Say You Still Love Me: A Novel

by K. A. Tucker

  My door connects with something solid just inside.

  “Hello?” I holler through the crack.

  “Piper! Hold on! Let me move that!” comes the responding shout.

  Bare feet slap against the hardwood, followed by a series of grunts and the sound of a heavy object sliding across the floor, and then the door flings open and a freckled face appears.

  “Sorry!” Ashley exclaims, panting. “I meant to move those earlier, but I got caught up with unpacking.” She takes a deep breath, exhales, and then grins. “Hey, new roomie!”

  I laugh as I hip-check the door shut and shimmy past the wall of stacked blue containers to set my purse on the kitchen island. “Is this all your party-planning stuff?”

  “Yeah,” she admits, smoothing over the lifted corner of a label marked “Ribbons.” “I’ll make it all fit in my room, though, I promise.”

  “No worries. How’d today go? Did security give you any problems?”

  “Nope! They even met the movers at the service elevator.” Ashley runs her slender fingers over her hair, attempting to tame the strawberry-blonde halo of frizz around her messy topknot, to no avail. The only day of the week that it’s truly ever smooth is Friday, if she goes for a blowout at the salon. And if it’s a humid day? Forget about it. Even that won’t last an hour.

  “Good. I stopped by the front desk this morning to make sure they remembered, but you never know with them.”

  “That shade of green looks amazing on you,” she murmurs, dusting her hands over the ratty concert T-shirt she obviously threw on to unpack. The disheveled, frumpy outfit is so opposite her usual feminine boho-chic look.

  “Thanks.” I kick off my heels with a groan, stretching and wiggling my toes. I’m going to need to swallow my pride and start changing into running shoes for the fifteen-minute walk from work. “Is Christa home yet?”

  “On her way. And she’s bringing dinner, so don’t order in.”

  “Thank God.” Christa is the general manager at a popular steak house nearby, with a staff of seventy-eight, open 364 days a year. On the rare occasion that our schedules cross paths over dinner, she usually brings a fully prepped meal, hot off the grill, saving me from day-old sushi and wilted salad.

  I round the island and wander over to the adjacent living room, to take in the charcoal-gray velvet sectional. “So, this is the infamous couch.” The one that sparked the colossal fight between Ashley and Chad that ended in their breakup. The one that Elton, Christa’s severely cross-eyed Siamese cat, is currently perched on, calmly and methodically licking away at his paw.

  “I told you it would be perfect for this room,” Ashley says, her gaze assessing the space with a smile of satisfaction.

  “It’s starting to look like an actual home in here,” I agree. When I ended things with David, I left with my bedroom set and two white leather chairs. Everything else was his and I didn’t want any of it. My dad offered me this place—a spacious three-bedroom, four-bathroom penthouse unit in CG’s newly completed Posey Park project. It’s far too spacious for one person but it’s close to work, so I happily accepted, having every intention of hiring Marcelle, my mom’s interior decorator, as soon as I had time to care about things like furniture and artwork.

  For all the effort I put into decorating my office, I’ve put in the opposite amount here. Almost four months have gone by, and the generous space still sits mostly empty and undecorated. Christa moved in last month and brought with her a flat-screen television to hang over the gas fireplace, a chunky oak coffee table that is heavy enough to break shins, and a four-person round-tabled IKEA dining set that screams of low budget.

  Basically, we’ve been living like a couple of college students who found a penthouse to squat in.

  But now, it’s starting to come together. With some style, too, as Ashley’s beautiful, huge sectional and geometric black-and-white rug complement my white leather chairs perfectly.

  I sink into the couch to test it out. “Oh . . . I’m not getting up again tonight.”

  “See? I told you it was comfortable.”

  “So comfortable.”

  “And two people can lie down on either side, easily,” she goes on, as if still selling the thing to me. “It’s perfect.”

  “Oh, it is,” I agree, adding more gently, “though I can see why Chad might think this was too big for your place.” The tiny midtown bungalow that they were renting couldn’t have been more than nine hundred square feet.

  “It was a bit tight for there,” she admits sheepishly. “But we could have made it work. He didn’t have to be such a jerk about it.”

  I offer her a sympathetic smile. “Was he there today?”

  “He showed up as the movers were carrying out the last load, just to make sure I didn’t take anything I wasn’t supposed to. Like his TV.” She rolls her eyes. “I don’t even know how to turn on that stupid thing.”

  “So, things didn’t leave off amicably then?”

  “I’m sorry, what? Did you say you wanted a glass of pinot noir to celebrate my move in?” Ashley sashays over to the kitchen island and pours two glasses of red wine from an uncorked bottle, artfully avoiding my question. She hands me mine and then takes a seat beside me.

  We clink glasses and I revel in the first sip, savoring the meld of black currant and elderberry.

  “So how are you really doing?”

  She sighs. “I think this is really it, this time.” Her tone is missing its typical chirpiness.

  “You’ve said that before.” In the five years since they started dating, Chad and Ashley have broken up a handful of times, twice while living together. It invariably unfolds the same way: Ashley has enough of Chad mocking her—her eclectic style; her oddly close relationship to Zelda, her psychic; the fact that she has a psychic; the “wasted” amount of time, effort, and money she puts into her fledgling event-planning business, a passion that he claims will never take off. He gets defensive when she calls him disrespectful and complains that he’s sick of supporting her financially, then they have a huge fight and break up. The separation usually lasts two or three months, until Chad comes crawling back, asking her to give him another chance.

  And she takes him back. She always takes him back because her confidence in herself is sorely lacking.

  Her button nose crinkles. “Yeah, but this time feels different. More final, you know?”

  If only . . . I reach over to give her shoulder a squeeze. “You guys have been trying to make it work for five years now. Maybe there’s someone who you’d mesh with better?” Chad and Ashley are as opposite as you can get, and not in a good way. Ashley is all about organic foods, vegetarianism, and protecting nature, while Chad had a deer head—from a deer that he shot—stuffed and mounted above their bed. Ashley uses laundry baskets instead of dresser drawers to store her clothes, while Chad vacuums the vacuum cleaner. Ashley will spend hours on Pinterest, looking for ways to up-cycle a chipped teapot to avoid it going into a landfill; Chad is an engineer for an energy company—that Ashley has protested outside. Ashley spends a few hours every Thanksgiving working at a soup kitchen; Chad thinks the homeless are all lazy people looking for a handout.

  Basically, Chad’s a dick and Ashley’s way too good for him. I don’t know how they ever ended up together in the first place, or how they’ve given each other five years of their lives.

  I suck back a large gulp of wine before I say any of this out loud, though, because it’ll only make things awkward as hell when they reunite.

  Ashley sighs with resignation. “Well, I guess the silver lining is that the three of us get to live together. Who knew that would finally happen, right?”

  “Who knew . . .” I echo, tapping my wineglass against hers again. “And it only took thirteen years and a few jerks.” More like, who knew that the Camp Wawa trifecta of oddly suited girls would last beyond that summer in the first place. But it has, through out-of-state colleges and boyfriends, polar-opposite social circles, contrasting pri
orities, and, at times, an abrasive rubbing of personalities. Ashley and Christa have become my two most trusted and loyal friends. Sometimes I’m amazed by that, but then I think back to that summer, to the aftermath, and it doesn’t seem so crazy.

  With a resigned sigh, Ashley holds out her hand and makes a soft, tongue-clucking sound. “Here . . . kitty, kitty, kitty.”

  Elton pauses in his obsessive bathing ritual to glare at her.

  “Why won’t he come to me?” Ashley complains. “Cats love me!”

  “Not him. He hates everyone.” I savor another mouthful of wine. Christa was so desperate for a cat that when an elderly friend of her family was seeking a new home for Elton, her “loving and affectionate” blue point Siamese cat from “impeccable purebred lineage,” Christa didn’t think twice before adopting him and bringing him home to the condo she shared with her younger sister, Carrie.

  And Ginger, Carrie’s Jack Russell.

  It didn’t take long to learn that loving and affectionate are not the most accurate words to describe this animal and, after four months of vet bills to treat Ginger’s scourged face and the discovery that Carrie’s chronic sinus problems were in fact a cat allergy, Christa had to either give up Elton or find another place to live.

  “He hates everyone?” Ashley asks with incredulity.

  “Everyone. People, other animals. Even plants. Basically, anything that consumes or produces oxygen.”

  “Plants, too?”

  “Carrie stepped out to walk her dog and came home to every last houseplant uprooted and shredded.” She claims it was a premeditated massacre.

  Ashley’s gaze flashes to the dozen or so potted aloe veras and succulents sitting in a box in the corner.

  “Yeah, you’d better keep those in your room, with the door closed at all times.”

  “So weird.” She eyes Elton, who’s gone back to licking his front paw. “Is he still doing that weird thing with his—”

  “Yup.” Turns out Elton suffers from severe anxiety, which only surfaced after Christa adopted him. He spends half his day trying to outrun his tail and the other half attacking it.

  “Too much inbreeding, I guess.”

  “Too much of something,” I murmur, letting my head sink into the plush cushions as I stare up at the seventeen-foot white ceilings. My nostrils catch a faint odor. “What is that?” I inhale sharply. “It smells like . . . cigarettes?”

  “Seriously?” Ashley presses her nose against the cushion again, and then groans. “I’ve shampooed and doused this thing with vinegar, like, five times. I thought I got it all out!”

  I frown. “Why would it smell like cigarettes?” Neither Ashley nor Chad are smokers, and Chad is too much of a clean freak to ever allow others to smoke in the house.

  “Zelda.”

  My frown deepens. “Your psychic does house calls?” And smokes during them?

  “No. In her house.”

  “I am so confused right now.”

  Ashley sighs with exasperation, and I can tell she doesn’t want to tell me whatever I’m about to hear. “I bought this couch off Zelda and she smokes in her house.”

  “Wait a minute . . .” I hold my free hand up. “You bought a couch off your psychic? You told me it was brand-new!”

  “Well yeah, brand-new for me,” she clarifies.

  “Ashley . . .”

  “What! Ugh. Okay! So, Zelda sensed I’d be needing a new couch in my life soon and since she had just ordered a new one for herself, she offered to sell me hers. And look!” She gestures at our sizeable space. “She was right! And she sold it to me for five hundred bucks, even though she paid almost three grand for it last year!”

  “Because she knew she wouldn’t get more for it, reeking from smoke! Oh my God, this is making so much more sense now,” I moan, gulping my wine. When Ashley said she bought a new couch and promised it would look fantastic in my place and “please, please, please, can I bring it because I can’t return it,” I assumed she had bought a floor model on clearance.

  I shake my head at my friend. “This is why you and Chad had a huge fight and broke up, isn’t it?”

  “No, not exactly,” she says with a mixture of irritation and reluctance. “Chad was pissed, but I promised I’d get the smoke out and rearrange the living room to make it cozy. So he calmed down, and I thought everything would be fine. It wasn’t until the smoke smell faded that we started to smell the urine—”

  “What?” I bolt upright, nearly spilling my wine all over my dress in the process.

  “It’s all gone, I swear!” Her hands are in the air in surrender. “It was just one cushion and I replaced all the stuffing in it. But that’s when Chad blew up. He said that I was stupid for trusting Zelda, and that she had conned me.”

  “And would you maybe . . . perhaps . . . agree that she took advantage of you?” I ask as evenly as I can.

  “I don’t know? No! I mean, why would she do that when she sees me every month? Honestly, I think she just forgot about it. Or figured it wasn’t a big deal. It was probably her grandson. He’s two, and I remember her saying they were having a tough time potty training him.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” I struggle to hide my skepticism from my voice. My dear friend’s sweet, forgiving, glass-is-always-half-full nature is both a blessing and a curse.

  Slowly, I settle back into my seat, though not nearly as relaxed. “Which cushion was—”

  “I’ll never tell,” she says with wide-eyed earnest. “But isn’t it perfect for this place?”

  Finally, I have to laugh to myself, because the entire debacle is Ashley in a nutshell.

  She joins in soon enough, shaking her head. “I know. I’m ridiculous.”

  “Just don’t tell Christa,” I warn. The last time Christa told Ashley what she thought about the “spiritual advisor” who bills our best friend two hundred bucks a month, they didn’t speak for weeks. “And there had better not be any bad spirit juju with this thing. If weird stuff starts happening around here, the couch has to go.”

  She rolls her eyes. “You sound like Chad now.”

  Maybe he isn’t a complete idiot, after all.

  The sound of keys jiggling has Elton leaping off the couch and trotting toward the door. I cringe at the sight of his tail, the end of it a bony white stick where he’s chewed off the hair. He meows—that unnatural woeful Siamese howl—in greeting as Christa plows through, her arms laden with two plastic restaurant bags. She has to turn sideways to manage past Ashley’s containers. “Tell me you have more of that wine.”

  Ashley and I share a look. Christa rarely drinks and when she does, it’s sugar-free, low-calorie vodka on account of her being hyperconscious about maintaining her figure. Halfway through college, she got onto an extreme healthy eating and exercise kick that helped her shed pounds. Since then, it’s been what seems like a constant battle against her body’s natural tendency to carry extra weight. She’ll never be what society deems “thin,” but she can fill out a vintage swing dress like no one else I know.

  “Rough day?” I hazard as Ashley heads for the cabinet to fetch a third wineglass.

  “Oh no, it was great!” Christa says, her voice dripping with sarcasm. She dumps the take-out containers on the counter and reaches down to scoop up Elton and hug him close. He returns the affection immediately, rubbing his pointy face against her cheek, his raspy purr carrying. “I caught my bar manager stealing bottles of Veuve.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” Ashley says, her freckled face scrunching with sincerity as she holds out the glass.

  Christa sighs heavily, then sets the cat down to take the wine and tuck her hair behind her ear. She’s been wearing it layered and shoulder-length for years now, a style well-suited to her round face. “There’s a vegetarian pasta for you, Ash, and a bloody slab of cow for you.” She nods to me through a sizeable gulp.

  “Gosh, that sounds delicious,” I murmur with a mock-dreamy look. Christa might be the only general manager at a steak house who is genuine
ly disgusted by steak.

  “So . . . how was everyone else’s day? As much fun as mine, I’m guessing?” Christa’s gaze takes in the disarray around the condo.

  “Well . . . I for one am exhausted, but I’m happy to be here with you guys.” Ashley collects cutlery and plates from the drawers and begins dishing out.

  “That couch is perfect for this place, by the way,” Christa says before another gulp, eyeing the new living room setup. “Where did you get it from again?”

  Ashley’s eyes flash to me. “Oh . . . just some local furniture store?” It comes out sounding like a question, but Christa is too distracted by her own frazzled nerves to seem to notice.

  “Cool. Piper?”

  “I made Tripp look like a fool.” But that’s not what I really want to talk about, what I’ve been dying to talk to somebody about. “You’ll never guess who I saw in the lobby today. At least, I think I saw him.”

  They pause, waiting expectantly.

  “Kyle Miller.”

  Their mouths hang open for a long moment, and then . . .

  “Seriously?”

  “Why are you just telling me now?”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Is he still gorgeous?”

  I hold my free hand in the air to stop the onslaught of questions. “I’m not even sure it was him. He was ahead of me and then he went out the doors, and when I tried to catch up, he was just gone.” I couldn’t have been more than ten paces behind him, and yet he all but disappeared when I reached the sidewalk, my adrenaline racing through my veins.

  I don’t tell Christa and Ashley that I spent the next hour wandering through the Pier Market, looking not at the tempting menus or the colorful wares, but for those familiar dark golden eyes.

  “Wow. Kyle Miller,” Christa begins, exchanging a glance with Ashley.

  “I know.”

  “And you’ve never talked to him since that summer? Not even once?” Christa already knows the answer to that, but she asks it anyway, as if to confirm the gravity of Kyle’s possible reappearance in my life.