by Rosie Danan
“Yes, ma’am.” Josh took his own bite, letting his eyes fall closed.
He knew his mom had let him off easy. Knew he’d have to apologize all over again once his dad got home. Most of all, he knew he owed Clara more than an apology. Josh had watched her face her fears over and over in the last few months. Now it was his turn.
He had all the pieces. All he’d needed was the courage to put them together.
chapter thirty-five
RECKLESSNESS PUMPED IN Clara Wheaton’s veins, as potent as any other poison. Following in the footsteps of many a scorned woman before her, she’d gone and blown an absurd amount of money on a flight and a dress designed to make men pant. The moment she stepped outside the airport in Las Vegas—the last leg on Everett’s band’s tour—all moisture drained from her body. Well, at least what remained following an onboard crying jag that had drawn concerned whispers from several passengers. She supposed most people cried on the way home from Sin City, rather than on the way there.
The travel-size pack of tissues in her purse had proven no match for the way her confrontation with Josh had stripped her of whatever remaining armor she possessed against the world. Every inch of her felt flayed open. Raw.
Love. He’d said love. Love, in the same breath he’d used to declare she’d never find anything better. Despite all the worrying she’d done in her lifetime, none of her contingency plans covered this type of emotional implosion. For so long, she’d refused to allow herself to indulge the idea of building a romantic future with Josh. Two people as different as they were couldn’t fit into each other’s lives without carnage and bloodshed. They’d made an attempt and ended up the first victims.
Reverting to her original plan, otherwise known as Operation Everett, made sense on paper. Clara needed to remind herself of what she used to want so she could stop thinking about a love she could never have.
Attempting to swish her hips, she entered a dive bar on the outskirts of town that stank of fried onions and stale beer. Making her sway fluid with luggage in tow was no easy task, but she’d traded in her reputation as a conservative socialite for one as a champion of the clitoris. She might as well act like it. Some sort of sex appeal through osmosis should have occurred after all her time spent around people who excelled at raising pulses. And . . . appendages. The bottom of her heel stuck to the sticky floor and she stumbled. Or not.
At seven p.m., the bar held only a smattering of customers, but the band’s website said they went on in half an hour. A small stage with a lone mic stand and a despondent-looking amp flopped facedown took up most of the back wall.
“Excuse me?” Clara caught the eye of the surly bartender. “I’m looking for Everett Bloom and the Shot of Adrenaline.”
He pointed a rag at the door down a dark hallway. “Check out back. Think he went for a smoke.”
“Thanks.” Clara wrapped her arms around herself and stepped carefully over piles of peanut shells littering the floor. Reuniting with Everett was supposed to cut through the miserable haze that had engulfed her ever since she’d left Danvers Street. Instead, she just felt numb.
“Actually.” She spun around. “May I have a shot of your finest tequila, please?” Fingers crossed that the burn of alcohol reminded her she was alive.
The bartender passed her the drink with an appreciative smile. “On the house.”
At least she knew the dress worked.
She found Everett sitting on the curb of the parking lot with a cigarette resting between two fingers. The sunset painted a starburst halo over his head.
She waited for her heart to flip over like a pancake.
It didn’t.
Almost as if she’d left the vital organ back in West Hollywood.
“Hey,” she said, trying not to cough. Not her finest opening line.
Everett swiveled and his mouth dropped. “Cee? Oh my God, kid.” Stubbing out the cigarette on the pavement, he got up and wrapped her in a bear hug. “What are you doing here?”
Brushing her hair out of her face from where he’d accidentally pushed the heavy locks into her lipstick, she aimed for nonchalant. “Thought I’d catch the show.”
“Wow.” He nodded his chin at her suitcases. “You planning on moving in?”
“Not exactly. I, ah.” It’s only embarrassing if you let it be embarrassing. “I’m on my way back to New York. This is a layover.”
“What?” His face fell. “Trip’s over already? How much trouble could you have possibly gotten into over the course of one summer?”
“You’d be surprised.” Her laugh turned into a wince.
“I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you’re here.” Everett’s eyes traced her from head to toe. “You look different.”
Clara tried not to fidget. She’d waited a long time for him to look at her with unbridled interest. So why did it make her long to wipe off her makeup and pull on sweats? Everett only ever saw her at her best. Her most polished. Josh had seen her covered in flour and raw egg, in lounge clothes that made her resemble a human potato, and in a terrible hospital nightgown—bruised and battered. Not to mention buck naked. He looked at her the same way when she was stripped to her foundation as he did when she was decked to the nines.
Everett gestured at her general form. “Did you do something different?”
She knew he meant had she dyed her hair or lost weight or bought a new shade of lipstick. But the more honest answer went beyond the way she looked.
This summer, she’d done a lot of things differently.
While on paper, she was ending the summer the same way she’d started it—unemployed, single, and in search of housing—she’d recently learned that sometimes the facts only told half of the story.
If her name had never appeared in those articles, today would have gone a lot differently. She’d seen the bottle of champagne Josh had bought weeks ago and tried to hide behind a grapefruit at the back of the fridge. In another life, they were toasting their success right now, the bubbles stinging her nose each time he made her laugh.
“You know,” she said, folding her legs to sit next to Everett on the sidewalk, “I think I might be a coward.”
He ran a hand across his head, ruffling the dark hair. “Come on.”
“I’m serious.” She could still feel the tequila hot in her throat, loosening her tongue. “I spent all those years in art school. Countless hours observing creators, their patterns and motivations, their fears, and their pain. And I never once had the guts to make something with my own name on it.” Shameless could have changed everything if she’d had the strength to claim it.
“There are worse things than being afraid,” Everett said gently. “I was always really proud of you going for your PhD. Keeping art history alive. I’d picture you in a museum somewhere, showing everyone how much smarter you are than them. The path you chose suits you.”
The future he described had always been the plan. The Guggenheim. Perfectly tailored pantsuits. A lifetime preserved in a temperature-controlled room.
“I’m more than my job.” The words came out bare. Truth without accusation. The first lesson, though not the last, that she’d learned from Josh.
Inside, she heard the band begin to tune up. The drumbeat was almost visible in the stifling Nevada heat. Why had she come here?
Up close, it was stupidly obvious that Everett was never going to want her. He was never going to look back on their friendship and wish for more. Never going to lie awake in bed wondering where he’d gone wrong. Never going to see her name in the Sunday wedding section and taste regret. Hollywood had promised her that if she loved hard enough, pined long enough, threw herself in his path, again and again, eventually, her childhood best friend would fall for her.
But real life didn’t account for free will.
It didn’t matter how many reasons she could list why Everett should love
her. He didn’t. Not in the way she’d always wanted. And until she stopped waiting for a love she felt she was due, she’d never be able to imagine the future with anyone else.
Everett ran his hands down his jeans-covered calves. “I guess you’re not the girl with Popsicle-stained lips trying to dunk me in the pool anymore.”
A giggle made its way out of her mouth. Oddly painful. God. What an absolute nightmare. She’d been waiting all summer for some kind of closure. For him to say something or do something that would complete the narrative of their one-sided love affair. No wonder she couldn’t get closure from Everett. As the architect of her own suffering, Clara was the only person who could bring this emotional pilgrimage to its conclusion.
With a glance over his shoulder, he tapped his foot against the concrete, a nervous, itchy tune. “I should probably head back inside.”
As Everett got up, turning his back on her for the second time that summer, she realized she didn’t have any of her usual responses from close proximity with him. Her breathing was calm. Her face cool. The only impulse she fought was one to check her watch. At some point over the last few months, Everett’s position had shifted in her memory and her esteem, the evolution occurring so gradually she hadn’t noticed until now.
She could see why she’d once liked him. He was still handsome. Still said her name like a caress. Fourteen years of fantasy built up a lot of scar tissue. But Everett was no longer her “one that got away.” No, that title was desperately in danger of belonging to someone else.
Josh might have acted like a self-righteous idiot, but one bad day didn’t change the fact that he’d spent his summer making her feel exceptional in every way.
Everett was . . . she considered a handful of words most commonly attributed to women: flighty, ditzy, bimbo. Figures there aren’t as many readily available terms for men.
The very idea of loving Everett suddenly struck Clara as ridiculous. A wannabe rock star living off his daddy’s money who forgot to return her phone calls. She didn’t need Everett Bloom with his cleft chin and his Ray-Bans and his halfhearted apologies. What an embarrassing catalyst for her fall from grace.
It’s amazing how wrong you can be about a person. About yourself.
Clara pressed her lips together to avoid smiling. She wondered if it was hindsight or the tequila buzzing in her veins that transformed tragedy into comedy. Discarding old dreams was surprisingly liberating.
“I loved you for a really long time,” she said on an exhale, letting the truth out into the night air.
Everett froze. “Clara,” he started, but then didn’t seem particularly inclined to take the sentence further, as if her confession were an inconvenience more than anything.
Oh, for crying out loud. She’d been the one to carry a torch for fourteen years; the least he could do now was hear her say it.
He ran his thumb along his eyebrow. “You’re just saying that because we’ve known each other forever.”
She let her eyes swipe across him then and came away cool and impartial. The sky’s last traces of sunset surrendered to dusk, and in those impossible blues, Clara saw Chagall. She saw Josh when his hair fell into his eyes. Her heart, which had been screaming in her chest all day, had finally found a way to speak to her brain.
“I think you’re right.” Everett had eclipsed her ambition, her drive, her hunger, all of the things that she now loved most about herself. All the things Josh celebrated. “I think I loved my idea of love. Of passion and partnership. Of someone else’s hand in mine. My name on the lips of a man who wanted me. I craved certainty. The excitement and reassurance of knowing who I was coming home to at the end of the day.”
It was strange to want something for so long, to turn it over so many times in your mind, that the image became as faded and worn as an old Polaroid. To become so consumed by the yearning in your heart that when you got what you’d always longed for, you could hardly recognize it. “But still, I pinned that fantasy on you for longer than I’d like to admit.”
“I’ve been a shitty friend.” Everett let out a long sigh. “I’m sorry. I want to say that I didn’t know how you felt all those years, but I did. I knew and I pretended not to know because it was easier. I didn’t wanna lose you. You’ve always been there for me.”
It was a crummy answer, but honest, and at the end of the day, it didn’t matter very much. She took the hit like a pinprick.
“You know what’s funny?”
Everett pulled a new cigarette from his pocket and lit it. “God, I hope you’ve got something good, ’cause I feel like a colossal asshole right now.”
Clara grabbed the cigarette from his mouth and tossed it on the ground. Even if she wasn’t in love with him, she didn’t want him giving himself lung cancer.
“You came through in the end. Not intentionally, of course, but through sheer dumb luck. Because you got me to Danvers Street. You got me to Josh.”
Everett’s eyebrows shot toward his forehead. “Don’t tell me you and Craigslist guy . . . ?”
She sighed. “I think he might be the best mistake I ever made.”
“The Clara Wheaton I know doesn’t make mistakes.”
She whistled under her breath. “I guess you don’t know me anymore.” Her months in L.A. had been about more than Josh. Somewhere in a falling-down bungalow in West Hollywood, she’d built Shameless and a version of herself that she admired.
Honestly, so what if people knew she’d invested in promoting women’s pleasure? For twenty-seven years she’d held a nearly perfect record, and all it had landed her was a life she could walk away from at the drop of a hat. Maybe it was her Wheaton blood, or falling head over heels for the last person she’d expected, but somehow, some way, Clara had finally developed a taste for scandal.
She got to her feet, her mind already miles away. “I gotta get out of here.”
“What do you mean? You just showed up. The band’s on in ten minutes.”
Leaning up onto her tiptoes, she gave him a quick peck on the cheek. “Sorry, kid,” she said, tossing his favorite nickname for her back over the fence. A quick look at her watch and a few careful calculations confirmed the fastest way back to Josh. She could wait, take a flight tomorrow, but suddenly the idea of getting behind the wheel, of trusting herself and navigating toward exactly what she wanted, was undeniably appealing. Sure, her heartbeat still kicked into high gear. Her hands would probably still tremble a little when she wrapped them around the steering wheel. But Clara now knew that more often than not, the scary things, the ones you spend the most time and energy talking yourself out of, are the ones that make life worth living. “Hey, I actually need a favor.”
“Anything you want.” Everett shrugged. “I owe you big-time.”
Clara held out her hand, palm up. “I’m gonna need your keys.”
chapter thirty-six
THE LAST THING Josh wanted to do two days after losing Clara was talk to more press. But if he couldn’t do right by the woman he loved, at least he could show up for the project they both believed in.
So Josh sat in the recording studio of KXZR radio station in Torrance. Following the mini press schedule Clara had made for them weeks ago, he and Naomi were appearing on Dana Novak’s popular syndicated talk show. He’d tried calling and texting Clara, but she must have turned her phone off. The word gone flashed across his brain in neon letters.
The well-known host’s signature close-cropped silver hair shone under the lights as she fired off a series of questions. Josh tried to smile. The big headphones he’d received from her assistant made his ears sweat. So far, they hadn’t gone near Clara, but he knew it was only a matter of time.
“How did you decide to start Shameless?” Dana had the perfect radio voice, clear and direct. “I’ll be the first to acknowledge the sad state of sex ed in America. But it’s a bit of a stretch to go from porn—and exes, I m
ight add—to creators in the business of promoting female pleasure.”
Josh nodded for Naomi to take this one. He didn’t feel like talking. Didn’t want to waste another second not looking for Clara, but Naomi had threatened to skin him alive if he missed the interview, and his ex was nothing if not a woman of her word.
“We came into the project with different perspectives but a common goal,” Naomi said. “We both believe sex is better, for everyone, when partners understand each other’s bodies. When they give each other permission to communicate and experiment and grow. Pleasure isn’t one size fits all. Great sex is constantly evolving, and so should the discourse around it.”
Naomi gave him a half smile. “Josh and I happen to have more sex than average, so we’ve learned a few tricks that we share on the site, but we certainly don’t know everything. We could never have brought Shameless to life alone.”
Dana propped her chin in her palm. “Ah, yes. You’ve got a handful of creative collaborators. But I’ll tell you, the one I’m most interested in, and I’m sure you can guess, is socialite Clara Wheaton. Before Shameless, she’d never dealt in adult entertainment, but her family’s got a list of scandals as long as my arm. What made her decide to take a walk on the wild side?” She looked back and forth between them. “Or should I say which one of you?”
Josh had known this moment was coming. Still, his pulse jumped at her name. “We’re not going to discuss Ms. Wheaton in any capacity,” he said into the mic with a flat tone that brooked no argument.
“Ooh, do I detect a bit of protectiveness? Did I stumble on America’s raunchiest love triangle?”
Josh took off his headphones and got to his feet. “I’m done.” The vision that greeted him when he turned around stole his breath. “Clara.”
