Chapter 17
A bby
Home again at my mom’s Windsor Terrace apartment in Brooklyn with a bowl of chicken noodle soup in my lap and our kitty, JoJo, curled up on the pillow next to me, I watched reruns of I Love Lucy, occasionally breaking the tiniest of smiles. Not because I was feeling better, but because Lucille Ball was the only actress who could make me crack a smile when I was little, when everyone used to say, “Smile, Abby. Turn that frown upside down. Why the long face, Abby?
“It’s my only face,” I’d reply.
Of course, I was doing everything possible not to think about the VIP room fiasco of almost a week ago now. It hadn’t been so much the fact that a half-naked sex goddess was sitting on top of Liam, or the fact that she was pushing her tongue down his throat, it was the fact that he seemed like he could be enjoying it. After we had made love just the day before. The night before. Why? Why couldn’t he have just told me he was going to do that, like he promised? Why couldn’t he have been up-front and told me, I’m sorry, but I’m still going to see Giselle tonight . It would’ve hurt, but it would’ve been the truth. I wouldn’t have been blindsided by seeing her tits in his face so shortly after he told me that he was falling for me.
In any case, it didn’t matter. I gathered my stuff up that very night and boarded a plane for JFK. On the flight, I had the untimely misfortune of sitting next to a Point Break fan. I found this out because she asked what I did for a living, and I told her I was a musician. She got excited, telling me how she’d just come from the Vancouver Point Break concert, how incredible it had been, and how sexy her idol Liam Collier had been onstage. I nearly barfed in her lap.
Being in the front row (she’d been in the front row for five of their shows, she said), she was almost certain that he had looked at her this time. In excruciating detail, she described how he had crouched right in front of her and reached out to her or someone near her, but she was almost sure it was her. She had reached out, too, their fingers almost touching, as he crooned to her. All I wanted was to curl up and sleep against the window, letting the memory of that evening burn away like jet-engine fuel, but the older teen prattled on and on about who was cuter—Liam Collier or Tucker Benning, because while Tucker was “pretty boy” cuter (whatever that meant), she’d heard he was a bit of a prick.
I nearly told her how horrible they both were, not to believe the hype, that Liam was really just a two-timing womanizer who crawled into the panties of any woman who let him, and how she should run far, far away if she ever encountered him in person.
But I didn’t.
She only knew the persona, the rock star, the legend—the man who wasn’t real. The actual man, the one I had stupidly fallen in love with, was an insecure, talented, geeky drama class thespian singer-actor whose high school girlfriend had suggested he start a band with a new persona, then when he finally saw his dreams and hard work coming to fruition, he got a tattoo symbolizing her dedication to him, then promptly dumped her ass.
And I fell for him, thinking he could handle being a one-woman man.
Ugh.
I Love Lucy was over, so I switched through the channels, stopping briefly on What Not to Wear, watching, aghast, as Stacy and Clinton transformed an everyday book nerd into a rock chic diva. They should’ve just left her alone and called the show Be Who You Fucking Are. My red minidress that night had been similar, and while it still lay crumpled in a ball inside my still-packed suitcase, I’d probably burn it in a bonfire atop our brownstone apartment.
Then came the worst part about the Point Break fangirl—she went on and on about how Liam Collier and Giselle Vici were on-and-off boyfriend and girlfriend, how cute it would be if they actually got together and married one day. What a wedding that would be! Yay! I’d said. Though she was jealous, she had to admit. I had to tell her at that point that I was very tired and needed to sleep, which was why I’d gotten a red-eye flight, so I could sulk here against the window, but her post-show high was difficult to come down from, and she added, “But he was seen with that girl, that cello player last week. Did you see those pics?”
“No,” I’d told her. “I don’t follow Point Break gossip.”
“Well, you kind of look like her,” she’d mumbled, pulling out her phone to confirm.
I’d turned my face toward the window at that point, murmuring, “She’s not me.”
Happy Point Break Girl thumbed through her phone to summon up the now notorious pic of Liam and me touching hands in the sleeper bus parking lot, tilted her head, and said, “Yeah, you’re right. You’re much prettier.” She’d shrugged. “Huh. I wonder what that was all about anyway. Don’t think they’re together anymore.”
She got that right.
I had no idea what it was either.
A blip. A hiccup in my plans. A cruel joke by the universe to see how much I could fall deeply in love with someone who would never be mine. A man who freaked after being with me and scampered off like a baby deer hearing a gunshot.
Not nice, Universe. Not nice at all.
A text chimed, and then another.
I ignored them and finished my soup.