Ever After (Dirtshine Book 3)

by Roxie Noir

  “A week to fuck this up. Or not. A week to see you after work and take you to dinner and charm you into thinking I might be worth keeping.”

  I feel like there’s a hand mixer in my stomach, scrambling my insides. I hadn’t quite dared to hope for this, and yet.

  “A week for me to apologize that I never told you.”

  “You’re not flying back?”

  “Not in a week.”

  Not anymore, at least. Flights can be changed. It’s just logistics.

  “Are you going to torch my number again?”

  “I wasn’t thinking to. Are you planning to leave my bed without saying goodbye again?” I ask.

  It gets a smile out of her.

  “Sorry about that,” she says.

  “It’s already forgotten.”

  There’s a long pause, like she’s thinking. But her cards are already on the table. She’s just nervous to say yes, to admit once more that what she wants isn’t what she should want.

  “Frankie,” I say, leaning over the table.

  “I’m mulling it over,” she says, leaning forward as well.

  “Stop mulling it and just say yes like we both know you’re going to,” I tell her, keeping my voice low. Her eyes flick up, that dangerous look in them, the one that propels me on. “At the very least I know how to you like to be properly fucked.”

  There it is, the lovely pink in her cheeks.

  “Shouldn’t you be begging me right now?” she teases. “I could stand to see you on one knee, pleading for my favor.”

  She puts her hand over mine, tracing tendons past track marks, and I nearly laugh.

  “Christ, are we going to hold hands like we’re in some Paris cafe sharing a bottle of wine and staring into each other’s eyes?” I ask.

  “You’re killing my dreams of a proper English romance,” she deadpans.

  I grin, turn my hand over, tangle our fingers together.

  “If you wanted some bullshit courtly romance with flowers and poetry you’d be miles away from me of all people,” I say, knowing I’m right. “Fucking say yes already. Seven days. If you hate me by Saturday, we’re done.”

  She just laughs, reaches her spoon for the last bite of waffle brownie, and I catch her wrist.

  “Say yes first.”

  “I’m a hostage now?”

  Her eyes are dancing but there’s a sudden desperation in the center of my chest, the need to hear her say it, to put an end to these two miserable months I’ve spent knowing what I want and totally unable to get it.

  “Come on, Frankie,” I say.

  Her face changes, softens.

  “All right,” she says, her voice soft. “A week.”

  It’s all I wanted to hear. I didn’t know it until now but it’s what I’ve been craving for months, the assurance that Frankie’s not gone. That I’ll see her again tomorrow, and after that, and that I’ve got some sort of place in her future and by some miracle didn’t burn it all to hell like I always do.

  “Thank you,” I say, and before I know it I’m leaning over the table again, kissing her, not giving a single shit that we’re in the middle of a crowded restaurant.

  Saturday comes. It starts with me telling her good morning and her squinting at me, pillow lines on her face, like she’s slightly confused at everything before she tells me good morning back. I’ve learned not to ask her anything important — all right, I’ve learned not to ask anything — before she’s showered and had coffee.

  Her roommate, Chloe, is in the kitchen and drinking something green from a tall glass. She doesn’t like me, and I don’t know why, but it isn’t as if she and Frankie are particular friends, so I don’t really give a shit.

  Instead I grab pancake mix out of the cabinet and eggs out of the fridge.

  “Would you like some?” I ask, as I have for the past six mornings.

  She tucks her blonde hair behind her ear and tries not to wrinkle her nose, her entire willowy body emanating disgust.

  “No, thank you,” she says, her voice technically polite.

  I toss one egg in the air and then catch it, just to annoy her.

  “Your loss,” I say, because Chloe definitely doesn’t eat carbs. I’m not quite sure what she eats, aside from green juice, but Los Angeles is full of tall, thin blonds who seem to subsist on kale and sunlight, so Chloe’s not my problem.

  I cook pancakes. Frankie gets out of the shower, still toweling off her curls with an old t-shirt, comes into the kitchen wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

  “Smells good,” she says.

  “That’s because it is,” I say, and give her a kiss now that she’s awake.

  We eat pancakes. We talk about nothing, about things that should be boring and mundane, except it’s her and that fact makes everything shine and sparkle.

  She tells me what she’s been working on — the past few days, she’s been putting the embroidered finishing touches on a table runner that will be onscreen for about two full minutes, even though that’s technically the props department, not costume.

  “Don’t tell the union,” she says, laughing.

  “Your embroidery secrets are safe with me,” I say.

  Yesterday I jumped the gun and moved all my things from the Motel 6 where I was staying to an extraordinarily cheap by-the-week bachelor apartment. It’s miles away, deep in the valley, and it takes me over an hour to take the city bus in each direction.

  But it’s boring and shoddy instead of sordid. The other people staying there work at the Budweiser plant nearby, or they’re gardeners or repairmen just trying to string together a living.

  Los Angeles is full of places with quite low weekly and monthly rental fees. Many of them are closer to Frankie, and I’ve been there. I usually left with heroin in my pocket. I’ll take two hours on a city bus.

  It’s been nearly a year. That first time I met Frankie I’d already relapsed for the second time, gone ahead and accepted that I knew what was going to kill me, so I may as well hurry up the process.

  Only I met her instead. I thought of her pretty face the next time I had a needle in my arm, and the time after that, and then I thought of her face when I entered rehab for the third time a week later.

  That evening I take her to my favorite taco place. It’s a shack in the parking lot of a grocery store in Silverlake, the only seating is folding chairs set up around a card table, and it’s fucking delicious.

  “Maria texted me,” she says through a mouthful. “She went in today to find something and apparently there’s a giant pile of socks waiting. I think hand-finishing those is gonna to be my day tomorrow.”

  Maria’s her coworker, the other assistant costume designer on The Spinster’s Panorama, a title I still don’t entirely understand. Though for that matter, neither does Frankie.

  “How does one hand-finish a sock?” I ask.

  “You know how fancy little girls’ socks sometimes have that embroidered scalloping along the top?”

  I just stare at Frankie blankly, taco juice dripping onto my paper plate, and she laughs, dousing hers with more red sauce.

  “Right. Well, fancy girls’ socks have that, so my day Monday is gonna be putting that on.”

  That sounds like hours of sheer hell to me, but I’m well aware that it’s Frankie’s dream, so I just eat some more taco. When we finish we take a walk through the hip part of the neighborhood, holding hands past the bars, coffee shops, vintage stores, up through the hills and past the houses until we’ve got a view of downtown Los Angeles.

  Then we walk down again, still hand-in-hand, debating the acting merits of Patrick Swayze vs. Kurt Russell, and we go back to her apartment, and we go to sleep in her bed.

  The week ends. I don’t say anything about it, and neither does she.

  I just wake up Sunday morning with her in my arms and go make her pancakes.

  A week later, my phone rings. I’m at a bus stop in Hollywood, where I’ve been applying for work as a studio drummer with Nigel’s help, and
someone finally called back today.

  It’s Darcy. I brace myself for a barrage of something, and answer.

  “You’re banging the bartender,” she says.

  “You’re banging the guitarist.”

  “Nigel just told me,” she says, ignoring me. “I think he’s told everyone, by the way, I hope that wasn’t a secret. But you already knew Nigel’s a fucking gossip, so...”

  “It’s not a secret,” I tell her. “The bartender’s name is Frankie, and she’s quite lovely.”

  “Probably too lovely for you,” Darcy says. She’s teasing, but there’s a slight edge to her voice.

  “Probably,” I agree. “But she’s not run screaming yet, and believe it or not I’ve been on quite good behavior.”

  I don’t point out that I didn’t have a single drink at Gavin’s wedding, despite the free bar, because I know she knows. I know that’s what the pause is all about.

  “Do you and Frankie the bartender want to get dinner tonight with me and Trent?” she finally asks.

  “Darcy, are you asking me on a double date?”

  “Why do you say it like that?”

  “Because you’re going to have to record Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune and watch them later, and I don’t know if—”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up and let us meet this magical fucking creature who’s apparently made you slightly less of a degenerate,” Darcy says.

  I start laughing.

  “Jeopardy, what am I, fifty-thr—oh,” she says, and I just laugh harder. “That was the joke, I’m middle-aged because I asked you on a double date.”

  “Don’t ever change,” I tell her.

  “At least when you were blitzed out of your mind you usually fell asleep before you could be an asshole to me.”

  “You did miss me.”

  She sighs into the phone.

  “Meet us at the Copper Soliloquy on Franklin at seven-thirty?” she says. “It’s swanky, we’ll treat you since I know you haven’t got a job.”

  “Darcy, I can—”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she says, and hangs up.

  I grin at my phone’s home screen, because Darcy is exactly like I remember her: all sweetness and heart, surrounded by dozens and dozens of sharp spikes. The only person she ever really let in was Trent, though after a while Gavin and I were both close enough that we didn’t always get stabbed.

  Chapter Forty

  Frankie

  “The Spinster’s what?” Darcy asks.

  “Panorama,” I say, taking another sip of my sparkling water. Liam swore up and down that if I got a cocktail it wouldn’t send him careening downward, but I opted for water anyway.

  Everything is beautiful and magical and wonderful, and I’m horrified that I’ll ruin it somehow.

  “What is a spinster’s panorama?” Darcy asks. “Is that a single lady who makes a scene out of cardboard and construction paper in a shoe box?”

  “That’s diorama,” I say. “Don’t worry, people keep making that mistake.”

  Darcy narrows her eyes, thinking.

  “You’re right,” she finally says.

  “It’s easy to confuse,” I say, taking another sip to hide my nervousness.

  It’s only been two weeks with Liam. Two amazing weeks, but it’s still not much, and I get the sense that I’m here because they want to examine me, see if I’m going to drag Liam down again.

  “The panorama’s the ocean,” Liam says. “We think.”

  “It takes place in the forties, and I think the plot is something about a woman’s love lost at sea to a U-Boat, maybe? And she gets advice from the ghosts who live in her house, because they’re also all women who had lovers that died at sea, back when that happened a lot?” I say, suddenly realizing I’m not exactly sure what the movie’s about.

  “Do the ghosts give good advice?” Trent asks, leaning back in his chair, one arm slung around Darcy.

  “I’m not sure I’d take it,” I say.

  “They’re ghosts for a reason,” Darcy points out.

  “Because they’re dead?” Trent asks.

  “Because they died with unfinished business,” Darcy says. “And they can’t, you know, chill and let go of it, so they wind up haunting living people like assholes and saddling living people with their problems. That’s what they’d do if they existed, I mean.”

  “If you ever quit being a bass player you ought to be a ghost life coach,” Liam tells her.

  “Hilarious,” Darcy deadpans.

  “Anyway, Frankie was telling us about her job and we got off track,” Trent says, his voice a low rumble.

  “Well, mostly my job is to tailor those longish pleated skirts from the forties so that they both look authentic and billow nicely in front of enormous fans,” I say. “Which is more of a challenge than it sounds like, but I won’t bore you.”

  Strangely, they keep asking questions, and I keep telling them about the challenges of authentic-but-billowy pleated skirts.

  After a bit, I start to relax. I realize that they’re not taking us to dinner because they’re still angry at Liam or because they want to hate me. They have a worn-in feeling rapport, the three of them, and as I go on about sewing I think: everything from before wasn’t bad.

  And I also realize: the rest of Dirtshine didn’t want to let him go. I can tell from the way that Liam and Darcy trade barbs, the way he and Trent banter back and forth, that they miss him. They didn’t want things to go the way they did to begin with.

  We talk about nothing, but we talk about it for ages. When Darcy asks how we met, Liam and I exchange a quick look and he tells them that I walked into the pub where he was bartending one night because I was tired of my fiancé and needed a proper man.

  I laugh.

  “Not what happened,” I say. “He was an asshole, I had to talk him into selling me a beer, and if that hadn’t been the only pub for thirty miles I’d have left that very second.”

  “That I believe,” Darcy says.

  She and Trent tease Liam for being an asshole for a bit, and I help. The food comes. We eat.

  “Where are you staying, again?” Trent suddenly asks Liam, leaning forward on his elbows.

  The mood shifts, just a little. I’m not sure why.

  “Weekly rental just off the five in Pacoima,” Liam says.

  “That’s far.”

  “It is,” Liam says, shrugging. “But I don’t know anyone there and no one’s ever snorting anything in the halls, which makes it better than the cheap fleabags in Los Angeles proper.”

  He doesn’t mention that he’s spent most nights at my place, unless I’ve got to get up too early the next morning for work or he can sense that Chloe is getting too irritated.

  Darcy and Trent are just watching him now, the table suddenly tense. We’ve avoided this topic so far at this dinner, the topic of Liam’s sobriety and whether it’s real and whether it’ll stick.

  But I guess now’s the time.

  “A year and a month, more or less,” Liam finally says. “That’s heroin, anyway. I’ve not had a drink since late November.”

  Trent murmurs something encouraging, but Liam cuts him off.

  “And I did it by moving to somewhere like Pacoima, where I don’t know anyone and where there’s no one ringing my doorbell wanting to get high. It’s easier that way.”

  They exchange a look. From what Liam’s told me I know they’ve been through this all already, with Gavin.

  Darcy shrugs at Trent.

  “You’ve had dumber ideas,” she said.

  Trent looks from Liam to Darcy, and then back. I frown, totally unsure what’s about to happen, but I’m oddly nervous nonetheless.

  It’s something to do with the band, I think, heart suddenly fluttering.

  “Stay at my house,” Trent says.

  Liam goes dead silent and perfectly still. He’s got a fork in one hand, poised over his dinner, but no one at the table moves.

  He stares at Trent and Darcy. They star
e back at him.

  I stay wide-eyed and quiet, because it’s clear that something is sure the fuck going on, and I definitely don’t know what it is.

  Is Trent’s guest bedroom filled with giant snakes? Is this actually some kind of invitation to swing with Trent and Darcy? Would there be a ‘one gallon of blood’ fee that I don’t know about?

  “I moved in with Darcy,” Trent goes on, his voice low and calm despite the sudden freeze that’s fallen over the table. “So it’s got furniture, mostly, and I’m probably going to use it as a short-term rental for people who are temporarily in town, but I haven’t gotten around to doing that yet. It’s perfect.”

  “Your house,” Liam repeats.

  “Your house,” Darcy points out to Trent, giving him a significant look I don’t understand.

  I feel like I should say that as well, just to fit in, but I keep my mouth shut.

  “Yes, my house,” Trent says, leaning forward on his elbows and sounding faintly amused. “It’s got a roof, four walls, the whole enchilada. In the hills right above Los Feliz, not that far from where Gavin and Marisol live.”

  My eyes go wider. Those houses are nice, and I nearly kick Liam under the table.

  “I can’t,” Liam says. “Thank you, it’s lovely, and I absolutely appreciate the sentiment but it’s a terrible idea, I’d be afraid I’d—”

  “What, you’d break a plate?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Burn the place down?”

  There’s a long pause, and Liam is dead fucking silent.

  He did nearly burn a condo down, I remember.

  Shit.

  “That’s a bit closer, yeah.”

  Trent reaches into his pocket and pulls out a mass of keys. We all watch him as he pulls a keyring off, then slides it across the table.

  “So don’t,” he says.

  Liam swallows. He doesn’t take the keys, but he leans back in his chair, crosses his arms, and looks at Trent.

  “Why are you being nice?” he asks. “Why are you being this nice?”

  “It’s time,” Trent says.

  “The fuck do you mean, it’s—”

  “I mean it’s time that I want to give you another chance,” Trent says softly. “You fucking hurt all of us, Liam. You nearly destroyed Gavin’s life again, you nearly destroyed yourself, and Darcy cried so much I thought she might drown—”