Ever After (Dirtshine Book 3)

by Roxie Noir

  “I do recall something about Gavin punching him,” I point out.

  Actually, I recall it quite well. It was reported everywhere, and I remember reading it and being completely delighted that their new drummer wasn’t working out like I’d hoped.

  I’ve not always been a nice person.

  “He deserved it,” Darcy says, the line moving forward. “He drugged Marisol. I mean, by accident, but still, who the fuck does that?”

  “I can’t imagine anyone ever being so careless or reckless with themselves or others,” I deadpan, shoving my hands in my pockets and looking away.

  Darcy just laughs.

  “Didn’t you set her book on fire?” she asks, casually, the line stepping forward again.

  Holy shit, I’d completely forgotten about that.

  “I did,” I say.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I am. I’d forgotten.”

  “You forgot stealing a van, crashing it into a post, getting into a huge fight with Gavin and then setting fire to a textbook?”

  She looks up at me, judgily.

  “I remember it now,” I say. “Does that count? I may have been on a substance at the time.”

  “Just one?”

  “Darcy, am I apologizing again?”

  The line moves forward again, the guy in front of us ordering drinks.

  “I’ll let this one slide,” she says. “I wasn’t even there, I just heard about it later.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I think Trent and I had gone for drinks that night,” she says.

  “Yes, right,” I say. “Drinks.”

  She sighs. The guy in front of us shifts his feet, looks off into the distance at a palm tree.

  “We didn’t start fucking for like another year, you know,” she mutters. “I don’t know why no one ever believes that.”

  “Because we all naturally assumed you were fucking all along?” I offer. “You did spend a lot of special time alone.”

  “We spent a lot of time alone because you and Gavin were either passed out, shooting up, or on the hunt for more,” Darcy counters.

  “Then you’re welcome, I suppose.”

  She rolls her eyes, and I grin. The guy in front of us get his second drink, picks them both up.

  “For all the bad shit I’ve caused, I think I deserve to take credit for at least one good—”

  He steps away. I see the bartender for the first time.

  I turn to stone, mid-sentence. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I can’t even think, only stare, open-mouthed, stuck in place like a statue.

  It’s her.

  I don’t know how and I don’t know why, I just know that it is and her presence throws me so hard that I nearly fall down.

  She looks the same. Curly hair, freckles everywhere, wide hazel eyes. Christ knows I’ve thought about her face a million times. I’ve seen her in my dreams, my fantasies, my idle nothing-to-do-while driving thoughts.

  I imagined her coming into my bookstore, driving into my driveway. I imagined her around every corner in New York.

  But never here. Of course not. Why would I?

  Darcy’s at the bar, talking, but her voice is just a low buzz. Everything is a low buzz, because against every fucking odd Frankie is standing in front of me.

  You’ve taken something, a tiny voice in my head says. You’re at that party in Brooklyn, you’ve taken an absolute shitload of acid, and you’re hallucinating her.

  It’s the only explanation. You got so desperate that your brain just filled her in.

  Suddenly Darcy’s in front of me, waving both arms like a lunatic, and I finally look at her, blinking.

  “Are you having a seizure?” she says, alarmed.

  I shake my head. I step forward, past Darcy, up to the bar. Frankie’s eyes stay glued to me, and suddenly I’m tongue-tied around this girl. The girl.

  “Hi,” I finally say, like some sort of fucking idiot.

  Frankie swallows. She’s faintly pink, the flush in her cheeks tightening my stomach.

  “We’re out of appletinis,” she says.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Frankie

  Shit.

  What the fuck is Liam doing here?

  “That’s all right, never did like them,” he says, a smile beginning to curve his lips upward.

  My stomach twists, my heart kicking against my ribcage.

  Of all the stupid fucking times and the stupid fucking places to see him again.

  “I could put an orange wedge in a beer if you’d like,” I offer.

  I look like shit, wearing black pants and a black button-down shirt and a vest. A vest, the least-attractive item of clothing after socks with sandals.

  And of course he looks like walking British sex, tall and hot and wearing a suit, fucking smirking at me like an asshole. He’s probably already banged one girl in the bathroom here, figured out who he’s going after next—

  “So, could I get an old-fashioned and a Smithwick’s? No orange, thanks,” says the girl next to him, the one who just waved her arms in his face.

  Maybe he’s with her. Like with her. She’s pretty, dark-haired and blue-eyed, and she’s not wearing a vest and serving cocktails.

  “Of course,” I say, and turn away, grateful for something to do besides gawp like a moron.

  I grab the beer and mix the old-fashioned, my mind running at 1,000 rpm the whole time. He didn’t call, didn’t text, didn’t anything and now he’s here. With this other girl, smirking at me, looking fucking incredible in a suit.

  Secretly, I’d hoped he’d relapsed or something. Gotten arrested, fallen into a pit, I don’t know. I wanted some explanation for why he couldn’t call me.

  But the truth is right here, in front of me.

  He just didn’t call me.

  I plaster a smile onto my face, turn around, hand the old-fashioned and the beer to the girl. Curl my toes in my shoes for extra strength.

  “What can I get you?” I ask.

  “I ought to demand a pint for free.”

  “It’s an open bar,” I point out. “We don’t have pints but everything is free.”

  “Don’t take the fun out of it, Frankie.”

  I want to ask where he’s been, what he’s been doing. More than anything I want to say why didn’t you call me, but this isn’t the time or the place.

  “All right,” I say, cocking my head slightly to one side. “You can have a free drink, then. Just you, nobody else. What’ll it be?”

  “Club soda with lime.”

  I narrow my eyes at him. I know I’m flirting, and maybe I shouldn’t be, but I can’t help it. He’s so... flirtable.

  “You harangue me into pretending to give you a special free drink, and then you want seltzer?”

  “It’ll be free, right?”

  Fuck. He’s still got the same accent, still the same fucking irresistible asshole as last time we met, and I pour him the drink while doing my best not to smile, hand it over the bar.

  The girl’s watching us, puzzled. I try my best not to act like my insides feel like bees buzzing around a space heater, like after he leaves I might have to go hyperventilate in the walk-in freezer.

  Liam grabs the glass, his fingers over mine. An electric current runs from him to me, no matter how much I wish it didn’t.

  “Frankie,” he starts, and his eyes drop to our hands on the drink.

  He stops, like he’s recalibrating. Then he looks at me again, but something’s changed in his eyes.

  “I hope you’ve been well,” he finally says, taking the drink from me. I let my hand fall. “We should catch up. Good to see you.”

  “You too,” I say, but he’s already walking away, the girl he’s with next to him, and I watch them walk away across the grass, past a stand of yuccas, and disappear.

  I don’t cry. I kind of want to, but instead the next person steps up to the bar, I ask what they’d like, I make a drink. I go on autopilot, the only way I can get t
hrough the remaining ninety minutes of this cocktail hour.

  People make strange drink requests. Lots of them want to know how many carbs are in a cocktail, and one woman asks for a kale margarita, like that’s even a thing.

  The bride and groom flit back and forth, looking disgustingly happy. From time to time I see Liam, sometimes with them, sometimes talking to other people. More than once I watch him walk out of his way and up to the other bar to replenish his drink.

  I guess he doesn’t want to see me, not even while I pour him club soda.

  You were wrong, I tell myself, pouring a heavy-handed Scotch for a man who seems to think he’s very important. It happens. You were wrong about him, so you move on.

  Jesus, this happens every day, get yourself together.

  “A very pretty drink from a very pretty girl,” he guy says, holding his Scotch up like he’s offering a toast.

  I just stare at him for a long moment, not in the fucking mood for this.

  “Right,” I finally say, my voice flat.

  Thankfully, he just walks away.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Liam

  I was right. I was fucking right with my first guess, the one I made hungover and half-drunk. I was fucking right when I burned her phone number at my kitchen table, right when I deleted her number from my phone after calling her a thousand and one times, calling until I had glass embedded in my face.

  She went back to him. She fucked me once and then went back to him, went through with the wedding. The gold wedding band on her finger curving against the glass like an ugly smile, mocking me in the sunlight.

  I ought to demand a pint for free. Christ, what was I thinking?

  The rest of the cocktail hour is a blur. I’ve got half a mind to drink Gavin right out of Scotch, go back to Frankie and give her a piece of my mind, tell her that I called again and again, I went to New York to look for her, and the whole time it was already over and finished because she wouldn’t answer her phone and didn’t call me back.

  I want to get absolutely smashed to forget the time I spent heartbroken. Because it wasn’t fucking worth it, getting fired from the pub and getting completely sober. The two months I’ve spent without a drink, even when I’ve really fucking wanted one haven’t been worth it.

  I wish she’d just told me. That morning. Shaken me awake and said that was fun but I think I’m going to work things out with Alistair.

  I’d have gotten wrecked still, but I’d not have spent months doing it. I’d not have gone to fucking New York to wander around like a pathetic lost puppy, looking for her. Christ.

  But I don’t get smashed. I walk all the way across the lawn and behind the building to the other bar so I can avoid her, but I order more club soda, because I think I might have finally fucking learned that I never make anything better when I’m drunk.

  Besides, I’m getting on with the band again. Gavin’s the happiest I’ve ever seen him, and I think even Darcy’s forgiven me.

  Somehow, I know I shouldn’t spoil that yet. Somehow, after years and years of crawling into a needle or a bottle or a pipe or whatever the fuck happens to be around, I might have learned that it’s no way at all to deal with problems.

  That, and there’s a liquor store next door to my motel. If I get through this sober I can always head there afterward.

  So I mingle. I turn down tequila shots. I spend a while talking to the band’s producer, debate whether or not drum machines are making a comeback with one of the members of Death Memento, even chat for a bit with Marisol’s fifteen-year-old cousin who wants to be a rock star.

  I’m an adult, in other words. I’m wearing a suit and making good choices and it’s not what I want to do at all but maybe it’s about time that I did.

  During dinner, I’m seated near the back of the room, at a table separate from the rest of the band, with a few other old friends of ours. I’m sure that Gavin and Marisol thought that by now I’d be totally shitfaced and probably no longer wearing trousers, so I can’t blame them for putting me back here even if I’m tempted to simply go ahead and do what everyone thinks I will.

  After we’re served salad on very nice plates, we’re treated to ages and ages of toasts. Gavin’s brother goes up, as does Nigel, as does what feels like every single member of Marisol’s family. There’s her parents, her sister, her aunt and uncle, someone she grew up down the street from.

  They drone on. I’m sure it’s all true and Marisol is absolutely lovely, but I’m not listening. My mind’s wandered back to Frankie, the look on her face at the bar. The ugly circle of gold around her finger, my gut tightening whenever I think about it.

  That makes it not my fault, I think. It was decided before I ever tried to call her, before I ever smashed my phone, before I ever got rid of her number.

  It doesn’t make me feel better, only worse. Worse because I fell for it, because after probably dozens of one-night-stands in varying states of sobriety and never ever calling again, I let it happen to me like a fucking idiot.

  I concentrate for a moment on the flower arrangement in the center of the table, vines crawling around roses.

  Why’s she working bartending at a wedding if she married the future Earl of Downhamshire-on-Kyne?

  Before I can answer that particular question, I notice a figure in black walking along the side of the room. She deposits two wine bottles on a table, then heads for the door again, her curly hair bouncing just a little with every step.

  “Even though we’ve known Marisol since she was a little girl, we’d never have possibly imagined...”

  Christ, this is never-ending. I murmur some excuse to my table mates, stand, and walk through the nearest door. I keep walking until I’m outside, heading in the direction where Frankie disappeared.

  I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to say. I’m not sure it’s going to do any good, because even though it’s occurred to me that she might not be married to the Little Lord, she’s married to someone and that’s what matters, right?

  But I’ve got to talk to her. I can’t just find her again, after all this effort, and let her go without talking to her.

  New Liam can’t, at least, and Old Liam is gone so he doesn’t matter anymore.

  I round a corner, in a lovely little side yard lined with bougainvillea, and there she is, walking away the next corner.

  “Oi!” I call before I can chicken out.

  She stops. She turns, and even from here I can tell that every muscle in her body is tensed, her lips pressed together, her eyes wide. She shoves one hand through her hair: the left one, ring glinting in the receding sunlight.

  “Hey,” she says, her voice tight.

  “I didn’t get a chance to properly say hello,” I tell her, shoving my hands into my trouser pockets. “I guess congratulations are in order.”

  My stomach is a tight, churning ball. Frankie just blinks in the sunlight, making me wonder if we’ve ever seen each other somewhere this bright before. I don’t think Shelton has ever been this sunny in the full length of its existence, but she’s just as fucking beautiful in the sun as she is in the dim light of the pub.

  “Thanks?” she says, sounding a little puzzled.

  There’s a brief pause, both of us just looking at the other.

  “I’m not really sure what you’re congratulating me for,” Frankie finally says.

  “On your marriage,” I say, the words like spitting acid.

  “I broke it off,” she says, her voice rigid. “I told you that, how drunk were you?”

  “Drunk enough to get my hopes up,” I tell her, and point at her left hand.

  Frankie misses the intention and looks at the wall behind her, then back at me.

  “What is going—”

  “You’re wearing a wedding ring,” I say flatly.

  She holds her hand out, looks down like she’s seeing it for the first time.

  “Oh!” she exclaims. “It’s not real.”

  My heart kicks at my ribcage.


  “I mean, it’s a real ring,” she goes on, pulling it off and holding it up between two fingers. “But it’s just costume jewelry that the other bartender let me borrow because last week a bunch of guys got super drunk at this wedding and would not stop hitting on me, and she said that this would work like a charm, so I figured I’d try it.”

  “Has it?”

  “Haven’t gotten hit on yet.”

  She holds it in her palm, hand flat, and I feel as if something’s been lifted from me. I feel jubilantly, excessively, triumphantly pleased that right now I’m dead fucking sober, that I was only a slight prick to Frankie just now because if I weren’t, I imagine security would be escorting me off the premises.

  Frankie closes her hand around it.

  “How have you been?” she asks.

  “I burned your note and deleted your number from my mobile,” I tell her.

  I can’t hesitate. I can’t stop. I’m afraid that if I do I’ll never get through it, and I need to. Not that she’s ever going to want me again anyway, but to her and her alone, I feel beholden.

  Frankie raises both eyebrows.

  “I woke up and you were gone and I thought you’d changed your mind,” I say, the words just pouring out of me. “And that problem I fixed with a bottle of whiskey, until I finally saw your note on the table.”

  My mouth is dry, my heart thumping wildly. I’ve never done any of this before: been so heartbroken about a girl, tried so hard to get someone back.

  Most of all, I’ve never admitted it to anyone. It feels like I’m tearing my heart from my chest and holding it out for Frankie to examine.

  She just watches me, her face unreadable.

  “I called you,” I say, my voice suddenly quiet. “And I was absolutely legless by then, and it rang for ages and you never did answer. So I found a bottle of shit gin under the sink and drank that and kept calling, but by then you’d turned your phone off.”

  Her eyes are wide, her cheeks flushed. I’m not sure she’s breathing, her hands knotted in front of her.