After All

by Karina Halle

  “Please tell me what happened,” I say.

  At that her eyes narrow. “I can’t believe you,” she mutters bitterly.

  But at least she walks inside.

  I quickly shut the door as she walks into the middle of the room, looks around.

  “What are you looking for?” I ask her.

  “Is she here?”

  I run my hands down my face and sigh. “Is who here?”

  “Autumn.”

  I give my head a slight shake, knowing I have to tread carefully now. “No, Alyssa. She’s not. Why would you think she’s here?”

  She sniffs, her face crumpling. “How could you do this to me?”

  “Baby, please…”

  “Don’t baby me!” she cries out, back to vicious. “Don’t play dumb!”

  “I just woke up, Alyssa! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You haven’t seen your emails?” she asks, nearly breathless.

  Now I’m extra worried. “No. Phone is dead. Why? What…?”

  She folds her arms across her chest. “Go and look. I’ll wait.”

  It feels like my heartbeat is doubling up as I stride across the room and pull out my MacBook from the shelf. I bring it over to the kitchen island beside her and open it, then open my emails.

  There’s an email there from a name, Kristoff Gantz, no subject but an attachment.

  I glance at her.

  “Open it,” she says in a hard voice, eyes like steel.

  I click on it.

  There’s only a few lines of text. A few lines that turn my world upside down.

  * * *

  I had the pleasure of taking these photographs last night. I know that is your publicist, not your girlfriend Alyssa Martin. If you don’t wire me 50,000 to the bank account below in forty-eight hours, I will release the pictures to the public.

  Kristoff Gantz.

  * * *

  My heart sinks.

  Do I even dare click on the attachments?

  I look over at Alyssa. “Alyssa…”

  “Look at them,” she says.

  Her voice is practically shaking.

  I ready myself and click.

  There are four of them. All taken from the same angle, a low angle, like he was crouching at the edge of the other trailer.

  Every single one looks completely incriminating and in every single one we’re kissing.

  It doesn’t matter that I know that the kiss only lasted a few seconds before I broke it off.

  It looks like it lasted a hell of a lot more than that. The photos only tell half the story.

  But is that a story that Alyssa is willing to believe?

  I look at her, feeling my heart hanging in the balance.

  This can’t be over, not because of this.

  I lick my lips. “You have to let me explain,” I say quietly.

  She stares at me. “I don’t want to hear your explanation. You said you were working last night, Emmett! Your last day on the job! I was hoping that maybe when you got home, I could take you out to celebrate. But you never called me. And now I know why. Jesus…”

  With each word, it sounds like she’s dying.

  “Alyssa,” I say, putting my hand over hers but she yanks hers away.

  “Don’t touch me,” she sneers. “Don’t you dare touch me after you kissed her. You…god!” she screams and pulls at her hair. “I’m such an idiot! I am such a fucking idiot, I actually believed you. I actually believed in us. And it was all a lie.”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions.”

  “You’re fucking kissing her! Tell me those photos are manipulated then!”

  “They are!” I yell. “We only kissed for a second.”

  “Oh my god, you admit it!” she shrieks, turning her back to me and walking across the kitchen. “I can’t believe you.”

  “Well if you just let me explain what happened,” I cry out weakly. There’s nothing but pure panic rising in my chest, fluttering around in a flurry of wings. Holy shit. Is this really happening?

  “Explain?” she says, whirling around. “Explain what? You just said you kissed her, what else could you have to add to that?”

  “For one, she kissed me.”

  “Oh she did? She took advantage of you, is that it?”

  “I was drunk.”

  Fuck. That was not the right thing to say.

  She stares at me, blinking, her mouth open. “You were drunk,” she eventually says. “So when you’re drunk, you go around kissing girls. So that’s a thing you do.”

  “No,” I protest. “It’s not…I thought she was you for a second.”

  Alyssa’s laugh fills the room, so bitter, sour, laced with hatred for me.

  “Well I am so fucking flattered. Emmett…I wanted to expect more from you, I really did, but somehow I’m not surprised.”

  Now I’m starting to get mad. “Wait a minute, that’s a low blow.”

  “You deserve a low blow.”

  “You expected me to do something like this?”

  “And you just did it!”

  “Alyssa,” I say, breathing heavily now. “Please just…listen to me. Okay? She came over to my trailer and she brought rye to celebrate.” She rolls her eyes, scoffs. “And so we did. I had too many drinks and then we left to go join the party in Julian’s trailer, the goodbye party for me. I could barely stand. I thought I should call you. I remember even saying your name out loud and then the next thing I knew she was kissing me. And yes, I kissed her back for a second, that second you see captured on film. And then I realized what was happening. I broke it off. I pushed her back. I told her no. It pissed her off. But I told her no, that I love you and I can’t, and I left. I called a cab and got in that cab alone. And then I wake up here to this…this fucking bullshit!”

  “Don’t start yelling at me!”

  “I’m not yelling at you, I’m yelling because it’s bullshit! Of course there was some fucking vulture hiding around the corner, of course there’s someone fucking blackmailing me right now. Blackmailing us.”

  “Oh they aren’t blackmailing me,” she says. “This is your problem now. Whatever we had, it’s over. Fuck the contract, I don’t want your fucking money and fuck your reputation too. You obviously reap what you sow.”

  I wish what she was saying wasn’t flying into my chest like shrapnel, but it is. It fucking is.

  “No,” I tell her, but fuck it’s hard to speak. This can’t be happening. “No. You have to understand. Everything I said is true.”

  “But the pictures say otherwise.”

  “The pictures lie!” I yell. “It’s all a lie. You have to believe me.” I press my hand into my chest. “Me, Alyssa. We’ve been together in this crazy world of real and fake for so long now, I get that it’s confusing, I get that you don’t know what to believe, I get that you might think it’s an act. I’m not blaming you for thinking the worst.”

  “What? Thinking the worst?!” she cries, throwing out her arms. “Again, Emmett, the pictures. Your words. You kissed her. You were drunk and thought it was me. That doesn’t make it okay. Not even a bit.”

  I put my head in my hands, pinch my eyes shut, hoping to drown out the world. “I know. I know it’s not okay. I fucked up.” I breathe in deep but everything hurts. “I fucked up.”

  “Yeah,” she says quietly. “You did. And I’m sure I should just give you the benefit of the doubt but…I can’t. I just can’t. These pictures they’re…I’ll never stop seeing them. Never stop picturing you with her.”

  I stare at her, imploring her with my eyes but I already see the wall between us. “This can’t just end. It was just beginning.”

  “It was a role to you Emmett, that’s all it was.”

  “It was never a role. It was always real. Alyssa…I love you. More than I can even say. Please, don’t leave it like this, leave me like this. How I feel about you is the only true thing I have.”

  God, please, let these words get through to her
!

  She breathes in deep through her nose, shaking. “I need to go.”

  She heads to the door.

  I need to run after her.

  I need to stop her.

  I need to cry and plead and beg.

  But I don’t.

  My heart hurts too much to even move.

  Chapter 19

  Alyssa

  Broken.

  There’s no other word for it.

  There are other words for how I’m feeling. Humiliated. Embarrassed. Ashamed. Angry. Sad. Depressed.

  But the word that says it all right now is…broken.

  I’m no longer a whole human but one that’s splintered and fragmented and made up only of jagged parts.

  On Saturday morning I got the email that was addressed to both me and Emmett. The email that ruined us and everything we shared together. It ruined the future I thought we had. It ruined a love I thought we had.

  It broke me into a million pieces before I even heard the truth from Emmett’s mouth.

  Him with her. Autumn, who represents everything I’m not. Tanned, tall, skinny, effortlessly beautiful. Successful. She’s the polar opposite of me in every way.

  And she’s Emmett’s type. Not just in the fact that he dated and screwed so many actresses and models that looked just like her before I came around. It’s the fact that he specifically slept with her before. He says it only happened once…I believe him. But I also believe that’s why when she kissed him, he let it happen.

  The thing is…I know that Emmett was probably telling the truth. He’s an honest guy, especially about his misdeeds and shortcomings but…

  Fuckity fuck fuck.

  He just broke my fucking heart.

  Is he that easy to take advantage of when drunk? How many times has this happened before?

  And…what if I never showed up at his door, if we never got that email…would he have told me what happened?

  That’s what I have a hard time wrestling with. Because as honest as he is, I can’t forget his type, the person he was before he met me. I believed him when he says he loved me, I really did but…I just think maybe his idea of love is skewed. I couldn’t even blame him for that, not with his upbringing and losing his mom, not with his job and essentially lying for a living. After all, how can loving me really change a person? How can I make him stop being the person he was and become someone else?

  I’m just Alyssa Martin.

  And I don’t think I have that kind of power over him, over anyone.

  How can a relationship built on a lie ever feel like the truth?

  And how the fuck am I ever going to get over him when it feels like I don’t even possess my heart anymore. I left it at his house, where it lays shattered on his floor. Now I’m just scooped out inside, hollow, a space that only darkness can fill.

  It’s killing me.

  Honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever really loved, ever really hurt before.

  Not like this, never like this.

  I walked straight off that cliff.

  Why am I even surprised I hit the ground?

  “How could he?” I cry out suddenly over my glass of wine.

  I’m plopped down on my bed, the wine having already spilled twice as I try to balance drinking and lying down at the same time. I want to float away to oblivion and I can’t even sit upright to do it.

  Tiffany and Jackie don’t say anything and when I lift my head to look over at them, Jackie in my armchair and Tiffany sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, hand in the middle of the popcorn bowl, I realize they’re exchanging a look. That look pisses me off.

  “What?” I ask. “What is it?”

  Their look deepens.

  “Well…” Tiffany says slowly.

  Yeah, Tiffany knows the truth now about Emmett and me and our whole relationship. I told her the moment that my life went to fucking hell. She wasn’t even insulted that she was kept in the dark for so long. She just said, “You’re smart, I probably would have told everyone. Accidently, of course.”

  “Well what? Come on guys,” I plead. “This is part of the grieving process, isn’t it?”

  Jackie shrugs. “Me and Will never broke up.”

  “Ken’s the only boyfriend I’ve ever had,” Tiffany adds.

  “What the fuck?” I glare at them, rolling over on my side. “Neither one of you have an idea what I’m going through? That’s it. Carla!” I yell. “Get your ass in here!”

  Within seconds my bedroom door opens and Carla appears, her hair wrapped up in a bandana, holding a bottle of beer. “Are you finally inviting me to join your pity party?”

  “Are you high?” I ask her.

  She shrugs.

  “Anyway, tell me about the last time your heart was broken.”

  She leans against the doorway, eyes staring off, tapping her finger against the bottle. “It was July, 1994. We had met at the waterpark, shared a stick of Juicy Fruit…”

  “Just sit your butt down and make me feel better,” I tell her.

  She sits on the edge of the bed and looks me over. “I think you’re being too harsh on him.”

  “What?” I exclaim. “I’m being too harsh? Do you even know the rules of a pity party?”

  “I mean, the guy has to pay you forty thousand dollars, right? And now this blackmailer fifty thousand? And he just lost his role on Boomerang? The dude is out close to a hundred grand and just lost his job. Give him a break.”

  I’m slack-jawed. “First off, I’m not taking the money. And, Carla, he cheated on me!”

  “Kissing isn’t cheating,” she says with a scoff.

  But both Jackie and Tiffany make urgent sounds of protest.

  “I would cut off Will’s balls if he kissed another woman.”

  “I would put Nair in Ken’s hair oil,” Tiffany seethes, “and then I’d switch his toothpaste with hemorrhoid cream, and then I’d cover him in honey from head to toe and push him off a plane straight into a bear’s den, throwing down a bottle of bear spray that I actually filled with salmon-scented water. Cuz bears love that shit.”

  We’re all staring openly at Tiffany and I’m making a mental note to never cheat on her.

  “Anyway,” Carla says slowly, turning her attention back to me, “the girl wanted him, you suspected this yourself. She gets him drunk, she kisses him. Now you can believe he pushed her back right away or you can believe he had a full-on make-out session with her. Which one do you choose to believe?”

  I still, thinking it over. “I don’t know. Both are bad.”

  “Both are bad. One is worse. You can’t possibly tell me that you haven’t gotten so drunk that some guy hasn’t kissed you and it took you a few seconds to be like, whoa, no, this is wrong. Or at least a situation similar. Isn’t that the important part? The fact that Emmett stopped it?”

  “But the pictures…”

  “The pictures tell a half-truth, just as the pictures with you both, the pictures that started you all, told a half-truth.”

  Holy crow, that feels like a whole lifetime ago.

  “Now it comes down to you and Emmett,” she goes on, “it comes down to trust. Either you trust Emmett or you don’t. If you don’t well…then you needed to break up. Because there is no relationship without trust, not a real one anyway. But maybe you guys have been so busy faking it that you’ve both forgotten what it’s like.”

  Carla looks to Jackie. “Tell me, Miss Pregnancy Pants, if someone sent you pictures of your husband kissing, like, your housekeeper or something–”

  “We don’t have a housekeeper.”

  “In this scenario you do. And she’s super hawt. That’s hot with a W. Anyway, you get the pictures and Will is all, look she got me drunk, she kissed me, I broke it off, I told her no, I told her I love you, I swear the moment I realized what was happening I was disgusted, I would have told you the first thing but I was sleeping, etcetera, etcetera, would you believe him?”

  “Of course I would,” she says.

&
nbsp; “Without a doubt?”

  “Without a doubt. I trust Will with all my heart. He would never ever do anything intentionally to hurt me. He would never even want to kiss another woman. He wouldn’t do that to me.”

  And then all three of them give me a weighted look.

  I chew on my lip for a moment, mulling it over. “So now the problem lies with me?”

  Carla nods. “It comes down to trust. What he did was stupid but…if you believe him, you should have nothing to worry about. If you believe him, it’s something you’ll get over. It’s not something to end your relationship over. Not when you truly love a person. You don’t give up that easily.”

  Ah, fuck.

  “What do I do?” I ask, looking down into my wine glass. I feel like I could sink to the bottom of it and never come out.

  “We can’t answer that,” Carla says. “You have to search within yourself to find the truth. And then you should probably talk to Emmett about it.”

  Because he was my truth.

  I take in a deep breath.

  All the hurt and humiliation and pain and shame isn’t just going to go away. Even if I do believe Emmett, even if I have faith in this new him, that he wouldn’t let this happen again, how do I deal with my feelings? How do I deal with this hurt? I can’t be with him and secretly hate and resent him at the same time. I can’t go back to him until I’ve worked it out, until I’m ready.

  And what if that never happens?

  What if I find the real truth about us and discover that nothing was real to begin with?

  Chapter 20

  Emmett

  Rain.

  It’s one of the things that make Vancouver what it is. It’s what the tourists and locals both complain about, it’s what keeps it beautiful and green. It shows up on long weekends and tends to rain out concerts and weddings. And it’s the perfect soundtrack for a ravaged heart.

  As emo as that sounds, that’s all I have right now. The rain pouring outside this coffee shop window and the ache in my heart that hasn’t subsided for the last forty-eight hours.