Miss Independent, Volumes 1 - 4

by Kiki Leach

  When she realized it was straight, she looked down into the glass and twisted her face in confusion.

  “I thought this was a mimosa?”

  “I think you might need to calm down on the intake of so much alcohol. You’ve been drinking a lot more lately and we learned last night that it doesn’t solve any of our problems, it only adds to them.”

  “You don’t have the excuse of drinking too much, so I think your problems could’ve easily been avoided,” she said.

  “So could yours, drinking too much or not.”

  “Hardly. Sheila attacked me unprovoked, Mo. I don’t care what anyone says or claimed to see, I wasn’t nearly fucking Nathan on the dance floor like she accused me of. When we danced, it was completely and strictly platonic and only at the urging of Eliza, who practically forced us into it with that stupid king and queen announcement. It’s not like I wanted it. It wasn’t necessary, and no one cared.”

  “Sheila cared, which is why she attacked you. And Nathan cared…” He took a sip of juice and soured as he swallowed it back. “It’s why he hit me.”

  “You goaded him.”

  “You weren’t even there,” he said, “and yet you assume I goaded him.”

  “I didn’t have to be there. You paid the security guard to take a smoke break. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain inside their skull that you weren’t looking to sing kumbaya with him in the streets.”

  He shrugged and returned to his cereal. “He deserved whatever he got,” he mumbled.

  “See?” She rattled her head and placed the glass next to her plate. She looked down at her food and grabbed a fork, then stuffed a heaping pile of eggs into her mouth.

  Maurice glanced at her from the corner of his eye and lifted his brows in a curious manner. “How did you manage to sleep in spite of everything?” he asked.

  “Everything?” There was that word again. “Um…” She scratched the side of her nose with the tip of her fork and chewed fast, swallowing the eggs, only to replace them with slices of bacon and pieces of bread. She knew what he was getting at and she wasn’t prepared to give him an honest answer, or the one that he wanted. “I slept okay, I guess. I just had a lot of shit on my mind with me and Sheila going at each other like that.” She sunk down in her chair. “And I’m cringing at the thought of the videos that everyone took. They’re probably all over the internet by now. Which means when my mother finds out from the friend of a friend of a friend whose daughter’s, sister’s, niece’s cousin was there with her new boyfriend, she is going to fucking kill me. I’m surprised it’s not all over Page Six or the New York Daily News.” She continued picking at her plate. Maurice winced and wiped his face with a napkin as he sat back. She regarded his dour expression and dropped her shoulders. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. Already?!”

  “According to my mother,” he stated, “you did make the cover of the Daily News. Something like, ‘Acclaimed ‘mini-mogul’ and current Editor-In-Chief of Attitude Magazine involved in alleged ballroom brawl with local senator’s daughter’. It said something about how you hadn’t been on the cover for something like that since you were sixteen.”

  “Great.”

  “And they have a clear picture of you on top of Sheila trying to bash her head into the ground.”

  “She told you all of this?”

  “She sent a picture to my phone. It’s upstairs in my room if you want me to--”

  “I don’t want to see it, I can’t.” She stopped and ran her shaky fingers through her hair. “She’s not going to tell my mother is she?”

  He rested a hand on the table and leaned down, reassuring. “She promised she wouldn’t say anything until you talked to her first.”

  “I don’t know if I want to talk to her first. I don’t know if I want to talk to her at all.” She shook her head, embarrassed, and thought a moment. “What about you? Is your name out there anywhere? Is Nathan’s?”

  “We don’t rank on your level of importance, V. And by the time everyone in the ballroom had gotten to us in the lobby, they already had the footage they needed.”

  “Double great, so now it looks like Sheila and I were the only two idiots last night. Just, motherfuck me gently with a chain…” She looked over at him as he lifted his brow. “It’s from a movie -- Never mind.” She tossed her fork onto her plate. “Alexis is going to literally skin me alive for this and make all of New York watch via the megatron in Times Square. She barely knew about us dating despite the coverage it got, but this is going to hit her first thing tomorrow morning when she gets to the magazine, if she hasn’t heard it already. In fact, I’m surprised she’s not ringing my phone off the hook.”

  “She might still be asleep.”

  “At one in the afternoon on a Sunday? You know Alexis, she’s up before the birds and chickens.”

  “Maybe she’s taking a nap,” he said.

  “My mother doesn’t take naps, she doesn’t believe in them. There’s got to be a reason why she hasn’t called.”

  “Okay, then maybe she and Alexander are busy.”

  Vanessa made a face. “I don’t really need to know what my mother and her husband are doing that would keep her from calling me in a panic, but thank you for that.” She folded her arms and stomped her foot against the floor in a fury. “I still can’t BELIEVE I allowed that snippy little two faced bitch to get to me like this. I stooped so low in attacking her like that. I’ve always been better than her in that respect…” She paused, thinking back to the time in high school in which she had punched Sheila in the nose at a pool party, which resulted in the latter needing a few surgeries to fix her crooked septum. “Well, maybe not, but she’s always been nothing more than an antagonizing bitch,” she continued. “She lives to rile me up just so that she can keep playing victim to MY pain. I didn’t tell you that she called me after the whole thing to apologize, but I know she didn’t mean it.”

  “What if she did?” he asked.

  She turned her eyes to Maurice, glaring. “You’re starting to sound like Alexander. Don’t.”

  “All I’m saying is, what if after last night, she really wants to move past this?”

  “She doesn’t. She wants to keep this thing going no matter what she says to me or anyone else. That’s why she and Nathan aren’t leaving town anytime soon.”

  “You mentioned that.” He cleared his throat. “How long are they planning on sticking around?”

  “I don’t know. When he stopped me on the street that night after I left the gym, he told me that she wanted to move the wedding here, so God only knows if they will EVER actually leave. What’s the point in having the wedding here, honeymooning someplace else, and then moving back to California?”

  “Do you want them to stay?”

  “Hell no! If I could go to their hotel room and pack her bags for her, I would do it with bells on.”

  “Her?” he asked. She noticed his reaction, but didn’t respond. He scrunched his brows. “Sticking around for longer than planned and possibly having the wedding here doesn’t really sound like Sheila to me.”

  “Really? Because it sounds exactly like her to me. She wants to rub my face in this whole thing and what better way than to get married in the city their affair started in. Ah, yes, True Love and the Sins of Adultery, the Nathan and Sheila story. I’ll be sure to mark the calendar for the day it arrives on Netflix or in the book stores. Maybe I can give it a bad review in the magazine.”

  She took another sip of orange juice, letting it rest on her taste buds, and suddenly had a flash of Nathan’s tongue inside her mouth. She remembered savoring it a lot like this, as if it were some kind of exotic candy made on another universe entirely and brought down especially for her. She coughed, nearly choking on the small bit she had and swallowed it quickly as she sat the glass back down.

  Maurice looked over at her and frowned. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “I’m fine.” She pat her chest and smiled when turn
ing away. She knew she was being a hypocrite in everything she said about Sheila while still thinking of Nathan and his tongue, but most of it was out of routine hatred. She knew in the bottom of her soul all the way down to the core of who she was as a woman that what she had done with him last night was just as wrong as anything her former friend had done with him when they were in high school.

  Even though they didn’t follow through on having sex in her office, had Sheila not called and interrupted when she did, they were both certain it would’ve happened, and possibly more than a few times. She couldn’t believe she had managed to fall back into old habits, but part of her felt almost smugly justified in reclaiming what was once hers.

  In the midst of all of that, she was still confused about what to make of things with Maurice. With Nathan, it was easier, she had been in love with him since they were children and she knew that was never going away. In fact, it had been amplified given what almost happened between them.

  Maurice was different. He was always supposed to be her best friend and male confidant. The one who steered her away from men like Nathan, not because he was supposed to be a contender himself, but because he knew the type and wanted to protect her as his friend. And now that had changed. He was no longer protecting her as a friend so much as he was trying to secure the slot for himself inside her heart.

  She stared off into space and he looked at her with admiration mixed with layering mounts of confusion. He started to wonder with the mention of Nathan’s name and her sudden aloofness if their kiss meant more to him than it had to her, and if he was really willing to put up with this shit again just like he had for so many years before. He loved Vanessa with his whole heart and he knew he would for the rest of his life, but he wasn’t willing to continue coming in second to last where Nathan or any other man was concerned.

  “I was thinking,” Maurice began. He tapped his fingers on the table, anxious to regain her attention. “I was thinking that maybe we should try that restaurant again for dinner one night soon.”

  She was immediately pulled out of her daze and tilted her head as she turned to him. “The Thai restaurant on Madison?” she asked. He nodded. “I don’t fucking think so. Not after you took someone else there claiming our first time together as basically being nothing.”

  “I never said that, Vanessa.”

  “You may as well have said it when you chose to meet your ‘destiny’ there, or whatever the hell her name was.”

  “V, did you ever stop to think that maybe I took her there because I wanted to get some kind of rise or reaction out of you? I knew if I did, it meant that you cared more than you ever chose to admit.” He smiled. “After nearly fifteen years of being in love with you, I finally got that rise. And I’m not sorry that I did.”

  “You didn’t take her there to get a rise out of me, you took her there because you were being an asshole.”

  “That too, but I still got what I wanted in the end either way.”

  They stared at each other for a long time, waiting for the other to say something else first.

  Before either one of them could say a thing, their roommate Nikki burst into the kitchen full of enthusiasm. “Buenos Dias!” She slammed the door back against the wall, her voice booming throughout the room. Vanessa jumped back, not realizing she had moved in closer to Maurice’s face. His frustration kicked into high gear the moment he saw Nikki’s face. He feared he had lost his only chance to hear the truth from Vanessa once and for all.

  “Great timing, Nikki, as always,” he mumbled, getting up from his chair and heading for the sink. He rinsed out his bowl, sloshing water from side to side as he jerked a washcloth around the inside of it.

  Once Vanessa got her bearings, she turned to Nikki and scowled. “What the hell happened to you last night?”

  She tossed her black hair behind her and looked over at Maurice. “You didn’t say anything?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about you this morning,” he replied, his eyes focused on the bowl, “sorry.”

  “Didn’t say anything about, what?” Vanessa got up and eyed them both as she moved across the room. She rested a hand on the counter and shrugged. “What the hell is going on?”

  Nikki tilted her head and sighed. “He knows about Oscar.”

  Vanessa turned to Maurice and craned her neck. “She told you?”

  “I overheard you two talking downstairs a few weeks ago.” He turned off the water and whipped around. “When she disappeared last night, it wasn’t that difficult to figure out.”

  She turned back to Nikki and expanded her eyes. “You went to see him? What the FUCK, Nicole?”

  Nikki shuffled over to the chair Vanessa had been sitting in and plopped down, tossing her hands on the table. “He called me earlier in the night but I didn’t want to speak to him because I was trying to talk to Eliza about her books. She managed to open my eyes about a few things, about him and my life. So I called him back later and told him that I wanted to see him.”

  “And what happened?”

  “We talked. We really talked about everything, what our relationship meant, and about Melanie. He said he still plans to leave, he just needs time.”

  “How much time? And what about his kids?”

  “He hasn’t worked all of that out yet.”

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  “He said that things could be changing with their entire living situation since Melanie is thinking of relocating to New York.” She reached for a piece of bacon on Vanessa’s plate and stuffed it into her mouth.

  “And what about her job at CBS films? If she announces that she’s leaving before this issue is out to the public, we’re screwed.”

  “Just call her in the morning and ask her about it, V,” she said.

  “Yeah, that looks real professional and sane, me asking her about something personal that she hasn’t told me about yet.”

  “I would have asked Oscar if I had thought about it, but I didn’t. We didn’t exactly get very far into the conversation.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet. Here’s another part of the conversation you never got to, the part where he’s not leaving his wife for you.”

  “I’m not going to start this with you again, Vanessa. Neither of you know him as well as I do--”

  “Nor would either of us even want to,” Vanessa told her. “I just can’t believe you went to see him and allowed him to once again fill your head with nothing but more lies.”

  She jumped up from her chair and tossed her arm forward. “And what about you, you hypocrite?”

  “What ABOUT me?!”

  “What were you doing in your office all night?”

  “I was working. You know it helps me take my mind off of things, and I especially needed that time last night.”

  “That’s all you were doing?”

  “What the hell else would I be doing instead, Nikki?”

  She smirked. “Sheila called here looking for you last night and I told her where you were.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Vanessa sighed. “Thanks a lot for that--”

  “She said that Nathan had gone missing earlier that night. They got into some kind of fight about you and she kicked him out.”

  She folded her arms and looked aside. “So?”

  “Was he with you?” she asked. Vanessa took a deep breath and rolled her tongue around inside her mouth to avoid answering. “V--”

  “He might’ve stopped by for a few minutes,” she responded. “Okay?”

  “Hold on,” Maurice lifted his hand and stepped forward. Vanessa turned to look up at him and cowered as the guilt crept over her. She felt the size of a needle, and just as sharp. “He went up there to see you? In your office?”

  “He wanted to talk about…” She stopped. “He wanted to talk about what happened.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t he come by here?” he asked in a harsh tone. “What the hell did he have to say to you when I’m the one he attacked?”

  “I don’t think he ca
res that he attacked you, Maurice,” said Nikki.

  “I wasn’t asking you,” he snapped. He turned his entire body toward Vanessa as she kept her eyes straight ahead. “What did he say to you, V?”

  “You know what, Mo, a lot happened last night, okay? And I don’t remember the exact words that were exchanged between all of us. Just a lot of blah, blah, blah in between glasses of champagne and slaps.”

  “There had to be more than what you’re saying,” said Nikki, fanning the flames of an already blazing fire. Her eyes were the color of emeralds, and they sparkled just as bright. “He went there out of his way--”

  “It wasn’t that far out of his way,” Vanessa mumbled.

  “Did he really just want to stop by with the intention of talking to you about last night?”

  “What difference does it make? At the end of the night, he still went home to Sheila.”

  “Because you forced him to leave, right?” Maurice asked. Panic had set in his voice, though he attempted to remain stern in his tone. He gulped and continued staring at her, his eyes nearly piercing a hole into the side of her face. “You wanted him gone, right?”

  “Yeah,” she replied in a soft voice. “Yeah, I did, I practically begged for it.”

  “And he did. Which means that nothing happened.”

  “No.”

  She answered quickly to relieve herself of the pain she felt in lying to him for the first time ever. It was like ripping off a band aid before the wound was even healed, when the air hits it and it stings like someone has poured acid all over your skin. Her throat tightened and she felt like fainting if only to excuse herself from the entire conversation. She knew every word that had come out of her mouth was an even bigger atrocity than the last, but she couldn’t stop herself even if she wanted; she had to wonder if she truly did.

  She was also aware that she was an even bigger fraud than either one of them would ever want to believe. But she was so desperate to hide that part of herself, so keen on keeping silent the derision that was sure to come if they had ever learned the truth of who she really was outside of their friendship.