Heartless Few Box Set

by MV Ellis

  Luke was the only real friend I had, barring a handful of nodding acquaintances with girls in a few of my classes, and even that was hardly friendship in the true sense of the word. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure what it was. We hung out and chatted some. Luke helped me with homework, gave me unsolicited advice, and kind of took me under his wing like the older brother I never had. On the other hand, there always seemed to be so much more unsaid between us than the words actually spoken, though I could never quite understand exactly what. I was “friends” with the other guys in his group, solely by association with him.

  My connection with Luke was instant and so strong that instead of being compelled toward him, I’d instantly pulled away. I couldn’t want him because I knew I couldn’t have him. He couldn’t want me because he didn’t deserve me. Luke was so kind, calm, and gentle. He was kind and pure, and way too good for someone as inherently bad as me. He had a bright future ahead of him that would only be tainted by our association.

  Ironically, he seemed to handle me with kid gloves, as though I was fragile and likely to break at any moment. In so many ways, he was totally right, but he was also so very wrong. I hadn’t survived what I had by being breakable. I’d built walls and reinforced them; then I’d reinforced the reinforcements. I might have been weak behind all those walls, but I wouldn’t ever let anyone get close enough to find out. Not even Mia. Definitely not my therapist. Especially not Luke. Categorically not Arlo, not that he would ever even try.

  Things with Arlo were different. We’d never been friends. I was like the little sister he never wanted, the tagalong friend of Luke’s who buzzed about him like a fly near molasses. It was no secret that something about Arlo had captured my attention from day one, and that it was nothing like the things that had drawn me to Luke. Arlo was a different beast altogether—beast being the right word.

  He was so confident and imposing even as a kid that I’d felt him before I saw him. The hairs on the back of my neck and all down my arms had stood up in alarm. His presence had sent warning shock waves through my body. Warnings I knew I’d never heed. I’d turned, and my dark gaze had met his blazing emerald glare, and boom! That was it. I knew right away we were made for each other, that we craved the same things and could help each other achieve them. We both wanted to block out the world. We wanted to see nothing, feel nothing, and have nobody truly see us. We wanted to hide in plain sight.

  I’d continued my routine of bingeing and purging until the day Arlo and I first got together, realizing that hot, meaningless sex with him gave me the exact same numb feeling, but without as much of the stress, guilt, and self-loathing that went with purging. It was a win-win situation, and so our fucked-up little partnership was born. It worked for us both, though it was obviously perplexing to the outside world. I gave zero fucks about what those people thought, and plenty of fucks about no longer feeling like shit. Arlo was my ticket to feeling good, or at least feeling less bad. It wasn’t perfect, but nor was life. I of all people knew that.

  Back in the present, the next few weeks and then months passed in a timeless vacuum of eating and puking. Whether it was day or night was of no importance to me. Neither was whether I had showered or not. Whether I left the house. Whether I spoke to another soul. Whether I cleaned the apartment or did anything that constituted normal adult life. All that mattered was what I ate and then un-ate and how I felt in the moments afterward.

  I was aware that it didn’t feel anywhere near as good as it had when I was a kid, that the “high” lasted less time, and the guilt lasted longer. Sex with Arlo had done a much better job of keeping me comfortably numb—not to mention being less of a physical drain, less harmful to my health, and leaving me feeling less like a sad waste of space. However, I was also aware that with Arlo out of the picture, I had no other options available, and this was going to have to be it until I could get my sorry shit together.

  Seventeen

  Marnie

  Four months later…

  Ugh. I looked at the phone as it beeped for the billionth time in the past twenty-four hours. Why wouldn’t he take the fucking hint? Especially at—I looked at the time—7:00 fucking a.m. What the hell was Luke’s problem anyway? It was just past sunrise. Why was he even up at this hour, when no other self-respecting musician was? Although come to think of it, he was probably still awake from the night before. That made a lot more sense. Still, he should know better than to be bothering the rest of the world at this hour. I was sure he knew by now that unless they were shooting, models were almost as nocturnal as musicians.

  Luke: Come on, Marnie, how long are you going to keep up the radio silence? It’s been months. I’ve been halfway around the world and back. Can we just meet up and talk? I know I fucked up. Badly. I want to explain. Please?

  He was such a drama queen. Yes, it had been months since we last spoke or saw each other in person, but I hadn’t been ignoring him that entire time. Yes, he’d toured the world, sending me a message from every destination he’d visited, just like he always had. I’d replied here or there with a one-word answer, just so he knew I was alive.

  Then there were the postcards. They were new, and completely unexpected. When I received the first, I had assumed it would be the last, but they kept on coming. Thirty-two cities over thirteen weeks, and I had a postcard from each one. They were cute and funny, and so very... Luke, which set off massive pangs of missing him every time I found one amongst the rest of my snail mail. Then I wanted to slap myself for succumbing to his charms, even from afar, or him for playing me that way. But they hadn’t required a response, so it wasn’t like he could say I was ghosting him on that basis.

  Me: Okay. Whatever. Let’s just get this over with. I’m free tonight.

  And every night. Not that he needed to know that.

  Another ping came back almost instantly

  Luke: Great. I really wanna see you, but I can’t do tonight. Arlo has this thing in Chelsea. It’s kind of a big deal, so I can’t bail.

  Me: Right.

  Luke: Come on, Marns, don’t be like that. I wasn’t expecting you to say yes after all these months of radio silence. You know how much I want to see you. I’ve been basically stalking you for four months.

  Me: Okay.

  Luke: Okay what? What does that even mean?

  Me: Nothing. Just like me, evidently.

  Luke: Jesus, Marnie. It’s not like that. Look, I have to be at this thing, but why don’t you meet me there at like 10:00? It will be mostly done by then, and it should be okay for me to split.

  Me: Okay.

  Luke: Like, okay, you’ll be there, or okay, whatever?

  Me: I’ll be there.

  He shot me the address of a studio in Chelsea, and we ended the exchange there.

  Why the fuck had I just agreed to that? I’d resisted caving in to him for all these months, and now suddenly I was at his beck and call? What the fuck was wrong with me? I was left wondering why I had even bothered to hold out before when ultimately I was going to do what he was asking all along anyway. What was it about those brothers—why did everything have to be on their terms?

  I was actually really sick of being yanked around by people—Arlo, Luke, the agency. It was sad to wake up every day and realize I had nobody in my corner. Literally nobody on the planet who would be prepared to put my needs before theirs or go the extra mile to make me happy. Sure, I had “friends” on the face of it, but not only were they few and far between, but if you scratched the surface, there was nothing there. Most were people I’d met in the industry, and everyone knew that fashion people were just about the flakiest and most superficial on the planet. Everything and everyone was for show. Even those you thought you could trust. It had been extremely sobering to realize how alone in the world I was. I’d always known I had to have my own back, but recently I had come to know exactly how much that was the case.

  I looked around my apartment. Like the rest of my life, it was a mess. Four months ago, my world had
been turned upside down in so many ways and it had pretty much stayed that way. Taking in my surroundings, that seemed like a fitting analogy. The place looked like a real-life snow globe that had been shaken and not returned right way up. I knew I needed to get my shit together, but I wasn’t sure how to at this point. I glanced around the room again, and it made me angry. At the world, but primarily at myself. This wasn’t who I was.

  Wallowing in my pit, a festering sore of self-pity really wasn’t my style. Shit, my parents had topped themselves, leaving me an orphan and a ward of the state at thirteen. Even then, I hadn’t sunk this low. I’d gotten up every day, put one foot in front of the other, painted a smile on my face, and gotten through the day. And the next day. And the one after that—even when I was in the group home, aka hell on earth. I kept on doing that until I didn’t even know myself whether I was for real or faking it. They say fake it til you make it. I’d literally been doing that my whole life. Until now.

  This time around I had let life get the better of me. I’d let the self-doubt, fear, and disappointment eat away at me, eroding the armor I’d worked so hard to build around myself. Hell, I’d broken my number one rule and allowed myself to feel. Stupid, stupid me. The rule was in place for a reason. I’d learned the hard way that feelings were the root of all evil, and I’d worked so hard to suppress mine over the years, but one lapse—laying my feelings for Luke bare and in the open—and the whole house of cards had come toppling down around my ears, just as I’d known it would. Well, not anymore. I was drawing a line under the last four months of my life and moving the fuck on. From Arlo. From Luke, and from Wildefire Model Management. It wasn’t going to be easy, but the way I figured it, I was so low now, the only way was up.

  I decided to tackle the mess of the apartment first. Tidy home, tidy mind, and all that. I cleaned, scrubbed, vacuumed, and did laundry like a demon, and was surprised how much better I felt just from seeing the place all clean and sparkly. After I lit some scented candles, it smelled great too, which also seemed to help lift my mood. It was weird, but as soon as my surroundings were beautiful again, I really felt the need to fix my physical appearance too. Four months of schlepping around in saggy sweats and oversized stained tees had been more than enough.

  The truth was I’d been tempted to say yes to meeting with Luke to talk a few times, but then I’d been too deep in my funk to want to put in the effort to make myself presentable, so I would go back to my Brat Pack movie marathon and ignore him. Not this time though. This time I was all fired up with somewhere to go.

  A few calls, and Operation Comeback was in full effect. First stop: hair. After literally begging and groveling to Zeke, my regular stylist and one of the most sought after in the city, he finally agreed to squeeze me in for a last-minute cut. I think it was a combination of the sob story I spun him—I literally sobbed—and the fact that I was threatening the integrity of his razor-sharp precision cut by taking it elsewhere if he couldn’t help.

  I left there with both my bob and my confidence restored, and a new ink blue rinse that was only visible when the sunlight hit my hair but made me feel great regardless. Next stop was a mani and pedi, after which I felt like a million dollars.

  I returned to the apartment to find just the right outfit. I thought long and hard about what to wear. I wanted to walk the balance between looking totally hot and totally desperate. It wasn’t easy. I needed to show enough to entice but hide enough to intrigue. After careful consideration, I decided on a sheer black shirt with a bondage-style bra clearly visible beneath, worn together with a skintight leather pencil skirt. Sky-high red-soled shoes and a beat-up but beautiful embellished leather jacket slung over my shoulders finished the look. I looked in the mirror and liked what I saw. I’d fuck me, and not just with a dildo.

  I glanced down at my phone and noted the time—7:00 p.m. What a difference twelve hours could make. When Luke had woken me this morning, I’d been planning another long and lonely day of solo pity partying, and now here I was looking like a hot, slow screw. What was I going to do for the next few hours? I was primed and ready to go, but I was also scared that the adrenalin that was propelling me would wear off, and by the time ten o’clock rolled around I’d be deflated again.

  I waited another hour, feeling increasingly antsy as the seconds ticked by. I felt my confidence slowly ebbing away, like grains of sand through an egg timer, and I decided to bite the bullet and leave the apartment. I was sick of pandering to the Jones brothers’ terms, and if they hadn’t both behaved like assholes, this wouldn’t have been happening at all, so screw them. Besides, anything Luke had to say to me at 10:00 p.m. could just as easily be said now. I headed to the bottom of my building and hailed a cab, giving the driver the address Luke had messaged me earlier. It reminded me of the Death and Taxis night, and my chest tightened painfully.

  The driver pulled up to the curb, and for a split second, I almost considered telling him to take me right back home. When Luke had said that this thing was a big deal, he hadn’t been exaggerating. It looked like it was bigger than Arlo’s ego, if that were even possible. There was a crowd of paparazzi outside calling and jostling as various “faces” made their way into the building. I was suddenly extra-glad I hadn’t pulled up in kicks and a grungy tee with dirty hair and no makeup.

  Eighteen

  Marnie

  I asked the taxi driver to overshoot and pull up a few cars away, rather than right in front of the door. I was fairly well known, especially in fashion circles, and definitely on the map for being one of the many women associated with Arlo Jones, but I figured with the level of fame of some of the attendees—was that Bono I had just seen going inside?—I could pretty much fly under the radar if I kept things low key. Nobody was going to bust a gut for a shot of me when they could get one of Beyoncé.

  Sure enough, as I sidled up to the door bitch, nobody batted an eyelid. I told her my name, and she started scanning the list on her tablet in that bored way that screamed, “If you have to tell me your name, you’re way too unimportant for me to bother with.” She scrolled for what seemed like an eternity before finally looking up from the tablet and pretty much popping her gum in my face.

  “Nope.” One word. One super-humiliating word.

  “What do you mean ‘nope’?” I tried to look at her as disdainfully as she was glaring at me.

  “I mean your name is not on this guest list. Sorry, miss, but if you could please move to the side and let these guests into the building….” She dismissed me with a bored flick of the wrist. Oh. No. She. Didn’t.

  “No. I’m a guest of Luke Jones. It’s Marnie. Marnie Harloe.” I enunciated slowly and clearly as though speaking to someone of limited intellect, which seemed about right.

  “There’s no mistake, miss. Your name is not on the list, if you could move along.” She motioned in the general direction of the gutter. Her inference made my blood boil.

  “I’m not moving anywhere.” My voice rose, and I saw the exact moment when the exchange escalated. Door Bitch signaled to the beefy security guard who stood wide-legged behind her. He approached.

  “Hello, Natalie. Do we have a problem here?”

  I felt the weight of the stares of everyone around me burning into my back. Great. Just fucking great. So much for sneaking under the radar. I turned on the famous Marnie look of indifference and pretended like the whole situation was some mildly inconvenient blip on the otherwise unblemished horizon of my life.

  “Natalie” motioned to the thick-necked man and spoke in the overly condescending tone they must all get taught at door bitch school, as it was truly universal—having experienced it all around the world, I knew it even transcended language barriers. She swished her immaculate and infeasibly tight high-ponytail in agitation.

  “This person seems to think she is invited tonight, yet she clearly—” She paused for emphasis, looking me up and down as though I was shit on her shoe. “—isn’t on the list.”

  Speaking of shoes,
it was all I could do to refrain from reminding her that mine probably cost more than her car. True, but even I knew that this was neither the time nor the place to go into full bitch mode—with the telephoto lenses hovering from all angles, poised and ready to capture an unfolding scandal. I’d been cannon fodder for the paps a few times over the years when hanging with Arlo, most notably a recent run-in with a drone—the footage from which had thankfully never surfaced—that was more than enough.

  Thick Neck looked at me as though I was a simple-minded child and spoke of me, not to me, the same way.

  “Maybe the lady is confused, thinking of a different event?”

  “I’m not confused. At all.”

  “Well, whatever the situation, I can’t have you blocking the entrance, miss. You’re causing an inconvenience to guests. Please step aside.”

  Never let it be said that Marnie Harloe would take up space meant for more deserving people. Ever. I moved aside, while also pulling out my phone.

  Me: I’m outside. Apparently I’m not on the GL? You need to come fix this.

  Thankfully I got a ping back instantly.

  Luke: You’re early. Wait there. I’ll come grab you.

  I wasn’t sure where exactly he thought I’d be going otherwise; they weren’t about to let me inside any time soon.

  He materialized moments later—rock god charm and smiles in full effect. He looked pretty damned fine on any given day, but that day when he was slicked up for a special event, he looked good enough to eat. Actually, he looked good enough to fuck, right there on the sidewalk. His freshly cut hair was slicked back into thick waves on top, with the sides closely cropped. He looked like an old-school screen star, until you looked further down and saw he was wearing a black dress shirt that fit him so well, it looked as though it had been sculpted just for him. Come to think of it, it probably had been. The sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, drawing the eye to his biceps.