while she sobbed in earnest—all bright red eyes and choking snot—I knew the tender glistening tears were a performance.
But still I worried there was something real to it—that she was breaking down in public and covering it up with this false concern: that as the months passed, it was harder to believe Joel had truly run away.
That a man so famous might have successfully gone into hiding to dodge his wife or his mistresses or loan sharks or gangs or whatever he might have got himself mixed up in now.
“Joel, if you’re out there, please come home. Please,” she begged.
Because she was a romantic—or because she needed the distraction or perhaps to compensate for every time she uttered his name—she devoted herself to me.
Harper filled my house with flowers. She sent bouquets weekly: calla lilies, camellia, clover, gardenia, irises, salvia. Beauty. Longing. I am thinking of you. I yearn for you.
When I was on set—no projects I was particularly excited by, but god, I needed something to stave off the boredom, so here I was—Harper sent flowers there instead, from different florists each time so that the press were driving themselves in circles to delve out my secret admirer.
I dried the bouquets and sent them back, so both our houses always smelled of fresh cut flowers and drying earthy stems.
Harper brought me breakfast in bed—lopsided waffles and half-blended smoothies. She braided my hair at night. She climbed into the shower with me so she could scrub my back before running her hands elsewhere.
She pouted about not being able to take me on a date, so I ordered in wine from a local vineyard and we held our own tasting until the taste of it blurred on our tongues.
For our next, she spoke to a gallery owner she was friendly with—she booked out the whole place for the evening, and we drove in separate cars before wandering round, admiring the art.
There was one—a woman strung from the rafters, angel wings in the shadow cast against the wall, and when I turned Harper was looking at me like I might be a similar sort of sacrifice.
She pressed me against the wall beside it and sealed her lips against mine like it was every bit as holy.
It was relentless, her determination to pretend things were normal.
Slowly, I began to believe it.
———
By September, Harper was sleeping through the night, and I’d been cast in Gentle Hour, an adaptation of the new De Vries book, and the two of us were dominating every late-night news bulletin after I’d thrown a drink over her at Stephanie Cameron’s birthday party.
Caleb had invited me and how was I to know Harper would be there.
“You should have seen her face,” Harper cackled on the phone.
I had my own phone pressed so hard to my cheek I feared the screen might flip all the way back, but something about Harper made me long for a coiled landline so I might twirl it around my finger.
“She was so excited to reveal her relationship with Leyton Madders, and there we were upstaging her.”