by Jessica Love
“That’s not what I’m saying.” I shake my head, trying to clear the built-up frustration from the night. “I want you guys to have fun. But I needed you. I still need you. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Lo stares at me, good and hard. I think her face is going to soften up and she’ll pull me into a hug and tell me how to fix everything. But instead she narrows her eyes, sharpening all her features. “Look, I mean this in the nicest possible way, because you know I love you, but you act like a control freak and then take absolutely no control over the things that matter. You float around and wait for other people to make your decisions for you, but you don’t actually do anything yourself. I think it’s time for you to stop relying on me and Grace and everyone else, and solve this on your own.”
“But, Lo—”
“I’ve had to listen to you talk about Nick for years, and, honestly, I’m getting sick of it. If you want him, go get him. Talk to him. Do something. If not, shut up about it and deal.”
“I can’t just—”
“This is tough love, baby,” she says with a wry smile. “Go figure it out.” Then she turns around and walks back to the room, and to Oscar, leaving me alone in the hallway.
I do want Nick, but I think it’s too late to go get him.
And I’m going to have to go through Frankie first.
CHAPTER
25
It’s not hard to find Frankie downstairs. At this hour, the casino is full of ridiculously drunk people stumbling back to their rooms and unbelievably trashy people powering through the night, gambling their last few dollars away.
Frankie is one of the few sober ones.
She’s sitting at a table in front of a closed shop called Earl of Sandwich. I hesitate before she sees me, and I take a second to look at her. Her bright red hair is a little flat and dark circles have formed under her eyes, but besides that, she’s as cute as she was when I saw her for the first time earlier tonight. Unbelievable, since I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the elevator on the way down and I look like I’ve been run over by a truck and then backed up over by it for good measure.
She’s bent over and on her phone, of course. Texting some bouncer or club promoter, I’m sure, or maybe updating her blog with her recap of the night’s exciting events. I can picture the tweet:
NICK’S PATHETIC FRIEND TRIED TO MOVE IN ON HIM #WTF.
I take a deep breath, gather everything I have inside me, and I walk up to her.
“Hey.”
Her head snaps up and a smile is on her face immediately. “Thanks for coming down here, Hannah.” She sounds so freaking happy to see me that I smile back in spite of myself.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.” I stick my hands into my pockets and look at the ground. “Lo and I were having a fight.”
“Oh no!” She jumps up from her chair and hugs me. Hard. “I’m so sorry, Hannah. Best-friend fights are the worst.”
Tell me about it. I just had two in the span of an hour.
“I have an idea,” she says as she pulls away from me, her eyes practically sparkling. “Let’s go have some fun. Do you play blackjack?” She doesn’t even wait for my answer; instead, she pulls me into the casino, weaving us through the maze of tables, about half of which are closed at this hour, and she slows down every time we pass one playing blackjack.
“There’s blackjack.” I point with my free arm.
“Ew. That’s single deck.”
I don’t know what that means, or what any of these signs mean, so I let her lead me. She dismisses every table, though, mumbling things like “Spanish Twenty-one” and “Bah. High limits.”
Finally she chooses a table that meets her standards. It’s empty of players, in a pink area of tables called the Pleasure Pit. The dealer, a pretty dark-haired girl in a bustier with a necklace that says Lourdes in script, smiles at us as we approach. “This is perfect,” Frankie says. “Sit down.”
I sit.
“I don’t know how to play blackjack,” I say, adjusting myself on the tall chair.
“No big,” Frankie says. “I’ll tell you what to do. And so will Lourdes. Right, Lourdes?”
“Of course.” Lourdes says it in this sexy, breathy voice, and I suddenly wonder if we are supposed to be sitting in this area called the Pleasure Pit.
“Are we okay to be here?” I whisper to Frankie. “This feels like the ‘naked chicks on display’ area. I feel a bit out of place.”
Again, Lourdes smiles. “You’re fine. Everyone is welcome in the Pleasure Pit.” Behind her, a girl on a box is go-go dancing to the Jay Z song playing throughout the casino, so I totally don’t believe her, but no one is kicking us out yet. “But I do need to see your IDs.”
Oh yeah. You have to be twenty-one to gamble. Luckily, I shoved my wallet in my back pocket when I stormed out of the hotel room earlier, so I have my fake with me. It’s the third time I’ve used it tonight, but my hand still shakes as I pull it out of its sleeve in my wallet and hand it to Lourdes at the same time Frankie hands hers over.
I’m watching Lourdes’s face as she examines our IDs. Her eyes flick back and forth from my picture to me, and then from Frankie’s picture to Frankie’s face.
“Drinks?” A cocktail waitress comes up behind us, and before I can wave her off, Frankie orders two Jack and Cokes for us.
“But—”
Frankie puts a hand up in my face. “We need to talk, and I’m going to need a drink to do it.”
My stomach drops to the ground. What is she going to say that she needs me buzzed for? She was hugging me and smiling a minute ago. Was that all an act to get me comfortable so she can scream at me about her boyfriend?
“Fine,” I say. “But can I have a water, too?”
The waitress nods and walks to the next table, and I turn around to find Lourdes has laid our IDs down on the table in front of us. Whew.
Lourdes stares at us like she’s expecting something.
“So, what do we do now?” I whisper. “Make a bet or something?”
“I got this,” Frankie says. “This is my treat, okay?”
I start to tell her I can use some of my slot machine money, but she stops me with her hand again. She reaches into her wallet and pulls out a one-hundred-dollar bill that she lays out on the table. Lourdes takes the bill, flattens it out in front of her, and calls something over her shoulder to the huge guy in a suit behind her.
“Oh my God,” I whisper again. “What is she yelling? Are we in trouble? Where did you get that money? Is it stolen?”
“Settle down.” Frankie pats my leg. “They do that with big bills, so the pit boss knows a big bill is getting changed into chips.”
Lourdes pushes a stack of chips to us. Frankie divides up the chips between us and explains the rules to me as Lourdes deals.
I look at my two cards. An eight and a five. “I have thirteen. Hit, right?”
“Nope,” Frankie says. “I know it seems like you should, but she has a sixteen.” She waves her hands over the top of her queen and eight, and nods at me, like that’s what I’m supposed to do, too. It goes against pretty much the only thing I know about blackjack, to stay on a thirteen, since I thought it was about trying to get to twenty-one, but I follow her lead. I don’t know what it is about Frankie, but she has this way of making you do what she tells you even when it flies in the face of all logic and reason. I wonder if that Frankie Magic is how she got Nick to go out with her in the first place.
Now it’s time for Lourdes to turn over her next card. It’s a four. Lourdes gets a twenty. Frankie and I both lose.
“Sorry, ladies,” Lourdes says as she leans over to collect our chips and our cards.
“That totally wasn’t supposed to happen,” Frankie says, shaking her head. “You should always stay on that hand. She’s supposed to bust.”
The waitress delivers our drinks, which are apparently free if you’re sitting at a table, and Frankie continues giving me blackjack tips, all of which result in m
e losing every single hand.
“I hate blackjack,” I say after losing a particularly painful hand where I put all kinds of extra bets down because Frankie told me to, and I lost them all.
Frankie runs her hand through her hair. “I don’t know what’s going on, Hannah. We are following all the rules exactly. Aren’t we, Lourdes?”
“You sure are,” Lourdes says. “I would have played all those hands exactly the same way.”
“I guess I just have killer luck tonight,” I mumble. Following the rules and having it get me nowhere has suddenly become a theme in my life. Rules I understand, rules I don’t understand, they’re all leading me down a dark path to nowhere.
I’m about to give up on blackjack for the night, since I’ve lost almost all Frankie’s money and don’t want to dip into my own. I’m realizing what a loser I am, and my patience for this stupid game is wearing thin. Lourdes’s pile of cards is through, so she takes a quick break to shuffle everything up again, and I take a huge gulp of my drink.
“I hope this isn’t weird,” Frankie says, angling her chair to face me. “I need to talk to you about something. I know how close you and Nick are, and I don’t know who else to go to.”
What is this? I was worried she was going to get mad at me about something, but if she is trying to have some sort of sex talk with me about Nick, I think I might lose my ever-loving mind. There’s no way I can sit here and listen to her talk about doing stuff with him. Sitting through Lo and Oscar’s encounter upstairs was already more than my delicate imagination could handle. A play-by-play and color commentary about Nick and Frankie getting it on will likely break me into pieces.
“What’s up?” I manage to squeak out.
“Well, I’m sure you’ve noticed we’re having a few problems.”
I had noticed a smidge of tension between them—but, honestly, I thought it was because of me. Is she going to confront me about it? Are the gambling tips a way to warm me up so she can sneak-attack me? I size her up. I’m not very big, but I’m definitely bigger than she is. If she tries to fight me, I have an advantage.
“I didn’t notice,” I say as I pull my hair back into a bun. I don’t want her to have anything to grab on to if she does take a swing at me.
“Oh, that’s good.” She spreads her hands out on the felt table and stares at them. “We are, though. Having problems.”
“Uh … why?” I don’t want to get in the middle of it, but I have to know more.
“My blog. He doesn’t like it. He hates that I have so much personal stuff online. He hates that everyone who reads my blog knows we’re dating.” Her phone beeps with a notification. She looks at it and puts it back in her pocket. “We just got in another fight about it, out of the blue. He blew up at me and stormed off. I don’t know where he went, and he won’t answer his phone.”
“Oh.” This isn’t what I had been expecting at all. It’s about Frankie’s stupid blog this whole time. I take another huge swig of my drink. “Well, you know Nick’s a private person.”
“I know,” she says. “I don’t think he would ever leave his bedroom if he didn’t have to. He told me the only reason he has a profile online is because of you. Is that true?”
I can’t keep a smile off my face at the memory. “I started it for him and e-mailed him the password so he could keep it up. It was easier for us to keep in touch that way. The chat feature, you know?”
“He hardly ever updates the page.”
“I know. He only has tagged photos up there. Or ones he texted me that I uploaded for him. I don’t think he has any idea where the upload button even is.”
She shakes her head. “We’re so different that way, you know? I live my whole life online. My blog is who I am. It’s not like I can not include him on it. That would feel like lying.”
“But he hates it.”
She nods and stabs her drink.
I try to figure out what to make of this odd situation, the girlfriend of the guy I’m desperately in love with—yes, even after everything—asking me for advice on how to work things out with him. She reaches over and grabs my hand, squeezing my fingers tightly. “I like Nick so much,” she says. “You know. You know he’s special.”
As soon as she says that, I wonder how much she’s aware of. How much do I wear my own feelings for Nick around on my face? Can Frankie tell? Or is she saying this only because she knows how deep our friendship is?
But she says she likes him. She doesn’t say she loves him.
Has he told her he loves her?
I let her squeeze my hand, but I don’t squeeze back. When she loosens her grip, I pull my hand back to my own lap. “Nick is special, Frankie.” I choose my words carefully. I don’t want to say the wrong thing here. “He’s an amazing guy. He’s sweet and thoughtful and funny and talented. He’s…” I almost say he’s honest, but I wince and keep it inside. He lied to me. Big-time. The sting is dying out quickly, though, because I can understand it. I get why he did it, and I did it, too. “Well, of course he’s hot.”
We both grin at that. “Yeah,” she says. “He’s gorgeous.”
I clear my throat. “But there are other hot guys out there, you know? There’s more to him than being hot.” I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with her. I must be a decent liar after all, and hid my feelings for Nick better than I thought. Or maybe Frankie, as sweet as she is, is completely clueless. Or smart enough to not see things she doesn’t want to see. Like, what does she think about the fact that Nick wears a flattened Disneyland penny around his neck every day? Has she bothered to ask? Does she even care?
“I need you to tell me what to do, Hannah. I don’t know how to do this. I just need to figure out if this is worth it, you know?”
This is the moment of truth. I probably could have it all right here. Frankie seems desperate, like she’ll do whatever I say. If I tell her it doesn’t seem like things will work out, Nick will never change, they aren’t a good match, any of that, I can tell from the look on her face that she’ll take me at my word and probably end things between them. That will get her out of the way.
That will leave Nick free for me.
But I look at Frankie and I see myself. I see someone who cares about Nick like I do, who wants to be with him.
She didn’t overlook Nick, and she didn’t run when things got too serious. She didn’t leave behind chance after chance to tell him how she felt. She knew she wanted him, and she went after him.
I can’t do this to her. Not after she’s been so nice to me since the minute I met her. Not since I saw the two of them together, the way she looks at him.
But I can’t tell her that being with him is the right thing to do, can I? I mean, if I do, that would mean cutting myself out of the picture. On purpose.
Giving up everything we had on the dance floor, at the top of the Eiffel Tower. For good.
I have no idea which set of rules to follow here.
“Here’s the thing,” I say. “It seems like you have to figure out what you want the most.” I look right at Frankie. At her red, red hair and her perfectly fitted jeans and her perfectly distressed leather jacket. At her face, so worried and so desperate. “I’ve known Nick a long time. And in some ways, he’s changed a lot. He’s become more open. He’s loosened up. But in some ways he hasn’t changed, and I don’t think those parts of Nick will ever change. He’s always been stubborn. He’s always been really private. He’s never really liked to share.”
I grin at a memory of Nick, when we were talking online and I told him I had a boyfriend the first time and he responded with frowny faces. He tried to act like he wasn’t jealous, and he said he was just bummed because he knew we wouldn’t be able to talk as often. He didn’t want to share me. Of course I made sure nothing changed between us, and that first boyfriend lasted only two weeks.
I should have known right then.
“Yeah,” Frankie says. “He won’t even share his food with me when we go out. I always like to
order one dish, and then have the person I’m with order something else and then we can both split our stuff to try more things. But Nick orders what he orders and doesn’t want to split or share with me. Not even a bite.”
I feel such a strong stab of jealousy that I flinch. I’ve known Nick for so much longer than Frankie, but I’ve never been out to eat with him. I’d never reach over to his plate and try to take some of his fries, because I don’t like to share my food either. Other people touching the food on my plate? No way.
This whole time, I never knew we’d be perfect dinner companions.
“I don’t think that’s going to change about him,” I tell her, dropping my voice. “If he doesn’t want to share you with your blog readers, and if he doesn’t feel comfortable being a public part of your blog, that’s how it’s going to be. And I think asking him to be okay with it would be like asking him to be something he’s not.”
Frankie lets out a sad sigh.
“I hate to tell you to change your blog, especially when it’s so funny and good.”
She beams. “It is funny, isn’t it?”
“Oh yeah, it’s the best.” I chew the side of my mouth. I haven’t even looked at her blog yet, but given everyone’s reaction to it, I’m sure it’s the best thing to hit the Internet since TMZ. Either that or everyone is easily impressed. “But I think what it comes down to is which Nick is more important to you? The Nick you write about online? Or the real Nick? The one who you can sit around and watch a movie with? Or that blog Nick from all your dates? Which Nick matters the most to you? That’s what you need to ask yourself.”
And I realize I’m not even asking Frankie. I’m asking myself. Which Nick is more important to me? This person who exists only on the phone and the computer screen? The one I so wanted to preserve a friendship with that I was willing to remain a ghost? Or the one who is real? The one who I’ve screwed things up with so royally, and he screwed things up right back, I wasn’t sure if we would ever be the same?
