Hollywood Nights

by Sara Celi

  “But I’m—”

  “You promised me you’d stay sober. You promised me.”

  “It’s a little vodka. Something to take off the edge.” His words slurred and shook. “You don’t know what I’m dealing with.”

  “I can guess. And anyway, do you realize what’s going on?” My voice rose with every word; I didn’t bother trying to contain it. “Your whole world is collapsing around you. Right now, Tanner. Right now. Not just whatever is downstairs. With me, too. We’re on the edge.”

  He ran a hand over his face and through his spiky, disheveled hair. “I’m going to be a father, Brynn. A father. A father.” He repeated the words a few more times, as if he couldn’t believe he was actually saying them. “How the hell did this happen?”

  “I’m pretty sure I know how it happened. It’s not hard to figure out.”

  He groaned.

  “She says you all slept together that night when I picked you up at the Polo Lounge.” I jerked my head in the direction of downstairs. “Is that true? That’s when? Do you remember?”

  Tanner shook his head. “I honestly don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  “I remember it clearly.” I shivered. “And then you came home, and you came onto me—ugh—and I actually thought you liked me. The way you talked to me that night—and you kissed me.” I paused. “You must have thought I was a fool.”

  “You’re not.”

  A few seconds drifted by, and when he didn’t reply, I knew right then I had my answer.

  “You told me the other day that you hadn’t had any real contact with her in a long time. That you didn’t think about her anymore.” I leaned against the doorway. “I hope you’re happy with yourself.”

  He turned to me. “I didn’t want this to happen, Brynn. I made mistakes. I’m human.”

  “This is more than a mistake. This is a big deal. We’re talking about a human life here. You’re going to be a father.”

  “We had something here. Something special. I thought—” I broke off and didn’t tell him what I wanted to say: I thought we were in love.

  “This is complicated, Brynn. It’s more than you and me. I’m serious; you don’t understand.”

  We stared at each other for a long moment, and then reality hit me.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “You’re going to let her back into your life, aren’t you? She’ll go right back to her old ways, dominating you like she always has. All because you couldn’t control yourself for one night.”

  “I can’t abandon her,” Tanner said. “She’s carrying my child. Maybe we could—I don’t know. I need time to think right now. I need to figure this out.”

  “But where does that leave me?” I said, the words hurting my chest as I spoke them. “Where does that leave us?”

  I waited for an answer that never came.

  “I’m out of here. Done,” I said. “I don’t need this in my life.”

  “Wait, please.”

  “Don’t tell me to wait, Tanner. You don’t get to tell me how to do anything anymore.”

  “I need you to calm down and listen to me, Brynn. I have an explanation.”

  “No, you listen to me. What I see is this: I see a man who has everything, but he doesn’t appreciate it. Do you know how many people out there would kill to be as famous as you? How many people spend their days wishing they could have all of this? You’ve been given so much, Tanner, and now you’re wasting it. You’re wasting it on needless drama. Needless crazy shit!” I threw up my hands. “Well, guess what? I’m done. Totally done. I’m not going to be a part of the reality show that is your life anymore.”

  As I moved past the doorway and toward my things on the opposite nightstand, Tanner got up off the bed.

  “Brynn, wait. You’ve got to give me a chance here. It’s not what you think. I don’t love Lana.”

  “I’m sure you don’t, but now you’re stuck with her, aren’t you?”

  He faltered. “I am. You’re right. And that means I have to take responsibility for the things I’ve done. She wants to keep it.”

  “She doesn’t want to keep it. She wants to keep you.”

  “Most people would blow her off. Pay child support and be done with it.” He hesitated. “But that wasn’t the way I was raised.”

  “Which means Lana wins. But maybe she always did.” I ripped open the drawer on the nightstand. Only a few things of mine lay inside; it wouldn’t take long to pack the rest of my stuff. I opened my purse and dumped in the mess of chains, a watch, some coins, and a bottle of perfume. “You know what? Your life is like a bad movie.”

  “You really are leaving, aren’t you?”

  “What’s going to stop me?” I glared at him. “You?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Try me. You’ll regret it.”

  I waited for him to stop me. To do something. Anything.

  In that second, all of my emotions solidified. I should have never gotten involved with this guy. From that first night at Twisted, I’d had this lingering thought in the back of my mind that things wouldn’t turn out well, and I’d be the one to get hurt. Now it had come true, and in a horrifying, totally fucked-up way. There was a reason why people didn’t trust Hollywood celebrities. Their lives didn’t make sense. All fake. Just for show. Nothing substantial. Just like Tanner had told me that first night at dinner.

  “This is it,” I said.

  “Don’t go,” Tanner said, and his voice broke. “Give me some time. I don’t know—she can live in the pool house, maybe. We can—”

  “We can what?” I said. “I don’t see how this can work.”

  He raised his hand to touch me, but then it fell heavy at his side. “I don’t want to hurt you, Brynn.”

  The situation downstairs spoke for itself, so I walked over to the master closet and ripped my clothes off the hangers. “I figure you won’t want these.”

  “You’re doing this, aren’t you?” he said.

  I turned around toward him. “I’m doing this.”

  “I don’t love her. This is all a huge nightmare. I’m serious. Just as shocked as you are.” His hand landed on my shoulder, and I shrugged it off as fast as it got there.

  “Don’t touch me.” I turned to him, a pile of designer clothes in my hand. “Don’t ever touch me again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I couldn’t hear those words right then. “Do you know how I found out about this? I got ambushed by the reporter from Rockchick. In front of Kenneth. It felt like a setup.”

  “Jesus, Brynn.”

  His eyes seemed to turn down at their edges and he searched my face for something—sympathy? I wasn’t in the mood to give it. The air around us felt thick, and I struggled to breathe. I needed space. Immediately.

  Finally, he sighed. “Do you want your money?”

  “No. I can’t believe you would bring that up right now.”

  “But what about our agreement? I want to do the right thing.”

  “I don’t care about your money. It was never only about that for me. I don’t want you to ever contact me again,” I said, forcing back tears. “I want to forget this whole relationship ever happened.”

  It didn’t take me long to pack the rest of my things. Most of it fit in the original suitcases I’d brought into the pool house, and the few things that didn’t went into a plastic garbage bag. I threw all of it in the back of the Corolla. Tanner stopped trying to argue with me; I made it clear he wouldn’t change my mind, no matter how many times he begged. Lana stayed in the kitchen, luxuriating in her newfound position. She’d worked her way back into his life; she’d get to have him forever.

  I steeled my heart against them both, backed the Corolla out of the garage, and pulled out of the driveway. Once again I had nowhere to go, and no one wanted me. I didn't care.

  I kept driving.

  “So let me get this straight.” Kenneth placed his phone on the sticky restaurant table and folded his hands as he studied me. “You’re getting b
ack together with Lana.”

  “She’s pregnant with my child. What choice do I have?”

  He shrugged. “A few. She could get rid of it.”

  “That’s totally out of the question,” I said through gritted teeth. “Don’t bring it up again. Lana wouldn’t consider it, anyway.”

  “All right.” Kenneth lifted a hand and glanced around at the other restaurant patrons. “Forget I said it. Wrong choice of words.”

  “Here you are.” A skinny waitress with long dreadlocks placed a margarita in front of Kenneth, a Dos Equis in front of me, and a large basket of chips and salsa in between the two of us. Then her eyes roamed over my body but if she recognized me, she didn’t mention it.

  Good.

  I’d chosen Tito’s Cantina in Encino for one specific reason: It lay tucked away on a quiet street in a random corner of the San Fernando Valley. People wouldn’t bother us here. We could talk. And drink. I’d been doing a lot of that in the last few days.

  “Bottoms up.” I lifted the Dos Equis bottle and tipped it at Kenneth, then swallowed a large gulp of beer.

  “Like I said before, I don’t mind drinking with you, but we’re not getting drunk. I’m not dealing with that at a restaurant in the Valley.”

  “Got to keep taking the edge off.” I’d repeated that mantra over and over again since Brynn had walked out of my life three days before. So far, it hadn’t worked.

  “When are you and Lana going public about this… ahem… reunion of yours?”

  I shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “Just want to know what I should prepare for.”

  I slammed my beer bottle on the table. “Speaking of which, you weren’t exactly prepared when it came to Lana’s big announcement, were you?”

  Kenneth grabbed a tortilla chip out of the basket and dunked it into the salsa. “I don’t think anyone could have been,” he said in between crunchy, loud bites. “This literally came out of nowhere, and that morning, I got about an hour warning before the shoot. I called over to the editor and she assured me…” He ate another chip. “I still thought you and Lana weren’t speaking to each other.”

  My attention wandered around the room, looking at the rest of Tito’s sparse patrons, but I didn’t see them anymore. I kept thinking over and over about that night at the Polo Lounge, and the things that happened before it. What an epic fuckup. And now I would get to pay for it in more ways than one.

  “I feel like I don’t have much of a choice,” I said to Kenneth. I propped my elbow on the table, and shoved my hand through my hair. “I’m not going to abandon her. Not if the baby is mine.”

  “So you’re saying you have no choice but to try and make this work.”

  “This would be a lot easier if Brynn would talk to me.”

  I fished my iPhone out of my pocket and unlocked it. Nothing. No text messages from her. No Instagram posts. Nothing on Twitter. No Snapchats. Zero. I sighed and threw it down on the table. She must have meant what she said. “At least I can think of one good thing about this situation.”

  Kenneth sucked down a large gulp of his margarita. “Which is?”

  “Brynn’s better off without someone like me.” I picked the bottle up and drank some more beer. “She always was. I guess somewhere deep inside I always knew that.”

  I didn’t allow myself to cry until I made the last turn, the one that took me off State Route 437 and onto the gravel driveway. When I got there, I wept, crying harder than I had any other time in my life, and I still cried as the car rolled up the drive and came to a park.

  At the end lay the familiar blue and white house with the same rusty shutters and broken front steps. Nothing had changed in the last few years, not even the rusting washer and dryer on a concrete slab about ten feet away from the house.

  The screen front door opened five seconds after I parked the car. He’d been waiting for me ever since he picked up the frantic phone call I’d placed on the road a few miles outside of Albuquerque. I’d told him everything, from the setbacks of my life in LA to the arrangement I had with Tanner, then the way my feelings grew for him, and how it felt to find out Lana was having his baby. I hadn’t been so honest with him in years.

  After I got up the steps, my dad folded me into his arms.

  “It’s all right, bumblebee. You’re okay.”

  I sobbed against his chest, finally letting it all go in a tidal wave of emotion I had bottled up since putting the Californian sunshine in my rearview mirror and Ohio in my front. It felt so good to cry with no consequences.

  “Everything’s so screwed up,” I said against my dad’s denim sleeve. “My whole life. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

  “It’s okay. You’re only in your twenties. You don’t have to know.”

  The kindness in his voice made me cry harder. Pretty soon, his sleeve had a large wet patch. I tried to apologize, but he wouldn’t hear it.

  “Come inside.”

  He led me through the front door and into the small living room. The walls had their familiar wood paneling, the green couch still sat across from the battered tube TV, and my senior pictures hung from the wall. Dad didn’t like change. When I was younger, that bothered me almost as much as his recurring drinking problem. On that day, I wouldn’t have asked for anything else.

  I sank onto the couch. Every bone in my body wanted to give up. It had been a long drive—more than thirty-two hours on the road. While I broke the trip into three days, I still drove it all carrying nagging anxiety, lingering anger, and stress that wouldn’t leave my back or my shoulders. Tanner hadn’t helped either. My phone had twenty-five text messages, three Snapchats, and five DMs on Twitter from him. Every time I read one on the drive from California to Ohio, I wanted to respond.

  But I didn’t. And I wouldn’t.

  “Here’s some water.” Dad handed me a blue plastic cup and took a seat in the fake leather La-Z-Boy recliner. “You look like you need a good night’s sleep.”

  “Haven’t had one of those in a while.” I sipped the bitter tap water and relished the familiarity of the blue plastic cup’s fading Cincinnati Cyclones logo. It was good to be home, and better than I had expected. “What I need is a new life, Dad. Or maybe my old one. I still can’t believe this is happening to me.”

  “But it’s not happening, sweetheart. Not anymore. All that drama is two time zones away, and whatever you’ve been doing in California isn’t real life.” He gestured to the rickety house where he’d lived for more than thirty-five years. “This is reality. This. Day-to-day stuff like hard work and paying taxes—not media manipulation for the sake of tabloids, blog posts, and fame.”

  “When I was a little girl, I used to think my whole life would be better as long as I got out of Griffin. I hated it here, and I wanted everyone to know it.”

  My dad nodded. “That’s your mother’s fault. You’ve got a streak of her in you. Stubborn. Headstrong, I think.”

  I bristled; I didn’t like thinking about my mother. She took off when I was five, after an epic argument with Dad about money and his inability to make much of it. I remembered her standing in the driveway, red-faced as she’d yelled at him about the mounting bills, and how he’d never amount to anything. She’d moved to Atlantic City and then to Rochester, New York; neither of us had heard from her since my sophomore year in high school.

  “I didn’t want you to know how things were going out there. I mean, before I met Tanner, I was working at a strip club. A strip club,” I said, a sob welling up in my chest once again as my mind rolled over the previous few months. “I wasn’t a dancer; I didn’t get naked for money. I was a cocktail waitress, but I thought if you knew things weren’t going so well you’d be so disappointed, so—sad for me. I didn’t want to let you down.”

  “You could never make me feel that way.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t know what it’s been like out there.”

  “I do know one thing. Would’ve been more disgusted if you’d stuck
around a guy like him.” He shifted his weight in the recliner and patted my knee. “Anyone who hurts my daughter can’t be a good man.”

  “I need to sleep,” I said as I wiped my eyes. “I’m exhausted.”

  “Your bedroom is the way you left it,” Dad said.

  I sighed. I didn’t know what Tanner was anymore, but I knew he was a mess. A mess I didn’t want to deal with. And a mess I wanted to forget.

  My life was a mess. Fucked up. Screwed up. Confirmed. No question. I’d done it this time.

  I ripped my phone off its charger and unlocked it. Damn. No messages. No voice mails. No calls from her. Nothing. Silence. Roaring, deafening silence.

  Brynn had ignored me for a week, and I had to admire her steadfast stubbornness. Once she bit down on something, she didn’t release it. Most women didn’t have much resolve when it came to me; I could usually break them by saying the right things.

  But of course, Brynn wasn’t the average woman. Not at all.

  I rolled over in bed and stared at the skylight. Sunlight streamed through, and it would be time to get up soon. A mix of eggs and sausage already wafted up the staircase from the kitchen, and I heard faint clattering. If I went downstairs I knew what I’d find: Lana in front of the toaster and Martha right next to her, as if they had always been there together.

  I checked my phone again. 8:47 a.m. Sixteen hours and forty-five minutes since my last text message to Brynn, one that once more said how worried and concerned she made me. Too soon to text her again? I mulled this over and decided it wasn’t. Before I could rethink it, I fired off another text and locked the phone.

  Someday, she’d crack, I told myself. I needed to keep trying.

  Lana greeted me with a tomato, sausage, and egg-white sandwich when I arrived in the kitchen. She placed the plate in front of me and asked if I wanted coffee. I said yes, and then studied her as Martha brewed a large pot. God, this woman had a way about her. She knew how to get what she wanted, and how to muscle her way into an advantageous situation. If she wrote a book on pussy whipping, it would be a best seller.