by Claire Adams
All I wanted was a place near Shelby's, but I would settle for one that I could get to in under a twenty-minute drive. Those places weren't many. The places in that group that I could get within my budget were even fewer. I should have said something to Shelby about us living together because now look at this shit. Finding an apartment was almost as hard as getting her to call me back. If she picked the fucking phone up, maybe she'd have some goddamn advice for me. This shit was impossible. At the same time, the buyers who had been interested in my penthouse in Tribeca hadn't offered anything near my asking price.
Everything had just stopped. I had hit a wall and everything, my whole life, had gone up in flames. I had nothing. I didn't have a home, I didn't have Shelby or our son, and I didn't have a job. Judging from Vic's reaction, I was thinking maybe my days in broadcast journalism were over. I had enough of a catalog to get by without her recommendation, but following this shitshow, there were going to be few stations that wanted that attached to their name.
Of everything that was gone, the job was the most replaceable. I could last a while longer without one; I had enough socked away to do that and anyway; how many people these days stayed in one job all their lives? That wasn't how the job market worked anymore. I had gotten my degree wanting to go into broadcast, but TV was just one part of journalism. Earlier in my career, when I had just been starting out, I hadn't had that many writers work with me on stories. I had had to do a lot of it myself. Talking to Lake after the call with Victoria on Friday, he had been telling me that Hollywood needed writers more than it needed talent. Whether it was writing for commercials, TV, movies, another news outlet, it was an evergreen skill.
I had taken his advice, but not really in the way that I figured he had intended that I take it. I mean, I liked writing and apparently I had a chance to do it again. I wanted another job, but I wasn't that excited to start writing for other people. Not yet anyway, so I was doing it for myself. I had bought a domain and started writing. At first, it had been unfocused, rambly stuff about New York and L.A. and what moving was going like. The more I had written, the more I found that I had to write. I had been doing that for most of the weekend when I hadn't been doing damage control or trying to contact Shelby.
People in my position talked a lot, but it was generally about other things and other people. No one outside the business really knew what it was like being at the center of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and how celebrity factored into all that. I thought that was pretty interesting; I figured other people would too. Maybe Lake was right, and I could figure out a way to write full time. I had enough to live on so I wasn't worried about a job just yet. A house actually would have been good though. I'd want to have one of those to live in before I got a job.
Yeah, that was that. Everything. I basically had my whole life in this fucking hotel room. I started typing instead of restarting the apartment search. Stalling on the disappointment for a least a couple hours. After that, I'd try Shelby again.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Shelby
Why was the weekend only a couple days long? I parked the car, sitting for a few moments in the driver's seat after I had turned the engine off. The past couple days had been good, but not enough. I would have needed another lifetime to come back from everything that had happened last week. Mom's house had been great; it always was when we visited. We had called Frank and spent the afternoon before I had to come back to L.A. on a boat on the lake. There weren't a lot of things that a mother's home cooking couldn't fix, but this mess was going to take a little something more than that. The incessant alerts from Jason had been driving me crazy; why couldn't he take a fucking hint?
I let myself out of the car and opened the door to the back seat where Damien was. He had dozed off during the trip. It would make more sense to take him in to his crib before I got the bags out of the trunk, I figured. I was careful pulling him out of his car seat and walking to our door, so I didn’t wake him. Climbing the steps to the porch, I saw a bouquet of red roses arranged carefully on the welcome mat.
"I wonder who left those," I muttered, stepping over them and unlocking the door. I turned the lights on and went to Damien's nursery, placing him in his crib. He probably wouldn't be down the whole night since he had fallen asleep a little earlier than he usually did. It was fine; my fault, I'd deal with it. The trip had been impromptu, and his whole sleep schedule had been screwed with. I sighed: another thing that I could blame Jason for.
I went back out to the car and quickly got our bags, picking the bouquet up on my way inside. Dumping the flowers on the ground with the bags, a card fell out from between the stems. I picked it up, reading the inside. I can explain, it said. Could he? That was great; too bad I didn't want to hear it. I picked the roses up, and it all went in the trash. I took the bags to my room and made my mind up to start on the laundry. I wasn't really tired and going to bed this frustrated, I just wouldn't be able to get to sleep.
We were back; that meant the next time he came to my door, I would probably be home. That was if he was coming back again. He had persisted the whole weekend; maybe he still had some fight left in him. I wished that he wouldn't. I didn't want to hear it; I didn't care that he could explain, that there was a possible explanation to this at all, that wasn't what had obviously happened that night. He wasn't serious; that was what he had proved to me. I had given him another chance, and I should have saved it because he hadn't deserved it.
He had to give it up, I figured. A couple more days of this and he'd cut his losses. He was persistent, not stupid. I loaded the machine, which was in a closet with the dryer, right outside my room, with mine and Damien's clothes, hearing him wake up in his nursery. It was going to be a long night.
I leaned against the back wall of the elevator as we went up. Damien had woken up three more times during the night. The first time, I had still been awake, and after I had gotten him calm and back in his crib, I had gone on my computer and read article after article about Jason and his little friends. It made me mad, but I couldn't help it. I almost wanted the punishment. It served me right for ever believing that Jason Bowman wasn't a total fucking liar. The girls were your run-of-the-mill social media girls who modeled but didn't have agency representation but inexplicably had fancy cars and huge apartments that no normal job should have gotten them.
Some women were just lucky I guess. I didn't hate them for that. I didn't even hate them, I was jealous. Was that what Jason wanted? Where did his son fit into all that? Raucous nights getting trashed and going home with strangers wasn't what I wanted Damien being exposed to, especially when he got old enough to realize what was happening. He had been so good with him. He had seemed so happy spending time with him too. If this ended up being a situation where we co-parented, what the hell kind of household would he be living in half the time with his dad?
And what about me? I had started to think that maybe... it didn't matter. He didn't want me. I got coffee before even stopping at my desk. I was exhausted and frustrated: a deadly combo. I wanted to pass out for the next three days but also scream loud enough to shatter all the windows in here. I sat at my desk, drinking my coffee; last night had just been the beginning.
After the first taping, I went down to the daycare to see Damien and found Davis by my desk with a cup of coffee when I came back up. Things had been good between us. There was nothing there anymore; we worked together like nothing had happened.
"Davis?" I said, approaching. He held the cup out to me. I raised my brows, looking at him. He wasn't really in the habit of getting coffee for me anymore unless we were having a meeting together or something.
"You look like you need it," he said. Wow, just say I looked like I spent half the night awake, I thought. I took it anyway, thanking him. He left after, not saying anything else. It might have all been in my head, but I felt somehow that people had been almost avoiding me today. Maybe the bitch face was turned on high, and I just hadn't realized it. How had Davis known t
hat another cup of coffee was just what I needed to face the rest of the day?
Unless... no. It was done between us. He was a good man, someone else's good man, not mine. He wasn't trying to flirt with me; he was just being nice. I thanked him for that. The rest of the day faded pretty fast, till I was back at the daycare, picking Damien up. I was looking forward to a quiet night. I picked Damien out of his car seat and checked my phone when we got home, walking towards the porch. He had finally let up; there were no missed calls or texts from Jason at all since last night. I sighed, relieved. What if he hadn't stopped; would he have finally worn me down?
I could just ask him that myself. I stopped at the bottom of the steps to the porch. Jason stood, seeing us. He had a bouquet of flowers in one hand. He looked, well, rough, to put it politely. He didn't have any gel in his hair, so the longer locks fell down over his ears and forehead. He had more than a day's worth of light stubble grown in over his cheeks and jaw, and he was in a hoodie and jeans, making him almost unrecognizable from the guy in the sharp suits who read the news. The anger I felt that had been latent all day flared when I saw him.
"Are you out of your goddamn mind?" I finally asked, seething.
"Shelby, I needed to talk to you. You've been ignoring me all weekend."
"And you thought what? That I had lost my phone?" I demanded. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"We need to talk."
"We don't need to do anything."
"I need to talk to you. I have to explain. I know you saw the pictures and I know the way they looked."
"They looked like you had your hands full. I could see that just fine. No need to explain that." I tried to keep my voice level. Seeing him again had reignited the rage I had felt seeing the pictures for the first time.
"It isn't what you think. Can we please just talk?"
"No," I said, walking past him up the stairs.
"I know you're mad. I'd be mad too if I was you. Just let me explain what happened."
"Tell it to someone who cares, Jason. I don't," I said, unlocking and opening the door.
"Are you serious? You think I wanted this to happen? I made a mistake. I want to explain myself to you."
"Fuck off, Jason. I don't want to hear it," I said, crossing into the house, standing in the doorway looking down at him.
"All I want is for you to listen; I'm not even asking you to forgive me, not even believe me if you don't want to. Five minutes, Shel; you can’t give me that? You used to say I was impossible; now you're the one being rude." He turned and walked away. I closed the door but not before I saw him throw the bouquet into an open trashcan on his way down the street. I cradled Damien close to my chest, walking to the living room. I dumped my purse on the couch and sat heavily. I buried my nose in Damien's silky hair, closing my eyes. I had been on a knife's edge all day; that confrontation had been the last thing that I'd needed. I was still shaking a little.
"What do you think, bub?" I whispered to Damien. He was still so small; he didn't know that his parents literally hated each other. At some point, he wouldn't be so small anymore; what then? How would I tell him about why other people's parents lived in the same house but not his; why his friend's parents held hands, even kissed, but his dad and I didn’t?
The decisions I made didn't just affect just me. If I was on bad terms with Jason, Damien would get sucked into the middle of it, and I didn't want that. I wanted to plan for the future, but how could I when the present was so uncertain anyway? I didn't know where Jason would be in six months; I hardly knew where he'd be in six days. Would his feelings shift towards Damien? Would he end up leaving? Losing interest? Forgetting us?
How about you let him tell you, I thought. Ask him: how about that? Figure something out depending on what he says. Sounded like a plan but... the pictures. My insecurities were getting the best of me. I had always thought that I wasn't really Jason's type, but the images had really driven it home what it was that he did like. My bruised ego mattered less than what Damien's future with or without his father would look like. Damien was a better reason for letting him talk to me than my feelings were.
I had worked in journalism for almost six years; I knew how it went sometimes. Things reported as fact sometimes weren't. A picture said a thousand words, but without a caption, how would you know what you were looking at? With social media, fake news was an epidemic. If he had been this persistent about explaining the pictures to me, didn't that mean that I had the wrong idea? Maybe there had been more to that night and I just wasn't letting him tell me. I looked down at Damien, sucking on two of his fingers, resting his head on my chest, contented. For his sake, I hoped I was doing the right thing.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jason
I unlocked the door and walked into the apartment, lugging the two boxes I had come up the stairs with in behind me. That severely limited the already limited space. I had done it though: found an apartment. It almost hadn't happened but the person who had wanted it before me had pulled out, letting me have it. I could kind of see why. I was grateful to finally have a place, stop spending money at a hotel, but the apartment was almost smaller than the hotel room I had been staying at had been.
It was a studio. The front door opened into the kitchen, which I wouldn't have been able to stand in with another person. There was a bathroom with a shower and no tub and a combined living and bedroom area that was like the size of my college dorm plus a little extra. It was a little... no, a lot less than I had been used to. My penthouse in Tribeca had been close to four thousand square feet. I was likely maybe hitting five or six hundred with this place. It would work though. It had to. I wasn't going to keep looking when I had finally found somewhere.
All the furniture from my penthouse was in storage back in New York. All I had come to L.A. with had been a suitcase full of clothes. I had resorted to IKEA furniture, which was what was in the boxes. My bed and a couch. I had ordered a mattress which would likely be coming in tomorrow or the next day, so I was putting the couch together first. I wouldn't need a TV, coffee table, probably not a dresser either, no end tables or any stuff like that. If I had to maybe I'd get one lamp. I didn't have that much space that I could fill anyway so I wasn't really trying to spend a bunch on things I could only use while I was using the space.
This was only temporary. I had told myself that from the beginning. After I got a job and got settled, I could think about sizing up. It would start to feel cramped after a while; I knew it would. Once my penthouse sold, it wouldn't be a problem moving into somewhere with more space. I had lived in a college dorm before, and it wasn't like I had walked out of that dorm right into a high-rise penthouse in one of New York’s most expensive neighborhoods. I could slum it.
This place was kind of a saving grace. My living situation had been the biggest stress for me since the plan to move in with Shelby hadn't worked out. Shelby herself was a close second. I still wasn't getting anything from her. I would leave her texts and voice messages, but if she had seen them, she wasn't giving me anything back. It was a headache at this point. I didn't know what the hell else she wanted me to do. If I couldn't tell her what had actually happened, then we were stuck. I was kind of out of options. What did I try next? Going to her place hadn't worked. I had a feeling that going to the station would end the same way. What else could I do? She had been pretty clear; she didn't want to know how those pictures had ended up all over the place.
Guess it was her move now. I went to the kitchen and dug up a knife I could use to open the boxes. I had bought only a few of everything since it would just be me. I had had to get a basic toolkit which I had been a little mad about. It had been a while since I had had to move houses and even longer since I had done it alone. There were some things that people usually just had, so they didn't have to replace. You know what? This was good. Now I knew better for the next time that I moved across the country without any real plan where I was going to live or what I was going to do for a job. I g
ot to work, sitting on the floor and starting on the couch. It came together in just under an hour of assembly later. I had gone as big as I could with both the bed and the couch for the amount of space that I had. I didn't need much; with what I did get, I at least wanted to be comfortable.
Besides those, I had gotten a small dining table for a steal off of someone from Craigslist. I wasn't planning any dinner parties or anything. Since I had been getting more invested in my writing, it made sense to have somewhere to work that wasn't the bed or couch. I had been getting traffic and feedback on my posts, which were motivators. Distractions too. If I was writing, I didn't have to think about the train wreck that was mine and Shelby's relationship.
I had actually written about it. The post wasn't public, and I wasn't sure I was going to end up putting it up. I hadn't used Shelby's real name or details too specific about the situation, but I had gotten it out. What it was like to fuck up so royally that someone who trusted and cared about you couldn't even look at you anymore. That was it, right? Trust. Shelby had stuck her neck out, trusting me, and I had fucked up anyway. It was therapeutic in a way, helped me see her side I guess, even though I wished she had it in her to let it go. That would probably take time, and that was something I now had a lot of.
But not right now. I was meeting Lake for lunch. I headed out, getting a cab. That was something else I had to do: get a car. Everything in this city was spread out miles apart. We met at a restaurant close to his production company in Hollywood. He had wanted to help with the move but had had work. The night before though, he had told me that he wanted to talk to me about something. I hadn't thought too much about it, being so busy this whole morning.
