Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
Alec sitting across the low bar table from me, our hands are joined over the center, eyes locked.
Alec pinning me against the rock cliff, his hand grasping my waist, mouth sweetly pressed to mine.
Alec in sunglasses and a baseball hat, laughing as I feed him a bite of doughnut.
Me reaching to wipe a smudge of chocolate from the corner of Alec’s mouth.
All these perfect memories have been posted by TMZ for the whole world to see. Their carefully curated collection, shared in a single tweet, has nearly five thousand retweets and ten times as many likes in only two hours.
I’ve seen the internet dogpile before, but I’ve never even been a close bystander.
Now, in the same tweets that contain thinly veiled rape accusations against Alec, I am accused of covering up his crimes, of using my position at the LA Times to shelter a criminal.
With the photos of him outside Jupiter, it is a veritable bloodbath now.
Eden has already had to delete all of the social media apps from my phone because I was starting to hyperventilate.
Two hours later, still numb and reeling, I’m walking to the kitchen for a glass of water when my phone rings.
I’ve been expecting this call at some point from Billy, but adrenaline makes me light-headed anyway and I perch carefully at the edge of the couch.
I can’t decide whether this call took more or less time to arrive than I expected.
He’s silent for a good five seconds before saying only, “Hey, George.”
My voice is hoarse from yelling into the void of my bedroom. “Hey.” I close my eyes and pull my brain into order. “I bet I know why you’re calling. We need to craft a response plan.”
A long, blown-out exhale. “Actually, kiddo, I gotta ask you to come in and drop off your credentials.”
My world hits pause, and my stomach drops through the floor. He’s… firing me? Sex with sources is frowned upon but rarely results in termination anymore. “What?”
Billy’s voice comes out thinner. “We’ll do a quick exit interview. I promise to keep it painless.”
I stare at the wall in shock. Painless? Is he for real?
I didn’t think it would be possible, but this conversation with Billy is more painful than the last one we had.
He sounds so defeated, telling me I’m out of a job.
I’ve seen my boss excitedly foulmouthed, angrily foulmouthed, and joyfully foulmouthed.
But I’ve never heard him sound resigned before. He isn’t even going to fight for me?
“Billy.” My voice comes out wavy with heat. I’m past devastated now and am sliding into angry. “You’re firing me for sleeping with Alec? Are you serious? This is exactly why I didn’t include his account in the story!”
“You know this isn’t coming from me,” he says.
I don’t know what to say to that. It is absolutely him—Billy has been at the Times for twenty years; he has pull there.
The Netflix and BBC spokespeople have already come out and stated unequivocally that Alec is not in any way involved in the alleged crimes that happened at Jupiter.
Billy and the Times could come out with the same; they could keep me if they wanted.
“Unbelievable,” I say, pacing. “You know I tried to do the right thing here.”
“I hate being told what to do,” he says, “but in this case, I agree the optics aren’t good.”
I lift a shaking hand and smother back an agitated, disbelieving laugh. It was Eden who, only an hour ago, in a brief moment of hysterical levity, suggested we revise our drinking game with some truly macabre rules:
Take a drink every time we come across a fresh, absurd headline; the recent favorite is “Feeding Him Doughnuts While She Feeds Fellow Women to the Wolves.”
Take a drink every time a new meme is created by Alec’s fangirls trashing my body in the beach photos.
Take a drink anytime a news article says, “The optics aren’t good.”
“Billy,” I say, with as much control as I can manage, “these tweets accusing me of helping a criminal make zero sense! I’m the one who exposed the Jupiter crimes! Firing me is absolute bullshit.”
“I get it, George.”
“I mean it. I was researching this story before I ran into Alec in Seattle.”
“I know.”
“And you know he didn’t even do this!”
Billy sighs. “I know.”
I make a mental note to add a rule to the game: take a drink every time Billy gives me a resigned “I know” and still does not go to bat for me.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out better, George. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“I’ll drop off my credentials in the lobby,” I say, and hang up.
Eden understands that there is no way in hell I can sleep in my own bed tonight, not when I haven’t yet washed my sheets since Alec slept here, not with his swim trunks slung over my shower door and his toothbrush in the cup next to mine, and not with him ignoring all my calls and texts.
Once I’m home from dropping off my LA Times office keys and credentials, I give up trying to get ahold of him and toss the cursed Batphone onto my bed, focusing instead on packing a small weekend bag.
My plan: head to my parents’ place, crawl into my old bed, sleep for a week.
My best friend watches silently. We’re now out of words. Our last exchange was a simple “This fucking sucks,” repeated a few times with increasing emphasis until we fell quiet again. But as I’m zipping up my bag, Eden bolts upright when the Batphone starts to vibrate on the bed, tossing it to me.
I let out a scream, fumbling it like a hot potato.
“Alec!” I yell, answering. “Holy shit! This day! Where are—?”
“I’m headed back,” he cuts in calmly, and wind whips through the line.
“Back?” I repeat, pausing my pacing between my bed and closet. “Back to the hotel?”
“To London.”
Just hearing his voice triggers relief and it floods me with warmth. “Okay. That makes sense. Oh my God it’s so good to hear your v—”
“I wanted to let you know,” he says with quiet finality.
Confused, I carefully enunciate. “Thank you. Yeah. I—Alec, look—”
“And I want to make sure you’re clear that my permission to print my account is rescinded.”
“Your—?” I break off, frozen in shock. He has no way of knowing I’ve been fired, but I’m not going to add to his turmoil by telling him. Especially when he sounds like a fucking robot. “Of course. We wouldn’t add anything without your permission.”
He’s quiet in response—meaningfully quiet—and I meet Eden’s eyes.
She’s staring at me like she wants to bore a hole in my skull and read what’s happening there.
“Listen,” I say gently, “I’m sorry I changed the story and pulled your part of it.
I hope you know my intention was to protect you. You and Sunny. You and me.”
“We understand.”
“We?” I scan my mind for something better to say, some words that will pull him out of this quiet damage-control monotone and remind him that I’m here and I’m his, and even though this is genuinely shit, we can figure out a plan together.
But Alec speaks first. “Please take care, Gigi.”
Blank inside, I stare at the wall. “I… wait. Alec? That’s it?”
The other end of the line is oddly flat.
He fucking hung up.
Pulling the phone away from my ear, I stare at my home screen, a photo I took of him playing Mario Kart, his tongue sticking out, trapped between his perfect, grinning teeth. Inside I am glowing—I mean, I am positively incandescent—with rage. “Is he fucking serious?”
“What just happened?”
I’m trying to relax my jaw so that I can get more words out than the string of curses that want to rip free, but I can’t. I just shake my head again. “Holy shit.”
“Georgie, what?”
“He’s going back to London,” I say.
“Okay?” She’s trying to keep me from blowing a fuse. “That makes sense, right? He probably wants to get his team and family together.”
“He told me he was rescinding his permission to print his account and to—and I quote—‘please take care,’ and then he hung up.”
“He just hung up?”
I look at her and nod.
Eden lets out a low, violent “No he fucking did not.”
“He sure did.”
She stands. “Be right back, I need to put all of my West Midlands shirts in the trash.”
“That is not what we’re doing here,” I say to her, struggling to pull my composure together. “We are going to give him more grace than he deserves.” But then I look at my Batphone one more time, turn it off, walk into my bathroom, and drop it in the trash.
My mom is beside herself with worry when I get to the house, but I promise her that I will drink an entire bottle of wine and unload everything if I can only have an hour to go pound the pavement alone.
I pull on my running shoes and bolt from the porch with angry music blasting in my ears.
Eden made me a playlist titled Men Are Trash, and I admit, it’s exactly what I needed to channel this confusion and hurt into something kinetic.
I didn’t stretch first—no doubt I’ll regret it, but not nearly as much as I’ll regret letting my subconscious guide me two and a half miles down the road to the Kim family’s old house.
It’s been repainted. No longer a pale yellow house with a soft patch of grass, it is now a rich cream with olive-green trim, a xeriscaped yard, and two Teslas parked out front.
For as much as the house looks brand-new, the shape of the front window is the same, and I can imagine sitting on the soft velvet couch just inside, can hear the slapping echo of Alec’s skateboard down the sun-warped street.
My brain tunnels through time. At this exact moment yesterday, I was getting ready for the gala. And less than twenty-four hours ago, Alec was cleaning my skin with body wash and his big hands, telling me about the place he wanted to take me for dinner on our first night in London next month.
I haven’t cried yet, but before I can actively hold myself together, I’m bursting into tears, letting it all out on the dashed yellow line in the middle of Pearl Street.
What the fuck just happened?
I tried to do the right thing, tried to protect everyone, and ended up losing my job and my new boyfriend in a single afternoon.
My life has emptied of meaning so suddenly that it almost feels like I’m closing in on myself, collapsing inward.
Sitting at the curb, I stare at a line of ants moving past the round toe of my shoe.
Slowly my eyes lose focus until the ants turn into a blurred black line, waving on the concrete, doing nothing but moving forward one step at a time.
I return to my parents’ place at least two hours later than I’d planned, to find my mother on the porch with her phone in her hand, Eden standing next to her. They march toward me, lectures ready, words overlapping.
I let them have this. I didn’t take my phone. I was just dumped and fired. I didn’t notice how much time had passed on the curb until the sun was gone and I realized my old iPod had played the playlist at least three times through.
They gather me inside, depositing me on the couch. Some food materializes. Eden is on one side of me, Mom on the other, and I hate this familiar comfort.
Even though we did this exact same thing only six months ago, this time it feels infinitely worse.