Kittenfish: An Enemies-to-Lovers Romantic Comedy

by Brenda Lowder

  “Come on, everyone, let’s go tell Giselle what a great actress she is.” Kya’s eyes flash to mine, and she pulls Tarek by the arm. He follows her and so does the rest of the crew. Only Brandon hangs back.

  He rubs his head. “So this is some crazy plot of Kya’s to get you all here that has something to do with Giselle.” His put-upon tone confirms this is not a question he has but a foregone conclusion.

  I nod, not wanting to admit the crazy plot was originally mine. “Looks like it.”

  Brandon bobs his head. “Yeah, I thought so.” He takes a deep breath. “Marissa, I’m done. You’re a nice girl, but your friends are crazy.” He starts to walk away but then pauses and half turns toward me. “And I think you might be in love with Tarek.”

  I start to object, but he holds his hand up. “Just, don’t. Just, whatever. It doesn’t matter.” Brandon turns and stalks to the door. Right now the kindest thing I can do is let him walk away. As much as I don’t want to be, I’m too complicated for him.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Blaire is waiting a few rows away. Stragglers pass between us, exiting the theater.

  “No.”

  “Don’t you have to see this thing through?”

  “No.” Of course Blaire would. She owns her drama. And there’s going to be some. Some kind of big, dramatic scene I haven’t figured out yet and definitely haven’t written. All I can think about is running away. I’m such a chicken.

  Blaire looks at me expectantly, and I square my shoulders. I made this bed.

  Now it’s time for me to stop lying in it.

  ∞∞∞

  Kya marches the group backstage, keeping a hand on Tarek as we go. Behind the curtain we find a flurry of actors ducking into and out of dressing rooms, crew members resetting the stage, and everyone putting their hands on some kind of alcohol to celebrate.

  We run into Lexy almost immediately. She’s still wearing her costume and turns in the doorway of the dressing room when Kya calls her name.

  She smiles when she sees me like she’s happy I’m there, but when her eyes take in Tarek—and everyone else—her brow clouds over with confusion.

  “Hi,” I say, attempting to head Kya off. “Great show.”

  “Thanks.” She smiles again and hugs me. “And thanks so much for coming.”

  I turn to leave and stretch out my arms to shepherd everyone else back with me, but Kya sidesteps my grasp.

  “Giselle!” she says.

  Lexy bites her lip, and her eyes dart around before landing on me. “Are we filming now?”

  I shake my head quickly and try once again to escape, but Tarek pushes past Blaire and Troy to stand between Kya and me and faces Lexy.

  “Hey,” he says with characteristic Tarek coolness.

  “Hey,” she returns with a smile, and I’m reminded of her asking me to give him her phone number not so long ago.

  “So…you’re an actress?” Tarek’s eyebrow is fully cocked.

  “Um…yeah.” Lexy giggles uncomfortably like Tarek’s told a joke that didn’t really land. “We all are, right?”

  Tarek frowns. I rack my brain for something to say to interpret her question for him—he’s handsome enough to be one? It must be a hobby of his? In the grand scene of life we are all but actors? I wait too long and Kya jumps in.

  “Giselle, I’m confused. Why does the program say your name is Lexy Hunter?”

  Lexy laughs but stops when she realizes no one else is.

  “It’s a stage name, right, Giselle?” I prompt.

  She tilts her head and narrows her eyes. “I don’t get it. What’s the joke?”

  “What do you mean, Giselle?” Kya asks with round-eyed innocence.

  “I mean my real name’s Lexy.” She doesn’t add “duh” to the end of her sentence, but it hangs in the air anyway.

  “Your real name?” Tarek steps closer.

  “Well, yeah. Of course. Giselle is the character—Lexy’s my name.” She shakes her head, visibly awed that she has to explain this. Acid coats my stomach walls, but there’s no turning this truth train around now.

  “Like there’s no way your name is really Tarek.” Lexy laughs.

  Tarek stiffens at my side. “My real name is Tarek.”

  Lexy bites her lip. “And Marissa?”

  “My real name’s Marissa,” I mumble.

  “I don’t get it.” She glances between us. “So everyone in the film is using their real names except me?”

  “Film? What film?” Tarek’s voice gets deeper. I feel it echo in my rib cage.

  “The film we’re all making together that Marissa’s directing.” Again, she leaves the “duh” off, but everyone’s stupidity is implied.

  “The film we’re all making that Marissa’s directing,” Tarek repeats slowly.

  Blaire bursts out laughing, and my stomach acid threatens to find a way out.

  Once again, Lexy is on unsure footing. She squeezes the trim of the doorframe, anchoring herself. Her face clouds, and she frowns. “Hey, I’ve got to go. Thank you all for coming. Good to, um, see you.” She steps back into her dressing room and closes the door behind her.

  I turn from the closed door and survey the faces of what used to be my friends. Blaire’s hand is covering her mouth to stifle her laughter.

  Kya’s eyes are grimly triumphant like she’s just ripped off the mother of all Band-Aids.

  And Tarek. I can barely look at Tarek, but when I do, his eyes are wide, and there’s a haunted, horrified look that makes me feel like I’ve just killed his hamster. With a hacksaw. In front of him.

  “Where’s Dog-boy?” Blaire asks, breaking the moment.

  “Brandon left,” I say. “We broke up.”

  “About damn time,” she says. I glance at her and for once, she takes the hint. “Troy and I are off to bed. Call you tomorrow.” She and Troy exit stage left—literally—and it’s down to Kya and Chloe and Tarek and me.

  Tarek runs a hand through his hair, seemingly unconcerned that he’s messing up its perfection.

  Kya pulls Chloe away—now that Tarek knows what she brought him here to learn, she’s abandoning me to my punishment.

  He searches my face with his sea-green eyes. “I don’t get it, Marissa. What’s going on? Giselle’s not Giselle? She’s an actress named Lexy who thinks she’s filming a movie with us?”

  I nod mutely.

  “Is she?”

  I blink at him. “Is she what?”

  He shakes his head. “Are we making a film?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re, what? Telling your friend she’s in a film when she’s not?”

  I rub my forehead. A headache is starting. “She’s not my friend. She’s an actress I hired.”

  He puts his hands on his hips and leans back, gazing at the ceiling. “You hired an actress to play Giselle?” When he looks back at me, his eyes are huge. “Then who’s the real Giselle?”

  “Me.”

  Tarek flinches. “You?”

  I nod, miserable with myself.

  He swallows. When he speaks, there’s a reedy quality to his voice that makes my chest feel hollow. “You were catfishing me?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Why the hell would you do that?”

  It’s difficult for me to muster any defense when he’s looking at me with his piercing ocean-tinged eyes as if after I slaughtered his hamster I moved on to his puppy.

  “Because you made Liam break up with me and ruined my happily ever after and dumped me in the shower and bruised my butt,” I say in a rush, trying to pile every ounce of grievance I have against him so that it measures up to the hurt I see in his eyes.

  Tarek puts his hands over his eyes and then rubs his head. “You invented a whole person for me to fall for, hired an actress, and lied to my face the entire time we were together. Because of Liam? Liam, that selfish idiot who wasn’t worth ten minutes let alone the three years of your life you wasted on him?”

  I stare at him, my sympa
thy wavering. Is he seriously reducing Liam’s and my whole relationship to a virtual prison sentence that I should feel happy Tarek liberated me from?

  Some of my well-deserved guilt takes a hike, and my anger and righteous fury reignite.

  I advance on him. “What do you even care, Tarek? You said it yourself: ‘Love is a lie.’ You don’t have any feelings.”

  He freezes as if he has turned to an ice sculpture and levels me the coldest stare I’ve ever seen. The fact that it’s directed at me makes my heart ache in my hollow chest.

  “Marissa, I have all the feelings. And you’ve just crushed every single one of them.”

  He turns around and leaves. I watch his long strides as he ducks around a stagehand before exiting my view.

  Heart pounding, hands shaking, I head out to find my own way home.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Oh, wow. What just happened?”

  Blaire is exploding at me over the phone. After a soul-searching and silent Uber ride home, I finally answer her third call.

  “What do you mean?” I lie down on my couch and throw my arm over my eyes.

  “Oh, don’t play that. Think for a minute about who you’re talking to.”

  “A reporter for The Herald? No thanks. No comment.” I turn on my side. I should’ve turned off the light. I wish I were in darkness, but not enough to get up from the couch.

  “Ha ha. No! I want the whole story. What’s up with you and Tarek?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing, my ass. There was deep angst in that reveal.”

  “Seems so.”

  “That’s awesome.”

  “It’s really not.”

  “Oh, pshaw. That’s only because you have too much of a conscience. It’s poetic justice. Tarek has been using women for years. It’s perfect that when he finally falls in love it’s with the woman catfishing him.”

  I prop myself up on my elbow and deal with the easiest part of what she said. “Poetic justice? I thought you liked him.”

  “Well, sure, I always wanted a ride, but it’s not like I thought what he was doing was right. Or very emotionally mature.”

  “And you are?”

  Blaire pretends offense. “I am soon to be a committed, stable, happily married woman. I’m emotionally mature by definition.”

  “Keep telling yourself that, Blaire.”

  “Whoa. Snark from the Queen of Nice. So what’s up with you? Why are you so upset? Your evil plan worked.”

  “My plan didn’t work. He was supposed to fall in love with Giselle and then when he was aching with love for her, she was supposed to dump him online where no one had to face each other and then completely disappear.”

  “And instead he fell for you and got his heart broken when he found out the love of his life was not only trying to make him fall in love with somebody else but she’d been deceiving him the whole time they were sleeping together.”

  “What?” I sputter, sitting up and startling the cup of coffee on the table. I don’t know which to refute first—that Tarek is in love with me (not possible) or that we’ve been sleeping together (boy, have we). I tackle the easier topic. “What makes you think I was sleeping with him?”

  “Oh, please! Outlander? Seriously? That man hasn’t cracked a book since—what—ever? And you have to go discuss Outlander in your bedroom?”

  “Oh my goodness. Does Kya know?”

  Blaire pauses a beat. “I don’t think so. She didn’t seem to sense anything was up that night, and I was standing right next to her. But Marissa, she knows something worse.”

  “What?”

  “She knows how much Tarek loves you.”

  Giddy dread fills me up. The idea of Tarek being in love with me is both the buoyant red balloon and the murderous clown attached to it. “No. It’s not possible. Tarek says there’s no such thing—”

  “Forget what Tarek says and look at what he does. He sleeps with you—multiple times, I might add—”

  “How do you know?”

  “Aha! I knew it! And he follows you around like a lovesick puppy, showing up wherever you go.”

  “Just to annoy me. And openly criticize me.”

  “Because he likes you and has the romantic maturity of a third-grader.”

  “It’s not—”

  “Look,” Blaire cuts me off. “Kya knows her brother, and she knows he’s in love with you. That’s why she made tonight happen. She didn’t like what you were doing to him, and she forced both of you out into the open.”

  “She didn’t force him to do anything. She was protecting her hero like she always does.”

  “Kya forced Tarek into the truth, even knowing it would hurt him.”

  “Enough. I don’t want to hear any more about how my best friend turned against me to protect her brother who is really the last person in the world who needs protecting.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Blaire, I’ve got to go.” She tries to argue, but I succeed at scraping her off the line.

  I’m breathing hard when I put the phone down. I might be having my first ever panic attack.

  Tarek loves me?

  Terrifying thought.

  ∞∞∞

  The next morning I’m awakened by an obnoxiously loud ringing telephone. My mother. Because no one else would call me at six in the morning.

  The second I answer it, the haranguing starts.

  “Marissa, I can’t believe what you did to that boy,” my mother starts.

  I fluff my pillow and sit up against the headboard, head pounding. “Mom, it’s six in the morning. How do you even know any of this yet?”

  “Kya called me last night when she got home from the play.”

  “Kya told on me?” Surely this is a new low for her. Or at least one she hasn’t employed since we were twelve.

  “She didn’t tell on you, dear. She merely wanted to make sure I was in the loop. You know I like to know everything that’s going on with you children.”

  “We’re not children anymore, Mom.”

  “You’re certainly acting like it.”

  “Mom, no. We’re grown-up people with grown-up problems.”

  My mother sighs. “Oh, honey. You’re not. None of you are. Oh, I could throttle that woman.”

  “Who? Kya?”

  “No! Lydia Oliver, her mother, of course. Kya and Tarek’s mother. Leaving them like she did. Messing those poor children up. Kya clinging to any woman who shows her the slightest bit of affection. Believing only a relationship will make her happy. Tarek running from even the smallest semblance of stability. Not trusting anyone or anything. You know, it’s lucky they had me. They’d be worse off than they already are if they hadn’t had my influence growing up.”

  “We’re all lucky to have you, Mom.”

  There’s a beat as my mother processes that. “Was that sarcasm, Marissa?”

  “No, Mom. I’m grateful for you. But I’m really tired. It’s six in the morning. And saying ‘six in the morning’ sounds like sarcasm.”

  “I know that, but I had to get your attention. And I wanted to reach you as early as possible so you can start fixing things.”

  I sit straighter and pull up my knees. “There’s no fixing this, Mom.” I talk past the sudden aching lump in my throat. “Tarek and Kya both hate me.” Unless Kya thinks her triumphant onstage Giselle-unmasking has been payback enough. With the way she holds a grudge, though, I doubt she’s done making me pay. I marvel that she was able to hold it in for so long before the Giselle/Lexy reveal.

  “They don’t hate you.”

  “They really do.”

  Unlike Tarek and Kya, my mom won’t argue back and forth with me to infinity.

  “Just talk to them,” she says. “They’re your best friends. They have been all your life.”

  “Until now.”

  “Until you make up with them.”

  I cross my arms over my knees and lean my chin on them. “Oh, Mom. I don’t want to. I wasn’t
all wrong. Tarek said—”

  “No.” Her voice is forceful when she cuts me off. “I don’t want to hear it. Be the bigger person, Marissa. Apologize. Make it better.”

  I take a cleansing breath. God save me from my mother’s giant moral compass. I want to fight her. I want to be right. But deep down, I know I’m not. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” Her tone wants confirmation.

  “Okay. I’ll start fixing things.”

  “When?”

  “Right away.”

  She finally seems to believe me. “Oh, wonderful. I love you, sweetie.”

  “I love you, too, Mom.”

  As I disconnect from the call, I resist the impulse to snuggle down into my covers and go back to sleep. I’m committed to fixing this. I just need to figure out how.

  ∞∞∞

  Later that day I drive to Kya’s apartment.

  Of course I tried her on the phone first. Eight times. And I left messages on all but the first call. Because I’m not a stalker. I toyed briefly with the idea of writing and performing a serial podcast on her messages so at least she’d be getting a story instead of a repeating litany of apologies and pleas to talk, but I refrained.

  So since she won’t answer her phone or reply to my texts, I go to her apartment and wait outside of it until I get an idea.

  Twenty minutes later, I’m standing outside her place wearing a baseball cap, and Kya’s opening the door for me because when I rang the doorbell and she looked through the peephole, I blocked my face with a pizza box.

  “I didn’t order a—”

  “Kya, it’s me,” I interrupt. Her face closes up, and my heart hurts. She starts to close the door, but I stick my foot in it. I wore boots for just this purpose.

  “Wait, please.”

  She hesitates. Her lips are pursed, and she has a hip cocked to the side like she’s five seconds from a head swivel and a directive about where I can stick my pizza. But she hesitates, and I seize on it.

  “Can we just talk?”

  She stares at me a moment with her hand on the knob. “Is that a prop or a real pizza?”

  “It’s real. Hot, fresh, now. A supreme.” Kya’s favorite.